“Art is not a matter of pointing up to alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the heads of human beings.” Adorno’s argument...is that even the pistol pointed at your head does not justify art’s resignation of its autonomy. For Adorno, an art of pure survival would thus become political only under the sway of heteronomous violence, and therefore partakes in a politics not able to think any other state of the world. It is precisely the purpose of Adorno’s argument to disarm this manoeuvre, in which one is reduced either to the compulsion of fighting back, grasping reality in fear; or alternatively, sanctioning a retreat inwards, affirming an internal subjective decision as all that remains left, while renouncing any objective responsibilities in registering the severity of the threat. That art is produced under such conditions regardless - that the resistance that art forms may well be continually destroyed, that the heads will continue to be shot off as they have been throughout the capitalist epoch - does not, for Adorno, justify such resignation to the course of the world, and the jettisoning of artistic expression into a whirlpool of blind contingency. Steyerl certainly disagreed: her theoretically most forthright contribution to the evening was a claim that a distance from the artwork, its separation from the subject as object was problematic. In her defence of engagement she claimed that dialectics doesn’t work, and probably never did. But for Adorno such a position would amount to a misrecognition of what it means for art to be social: sociality is not just the immediacy of violence, but instead precisely the mediacy of a violence that conditions an alienation from and within society, a social separation of the things of the world. For Adorno art can become critical only in taking up its separation from society which is itself part of society. It may be the case that even Adorno’s conclusions - sober and overcast as they are with the history of the Holocaust and the threat of universal annihilation by atomic weaponry - are too positive for the catastrophic times through which we live. It is hardly a surprise that some, or many, have given up all hope, and in doing so give up on the critical power of art, grasping instead for a certain practical instrumentality. But Adorno at least would resist a claim to a practical immediate truth found in partisanship, which despite being part of society would hope to discover deep within itself some power that has escaped society’s total system of production and value. For Adorno the part and the whole are already fully mediated in one another - indeed this is society’s dialectical form.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Dec 2014 12:10:09 +0000
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