“On Jazz” exhibits a profound cultural pessimism. It rests on general claims and it is unconcerned with distinguishing between artists or artistic works. Comparisons never emerge between say, Louis Armstrong and Paul Whiteman or Duke Ellington and his imitators. There is nothing about the great songs that were interpreted and reinterpreted by a host of extraordinary female vocalists.
To this extent, indeed, Adorno’s essay reflects the undifferentiated image of a totally administered society that animated Dialectic of Enlightenment. The lyrics of songs sung by Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, and Billie Holiday apparently don’t inspire genuine resistance. What resistance should mean, however, remains as vague as ever. The same situation pertains to politics. Even Marcuse admitted as much when he wrote in One-Dimensional Man: “The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus, it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.”
Chapter 7
The great refusal
Critical theory was an important intellectual impetus for the European student movement of the 1960s. In the United States, however, most seminal works of critical theory were translated only during the 1970s. That was when journals like Telos and New German Critique began gaining an audience and publicizing its most important representatives. Complicated ideas about alienation, the domination of nature, regression, utopia, and the culture industry made critical theory relevant for young intellectuals who were coming of age amid the turbulence of the times and were trying to make sense of what was happening around them. But the rebellion and the solidarity of the young employed the culture industry. That made its radical character no less real. It soon enough became apparent that art is not a lost cause even after Auschwitz. The identification of culture with the happy consciousness is never quite as absolute—or not yet as absolute—as some might care to believe.
The new sensibility
Activists during the 1960s still understood critical theory within the context of Marxism. Herbert Marcuse insisted that transforming advanced industrial society required action by the working class. But he felt that its outlook had been manipulated by the culture industry, economic gains, and the political establishment. Revolutionary consciousness could arise only outside its ranks. Women, people of color, anti-imperialist movements at the periphery of the system, intellectuals, and bohemians might provide the working class not merely with a revolutionary spark, but with something more elusive: a new sensibility. These new catalysts of revolution would embody what Andre Breton originally termed the “great refusal.”
Here, once again, critical theory evinces its connection with modernism, Breton was a legend among the European avant-garde and the guiding light of surrealism. He called for rebellion against the settled habits of everyday life and direct action by the proletariat against the state. Above all, however, Breton endorsed a form of art that rejected the familiar, the consensual, and the traditional. His aesthetic was dedicated to an assault upon narrative and linear rationality.
Both Benjamin and Adorno had been fascinated by surrealism during the 1930s. They, too, endorsed montage, stream of consciousness, the epiphany, and the liberation of the unconscious. Especially Benjamin saw surrealism as evoking a kind of “revolutionary intoxication” whose enemy was the everyday life of bourgeois society. The great refusal was understood by Marcuse as animating resistance to cruelty, exploitation, and the inhumane values of advanced industrial society.
An Essay on Liberation, among his most popular works, saw the great refusal as generating a utopian sensibility. That the young rebels embodied this is surely an exaggeration. The marginal groups were perhaps never quite that marginal. It is probably better to speak of burgeoning new social movements—partially generated by expanding labor markets—and strip them of revolutionary and utopian pretensions. Their most impressive successes were achieved through the courts and by political legislation. But it is easy to be too cynical. There was a widespread revulsion against war and the “military-industrial complex.” There were radical demands for transparency and for democratic accountability. The “Great Society” programs of President Lyndon Johnson were responses to pressure from below by community-based organizations and new social movements. The “freedom riders” that fought for civil rights in the South were outsiders. In Europe and Latin America it was radical intellectuals like Rudi Dutschke and Danny Cohn-Bendit whose followers ignited the huge strike-wave of 1968 that was marked by a democratic ideal of autogestion that harked back to the workers’ councils and the Paris Commune.
Environmentalism, animal rights, and an assault on male chauvinism were outgrowths of the new sensibility. Educational reform of a radical sort mixed with the demands of cultural modernists for the transformation of everyday life. Sexual mores and race relations changed. The quality of life emerged as a matter of fundamental concern—and, undoubtedly, aesthetic perceptions changed as well. The New Left evinced a deep appreciation of subjectivity. People of color, women, gays, and intellectuals sought to make sense of the world and gain a measure of existential meaning and purpose for themselves. The New Left was the first mass movement that privileged cultural transformation. That was what created its affinity for critical theory and the Frankfurt School.
Conservative attacks on the adversary culture in the 1980s in the United States, and then again in the aftermath of 9/11, brought with it an overarching attack on the welfare state and civil liberties in the name of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism. Marcuse anticipated something like this in Counter-Revolution and Revolt (1972). He speculated about reactionary attempts to undermine the political interests and ideals associated with the new sensibility His own sensibility underwent not so much a change as a shift in emphasis. His last published work, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), notes that its “debt to the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno does not require any specific acknowledgment.” There was still a hint of hope—but it was fading. The great refusal embodied in modernist art of an explicitly political sort (like that of Brecht) now exited the stage. Aesthetics should now affirm not the consciousness of a movement, or some new form of historical subject, but genuine individuality whose existence is imperiled by forces far grander than what the rebels of ’68 imagined.
Utopia is always less a finished product than a longing for transcendence. Especially where the culture industry defines public life, where concepts are continually simplified and ideals are turned into platitudes, cultivation of that longing perhaps assumes value in its own right. That was certainly what Max Horkheimer came to believe toward the end of his life. He also knew that individual experience is easily manipulated and that the critical impulse within seeking transcendence cannot be taken for granted. There are drugs; there are preachers; there are cults; and always there are promises of redemption and bliss. The culture industry thrives on happiness. It is standardized and prepackaged. But real happiness contests a miserable reality. It speaks only to the experience of the particular individual—like the religious notion of grace.
In “The Ego and Freedom Movements” (1936), Horkheimer insisted that unconditional happiness cannot exist—only the longing for it. That longing denies all attempts by the commodity form and instrumental rationality to transform the qualitative into the quantitative and the sacred into the profane. Each of us has a natural desire for eternity, beauty, transcendence, salvation, and God—or what Horkheimer ultimately termed the “longing for the totally other.” He makes no promises, depicts no ritual, and provides no church. But this longing provides the foundation for resisting the totally administered society and affirming individuality. The longing for the totally other has nothing in common with organized religion. Nevertheless, its reliance on negation incorporates its hopes for paradise and its ability to experientially affirm the self.
Ernst Bloch once said that the truth is a prayer.
Yet the inexpressible is perhaps best expressed by music. It provides the encounter with what is deepest within us. In his classic Philosophy of Modern Music (1958), similarly, Adorno was obviously referring to redemption when he insisted that the intimation of “someone returning” is “expressive of all music, even in a world that deserves to die.” There is a way in which all of this tends to identify negation and utopia with existential experience. Stripped of all determinations and mediations, intimations of clarity and hope can be elicited (though never defined) by religion, art, and philosophy. Hegel had viewed these domains of the mind as being rendered ever more distinct by historical progress. But that perspective is inverted by the Frankfurt School. Religion, art, and philosophy now become almost interchangeable in the inexpressible truth they project.
Whatever differences exist between them lack any practical significance. Freedom stands beyond mimesis–like God—and that is also true of hell. When Adorno noted that “there can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” the oft-quoted and oft-revised line that concluded “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1951), it was meant in just this spirit. The religious injunction of Judaism now takes aesthetic form. The incarnation of evil, like the incarnation of good, can only be intimated and never depicted: no objectification of God can be perfect enough and no objectification of the Holocaust can be horrific enough. Adorno drew the radical implications of this position in Minima Moralia when he wrote: “only insofar as it withdraws from man can culture be faithful to man.”
Embracing the negation
The Frankfurt School breathed the air of European modernism. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the Nazi triumph of 1933, it seemed, an international avant-garde was contesting an emerging mass society with its emphasis upon bureaucracy, standardization, scientific rationality, and the commodity form. Countless Impressionists, Cubists, Expressionists, Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists sought to experience the world anew. Through a blizzard of philosophical-aesthetic manifestos they launched an assault upon everything associated with the “realistic” purposes of art in the name of the utopian imagination and the liberation of individuality. Resistance shifted from the political to the cultural realm. Or, in the case of the Frankfurt School, the moment in which critical reflection provided by philosophy blends with the experiential intensity highlighted by aesthetics. The negation turned into the point of transcendental resistance in which subjectivity contests the ontology of false conditions.
The Frankfurt School was always suspicious of organized politics. Implicit in its views on alienation and reification was the belief that linking theory to practice would only further the plans of the terrible simplifiers. The dangers of anti-intellectualism seemed palpable, and in “Resignation” and the other essays comprising Critical Models 2 (1969), Adorno expressed his contempt for those who say “enough talking already.” The practice in which they wished to “join in” could never be radical enough given the way in which the culture industry would present it. Young people had lessons to learn from totalitarian movements with their propaganda apparatus and their contempt for the individual. Affirming individuality was the best response to the totally administered society. But there is something self-serving about all of this.
Activity that evidences a plausible connection between ends and means is not the same thing as action for its own sake or what Adorno termed “actionism.” Theory is surely not reducible to practice. But this doesn’t mean it should turn its back on illuminating the constraints and opportunities for change. That political activity does not always generate reflection is a hard lesson. Adorno was right to teach it. But his call to “think” sounds like the stern command of a provincial schoolteacher; it becomes a code word for standing above the fray. Resignation remains what it is: rejection of engagement and withdrawal from the organized project for institutional change.
Adorno’s essay titled “Engagement,” which is included in Notes on Literature (1969), is a direct assault on Bertolt Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre. Both of them were sympathetic to communism and both emphasized the need to connect literature with a partisan view of political trends. Sartre wrote in What Is Literature? (1947) that no great novel can be written that endorses anti-Semitism. With an eye cast on Brecht’s didactic plays like The Measures Taken (1930), which contains the famous line “the party has a thousand eyes, we have only two,” Adorno retorted that no great novel can be written in praise of the Moscow trials either. He always believed that the idea of a politically engaged literature is a contradiction in terms. It can offer neither critique of the totality (since the artwork is always partisan in its politics) nor any meaningful utopian vision (since genuine happiness always stands beyond objectification).
The ability to depict the eradication of subjectivity in a totally administered society, a nightmarish world of bureaucracy with no exit and no meaning, is precisely what made Franz Kafka’s writings so seminal for this brand of critical theory. Something is always elusive in Kafka. What? Not only subjectivity, whether of the character or the onlooker, but the manner in which it is elicited.
Aesthetic Theory (1969) projects notions of subjectivity, freedom, and utopia that resist all objectification. Adorno’s towering work—that demonstrates his extraordinary intellectual power and justifies his enduring appeal—stresses the tensions arising within the artwork as a social monad. Kant’s view of aesthetic experience as exhibiting a kind of purposeful purposelessness thus exists within the same phenomenon that, following Marx, embodies specific forms of repression. Conflicts are embedded in the work between form and content, reflection and experience, technique and inspiration, utopian hope and anthropological negation. The work of art is thus a “force field” of conflicting tensions. Critical aesthetics should highlight them. Its true aim is not to create a shared understanding of the world through some common identification with characters, narratives, and themes but, instead, to intensify experience. That is why, according to Adorno, the paradigmatic moment of art is “fireworks.”
Not many artists are capable of generating this moment, and Adorno’s essay on a play by Samuel Beckett, Understanding Endgame (1961), is both a masterful investigation of dramatic technique and a superb condensation of his general aesthetic outlook. Beckett creates a world of illusion that each experiences differently. Its “truth content” appears in its aesthetically formed resistance to the world of reification and alienation. The character of its response, however, is inexpressible: it is rendered unique for each member of the audience.
The longing for the totally other implicitly makes itself felt. Adorno was surely aware of that. From Benjamin, after all, he had learned that aesthetic critique rests on the (hopeless) hope of redemption. There are no good old days as romantics and conservatives still tend to think. Beckett’s Happy Days (1961) offers a searing indictment of that idea with its characters ultimately buried in sand up to the neck while indulging in recollections of the past that never occurred. Both of these plays by Beckett are minimalist in their staging and dialogue. It should be noted that Adorno always sought to prevent the use of aesthetic form from degenerating into formalism and utopian longing from collapsing into irrationalism. His corrective lies in the critical connection of the work to the ontology of false conditions and its rejection of all facile attempts to live the wrong life rightly.
Negative Dialectics (1966) is the philosophical articulation of this enterprise. Its starting point is a metacritique of idealism that builds upon Three Studies on Hegel (1963). The break between history and freedom once again becomes the centerpiece of the argument. No prefabricated harmony is possible between the individual and society. Creating an identity between subject and object is self-defeating. History is the realm of un-freedom, the increasing subjugation of subjectivity, and the triumph of necessity and instrumental rationality over happiness and subjectivity. Belief in the march of progress has been invalidated by the triumph of totalitarianism. Conceptualizing the individual in universal terms was a mis
take from the beginning.
Kant succumbed to that idea. So did Hegel and Marx. Their teleological outlook seemed to justify every sacrifice in the name of bringing about an ill-fated unity between subject and object. Subjugated either to the World Spirit or the working class, the individual was left without experiential moorings and, effectively, disempowered,
8. According to the interpretation by T. W. Adorno, Endgame by Samuel Beckett elicits subjectivity and thereby serves to resist the totally administered society. This photograph shows a scene from the play.
Negative Dialectics and the Three Studies on Hegel contest this set of assumptions. Each shows how the Hegelian “negation of the negation” that supposedly produces ever more positive determinations of freedom actually undermines autonomy through increasing reification. These works by Adorno validate the negation in its own right without reference to any historical understanding of progress. Resolution of the tensions between the individual and society is impossible. The attempt to project it is a self-defeating enterprise. Negative dialectics affirms instead the non-identity between subject and object, the individual and society, as well as the particular and the universal. Non-identity, however, cannot simply be proclaimed. Critical reflection is required to explain how it is expressed in any particular circumstance and how the given experience escapes objectification.
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