Bourgeois sentimentalism

The other day I was listening to a radio programme, in which a Roman publisher was talking about how Boris Pahor (among other things Knight of the Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur and repeated nominee for the Nobel prize in literature) was for a long time virtually unknown in Rome. What struck me was not so much the provincialism of Rome, but the words the publisher chose to praise the writer, taken right from the stock of romanticist criticism: he praised the "depth" of his writing and the "sincerity" of his testimony. It made me wonder whether Habermas was right in Theory of communicative action to ban art to the realm of intimate testimony, to be judged according to the criterion of sincerity. Was the historical avant-garde just a fleeting flash of light that made the subsequent darkness all the harder to bear?

To properly understand sentimentalism, we must go back in time a bit. It is inextricably intertwined with the rise of the bourgeoisie, which during the 18. century discovered a whole new phenomenon, completely foreign to feudal society - intimacy and the subjective experience housed by this sphere of life. As the bourgeoisie was also beginning to take the leading role in the realm of culture, this preoccupation with subjectivity also appeared in art: whether in introspective literature, the predominance of melody in music (one need only think of the emotion-laden melodies of Mozart) or of the playful rendition of everyday life in painting (Tiepolo or Zuccarelli come to mind). Biedermeier of course represents the grotesque peak of this movement - intimacy gone awry - expressing a radically entrenched privatism, fleeing from the gradual decay of progressive bourgeois ideals and their immanent shattering in the reactionary reflexes of 1848.

I do not want to argue that under the sway of sentimentalism critical art is unable to flourish, but there is a danger of intimacy becoming an alibi for the flaws of the world, or as Adorno put it in Minima Moralia 110 - Constanze:

As longing for that which dispenses with labour the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But by constructing the true as unmediated in the all-present untrue it perverts the former and transforms it into the latter. Not only does pure emotion, insofar as it is possible at all in the economically determined system, become a social alibi for the hegemony of interest and acclaims a humanity that does not exist. But the unwilfulness of love itself, even when not a priori practically oriented, contributes to this totality as soon as it is established as a principle.

It is in artists such as Euripides and Kafka that a rising dischord is felt between private destiny and the order of the world. While still staying in the confines of metaphysics - the notion of fate is strong with both writers - the order of the world is no longer seen as inherently just and rational, it is no longer pure form, but takes on an arbitrary and alltogehter alien character. Here we witness the sprouting of the same intellectual seed that Marx planted in German Ideology and Contribution to the critique of political economy, namely the realization that ideas are not the governing principle of the world, or as we could put it in Adorno's terms: recognition of the non-identical. It is from this rupture between form and heteronomy of the non-identical that critical thought emerges as Athena from Zeus' head. Similarly it is at the point where it transcends psychology that bourgeois sentimentalism is critical. No one understood this better than Ivan Cankar, when he described the reaction of children to the letter announcing their father's death in world war one:

That evening something unknown from lands far away disturbed the heavenly light with a violent hand, it struck the hollidays, stories and fairytales mercilessly. A letter had anounced that father "fell" in Italy. "He fell". Something unknown, new, foreign, completely incomprehensible was standing before them, high and mighty, but it had no face, nor had it eyes, neither had it a mouth. It belonged to nowhere; not to this vibrant life in front of church and on the street, not to this warm dusk on the oven, not even to fairytales. It was not happy, but not particularly sad either; it was dead, since it had no eyes to reveal why and from where it came, and no mouth to tell it. Thought stood miserable and shy before this enormous apparition like before a mighty black wall and could go nowhere. It came close to the wall, stood there and was speechless.