Non-places

In the previous post I have outlined Adorno's vision of utopia. This should be distinguished from the way Marcuse used the term in The end of utopia. Marcuse claims that ideals of the emancipated society have often been reproached with being "utopian". He then goes on to prove that an emancipated society is possible - or at least that it is impossible to claim that it is not possible. But Marcuse himself adds to the confusion of terms that critics of critical theory have made use of when accusing Marxism of "utopianism". U-tupia, the non-place, should not be understood as a plan for reality to follow. As Adorno showed the question of whether redemption can ever come is besides the point - but I would go even further and claim that posing this question already distorts the function of utopia. Utopia is a regulatory mechanism, an imaginary vantage point set into emancipated society from which our world is viewed. This is the meaning of non-place: the vantage point of the utopian gaze is beyond the world. Yet because it is never possible to step outside the world this gaze remains bound by it, it remains a historical contingency. In fact it is bound by history the strongest when it feigns independence, thereby regressing to mere ideology. The point of utopia is not to gaze upon emancipated society, but to step into emancipated society and gaze upon the existing. But since every utopian view is historically contingent, each historically existing society constructs a different emancipated society, utopia is not static. Utopian society can not be fixed for all times, but fulfills its functions only if it changes together with the society it mirrors.

O Freunde, nicht diese Töne

Adorno concluded his Minima Moralia with an essay contemplating the role of eschatology for critical thought:

The only philosophy that can be responsibly practised in the face of despair, would be the attempt to observe all things as they appear from the standpoint of redemption. Cognizance has no light but that which shines on the world from redemption: all else is exhausted in repetition and remains mere technique.

And even if we agree that: "Compared to the demand thereby laid upon [thinking] the question of the reality of redemption itself is nearly irrelevant," the question of what redemption looks like remains immensely important. From the standpoint of a redemption that is itself repetition of the existing the faults of the world are concealed, affirmed and reinforced, not brought into the light. But what are the predominating visions of redemption but repetitions of the existing? We are forced to ask as Schiller did in Shakespeare's shadows: "Why do you flee from yourself, when it is yourself you seek?" Even great works of art - or perhaps those especially - are not immune, the promesse du bonheur they utter tends to be as far from redemption as the world it is trying to flee. What is most noticeable about the great finale of Beethoven's ninth is that there is not one spark of tenderness to be found in the pompous fireworks of joy. Fleeing from the misery of the world one is struck over the head with it thousandfold. What Adorno wrote about Strauss in part holds for Beethoven:

The misery of the sunrise in Richards Strauss' Alpensymphonie is not caused merely by banal sequences, but by splendour itself. No sunrise namely, not even that in high mountains, is pompous, triumphant, majestic, but appears weak and hesitating like the hope that all might turn out well in the end, and in such inconspicuousness of the mightiest light lies its moving magnificence.

True redemption, whenever it appears, is hard to discern, not because it is hidden, but because it is fragile and tender, not to be perceived in the overpowering racket of trumpets and timpani, but at the border between sound and silence:

And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation. Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:20-21)

True redemption was captured by Mozart in Zauberflöte. Not in Die Strahlen der Sonne though, but in Papagena, Papagena, Papagena. There we can feel true grace, awarded to the weak not because of their merits but in spite of their flaws. Stubbornly adhering to a vision of redemption that is not and can never be earned Zauberflöte opposes the world in the name of a better, a world whose strenght lies in its frailty.

Sapere aude!

Kant demanded free reasoning but forgot that reason itself is not free.

A fragment on love

I do not even measure time in minutes and hours and days and weeks any more, but in hearing from you: every time is a heartbeat and between lies an eternity. It is the same every time, my torture repeated, living for moments that are as fleeting as the silence between them is deafening. Were the heartbeats to stop, what then? Would I die, would I find absolution, would I find apocalypse or apocatastasis? I am just another impotent prick, chasing flashes of light (oh, but what a warm and bright glow you are) like a moth, stumbling and fumbling around spectres of a thousand false moons. To everyone seeing through the illusion we moths do look like complete fools. But know this: their self-assuredness is itself nothing more than illusion.

Is that Marx I smell on you, herr Heidegger?

The parallels that exist between Heidegger and critical theory are striking. One need only compare Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Heidegger claims that we necessarily misconstrue the essence of technology if we look at it as a means to an end or as something people do. While these viewpoints are correct, they are not true - that is they do not grasp the essence of technology. The essence of technology for him is to be sought by following the etymology of the word to its Greek origin techne. Techne meant a way of knowing and through technology for Heidegger the world is revealed in a certain way. Modern technology relates to the world as a Be-stand (quite impossible to translate, some use "standing reserve"), a reserve of energy that can be harboured - in this way the earth becomes the harbinger of coal or oil, while the traditional understanding of the field for the peasant was as something that needed to be nurtured. The danger Heidegger sees is that if this relationship to the world as Bestand is taken to its extreme, humans - who are also part of nature - will relate to each other as mere Bestände, and never be in touch with their essence.

It is quite easy to find empirical equivalents of Heidegger's somewhat perplexing writing. The operation that transforms the world into Bestand is the transformation of use value into trade value. As capital the world can be accumulated and as capital it is used to turn people into Bestände, making it possible to extract more capital from their work. An even more intimate link can be found between Wesen der Technik and Dialektik der Aufklärung. Adorno and Horkheimer similarly devote their attention to a specific relating to the world - Aufklärung or enlightenment. This stance towards the world is an instrumental one, it aims at dominating nature but the price humanity has had to pay for this control was high: in the process of enlightenment (which is not to be confused with the historical epoch of the same name, the process is broader and only culminates in this epoch) humanity has extended this instrumentalist posture to themselves, domination of other human beings has been inextricably connected to domination of nature. In Heidegger's terms: humans extend the relating as Bestand from nature to themselves.

But let us not be fooled into lumping these quite diverse philosophical traditions together on account of a few common themes. Nietzsche supposedly once wrote that he who sees too many similarities between different philosophical systems should get a better pair of glasses. Let us therefore take a closer look at the differences between these two positions. Adorno and Horkheimer claim that we have come full circle: before the process of enlightenment started, our lives were governed completely by necessity, today they are again. The only change that had happened is that natural necessity has given way to economic one: if caveman was blindly subjected to the arbitrary events in nature he could neither control nor understand, so today we are blindly subjected to the arbitrary events of the economic system we can neither control (and on this point neo-liberals will agree first of all) nor understand. Adorno and Horkheimer turn to a critique of enlightenment only to save it from itself. The ideal remains the same: emancipation, subjecting our lives to our own free will instead of external arbitrary forces. This emancipation is not the telos of history (like Hegel's idea of the self-realization of spirit) nor is it the essence of humanity - whenever it is present it is purely negative, a possibility that was never realized but that can be grasped as such. As Adorno had put it in his answer to Popper: "only to those that can imagine it as different from the one currently existing does society, to use Popper's term, pose a problem; only by what it is not will it unveil itself as what it is, and that should be the object of a sociology that does no limit itself, as the majority of its projects does, to projects of public and private administration." What the dialectics of enlightenment is endangering is not any metaphysical essence of humanity, but the never manifested - yet inalienable - right to lead a free life. For Adorno and Horkheimer that, which is, calls upon humanity, but negatively, by revealing itself as what it might become. For Heidegger on the other hand Dasein calls upon humanity affirmatively. As he had put it in Wesen der Technik: "[Gestell] is the way in which the real unveils itself as Bestand. Now we ask: does this unveiling happen somewhere beyond human activiy? No. But it does not happen merely in the human nor essentially through him." Notice the similarity in phrasing between Heidegger and Adorno: they both talk of unveiling (Adorno uses the word ent-hüllen, Heidegger ent-bergen, they both imply that truth is revealed by lifting a barrier that prevents it to be seen), but the crucial difference is that for Adorno truth is revealed through a critical relationship to the world, for Heidegger it is purely affirmative. This is the crucial difference between Adorno's critical theory and Heidegger's metaphysics. The similarities are explained by Adorno in Minima Moralia, 122 - Monnograme: "Not the last of the tasks facing thinking is to put all reactionary arguments against western culture into the service of advancing enlightenment."

Trading badges

In my opinion one of the greatest movie scenes ever shot is the badge scene in Schindler's list. It is right at the end of the movie when Schindler reflects that what he has done was not enough, that he could have saved more people. He has wasted too much money, he kept the car that would have bought 10 people, and the gold NSDAP badge he wears would have bought at least one more life. At first it would seem that the audience is drowned in a tide of sentimentalism. But something happens that blocks the impending catharis; the tide recedes, yet we are still unable to draw a breath. For when the tide recedes, that which repelled it stands revealed: the grotesque. The schock comes not from identification with Schindler and his remorse that more lives could have been bought, but from the realization that life has a price. A puny badge is equivalent to that which should be beyond all worth. If Schindler's trading at first glance seemed heroic, now we are forced to realize the truth of Adorno's claim: "There is no right life in the wrong."

Aura

Aura is a crucial concept of Walter Benjamin's essay The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility. The core idea of the essay is that technical reproducibility is dissolving the aura of the artwork by loosening its ties to tradition and ritual and is thereby an emancipatory effect. I have already criticized the technological determinism of Benjamin's essay and now it is time to ask whether the critical concept of aura can be salvaged. What is aura according to Benjamin? The essay lacks a clear definition. He starts by discussing "originality". He writes that with technical reproducibly the originality of the work of art, it's "here and now /.../ it's unique existence in the place where it is present," is dissolving. In this process the Aura, the "unique impression of distance, as close it may be" is also lost. Aura was reproduced by ritual, it was part of the traditional use of art, it had cult value.

What are we to think of the enigmatic definition of aura: "unique impression of distance, as close as it may be" It reminds us of Barthes' description of myth as alibi. He presents us with the image of a train ride during which one is looking through the window: as ones own reflection on the glass and the view through the window are never in the same place, so the mythical (second-order) signifier and signified can not be grasped as a whole. The whole (the sign) therefore acquires the characteristic of an infernal distance, and this distance increases with closeness. Closeness is the modus operandi of myth for Barthes: when we are presented with the image of the saluting soldier, French imperialism is right there, presenting itself as the most obvious commonsensical fact. But at the same time it eludes us with its infernal distance, it jumps just out of reach at the moment we reach for it. What Barthes analysed was aura in the age of technological reproducibility.

Benjamin made the mistake of tackling aura from a purely technological viewpoint. Therefore he could not see that aura could flourish even in face of technological reproducibility. Creation of aura is a process that transcends the creation, reproduction and reception of works of art. In romanticism for example discourses of "genius" accompanied art and made sure it is received with awe for the singular abilities of the artist-god. The culture industry creates stars for the same purpose, although it produces for a mass market and is therefore geared towards the highest level of technical reproducibility and the availability of its products is even enhanced by illegal exchange on the internet. Benjamin exhibited a naive trust in the masses and their need to "bring things close" since - as Barthes has shown - an illusion of closeness is the modus operandi of myth.

But Barthes' brilliant analysis of signifying processes also does not bring us closer to an emancipatory theory of art. In a sense Barthes' analysis is even narrower - and perhaps this is the only reason fewer problems can be pointed out - because his analysis is limited to the structure of myth and ignores the whole context of it's creation and reception, it is completely ahistorical. His belief that by analysing myths they will lose their function was just as naive. A theory that is to have emancipatory potential must take into account social conditions of the production and effectiveness of aura. I see two particularly useful starting points for this endeavour. On the one hand are Adorno's writings on the culture industry and his idea that for art to have a critical potential it's production must have some level of autonomy from social praxis. His search was also for a form, but an emancipatory one: he believed that only that form which actively resists incorporation into praxis can have critical potential. By the very act of resistance it is a prophecy of a world in which "happiness is be above praxis". This is what promesse de bonheur means for Adorno. On the other is the idea of an aesthetic public sphere which is capable of critical reflection on works of art while individualised recipients are easy prey for manipulation.

Night of the living dead

This will be a post on post. It seems we are living in a post world, words with the prefix are springing up like daisies on a spring pasture. Notwithstanding the most obvious objection that adding the prefix post does not say anything substantial: we might as well say that philosophy today is post-scholastic and have it done with, say that we are living in the post-palaeolithic and that our art is post-baroque, the real problem is that the prefix does not only reveal an intellectual confusion, but that it is ideological. It's aim is to conceal a reactionary movement in all spheres of modern life. The process is the same everywhere one looks: take a name of a progressive movement (in either art, philosophy, politics or social sciences), strip it of all progressive tendencies and attach the prefix. A good example is post-modernism in art. The historical avant-garde developed means of expression that aimed at a revolutionary impact: no more and no less than a thorough social transformation by the aesthetic realm. In post-modernism these devices have survived, but have become assimilated by the institution art that the historical avant-garde rebelled against. In this process the avant-garde has been reduced to a set of ornaments, set to adorn a resurrected affirmative culture. And as Adorno noted, culture is the mechanism by which class domination is internalized. It, that can exist only by exclusion, has produced a sphere that promised pure humanity to the select few - it should be noted that just as slave labour was constitutive of philosophy in ancient Greece, so exclusion was constitutive for bourgeois culture. That today all are excluded - the manager, who must subordinate not only his body, but his mind to the dictates of economy, most of all - might fool us into thinking that contemporary culture has become inclusive. Quite the opposite is true: exclusion has becom universalized. Where can one today find a homme de lettre, or anybody cultivating aesthetic sensibility as an entry into the realm of a pure humanity? There is no "high" or "low" art any more - constitutive of "high" art of the bourgeois era was that it transcended social praxis by its promesse de bonheur - a counterfactual vision of a better, a harmonious world. This idea (one can find it in almost all aesthetic manifestos of the time, whether it be Kant's Critique of the faculty of judgement, Wordsworth's preface to his Lyrical ballads, Schiller's Aesthetic education, or Hölderlin's Hyperion) was of course ideological when it claimed that the harmony of art was realised in society, but at the same time critical, when it showed the gulf between social praxis and happiness. Bourdieu's analysis of art in Distinction implicitly treats it as equivalent to objects of taste (furniture, clothing, cuisine), which might have caused an outrage in the 19. century, but is today statement of fact: art has been reduced to a mere object of taste, critique to a statement of like or dislike on a 5 point Likert type scale - in short, art has become a mere commodity among others. Post-modern art has retained the affirmative character of bourgeois culture, but what it affirms is no longer a realm of pure humanity set into heaven, but social praxis itself - one need only look at the works of Andy Warhol. What has remained is the ideological moment of affirmation, what has been lost is the critical vision of a better world. Avant-garde techniques are used not to beat the path to a free society, but to soothe the guilty conscience of the sublime fallen from grace.

guilt - some reflections on Kafka's Judgement

Punishment is a theme frequently reoccurring in Kafka's works from Prozess to In der Strafkolonie, but nowhere is its nature revealed to us so clearly as in his short story Das Urteil. Here it is bound up in a seemingly paradoxical web of guilt and an arbitrary use of force. The first object of guilt for Georg is a friend that has emigrated to Russia. Georg ponders the situation of the friend who appears as his binary opposite: while Georg is taking over his father's business and making enormous profits, about to get married to a woman from wealthy background, his friend in Russia is living in poverty, sickness and social isolation without hope of ever finding a spouse. At this point we find Georg has kept all his success concealed from his friend and limited their correspondence to banalities. When he decides to report his engagement to the friend and goes to tell his father another object of guilt is revealed: Georg finds his fading father, already a bit senile, sitting in his dark room, his breakfast hardly touched and wearing dirty underwear (dirt is something that Kafka frequently associates with authority), so he starts to think that he has been neglecting his father and resolves to take better care of him. When he puts the father to bed, the story takes an abrupt turn. Just when the father seems completely passivized, he rises from his bed with fierce force:

»Nein!« rief der Vater, daß die Antwort an die Frage stieß, warf die Decke zurück mit einer Kraft, daß sie einen Augenblick im Fluge sich ganz entfaltete, und stand aufrecht im Bett. Nur eine Hand hielt er leicht an den Plafond. »Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte Kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich.

The usual situation of succession has been turned on its head: the fading father that is to be succeeded by his son - one might interpret the putting to bed as a symbol of burrial, especially since the father rejects the act with the words: "you wanted to cover me /.../ but I am not yet covered" - suddenly rises while the son fades. The seemingly powerless father becomes ever more energetic as his accusations accumulate, while his son is fading at the same pace. The energies of father and son are bound in a zero-sum game. The father reveals that he has been the informant of the friend and accuses Georg of betrayal. Another point of his accusation is the most paradoxical one, at one point it seems that the very fact of succession (which the father acknowledged as a fact of nature earlier in his seemingly passivized state) is a sin against the father:

Und mein Sohn ging im Jubel durch die Welt, schloß Geschäfte ab, die ich vorbereitet hatte, überpurzelte sich vor Vergnügen und ging vor seinem Vater mit dem verschlossenen Gesicht eines Ehrenmannes davon!

The verdict the father delivers at the end of his accusations is damning - death by drowning:

Und lauter: »Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch! – Und darum wisse: Ich verurteile dich jetzt zum Tode des Ertrinkens!«

Georg rushes out of the room to fulfill his sentence - he runs to a busy bridge and throws himself into the water, his last words being: "Liebe Eltern, ich habe euch doch immer geliebt"

The first question that merits an answer is what is the nature of the fathers' authority. The father has no means to force Georg to fulfill the verdict, certainly he can not use physical force, the most likely explanation seems that there is an agreement on guilt between them - the guilt Georg felt weekly when composing the letter to his friend and one that the father attached his judgement to. Yet when we judge this by conventional moral codes there is no real cause for guilt, rather for compassion: nothing in the story suggests that the friends miserable state is Georg's fault. The other sin, the sin of succession, is likewise not one of his own, if anything it is a sin of the father. The first sin, the one of doing well, is a consequence of Georg succeeding his father in business - again it seems the sin is on the side of the father. The only moral transgression Georg is objectively guilty of is his existence, for which the father acts at once as the actual perpetrator, judge and jury. The moment the father mounts the accusation is at the point when Georg is about to enter maturity (financial independence, marriage) and at which point he has become distinguishable from his heritage - hence only now the judgement can be spoken by the father without being spoken against himself. The judgement is a representative one - in it the son takes the role of the sacrificial animal, being slaughtered in place of the father.

The notion of guilt Kafka portrays is one that is perfectly in accord with the one Walter Benjamin attributes to capitalism in Capitalism as religion: "A situation that is so inextricable creates guilt." Benjamin's formulation is at least as puzzling as Kafka's. How can something that is inextricable - hence beyond responsibility of any and all involved actors - produce guilt, which feeds on responsibility. But this paradoxical situation is one that all Kafka's characters have to deal with when they face the law, be it Georg, Joseph K. or the man from the countryside. As Benjamin elucidates: "This cult [of capitalism] is thirdly culpabilizing. Capitalism is presumably the first case of a religion that does not atone but produces guilt. In so doing, this system of religion stands in the wake of an enormous movement. An enormously guilty conscience, which does not know how to atone, seizes on the cult, in order not to atone for its guilt but to make it universal, hammering it into consciousness until finally and above all God himself is included in this guilt, so as finally to interest him in atonement." This is exactly the world Kafka's story paints: a world in which individual actions are sundered from the moral framework, from guilt and atonement, and the law does not sanction individual actions but sanctions in spite of them. Guilt is something that has become universal, one is implied in it merely by being. And Kafka makes it absolutely clear that death is not a refuge from guilt. When Joseph K. dies he feels as if shame - but why should he feel ashamed, he always felt he was guilty of no crime - was to outlive him. Similarly the executioner in Strafkolonie is refused a cathartic death because of a malfunction in the machine. His failure is double: firstly he feels that he will not be able to uphold the commandement "be just!" and secondly he is refused to even justly punish himself for failing justice.

Das Urteil is a judgement on a world in which being is a sin. In the purest form it achieves what Brecht presumptuously ascribed to his epic theatre - it poses a moral problem in such a way that it cannot be interpreted away, it can not be reconciled by pure reasoning. It calls for action: only through action can the paradoxical strands of the story be woven into a whole, only social change can achieve what literary criticism must fail to do. The judgement Kafka here speaks is on the world that has made coldness its driving force - as Hannah Arendt noted, evil is banal, and as Adorno rephrased: everything that is banal is evil. We see Georg at the point of awakening from his moral solipsism and that is what the father means by saying that in being an innocent child Georg was an infernal human:

Jetzt weißt du also, was es noch außer dir gab, bisher wußtest du nur von dir! Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!

Georg was guilty of succession, he was guilty of perpetuating the social injustice and living in a moral vacuum - "bisher wußtest du nur von dir" - you knew of nothing but yourself! You have made the bourgeois principle of indifference your own and never questioned it! The world Kafka presents us is one where there is no innocence, or rather: where the greatest innocence is at once the greatest sin. A world in which a rupture has sprung up between success and achievement, a world that has reached its grotesque peak in the form of concentration camps where the only reason one survived was because someone else died. As Brecht had put it in To those who come after us:

What kind of times are they, when
A talk about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many horrors?
That man there calmly crossing the street
Is already perhaps beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true I still earn my keep
But, believe me, that is only an accident. Nothing
I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance, I've been spared. (If my luck breaks, I am lost)

affirmative culture

I have already proposed the idea that art can be approached through the framework Marx had developed for the critique of ideology. I argued that role playing games were revealing a specific subjectivity of the contemporary individual and through analysis of this subjectivity a critique of society can be practised. The problem is that this critique of ideology is a critical destruction: for Marx religion was to be destroyed by critique so that it would not be able to comfort people suffering under the given social circumstances and with the abscence of consolation the need for change will rise.

Now I would like to play with another, more affirmative idea of criticism. I will start from Adornos premise that art had a dormant emancipatory potential, a promesse de bonheur. He believed that the harmony and beauty of bourgeois art held a dark mirror to society in which its faults were revealed and a vision of a better world was made possible. In contemporary society for him this was no longer possible - in a world that continually reproduces mass murder, torture and terror the promise of harmony has lost all credibility. Therefore he believed that contemporary culture could only be negative, not affirmative: it could only show society as untrue and broken, but no more show the promise of paradise society could potentially be. Culture industry on the other hand functioned by assimilation to the status quo, to the broken individual such as he has become under the untrue society and even dared to justify this with a recourse to democracy (people are buying, ergo: we are giving them what they want). The question is whether we can find a middle path between this total rejection of the world and complete assimilation to it.

The key is an aesthetic public sphere. The idea has been neglected in favour of the political one, but in Structural transformations Habermas assigned a very important role to a literary public sphere, which was crucial to the formation of a bourgeois public in three ways: 1) it was instrumental in the formation of the fora of the political public sphere like salons; 2) in it the bourgeoisie honed their debating skills; 3) through aesthetic exchange the bourgeoisie formed a specific subjectivity that was the stepping stone for their political activity; The idea I want to defend is that only through the workings of an aesthetic public sphere can art redeem its emancipatory potential. If is to do so it must avoid two pitfalls: assimilation to the existing state of society that makes art perform an ideological function, and a complete isolation from society that while preserving the emancipatory potential, does nothing to realize it. If art is to be a critical force it must go beyond the understanding of it's audience, if it is to have some transformatory potential, it must challenge, it must perturb, it must violate. It is naive to expect that this challenge can be faced by isolated individuals, only by critical reflection on art in a public sphere will they be able to go beyond their current subjectivity.

Philosophy of despair

I believe two anecdotes are illuminating the nature of critical theory particularly well. One is supposed to have happened in California still during the war. At a party Adorno presented the idea that his philosophy was a message in a bottle. The question what the content of the message was was answered by Fritz Eisler in broad Viennese accent: "Mir is' soooo mies!" (I feel sooo bad)

Another is reported by Benjamin in his Kafka essay: In a conversation Kafka had with Brod he had the idea that we are all suicidal, nihilistic thoughts in the mind of god. This reminded Brod of the gnostic idea of god as the evil demiurge and creation as his sin, which Kafka denied vehemently:"No, nothing like that, we are just the result of a mood, a bad day." "Then there is still hope." Brod concluded from this, at which moment a broad smile crept across Kafkas face:"Hope? Of course! Endless hope, just not for us!"

These two anecdotes reveal a stance towards the world that John Berger has called stance of undefeated despair. Despair shines thorough both anecdotes like a black dawn, a sense that in any conceivable way all is lost. This sense of despair is coupled with an almost boundless hope, a hope for a better world we will never see. That is why Adorno and Horkheimer thought of their philosophy as a sort of time-capsule: it would preserve the emancipatory potential of philophy for a future time, when it would be possible to redeem this emancipatory promise. Like bacteria that form a protective coating when the environment is hostile, so culture was to isolate itself from the social environment, because the world in which Ausschwitz happened for Adorno held no possibility of realizing the emancipatory potential of bourgeois culture. Curiously enough this idea reveals a trace of affirmative fatalims - a belief that things will in and of themselves turn towards the slightly better, a trace of metaphysics that Adorno despised so much.

Elective affinities

Andy Warhol and Leni Riefenstahl. Seemingly the hypothesis of an elective affinity between these two artists is bizarre. Once we search deeper the very adverse is revealed. I was having a discussion with a friend on the merits of Warhol and he claimed that Warhol's achievement was taking banal or ugly, even terrifying (electric chairs for example) objects and making them seem so beautiful that people actually wanted to hang them on their walls. That is the moment Leni Riefenstahl came to my mind: what was her greatest achievent but making the horrors of Nazism seem so beautiful that - if possible - people would be nailing them on their walls. This was only part of the phenomenon Walter Benjamin called aesthetization of politics, a most radical antidemocratic force. Leni Riefenstahl took the driving principle of Nazism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made and aesthetic principle of it: her films have perfect symmetry, rigid rhythm, nothing idiosyncratic or non-identical (like the Jew) is allowed to enter, the people are all so similar that it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other - all except for the führer, who is allowed his idiosyncrasy only because he encompasses the whole. Warhol took the driving principle of capitalism - the elimination of all non-identical - and made an aesthetic principle of it: his paintings aestheticize the workings of a mass society in which all is reduced to economic functions, in which all is tradeable, in which all is expendable and hence worthless. Just like Nazism, capiatlism had made humans only cogs in the mechanisms of the whole and just like Leni Rifenstahl Andy Warhol has functioned as an ideologue for this process.

Barroco by Tomaž Pandur

The sublime with a guilty conscience.

How Duchamp killed the artist

One of the most controversial instances - "work" would hardly be applicable here - of art remains Duchamp's Fountain. It is surely idiosyncratic for a number of reasons. Adorno wrote about the tension between artefactuality and transcendentality that is present in every work of art and the Fountain is special because it implodes this tension. In history we can find works of art that attempted to hide their artefactuality, for example contemporary productions of the culture industry, or romanticist art that sought to hide the process of production with recourse to ideas of "inspiration" and "genius". The historical avant-garde flaunted artefactuality openly, the institution of art became a focus of reflection, but still the tension persisted, the transcendental character was not eliminated. Duchamp's Fountain goes beyond that, the artefact (an urinal) is not a signifier, but a gesture. The difference is that a signifier points to something in a certain aspect, while a gesture points to it in its totality and idiosyncrasy. If I referr to a "table" I point to the aspect of this object that it shares with all other objects of the same name and by virtue of which they are equivalent. A gesture points to the very specific object with all its idiosyncrasies. The Fountain points to the process of it's own creation as an instance of art, at the space in which an urinal becomes the Fountain. The actual artefact is merely pointing to the process of it's creation, artefactuality taken to it's extreme becomes transcendence. It is the avant-garde in it's purest form, ideal type become flesh. It exhibits unbreakable resistance to the institution of art, in fact the strength of resistance increases proportionally to the force of incorporation. The greatest example are the "replicas" that were made of the urinal and which are displayed as replicas of the Fountain. In one sense this is a vain attempt since the content of the Fountain is not the artefact but the process of its initiation into a work of art and that can not be replicated. In another the replicas are true children of the Fountain - they no longer point to the process of initiation but to the resistance of the institution towards such reflexivity and its vain attempts of suppressing it. Just like the father in Kafka's Judgement the Fountain rises with fierce force just when the replica thought it passivized (I could not find a translation and am not confident enough to attempt one myself, therefore I must apologize to the reader for giving the quote only in german) :

Du wolltest mich zudecken, das weiß ich, mein Früchtchen, aber zugedeckt bin ich noch nicht. Und ist es auch die letzte kraft, genug für dich, zuviel für dich!

Those familiar with the story will know that the father is in no way an emancipatory force, he is a fierce tyrant. It seems we must submit the Fountain to closer scrutiny. It rebels against the institution art and brings the artefactuality of the work of art to the fore, this is its anti-mythical impulse that should be praised, but in the end it turns out to be the mouthpiece against a bad world in the name of one even worse. It rebels against the fact that in myth the artefactual nature of the work of art is concealed (in contemporary movies by the culture industry all aspects of craftsmanship are concealed) but in so doing it sacrifices the subject. Bourgeois aesthetics thought of the artist as a singular genius and thus concealed the social circumstances of the production of art. Duchamp dispenses with this hypocrisy by dispensing with the artist; there is no place for the artists in The fountain, he creates nothing, only selects. The artist becomes nothing more than an agent of the death drive, the need for complete assimilation with the surrounding, indeed the radicalised version of the dialectic of enlightenment. The seemingly radical work is revealed to be nothing more than a radicalised version of the status quo.

Throw your motherfuckin fingers in the air and wave them motehrfuckers like you just don't care

Avid Hip-hop fans will have recognized Snoop - at the time still Doggy - Dogg's take on stock phrase of old school hip-hop. They will also recall that a stock of phrases that was constantly being reused and recombined was a crucial characteristic of old school hip- hop, a phenomena that survived well into the 90s: for example Jay-z's début album Reasonable doubt (released in 1996) features a lot of quotes from older hip-hop songs. For example 22 twos refers to Can I kick it by A tribe called quest, Dead presidents refers to one of the greatest verses in the history of poetry (from Nas' The world is yours):

I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for presidents to represent me
Say what?
I'm out for dead presidents to represent me

Just by the way: I use this verse to explain Habermas to my students (the two types of political representation characteristic for critical and manipulative publicity). Then there is a quote from Snoop dogg's Murder was the case from Doggystyle in the track D'evils, then there is some quoting of LL Cool J, ODB, and very prominently also Scarface. This is the interesting bit: When Nas recorded The world is yours the chorus was an allusion to the same movie (Tony Montana is inspired by an advertisement that reads "The world is yours" and has a globe made for his house featuring the same slogan) and in the music video a few scenes are taken over from Scarface. The fact that one moment we see Nas in the bathtub scene from the movie and the next moment a child watching this same scene on television shows us that montage here is used reflexively in the tradition of the historical avant-garde.

Intertextuality in hip-hop is not limited only to text, it is also a key stylistic element of the music. The break came with a technological innovation - namely sampling - towards the end of the 80s that enabled DJ's to cut a short part of another song (called a sample), loop it and use it in their music. This can be done very lavishly (like is the case with kitchsy MTV hip-hop of today) or minimalistically, a great example of the latter approach is Heute Nacht by the german rapper Torch:



Here montage is clearly audible, samples are not even looped, but follow one another successively.

To recapitulate: stylistic characteristics of Hip-hop involve use of a stock of material (phrases, samples from music), which are edited (an author was expected to add something innovative to the stock phrase to rise above mediocrity, today music samples are often digitally edited) and through the principle of montage composed into a new whole.

All that has been said has implications for the analysis of the impact of digital editing and distribution techniques (what is sometimes referred to as new media) on art. Walter Benjamin in his essay The work of art in the age of it's technical reproducibility (the translator mistakenly wrote "in the age of technical reproduction" - compare a recent book by Weber on Benjamin's abilities for a comprehensive explanation why the suffix -ibility matters) proposes that we must analyse the impact of new media on art with a view to tendencies in artistic circles that try to achieve with old technology what only the new one makes fully possible. If Benjamin had followed this suggestion himself more closely he would have not made himself vulnerable to justified accusations of technological determinism (among others by Adorno in their correspondence) and been proven wrong by the culture industry which reproduces aura effortlessly by marketing techniques such as branding even in an era of advanced technical reproducibility. Another major problem with Benjamin's essay is that it lumps all forms of art together under the heading of "the work of art"; technical reproducibility of written text was possible since Gutenberg as every technique of mass reproduction like radio, photography and cinema has a different history - it simply can not be justified to treat all art as homogeneous when talking about technical reproducibility of artefacts.

Hip-hop needed digital technology to fully realize the potential that lay dormant. Crucial stylistic elements are echoed in the logic of digital media: since digital media break up content into bits of data, these bits can easily be separated, filters can be used on them and they can be recombined into new units (the famous copy-paste operation familiar to all computer users). It is not true that this was not possible before, just that it was much harder to say apply a filter to analogue media (film sometimes had to be hand-edited one frame at a time, with music the absence of frames made even this luxury unattainable). This has lead to a brief efflorescence of hip-hop music during what is referred to as it's renaissance (roughly '89 to '91) and continued throughout the first part of the 90s; after 96 it stared to fall to pieces because the workings of the culture industry finally gained complete control of production. The main stylistic change has been that montage is no longer used as a reflexive technique in the tradition of the historical avant-garde, but as a latent mode of construction: just as with modern movies that use digital editing, modern hip-hop presents a shiny seamless façade (Roland Barthes once noted that the seamless façade of the Citroën DS was the essence of its mythical character), the affirmative nature of bourgeois culture walks again devoid of its soul, a limp and lifeless zombie, polished to a shine by the workings of the culture industry. If, as Adorno noted, in every artwork there is a vibration between its nature as a product and as something transcendental, the culture industry forcefully destroys this vibration by hiding the nature of the product and trying for complete transcendentality. And the illusion of complete transcendentality is, as it always was, ideological; it takes the form of myth as analysed by Barthes: a perpetual alibi in the service of the status quo.

This shows that a broader view on technology is needed - Benjamin's problem was that he treated technology too narrowly. Technology are not just the tools we use, it is also social organization of labour and the production and reproduction of systematic applicable knowledge (techne in greek). Artefacts do not have a life of their own outside of this tripartite constellation, and such a broader view can shed some light on the question why "technological reproducibility" has not led to the emancipation Benjamin had hoped for.

Proletarian music

To continue the cultural theme taken up in the last post (for Adorno philosophy - or theory - and art were both part of "culture", the defining characteristic of which is the freedom from immediate pressures of utility - or social praxis, to use Adorno's terminology). In On the social situation of music Adorno wrote:

The immanent-aesthetic results of bourgeois history, including that of the last fifty years, cannot simply be brushed aside by the proletarian theory and praxis of art, unless the desire is to eternalize a condition in art produced by class domination. The elimination of this condition within society is, after all, the fixed goal of the proletarian class struggle.

The attentive reader will surely hear the reverberations with my writing on the European public sphere and I will not insult her intellect by explicitly stating them. The object of my scorn in this specific post will rather be cultural studies. I am not quite sure what to even call them, it is hard to imagine them as a discipline or even field, since they have neither a specific object nor method of enquiry. John Storey in his introduction to Cultural theory and popular culture defines their object as culture understood as the way of life of a given community - but that is already the object of anthropology. The methods cultural studies employ also show an elective affinity with anthropology when methods developed by sociology are not far more advanced. In the end cultural studies have managed to produce an astounding amount of purely descriptive work, lacking both the methodological rigour of positivism and theoretical rigour of speculative approaches like critical theory.

With a look to Adorno the hidden conservative bias in cultural studies, especially when treating the output of the culture industry, comes to light. The way they treat it is in accord with the way the positivist Lazarsfeld chose to research it in the Princeton radio research project - taking the output of the culture industry as a given and researching the reception side as a variable, ignoring how reception is shaped both by the social totality of capitalism of which the culture industry is an integral part and by the output of the culture industry itself (as Weber had already noted in Economy and Society, in capitalism needs are constructed by the economic system to a substantial amount). To avoid misunderstanding: this of course does not imply the distinction between "real" and "false" needs, a patently naive idea, just the fact that earlier economic systems worked with needs that were constructed outside of the economic system, while the capitalist economic system takes an active role in influencing and constructing needs. Adorno's point was that the fact that people consume products of the culture industry and derive meaning and a sense of enjoyment from them is not an argument for the culture industry, because both it and the tastes it caters to are part of the "untrue" society.

If we now look at the quote from Adorno, we can see that cultural studies stops short even of the position Adorno criticized, namely that bourgeois art is to be counterbalanced with proletarian art. Adorno here takes up an orthodoxly Marxist (and, seemingly paradoxically, orthodoxly bourgeois) standpoint - namely that emancipation can only be universal: for Marx the grand historical role of the proletariat was not that it would itself become a ruling class but that it would make class rule history along with classes themselves. For Adorno the promise of universality in bourgeois art is to be taken seriously, not dismissed as pure ideology in the face of the actual exclusivity of bourgeois culture. The reception fetishism - and fetishism here is to be read in its Marxist sense - of cultural studies has made even a proletarian counterbalancing of bourgeois culture obsolete. And this has happened not by induction from empirical proof but from the very decision to hypostize the productive side and treat reception as the variable.