Aesthetics and Politics. Theodor Adorno

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ stance towards reality there obviously cannot be any action, structure, content or composition in the ‘traditional sense’. For people who experience the world like this it is in fact perfectly true that Expressionism and Surrealism are the only modes of self-expression still available. This philosophical justification of Expressionism and Surrealism suffers ‘merely’ from the fact that Bloch fails to make reality his touchstone and instead uncritically takes over the Expressionist and Surrealist attitude towards reality, and translates it into his own richly imaginative language.

      Despite my sharp disagreement with all of Bloch’s judgements, I find his formulation of certain facts both correct and valuable. In particular, he is the most consistent of all defenders of modernism in his demonstration that Expressionism necessarily leads to Surrealism. In this context he also deserves praise for having recognized that montage is the inevitable mode of expression in this phase of development. Moreover, his achievement here is all the greater because he shows that montage is important not only in modernist art, but also in the bourgeois philosophy of our time.

      However, one consequence of this is that he brings out the anti-realistic one-dimensionality of the entire trend much more starkly than other theoreticians who think along these lines. This one-dimensionality – about which, incidentally, Bloch has nothing to say – was already a feature of Naturalism. In contrast to the Naturalist, the artistic ‘refinement’ introduced by Impressionism ‘purifies’ art even more completely of the complex mediations, the tortuous paths of objective reality, and the objective dialectics of Being and Consciousness. The symbolist movement is clearly and consciously one-dimensional from the outset, for the gulf between the sensuous incarnation of a symbol and its symbolic meaning arises from the narrow, single-tracked process of subjective association which yokes them together.

      Montage represents the pinnacle of this movement and for this reason we are grateful to Bloch for his decision to set it so firmly in the centre of modernist literature and thought. In its original form, as photomontage, it is capable of striking effects, and on occasion it can even become a powerful political weapon. Such effects arise from its technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context. A good photomontage has the same sort of effect as a good joke. However, as soon as this one-dimensional technique – however legitimate and successful it may be in a joke – claims to give shape to reality (even when this reality is viewed as unreal), to a world of relationships (even when these relationships are held to be specious), or of totality (even when this totality is regarded as chaos), then the final effect must be one of profound monotony. The details may be dazzlingly colourful in their diversity, but the whole will never be more than an unrelieved grey on grey. After all, a puddle can never be more than dirty water, even though it may contain rainbow tints.

      This monotony proceeds inexorably from the decision to abandon any attempt to mirror objective reality, to give up the artistic struggle to shape the highly complex mediations in all their unity and diversity and to synthesize them as characters in a work of literature. For this approach permits no creative composition, no rise and fall, no growth from within to emerge from the true nature of the subject-matter.

      Whenever these artistic trends are dismissed as decadent, there is a cry of indignation against ‘pedantic hectoring by eclectic academics’. Perhaps I shall be permitted, therefore, to appeal to Friedrich Nietzsche, an expert on decadence whom my opponents hold in high regard in other matters too: ‘What is the mark of every form of literary decadence?’ he enquires. He replies: ‘It is that life no longer dwells in the totality. The word becomes sovereign and escapes from the confines of the sentence; the sentence encroaches on the page, obscuring its meaning; the page gains in vitality at the cost of the whole – the whole ceases to be a whole. But that is the equation of every decadent style: always the same anarchy of the atoms, disintegration of the will.… Life, the same vitality, the vibrance and exuberance of life is compressed into the most minute structures, while the rest is impoverished. Paralysis, misery, petrifaction or hostility and chaos everywhere: in either case the consequences are the more striking, the higher one rises in the hierarchy of organizations. The whole as such no longer lives at all; it is composite, artificial, a piece of cerebration, an artefact.’⁷ This passage from Nietzsche is just as truthful an account of the artistic implications of these literary trends as that of Bloch or Benn. I would invite Herwarth Walden, who dismisses every critical interpretation of Expressionism as a vulgarization and who regards every example used to illustrate the theory and practice of Expressionism as an instance of ‘vulgar-Expressionism’ which proves nothing, to comment on the following adaptation of Nietzsche’s theory of decadence to the theory of literary language in general: ‘Why should only the sentence be comprehensible and not the word? … Since the poets like to dominate, they go ahead and make sentences, ignoring the rights of words. But it is the word that rules. The word shatters the sentence and the work of art is a mosaic. Only words can bind. Sentences are always just picked up out of nowhere.’ This ‘vulgar-Expressionist’ theory of language comes in fact from Herwarth Walden himself.

      It goes without saying that such principles are never applied with absolute consistency, even by Joyce. For 100 per cent chaos can only exist in the minds of the deranged, in the same way that Schopenhauer had already observed that a 100 per cent solipsism is only to be found in a lunatic asylum. But since chaos constitutes the intellectual cornerstone of modernist art, any cohesive principles it contains must stem from a subject-matter alien to it. Hence the superimposed commentaries, the theory of simultaneity,⁸ and so on. But none of this can be any more than a surrogate, it can only intensify the one-dimensionality, of this form of art.

      5.

      The emergence of all these literary schools can be explained in terms of the economy, the social structure and the class struggles of the age of imperialism. So Rudolf Leonhard is absolutely right when he claims that Expressionism is a necessary historical phenomenon. But it is at best a half-truth when he goes on to assert, echoing Hegel’s celebrated dictum, that ‘Expressionism was real; so if it was real it was rational.’ Even in Hegel the ‘rationality of history’ was never as straightforward as this, although he occasionally contrived to smuggle an apologia for the actual into his concept of reason. For a Marxist, ‘rationality’ (historical necessity) is unquestionably a more complex business. For Marxism the acknowledgment of a historical necessity neither implies a justification of what actually exists (not even during the period when it exists), nor does it express a fatalistic belief in the necessity of historical events. Once again we can illustrate this best with an example from economics. There can be no doubt that primitive accumulation, the separation of the small producers from their means of production, the creation of the proletariat, was – with all its inhumanities – a historical necessity. Nevertheless, no Marxist would dream of glorifying the English bourgeoisie of the period as the embodiment of the principle of reason in Hegel’s sense. Even less would it occur to a Marxist to see thereby any fatalistic necessity in the development from capitalism to socialism. Marx repeatedly protested against the way in which people fatalistically insisted that the only possible development for the Russia of his day was from primitive accumulation to capitalism. Today, in view of the fact that socialism has been established in the Soviet Union, the idea that undeveloped countries can only achieve socialism via the route of primitive accumulation and capitalism, is a recipe for counter-revolution. So if we concur with Leonhard, and agree that the emergence of Expressionism was historically necessary, this is not to say that we find it artistically valid, i.e. that it is a necessary constituent of the art of the future.

      For this reason we must demur when Leonhard discerns in Expressionism ‘the definition of man and the consolidation of things as a stepping-stone towards a new realism’. Bloch is absolutely in the right here when, unlike Leonhard, he looks to Surrealism and the dominance of montage as the necessary and logical heir to Expressionism. Our dear old Wangenheim inevitably arrives at completely eclectic conclusions when he tries to use the debate on Expressionism for his own purposes, i.e. to salvage and preserve the formalistic tendencies of his early work – tendencies which so often inhibited and even suppressed his native realism – by bringing them under the umbrella of a broad and СКАЧАТЬ