From Pseudo-Activity to Critique Adorno, philosophy, participation

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Notes

¹ This phrase, the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, alludes to Marx's letter to Arnold Ruge in 1844 but shows up in Adorno's Notes to his lecture on ‘The negation of negation’ in Lectures on Negative Dialectics. In the text, dated 11 November 1965, Adorno writes, ‘negat[ive] dial[ectics] = ruthless criticism of all that exists’(2008: 13).

² Henry W. Pickford's gloss on this term, in his preface to Critical Models (2005d), is helpful: ‘Adorno's confrontation with the student movement in several late texts draws on vocabulary specific to that time. In particular, “action”, “actionism”, etc. mean not planned activism but confrontation and agitation as a direct response to any political conflict.’

³ For more on Sartre's notion of ‘commitment’ and its relation to practice, see Ian Birchall's ‘Sartre and the myth of practice’: ‘For Sartre commitment is both a fact of life and a desirable value. We cannot choose except to choose – we are “condemned to be free” – but we can choose to accept our responsibility and to make meaningful choices.’ (2004: unpaginated)

⁴ The word ‘autonomous’ infers that ‘autonomous art’ exists apart from society and social relations, and yet, for Adorno, the separation of autonomous art from society is never complete. The separation is a gesture, an attempt to separate from society. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno analyses this gesture as something essentially social, thereby unearthing the paradox of autonomous art as something that claims independence from society whilst all the while remaining inextricably bound to the society from which it wishes to escape. ‘[Art's] autonomy, its growing independence from society, was a function of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that was itself bound up with the social structure. Prior to the emergence of this consciousness, art certainly stood in opposition to social domination and its mores, but not with an awareness of its own independence … art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art’ (Adorno 1997: 225). Acritique of Adorno's definition and analysis of autonomous art comes from Peter Bürger's Theory of the AvantGarde. Although Bürger critiques Adorno, his own definition of autonomous art resonates with Adorno's definitions; see, for example: ‘[T]he autonomy status of art within bourgeois society is by no means undisputed but is the precarious product of overall social development’ (Bürger 2007: 24).

⁵ The best example of this comes from the play No Exit, the title of which conveys the unfreedom of the individual.

⁶ This quotation includes an excerpt from Hanns Eisler that Buck-Morss incorporates into her narrative about Brecht and Adorno. The section from Brecht's journal reads, ‘Adorno here. This Frankfurt Institute is a gold-mine for the Tui novel.’ Buck-Morss notes that the novel was ‘Published as a fragment posthumously: Bertolt Brecht, Der Tui-Roman: fragment (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973)’.

⁷ An excellent starting point for Adorno's works on music is Essays on Music (2002b).

⁸ The original utterance of this famous statement – ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ – appeared in ‘An essay on cultural criticism and society’ in Prisms (1967). Adorno wrote the essay in 1949, it was published in English in 1955, and has been reprinted several times since then. Adorno reprised the statement in a handful of subsequent essays, one of which was ‘Commitment’ (2002a). In those essays, Adorno shows no sign of retracting the statement; however, in Negative Dialectics (2005e), he offers a caveat. In the section ‘Meditation on metaphysics’, Adorno offers this thought: ‘Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’ (Adorno 2005e: 362–3).

⁹ In ‘On subject and object’ Adorno offers an excellent image of this attempt to shake off one's subjectivity: ‘What transcendental philosophy praised in creative subjectivity is the subject's own self-concealed imprisonment within itself. The subject remains harnessed within everything objective it thinks, like an armored animal in its layers of carapace it vainly tries to shake loose’ (Adorno 2005d: 252).