DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 8-2012 The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Joseph Weiss DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Weiss, Joseph, "The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno" (2012). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 125. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/125 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October, 2011 By Joseph Weiss Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois 2 ABSTRACT Joseph Weiss Title: The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory demands that its forms of critique express resistance to the socially necessary illusions of a given historical period. Yet theorists have seldom discussed just how much it is the case that, for Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the concepts and language it employs, as well as the aesthetic comportment it would champion for the sake of generating a critical distance from these illusions, require an understanding of the mimetic faculty. The point of departure for this work is thus an attempt to delineate both the essential and the historical features of this faculty, in the hope of understanding the conditions under which the force of critique can truly find language today. With this is in view, I illustrate the manner in which these features of mimesis, namely its semblance (Schein) and play (Spiel) character, are initially at work in our experiential relation to nature, but are ultimately subject to a violent taboo that wrenches us from nature and thereby wages a desperate battle against the attempt to give voice or call a halt to the unnecessary suffering of an antagonistic historical circumstance. This shows that there is a dialectic of enlightenment built into the comportment of mimesis itself, that latent within it is the simultaneous potential for progress and regression. More specifically, it shows that mimesis is, as it were, banished from an immediate absorption with nature, and, therefore, needs to migrate into the neutralized and sorrowful (traurig) sphere of art—the sole refuge within which the outermost consequences of mimetic development are granted full expression. Parallel to the Kantian category of philosophical ―ideas,‖ I, accordingly, argue that the recognition of this immanent struggle to end myth is synonymous with a mimesis awakened to a regulative striving after the idea of peace or reconciliation, i.e., a striving that, if realized, would at last assuage the hostility between rationality and mimesis, concept and intuition. Mimesis is thus, on the one hand, capable of sensing the material trace or hearing the musical echo stored up in the unreconciled state of language. But if, on the other hand, it becomes dislodged from the sensitivity that ―reads‖ with and against the tempo of its material circumstance, it could just as well disavow precisely the possibility of this peace and thus regress to a catastrophic form of instrumental rationality. By virtue of immersing itself in the most minute details of the present historical constellation, exposing the falsehoods involved in, for instance, the harmony of traditional beauty, or the triumphalism and sovereignty of the traditional sublime, I argue that mimesis not only marks an indispensable moment in the dynamic movement of critique, it also brings to the fore the pressing need for a materialist conception of aesthetics. 3 Contents List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Redemption of Nature 4 Part One: The Experiential Grounds of Mimesis 1 The Language of Mimesis 28 I. The Role of Mimesis in the Age of Technical Reproduction 31 II. The Implicit Mimesis of Benjamin‘s Trauerspiel 40 III. The Musical Character of Mimetic Trauerspiel 49 IV. Mimesis as the Rupture of History 60 V. Gesturing to the Critical Protest of Mimesis: Precursors to the Dialectic of Enlightenment 72 2 The Mimetic Struggle of the Dialectic of Enlightenment 83 I. The Materialism of Mimesis and the Possibility of its Sublation 86 II. On the Shudder and the Ensuing Mimetic Taboo 92 III. The Death Drive Built into Mimesis: With and Against Subjectivity 105 IV. Language in General and the Mimetic Language of Artworks 121 Part Two: The Banished Comportment of Mimesis in Art 3 The Dynamic of Semblance 132 I. Critique and Rescue of the Aura: The Task of Re-enchanting Reified Experience 133 II. Secularized Magic and the Life that does not Live: Resisting the Spell of the Beautiful 145 III. Concrete Developments of Semblance in Music: The Bond Between Semblance and Play 158 4 The Dynamic of Play 175 I. The Ambivalence of Play and the Critical Emergence of the Sublime in Artworks 176 II. The Downfall of Subjective Sovereignty: The Playful Metamorphosis of the Sublime Farce 193 Conclusion: Rescuing a Materialist Aesthetics 203 Bibliography 235 Abbreviations All works that are part of Benjamin‘s and Adorno‘s Gesammelte Schriften will be cited in parenthesis within the body of this text. In order to distinguish between them, references to Benjamin‘s work will be cited in the English edition first, followed by a slash and the appropriate GS number. References to Adorno‘s work will cite the GS number first and the English edition will follow the dash. AT T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). AP Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Cited with convolute letter and number in brackets. BE T.W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). CC T.W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). DOE Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). GS T.W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1-20 (Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972). Cited as volume and part number with decimals. GS Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1-7 (Frankfurt a.m.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977). Cited as volume and part number with decimals. ML T.W. Adorno, ―Music and Language: A Fragment‖ in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Verso, 1998), 1-6. MM T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2002). NS1 T.W. Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik. In Nachgelassenen Schriften. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag, 1994. PNM T.W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). ND T.W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973) OTS Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998) SW Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 4 vols., ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Cited as volume number and part number with decimals. 3 These flourishes and cadenzas! Do you hear the conventions that are left in? Here – the language – is no longer – purified of the flourishes – but the flourishes – of the appearance [Schein] – of their subjective – domination – the appearance [Schein] – of art is thrown off – at last – art always throws off the appearance [Schein] of art. Dim-dada! —Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus 4 Introduction: The Redemption of Nature Nothing shocks anymore. Everyone knows that. Coming to any other aesthetic or philosophical conclusion would smack of modernist heroism today. This sentiment is likely part of the reason why, when faced with the choice, theorists interested in the various threads of cultural criticism more often than not side with Walter Benjamin‘s work over Theodor W. Adorno‘s. Whereas the former appears to be optimistic about the commodity form, particularly as it plays out in film, the latter, pessimistic elitist that he is, appears to only find a, so to speak, critical ferment in the antiquated and classist ―high‖ art of the Twentieth Century. At least this is the story we are told. Such a story, of course, presupposes that there is an irresolvable conflict between these two thinkers and that what is said of Benjamin and Adorno is true. For those familiar with Benjamin‘s corpus, however, his use of the concepts of shock, of historical rupture, of the moment of awakening, play such an important role that one is not only forced to consider the modernist tendencies in Benjamin‘s own thought, one is also forced to question just how close he might be to Adorno‘s thought. Who could deny, for example, how much these concepts resonate with Adorno‘s persistent concern over the shudder (Schauer) of experience and the manner in which it drives the famous concept of the dialectic of enlightenment? From the start, then, this demand to hear the shudder, to hear what might be termed the call of suffering, strikingly brings to the fore the similarities between Benjamin and Adorno.