Robert Hullot-Kentor - What Barbarism Is?
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Transcript of Robert Hullot-Kentor - What Barbarism Is?
Art February 3rd, 2010
WHAT BARBARISM IS?by Robert Hullot-Kentor
An enormous nation happy in a style,
Everything as unreal as real can be.
Wallace Stevens
Prometheus stole fire to distract the gods, not for our gift; what he bestowed was reason, the
ability to make anything into a weapon—even this.
Anon.
What interests us in the thought and writings of T. W. Adorno cannot interest us. Where it
touches us most closely in the urgency of the moment, it misses the mark entirely. When it
cuts to the quick, nothing is felt. This is easily demonstrated. For wherever we open Adorno’s
writings, whichever volume we turn to, the topic is the barbaric and barbarism. In Aesthetic
Theory, we read that the “literal is the barbaric;” we learn in the section on “Natural Beauty”
that “it is barbaric to say of nature that one thing is more beautiful than another.” Adorno
insists, again in Aesthetic Theory, that he will not temper his most notorious claim that it is
“barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz.” Concerns we barely recognize are nonetheless
barbaric: the New Objectivity is said to “reverse into the barbarically pre-aesthetic.”
Inwardness is “barbaric.” Even it is barbaric, says Adorno, to name the artist “a creator”. I
am positive that he would have found this fragmented rendering of phrases from his work
barbaric. The relentless apostrophizing of the barbaric emerges as the single apostrophe of
his labor and circumscribes the entirety of what he perceived. In Minima Moralia “the whole
itself” is, in fact, said to be “barbarism”. And, if so, if the whole itself really is barbarism then
nothing less than all things are barbaric. In the stream of assertion that threads through his
thousands of pages, Adorno never once admits a half-tone, not a single “almost,” “semi,” or
“formerly” barbaric. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the culture industry that this country
produced is “barbarism.” This American “barbarism is not the result of cultural lag,” as other
European visitors to America speculated, he writes, but of progress itself. And here, in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment, we arrive at the statement that shifts like a magnet under the iron
WHAT BARBARISM IS? - The Brooklyn Rail http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/what-barbarism-is
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Richard Serra, "Betwixt and Torus and the Sphere"(2001). Wheatherproof steel. Three Torus sections andthree spherical sections, overall: 11'10"×39'9"×26'7"(3.6×11.5×8.1 m), plates: 2" (5.1 cm) thick. PrivateCollection. Photographed by Dirk Reinartz. Courtesy ofthe artist and Gagosian Gallery.
filings of what has so far been a scattered catalogue of barbarism’s membra disjecta and
causes them, as you’ll see in a moment, to draw together, take their place, become legible and
shape the focal point of the whole of thinking. The intention of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Adorno writes, with Horkheimer—this is the sentence—is to understand why
“humanity founders in a new form of barbarism instead of entering a truly human
condition.”
A New Form of Barbarism
Here, Adorno has us. In the precision of the optic
he crafted—that humanity now founders in a
new form of barbarism—in a second barbarism,
we stand in the glare of what has been forced into
focus. More than a half century after the
publication of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, we
know ourselves the addressee of Adorno’s work in
a way that we could hardly have realized a decade
ago. For the interregnum of the post-war years is
over. We are experiencing a return of the great
fear, as if it never ended—and perhaps it never
did. We are, without a doubt, the occupants of the
most catastrophic moment in the whole of human
history, in all of natural history, and we cannot
get our wits about ourselves. What is being
decided right now for all surviving generations
including our own, is the exact sum total of the
irreversible remainder, the unalterable “How it
might have been.” By every indication we are
going ahead with the irreparable calamity. Even if
the treaties soon to be negotiated in Copenhagen
are ratified whole—and nothing at all will be
ratified—the proposals on the table are
inadequate; even if the legislation of the cap and
trade of carbon emissions is eventually made binding on American industry, whatever limited
good it may do, the scheme will become another futures’ market and power of delusion. In
Adorno’s words, already cited from Minima Moralia, nothing less than the whole is barbaric,
because nothing can possibly be excepted. Knowing this, if we could be sane for a
moment—and sometimes we are—and if we intended to be sane for more than a moment,
Adorno’s imperative stated in Critical Models that the “sole adequate praxis would be to put
all energies toward working our way out of barbarism,” would read as the only adequate
statement of what there is to do. But a nation that has succeeded at knowing and recognizing
history exclusively as economic cycles, that has jettisoned all other historical differentiation in
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the articulation of its past, now finds itself stumped trying to name what it is we are in the
midst of. This is why Adorno’s work is no less urgent to us, than, as we acknowledge it, we
must dismiss it. We are those people who are unable to know what we know.
Brief Account
To take some account of what has occurred, two moments will establish historical reference
and comparison. Senator Charles Sumner deplored life in the South in 1860 as “barbarous in
origin, barbarous in law, barbarous in all its pretensions, barbarous wherever it shows itself.”
Sumner’s words—among the most declamatory of the age, but hardly unprecedented in their
views—were so antagonizing that he was attacked on the Senate floor by a cane-wielding
Southern congressman and knocked to the ground. The beating he sustained, from which he
did not recover for many years, directly contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. We
could today in Congress pronounce similar words on climate, war and economy in phrases
that would, likely, be shorn of Sumner’s stately periodic style. But our spoken words would
undoubtedly be shorn of any comparable self-evidence of moral provocation. Let’s also
consider—as a second moment of historical reference—that in nineteenth century America,
elements of Adorno’s model of the dialectic of history, were by no means something that only
foreigners might import to this continent. In the second decade of that century, for instance, a
journalist could observe that what was happening to people in the unexampled rapidity of the
spread of population over the continent, was proceeding contrary to what to date in history
had otherwise been a movement from barbarism to civilization. As this commentator wrote,
“Progress has [formerly] been from ignorance to knowledge, from rudeness of savage life to
the refinements of polished society. But in the settlement of North America the case is
reversed. The tendency is from civilization to barbarism.” “To some it seemed,” as one
historian has noted of the years following the American revolution, “that the mind once
enlightened could after all become darker.”
Open Secret and Barbaric Yawp
It is difficult to be brief in trying to understand what transpired that made these nineteenth
century thoughts aversively of another age to us. One might spontaneously want to say, with a
sense of progress achieved, that what provokes us in the judgment of barbarism is the
high-handed condescension of the light of civilization to the dark lands that were pillaged in
the presumption of that utter distinction of high and low. That pillage occurred; its criticism
was an achievement. But the terms of the accomplishment can be queried. While the epithet
of barbarism seems to transgress the achievement of equality, what we mean by equality may
not be so different from that force of colonial pillage. Equality, as such, our likeness without
affinity, is another technique of the same force of pillage in potentiated patterns of economic
advancement, and, effectively, a camouflage in which the muscled arm of that raised higher
hand of civilization was democratized as a universal potential to coerce without remark. This
is the open secret. By the structure of economy, law, and government, we do not permit
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equality to be pursued except as a fulcrum of inequality. Another age commonly recognized
this spurious form of equality—as the facade of inequality—as bourgeois equality. That age
could refer to it without requiring any explanation whatsoever as what needed to be
overcome. This perception of bourgeois equality, however, even on the political left, has
vanished while occupying the visual panorama whole. It is part of what we know without
being able to know it. While it must be discussed, it does not bear discussion; we have heard
it all already, and have yet to hear it. This clarifies something of what made the critique of
barbarism antipathetic to us. It must be that the dynamic of our form of equality consumed
both the insight into bourgeois equality and, with it, any possible comprehension of
barbarism as other than a culpable attack on equality. The critique of the epithet of
barbarism serves as its own mask. It is worn all the more securely because of the element of
truth, the genuine aspect of emancipation that it, like equality itself, bears. Still, a slight
nudge serves to dislodge the pretense and reveal a half grin. After all, who has come home
from elementary school, head on chest, complaining that the teacher “called me a barbarian
again today; I hate that!” And if that event had somehow happened, it is not at all sure that it
would have been such an unpleasant memory. For confirmation, we only need to think of
Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” to discover a soaring voice exalting in directly familiar tones that
“I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable; / I sound my barbaric yawp over the
roofs of the world.”
We do not need to disregard the humanity in Whitman’s work to realize how deeply his verse
participates in a “barbaric yawp” that is the characteristic assertion of a nation. American
nationalism is felt directly in opposition to the existence of the state; it presumes that equality
means that there should be no government; that, rightly, there can be none. We are able to
feel this motive national impulse without sensing anything national about it. On the contrary,
in the assertion of what we know as the form of equality, we are confident that we are nature’s
own allies in the spontaneous expression of equality as the literal truth itself. To a degree, this
assumption is unavoidable. The literal truth, truth shorn of any remainder, is the idea of
equality. Still, to arrive at something closer to what truth may be, we would need to adjoin
Adorno’s reflection that “the literal is the barbaric”—if we knew what that meant and meant
it, which is an aspect of what we are considering here. Part of the difficulty, however, in
following through on the need for this elucidation is that by its own structure, equality is
untarnishable by time, if only insofar as it cannot experience time, and so remains the always
youthful revolutionary impulse of the nation, as the one untarnishable truth. Tocqueville
more than touched on this when he wrote, in what I count among the darkest several
sentences in that enormous volume—a considerable source of Adorno’s thinking—that the
“gradual progress of equality is something fated…it is universal and permanent,” and “it is
daily passing beyond human control.” Four hundred pages later, his study of the implications
of the structure of American equality, of how here the dynamic of equality splits apart from its
own aim of freedom, causes us to recoil and dismiss its most central conclusion, but only
because Tocqueville leaves no doubt which of two “people” he means us to recognize
ourselves in, when he writes that “We should not console ourselves by thinking that the
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barbarians are still a long way off. Some peoples may let the torch be snatched from their
hands, but others stamp it out themselves.”
Esthétique du Mal
Tocqueville’s statement of the danger of an unstoppable, fated equality that is escaping what
is human, directly catches us going the other direction, and not only in our spontaneous
distress at the epithet of barbarism. For what Tocqueville names the danger of equality is
what we know as the rightly unstoppable impulse of the American Revolution. This is why we
have no choice but to suspect that the comment of Monsieur de Tocqueville is an unreformed
aristocratic attempt at foreign usurpation. Either his comment amounts to that, or we would
need to fear that crumbled up and sprinkled around, his words would reveal youth as an
archaic and incalculably wrinkled old age, with a pitch fork in its hand. For if, as Tocqueville
claimed, equality daily passes beyond human control, equality originated in what was not in
our control in the first place. Equality must thus be, on one hand, the power of human
emancipation—something Tocqueville never doubted any more than Adorno ever did—but it
is no less a force of second nature. It is as much a capacity of wakeful consciousness, as it is a
power of civilization for inflicting on its consciousness the aspect that first nature bears, of
having as yet to open its eyes. Equality is a means to an end as a technique of fairness; but
split off from the primacy of the object, it transforms all ends into a means. The problem is
not to abrogate equality, but to achieve it veridically as other than a technique of vengeful
manipulation.
This would be more comprehensible to us if we momentarily succeeded at extracting
ourselves from an unconscious preoccupation with flag. Then Tocqueville’s remarks—for
instance—concerning the inhumanity of equality, would make us think not of foreign
usurpation, but of financial forces of exchange, themselves devices of that same power of
equality, which we idealogically think of exclusively as the impulse of freedom, and realize
that these forces have become—beyond anything that Tocqueville himself could ever have
envisioned—primordially destructive powers. The characteristic mark of these powers, their
differentia specifica, what distinguishes the assertion of equality in the form of a mask of
inequality from equality as a power of freedom, is that they assert themselves literally, as in
page after page of available statistics, without a remainder, in the sense of drawing in their
wake no bindingly audible sound of what actually transpires. What is happening to people
now by the statistical millions in hunger, lost productive life, homelessness and ruined
education; and what we are far into doing to ourselves by the statistical billions, is what we
sense as the inability to get our own bearings. We know it, without our being able to know it.
We could, for instance, read in Wallace Steven’s Esthétique du Mal that “Except for us/
Vesuvius might consume/ In solid fire the utmost earth and know/ No pain,” and need to
consider that we are now substantially the closer kin to Vesuvius than to the except for us of
the verse, which, in spite of what it wishes for, evidently pertains only to the poem.
WHAT BARBARISM IS? - The Brooklyn Rail http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/02/art/what-barbarism-is
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Richard Serra, "Double Torqued Elllipse." Wheatherproofsteel, Outer ellipse, overall: 13'1"×33'6"×27'1"(4×10.2×8.3 m), inner ellipse, overall:13'1"×25'11"×20'11" (4×8×2.5 m), plates: each 2" (5.1cm) thick. Dia Foundation, New York. Gift of Louise andLeonard Riggio. Photographed by Dirk Reinartz. Courtesyof the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
Censure of Censure
We are following up on an interest—and a decisive disinterest—in Adorno’s work that
revolves around the question of what barbarism is. Our spontaneous censure of that censure,
of the epithet of barbarism, involves our not knowing what we know. It is in these terms that
Adorno casts his reflections on barbarism. In a lecture series, for instance, he memorably
questioned how it can be that internal to society tremendous advances are constantly made in
all areas, but society itself, as such, never advances a single step. Why is it, he keeps asking,
that the portals of historical possibility objectively await a single push and may even in this
moment ride wide on rusty hinges, but to us, in every direction, they appear barred and
sealed with lead? Adorno by no means supposes that there are not forces to contend with on
the other side of those portals, but that these forces cannot even be engaged in the name of
objective possibility, that even the hopes of the past continually become less distinct to us, is
the recurrent puzzle his philosophy presents. We thus find ourselves back at Adorno’s
question in the Dialectic of Enlightenment with which we started: Why does “humanity
founder in a new form of barbarism instead of entering a truly human condition,” while we
probably remain no less bothered that he was obliged to include that awkward remark on
barbarism?
Adorno sought to answer this question of the
vanishment of possibility in the midst of its
proliferation with a mobile group of
interpretative concepts, rather than with any
general theory of society. Adorno had no general
theory of society; he did not intend to have one. It
would not be difficult to extract such a general
theory from any number of his comments, such
as from the theory of sacrifice in the Dialectic of
Enlightenment, but only on the condition of
making his thinking as a whole meaningless. The
absence of this general theory was reciprocal with
the answers that Adorno could conceive to the
dead end we have manufactured for ourselves.
While his thinking is commonly recognized as a critique of systematic reason, Adorno
develops this critique by means of the impulse of systematic reason itself, not as a
post-modern “everything is in fragments,” and “here is more of the same.” He intended
nothing less than to save reason from reason, as the mastery of a false mastery that is
otherwise restricted to domination. Barbarism, he thought, is what befalls us when we have
lost the capacity to engage what he sometimes called the world of objects. Adorno held that
not just pleasure, but possibility itself only exists in reality, only in the objects themselves. As
Wallace Stevens conveys the gist of Adorno’s thought with utter compactness, “reality is the
only genius.” The critical-philosophical problem of Adorno’s philosophy, then, was to find a
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way to use reason’s own capacity for totality to make reality break in on the mind that
masters it and discern possibility in what it has achieved. Gaining the world of objects would
occur in acts of insight into reality, as a critique of reason’s own “spell,” of its socially
necessary illusions, its “bedazzling veils”—whether the “money veil” or the “technological
veil”—whether of the spurious necessity of logical construction, or of the exchange relation,
or, most of all, in aesthetic experience, and not in however many chapters seeking to grasp
the totality of society, whose total mediation blocks reality. Phrases about how ‘total
mediation’ blocks reality could, of course, merely be phrases unless it is realized that the only
reason here to introduce this thought is that our spontaneous censure of the epithet of
barbarism is a demonstration of that block.
“Radical Metamorphosisof Mental View”
We perceive Adorno’s concept of barbarism as being of another day and age, and it is. The
concept is emphatically modern; it epitomizes the insight of radical modernism; it is that
insight. As I’ve discussed in more detail elsewhere, (the Brooklyn Rail, November 2008) the
thought that first made radical modernism radical—its sine qua non on its every level of
thought and art—was the recognition of the primitive in ourselves and in the world itself. In
1911, a year in which radical modernism was still discovering its self-confidence, the reputed
11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica authoritatively noted that this new idea of the
primitive marked “the most radical metamorphosis of mental view that has taken place in
the entire course of the historical period”—in anthropological terms, that is, since the
emergence of the written word. Radical modernism is the recognition that the primitive is not
what we were at an earliest moment, but what we remain. Adorno himself acknowledged in
his “Concept of Philosophy” this understanding of the primitive in ourselves and in the world
as the definitive step of Western thought. When Adorno apostrophizes barbarism, then, he is
not—as we suppose—castigating the remnants of an original state of rudeness in nasty people
who failed to mature, and are as yet unfamiliar with European formality. What he intends is
not any century’s cruel reproof of the uncivilized, which is what we suspect in an oblivious
loss of the insight that once made modernism decisively modern. On the contrary, as Adorno
developed the concept of barbarism, he is criticizing the form of maturation itself, that is, the
struggle to dominate nature as a primitiveness that destroys the primitive rather than
becoming reconciled with it in its emancipation. This alliance with the primitive
fundamentally distinguishes Adorno’s epithet of barbarism from the instances of nineteenth
century American censure cited earlier. Adorno, who wrote at one point in Negative
Dialectics that “culture is the lid on the garbage can,” and at another that “culture is trash,”
could not have been more remote from Sumner’s reputed classicism and baritone stance
invoking the superiority of culture to barbarism, a dictum that Adorno would have recognized
as the close, if secret ally of the form of the contemporary dismissal to oblivion of the
perception of barbarism. Likewise, Adorno would have perceived that Whitman’s “barbaric
yawp” could hardly be reduced to the voice of unconscious nationalism.
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Formerly Primitive
We can document the exhaustion of modernism’s radical insight by thinking again of our
spontaneous aversion to understanding what Adorno means by barbarism, or, indexically, by
consulting the obituary early in November last year that marked the death of Claude
Levi-Strauss at the age of 100. The notice shares in a pre-modern prejudice against the
primitive by admiring Levi-Strauss as the French anthropologist who conducted research into
what “was once called ‘primitive man’.” Levi-Strauss, of course, like his contemporary
Adorno, and in alliance with an entire generation—including most of all Freud—wanted to
understand the entwinement of reason in myth. This is what Levi-Strauss repeatedly
demonstrated in his studies, for instance, of the mythology of Brazilian and American Indian
tribes. This intwinement of myth and reason is no less what he saw in front of himself when
he debarked in New York City harbor, expecting to find a sleekly vertical “ultra-modern
metropolis.” Instead he discovered a horizontal disorder of “ancient and recent” layers of
historical “magma” tossed up by the building of the sky-scrapers. The “magma”—he wrote—
covered the horizon as “witnesses to different eras that followed one another at an accelerated
rhythm with, at intervals, the still visible remnants of all those upheavals: vacant lots,
incongruous cottages, hovels, red-brick buildings—the latter already empty shells slated for
demolition.” This is a natural-historical cityscape. The forgotten, the archaic, and the detritus
of history are forcibly extruded from below as the sky-scrapers jut through the earth’s crust in
an accelerating entwinement of progress and barbarism.
But turn from this vision of what Levi-Strauss saw in New York City and consider again his
obituary, in the phrase quoted, which in the voice of the journalist presents a disillusioned
superiority over the ancient myth of the primitive, now capably dismissed. The comment that
Levi-Strauss helped render outmoded the idea of “primitive man” amounts to the sacking and
repression of the primitive, along with the capacity of insight into what the modern is. That
obituary notice—it exactly—is what Adorno meant by barbarism. Yet it likely strikes us as the
most contemporary freedom from bias. We are the modern that has consumed its earlier
radical insight in the force of the asserted equality of all things as a technique of mastering
them whole.
Lapsed Insight/Each Word
To elucidate Adorno’s concept of barbarism in this way, however, does not suppose that the
critical impulse of the concept can be restored. Insight that has lapsed, is just that. Its
moment is gone, and its impulse can not be recovered by systematic labor. In seeking to carve
into the moment, Adorno’s concept of barbarism is no less futile than is the idea of reification,
which no effort of clarification and expansion will revive, not any more than the stale
academic banquets on five continents devoted to the culture-industry, dialectics or historical
materialism will resurrect those now decisively vestigial ideas. They are defunct. One must,
on one hand, regret the fragile loss of insight. But, on the other hand, “our problem is not
what we have lost, but what we have failed to find.” This recognition is allied with what was
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once most alive in those concepts by acknowledging that they now verge on an irreversible
vacancy. Citing them is legitimate only when they resonate with their imminent disuse. They
remain actual exclusively as memorials to the effort to differentiate the vanishment of
differentiation—the actual loss of reality—which is the preeminent sense of our own moment.
Thus the idea of barbarism now shifts our attention to where the affect of social self-evidence
pools up as we most indisputably feel it. It is located, for instance, in the confidence with
which the enunciated surge continues long after the event. Bush may be gone, but the surge
mounts. In every next article, reading the newspapers broadly, we continue to see that
“Republicans predict a 2010 surge;” “lay offs surge;” “China’s power surge ends, for now;” in
New York City, involuntarily comic, even “bed bugs surge;” there is a “surge in financial
products,” and, as it turns out, as if we still need to be told what we know—but have decided
to do anyway—the “surge might not work in Afghanistan.” The Wall Street Journal headline,
December 1, 2009 reads, “U.S. Decides for Limited Surge in Afghanistan.” At variable
distances, the one syllable surge sits in ever reiterated range with the other watchwords of the
day, the muscularly eager robust; the aspiration to a timeless legacy straight out of a box; the
obliterating trump; the same push coming to shove in the self-identify—as in “they
self-identify as home-owners”—that dismisses the life labor of identity with the punctual
obligation to omit reflection on himself , herself, or themselves; the rethink whatever
—climate policy, perhaps—that treats every concern as handily as any other direct object, as
in, to kick a soccer ball; each rethink, at the cost of strictly limiting thought to what anyone
can recognize as a guaranteed rehash, disposes of the cumbersome prepositions that efforts to
think about something require in achieving a relation to an object. These contemporary
self-certitudes have in common, in each repetition, a differentiation that has vanished and
been sacrificed to a greater fright and power. Stevens would have heard in these words—in
alliance with the perception of that entire generation, in which we can no longer share—an
ancient labor of curse and spell, and written, as he did, that “We live in an intricacy of new
and local mythologies.” All that the reading eye can do in this moment, however, aware of the
collapse of all critical concepts, is to halt at each and every rethink, reimagine, rediscover,
rewrite, reinscribe, trump, legacy, and surge, seeking the differentia specifica of regression
by refusing—as if that refusal might be all that is left to possibility—to read another word
before trying to figure out how it might otherwise have been said before what fell on our
heads tumbled.
Plain People in Plain Towns
Barbarism, then, as a critical concept that no longer strikes flint on stone; that surrenders any
intention to be stated with crescendo or even decresendo, is meaningful as a capacity for the
perception of the loss of differentiation. Wallace Stevens helps in this regard by reducing the
tone of what we find arch in Adorno’s epithets—such as that the literal is the barbaric—to our
own vernacular. In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” Stevens described us as “plain
people in plain towns” and added that the “plainness of plain things is savagery.” The
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Richard Serra, "Open Ended" (2007-2008). Weatherproofsteel,12'5"×59'9"×24'2" (3.8×18.2×7.4 m), Courtesy of theartist and Gagosian Gallery.
difficulty in comprehending what Stevens meant is no less than the problem of knowing what
we know.
The plainness he discerned is immediately there for our own ears in every you—every English
you—we speak. But it is unavoidably striking if one has needed to listen to this you while
working one’s way into English, coming from another European language. Then one
constantly makes the discovery that English provides no alternative to you. For unlike any
other European language, English expulsed its familiar pronouns, the “thee” and “thou,” and
did so in deference to the Puritan distress at the presumption of that familiarity’s intrusion on
the inwardness of spirit.
The Puritan effort, however, in the literalism of
its intention to defend the boundary of the
inward at all costs, contributed to the effacement
of the sanctum that they sought. For the
prohibition on the intimate pronouns dissolved
the boundary between the familiar and the
formal, leaving in its wake a remaindered you
that turned out to be both singular and plural. In
our plain language, that is, you darling is, in the
same breath, inescapably you thousands and
millions and, frankly, darling, you everyone. The
you we speak and have no choice but to be, is as
icy in its intimacy as it is insinuating in public. In
the decades and centuries following the Puritan
repudiation of uninvited intimacy, commerce
would seize on this anonymously intimate and
intimately anonymous you as an economy of
scale. Thus, the you of Melville’s 1850s
Confidence Man, who goes about the ferry deck
importuning every next inadvertently available
you with the skeweringly invasive, “Do you have
confidence, sir?” Implicit in the huckster’s “you”
was already the supreme court ruling that commercial speech would enjoy every First
Amendment protection; “you” fore-spoke the emails from colleagues and socially net-working
friends linking directly to their websites, unable to distinguish the importuning from the
intimate. We think of Hopper, of course, as having painted that you at the “All Night Diner,”
as our own melancholy, “Okay, you, your turn honey; what’ll you have?” and any next
“honey” who takes a seat down the row of barstools for the displaced, each feeling equally
alone at the ragged mercy of an unparryable economy.
American literature has not had anything like its own Flaubert, but we can still perceive, if in
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a learned way, that language bears its own criterion, and that it is a criterion of reality. By the
criterion of our you, we can hear in our own voices plain people in plain towns, distorted by
their isolation, whom Sherwood Anderson still had the sense of scale and courage to describe
as the “grotesques” of Winesburg, Ohio. Adorno speculated in a lecture that it was in the
vulnerability of this isolation that the primitive impulse, as the primitive in ourselves and in
reality, was first recognized as such. And, if so, the you we speak is the literal measure of the
dynamic of equality that also anathematized the insight into the primitive.
This is, of course, not to say that the fact of the familiar pronouns enduring in the other
European languages, the du Lieber Kind, or the c’est toi cherie, protected their people from
barbarism. We know it did not. Adorno knew this. But, the residual existence of this
differentiation of the familiar and the formal in the other European languages, is one aspect
of historical boundaries internal to those societies and the self that has something to do with
the continuingly possible comprehension in them of the meaning of the “barbaric” and why it
is that, in Europe, in the wake of being overcome by its own barbarism in the 20th century,
“acts of barbarism” are indictable, whereas, by contrast, our law has available to itself only the
term of art, “incivility,” or, “hate crimes.” The latter constitutes a distinct category from acts
of “barbarism” in that they specifically concern a crime against equality, as a culpable bias,
not as a crime against humanity as an acknowledgeable transgression.
In his writings, Adorno certainly never once addresses us as du—he did not address Walter
Benjamin as du. It is, however, the place of the unvoiced du in his thinking that provokes us
in what we perceive as the haughty Alexandrian formality of his writing. It is part of what is
inimical to us in his apostrophizing of the barbaric, and in claims such as that writing poetry
after Auschwitz is itself barbaric. But it is no less the implicit du on every page that causes a
style determined never once to slip, to crack with pained tenderness even where it is
conceptually hardened to a glassy impenetrability. For us, the du is a more resilient puzzle
than any of the intricacies of Heidegger’s being of beings. Even those of us who, for historical
reasons, find it difficult to travel in Germany and may avoid speaking the language, however
well we may know it, may also be aware that there is not any way in English to sign a letter to
the friends in Germany of many years, Seid beide für heute herzlichst gegrüßt— the plural
familiar—or, the other side of it, to provide a formal salutation that concludes with anything
like, Je vous assure, Mesdames et Messieurs, de mes sentiments les plus distingues. What
may feel comic and archaic to us in these expressions, whether as an excess of sincerity or of
formality, is how plain people, in plain towns, sense the commercial force of a nation that
Claude Levi-Strauss described in his “New York City 1941”—when Adorno was also a refugee
there, sharing with him as well the perception of the mythical barbarism of the modern—as
the force of a “machine capable of both going in reverse as well as advancing in time” that
“has pushed us back into the one remaining dimension: one will probe it in vain for secret
loopholes.”
Interrupted Gesture and How-it-is
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If we bring the sound of Whitman’s “barbaric yawp” into relation with Benjamin’s much
quoted thesis that “there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of
barbarism,” questions emerge that are at the heart of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and how he
conceived of art as a capacity to cause reality to break in on the mind that masters it. These
questions are elucidated by the two most important statements in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,
which are in fact located in Walter Benjamin’s study of the baroque play of lamentation, the
Trauerspiel book. The first is this: “The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the
function of artistic form…is to make historical content…into a philosophical truth.” Aesthetic
form translates history into truth. In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, this becomes the thought
that art as form is the unconscious transcription of the history of human suffering. Aesthetic
criticism, then, must in concepts present this content. The second essential statement for
Aesthetic Theory from the Trauerspiel study, which occurs several paragraphs later, is in no
way as deceptively limpid as the first, but a striking pictograph drawn from the imagery of the
baroque, which Benjamin frequently characterized as barbaric. The statement explains how
aesthetic form functions to make historical content truth: “It may not accord with the
authority of nature; but the voluptuousness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan
in the harem of objects, is without equal in giving expression to nature. It is indeed
characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his object and then—or thereby—satisfies it.”
In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory the figure of the sadist in relation to nature becomes a dialectic
of construction and mimesis in which expression is achieved as an interrupted gesture.
Expression is not in tossing the proverbial shoe against the wall with a shout, but is shaped in
its historical impediment. The dialectic of mimesis and construction occurs as a movement at
a standstill—as if the arm were moving, but the shoe not; or, the shoe, and not the arm. This
is how art, unlike any other object we can make, becomes a surface that refuses to let its
content remain hidden. That is no less why the unconscious transcription of human suffering
is the human, as the more than human, in the achieved voice of nature in what it undergoes.
We could follow this philosophical discussion art-historically if we considered Paleolithic rock
painting, which is exclusively mimetic participation in a magical object, and compared it with
what happens in the sudden appearance of Neolithic geometrical artifacts. These pots mark
the beginning of settled, agricultural society and with it, not only of the separation of image
from object in life as organized labor, but no less of the appearance of the conflict of mimesis
and construction in geometrical decoration. In the absence of an emancipated concept of
form, however, which would not occur for tens of thousands of years before the Greeks, the
Neolithic conflict of mimesis and construction remained at a null degree of expression. This is
not the moment to follow the history from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic. It is only
mentioned here to help flesh out something of what is happening in Aesthetic Theory,
because neither does Adorno proceed in any way art-historically. In Aesthetic Theory he
omits most all close history of art from his discussion, and hardly discusses a single art work
in the volume. This makes it difficult to recognize what he is talking about, especially in the
important discussions of the dialectic of construction and mimesis.
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Aesthetic Theory is organized in this fashion because a philosophy devoted to the
emancipation of nature that is conceived as much in alliance with the barbarically primitive
as in opposition to it, required making the experience of natural beauty central to aesthetics.
Aesthetic Theory thus runs self-consciously contrary to the telos of the modern development
of aesthetics, which participates in the ban on the mimetic relationship in the marginalization
of natural beauty from aesthetic reflection. Structurally considered, Adorno’s aesthetics is
organized concentrically around the section on Natural Beauty, which may also be this
almost intolerably interesting work’s most interesting section. The section itself turns most of
all on the study of the experience of a movement at a standstill in nature. Adorno memorably
describes this movement as what most of us know from childhood as those cloud dramas in
which under our gaze the cumulus rhino in motionless motion becomes the elongated cirrus
giraffe. Here the experience of natural beauty provides the model of the longing, needful,
voice of nature, which elsewhere in his aesthetics Adorno shows takes shape in the form of art
beauty in the dialectic of mimesis and construction as memory of what historical nature
undergoes.
Adorno’s aesthetics, then, directs our attention not so much to the observation of nature, but
to beauty in art as it is primordially oriented to nature’s beauty and seeks to fulfill it, though
not in the sense of copying the yachts at bay down at the harbor club. In instance, we might
think, rather, of Richard Serra’s work. He employs a German steel mill that once rolled out
materials for battle ship hulls for the manufacture of torqued panels that never before existed.
Self-alert that a humanizing touch now adds nothing in art to the human, other than the
pretense that the human immediately exists, the unsurfaced, oxidized steel panels of his
sculptures are as rebarbative to the touch as any compacted encompassment of cinder block.
Serra’s accomplishment depends on the possibility of a mastery of mastery, as the mastery of
the domination of nature. Its constructive powers must be at the level of what remains
enmeshed in pragmatic labor as powers of production, and match them with their own force,
with no less ability than Titian once handled a paintbrush. In art, only what impedes can
emancipate because what impedes is the whole of what awaits becoming a capacity of
emancipation. A work of art that fails to become its own-most enemy remains the imitation of
the muteness of history. Art, as Wallace Stevens wrote in The Noble Rider and the Sound of
Words (1941), must be a violence against the violence; but if this violence is to be something
more than more violence, what history presents art with must be returned to it pacified in
form as memory.
Serra’s legerdemain has been in figuring out how to organize his torqued panels to transform
the mobile sensorium, including the splayed hips and sprung ribs of his otherwise desk bound
visitors, into elements of the performing arena of the work. The perceived dynamic walking
through these raw spirals is that you could confidently throw yourself with a heave against
those massive walls. But given the pitched angle of the severe tonnage no one dares lay on a
finger tip. The ingenuity in the sudden, built transitions between these two states is
prodigious. So much weight, so tentatively poised, draws on an ancient tradition in
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architecture of those buildings where the most intense feelings of helplessness have
historically lodged. In those precincts the devout, shielded eye is trained on domed arches
and high pitched windows whose majesty is in all that reaches up to support them, as if
thought alone either sustains dome and glass with belief or brings them down in deserved
punishment. Serra does without dome, window, devotion, or doctrine and without
architectural replication of any kind. But the knee does bend. For the work captures the
primordial impulse of self-preservation where it wells up in those walls’ remnant of the
sacred, “Don’t touch me.” Under the shifting weight of vectored forces of avoidance and
enclosure, in the perceptually counterintuitive sweep of Serra’s steep, triggered caverns, a
focal hollow of amazed sensorial concentration is compressed into existence and you begin to
count your footsteps, though not to number them: “If there were anything on top of this—you
think—no one would come in here.” Whichever interior vector you follow in response to the
inner turning spiral’s massed Egyptian come hither, to its final center—its utter be like
me—you become acutely awake to what reaches under your ribs, to what takes hold of the left
shoulder blade, and, as invisibly, of the right, and of the knees, then of the ankles: every
constancy of proprioception is impinged by its intensification. There is no step that does not
carry forward, none that is not a restriction, and none that does not transform geometrical
space into memory of nature in the subject. Time clocked becomes porous to a movement at a
standstill in which you—you anyone in the spiral’s anonymously intimate confine—sense a
loss of footing largo on solid ground. In Serra’s heaved walls we discover ourselves as close to
public participation in news of the mortal coil stung by the weight of How-it-is as what is
otherwise hardly elsewhere to be sensed in this managerial land of body bags and distant
bombardments.
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