Prologue: 'After Auschwitz': Survival of the Aesthetic

Notes Prologue: ‘After Auschwitz’: Survival of the Aesthetic 1. In 1959 the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger called Adorno’s statement ‘one of the harshest judgments that can be made about our times: after Auschwitz it is impossible to write poetry’, and urges that ‘if we want to con- tinue to live, this sentence must be repudiated’. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ‘Die Steine der Freiheit’ in Petra Kiedaisch (ed.). Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter (73). 2. Herbert Marcuse, too, criticised the tendency toward uniformity and repres- sion of individuality in modern technological society in his seminal 1964 study One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced industrial Society. 3. For philosophers such as Hannah Arendt the culmination of totalitar- ian power as executed in the camps led not only to the degradation and extermination of people, it also opened profound and important questions about our understanding of humanity and ethics (see: Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism). The question of an ethical response to Auschwitz also preoc- cupies Giorgio Agamben who argues that an ethical attempt to bear witness (testimony) to Auschwitz must inevitably confront the impossibility of speak- ing without, however, condemning Auschwitz to the ‘forever incomprehensi- ble’ (Remnants of Auschwitz 11). 4. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg’s Postmodernism and the Holocaust. However, Adorno’s response to the Holocaust is not discussed in this volume. His most notable reflections on Auschwitz can be found in Negative Dialectics (‘Meditations on Metaphysics’), Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (1965), and in the collection Can one Live after Auschwitz? 5. See the chapter in Adorno and Horkheimer’s ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ in Dialectic of Enlightenment where the authors discuss the schematic nature of advertisement and film production, and the construction of audiences as consumers and customers. 6. Lyotard also argues that the event has the power to alter the dominant forms and movements of desire, which in the economic system of capi- talist society are shaped according to the needs of the totality (the need to produce and exchange). The event elicits a crisis of desire because it mutates ‘the relation between what is desired and what is given, between potential energy and the social machinery’ (Lyotard, ‘March 22’ in Political Writings 65). 7. Adorno develops the notion of a ‘forced’ or ‘extorted reconciliation’ between art and objective reality in an essay on the work of Georg Lukács, where he criticises Lukács’s socialist realism as undialectical and ‘stubborn vulgar mate- rialism’ (Adorno, ‘Extorted Reconciliation: On Georg Lukács’ Realism in Our Time’. Notes to Literature Vol. 1). 182 Notes 183 8. Adorno argued that the culture industry manufactured standardised (rei- fied) responses to music, which he called modes of ‘regressive listening’. See Adorno, ‘Über den Fetischcharacter in der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’. Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt. 1 Adorno and Beckett: from the Crisis of Schein to the Fidelity to Failure 1. Hartmut Scheible points out that despite his aesthetic and philosophical nominalism Adorno nevertheless emphasises the importance of authentic art to negate the false empirical reality. Scheible argues that Adorno’s theory of art as an immanent transcendence of reality is an example of his ‘ideal- ism without ideal’. See Hartmut Scheible, ‘Geschichte im Stillstand. Zur Ästhetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos’, Heinz Ludwig Arnold (ed.). Text+Kritik, Zeitschrift für Literatur, T. W. Adorno (104ff). 2. See Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason), 379. Kant calls the illusion offered by the categories of reason ‘transcendental’ (transzendentaler Schein). 3. See Adorno, ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ (1951), 30: ‘[N]ach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric). Adorno, ‘Die Kunst und die Künste’ (‘Art and the Arts’) in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft 1, Gesammelte Schriften, 10.1 (452): ‘Während die Situation Kunst nicht mehr zulässt – darauf zielte der Satz über die Unmöglichkeit von Gedichten nach Auschwitz – bedarf sie doch ihrer’ (While the situation does not tolerate art – this was meant by the statement about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz – it nevertheless calls for art). 4. Beckett’s ‘Dante . Bruno. Vico . Joyce’ and other criticism and reviews con- tain the seeds of an aesthetic imagination that would flourish in his novels and find their most accomplished expression in his drama. This essay’s significance to Beckett’s ensuing creative progress could be compared to the importance of Adorno’s programmatic essay ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ for his later development. One gets the impression that both men’s philosophical and aesthetic projects are contained in miniature in their earliest critical writings. 5. Whilst the inclusion of the aesthetic concerns of both writers in a wider (and by implication general, universal) context may perhaps in itself seem prob- lematic, their shared concern for the particular in art has parallels in Adorno’s interest in the dialectic between the particular and the universal in modernist artworks and his defence of the somatic or material moments of thought. 2 Edward Bond and the Aesthetics of Resistance 1. Even though Horkheimer and Adorno do refer to the historical movement of eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, more often they consider enlightenment as a trans-historical phenomenon, or impulse, which is con- nected to processes of self-preservation and the differentiation between the human and the natural world. 184 Notes 2. Adorno notices a development of de-aestheticisation in modern art (‘Entkunstung der Kunst’), which began with modernist avant-garde art’s attack on its status as art and the desire to dissolve the boundaries between art and life (the desire to narrow art’s distance from its viewer). 3. David L. Hirst acknowledges Bond’s presentation of a ‘savage picture of abuse and irrationality’ (Edward Bond 124), which is true for most of his work, but in Saved no clear answers to the dramatised social problems are articulated. This is perhaps because the ‘picture of abuse and irrationality’ as presented in this play is contained within a specific social group and loca- tion, as pointed out above. The realism of the play resists the kind of exces- sive violence that becomes apparent in Bond’s later (both thematically and stylistically more complex) work. 4. Page references to quotes from Bond’s plays are provided in brackets in the main text. 5. Bond articulates the importance of the imagination in his notes to At The Inland Sea where he develops the idea that art (especially drama) is able to interrogate the irrationality of the world by stimulating our imagination and creativity. According to Bond, only when ‘we are made human by our imagination’ (At The Inland Sea 78) will we be able to respond to the problems of the world rationally and constructively. 6. Bond rejects Beckett’s theatre and the absurdist aesthetic as forms of cultural nihilism which glorify and fetishise the idea of ‘nothingness’ (see Bond, ‘The Cap’. Plays: 7). 7. It seems that Bond is driven by a need to justify the existence of theatre in modern society and to emphasise its ‘use-value’ (Marx) in the age of post- modernity. Barker seems to argue differently: in a society where everything is designated a use-value and a function, the theatre should express no utilitarian aspirations, no meaning, no sense of responsibility. The function of theatre today should be to have no function (or, to put it with Adorno, a ‘negative function’). 8. For a detailed study of The Threepenny Lawsuit with reference to Brecht’s social and media theory see Steve Giles, Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit. An extract of Brecht’s account of his lawsuit is also published in John Willett’s translation of Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (47–51). 9. See Bond, ‘Notes on Post-Modernism’ in Plays: 5. 10. See Jean-Paul Sartre’s What is Literature? 11. Originally published with the plays Jackets and In the Company of Men in Two Post-Modern Plays. Also published in Plays: 5. 12. Bond’s play Coffee (1995), however, does show an interest in the complex psychological landscape of his characters. Outer and inner worlds are inter- twined; dream realities and interpersonal power relations impinge on the objective reality of war, famine and genocide. 13. The same can be said about Hecuba in The Woman (1978), Bond’s ‘sceptical demythologisation of the Trojan War’ (David Ian Rabey, English Drama Since 1940 83). The play contains a sharp criticism of blind faith in myth and religion (religion is here turned into a political tool) and shows a world that is changeable if human beings develop the strength and will to question the ideological structures of their existence. Notes 185 14. Emancipatory knowledge is here understood as the aim of Marx’s praxis- oriented theory. It means the understanding of one’s individual needs as well as the needs of the collective, with a view to changing the material conditions of life in an antagonistic society. 15. Weiss’ experiments with the documentary theatre form in the 1960s and the centrality of historical as well as political questions in his materialist aesthetic practice are discussed in Robert Cohen, ‘The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss’ The Investigation and its Critics’ in History & Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past. 16. Born near Berlin in 1916 as the son of a Hungarian Jewish textile worker and a Swiss actress, Weiss emigrated with his family to England in 1935, then to Prague in 1936. In 1938, after the German invasion of the Sudetenland, his parents fled to Sweden while he moved to Switzerland.

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