Buck-Horss. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. NY: Free Press, 1977.

ch 8 Theory and Art: in Search of a Model: The Aesthetic Experience/ Surrealism as Model: the Experience of Hashish/ Criticism of Surrealism: Atonality as Model/ The Aesthetic Model and its Limits (122-135).

Chapter 8. Theory and Art: In Search of a Model

THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Thickness of texture. complexity of composition, inversion and variation of thematic motif - these were qualities which Adorno's writing had in common with a work of music, Kierkegaard: Kollsrrokrioll des Aesrherischell was itself an aesthetic construction. It wasn't that Adorno favored transforming philosophy from a scientific inquiry into an art form. 1 Rather, he rejected the dichotomy between science and art. which he considered not necessary. but the product of a particular historical era.

Ever since the seventeenth century, in the wake of the Newtonian revolution in science. the realms of art and knowledge, "mere" fiction and factual "truth," "­had been split into two opposing camps. In the context of this dualism. Enligh.1en­ment reason took the side of science. The philosophes were hostile to art. which, secularized and hence robbed of its aura as a theological symbol, was no longer considered a form of truth in itself but rather a pedagogic tool, a means of moral persuasion 2 in the bourgeois revolutions art became a platform for political propaganda. It can be said that the Marxian aesthetics of Lukacs and Brecht were still within this Jacobin tradition insofar as they were committed to art as a means of political instruction (although they differed radically in their defini­tion of the kind of art that met this requirement).3

In protest against the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century romanticism cham­pioned art as a source of truth in its own right, but it remained within the existing paradigm by accepting without question the notion of a dichotomy be­tween reason and art. Hence, for example, music was glorified by Schopenhauer and Wagner as the expression of a subjective. irrational will. Adorno, siding with neither the romantics nor the rationalists, challenged the basic dualistic assump­tion. He wrote in 1939 in regard to aesthetic criticism: It is my conviction that. . . a rationality [which can judge the truth or . falsity of artworks] is today not a matter of "science" concerned with art,

122

Theory and Art: In Search of a Model.

but of art itself. That is to say, that every art which deserves serious atten­tion approaches the aim of rationality by its very structure, and tends more .and more toward "knowledge.” 4

123

Of course, in the Hegelian system art was granted a rational cognitive function, but it was relegated to a lower sphere in comparison with philosophy, just as Kierkegaard had condemned the aesthetic mode of lived experience to a lower level in comparison with spirituality. Opposed to both rationalist and existentialist idealism, Adorno argued that aesthetic experience was in fact the more adequate form of cognition because in it subject and object, idea and nature, reason and sensual experience were interrelated without either pole getting the upper hand - in short, it provided a structural model for "dialectical," "materi­alist" cognition.

Such a position was to a certain degree anticipated by Kant, who recog­nized the mediating position of art between thought and praxis, and this theme, developed in Kant's third critique, was the subject of Horkheimer's Habilitatiolls­schrift for Hans Cornelius in 1925.s But Adorno's appreciation of the cognitive value of aesthetic experience came first-hand, through the composition and performance of music. His mentor Schonberg was a romantic in some ways but not in his conception of the creative process. Schonberg rejected the notion of artist-as-genius and replaced it with the artist as craftsman; he saw music not as the expression of subjectivity, but as a search for knowledge which lay outside the artist, as potential within the object, the musical material. For him, com­posing was discovery and invention through the practice of music-making.6 Its goal was knowledge of truth, and if Schonberg believed that the mimetic elements of the process' had affinities to magic, then this was not to negate the rational, "logical" moment of music, but rather, to emphasize its material, objective side, not identical (and therefore not reducible) to the subject.

In arguing that aesthetic production was not the expression of (either ra­tional or irrational) subjectivity, Schonberg's procedure in fact paralleled science. At the same time, scientists contemporary with Schonberg, theorists of the new scientific revolution, were recognizing that their own activity bore little affinity to the present-day rationalism of scientific positivism and logical formalism, but instead, as an objective and true "construction" of reality, converged with art. 7

Scientific positivism had become the hallmark of official Marxism. But by ; 1931 Adorno had access to Marx's newly discovered Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,8 and he must have been struck by the similarity between the young Marx's conception of the dialectic of labor as a cognitive experience and Schon­berg's conception of the aesthetic experience of composing. In both, the processes of creativity and cognition, production and reflection, were one and the same. Thus when Adorno based his Marxist philosophy on aesthetic experience, his aim was to "aestheticize" neither philosophy nor politics, but instead to recon­stitute the dialectical relationship between subject and object which he believed to be the correct structural basis for all human activities - knowledge, political

­124

praxis, and art. In this sense, both philosophy and art had a moral-pedagogic function, in the service of politics not as manipulative propaganda, but rather as teaching by example. In comparison, the positivist, "scientific" notion of cial engineering, which held that an elite group first acquired knowledge and then attempted through manipulation of the others to recreate the world in accord with that knowledge, was far more guilty of "aestheticism," in the negative sense connected with political totalitarianism, than was Adorno's own position.9

SURREALISM AS MODEL: THE EXPERIENCE OF HASHISH

Walter Benjamin was also convinced that the aesthetic experience was fundamental to correct philosophical understanding, but his intellectual develop­ment and the place where it led him were not identical to Adorno's. Impressed in his early years by the tradition of theological and mystical experience, to which his friendship with Gershom Scholem had exposed him. he was first at­t racted to the aesthetics of Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis. and other early German romantics who were the self-conscious heirs to these traditions. His dissertation, Der Begriff der Ku11sr/...Tirik i11 der deutschen Roml1lltik (19:!O ).10 had interpreted the concept of aesthetic criticism, particularly as it was developed in the fragments of Friedrich Schlegel's writings. Benjamin argued that the two operations of critical philosophy, thought (consciousness) and thought about thought (critical reflection, or self-consciousness), had their parallel in Schlegel's aesthetics in the creation of the artwork on the one hand and its critical interpretation on the other. It followed that the act of interpretation was the necessary comple­tion of the artwork, II because only in this second operation did the truth of the artwork, its uidea," become manifest,12 Literary criticism, or Sprachkritik, was thus itself cognitive revelation. For the early romantics, noted Benjamin, criticism was “a totally esoteric concept," one "which in regard to knowledge rested on mystical premises. . . ."13 Novalis viewed poetic texts - indeed, all of nature as well - as "hieroglyphs" and "codes," whose interpretation depended on a sacred language which only the few could read. J4 The conception was very different from that of Goethe and the French philosophes, for whom criticism was exoteric and inessential, having a limited, instructive function. But for the early romantics art, brought to completion by criticism, converged with philos­ophy (Schlegel) and religion (Novalis) as revelation of truth. This conception clearly influenced Benjamin's philosophical theory first outlined in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspie/s, which in turn made such a major impression on Adorno.

It will be remembered that by 1926, in the midst of working on the Trauer­spiel book, Benjamin had found himself in the paradoxical position of espousing a philosophy influenced by mysticism at the same time that he became politically commi tted to Marxism. At this crucial intellectual juncture he read Louis Aragon's

surrealist text Le Payson de Paris. He later recalled his extreme excitement: "evenings in bed I could never read more than two or three pages before my heartbeat got so strong that I had to put the book down." 15 The book used ­sacred language to portray sensuous love, and glorified the profane as the source of revealed truth, combining elements of the extremes of mysticism and materialism which now formed the poles of Benjamin's thinking. As an aesthetic model, surrealism appeared far more compatible with his purposes than the romanticism of the early bourgeois period, and Aragon's book became the inspiration for his study of nineteenth-century Paris, the Passage 1U1rbeit, on which Benjamin worked for the rest of his life. In 1927 he began spending time in Paris, the center of the surrealist movement.16 Two years later, the same year he read the first fragments of the Passagellarbeit to Adorno at Konigstein, Benjamin wrote that surrealism demonstrated "the true, creative overcoming of religious illumina­tion," its transformation into "a profane illumination of materialist, anthropologi­cal inspiration.

It is thus no accident that many of the elements of their Konigstein program were at home in the discourse of surrealism. Andre Breton, who founded surrealism in 1924, was himself influenced by the Kabbalah, and he enthusiastically endorsed Freudian theory at the same time that he embraced Marxism. In 1926 Breton proclaimed surrealism's solidarity with the Communist Party, 18 yet like Adorno and his friends, he remained independent of actual affiliation. A non. conformist and a tactical anarchist "'hose aim was to make art explosive in order to clear' away the old world for the new, Breton identified progress with man's "unlimited capacity for refusal. 19 In this sense he saw art as critical knowledge that implied a demand for action: .. 'Transform the world,' Marx said; 'change life,' Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us. 20 Not content to remain in the isolated sphere of I 'art pour I 'art, Breton's goal was the reconcilia­tion of dream and reality "into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, 21 and his volitional politics called for a transformation of society in accord with human desires. It can be said that the surrealists took literally Marx's statement "the world has long since possessed something in the form of a dream which it need only take possession of consciously, in order to possess it in reality. 22

It was the artistic technique of surrealism that fascinated Benjamin. Sur­realist art portrayed everyday objects in their existing, material form (in this literal sense surrealist fantasy was "exact"), yet these objects were at the same time transformed by the very fact of their presentation-as art, where they ap­peared in a collage of remote and antithetical extremes. 'Prototypical of Ben­jamin's "dialectical images," surrealist artworks illuminated unintended truth I, by the juxtaposition of "two distant realities" from which sprang "a particular I light. . . , the light of the image," as Breton wrote in the first Surrealist Mani­festo.24 In Les Vases communicants (1933) Breton maintained:

125

To compare two objects as remote as possible from each other or, by any other method, to place them together in an abrupt and startling manner, remains the highest task to which poetry can aspire. 25

126

This was the method of montage, the technique developed in the new film medi­um of using single frames rather than scenes as the basic unit of construction. 26

Film montage made possible the rapid succession of seemingly disconnected images, and its inner logic was radically different from the conceptual, linear logic of the traditional print medium. To Benjamin the principle of montage appeared precisely adequate for his study of nineteenth-century Paris. Urban experience was composed of shocks, of collage-like fragments that bombarded the senses: "no face is more surrealist than the true face of a city."27 The way transitory material objects, thc smallest, seemingly insignificant fragments of human existence appeared in his Passagenarbeit - smokestacks, fashions in clothes. tUrtlcs taken for a stroll in thc shopping arcades - paralleled "the shock­like flashes of obsolete elements from the nineteenth century in surrealism." 28

Not only did Benjamin usc dreams, the surrealist matcrial par excellence. in his writing.29 Like the precursor of surrealism Charles Baudclaire (whose works he translated). Benjamin experimented with consciousness-transforming drugs ­hashish primarily, but also opium and mescaIin. Benjamin was prompted by reading Steppellwolf, Hermann Hcssc's 1927 novcl.30 to record his experiences both under the influence and afterward.31 These records of scssions dating from

1927 to 1934 were found in his estate and recently published. They reveal that although hc recognized drug-taking as a liberating act, he considered its relation­ship to political liberation problematic:

Since Bakunin no radical conception of freedom has existed any longer in Europe. The surrealists have it. . . . But are they successful in uniting this experience of freedom with the other revolutionary experience which we must recognize since we have had it: with the constructive and dictatorial I aspect) of revolution: in short - in uniting revolt with revolution'?

To win for the revolution the powers of being high: surrealism revolves around this in every book and endeavor. That can be called its most particular task.32

Drugs did not themselves providc the "profanc illumination" that Benjamin was seeking: "The true, creative transcendence of religious illumination. . . does not really lie in narcotics":33

. . . the most passionate examination of hash-smoking will certainly not teach half as much about thinking (which is an imminent narcotic) as the profane illumination of thinking about hash-smoking. The reader, the person thinking, the person waiting, the !1fineur, are just as much types of flluminari as the opium-eater, the dreamer, the intoxicated, and they are profaner.34

Nonetheless, "hashish, opium and whatever else" could "provide the introductory course" for profane illumination,35 and the recordings of these sessions make it clear that the insights induced by drugs were not insignificant to Benjamin's theoretical endeavors. His notion of the subject-object relation_l!ip which lay at the heart of his theory of knowledge bore the stamp of these sessions and char­acterized the particular nature of his empiricism, in which concentration on the

Theory and Art: In Search of a Model

objects' appearance did not result in a mere reflection of the given. Under the "­

gaze of the hashish smoker the object transformed itself so that the very details of its surface appeared in changing configurations:36 "the first rush loosens and entices things out of their familiar world; the second places them very quickly'

37

Into a . . . new one.

The drug experience was especially significant for Benjamin's secularized theory of the "aura" of objects.38 Emanating from the surface of the phenomena and revealing their inner essence. this aura became visible within the "image­zone" of drugs,39 and could be reproduced on the artist's canvas: "Perhaps nothing gives a more correct concept of authentic aura than the late pictures of van Gogh, where - so one might describe these pictures - the aura is painted into all things.,,40 The goal of Benjamin's writing as a series of dialectical images \I.'as to capture this aura in the written word as well,­

127

CRITICISM OF SURREALISM: ATONALITY AS MODEL

There were difficulties in Benjamin's choice of surrealism as a model for philosophy, The essentially static nature of his "dialectical images" (Benjamin called them "dial_ctics at a st__ndstiJl'>41 and spoke of a "Medusan gaze"_2) be­

" camc' the focus of Adorno's criticism in the thirties, manifesting to him the ultimate inadequacy of the surrealist modeJ.43 At the outset, however, in 'the early d;1YS in Berlin, Adorno was not lacking in enthusiasm. In a 1930 review of BrechCs /tfalzagO1l11Y Adorno praised this "first surrealist opera,,44 for its use of shock, scandal, and montage to construct the "ur-images of capitalism,,4S not only within the dramatic action but in Kurt Weill's music as well.46 Adorno considered the form legitimate for a critical representation of the fragmentation and decay of bourgeois reality, and claimed that it promoted "the disenchant­ment of the capitalist order. . . .'>47 In 1932 Benjamin could count on Adorno's positive reaction when he said of the latter's Kierkegaard study: "since the latest verses of Breton (the 'union libre') nothing has so cultivated me in my particular fields as your map showing the way through the land of inwardness. . . ."48 In completing the} overthrow of bourgeois art forms which had been begun by ex­pressionists at the start of the century, the surrealists were involved in a project whic_ clearly had Adorno's sympathies. But decipherable within the surrealist techniques there were impulses of the movement and its reception of Marx and Freud that were bluntly incompatible with Adorno's conception of his and Benjamin's Konigstein program. 'Specifically, in violation of their early commit­ment to demystification, surrealism affirmed the irrational: it was intentionally in complicity with enchantment, and this was technically manifested in the im­mediacy of representation in i_s artworks. Surrealist montages were random assemblages of existing objects in their immediately given, hence reified form.

If their fortuitous juxtaposition was interpreted at all, then this was not in

128

THEORY

OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

Marxian terms, that is, as manifestations of sociohistorical reality, but in terms of meanings projected onto them by the subject. Yet these meanings themselves were reproduced immediately in surrealist art as a "photography of thought." 49 Following the Freudian principle of free associations, the surrealist project was to "write quickly, without any preconceived subject [matter]; fast enough so that you will not remember what you're writing and be tempted to reread what you have written:'50 But Freud himself saw this ,as only half the process in illuminating the truth. Not the dream image and its associations, but the inter­pretation of this configuration of elements, in connection with the subject's waking experiences, was necessary to reveal a latent logic within the manifest absurdity. As Adorno wrote in a 1956 essay criticizing surrealism:

Every analyst knows what pains and struggle, what will it takes to become master of the unintentionally expressed [dream] material which is already taking shape in the analytical situation by \irtue of such struggle, but this is much less so in the aesthetic [situation] of the surrealists. In the world debris of surrealism the in-itself of the unconscious does not come to light.Sl

Surrealism "regrouped" the dream elements without liquidating them. and thus, claimed Adorno, its images were "fetishes - commodity fetishes - in which at one time subjective libido became fIxed," and for which the true model was pornography.s:: Insofar as efforts at interpretation were made, then they were attempted only by imposing ready-made categories. like the Oedipus complex, mechanically from the outside.53

( In crucial ways. then. surrealism was undialectical. (Breton was a great ap­pr_5iator but poor interpreter of Hegel, to whom he referred as the "inventor"

of "the dialectical machine,")54 Surrealism fused subject and object in the art Im_e rather than, as Adorno attempted. making manifest the antagonisms char­acterizing their mutual mediation1 Breton's famous dream image of a man cut in two by a window55 might indeed have lent itself to interpretation within the constellation of the bourgeois interieur. but such interpretation was hindered by that immediacy of 4esthetic representation which was the outspoken goal of the surrealists. In Breton's conception. the role of the artist as subject was reduced to the passive reception of images: "we. who have made no effort what­soever to filter, who in our works have made ourselves into simple receptacles of so many echoes. modest recording instrumellls. . . ."56' The danger was that their art would not achieve the materialist objectivity they desired, but would provide only the magical reflection of the world of appearances. As Brecht noted critically, the objects of surrealism "do not return back again from estrangement" ;57 _nd in using surrealist techniques in his own epic theater he insisted'-on tf1eir ':.refunc­tioning." For Brecht this meant transforming them into did_ctic tools as a means for political education. For Adorno, of course, the external criterion of effect on the audience could not redeem the techniques, the validity of which would have to exist internally - "immanently" - or not at all.s8 To him the problem was whether the inner structure of surrealist procedures was so contaminated by ir­rationalism that redemption was impossible.

Theory and Art: In Search of a Mt

129

            At least by 1934, Adorno was skeptical. In a letter to Benjamin he called

            attentio'n to Andre Breton's recently published Les Vases communicants, which

            . . . directs itself against the psychological interpretation of the dream and

            replaces it with one composed of objective images, and appears to attribute

            , to the latter the character of historical keys. The whole thing lies too near

            to your theme not to make necessary perhaps a radical reversal precisely at

            the most central point.59

That same year Adorno published an essay on Schonberg as a "dialectical composer",60 describing Schonberg's method with the same terms he had used to define his own philosophical project in 1931. It elaborated and made explicit the philosophical significance which Adorno had long sensed in Schonberg's compositional procedure, The article can be read as a counter to Benjamin's

efforts to work with surrealism as a model for dialectical, materialist philosophy. ' Forjf the surre_list artist attempted to fuse subject and object _Y.- bec_<?IJ1ing the passive medium through which the ma-teriif6rihe unconscious was expressed in

empirical reality, if as a result surrealist images were reified -ana hence- "uncii­

alectical," then, so Adorno claimed, Schonberg as composer was not merely the medfum but the active mediator in a dialectical process between the artist and his materiaL61 Adorno wrote that it was the "absolutely new" contribution of Schonberg that this dialectical relationship between artist and material achieved its "self-consciousness" in a Hegelian sense.62 He was referring to the logic of the music's technical construction. The musical technique functioned "as the stringent locus of decisions concerning the musical contents. "63 Schonberg, he wrote, worked neither as a "blind craftsman" nor with the "arbitrariness and optional choice of a subjectively unrestrained artist",64 Instead, the composition emerged out of an unresolved contradiction between 3he_?_bj_c_i_e fre__PIJL oLthe 'composer and the objective demands of the material. "if one may express it in philosophical vocabulary, between subject and object - compositional intention and compositional material."65 Using the Benjaminian terminology of his 1931 , inaugural lecture, he described this procedure as "exact fantasy."66 In surrealism

an anarchistic, arbitrary fantasy converged with the seemingly opposite tendency of passive duplication of the given, intensifying mystification rather than dis­

. pelling it. But Sch°Il:berg, it will be recalled,67 developed the material to the point of a dialectical reversal_onC!.JjJy'_carried to its extreme resulted in atonality, which demystified music by demonstrating that the tonal "laws" were not natural and eternal. In his 1934 article, Adorno argued -that this reyersal enabled the self­conscious repossession of the means of musical "production," precisely the goal of the Marxist project.68

Adorno's positive evaluation of Schonberg's music played a major role in his intellectual estrangement from Brecht,69 This' explains why he failed to send a copy of the Schonberg article to Benjamin for his comments,70 as the article appeared in Vienna on September 13. 1934, and Benjamin was with Brecht in Denmark from July to October of that year. Yet there is no doubt as to the . seriousness with which he viewed the potential applicability of Schonberg's

130

THE ORIGIN OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

procedure for his project, the original conception of which had owed so much to Benjamin. That same year he began a critical study of Husserl, his major work of the thirties. Building on the Kierkegaard book, Ado.rno hoped to transcend bourgeois philosophy conclusively by means of an immanent dialectical critique of idealism in this. its most historically advanced form:-The opening pages of the Husserl manuscript refer to "the model-character of musical logic," particularly Schonberg's, for his endeavor.71 Significantly, his criticism of the subject-object relationship in Husser! paralleled his critique of surrealism: the immediacy of ob. jects as "given," the passivity, the arbitrariness of the subject, and the essentially static, undialectical relationship between subject and object. 72 In contrast, Adorno described as the "idea" of his investigation

. . , the task. in the interior of the matter, thus without presupposition of an anticipated process of its production which would be merely external, to disclose, . . the moment of production, i,e., the dialectic congealed within r the matter]. This procedure is synonymous with the deciphering of dialec­tical images,73       .

The structural relationship between subject and object in this procedure paralleled that of Schonberg's composing. Adorno had already defended this method as inherently revolutionary. ')4 arguing that Schonberg's overthrow of bourgeois tonality. a transfonnation wirhill music, carried with it a reversal of music's external, social function as well, transforming it from an ideological function into a critical one. He expressed the exemplary character of such music for theory in a 1934 letter to Ernst Krenek:

It is . . . the task of a true theory not to conceal and "mediate" reality's ruptures by means of harmonious thought-forms, but precisely to expose them and through knowledge of them to contribute to overcoming them. And 1 indeed believe that Schonberg distinguishes himself from other music in that through the conception and resolution of its antinomies he goes as far beyond the structure of present society as the most progressive social theory.7s

Not only had Schonberg changed the social function of music from ideology to

critical knowledge. The very structure of his compositions provided the "image

of a liberated music."76 and Adorno came to see in this image a utopian vision of society. He continued to Krenek: "Doesn't this [Schonberg's) music (I want to express myself carefully) have something to do with that which in Marx is called the 'association of free men,?,,77 Adorno meant of course Schonberg's liberation of the twelve tones from the domination of the lead tone, which led him not to anarchy, but to the construction of the twelve-tone row in which each note had an equalJy significant yet unique role in the musical totality, 78 analogous to the equal yet nonidentical, individual citizens in the hoped-for classless society. Schonberg's music was nonrepresentational, and thus the utopian image it provided was structural rather than pictorial or descriptive. 79 . Yet Adorno here was at the brink of breaking the Bilderverbot in regard to de­            lineating the nature of postrevolutionary society. To argue that the correct

Theory and Art: In Search oj

131

structure of geistige praxis could provide the model for a new social structure was to go well beyond the intentions of ldeologiekritik, aryd it clearly separated Adorno's Husserl project from the work of Horkheimer's Institute during the thirties. Not yet disillusioned as to the potential of Schonberg's twelve-tone techniques, 80 Ado_no went radically far in transposing Schonberg's method from the musical to the philosophical mode. There was a parallel between his own abandonment of philosophical first principles and Schonberg's abandon­ment of tonal dominance, also between his aversion to harmonious totalities and _onberg's use of dissonance and rhythmic irregularity.

I Moreover, Schonberg's development of musical ideas, which Adorno de­

Iscribed as a umovement between extremes,,8! comparable to "riddle-solving"82 or "deciphering,"83 was structurally analogous to Adorno's development of

\ philosophical ideas. Adorno's prototypical 1931 essay "Die Idee der Natur­geschichte" (discussed in detail in Chapter 3) developed its analysis from the paradoxical conste}]afion of the extremes of "history" and "nature." It would not be forcing the analogy to argue that the structure of this essay bore a distinct correspondence to the rules of twelve-tone composition. i.e., (1) the statement of the tone row: "all history is natural" (hence transitory); (1) retrograde, or rellersal of the row: "all nature is historical" (hence socially produced); (3) in­version of the row: "actual history is not historical" (but merely the reproduction of second nature); and (4) rerrograde illversion: "second nature is unnatural" (because it denies nature's historical transitoriness), Following a similar procedure in his Husser! study, Adorno unraveled the "paradoxical constellation" of ra­tionalism and empiricism in phenomenology,84 demonstrating how each of these extremes tended to negate itself (inversion) at the same time that it converged with the other (reversal). And if Adorno developed philosophical ideas the way Schonberg developed musical ideas, if each of his essays was constructed out of all the possible permutations of polar extremes,8S showing the identity of contra­dictions (history is natural) and the contradictoriness of identities (history is un­historical), then it was also true that in his unwillingness to allow anyone aspect of the paradox to dominate, the structure ofms essays could be read as a mimesis ­of a social structure free of domination.

Is this perhap_ the hidden, positive moment in Adorno's "negative dialectics"? Is each essay, precisely because of its unrelenting negativity, in fact a utopian emblem, a secret affirmation'? Indisputable at least is the significance for Adorno of correct cognitive procedure understood as a structure, or "model," which could be translated into different modes and different realms of intellectual discourse. Hence, for example, he could see parallels between the structure of Schonberg's composing and Freudian analytical procedure.86 Or he could dis­cern echoes of Schonberg'in the structure of Benjamin's writing:

Just as the new music in its uncompromising representation tolerates no "execution," no distinction between theme and development, but instead every musical thought, indeed every tone stands equally close to the center, so Benjamin's philosophy is likewise "athematic."s7

132

ORIGIN OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

THE AESTHETIC MODEL AND ITS LIMITS

The notion of equivalences between different modes of experience - be­tween philosophy and image for Benjamin, philosophy and music for Adorno ­

was far from new. In literary history it had a clear precedent in Baudelaire's theory of correspondences, itself the secularization of an older mystical con­ception (Gematria in the Kabbalist tradition,88 of which at least Benjamin, through discussions with his close friend Gershom Scholem, must have'been Jamiliar)_ What was new, however, was their discovery of such equivalences be­l tw;;;-aisthetic experience and dialectical materialism, which at least in its '. orthodox (non-Hegelian) Marxist form adhered strictly to that paradigm of \bourgeois science which opposed itself irreconcilably to art. and which Adorno

            ._nd Horkheimer later so devastatingly attacked in Dialektik der Aufkliinl1lg. 89

            Whereas wit_ln._t___scien.ti0c.paradigm dialectics was viewed as an objective la_

            _ of history and nature, whicli'could be known 'and described by the detached­

            subject in a totally undialectical fashion, the aesthetic paradigm was based on a

            subject-object relationship in itself dialectical. At the same time, it avoided the

- speculative, metaphysical representation of the dialectic in which Hegel had ex­pressed his philosophy, and which rested on the potential for synthesizing antagonisms both within and between the realms of reality and thought: sur­realist art and Schonberg's music expressed contradictions negatively, without resolving them into harmonious totalities.

To base philosophy on aesthetic experience thus understood was to retrieve that which had been lost by the ideological preeminence of the subject in bour­geois philosophy in both its Enlightenment-rational and romantic-irrational forms. In this new form of "negative dialectics:' the subject retained contact with the object without appropriating it. The thinker reflected on a sensuous and non­identical reality not in order to dominate it, not to butcher it to fit the Pro­crustean beds of mental categor(es or to liquidate its particularity by making it disappear under abstract concepts. Instead the thinker, like the artist, proceeded mimetically, and in the process of imitating matter transformed it so that it could be read as a monadological expression of social truth. In such philosophy, as in artworks, form was not indifferent to content - hence the central sig­nificance of representation (Darstellz/llg), the manner of philosophical expression. Aesthetic creation itself was not subjective invention so much as the objective discovery of the new within the given, immanently, through a regrouping of its elements.90

-- Implied in this cognitive model was a transformation of the idea of knowledge. No longer was it a search for causal laws which would make possible manipula­tion and prediction of the future. Now knowledge meant "seeing," a kind of secular revelation (the influence of Husserl as well as theology was clear here) by means of critical interpretation. In line with the Kantian distinction in the third

Theory and Art: In Search

Model

133

critique, this kind of knowledge was not empirical information which one pos­sessed, but judgment which prO\ided the capacity for action.

Throughout his life, Adorno insisted on the parallels between philosophical and aesthetic experience. His major work on aesthetics, published posthumous­ly,91 made continuous reference to the similarities between art and theory. Negative Dialektik, his mature philosophical work, explicitly noted the structural analogies between critical thinking and musical composition.92 There exists in his estate the manuscript of a book-length study comparing the development of the "concept" in Hegelian logic wi th compositional development in Beethoven's music (although as contemporaries, Hegel and Beethoven themselves never ap­preciated the connection).93

            Yet it would be wrong to conclude that in Adorno's theory art and philos­

ophy were one and the same. From the start and repeatedly, he insisted that if they converged in their "truth content." they were nonetheless nonidentical. In

            his inaugural lecture of 1931 he insisted:

. . . it would be better just to liquidate philosophy conclusively and dis­solve it into the particular disciplines than to come to its aid with a poetic ideal which means nothing more than a poor ornamental cover for faulty thinking.94

His Kierkegaard study (1933) stated: "Even with a view to the final convergence of art and philosophy. all aestheticizing of philosophical procedure ought to be avoided."95 And in Negatil'e Dialektik (1966) he wrote: "Philosophy that imi­tated art. trying to turn itself into a work of art. would cancel itself OUt.,,96

Perhaps the clearest expression of his position _'as in a 1935 letter to his friend Ernst Krenek. Here Adorno criticized what he called Krenek's "idealist" attempt to discover the cognitive character of art through "relativizing the dif­ference between art and science [Wissellschaft J . "97 The division between them, historically produced, was a "historical necessity"98 which could not be wished away. Science should not be haestheticized," nor art made scientific. Instead, argued Adorno dialectically, it was precisely as separate activities, both true to their own particularities, that they converged.99 As subjective "experiences" of the object, art, science and philosophy had a similar dialectical structure. How­ever, as cognitive processes. each remained distinct. As he wrote elsewhere, ". . . most bitterly irreconcilable is that which is similar but which feeds on dif­ferent centers. . . ."100 The cognitive value of art, which was by definition othe,\' than given reality, depended upon the adequacy of aesthetic form to the content, or idea which it expressed; the value of science, which gazed at reality head-on, depended on the adequacy of the theoretical concepts used to describe its ob­jects.IOl Philosophy was ""a third thing. "102 Its task was to speak the truth, and it did so by the critical interpretation oCboth art and science, showing how their

. adequacy demonstrated the inadequacy of reality. 103

            Adorno believed that Benjamin allowed the tension between cognitive modes

            to collapse. This lay at the heart of their intellectual dispute during the thirties,

134

THE ORIGIN OF NEGATIVE DIALECTICS

Theory and Art: In Search of a Model

135

which is discussed in detail in the next chapters, and hence takes us ahead of our

, story. Here we may simply note that much of the problem was implicit in Benjamin's choice of surrealism as a philosophical model. Surrealism fused sci­ence and art by eliminating what made them different (theory and concept in science, the logic of form in art), and Benjamin tried to fuse art with philosophy in much the same manner. Adorno wrote:

In fact no philosophy, not even extreme empiricism, can ufag the facta bruta by the hair and present them like cases in anatomy or experiments in physics; no philosophy can paste separate particulars into the text, as many paintings would falsely seduce it into believing.113

It was Benjamin's intention to renounce all open explanation and.to allow the meanings to emerge solely through the shock-like montage of the mate­rial. Philosophy was not only to catch up with surrealism, but become sur­realistic itselLIO4

Aesthetics provided a corrective for the positivism and pseudo-scientific rational­ism which did violence to the object by consuming it within a reified conceptual schema. But philosophical interpretation could not get beyond immediate ap­pearances of reality without the theory and concepts developed by the sciences, by Marxian sociology and Freudian psychology specifically. Science and art, concept and image, analysis and expression - these formed the two poles of philosophical activity. Philosophy didn't sublate their differences in a false synthesis. Rather, it existed within the tension between them and made that tension fruitful in order to speak the truth about the world.

The result was that Benjamin's work lost the critical negativity which for Adorno lent philosophical interpretation its value as truth, and lapsed back into that positive theology v,.hich his choice of surrealism as a model had been an attempt to overcome.        ­

In the sense which Adorno criticized. surrealist aesthetics was actually less adequate than the early romanticism of Schlegel and Novalis, who insisted that the truth content of art did not emerge until it was critically interpreted. Music as a model did not pose quite the same problem. Its modality was distinct from that of the art image.lO5 The latter condensed the material, whereas music un­raveled it. In the former, contradictory elements converged, superimposed on one plane, but music brought them to articulation by extrapolating them and extending them in time.l06 Moreover, while the art image existed ready-made, music had to be reproduced, translated from written text into sound, and this meant that it had to be thought through. imerpreted in order to exist at all. 107

The fact that the very existence of music necessitated its critical interpreta­tion, that in the performance or (nonmechanical) reproduction of music the two moments of creation and interpretation fell together, whereas the immediate appearance of the art image and its interpretation were separate and self-contained activities, made music intrinsically more analogous to Adorno's conception of philosophy. He clearly found his own experience producing music to be proto­typical of cognitive experience in general. loa The limitation of music as a model lay elsewhere, however. The medium of philosophy was language, and its practice was "language criticism. "109 Like language, music was composed of "the temporal succession of articulated sounds that are more than mere sound"; and "the suc­cession of sound is related to logic: it can be right or wrong."llO But because musical "language" lacked concepts, its interpretive procedure was different: "Interpreting language means understanding language; interpreting music means making music. "Ill In the first case, conceptual analysis was crucial ;in the second, imitation, or mimetic representation. 112

Aesthetic models, whether music or art image, could not carry the whole weight of philosophical practice. Criticizing Benjamin's overestimation of the illuminative power of "dialectical images," Adorno wrote in 1966: