My friend Theodor W. Adorno - thoughts discourse reception aesthetic E-Book

Heinz Duthel

• Herausgeber: neobooks
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 231

Beschreibung

Open Sesame! I want to go out. "The Hegelian motif of art as a consciousness of need has been confirmed beyond everything that can be foreseen from it." (Adorno 1973: 35) Theodor W. Adorno's conception of art occupies the central position in his entire work. In addition to philosophy and sociology, it is above all literature and music that Adorno's thought deals extensively with. In it he sees the only possible trailblazer for a more just society. In the modern age, only art is still able to create a state that is free of domination, i.e. to oppose the subjective means of end, rationality of use and domination. "Those were still good times when a criticism of the political economy of this society could be written that it took at its own ratio ." (Adorno 1987: 284) With his concept of art, Adorno is directed against any practice that, on the Marxist side, did not lead to the promised Telos, but to totalitarianism and mass murder. Beyond any ideology, Adorno tries to find a possible way out of a society saturated with domination in aesthetic reception. Similar to Habermas, who, based on Adorno's critical philosophy, sees a way out of the subject-object separation in casual communication (Habermas 1988: 346), the avant-garde works of art are, according to Adorno, the communication instance that mediates subject and object with one another without the object and the subject is suppressed. Mastery of nature can be overcome by reason becoming reflexive. Here Adorno can be read as Hegel's legacy, since he was already trying to find a way out of the dichotomy between subject and object in modern dialectics, which modernity was most strongly represented by Kant (Habermas 1988: 27). However, Hegel is criticized by Adorno for the concept of conceptual thinking, since this thinking is identifying and thus did not lead out of the aporias of modernity, i.e. the reification of objects (nature), but even radicalized them (Wellmer 1990: 137) . Adorno developed his own neo-Marxist aesthetic theory, which was primarily directed against the traditional German idealism. He describes it as "materialistic-dialectical aesthetics", since it can only be determined in relation to its other, empirical reality, and especially as a process (Adorno 1973: 12). Bourgeois art also tends to shift the social aspect to the outside, i.e. to the extra-social, uncritical (Adorno 1973: 334). Isolated passages of the "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett in this work should lead to a deeper understanding of Adorno's conception of art. However, since its scope is limited, a more detailed interpretation of the piece is not given. Beckett himself disliked this, by the way. Rather, fragmentary text passages serve to clarify Adorno's theses. Art as dissonance

Leseprobe

My friend Theodor W. Adorno - thoughts discourse reception aesthetic

Every image of man is ideology, except for the negative

Feelings of powerlessness and aggressiveness, conformism and anti-social behavior fluctuating .

"Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: They are just animals."

Commitment is often nothing but a lack of talent or a lack of tension, a lack of strength.

Advice to intellectuals: do not be represented.

Open Sesame! I want to go out.

"The Hegelian motif of art as a consciousness of need has been confirmed beyond everything that can be foreseen from it." (Adorno 1973: 35)

Theodor W. Adorno's conception of art occupies the central position in his entire work. In addition to philosophy and sociology, it is above all literature and music that Adorno's thought deals extensively with. In it he sees the only possible trailblazer for a more just society. In the modern age, only art is still able to create a state that is free of domination, i.e. to oppose the subjective means of end, rationality of use and domination. "Those were still good times when a criticism of the political economy of this society could be written that it took at its own ratio ." (Adorno 1987: 284)

With his concept of art, Adorno is directed against any practice that, on the Marxist side, did not lead to the promised Telos, but to totalitarianism and mass murder. Beyond any ideology, Adorno tries to find a possible way out of a society saturated with domination in aesthetic reception.

Similar to Habermas, who, based on Adorno's critical philosophy, sees a way out of the subject-object separation in casual communication (Habermas 1988: 346), the avant-garde works of art are, according to Adorno, the communication instance that mediates subject and object with one another without the object and the subject is suppressed. Mastery of nature can be overcome by reason becoming reflexive.

Here Adorno can be read as Hegel's legacy, since he was already trying to find a way out of the dichotomy between subject and object in modern dialectics, which modernity was most strongly represented by Kant (Habermas 1988: 27). However, Hegel is criticized by Adorno for the concept of conceptual thinking, since this thinking is identifying and thus did not lead out of the aporias of modernity, i.e. the reification of objects (nature), but even radicalized them (Wellmer 1990: 137) .

Adorno developed his own neo-Marxist aesthetic theory, which was primarily directed against the traditional German idealism. He describes it as “materialistic-dialectical aesthetics”, since it can only be determined in relation to its other, empirical reality, and especially as a process (Adorno 1973: 12). Bourgeois art also tends to shift the social aspect to the outside, i.e. to the extra-social, uncritical (Adorno 1973: 334).

Isolated passages of the "Endgame" by Samuel Beckett in this work should lead to a deeper understanding of Adorno's conception of art. However, since its scope is limited, a more detailed interpretation of the piece is not given. Beckett himself disliked this, by the way. Rather, fragmentary text passages serve to clarify Adorno's theses.

3. Adorno's criticism of the culture industry

According to Adorno's dialectical thought pattern, culture determines the mediation between the individual and society, whereby above all the consciousness-building of the subjects is influenced or even controlled by it (Adorno 1997b: 163).

The characteristic of the developing late capitalism of the 1940s is to subordinate all areas of society to the totality of the capitalist market (Adorno 1997b: 157).

After the first industrial revolution in the 19th century The mass production by machines still depends on goods such as railways, machines and textiles (Fülberth 2005: 149), the specifically new feature of the second industrial revolution that was implemented in the course of the assembly line production of Fordism was the machine-made production of immaterial goods of culture, food and beverage Auto industry (Fülberth 2005: 207f.). The inclusion of ever new areas of production and reproduction in capitalist merchandise management thus serves as the basis for Adorno's analysis of the works of art.

The central term for the analysis of the phenomena of mass culture, as it was initially called (Adorno 2003b: 337), is that of “standardization” (Adorno 2003a: 142). It describes the industrial mass production of cultural goods which, according to Adorno, only exist as an exchange value for the market (Adorno 2003a: 142). “Culture today strikes everything with similarity. Film, radio, magazines make up a system. ”(Adorno 2003a: 141) So“ all mass culture under the monopoly […] is identical. ”(Adorno 2003a: 141f.) It was only through the Fordist-style production of goods that society members saw cultural goods as standardized mass goods accessible through the market. Adorno sees bourgeois society as being controlled by the monopolized “total capital power” (Adorno 2003a: 141), whereby all classes and milieus are covered. Critical awareness is eliminated through the standardized production of consumer goods. According to Adorno's view, the production of cultural goods is not based on market conditions, i.e. the production of goods is based on consumer demand. On the contrary, “The culture industry is the deliberate integration of its customers from above.” (Adorno 2003b: 337) That means that it is the culture industry that first shapes the needs of the consumers. It is "the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system shoots closer and closer together" (Adorno 2003a: 142), because "the whole world is guided through the filter of the culture industry" (Adorno 2003a: 147).

4. Art as dissonance

In contrast to the standardized products of the cultural industry or the theories of totalitarian reason, Adorno attributes the autonomous work of art to the ability to generate “correct consciousness” (Adorno 1973: 134) in the subject. Avant-garde art is characterized by the dual character of autonomy and “fait social”. (Adorno 1973: 14)

According to Adorno, therefore, the mere consumption of high or serious art does not lead to real education, but only the awareness of the possibility of true humanity and emancipation through the “establishment of human things. Education, which refrains from it, posits itself and absolutizes itself, has already become half-education. "(Adorno 1997a: 95) With reference to Marx's analysis of the capitalist form of goods, Adorno concretizes" half-education (...) [as] the spirit seized by the fetish character of the goods . "(Adorno 1997a: 108)

Adorno, on the other hand, ascribes two properties to the function of the autonomous work of art, which in his opinion could lead to a process of enlightenment about the enlightenment, that is, to the reflexive nature of reason (!). The instrumental reifying reason could thus be overcome.

On the one hand, it leads to a memory of nature in the subject (Adorno 1973: 104), i.e. to the reconciliation of the subject with the object through the representation of the non-identical, that which eludes identifying conceptual thinking (Adorno 1973: 119). This is especially in Adorno's second major work, the "Negative Dialectic" topic and is only discussed here in passing, although it occupies the central place in Adorno's philosophy. “Aesthetic identity should stand by the non-identical that the compulsion to identify in reality suppresses”, subordinating everything to the general term (Adorno 1973: 14). Works of art therefore represent the general in particular (Adorno 1973: 130), while Hegel's concept is about the representation of the particular in general!

Theodor W. Adorno on the 100th birthday of Rolf Vegas House.

In the summer of 1950, the exhibition The Image of Man in Our Time took place at the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt. The opening was accompanied by the first conversation in Darmstadt. The Austrian art historian Hans Sedelmayer was one of the speakers at the three-day event. As a once active National Socialist, he was still forced to retire at this time. At the same time he was widely known through his book Loss of the Middle, published two years earlier, the title, which quickly became a catchphrase, stood for the diagnosis of a cynical degradation of man, a decline into egalitarianism and anarchy, for which the author blamed cultural modernity.

Sedelmayer and other speakers who accused modern art of overwhelming the audience with horrific and chaotic things turned out to be the most impressive opponent, not one of the other speakers, but an eloquent one. With all the passion and sharpness, the discussion participants formulated Theodor W. Adorno.

He had only returned to Frankfurt am Main from exile in the US the year before, and a few weeks before his appearance in Darmstadt he had been appointed adjunct professor of philosophy and sociology.

He was co-author of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in Amsterdam in 1947, and author of the Philosophy of New Music, published in 1949. In the book about the genesis of Doctor Faustus, published in 1949, Thomas Mann had emphasized the central role of Adorno in the musical parts of his novel about the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn.

A novel he intended as an interpretation of German fate about a composer who tried to escape the danger of artistic sterility through a pact with the devil during the epoch of the two world wars.

Nevertheless, Adorno was only known to insiders and experts at the time. The appearance of the 46-year-old EU migrant during the Darmstadt Castle Discussion showed, however, that he had what it takes to be an outstanding and engaging philosopher and cultural critic that there is a crisis of reception in contemporary art in the sense that the audience is is split off from modern art.

This is probably something no sane person will deny. And it's just incomprehensible to me that, among other things, tattoos are used to prove this amazing fact anew.

I think I think that what really matters here would be to grasp this fact for once, instead of just deriving a value judgment about modern art from this fact itself in a not entirely fair way.

That the lack of social obedience in modern art is seldom an expression of a social one, if one takes the social demand as seriously as one has to take it when what Dr. Köhler said that there should be more than demagoguery, then you have to be accountable for exactly that.

The fact that modern art has been put to the break with consumption has been mentally pushed by the fact that production in its breadth, namely production that is reproduced via the market, precisely so that it can be sold, the mechanisms of reification that Mechanisms of the character of a commodity, in short everything that has reinforced what actually makes life impossible for us. And the truth of the matter is that the concern of man, that is, the concern of the economic mechanism that is not alien to him, but the concern of vitality, is only represented today by art that refuses, according to conventions the true clichés, according to the spirit of the illustrated newspapers, radio and trade magazines, as a result, probably only the artist represents the cause of society, who does not make himself the mouthpiece of those who patent to be allowed to speak for society while they are are really looking to rule and fool society.

That was Adorno in top form.

A rousing advocate of radical artistic modernism as governor of a liberated society. Adorno appreciated dealing with critics of modern art . d as provided an opportunity to clarify modern art on the basis of allegations and resistors the specific nature and to illuminate their relationship to the state of social development.

Such critics and the confrontation with them counteracted the neutralization of art, helped to prevent it from falling into indifference and smooth consumption. Adorno had already characterized classical and traditional art in the dialectic of the Enlightenment as a neutralization of ecstasy and intoxication.

In his interpretation of the scene in which in the Romanian Odyssey the passage of Odysseus to the sirens is portrayed, it means the fear of losing the self and with the self dissolving the boundary between oneself and other life. The fear of death and destruction is related to a promise of happiness that has threatened civilization at every moment.

Their path was that of obedience and work, above which fulfillment shines only as appearance, as disempowered beauty. That is why the thought that Odysseus knows his own death and happiness as an enemy. He only knows two ways of penetration. One he prescribes to his companions, he plugs their ears with wax and they have to row as much as they can. They must doggedly sublimate the urge to distract with additional effort.

Odysseus himself chooses the other option. The landlord who lets the others work for him. He hears but passed out tied to the mast. And the greater the curl, the more he can be captivated. Just as later the citizens refused happiness to themselves all the more stubbornly, the closer it came to them as their own power grew. The bonds with which he irrevocably tied himself to the practice also keep the sirens away from the practice.

Their attraction becomes a mere object of contemplation, neutralized into art. The tied up lives on a concert stage, listening motionlessly as the concert visits and his enthusiastic call for liberation cease. Already as applause.

So applause couldn't be a criterion for the effect of music, of art in general. The faster it sets in and the more it crackles, the more likely it is to suspect that what has been heard is banished and kept at a distance and only the familiar sounding surface is appreciated. Who did not want to work in the hands of the neutralization of art? Anyone who wanted a feeling for the promise of liberation in art had to accept that it was alienating to the audience.

I am in the discussion, in a somewhat strange way I identify, as I need not say, with the subject of modern art, namely with modern art in its extreme form. However, I have the feeling that in this discussion of its own cause, modern art is a little shame, that it misses the apologetic point. That means that she somehow says of herself it is actually not that bad that she would like herself harmless. And Sedelmayer seems to me to the person opposite. Sedelmayer himself emphasized that our data are diametrically opposed to views. But to the other person it seems to me that one takes the element of negativity in modern art very seriously and with great difficulty.

That seems to me to be a little neglected , and I believe that we, who stand up for the cause of modern art, should not really be modest and here we are different. That we say just give us enough time. And then it will become apparent, so to speak, that we are also Raffaels and that we are also Beethoven's and age limits.

We are not, we can, must, and we don't even want to be.

Harmony with our own reality and with what is available to us, incompatible.

But Adorno did not stop at the general remarks that a philosopher and sociologist could make. He also spoke as an artist, namely as someone who could fall back on his own experiences as a composer and pianist.

His mother was a singer. His aunt, who lived with him, was a pianist.

From early childhood he had played the violin and viola, and later the piano. In the early twenties he had taken composition lessons from Bernhard Seglers in Frankfurt, from whom Paul Hindemith had also learned. In 1925 he had been a student of Alban Berg and Eduard, helmsman of the leading pianist of the Schönberg School in Vienna for a while. Berg valued his compositions as well as his commitment as a music critic for the Schönberg School, even if he repeatedly called for more comprehensibility. However, early on he had expressed the fear that Adorno would neglect composing over philosophy.

At the beginning of 1926 he had therefore written to Frankfurt returned.

It is clear. One day they will, because they are one who only goes all out. Thank God we have to decide for Kant or Beethoven. And only in this sense could I have made a remark that I may have made to the Réthy. I don't remember talking to God about them, to be understood. An expression of fear

Would you one day, despite your great talent, which predestined you to be a composer of a very high level, finally turned to philosophical work? Of course, I never managed to say a sentence like the one you quoted to me in your penultimate letter as being spoken by me, that I could ever fault a composer for the fact that his head was playing tricks on him. That was the remark put in my mouth, you will not trust me yourself. And you can confidently leave that to Mr. Réthy and the others who compose with the gut.

I think every artist who has worked on Mally Material in an emergency knows that if he is a musician and if he operates with dissonances, then these dissonances do not just appear to him as a nice, smooth echo. But neither do they appear simply as images that our world is like this. Both things are wrong, but there is a very strange relationship here that one would have to describe very subtly and very precisely, namely being drawn, a strange attraction that emerges from these non-harmonious things. They are attracted by the fact that there is both the moment of adventure, the moment of the unbound, the unexpected, as well as the moment in which one surrenders to the easy stance. And I only believe that if one were able to really take in this sense and the word of Mr. Ebers. To grasp the complexity of modern art and, for example, to see what actually resonates in a dissonance, in a musical work, what is concentrated in initially irreconcilable historical experiences in the fact that one can only, if one were able, all that in one's own to grasp all the wealth. That modern art, yes, I wanted to save things, would then be saved without falling into a mere apology and without playing it down by trying to find a common denominator with traditional art.

Adorno's contribution to the discussion on the polyvalent of dissonance and the complexity of the modern work of art could at that time seem like the anticipated explanation of the sentence of his that later caused the most sensation.

Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.

The continuation of the sentence was and is mostly withheld.

It is called and that also eats up the knowledge that expresses why it was impossible to write poetry today.

This continuation does not, however, relativize the preceding, but reinforces it. Because it says whoever decides when it comes to the conclusion that writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric and impossible would be even more barbaric, namely barbaric in the sense of staying out of the distance in the face of a contradicting and unbearable, an aporia ethical situation.

But anyone who writes a poem after Auschwitz has to write a poem that one notes in some layer, however hidden, that it is a poem after Auschwitz. He has to get involved in the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To be barbaric in that sense. The expression barbaric is ambiguous is by no means used by Adorno in a negative way. That Barbarossas was the Greek expression for non-Greeks for foreigners is always present. In one of the many contributions that Adorno wrote about Gustav Mahler in his 1960 commemorative speech in Vienna for this composer he particularly admired, the complexity of his use of the expression barbaric becomes particularly clear.

His nature was that of a flow, a savage, but one who does not mean the resurrection of barbarism, as it is hatched by the pressure of civilization, but a humanity above the established order and its failure, which otherwise the work of art again through its mere existence repeated. The works of art that he produced dream of the abolition of art through that fulfilled state that his symphonies tirelessly evoke.

As Adorno tried to illustrate the complexity of authentic works, art has a dual function of saying what it is like. Comments is, was the title of a Becket text he liked to quote in this context, and to say how it could and should be. He spoke of celebrities Bonheur with the expression standards. It is the intertwining of these two aspects that gives an aesthetic of endurance. Different from an aesthetic of horror. She faces the problem of how can the modern work of art be both more irreconcilable and more forgiving than the traditional one? How can the power to face the horror of society be combined with the power to embrace untamed sounds, the unexplored, the different, the non-identical?

Nobody from the circle around Max Horkheimer, the head of 1933 in Switzerland.

The following year, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research emigrated to the USA. Longed to return to Europe, was so moved at the first re-encounter with the old continent, and in later years also spoke as emphatically about his impressions and feelings as Theodor W. Adorno did.

At first I also experienced this fact of the homecoming infinitely strongly.

So strong that I felt a jolt in the process, right down to the physical model. Because this word has the way I rattled across the Plaste la Concorde in an old taxi for the first time, you have to say. Because it really not only shook the taxi with its poor suspension, but I filled this floor underneath. But that has a very specific meaning, especially when you come from America. You have the feeling that you are returning to the unexplored, the not yet congealed, not yet reified life. There is the sentence from America's Tired, Who Loves Life.

When you come into physical contact with Europe again, you have the feeling, or at least the expectation, that life is still alive after all, according to Adorno in January 1958 in a broadcast on the evening at the Hessischer Rundfunk Studios, in which he and Erika Mann talked about theirs Reported experiences on returning to Europe. Such high expectations are by no means taken for granted. In view of those twelve years in which Germany, according to Alfred Kantorowicz, had accumulated the crimes of 1000 years, it becomes understandable if one considers what the twenties and early thirties had meant for Adorno. The son of a Frankfurt resident, born in 1903, was a wholesaler and had been a private lecturer in philosophy at the Frankfurt University at the time of the National Socialist takeover. In the second attempt, he completed his habilitation with the philosopher and Protestant theologian Paul Tillich with a thesis on Kierkegaard.

He dedicated the book version of the habilitation thesis Kierkegaard Construction of the Aesthetic to Siegfried Kracauer to my friend. He wanted to dedicate the inaugural academic lecture he gave in 1931 on the topicality of philosophy to Walter Benjamin for the publication.

It never came to that Kracauer and Benjamin Frankfurter one, Berliner the other - these were the two mentors and friends from earlier times, to whom Adorno owed a methodological self-understanding and thought motives that he drew on for a lifetime.

Adorno already met 14 years older Krakauer as a high school student.

For many years he read with me regularly on Saturday afternoons. The Critique of Pure Reason is not. I am exaggerating in the slightest when I say that I owe more to this reading than my academic teachers. Exceptionally talented in education, he made Kant speak to me. From the beginning, under his guidance, I did not experience the work as a mere epistemology, as an analysis of the conditions of valid knowledge, but as a kind of cipher, the Schiereck, from which the historical state of the mind could be read.

He does not present the Reason Criticism to me simply as a system of transcendental idealism. Rather, he showed me how objectively ontological and subjectively idealistic moments strike in it, how the most famous passages of the work are the wounds left by the conflict. In a certain sense, the breaks in a philosophy are essential.

Because the continuity of the context, which most philosophies act on their own, without my being able to give myself full account of it, I expect for the first time through Kracauer, the expressive moment of philosophy to say what one comes up with. The fact that the stringency of the objective compulsion in my thoughts, contrary to this moment, took a back seat, as I first came across it in the philosophical business of the university, it seemed to me academic long enough until I found out that under the tensions in which philosophy has its loved ones, which is perhaps the central point between expression and commitment.

Kracauer, for his part, a highly talented student of Georg Simmel, joined the feature pages of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1921 and practically demonstrated to Adorno how the inconspicuous surfaces can be used to express expressions of an era, the locations of which can be determined more strikingly in the process. As from the judgments of the epoch about oneself. Adorno later spoke of the work of art as a historical-philosophical sundial or unconscious historiography by analogy. Kracauer's diagnosis amounted to the fact that in the capitalist epoch a clouded reason, incapable of self-reflection, autocratic and blinded in a world that has not only been disenchanted and demonized, but at the same time has become senseless, remains trapped and trapped. For Adorno, the epistemological preface from the origin of the German tragedy became the model for the formulation of an alternative rationality of the term. Walter Benjamin, eight years his senior, wanted to do his habilitation with this thesis. But it was rejected by the Frankfurt University. In the preface Benjamin outlined a form of experience in which the individual is not subsumed under general terms, but individual elements are arranged in constellations through which an idea of their meaning arises.

In the essay The Essay as Form and in the Negative Dialectic, Adorno later wisely presented his partly catchy, partly academic formulation of an insight that seeks to combine expression and stringency, freedom and commitment. Before 1933, Adorno offered the image of a highly talented young man from a good family who introduced ways of thinking that were at the height of a culturally extremely productive time, introduced to the field of the university and, unlike Kracauer, who came from a humble background, and literary and intellectual completely unconventional Benjamin seemed to be sure of a university career. But the descent from a Jewish father who had converted to Protestantism was enough for his teaching permit to be revoked in 1933. At the beginning of 1935, as, as the decision stated, he was not an Aryan, who did not feel bound and committed to his people out of the racial community and therefore not suitable for the administration of the German cultural property, the Reichsschrifttums Kammer refused to accept the application and the further publication of literary works is prohibited. In the mid-thirties, thanks to the payments from his father, Adorno undertook an academic career in England, living in a good financial position and living in Oxford during the termes in Frankfurt during the holidays. He was able to give up this little promising company when the opportunity arose for him at the end of 1937. Employee part of a radio research project, to become part of the emigrated Institute for Social Research in the USA and to move to New York just married with his Berlin girlfriend Gretel Karplus.