One of Adorno’s most sweeping and frequent characterizations of his project in Aesthetic Theory has it that the “task that confronts aesthetics today” is an “emancipation from absolute idealism.”1 The context (and the phrase itself) makes it explicit that he means Hegel, but only in so far as Hegel represents the culmination and essence of modern philosophy itself, or what Adorno calls “identity thinking.” He means by this that reflection on art should be freed from an aspiration for any even potential reconciliationist relation with contemporary society, or any sort of role in the potential rationalization or justification of any reform of any basic aspect of late modernity, or freed even from any aspiration for an aesthetic comprehension of that society, as if it had some coherent structure available for comprehension. He especially means that any expression or portrayal of the suffering caused in modern societies—capitalist, bourgeois society—that calls such a society to account in its own terms is excluded. Those terms have become irredeemably degraded and corrupt. Modern bourgeois society is in itself, root and branch, “wrong,” “false,” and the problem of art has become what it must be in such a world. What it must be is “negative,” and any attempt to understand Adorno must begin and end with that claim. By contrast, Hegel, the paradigm of bourgeois philosophy, and his absolute idealism represent the epitome of what must be rejected. If this is how we are to begin to understand the task of modern art according to Adorno, we face the daunting challenge of understanding what he means by both terms: negative and idealism (Hegel’s idealism, for Adorno paradigmatic of philosophy itself).

And this in turn immediately raises the question: does it matter, beyond the issue of scholarly accuracy, if Adorno’s version of “Hegelian idealism” (and what it typifies) is incorrect, more in the way of a very broad-stroke textbook summary than a confrontation with the thing itself? In one sense the answer is obviously no. We could just let the name “Hegel” stand for whatever Adorno is after in his attack on “identity thinking,” and move on to the substance of what in his own voice Adorno wants to say about the issue mentioned in my title, the status of “the negative” in modern art. That, after all, is what is philosophically significant. But it would matter if Adorno’s position is framed in terms that are incomplete and unclear from the start, and if that problematic framing derives from how he understands his opposition to Hegel and to idealism. I once argued elsewhere that Adorno’s ethical position is compromised in something like this way by his reading of Kant.2 I want here to suggest something less critical, more in the way of trying to show how Hegel’s aesthetics could be of help in the completion and clarification of Adorno’s chief cluster of terms in his account of art in the present age: the negative, or negativity, or the nonidentical.3

To begin with the obvious: Hegel’s account of art in his lectures is tremendously important for Adorno. For one thing, Hegel was the decisive figure in shifting modern philosophical attention to art away from “aesthetics” to the philosophy of art. This meant a shift away from the paramount significance of the beautiful and a pretty thorough dismissal of the significance of the beauty of nature in particular. Adorno would disagree strongly with the latter aspect of Hegel’s position; but Hegel’s rejection of the empiricist focus on a distinctive sensual pleasure as the essence of aesthetic experience, and so a subjectivist priority to that experience over the artwork as the bearer of artistic meaning (both aspects of which were still prominent in Kant, whose position Adorno calls “castrated hedonism” [11]), represents a shift embraced by Adorno. (The role of Schiller in this story is obviously crucial as well.)4 It was also Hegel who, according to Adorno, first realized that the concept of art’s completion or end is internal to its concept, and who realized that something decisive for the possibility of all traditional art had happened, that art, as it had been, could no longer be a vehicle of truth, it had become a “thing of the past.” (For Adorno, Hegel was the first to recognize art’s “lost naiveté” in the modern world.) This also means that both Adorno and Hegel had a historicized conception of art. As Adorno put it, “art is what it has become,” and art can be “understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants” (3). This already raises a problem that Hegel is in a better position to address. Art is what it has become. For whom? What has become? What “laws of movement?” And no “invariants” at all in what counts as art?

That is, Adorno begins by theorizing about the fate of art in its contemporary location, and for Adorno that means modernism in the arts, primarily in literature and music. This means attention to an artistic crisis in which nothing about the purpose, nature, or social role of art could any longer be taken for granted. But this historicized approach raises an immediate problem addressed by Hegel, but rarely explicitly attended to by Adorno. If any of the questions just noted about art as such, its purpose, nature, or social function, are thoroughly historicized with “no invariants,” understood only by the “laws of its movement,” then we are in danger of a positivist reduction of art to whatever is taken to be art at a time. This would be immediately paradoxical, and that paradox should bring into clear focus the question: the laws of “what’s” movement? It would also open the door to all sorts of historical possibilities in which art would lose any of the distinctive boundary conditions that Adorno clearly wants to invoke. If anything goes, then fashion, costume jewelry, reality television, crude propaganda, and body piercing and tattooing could all have, could come to have, equal status as art. (Some think, of course, that this is just what has already happened. Some applaud the development; Adorno certainly would not.) It seems obvious that Adorno not only needs an account of art that would distinguish it from non-art and especially from pseudo-art, he also needs a distinction between what Hegel called “fine art” (schöne Kunst), or art in which the highest ambitions of art as such are manifest, and art works that qualify as art, but as poor or inferior art. Indeed, in the contemporary world, Adorno’s defense of high modernist art, what is now called “elite” art, is one of his most prominent and controversial positions. (He speaks quite easily of the difference between the “lower” arts and “pure art” [16].) All of this means he needs, and I think he implicitly presupposes, something like Hegel’s position on the possibility of a conceptual clarification of art as such, but one that admits wide, various historical inflections. In Hegel this amounts to the claim that all art is a sensible-affective modality of understanding the Absolute, and its historical manifestations represent the progressive realization of, and coming to self-consciousness about, its own concept. Adorno wants no part of this theory, of course. His charge is that Hegel’s “content aesthetics” (Inhaltsästhetik) recognized the negative potential of art, what Adorno calls the “otherness” of art, but Hegel misunderstood this otherness in representational and discursive terms (as a kind of conceptual lack) and regressed to a pre-aesthetic level, thereby unwittingly helping to transform art into “the ideology of domination” (7, 47). This is Adorno’s way of saying that Hegel understood art as a version of, but an inferior version of, philosophy, and thereby subjected it to the domain of affirmative, identity thinking. Yet Adorno also agrees with Hegel that what “art demands from its beholder is knowledge … The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped” (15). What is obviously at stake is what is meant by “knowledge,” and what is at stake in that question is the status of the negative or the non-identical.5

So, Adorno’s own position also commits him to some sort of parallel Hegelian account of the logic of art as such on the one hand, and its unique historical manifestations in late modernity on the other, as a mode of “knowledge.” In the modern period at any rate, aesthetic negativity functions something like this logic, its very essence, and art’s contemporary self-negation, its embodiment of its own impossibility, is how he wants to understand its contemporary fate. This story subtends a broader narrative in which the development of aesthetic processes is said to correspond (korrespondiert) to social developments (5). This would appear to mean that Adorno accepts some sort of quasi-Hegelian narrative in which art succeeds in freeing itself from a function subservient to religion and politics, but achieves this autonomy at the moment when, because of “social development,” the emergence of the system and ethos of capitalism, art must also “turn against its own concept” (2). This is the moment when aesthetics turns into, as he puts it, “art’s necrology,” the moment when “the darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art [die radikale verdunkelte Kunst]” (4, 19). This is the only appropriate response to “a radically darkened objectivity [verfintersterte Obkektivität]” (19).

II

But understanding any of this requires attention to a great deal more detail from Aesthetic Theory. We should begin with the many variations on the theme of aesthetic negativity that are at work in that book. The concept is polysemous in Adorno, even though there is an important family resemblance. I want to outline six different, occasionally overlapping, invocations of negation before turning back to the issue of idealism.

(i) Supervening many of these variations is a general notion familiar from the logic of predicate or propositional negation, although things will quickly get more complicated. This is the straightforward denial of some positive function or argument: a “not,” followed by a value or assertion, or location, whatever. So the first obvious sense of contemporary aesthetic negativity is that modernist art is the negation of traditional art in this sense of negation; not what art has been (affirmative “voluptuous,” beautiful, harmonious, humanist), even though still “art,” to return to the problem of the logic of art as such, on the one hand, and its historicity on the other. As he says, “nothing is more damaging to theoretical knowledge of modern art than its reduction to what it has in common with older periods” (19). (Adorno notes that there is such a commonality, but he does not explore what that is, and insists that modern art’s distinctness overwhelms any such trivial commonality.) All of our efforts must be directed to exfoliating its radical differences from the art of the past, not as a matter of style or content, but as a matter of art itself.

(ii) Second, Adorno notes that art, and here he seems to mean all art, stands in a negative relation to empirical social reality: that reality generates an objective need for art, a need that should be understood as a gap or lack, an insufficiency or dissatisfaction behind the necessity of art. “Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it” (8). Or, as he puts it,

If thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something back of the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides. (18)

By and large here, Adorno means that it is objective “suffering” that demands a rejection by art of any assumption about the necessity or unavoidability of such suffering, although again this in an unprecedented way, not as in the humanism of Balzac or Dickens or the naturalistic depiction of suffering by Hardy or Dreiser. This becomes clearer when Adorno introduces the notion of “mimesis.”

(iii) Third, as we reach the more complexly dialectical level, art now stands in a negative relation to itself. This has a weaker meaning—art has lost its “self-evidence;” it can no longer rely on itself, on an inner confidence in what it is. Where that had been, there is now a gap, an absence, a doubt. But the stronger version is of an active resistance to itself, a fate expressed in several of the paradoxical or dialectical ways Adorno was so fond of.

Art responds to the loss of its self-evidence not simply by concrete transformations of its procedures and comportments but by trying to pull itself free from its own concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art. (16)

And even more paradoxically,

If all art is the secularization of transcendence, it participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed, without this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than that art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to that concept. (29)

 

This dimension also has a weaker and stronger formulation. In one sense this self-opposition is perennial. The perennial [perennierende] revolt of art against art has its fundamentum in re. If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world. (175)

Such formulations clearly reflect the influence of Kant’s account of the constant, necessary role of innovation in the arts, and so the need for genius. But Adorno also thinks that something has happened “today” that makes the struggle of art against objectification, repetitiveness and staleness much more intense and critical.

The inner consistency through which artworks participate in truth also involves their untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art has always revolted against this, and today this revolt has become art’s own law of movement. (169)

(iv) Fourth, as already indicated, such a negative relation to social reality should not be taken to mean that artworks bring to bear some standard of humaneness or justice or human flourishing on a historical reality, and, functioning as a social critique, point out social failures and try to inspire a reformist response. This would be a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin conception and it is one Adorno rejects. The reason for this brings us a bit closer to the critique of idealism, for Adorno rejects the idea of the application of some concept to an independent reality and, finding a gap between the concept and reality, then demanding or implying a demand that the gap be closed, that reality conform to the exogenously imported concept, that the concept and reality be “identical.” That is merely the critical variation of identity thinking, and, as we shall begin seeing in more detail, identity thinking is exactly what art must help us free ourselves from. Such a view is said to be subjectivist and so linked with the ideology of domination. By contrast, art’s relation to the self-negation of contemporary bourgeois society, its double bind demands, its inability to sustain and reproduce itself, is mimetic. By mimesis Adorno certainly does not mean anything imitative, copying or representational; he means something closer to embodying or sedimenting or assimilating. This is clearest in his discussions of Beckett.

The more total society becomes, the more completely it contracts to a unanimous system, and all the more do the artworks in which this experience is sedimented become the other of this society. If one applies the concept of abstraction in the vaguest possible sense, it signals the retreat from a world of which nothing remains except its caput mortuum. New art is as abstract as social relations have in truth become. (31)

And most clearly of all: “Because the spell of external reality over its subjects and their reactions has become absolute, the artwork can only oppose this spell by assimilating itself to it” (31).

It is clear from these and many other passages that mimesis is the most important and most elusive concept in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. The idea that there can be such a mimesis, “a mimesis of the hardened and alienated” (21), or what he calls “the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other” (54), and that this “defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as ‘rational,’” would require a book length study to unpack. But for us the signal word in these formulations, what Adorno is trying most of all to avoid (the conceptual), is “nonconceptual.” As in so many philosophical positions, Adorno’s, it begins to be clear here, is determined by, and somewhat captured by, what he thinks he is avoiding: the “logic of the concept,” as it would be put by Hegel. There can be no “subject” dominating or devouring the object on modernist aesthetics, and that is its revolutionary potential, its noncomplicity with the ideology of domination. This is also where the common or commonsensical notion of predicate or propositional negation, the active negation of some positive, is no longer applicable. This “unposited other,” what Adorno calls the nonidentical, is not the result of the denial of identity. That would make it derivative, secondary, a result, what it has been since the classical metaphysical response to Parmenides, as in Plato’s Sophist. In modern life, it is the nonidentical that has priority, what on its own, as it is, that eludes, refuses conceptual identification, not what results from the denial of identity. More on this vexed notion in what follows.

This is all given more aesthetic substance in the (v) fifth variation of the theme of negativity, as Adorno variously describes a modernist work’s refusal to mean in any traditional sense, and so its reliance on indeterminacy, abstraction (in the visual art sense, not the cognitive sense), dissonance (which he calls “the seal of everything modern” [15]) and even “the irrational.” “Dissonance elicits from within the work that which vulgar sociology calls its social alienation” (15). Or more expansively,

The absurd, the category most refractory to interpretation, inheres in that spirit that is requisite to the interpretation of artworks. At the same time, the need of artworks for interpretation, their need for the production of their truth content, is the stigma of their constitutive insufficiency. Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy between the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma. (128)

Adorno certainly doesn’t mean to deny the possibility of interpretation, but, as he says enigmatically, “Rather, the darkness of the absurd is the old darkness of the new. This darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning” (27). Presumably, this involves some interpretation of this very uninterpretability of “the absurd” and of the unstable self-negations of modernist form, of the sort that Adorno himself provides of Baudelaire, Beckett, Proust, and Schoenberg. This would presumably tie the manifestation of such dissonance and abstraction and indeterminacy to the social realities assimilated mimetically in a modernist work and such an exfoliation of aesthetic modernist content, continually “outstripping” its own embodied concept of art, suggests that we might be on the verge of a kind of mythic repetition in modernism, forcing us to ask how one indeterminacy or dissonance can be determinately differentiated from another. Adorno certainly is aware of this issue and thinks he can answer it, but that answer depends on the resources left over from his critique of absolute idealism, the presumption of the absolute conceptual intelligibility of everything, Hegel’s Absolute.

So, (vi) we arrive at the sixth and decisive variation on the theme of negativity. Adorno’s views here about Hegel as the epitome of the identity thinking inherent in the Enlightenment domination of nature and in capitalism’s establishment of manifold relations of domination and oppression in a class-stratified society are among the most well-known aspects of his philosophy, and his view both inherits a “finitist” criticism of, negation of, Hegelian rationalism begun by Schelling and intensified by Kierkegaard, and it anticipates a great deal of twentieth-century European thought, most prominently and ironically by Adorno’s nemesis, Heidegger. Here are some of his formulations:6

As the negation of the absolute idea, content can no longer be identified with reason as it is postulated by idealism; content has become the critique of the omnipotence of reason, and it can therefore no longer be reasonable according to the norms set by discursive thought. (27)

To restate the obvious, this all depends on what one means by the claim for the “omnipotence of reason.” And “Perhaps nowhere else is the desiccation of everything not totally ruled by the subject more apparent, nowhere else is the dark shadow of idealism more obvious, than in aesthetics” (62). Finally, “The new wants nonidentity, yet intention reduces it to identity; modern art constantly works at the Münchhausean trick of carrying out the identification of the nonidentical” (23).

Adorno here is especially, but not at all exclusively, thinking of the aesthetic availability of sensuous particularity in its particularity, as in the experience of natural beauty, or the negation of any conceptual satisfaction. And he is not naively proposing any sort of crude nominalist realism. He makes clear in Negative Dialectics that Hegel is at least right that “the particular itself is unthinkable without the moment of the universal.”7 Or in Aesthetic Theory, “Art cannot be conceived without this immanently idealistic element, that is, without the objective mediation of all art through spirit; this sets a limit to dull-minded doctrines of aesthetic realism just as those elements encompassed in the name of realism are a constant reminder that art is no twin of idealism” (91).

But just as obviously, for Adorno this “identification of the nonidentical,” as it is uniquely possible for art, is not what Hegel famously meant by the conceptual comprehension of the nonidentical in his account of the moments of the self-negation and reintegration of the moments of the Concept.8 But this should be enough, if only barely, to begin to appreciate how decisively Adorno’s project is shaped by his own negation of what he thinks Hegel’s system purported, catastrophically, to be able to do.9 (This is not a version of propositional negation because Adorno takes his claim to be an expression and embodiment of idealism’s own systematic incoherence.) It is at this point that, because of this negative dependence on Hegel, it matters a great deal that Adorno has misidentified the heart and soul of Hegel’s Absolute Idealism.

III

This idealism in German Idealism, at least the thread that travels from Kant, through Fichte to Hegel (Schelling’s “idealism” is another issue), has three components. The first is the claim that a priori knowledge of the world, the ordinary spatio-temporal world, as well as “objects” and practices in it like art, religion, and the state, is possible; knowledge about that world, but achieved independently of empirical experience. Idealism in this sense is primarily a critique of empiricism (not of empirical knowledge, although it is sometimes confused with such a critique; empiricism is itself an a priori position, intended to explicate what any possible knowing amounts to). Although it might sound strange to say that Adorno also holds that there is a priori knowledge, we have already seen that his view depends on claims about identity, nonidentity, negativity, and the nature of traditional and modern art that are hardly empirical claims and can only be understood as philosophical, that is, a priori claims. The second component is where all the interpretive controversies begin. It is the claim that this a priori knowledge, while in some sense to be specified, ultimately about the world that exists independent of thought, consists in thinking’s or reason’s knowledge of itself; thinking’s determination of thinking or, as Hegel designates, a “science of pure thinking.”10 This is where Adorno decisively parts company, but we need to explore what this claim might mean. It is understandable, but also quite false, to think that these two components can only be jointly claimed if either (a) objects of knowledge depend for their existence on being thought, or (b) if access to objects requires some sort of mind-imposed unification of sensory elements, resulting in a “subject-mediated” product, and appearance, not the thing as it is in itself. And Adorno often talks this way about idealism as the philosophy of domination, Herrschaft. There are many versions of this existential dependence, or subject-mediated interpretation of German Idealism in the extent literature. This view no doubt stems from the understandable but false inference that if such a conceptual structure is not derived from experience, it must be contributed by, or “imposed by,” us. This must be so, if objects depend for their experientiability on such “mind-imposed” unity, or, in a different tack, in what is known as “objective idealism,” if what there is is, in some sense or other, “really” a concept. (On this view, the idealism in Hegelian idealism refers to the ideal, nonsensible or noetic true nature of reality itself.)

But there is clearly a question to be answered, and it amounts to the third dimension of idealism: how the first two components could possibly be true (that objective a priori knowledge is possible, and that what pure reason knows in such knowledge is “itself,” thinking itself), if the standard versions of the third component are not true too. The most important watchword for Hegel’s Logic, once we realize that no form of “object dependence on subject” is at stake in that project (an extremely widespread general view of what idealism must be to count as idealism), is exactly the word Adorno baptizes as central, but Hegel means it in a sense diametrically opposed to what Adorno thinks he means. For Hegel, we are not talking about any dependence but about an “identity” (a “speculative identity” to be sure, and so not what Adorno means by his invocation of the term) between the forms of pure thinking and the forms of being, an identity compatible with maintaining a difference between anyone thinking and anything thought about. Here is Hegel’s summary formulation:

The older metaphysics had in this respect a higher concept of thinking than now passes as the accepted opinion. For it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true [wahrhaft Wahre] in them, that is, what is known in them not in their immediacy but as first elevated to the form of thinking, as things of thought. This metaphysics thus held that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but are rather their essence, or that the things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves (also our language expresses a kinship between them); that thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content. (SL, 21.29)

In summary: a science of logic is a science of pure thinking. Pure thinking’s object is, and only is, itself. But this “object” is not a nature, an object. As noted above, the Logic has nothing to do with “the mind” as a substance or thing. As in so many cases, Hegel is following both Aristotle and Kant here, for whom the claim that the “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations is a logical point, expresses the form of thought, and is not a claim about how the mind actually operates. If that were the case, and Hegel were making a claim about the mind’s nature, knowledge would be limited by its “instrument,” something Hegel had been vigorously denying since the Introduction to the Phenomenology. In knowing itself, what pure thought knows is the possible intelligibility, the knowability, of anything that is. But the intelligibility of anything is just what it is to be that thing, the answer to the “what is it” (tode ti) question definitive of many sciences since Aristotle. So in knowing itself, thought knows of all things, what it is to be anything. Again, as for Aristotle, the task of metaphysics is not to say of any particular thing what it is. That is the task of the individual sciences. It is to determine what must be true of anything at all, such that what it is in particular can be determined by the special sciences (what in scholasticism were called the transcendentalia). Or: it is to know what is necessarily presupposed in any such specification. Put another way, the task of metaphysics is to understand what it is to say of anything what it is.

This result could easily be misinterpreted. The absolute idea, expressed in Hegel’s terms as the identity of logic and metaphysics, could be understood as some sort of direct inference from the logical structure of thought. The basic form of rendering intelligible, one might reason, is the one place categorical judgment, S is P. This simply requires, if to be is to be intelligible, that the world be structured as substances and properties. This is how Adorno seems to understand the basic claim. (Heidegger makes the same claim, that metaphysics has always been a subjectivist impositionism.) But that would be dogmatism and would be rejected by Hegel. The characteristic and necessary features of judgment must be derived with a claim to necessity from the simplest, most immediate manifestation of any contentful thought, “Being!” the first moment of the being logic and the book itself. This internal derivation of more complex conceptual moments in order for thought to be rightly onto objects, and the kind of necessity claimed, is what answers in Hegel to Kant’s insistence on a transcendental deduction of the objectivity of the categories. While it is always possible to suspect that in any such derivation, we are specifying only “what we must think” or even “must believe,” in order to judge rightly that something is the case, such a suspicion is arbitrary if there is no reason to suspect such parochialism, as if thinking were a kind of species-characteristic capacity. The radicality of Hegel’s presuppositionless beginning and the necessity of the derivation is supposed to eliminate such a suspicion from the outset, and the self-negating and self-correcting derivation is supposed to preserve such purity. He realizes that the avoidance of any such parochialism, the establishment of pure thinking just as such as the “truth” of being, will disappoint anyone used to a more substantive or “furniture of the universe”11 version of metaphysics. But that is not Hegel’s project.

IV

So Adorno has formulated a claim about what is unavailable for conceptual articulation, only mimetically manifest aesthetically. But he has framed his account as a negation of an understanding of conceptual articulation that has missed the actual account of such conceptuality in idealism, one that is not subject to his criticisms. For one thing, Hegel’s claim for an identity of thought and being holds only for what he calls “pure thinking,” what is a priori necessary for any thinking at all to bear truth value. These involve nonempirical concepts like finitude, substance and property, essence and appearance, causality and so forth, not mass or velocity or the State or the family. There is no presumed “conceptual identity” between concept and reality for such concepts, just a standard, defeasible and often historically indexed claim of truth. Again, the task of identity theory or pure thinking is not to say of anything what it is; it is to say what is necessary for anything at all, such that any “what is it” question could have some purchase. This is completely compatible with empirical discovery, empirical falsehood, or even some mismatch between a concept in the philosophy of spirit, like the bourgeois nuclear family, and what is actually necessary for a historical form of ethical life to be an ethical form, a content that matches its own concept. Hegel is quite clear that the transition from the theory of pure thinking to the Realphilosophie is not a deduction and that it requires attention to the physical and biological sciences of the day, as well as to concrete historical actuality. In fact, as Adorno knows well, it was Hegel who first gave to philosophy as a task proper to it the task of a historical diagnosis, one’s own time comprehended in thought. That sort of historical thought is not a component of identity theory, the science of pure thinking. And any such normative assessment of any such historical form, such as Adorno’s interrogation of the culture industry, must be informed by something more than the internal insufficiencies of that form’s own self-articulation if the significance of those insufficiencies are to be understood, a larger framework that can ground any claim about unnecessary and unjustified human suffering.

More importantly for our present topic, appreciating the proper “place” of art in Hegel’s Encyclopedia account reveals not only that Hegel has not assimilated art and the experience of art to the discursive norms of philosophical conceptuality, it makes clear how important that difference is, as well as reminding us, by contrast, that Adorno’s “abstract negation” of what he regards as conceptual identity theory leaves his position threatened with an appeal to a vague indeterminacy or unassimability that threatens to turn all modernist art into a single repeated “consciousness of plight” of “inarticulable suffering so much more serious than Hegel could have imagined as to be approachable at all only by notions of irrationality and untruth” (Nöten, 19). (Again, what Adorno wants to say is that it is “conceptualized” suffering [Leiden] that is “mute and without consequence” [19], but as we have been seeing throughout, that depends on what “conceptualized” amounts to.) For one thing, to say about Mozart and classicism in general, as Adorno does,

the polemical element [of his operas] is central in the power by which the music sets itself at a distance that mutely condemns the impoverishment and falsity of that from which it distances itself. In Mozart form acquires the power of that distancing as determinate negation; the reconciliation that it realizes is painfully sweet because reality to date has refused it, (177)

represents a concession in his own voice that it is this sort of protest that must be “mute” and there is no indication why merely “setting itself at a distance” should provide anything like a determinate negation of reality (or mimetic embodiment of reality’s own self-negation). It seems quintessentially indeterminate; mere “distance.”

For another, that there can be a logic, reason, in the irrational is familiar to us now from Freud, and it is dogmatic to insist by definition that this assumption must falsify by “conceptualizing” the content of suffering. In this context, Adorno’s claim against Hegel is: “Hegel’s aesthetics does not resolve the question of how it is possible to speak of spirit as a determination of the artwork without hypostatizing its objectivity as absolute identity” (91). And it is true that Hegel famously says such things as,

Now, in this its freedom alone is fine art truly art, and it only fulfils its supreme task when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit.12

But “in the same sphere” only echoes what Adorno himself had said, that what “art demands from its beholder is knowledge … The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped” (15). Adorno’s frontal attack on Hegel, understood as Adorno understands him, fails to make contact with Hegel’s position. Here is a full statement of Hegel’s understanding of the issue:

For the beauty of art does in fact appear in a form which is expressly opposed to thought and which thought is compelled to destroy in order to pursue its own characteristic activity. This idea hangs together with the view that the real in general, the life of nature and spirit, is marred and killed by comprehension; that instead of being brought nearer to us by conceptual thinking, it is all the more removed from us, with the result that, by using thinking as a means of grasping what the live phenomenon is, man defeats his own purpose. (A, 12)

But Hegel is well aware of this possible interpretation of his project and takes pains to differentiate himself from it, especially with regard to art. This passage is important enough to quote in full.

And even if works of art are not thought or the Concept, but a development of the Concept out of itself, a shift of the Concept from its own ground to that of sense, still the power of the thinking spirit lies in being able not only to grasp itself in its proper form as thinking, but to know itself again just as much when it has surrendered its proper form to feeling and sense, to comprehend itself in its opposite, because it changes into thoughts what has been estranged and so reverts to itself. And in this preoccupation with its opposite the thinking spirit is not false to itself at all as if it were forgetting and abandoning itself thereby, nor is it so powerless as to be unable to grasp what is different from itself; on the contrary, it comprehends both itself and its opposite. (A, 13)

This sort of claim can seem as densely dialectical and so opaque as anything in Adorno, but Hegel is struggling to say that the presence of conceptual determinacy in an artwork does not transform the work into an instance of a concept, or imply that it is fully articulable conceptually, as if translatable. Hegel here means to say clearly that art is both other than, even the opposite of, conceptual thinking, even while he resists consigning it to indeterminate strangeness. Only in its otherness to pure thinking, its being only a sensible-affective modality of understanding spirit, does it accomplish something essential to the Concept that the Concept cannot accomplish, and that is, exactly as Adorno would have it, the reliance on a sensible dimension of communal self-knowledge that is not articulable conceptually, but is rendered intelligible in some way in art, articulable by criticism as its inner logos. If, say, a critic is able also to draw our attention to the author’s or composer’s or director’s control of the formal organization of the work, then we cannot but appreciate how such a narrative form itself intimates a purposiveness, points to such formal features and not others, and so manifests that the aesthetic object bears a conception of itself, a source of unity and ultimately interpretive meaning. It can seem odd to say that artworks are in this sense “self-conscious,” or embody an awareness of themselves, but this is just an elliptical way of saying that the maker is self-conscious (perhaps in an intuitive, distinctly aesthetic way) of the point of the determinate form. That point in mass culture art may simply be, “to create funny situations,” or “to scare the audience in a way they will enjoy,” but it can clearly be more aesthetically ambitious; for example, to help us understand something more perspicuously, like the distinct forms of suffering inflicted on people in late capitalism. This all corresponds to our own implicit awareness in experiencing an aesthetic object that aesthetic attending is what we are doing. “Implicitly aware” also requires a lot of philosophical unpacking, but there is a natural sense of something like such potential attentiveness becoming explicit when we find ourselves asking why the formal features of the work are as they are. But such aesthetic attending already embodies a norm. It can be done well, or it can be done lazily, sloppily, indifferently, in a biased way, or self-righteously. None of this detracts from the sensible-affective power of the work, something that relies on, but is not reducible to, its reflective form.13 This way of understanding art, and not its reduction to an instance of philosophy, is what Hegel means when he claims, “For since thinking is the essence and Concept of spirit, the spirit in the last resort is only satisfied when it has permeated all products of its activity with thought too and so only then has made them genuinely its own” (A, 13).

He means “made them its own” in their distinct aesthetic modality. And this modality, despite what Hegel says about the so-called end of art, is indispensable to philosophy. For it is this modality which distinctly embodies spirit’s restless felt dissatisfaction with itself and so its self-negation over historical time. Hegel in the Phenomenology invokes terms that could have been written by Adorno, had he understood the notion of the “pure I” as a logical term, not a psychological or subjective one, as when Hegel extolls “the tremendous power of the negative … the energy of thinking, of the pure I,” and when he goes on, in an even more Adorno-esque way,

Death, if that is what we wish to call that non-actuality, is the most fearful thing of all, and to keep and hold fast to what is dead requires only the greatest force. Powerless beauty detests the understanding because the understanding expects of her what she cannot do. However, the life of spirit is not a life that is fearing death and austerely saving itself from ruin; rather, it bears death calmly, and in death, it sustains itself. Spirit only wins its truth by finding its feet in its absolute disruption. Spirit is not this power which, as the positive, avoids looking at the negative, as is the case when we say of something that it is nothing, or that it is false, and then, being done with it, go off on our own way on to something else. No, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face and lingering with it.14

This invocation of the centrality of the notion of self-negation in Hegel opens onto innumerable and unmanageable questions, but it clearly bears on his understanding of art, which plays an indispensable role, indeed, paradoxically, a central role in Hegel’s understanding of the task of reflective thought today. For example,

Nowadays the task before us consists not so much in purifying the individual of the sensuously immediate and in making him into a thinking substance which has itself been subjected to thought; it consists instead in doing the very opposite. It consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal through the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts. However, it is much more difficult to set fixed thoughts into fluid motion than it is to bring sensuous existence into such fluidity.15

The sort of charge here made against Adorno, that he is basically throwing the baby of aesthetic determinacy out with the bathwater of a misguided version of hyper-conceptualism that is no part of Hegelian idealism, does not absolve Hegel of serious limitations in his theory of art. Hegel did not properly understand, for example, the way in which traditional aesthetic form, like realist narration, or lyrical expressivism, could be both invoked and suspended by the dominant modernist trope in its relation to bourgeois culture. (Hegel’s somewhat hysterical reaction to the celebration of irony in figures like Schlegel is the chief case in point.) But, I would want to argue, there are resources both in Hegel’s conceptual and historical-diagnostic approach to build on in formulating such an extension, and this in a way that does not run afoul of the genuine and distinctive aesthetic autonomy that Adorno is rightly worried about in an age of consumption frenzy and the culture industry.

A somewhat different version of this essay will appear in my Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy and Philosophy in the Arts (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

We have come some way from the days when a stone torso fixed a poet and lead him to speak of its gaze, one that saw, even read him head to toe. For many if not most, it is now the reader or viewer or listener that sets the terms of such encounters, attenuated as they are. That is, it is no longer simply beauty that is in the eye of the beholder, but everything there is to say about a work and whatever might be found there. Not that “reader response criticism,” whether based in affect, cultural identity, and/or the neuro-Kantian turn, is the principal variable in this turn away from the sensibility that enabled Rainer Maria Rilke to write “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” But even without exploring the art market and museum culture, one has a firm sense that the basics of aesthetic engagement have changed in our age of digital reproduction.

Permit me an anecdote. I asked my “What is Art?” class: “How often do you listen to music?” “All the time,” I was told, each reporting that he or she listened for at least an hour a day. “But what do you mean by listen,” I asked. “Do you play the music just to listen to it, to follow it, to see where it goes and where it takes you? And then again, maybe a day or two later, listen again, armed with a few anticipations that, if you’re lucky, will cede to more intriguing discoveries? And might all that then ask of you something, something dear?” No. Music accompanied some other activity: studying, working-out, walking to class. For these students, and I do not believe they are unique, though they certainly were talented and a pleasure to engage, music had become ambient, what Brian Eno glosses as “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint.”1

You might be thinking: “you want them (and us), to study artworks, and no doubt beaux arts, fine or high arts, perhaps even that slippery, unstable class of works that Heidegger calls great art.” Not really, particularly with regard to the latter presumption. All kinds of work can sound us out and any historical research into purportedly great works finds traces in technique and content of not-so-great art and the contributions of other cultural domains. To invert Newton’s revision of Salisbury’s image, great works illuminate so much because they stand on the shoulders of many works that were and remain good enough.2

With regard to “study,” much depends upon what that entails. Current trends in academic research are so prone to historicize or psychologize the work of art that even in the hands of scholars it seems that the work of art has gone missing. As I argued in Emerson and Self-Culture, historicism often dissolves works into a sea of causal forces, thus obscuring if not eliding their performative address and what is asked therein.3 Effects to be explained are not addresses requiring a response. A similar elision results from psychological approaches, and irrespective if the psyche is cast in terms of cognitive learning rules, evolved neural ensembles, or general psychic principles—the matter at hand becomes a series of processes that explain why artist X made the art that she or he made, or why interpreter Y responded like he or she did to what only amounts to a field of stimuli. Psychological approaches to works and their impact are thus effects to be explained, and nowhere among their operational definitions and founding tropes will the work of art, vibrantly interpersonal, have any claim upon us.

In what follows, I will sketch a counter discourse, one that assembles, in dialogue with various thinkers, an approach to artworks that does more justice to what can be found when the work of art is given room to gaze back at us, or as I would have it, address us in possibly transformative ways.

I. Solicitous Art

Let us begin by considering a kind of music that we might term peripheral because it is written and performed (or recorded and played back) for our peripheral rather than our focal attention. Ambient music belongs to this loosely affiliated class, but like each of its members (including Tafelmusik and Satie’s musique d’ameublement), it is something of a paradox. As it provides a background for other activities peripheral music simultaneously calls attention to itself, to its purported complementarity, even unobtrusiveness; its telos is a kind of conspicuous innocuousness irrespective of its allure. It is thus not unsurprising that an ensemble like Bang on a Can might score and perform (as well as record) Brian Eno’s Music For Airports. The work, in virtue of being a work (to be played, if only on a turntable or streamed), cannot help but call attention to itself, to how it complements its site. And once that call is audible, the music starts to slide from the ambient into more traditional patterns of musical engagements, that is, we listen to it rather than just hear, to invert Darius Milhaud’s recounting of Satie’s musical furniture. A kind of structural ambiguity haunts ambient music, therefore. It seeks to be unobtrusive but draws us toward how well it does so, thus leading us to listen to it in non-ambient ways.4

Similarly, minimalist sculpture cannot help but present itself even as it moves toward a thing-like presence alongside other things. Tony Smith’s “Die” may try to avoid referring us to anything, preferring to be one thing among many. And its minimal qualities (its cube shape, the presence of steel, rust) may drive the viewer’s gaze back into itself, especially if one expects technical virtuosity lush with the kind of aesthetic properties that action painting hurls our way. (“Just what am I supposed to be seeing,” one might ask.) But in trying to be just a thing, “Die” has a character that distinguishes it from mere things, and its provocative resistance to our expectations draws us back toward it, leading us to wonder what precisely is being resisted and why—the work returns from the realm of thinghood into what is at least a gesture, though probably a good deal more if we read the gesture within its art historical context.

I am beginning with ambient music and minimalist sculpture in order to mark a path to an opening generalization: artworks are solicitous in the sense of earnest and enticing petitions for our attention. This is not to say one couldn’t find some kind of art, perhaps light fixtures, whose bearing does not genuinely merit a descriptor like “solicitous,” though one might appreciate their shape and ornamental details. But such exceptions, should they arise, do not really trouble the view on offer. My goal is not a universal definition of art. Rather, my hope is to provide a workable, even rich key to a wide range of art forms and works, one that will empower and enrich our responses to them. Moreover, regarding works that do not solicit our attention, is seems only polite to leave them be.

While “entice” indicates the ways in which artworks tug at our attention, it equally reminds us that a good number captivate. We see a film and are absorbed. Immersed in scenes, dialogue, and music, attending perhaps to edits and camera angles, we forget most of where we are and what we had done that day, which is why, upon exiting, we are sometimes surprised to find it still light out and the parking lot buzzing. Now, you may object to the passivity connoted by “absorption,” but many commonly describe stories as absorbing—“I just couldn’t put it down”—or report that a play drew them in or that a piece of music carried them along—“that rhythm is infectious,” the pathogenic metaphor underscoring our relative passivity in the onset of tapping and snapping.

Many works do more than absorb us, however; they also engage us, which is one way to hear the sense of “solicit” that involves “disturbance,” though this requires us to hear the Latin sollicitare meaning “to disturb,” built from a term for “whole” (sollus) which is “moved” (ciere). In the grip of artworks, capacities interlock (like gears) and are set into motion. Works of art often stimulate affects, historical knowledge, personal experience, and institutional know-how—in almost literal ways, they move us.

Consider Anselm Kiefer’s Nigredo (1984; fig. 1), which hangs in The Philadelphia Museum of Art. The work is vast, 10.8 feet high, 18.2 feet long, and visually stunning. It depicts a ploughed field dotted by bits of post-harvest grain and presumably snow. There also seem to be a few fires, e.g. the red in the lower right corner, and possible wisps of smoke two-thirds of the way up, more or less in the center and descending slightly to the right. Slight traces, but the foreground is so charred that each takes on greater significance.

The title is also arresting—“Nigredo” is a stage of decomposition in alchemical transformation and a stage of despair in Jung’s conception of psychological growth. Standing before it, one cannot help but wonder if this field will renew come spring, particularly since the char seems to be spreading. One spot has broken through just left of center, a bit above the horizontal midpoint. It is as if some fire were continuing to burn beneath the canvas, not only disrupting its illusory dimensionality but threatening to overtake it entirely.

But Nigredo depicts more than tilled earth. At the top left center of the work, one spies a small disc that turns much of the field into a painter’s pallet, particularly since the field’s many rows gather there.  What hangs before us is thus not only a ravaged field with an uncertain future. Painting, at a point of inception, also is burning, both as object (this work on canvas) and activity (figured in the palette). Some blackening heat is threatening to consume it from within.

In the context of Kiefer’s other work, the movement between field and palette becomes legible. Several of Kiefer’s works situate painting within the contestations and disasters of history. A series of works painted in 1974, including “Painting,” “Nero Paints,” and “Painting = Burning,” situate an artist’s palette on or above ravaged fields, as if to say that painting both aims to depict such events even as it participates in them.5 This is clearest in “Nero Paints,” where the palette is connected to matches igniting houses in the background and seemingly dripping fire. A similar thought is told by the title “Painting = Burning,” although this time, the field looks as if it had already been burnt. Something along these lines also arises, sans images of fire, in a work on paper from 1974, “Sick Art.”6 This mix of water color, gouache, and ballpoint pen depicts a mountain-lined river or fjord covered in perspective-denying red sores or pustules, suggesting not only that art is sick but also that it can contaminate what it presents, a point lost, I think, if we only think about the title’s echo of “Entartete Kunst,” the Nazi show of 1937, which displayed instances of what those in power took to be “degenerate art.”

Nigredo is not only a painting of catastrophe, however. As an alchemical term, the title raises the question of transformation, as do the traces of gold in the top quarter of the painting, particularly at the top left horizon point. Nigredo thus stages post-War Germanness as an unsettled figure of transition from historical catastrophe toward possible renewal. I would stress “unsettled,” however. Char dominates the painting and it seems to be creeping upwards. Moreover, we have little sense for what the gold actually indicates whereas we can see that the char, should it continue to spread, will end the venture.

If we take Nigredo to mark a site of possible transformation, it becomes more than paint on canvas. What hangs in Philadelphia is history, an event still on its way, an event to which the work contributes as a tenuous reply. Said otherwise, the painting itself is a site of historical contestation, a work asking whether it has resources for anything other than memorials, and venturing what it hopes is an affirmative reply.

I have engaged Nigredo because it offers the kind of experience that artworks excel at facilitating. It integrates an amazing range of materials (e.g. oil, acrylic, shellac, and straw), formal elements (e.g. perspective, landscape painting, and flattening), and thematic offerings (e.g. the word “Nigredo,” figurative gold, straw, fires, and hair, as well the image of a painter’s palette). And in doing so, it activates my knowledge, emotions, ethical sensibility, perceptual powers, and imagination; they are engaged and integrated along the arc of an experience in which I encounter myself called to task. Presuming that the event, which Nigredo confronts, is still on its way, the work’s depictions and exemplification point past themselves toward a matter demanding immediate attention. It thus offers us something other than an art-historical puzzle to be decoded or an exquisite performance to be contemplated. In fact, the painting seems to demand that we locate ourselves in the contestation and respond. Even in the museum, one has the sense that we are party to the fate that Nigredo stages and wages, one that includes but is not limited to the fate of art.

The challenge and force of Kiefer’s work, fierce as it is, is not unique. Josef Brodsky, introducing Aleksander Kushner writes: “Yet I do consider it my duty to warn you that an encounter with poetry in its pure form is pregnant with far reaching consequences, that this volume is not where it will all end for you.”7 Brodsky warns the reader because certain works not only entice and engage but also transform.

One may find Brodsky’s conceit little more than the bravado of poets. But a similar sensibility orients certain philosophers, e.g. Heidegger, who says of Hölderlin: “This poetry demands a metamorphosis in our manner of thinking and experiencing, one regarding the whole of being.”8 Then again, given his lifelong engagement with art, Heidegger’s esteem for poetry may not persuade anyone not already persuaded. But do not forget that Plato also took poetry, at least mimetic poetry, to wield powers of transformation. And that is why he tells Glaucon that “poetry which aims at pleasure and imitation” has no place in a “well-governed city” (Republic, 607c).9 While Socrates’ arguments are manifold, the point I wish to draw from them is only that “the ancient quarrel” arises in Plato’s corpus because artworks do more than provide aisthesis. In fact many artworks meet philosophy en route to the good life. This is why Socrates asks Glaucon to repeat their discussion should the latter meet “those who praise Homer and say that he is the poet who educated Greece, that it’s worth taking up his works in order to learn how to manage and educate people, and that one should arrange one’s life in accordance with his teachings” (Republic, 606e).10 In short, Socrates interrogates poetry because he is convinced of its transformative power, and with regard to the good life.

I recall the ancient quarrel not only because it supports (by way of authority) my claim that art can be transformative. It also focuses our sense of where those transformations might lead: toward changed lives. And note that Brodsky is in full agreement, albeit with greater esteem for the benefits of poetry.  He writes: “A poem, as it were, tells its reader, ‘Be like me.’”11 And in a sweet recollection of Auden, he remarks: “To say the least, every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.”12 At the paper’s close, I will return to Brodsky’s inclusive disjunction (guide for life or yardstick for language), as well as to how one might be like a poem; but for now, my point, shared by Plato and Brodsky, is that when artworks change us, something like a possible path through the world is on offer.

II. Art as Address

In terming artworks “solicitous,” I am claiming that they have a kind of conspicuous, self-indicating presence that merely material things lack. And I have attributed to that presence the power to engage and transform those who respond to their petitions. I am thus committed to distinguishing artworks from what we commonly regard as natural forces; music is not mere wind, painting is more than simple plays of light, and sculpture and dance are something other than outcroppings of earth. Not that material or even elemental occurrences fail to underwrite artworks, but artworks have a character that so-called natural phenomena lack and we need to grasp at least some of that character if we are to understand the phenomenon I’m elaborating.

In accounting for the conspicuous presence of artworks, Heidegger refers us to their “createdness,” and for positive and negative reasons. On the one hand, and not unlike Collingwood, Heidegger desires a conception of artistic creation that directs our attention away from craft-like conceptions of art, which hold that artistic creation synthesizes matter and form by imposing the latter upon the former, like “coffee mug” might be said to organize the working of clay.13 On the positive side, Heidegger presents createdness as a quality of conspicuousness. On this view, and more so than tools and other artifacts (which he believes recede behind the projects they enable), artworks accentuate “that unconcealment of a being has happened here, and that as this happening it happens here for the first time; or, that such a work is at all rather than not” (“The Origin of the Work of Art,” 190).

There is a good deal to discuss but I only want to focus on the positive account. At stake is what one finds indicated by the createdness of artworks, and how those indications should orient us toward works. Heidegger suggests that the createdness of artworks conveys their peculiarly conspicuous presence, as if “createdness” were limited to a sort of “here I am” aspect. But that seems too thin an account. Looking at Nigredo, one wonders how Kiefer was able to burn the canvas in such a measured way, and where he got the idea for such a move within the context of painting. And one also wonders why Kiefer elected to return German painting to representative figures (and particular figures, e.g. the sieg heil salute), when for much of the post-War period up into the late 1960s and early 1970s, abstraction had been the rule. In short, with created phenomena, one begins to look for how and why various choices were made, which one wouldn’t if Nigredo were an outcropping of rock covered in moss and guano, no matter how stunning its shape and hue. “Createdness” is thus the mark of work, of a labor that has brought about what is at all rather than not, and it thereby indicates something more than a kind of conspicuous presence—in the least, anticipated and considered results (conscious and/or unconscious), commitments to some of those possibilities, and an effort to realize them.

Not that createdness only indicates individual decisions and executions. Among created works, one also finds genres and styles, phenomena that carry long and complex histories (as do various techniques and subject matters). And within those histories, and because of them, we also find novel deployments or inventions, that is, precisely the kind of variations that lead us to regard a work (or aspects of a work) as creative. Cubism transforms the still life, Wallace Stevens eschews formal rhyme schemes but still organizes its rhythms around the iambic foot. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” opens: “The eye’s plain version is a thing apart/ The vulgate of experience. Of this/ A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet–.”14 More than underscoring a kind of conspicuousness (if it even accomplishes that), the createdness of things marks of a scene of inheritance and transformation, and we read it, in part, with a sense that one work is derivative, another clever, and a few startling, even breathtaking, say Bach’s conversion of dance forms on the cello.15

I have argued with Heidegger about createdness for two reasons. First, in carrying with it the choices and histories of technique, genre, etc., createdness evidences what we might term a “world-world” struggle underwriting the work of art (to contrast it with the strife between earth and world that Heidegger highlights in “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” and to underscore a feature of the work of art that his view generally elides). For example, the sheer size of many of Kiefer’s paintings clearly contests the museum spaces in which they are set; each thereby contests a if not the prominent site for contemporary visual art.16 But second, and more to my present point, the createdness of artworks draws them away from the realm of thinghood, as if the were simply material objects with particular qualities that might fascinate us, whether with pleasure or the gut punch of a lyric insight. Instead, it marks them as actions, species of human labor transforming an inherited world, thus inviting us to explore how and why, and in ways that stormy skies or majestic mountains do not.17

If we are to take artworks as kinds of action, what kind are they? After all, any artifact is a human action in a certain sense. I share Heidegger and Collingwood’s sense that we miss the boat if we regard artworks primarily as technical transformations of pre-existing states of affair, if only because muses are fickle and often inspire on their own time and in their own way. But what is this boat, this more? On the one hand, it concerns art’s disclosive power, a work’s ability to expose us to the world and our place therein. (In this, Heidegger and I agree, although I won’t elaborate my sense of this agreement until later.) But that power takes place in a certain kind of action that requires more analysis.

In 1913, Osip Mandelstam claimed: “Without dialogue, lyric poetry cannot exist.”18 He believed this because he took lyric poems to be missives, writing: “although individual poems, such as epistles or dedications, may be addressed to concrete persons, poetry as a whole is always directed towards a more or less distant, unknown [elsewhere he terms it “secret”—JTL] addressee” (73). With Mandelstam on his mind, Paul Celan wrote: “A poem, because it is a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogical, can be a message in a bottle, posted with the—not always strongly hopeful—belief that it can somewhere and sometime wash ashore, on heartland perhaps.”19 Their point, whose scope I am expanding, is that poems have an ineliminable second-person dimension. If so, I would say that artworks—absorbing, engaging, occasionally transformative artworks—are acts of the sort that address another.

In insisting upon the address-like nature of artworks, I am redirecting, to some extent, our attention from the purported self-sufficiency or autonomy of the artwork. I say “redirecting” because I am not denying that the meaning of artworks is dependent, in part, upon interactions among a work’s elements, interactions that are integral to the work of art. In Adorno’s words: “They [artworks] speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them.”20 (One won’t genuinely understand a poem, for example, if one looks up each word in the dictionary. Instead, one must consider how the words interact with one another, and appreciate the play of various literary operations within or against a given genre and/or tradition.) But such interactions are initiated and massaged by one and delivered to another, and that is the wider current within which the artwork’s metabolism pulses.

The larger current of communication within which I am setting artworks is quite evident when artworks are explicitly presented, e.g. published, hung, cast and set, etc. But those acts only concretize what is a more intrinsic feature of artworks. Suppose one finds poems stashed in a drawer and reads them; doing say may be invasive, but the lines also enable one’s reading; formally, they are for-another, and even private works have an addressee—the creator at some future date. Let me make my point in another way. Frank Martin wrote his “Mass for Double Choir” between 1922 and 1926 and regarded it as a matter between himself and his god. Was anything structurally added when the piece was performed some forty years later? No. An open-ended, public audience simply assumed the role previously limited to Martin, his god, and anyone to whom he had shown the manuscript. I thus think Mandelstam and Celan’s observations tell us something important about artworks in general—their createdness not only marks a kind of purposiveness, but one that involves a second-person dimension in which a work’s technical executions are situated. Yes, one may wonder whether a work will be well received, even noticed, but such worries are simply further evidence that artworks are addresses.

In stressing the communicative orientation of artworks, my view runs counter to Adorno’s. That Adorno is mistaken when he terms Celan’s work hermetic is evident from Celan’s extension of Mandelstam’s position (Aesthetic Theory, 321). But Adorno is also wrong to claim that artworks fall altogether outside the category of communication (Aesthetic Theory, 109). In his astounding focus upon the integrative labors (and failures) of artworks, Adorno loses sight of how those labors remain structurally oriented toward future interpretants, and irrespective of whether the artist plans to publish the work. Now, one might object that Adorno’s sense of Ausdruck or “expression” does justice to art’s openness to interpretation. On Adorno’s view, each work’s inevitable pursuit of autonomy falls short. Works are not completely windowless monads, therefore, but phenomena that express the fate that each, in its own way, cannot escape, what Adorno glosses as the “suffering countenance of artworks” (Aesthetic Theory, 111). But expression in this sense is that of a symptom from which an observer infers a state of affairs, and a symptom is not addressed to another—it just appears. Artworks, however, do not just appear—they are created and, at least in part, created in order to be engaged by another. Adorno, like Heidegger, is at pains to free the work of art from the idiosyncratic stamp of artists.21 But works can be communicative without reducing their meaning and significance to pre-formed conceptions that just as well could have been presented otherwise. As I aim to show, artworks can remain novel sites of disclosure (even for those who create them), and nevertheless be akin to letters in a bottle.

If my commitment to a term like “communication” leads me to part company with Adorno—at least on this point—it establishes what is possibly a more ambiguous relationship with the work of Michael Fried, for whom the addressee is also a structural facet of artworks. What interests Fried, however, is the kind of relationship that works establish with their addressees, as well as how they do so. Fried distinguishes between two distinct stances (or what I will later term bearings) toward an addressee. One is theatrical, the other, or so it seems to me, is self-possessed (albeit as an existential posture as opposed to an ontological condition of substance-like autonomy). The former proves “incomplete without the experiencing subject, which is what I meant by characterizing such work as theatrical in the pejorative sense of the term.”22 Stances of the latter sort, which Fried aligns with modernism, is “fundamentally antitheatrical in that (to speak only somewhat metaphorically) they took no notice of the beholder, who was left to come to terms with them—to make sense of the relationships they comprised—as best he could” (572). Given the enduring provocativeness of Fried’s distinction, I would like to locate some of its concerns relative to the view I am developing. In order to do so, however, I need to further develop my sense of what taking a stance toward an addressee involves.

III. Art’s Bearings

If artworks are in fact communicative, it seems all the more proper to term them solicitations. They not only entice us to varying degrees (as well as engage and occasionally transform us), but they also address us on behalf of something, that is, they are petitions of a sort (to recall another meaning of “solicit”—to approach with a request or plea). This is not to say, however, that artworks are empty ciphers such that they disappear in their indicating (if any sign in fact does this). Obviously, and as I stressed at the outset, artworks draw attention to themselves. But what transpires in this term “themselves”?

Like Heidegger (and because of Heidegger), I think that various kinds of disclosures take place in the work of art, and that artworks call our attention to them in a solicitous address. Something is at stake in the work of art, something transpires there, and the work draws us toward it. In a way, each work announces, in a gestural way, not unlike a wave, “consider this.” But what is there to consider?

Nigredo, for example, through the interaction of its various elements, evidences painterly possibilities, particularly as it emerged from a context of near-compulsory abstraction. (The charring of the canvas seems a particularly powerful way to flatten the work—thus indicating its thinglyness—but in a way that nevertheless complements the figural drama portrayed and enacted.) But the painting also, in its sheer size and the intensity of its subject matter, discloses the framing presence of museums and, to some degree, the limits of those frames. Nigredo also discloses some of the plights of post-War Germany and the place of art in that history. And it just might disclose a transformative path into and through that history. In calling attention to itself, the painting thus calls attention to what is disclosed therein and thereby, that is, its solicitousness is something of a self-framing gesture, one that demarcates a site where disclosures occur.

Of course, artworks can disclose many things. On the one hand, they disclose art-historical possibilities, i.e. moves, perhaps exquisite moves, that can be made in art forms like painting, or in genres like the romantic comedy, or in harmonics, or in very particular forms like the sonnet or sestina. Artworks also disclose worldly possibilities—the physical and political space of the museum, the wonder of light, the terror of one battle (say, Guernica), or the general horror of war. In Heideggerian terms, such matters mark the “truth of beings,” with the genitive tilted toward beings rather than the event of their truth, though still other disclosures are also possible, ones that try to disclose the event of disclosure itself (or so I have argued elsewhere).23 However, no matter what they disclose, artworks also disclose their how, the manner in which they gather and focus various elements such that art historical or worldly possibilities are disclosed as well. Let me explain by way of Adorno’s conception of form.

According to Adorno, form is the “artifact’s coherence, however self-antagonistic and refracted,” the “objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent” (Aesthetic Theory, 142-43). It would be a mistake to take form statically, however, as if it were superimposed over matter or filled with content. As if reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, where “form” names the objectified appearance of the bondsman’s “formative activity” (formirende Thun) in the fruit of his or her labor (a sown field, a wooden chair, or a well-swept room), Adorno presents form as the “law of the transfiguration of the existing” which gives to artworks “their objective reflectedness into themselves.”24 In other words, form names a) the operations by which artworks integrate their elements, including genre (should one be in play), and b) the manner through which they confront the world to which they belong and to which they are a response. According to Adorno, one thus finds form at work in every operation that gives the work its determinate character, both by binding elements to one another (via perspective, rhythmic stresses, or symbols, for example), or by transforming the world in which they arise (say by mixing linseed oil and pigments, filling a subway tunnel with guitar chords, or leading a reader to rethink the task of mourning).

While I am compelled by Adorno’s sense and use of “form,” I find the term too ambiguous given its association with particular organizations like the sonata or the sestina. Moreover, I do not wish to forget the eloquence, that is, the disclosures, that form makes possible (and in this I keep a foot in the content-aesthetics that Adorno rejects). I would thus rethink Adorno’s sense of form within a broader term that indicates, solicitously, the labors that organize an artwork’s elements and enable a range of disclosures. To that end, I propose bearing as a marker of an artwork’s purposive comportment in and toward the world whose various relations and dimensions the work engages and discloses. I have chosen this term because at least five of its senses apply to artworks as I understand them. [1] Artworks have a manner of comportment, a bearing, e.g. bold, reflective, ironic, etc. [2] They are generative (in the sense of ‘bear fruit’) in that they provide disclosures. [3] They are purposively oriented and thus have bearings, principally toward an addressee, but also toward some determinate end, e.g. to be beautiful, to please, to rework culture, to witness suffering, etc. [4] Works of art also make use of the very world that they disclose, which leads me to say that artworks bear, in the sense of carry, extant possibilities, transforming them until they coalesce into a phenomenon that is bindingly eloquent. [5] Finally, artworks also bear (or fail to bear), in the sense of endure, the world they absorb in order to disclose whatever possibilities they are able to bear. (I think here of works that seems to be undone by the commodity form that pays their way, or the expressive strain a poem acquires when the language of an oppressor is employed to bear witness to crimes perpetrated by that oppressor.)

Recall Nigredo, whose manifold bearing is evident. At its most general level, the work presents us with a painterly alchemy that figures and confronts German history, thereby initiating what it hopes will be a process of melioration. In brief, this alchemy involves: enormous scale, the use and abuse of perspective, clear and powerful thematic elements of European history, the deployment of writing and organic matter, and a kind of symbolic self-scrutiny that gives the work an experimental tone, as if the final fate of what had begun has yet to be determined. But it would be a mistake to only consider the painting’s internal operations, to the degree spatial metaphors succeed in illuminating such interactive phenomena. The painting also includes a variety of postures adopted toward the world in which the artwork unfolds—toward its addresses (Nigredo is sincere, heroic, and demanding), the sites and modes of its presentation (its scale and content render it a gripping presence in a museum), as well as the situations to which it responds (WWII, the Holocaust, the drift of post-War German art into abstraction, and what I have called, in a revision of Heidegger, the empty dimension of presencing). Read as a whole, I would claim, therefore, that Nigredo petitions us to consider how (and to what ends) it engages (as it strives to transform) its art-historical elements, its materials, its thematic motifs, the museum in which it hangs, its addressees, and the history it depicts and embodies. In other words, Nigredo asks us to consider how it inhabits the histories it confronts, perpetuates, and possibly meliorates, a manifold phenomenon I wish to term its “bearing.”

If we return to Fried, I find his distinction between theatricality and what I termed self-possession to name two modalities of a work’s bearing, principally toward its addressees, although the pejorative sense of “theatrical” that Fried exploits suggests that it also names a work’s more general comportment, which is why, in part, I cast its contrast in terms of “self-possession.” What Fried resents about theatricality is how little it offers besides its initial solicitation. Works like Tony Smith’s “Die” demand (or is it command?) one’s attention but the “fulfillment of that demand consists simply in being aware of it,” taking “it” to name the work, given that, when faced by theatrical works, the “beholder knows himself to stand in an indeterminate, open-ended—and unexacting—relation as subject to the impassive object on the wall or floor.”25 The work is incomplete without the subject, therefore, because its occurrence, as art, is simply designed to catch the notice of an addressee, and to offer nothing else. Think of Cage’s 4’33”. Its meaning lives and dies with the attention it convenes but does not then engage or absorb.

Now, I do not believe that any work can evaporate in its own solicitous address, leaving behind nothing but its objectivity. As Fried himself observes, the closer one approximates that goal, the closer one approaches non-art, moving from music to an insistent hum, for example, or from painting to a pulsing light (the examples are mine). But as I noted at the outset, the very effort to achieve objecthood—or anything for that matter, say a “situation”—dooms the project at the outset. Moreover, as Danto’s work shows, when works approach objecthood they don’t prove mute but become conceptual, and they cannot help but do so, I would add, given the horizon against which they aim to prove legible, even in their evanescence. (The history they bear forces them, as it were, into a point—“here too is art.”) But I take it that what really draws Fried’s ire is the thought that theatrical objecthood should stand as the end toward which artworks bear. And not just because such programs leave us with wind in dry grass. Rather, something is lost, namely, the meaning made by works that take “no notice of the beholder.”

In “Art and Objecthood,” Fried says of Anthony Caro’s sculpture, repeating the remark almost forty years later: “It is as though Caro’s sculptures essentialize meaningfulness as such—as though the possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes his sculpture possible” (“Art and Objecthood,” 162). This is a remarkable claim, and I think we need to hear the italicized “alone” two times. [1] The possibility of meaning what we say and do is the sole condition for the possibility of Caro’s sculptures qua art (otherwise they would be lost to objecthood, which is nonmeaning). [2] The possibility of meaning what we say and do is something done alone. It seems, therefore, that theatricality and self-possession exist on a continuum according to Fried: to reject objecthood (or what he also calls “literality”), is to move toward self-possession while the pursuit of self-possession tries to negate (Fried says “defeat, or allay”) objecthood (162). Caro’s work accomplishes the latter according to Fried through the dynamic interaction of its elements, which presumably have no need of the beholder in order to mean what they mean, although the beholder is, I presume, invited to contemplate how the work’s “individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition” (161).

I too am impatient when addressed by works that bear toward objecthood as their end. (I might say: I find them unbearable.) On the one hand, they solicit our attention but often disclose very little of interest, say pleasure, insight, or a mode of comportment that we might make our own. To the degree they become conceptual, however (which is not the same as becoming an object), I think they offer us conundrums worth the time it takes to think through how a Brillo Box might come to stand as a work of art, or how, as with Brian Eno’s generative music, patterns of order emerge out of a mixture of intentional arrangements, accidental collisions, and the attentive efforts of the listener.

I presume I’m more interested in these conceptual disclosures because I’m not all that exercised by works that seem “incomplete without the experiencing subject.” I suppose it all depends on what is being asked of me and how much the work brings to the venture. Works that seem empty apart from the flick of their solicitation do vex me. But if I am invited into a work that includes my own activity in the event it depicts and exemplifies—as I am with Nigredo—I am happy to receive and accept it, and without any sense that the work thereby retracts into objecthood. I say this because works like Nigredo, as no object could, ask me to think through whether the forces that animated Nazism still burn in paintings, and, if so, what that requires of me. Not that they trigger this process in me, as if my doing so were a perlocutionary effect of the request. Rather, in order to fully understand Nigredo, I need to realize that a request for that kind of work is part of its solicitous address. Now, I might refuse such a request, that is walk away from the painting and into another gallery, or think instead of Kiefer’s childhood, but in those instances, I would fail to fully grasp what transpires in a painting like Nigredo. It would be as if I admired the font of a letter but never thought to answer it.

Returning to Eno’s generative music, one encounters programmed parameters for the production of sounds (wisps of melody, rhythmic miniatures) that nevertheless allow the results to develop in shifting and unintended ways. Listening to such works (“Discrete Music” and “Music for Airports”), I find myself solicited by a work that bears, in the sense of discloses, the complexity of its own occurrence, one involving a dynamic matrix of objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity (and the site wherever they compear, as Jean-Luc Nacy would have it). And at that point, I find myself at the limits of self-consciousness, folds of sense where self-consciousness both ends and begins. And that, I would argue, bears meaning in its most originary registers.26 But such works cannot accomplish this unless I play along, that is, track my own tracking of the shifting patterns. And requiring that of me does not render them objects because, again, no object can make such a request of me.

With regard to works whose chief end seems to lie with allaying objecthood, I recognize in them a possible and intriguing bearing, even a profound one insofar as it dramatizes how agents try to inherit the world through terms of their own making. To recall a line of thought from Thoreau, which marks the cornerstone of Cavell’s reading of Walden (and of his general approach to Emerson), if theatrical works bear the language of their mother tongue immaturely, unconsciously (and thereby prove “literal”), self-possessed works have taken that mother tongue and deliberately authored a father tongue, word by word, beam by beam.27 And in doing so, they do prove to be something like images of semiotic individualism or what I have been calling self-possession.28 But I do not believe that such works “essentialize meaningfulness as such,” at least insofar as I understand that claim. Self-possession is something toward which an artwork might bear, and in so doing, that is, in dramatizing that pursuit, the work might become an image of the dream of human self-constitution, or even of divine creation given how Fried seems to set Caro’s work in a nunc stans. But as Adorno rightly insists, such images are only semblances of such a state, that is, they gesture toward it without actualizing it, burdened (and enabled) as they are by all they bear, allay as they might that entanglement. More strictly, then, such works disclose that dream’s impossibility. And while that is another matter worth thinking through, one a work might give us to consider, it is not the only matter on which artworks bear, as I now aim to show. 29

IV. Art and Purpose

I regard artworks as solicitous in order to do justice to the ways in which they entice and petition us with a possibly transformative, communicative address, one that calls attention to their manifold bearings. A work’s petition is not without a certain quasi-normative confidence, however, both in terms of what it presents and how. In a passage that did not find a place in the penultimate draft of Aesthetic Theory (which is the only draft we have), Adorno writes: “Every work says, like a mime, ‘I’m good, no?’” (Aesthetic Theory, 392). A comedy that isn’t funny or a poem lost in clichés intrinsically disappoints, much like an invitation to a dinner that is never served—something has been promised but not delivered. Said more carefully, solicitous artworks create the legitimate expectation that they will provide something of value, something “good” within their field of operations. But how are such fields demarcated?

One might suppose the matter rests with successfully instancing a type—landscape portrait, novel, romantic comedy, pure punk, etc. I find this on point but narrow, and in two ways. Numerous artworks, and those we often most esteem, are presented as contributions to the wider work of humanist culture, namely, navigating mortal life with maps that do not defer to the letter of revealed truth. Works like Melville’s Moby Dick, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and Emily Dickinson’s poems all instance art-historical types, but they do so in order to respond to broader issues, namely, the chaos of nature and unbounded capital accumulation, the fierce, sometimes solitary work of enlightenment freedom, and the abysses that mortality repeatedly opens.30 In other words, artworks bear (as in carry) art historical types because those works are bearing toward ends that such types help them realize. If we take artworks to say “I’m good, no?,” we should hold our reply until we have a fuller sense of their bearings.

Of course, with regard to ends, artworks move in various ways. At least three come rather quickly to mind. In conclusion, I would like to mark them, if only to concretize my admittedly general invocation of the normative. To that end, and recalling that a work is solicitous, I have come to think of artworks as offering invitations that highlight the general end that gives them their bearings, for example, “appreciate this,” “acknowledge this,” and “be like me.” (N.B. I do not consider these ends to be exclusive nor do I take the list to be exhaustive.)

In calling attention to themselves, to their bearings, some works expect us to appreciate, to take pleasure in, some range of what they disclose. The mime expects us to applaud the precision of his or her mute but nevertheless legible gestures. The math rock quartet expects us to be awed by their ability to play in complex and unusual time signatures, at times furiously, at times approaching silence. And as heady as Wallace Stevens’ poems can be, their plain music is a delight and it is offered as such.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.31

Not all works wish simply to be enjoyed, however, though I presume most do to some degree. But other artworks purport to bear insights that seek understanding and acknowledgement. Poetries of witness, for example, track and mark historical violence and injustices, and they present them as such, that is, not simply as events but as evils. What they solicit from us is thus not merely our attention, but our acknowledgement that the events portrayed should not go unmarked and unresisted. When Carolyn Forché recounts her dinner with the Salvadorian Colonel, our rapt attention should not give way to delight but acknowledge the horror, the moral horror unfolding.

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid.33

Beautiful lines can be found here. “The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house.” But the various juxtapositions (the rack of lamb, broken bottles embedded in the walls) also present an awful scene, one I am led to elaborate as follows. This regime does not need to keep its violence at arms length, say in a prison, some torture bunker, or a rural camp—rather, hearse and home are one. And that union is evil, and we are told as much and expected to concur. Nor is this another world—that of a monster unconnected to its northern neighbors. A presumably American cop show is part of the evening’s entertainment, indicating both a spatial and cultural proximity to U.S. readers who are thereby asked to acknowledge what lies to their reachable, confrontable south. And when the poem goes on to recall the bag of dried, human ears that the colonel spilled upon the table, setting one into a glass of water (“It came alive there”), we also are asked to attend to the silent suffering of those who no doubt lost far more than their ears.

He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.33

My final class of solicitations takes us back to Josef Brodsky and two lines already quoted. “A poem, as it were, tells its reader, ‘Be like me.’” And: “To say the least, every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.” Some artworks—I think Nigredo is one, Caro’s sculptures may be others—call our attention to the full range of their bearings, presenting them as valid, even good paths, praiseworthy paths, through the world they engage, disclose, and work to transform. In a modest way, and following after the latter half of Brodsky’s disjunct, some poems offer themselves as “yardsticks for the language.” More concretely, they call our attention to how they inhabit language, resisting, for example, the clichés of the market, tradition, and the state, and replacing that numbing chorus with acute, singular articulations that not only resist assimilation but also require us to actively work our way into what is therein indicated. In short, we find in a poem (or corpus) a “way to be” that it exemplifies (and which it solicits from its readers), perhaps one inimical to totalitarianism.34

If I think of Nigredo, I also hear “be like me,” and again, through exemplification. I hear: live in a manner that is bindingly eloquent as you confront your history in all its violence, marking with particular care your entanglements therein. I hear: do not accept the scene of your appearance on habitual terms—museum, classroom, or conference. I also hear: don’t fuck around, that is, put positively, pursue your tasks with an intensity, perhaps even a fire capable of transforming whatever (and whoever) you encounter. But do so experimentally, which is to say, unsure of and alert to unpalatable consequences and emergent possibilities. Not that Nigredo says such things in any direct way. But its bearings radiate an ethos such that should we meet Glaucon somewhere along the road we might continue the ancient quarrel on behalf of poetry (and art more generally), if on altered terms.

Not that everything Nigredo offers is “good.” But then, I do not have to accept that it is. In being solicited to attend to all that the painting bears, and in the context of a normative horizon that the claim “be like me” (or, “I’m good, no?”) opens, I also am invited to critically assess that bearing. And when I do, I find that Kiefer’s attraction to alchemical melioration ideologically valorizes the work of art at the expense of social and political reform, and its palpable sense of the artist as hero remains bound to the figure of the charismatic leader whose will and vision might redeem a fallen past.35 But what it offers on the whole is profound, and I would be equal to the occasion, even in my refusals.

There is more to say, of course, e.g. concerning how and on what basis I take up invitations like “dig this,” “acknowledge this,” and “be like me.”36 But there always is and always will be more to say. But whatever is said is always said in a certain direction, and so I hope, at least with regard to artworks, that I have helped us find our bearings by uncovering, in part, art’s own.

The truth must be spoken because of the consequences which follow from it for behavior.

—Brecht, “Five Difficulties in Writing the Truth”

 

One thing I’ve learned, and dying I will tell you: It makes no sense to say there’s something deep inside you that won’t come out! Can you think of anything that has no consequences?

—Brecht, Saint Joan of the Stockyards

There is a peculiar note recorded in Brecht’s journal for December 2, 1942:

a great discovery: the need to buy vitamins here in the form of pills. i was already clearly aware how bad my brain was functioning, how quickly i tired, how low one’s vitality gets, and so on. five days of taking vitamins and i was fit again. what striking proof of the social origin of the proletarian “inability to think”!1

Brecht a little more than a year in Los Angeles discovers the wonders of vitamins. How serious is the claim about the “social origin” of thinking? But it is not really about the social origin of thinking, it is more about the chemical and biological roots of it.

A similar line of thought is recorded by Walter Benjamin in his “Notes from Svendborg” where he relates his encounters with Brecht over the summer of 1934 in Denmark. At the conclusion to his notes he mentions, in Brecht’s company, that he is reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He also writes he isn’t feeling well and for Brecht these are not unrelated events. “Reading this novel was the main cause of my illness,” Benjamin recalls of their conversation. Apparently, Brecht is speaking from personal experience. “By way of proof for my illness he told me how, when he was young, a chronic illness whose germ had been latent in him for a long time broke out one afternoon when a schoolfriend played Chopin on the piano, at a time when Brecht was already too enfeebled to protest. He ascribes to Chopin and Dostoevsky particularly dire effects on health.”2

Is this a joke? Why Chopin and Dostoevsky specifically? How serious is the idea that artworks—or rather, the formal properties of music—induce physical effects on their listeners? Hanns Eisler recalls an evening with Brecht at Adorno’s home in Los Angeles where they listened to Adorno’s Stefan George settings, “Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Stefan George,” op. 7 (1944). Brecht’s response is cutting, if not an obvious insult: “It reminds me greatly of Chopin.”3 Knowing Brecht’s feelings about Chopin (and Adorno surely did), one begins to see the point of the otherwise anomalous appearance of Chopin’s Funeral March in Brecht’s Man Equals Man.4 The final number performed at Widow Begbick’s canteen, the song played at Galy Gay’s funeral, has the soldiers “carry the crate on their shoulders and sing to the tune of Chopin’s Funeral March: ‘Now he will drink his Irish whisky no more.’”5 For Brecht, the song is a further act of violence.

And if music could kill, it could also heal. There were “times when music could be used to treat disease!” Brecht writes in “On the Use of Music in Epic Theater.” Brecht observes that composers have largely forsaken the art of healing through music: “Our composers on the whole leave any observation of the effects of their music to the café proprietors.”6 That Brecht was fundamentally concerned with the “effects” his plays had on the audience is uncontroversial, but that those effects were inevitable and unstoppable is more surprising (and potentially problematic). Nonetheless, it is clear Brecht had a traditional vision of aesthetics in mind; it was the “science” of feeling.

On occasion Brecht appealed to sociological research in the study of effects on the audience: “One of the few actual pieces of research which I have come across in the last ten years was the statement of a Paris restaurateur about the different orders his customers placed under the influence of different types of music. He claimed to have noticed that specific drinks were always consumed to the works of specific composers” (BT, 153). Brecht makes the exact same point in his notes for Eisler and Adorno on film music.

Composers know little about the effects of music. Generally they leave their study to barkeepers. One of the few research results I have seen in the past decade was the notice of a restaurant proprietor in Paris about the different drinks his guests ordered under the influence of different music. He claimed to have found that certain beverages were always consumed with music of certain composers. Undoubtedly the cinema would benefit much if composers were in a position to deliver music that had more or less precisely determined effects on the audience [Der Film würde unzweifelhaft viel gewinnen, wenn die Musiker imstande wären, Musik zu lieferns welche einigermaßen exakt bestimmbare Wirkungen auf die Zuschauer ausüben würde].7

How exactly could this research be utilized in the theater? Could it be marshaled to produce a new subject, as it were behind the viewers’ back?8 Brecht implied that theater and film directors could learn from the science of advertising and “produce music which would have a more or less exactly foreseeable effect on the spectator.” Did Brecht imagine he could produce correct political subjects through the right kind of music? Did he seriously envision an art with “exactly foreseeable effects” on the viewer? More importantly, what kind of effects did Brecht hope to borrow from the lessons of advertising?

Brecht was guided at this point by contemporary developments in philosophy and social psychology.9 “Behaviorism,” he writes in the “Threepenny Lawsuit,” “is a psychology that, based on the needs of commodity production, seeks to develop methods to influence the customer, an active psychology” and therefore “quintessentially progressive and revolutionary” (FR, 172). Progressive and revolutionary, that is, in the way that capitalist techniques of control are: when they are refunctioned from their invented purpose they become weapons in the war against their inventors. This is the point of the opening epigram to the lawsuit: “Contradictions are our hope!” (FR, 148). Brecht elaborates this idea throughout the text, noting how capitalist techniques contain their own contradiction if they are pushed to their limits. So it is that “Behaviorism’s limits are those that correspond to its function in capitalism. … Here again the road leads only over capitalism’s dead body, but here again this is a good road” (FR, 172). Put to alternate purposes, the commercial effects of advertising could assume a revolutionary role. Verfremdungseffekt is simply behaviorism with a Marxist bent. As the Philosopher observes in the Messingkauf Dialogues, he aims to identify “certain laws that might enable me to make predictions” and in the “possibility of influencing” people according to these laws.10

And if Brecht sought to influence the audience in exactly foreseeable ways, he nonetheless fundamentally distinguished this task from what he understood as the “suggestive” use of effects. In Brecht’s finely tuned hypnotic terminology, the estrangement effect is a mode of influence but not of suggestion. In a passage entitled “Influence the audience (by the inductive method)” from the 1936 performance notes to Round Heads and Pointed Heads, he writes of the necessity for controlling effects in order to draw out the right responses from the audience:

A considerable sacrifice of the spectator’s empathy does not mean sacrificing all right to influence him. The representation of human behavior from a social point of view is meant indeed to have a decisive influence on the spectator’s own social behavior. This sort of intervention necessarily is bound to release emotional effects; they are deliberate and have to be controlled.11

One might wonder what distinguishes Brecht’s vision of a work that produces a “decisive influence” on behavior from the kinds of suggestive control of the audience he ceaselessly critiqued.12

One of Brecht’s guiding assumptions, his theatrical ontology, is the belief in the consequential nature of all actions. Effects, of some kind, were an inevitable fact of all art (and of life itself). The task is to control them, putting them to specific ends to influence the right kinds of behavior. Suggestive effects are ones that wash over the audience, putting them in a state of mind undifferentiated from life outside the theater. Alternately, the artist’s task is to control effects; to attempt to foresee the result—to intend one’s effects on an audience, even if that prediction might fail—is the aim of leftist aesthetics.

Taken at face value, Brecht’s pursuit of “decisive influence” and “exactly foreseeable effects” on audience behavior seems to undermine his basic political aims and his affirmation of human reason to reach the right kind of politics. As Adorno famously argued, Brecht was authoritarian precisely because of his prioritizing of political effect over artistic autonomy. “As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect,” Adorno wrote.13 From Brecht’s perspective, there is an essential difference between the “‘direct,’ flattening, impact” of traditional theater and the “indirect impact” of epic techniques.14 The epic stage is indirect insofar as it set out to “block” the spectator and “prevent his complete empathy”15 with the events onstage, thereby “leaving the audience to decide the matter for itself.”16 This was a distinction Adorno found uncompelling.

For Adorno, putting the matter the other way around, autonomy was politically driven from the start and hardly autonomous. “The resoluteness of [the work’s] distance [from the world] … concretizes the critique of what has been repulsed,” he writes in Aesthetic Theory. So it is hard to see exactly where Brecht and Adorno differ in their accounts of political efficacy (both assume it is indirect), except to say that Brecht is forthright in his claims about effects (whether they worked or not is beside the point). Adorno’s putative “defense” of Brecht is that Brecht’s didactic “theses took on an entirely different function from the one their content intended. They became constitutive … and contributed to the collapse of the unitary nexus of meaning.”17 From the other direction, Adorno facetiously notes how in Brecht’s “best work” it is “hard to determine just what the author … meant.”18 An argument that was entirely different from the one that asserted that the meaning of every work of art was inherently “ambiguous.”

In one sense, Adorno was correct; Brecht sought, through research, to produce “desired effects” in his audience. Adorno’s defense, on the other hand, is untenable. Adorno’s assertion that works of art necessarily, by virtue of their objecthood, mean otherwise than what the author meant makes it impossible to disagree with his (or any) interpretation of the work. On what grounds could one disagree, if not by virtue of asserting what an author meant (even if that information is constitutively unavailable)? And if the claim to having a “decisive influence” on audience behavior was controversial, consider too that Brecht claimed that a work of art was “necessarily … bound to release emotional effects.” The latter, it seems, was a formula for naturalizing empathy in art. In a way, it was.

Consequences

Brecht’s deepest engagement with the problem of artistic effects (and an associated range of loosely behaviorist ideas) appears in a 1939 fragment entitled “Is it worth speaking about the amateur theater?” “In the arts, if nowhere else,” Brecht writes, “the principle that ‘if it doesn’t do much good, at least it can’t do any harm’ is quite mistaken” (BT, 239).

Most people have no clear idea of art’s consequences, whether for good or for bad. They suppose that a spectator who is not inwardly gripped by art, because it is not good enough, is not affected at all. Quite apart from the fact that you can be “gripped” by bad art as easily as by good, even if you are not gripped, something happens to you. Good or bad, a play always includes an image of the world. Good or bad, the actors show how people behave under given circumstances. (BT, 239)

All art produces consequences, he insists. “There is no play and no theatrical performance that does not in some way or other affect the dispositions and conceptions of the audience. Art is never without consequences”; bourgeois and socialist critics alike assume that “our morals are affected by it” (BT, 240). Brecht thus concludes that “political, moral and aesthetic influences all radiate from the theater: good when it is good, bad when it is bad” (BT, 241).

Brecht cites an idea derived from William James’s and Carl Lange’s theory of emotion that says physiological affects generate specific emotional states, rather than the traditional account of emotions which assumes the reverse. Brecht offers a thumbnail version of the theory: “weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping” (BT, 241). Characteristically, Brecht gives the seemingly biological and timeless theory of weeping a specific human setting: a funeral. He observes how “education proceeds along highly theatrical lines … [as] can be seen at funerals, whose meaning escapes children entirely. These are theatrical events which form the character. The human being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice.” In a sense, Brecht is projecting an affective picture of human education, but even here affect is situated, contextualized, in a particular setting. So even if it is the case that behavior comes first and “logical arguments only come later,” those mimetic habits occur within a space of reason (BT, 241). The situation is no different than the one where the customer hypnotically orders his drink as though to accompany café music.

Recent commentary has focused on Brecht’s investment in the priority of bodily response over “logical arguments.” Brigid Doherty, in “Test and Gestus in Brecht and Benjamin,” addresses the problem of influence in the “era of psychotechnics.” Doherty considers how, according to Brecht and Benjamin (with special emphasis on Benjamin’s “Karussell der Berufe” of 1930), one’s “own occupation has influenced his or her mood, opinions, and relations with colleagues, as well as how each would compare the person she or he was at the time of taking up an occupation to the person she or he has become in performing that occupation.”19 Similarly, in “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Miriam Hansen offers an influential assessment of the role biomechanics played in Brecht’s and Benjamin’s theories of artistic influence. According to Hansen, “A major reference point in this regard is Sergey Eisenstein who, drawing on and revising William James and the conservative philosopher Ludwig Klages … sought to theorize the conditions of transmitting or, more precisely, producing emotion in the beholder through bodily movement.”20 She continues:

Seeking to adapt Klages’s (metaphysically grounded) concept of expressive movement for a materialist theory of signification and reception, Eisenstein, like his teacher Vsevolod Meyerhold, returned to James’s axiom that “emotion follows upon the bodily expression” (“we feel sorry because we cry”), although Eisenstein modified James by insisting on the two-way character and indivisible unity of movement and emotion. Without going into distinctions here, what seems important to me … is the notion of a physiologically “contagious” or “infectious” movement that would trigger emotional effects in the viewer, a form of mimetic identification based in the phenomenon known as the Carpenter Effect. The recourse to neuro-physiological, mechanistic, and reflex psychology may not be as sophisticated as the insights of psychoanalysis; yet it may have been more in tune with new, technically mediated forms of aesthetic experience, predicated on mass production, unprecedented circulation and mobility, and collective, public reception.21

Hansen’s and Doherty’s media-based claims—the centrality of “psychotechnics,” “new, technically mediated forms of aesthetic experience predicated on mass production, unprecedented circulation and mobility”—grounded as they are in Benjamin’s writings, do not reflect Brecht’s purposes. (Brecht considered Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility,” with special reference to the notion of aura, “pretty abominable.”22 ) Most forms of media theory assume that new forms of technology influence behavior independently of the intentions of their users or receivers. Brecht’s interest in behaviorism, in contrast to contemporary media theory, is an interest in how people express themselves in their deepest intentions, expressions hidden from conscious awareness. Unconscious behavior, for Brecht, is not collapsible into unintentional or precognitive response to stimuli. Despite Hansen’s emphasis on the “two-way” character of Brecht’s interpretation of the James-Lange theory, she nonetheless assumes the viability and usefulness of “neuro-physiological, mechanistic, and reflex psychology,” which treats response as a matter of “movement and emotion.”

Given the recent emphasis on technological and biological concerns in Brecht,23 it is important to see how Brecht substantiates his point about response in the essay on amateur theater by reference not to music but to film. He describes his affective response to seeing George Stevens’s 1939 (loose) adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Gunga Din.” I cite the passage at length as it touches on Brecht’s most basic claims about the role of affect in art:24

In the film Gunga Din, based on a short story [sic] by Kipling, I saw British occupation forces fighting a native population. A tribe—the term itself implies something wild and uncivilized, as opposed to the word “people”—attacked a body of British troops stationed in India. The Indians were primitive creatures, either comic or wicked: comic when loyal to the British and wicked when hostile. The British soldiers were honest, good-humored chaps and when they used their fists on the mob and “knocked some sense” into them, the audience laughed. One of the Indians betrayed his compatriots to the British, sacrificed his life so that his fellow-countrymen should be defeated and earned the audience’s heartfelt applause.

My heart was touched too: I felt like applauding, and laughed in all the right places, despite the fact that I knew all the time that there was something wrong, that the Indians are not primitive and uncultured people but have a magnificent age-old culture, and that this Gunga Din could also be seen in a very different light, for example, as a traitor to his people. I was amused and touched because this utterly distorted account was an artistic success and considerable resources in talent and ingenuity had been applied in making it.

Obviously artistic appreciation of this sort is not without effects. It weakens the good instincts and strengthens the bad, it contradicts true experience and spreads misconceptions, in short it falsifies our picture of the world. (BT, 240)

Brecht is disturbed by the power of the film’s effects, as though the director could have predicted all of them without the audience’s awareness. In the film, Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. play sergeants in the Royal Army fighting off a murderous Indian cult in colonial British India. Brecht feels himself, as though at a biological level of behavioral response, mirroring their moves, identifying with their roles. And yet, his affective responses are upended when he exits the theater. Looking back, he senses his feelings were manipulated, as were those of everyone watching the film. Like the café owner, the film director made the audience consume, against their conscious will and morals, his (and Kipling’s) politics.

Recall that Brecht admired the café owner’s and the director’s capacity to control response and that he sought to put behavior research to use in the theater. The problem with Stevens’s film is not that he produces “foreseeable effects” on the audience; the problem is not even the politics of the director—Brecht assumed a properly educated political subject could resist suggestive effects—but rather the kind of effects deployed. Brecht is just as critical of “Leftist” suggestive effects as he is of conservative ones. It “is not enough to produce empathy with the proletarian rather than the bourgeois,” he insists, “the entire technique of empathy has become dubious (in principle, it’s entirely conceivable that you could have a bourgeois novel which encourages empathy with a proletarian).”25 Brecht further notes that one can have a “complete theatrical experience” based in a picture of real life that is “entirely misleading” (BP, 121). And if empathy with the proletariat does not constitute a Leftist politics, Brecht also argues the opposite. Consider his seemingly peculiar statement that Hitler’s “general intention, to improve himself by copying others [by studying acting], is not ridiculous—even if his choice of models was” (AP, 195). Hitler understood as well as Brecht the necessity of mimetic models, only Hitler’s were suggestive, while Brecht sought models that would teach one how to guide an audience to reason for themselves.

Empathetic attractions are ubiquitous and normal: human beings mimetically respond to other humans automatically (recall Brecht describing children at a funeral, or kids at a movie). Chopin, café owners, Hollywood film, and bourgeois actors and directors exploit this primordial fact. The point of Brecht’s theater is to introduce cognition into mimesis, to “divide the audience,” to provide space to reflect on, even refuse, one’s affective responses, not just succumb to them. And yet, Brecht also assumes that the kinds of responses his plays produce would lead to certain predictable results. But the predictability of response he intends is not a matter of the viewer’s normal response to stimuli—the products of empathetic identification—but rather to the normative demands of educated response; that is, socially, historically, and culturally saturated, normative responses allow for a failure to respond.

The problem of affective response in Brecht is difficult to see because the normal and the normative overlap so closely on the level of language. Paraphrasing Aristotle’s Poetics, for example, Brecht explains that when the actor imitates events from life those “imitations are supposed to have specific effects on the soul” (BP, 17-18). The crucial mistake of Aristotelian aesthetics is not the production of “specific effects” on the audience, but rather that those effects occur at the level of the psyche or soul, that is, to the biological subject. Aristotle appeals to the normal subject for his research into audience response and that biological body inevitably responds to stimuli in the way that drugs affect any normally functioning biological unit. That is why empathy, in Brecht, is always identified with the effect of drugs.

Like his experience of seeing Gunga Din, Brecht describes sound film as a “blooming branch of the international narcotics traffic” (BT, 153). He watches

entire rows of people transported into a peculiarly doped state, wholly passive, self-engrossed, seemingly the victims of severe poisoning. Their vacant, gaping gaze shows that these people are the helpless and involuntary victims of their unchecked emotions. Trickles of sweat prove how such excesses exhaust them. (BT, 152)

The music-benumbed audience in the grip of a poison attack is not a specific feature of film media. The effects available to silent film are crucial to Brecht because they allow for contradiction, for performances that work “against the sentiment that the music called forth” (a point further made by Eisler and Adorno in Composing for the Films) (BT, 153). Brecht assumes that the intentions behind most silent films are different from those of sound films; it is not a matter of the ontological nature of the medium, as it is in part with music. Brecht rejects predetermined emotional reactions, but not predictable ones. The latter, crucially, allow for a failure to come off and require activation by the viewer—what he called “the active, creative element” in response (BP, 153)26 —while normal response always occurs, whether one assents to it or not.

Shakespeare offers a test case on the difference between empathy and influence. The Philosopher in the Messingkauf Dialogues ribs the Actor about his performance of Lear: “As your Lear cursed his daughters, a bald-headed gentleman next to me started gasping in such an unnatural way that I wondered why, having lost himself completely in your wonderful portrayal of madness, he didn’t start frothing at the mouth” (BP, 22). Brecht’s point here, part of the joke, is that the actor is better than he lets on. The actor cannot actually bring himself to produce a wholly seamless performance, one that hypnotizes the spectator through the actor’s total identification with the fevered Lear. Brecht calls for the abandonment of the “expedient of suggestibility, which comes about as in epilepsy, where the epileptic carries along with him everyone disposed to epilepsy” (AP, 72-73).

Bearing in mind the distinction between normal and normative claims in Brecht’s approach to effects, it is easier to see the potential value of the contemporary sciences. Brecht frequently calls on writers to be aware of the latest developments in the science of the self. “Only very few of our ‘realists,’” he writes, “have … taken notice of the development of views on the human psyche in contemporary science and medical treatment. They are still stuck with an introspective type of psychology, a psychology without experiments, a psychology without history, etc.” (AP, 248). He repeatedly draws on the lessons of “physics” and “modern physiology,” of Pavlov’s experiments with dogs, to explain theater (BP, 18, 38). The Dramaturg in the Messingkauf Dialogues asks about the “direct transfer of emotions” like “when horror is aroused by horrific actions” (BP, 38). The Philosopher explains that at the theater one typically experiences “rich, complex, many-sided incidents which could be compared to those of Pavlov’s dogs: feeding plus bell-ringing” (BP, 34). For a failed actor, these complex events only show “secondary features,” a dulled set of reactions, not the full sweep of emotions, which is why the actor is “making the audience ill, just like Pavlov and the dogs.” Given Brecht’s understanding of the power of suggestive effects, one gathers that the illness is neither a joke nor imagined. The Pavlov experiment finds its way into Mother Courage when Eilif recalls how he strategically starved his soldiers in order to make a raid (a massacre) on peasants storing ox meat. They were so hungry that “their mouths watered if they even heard a word beginning with me … like measles.”27 What Eilif, Hollywood directors, Pavlov, and café owners share is a commitment to hypnotic suggestion and what the audiences share is a susceptibility to its effects.

Brecht’s relation to Pavlov is complicated. Pavlov was largely celebrated by Lenin and his research was supported by the Soviet Union (the admiration did not go both ways as Pavlov held little regard for Lenin). The Marxist revision of Pavlov comes out clearly in the “Threepenny Lawsuit.” Here, Brecht argues, “the reflexes are biological; only in certain films of Chaplin are they already social” (FR, 172). He goes on:

the great American comedies depict the human being as an object, and could have an audience entirely made up of reflexologists. Behaviorism is a psychology that, based on the needs of commodity production, seeks to develop methods to influence the customer, an active psychology, therefore, quintessentially progressive and revolutionary. Its limits are those that correspond to its function in capitalism. (FR, 171-72)

These sentences have been the source of trouble for commentators. It appears that Brecht is distinguishing the café owner or industrialist influencing the customer from the Pavlovian responses of the audience at a Chaplin film. Chaplin performs a scene open to the audience’s evaluation, while the café owner, performing his actions offstage, does not. In this sense, Pavlov was a crucial theorist of the normative. Pavlov showed how one can ring a bell and have the dog attack the owner under the right circumstances. The problem is that this implies that Pavlov, like an actor or director, is someone who could persuade dogs (the viewers of epic theater) of the wrongness and rightness of their salivations (their actions) independent of their associations with food (the object of empathy).

Suggestion/Influence, Empathy/Action

As Brecht explains in a short but important text written at the beginning of 1941, “On the Gradual Approach to the Study and Construction of the Figure,” what needs to be avoided at all costs is a mode of acting that “obscures from the spectator the process by which [the actor] himself gained knowledge of the figure” (BT, 228). To appear before the audience “already transformed” into a character is to show someone “free of influences and therefore also apparently unable to be influenced” (BT, 228). This kind of “general, absolute and abstract person” is the antithesis of the “step-by-step” construction required for properly epic theater. The audience must see how subjectivity is terminally influenced by others, for good and for ill.

In the period between January 11 and February 1, 1941, Brecht’s Journals are filled with discussion of the problem of influence, of how to understand “the social effect of works of art” (J, 130). The question, again, is not whether art has social effects, but what kind they are. In his journal entries Brecht presents a slightly revised picture of epic theater. He now claims that “empathy in non-aristotelian theater” is a “rehearsal measure,” that is, one can use empathy in preparing for a role (J, 124). Above all, Brecht writes, “whatever empathy is achieved should incorporate no element of suggestion, i.e., the audience is not to be induced to empathize too” (J, 124-25). Here, Brecht introduces a crucial distinction between empathy and suggestion, which he elaborates over the next several entries.

Although “in reality” empathy and suggestion “occur separately,” Brecht observes how difficult it is to maintain this distinction in current modes of theatrical production because “an actor … empathizing himself and inducing the audience to empathize (suggestive empathy)” is “identical” (J, 125). “Today’s actor,” he contends, “cannot imagine effects being achieved without empathy, nor effects without suggestion” (J, 125). Even Brechtian performers Helene Weigel and Hermann Greid seem to reject the idea that empathy and suggestion can be separated in practice. Brecht observes that the only performance precedent for this kind of distinction is comedy (and, outside theater, silent film). The question Brecht raises is “can the preventive techniques used in comedy to avoid empathy also be employed by tragic actors”? (J, 125)

In his January 14, 1941, entry Brecht again stresses that the “actor should empathize with person presented in the play” but adds that it should not happen “on a suggestive basis, i.e. not so that the eventual audience would be forced to participate in this empathy” (J, 125). Brecht draws out the artifice of suggestive acting, showing that it is a set of objective techniques. Brecht dissects this artifice: “Tension in certain parts of the muscular system, head movements executed as if pulling on an elastic band, the feet as if wading in tar, intermittent stiffness, sudden changes, moments of restraint, also monotony of voice, remembered from church responses” (J, 125). As Brecht makes clear, suggestion is derived from the literature and practice of hypnosis. Suggestion is a technique the hypnotic operator uses to put their patient into a state of passive openness to the operator’s commands. According to Brecht, a certain pattern of muscle, head, feet, movement, voice “induce hypnosis” and that “snakes, tigers, hawks and actors rival one another in this art” (J, 125-26). That is, snakes, tigers, and hawks use suggestive techniques to lower the defenses of their prey before they pounce and consume them. Above all, Brecht wants to dissociate “convincing, rounded acting” including empathetic acting and its effects from suggestive acting and its effects.

Brecht goes on to describe the traditional acting as a “simultaneous act of auto-suggestion and suggestion: he suggests to himself that he is somebody else, and he suggests to the audience that he is that other person” (J, 126). The actor drugs himself in the performance and induces the audience to feel the same. The classical actor “makes his simulation suggestive, i.e. he forces the audience to go through it with him” (J, 126-27). What marks the suggestive mode of acting as problematic is the automaticity of its effects. The audience is unable to think and feel other than what the actor, as hypnotic operator, wants them to. Brecht’s seemingly casual reference to the hypnotic powers of snakes and tigers is more serious than it appears. He writes that in the “case of hypnosis by snake movements or by the look of a tiger, simulations also occur—of the movements or of rigidity” (J, 127). At this point Brecht hedges some of his more forceful claims about the separability of empathy and suggestion. “I cannot yet see exactly whether the act of empathy (which is an act of auto-suggestion) can be carried out without the suggestion affecting the audience,” he writes. He provocatively describes the possibility of empathetic acting without suggestive effects as “straightforward imitation, which in turn can of course only affect the persons presented” (J, 127). Indeed, marking a surprising shift of emphasis in his theorization of epic theater, he offers that “in the same way as the act of empathy the a-effect can also be used on a suggestive basis” (J, 127). As the latter makes clear, Brecht’s concern bears on suggestive effects, on audience response, rather than on techniques of empathy or alienation.

Despite some equivocation over the separability of empathy/alienation and suggestion, he now writes that for actors “there is sometimes a fear of being unable to achieve any effect at all, except on a suggestive basis.” Rejecting this claim, Brecht returns to his basic supposition: “one thing at least is certain; there are some actors who ‘have presence’ without using any of the known means of suggestion” (J, 127). Brecht briskly closes off the line of inquiry—“I do not set much store by all these speculations”—and considers the problem of empathy and suggestion as a practical manner. “It is more important to find exercises … which produce the desired effects. They are relatively easy to check” (J, 127). How does one check the success of a “desired effect”? Part of the answer is to say that suggestive technique generates a sequence of readable reflex actions. “Is the moment of reality in question sufficiently exposed to causal scrutiny or not?” (J, 127) The latter is possible with any technique other than suggestion.

Almost forty years after Theodor Adorno delivered what had seemed to be a death blow to some of Bertolt Brecht’s most attractive claims, Roberto Schwarz had the audacity to return to a very basic question: How does Brecht mean what he means?2 The problem is precisely that of autonomy, or rather its lack: in Adorno’s essay on the question, the problem of “commitment,” or art’s heteronomy to politics.3

As is well known, Brecht’s theater aims explicitly at autonomy from the market. Entertainment of course precedes the market: opera “was a means of pleasure long before it was a commodity.”4 But under present conditions, “art is a commodity” whose value derives, in the case of opera, from “the social function of the theater apparatus, namely to provide an evening’s entertainment.”5 In Mahagonny, this pleasure is artistically neutralized by framing it:

As for the content of [Mahagonny], its content is pleasure: fun not only as form, but as subject matter. Pleasure is at least to be the object of inquiry, even as the inquiry is to be an object of pleasure. Pleasure enters here in its present historical form: as a commodity.6

The two sides of the chiasmus are not symmetrical. The inquiry as an object of pleasure (Mahagonny) is a commodity; pleasure as an object of inquiry (Mahagonny) is not. Supported by the theater apparatus, epic theater is all the same within it a “foreign body.”7 But autonomy from the market is understood to be heteronomy to something else. The goal of epic theater is “to develop an object of instruction out of the means of enjoyment, and to convert certain institutions from places of entertainment to organs of publicity.”8 Even as the culinary is retained, in other words, Brecht turns the ancient defense of poetry—“delight and teach”—more fundamentally into a choice of priorities: “Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater?”: theater for pleasure or theater for learning?9

Adorno raises an objection to this orientation that is in its essence very basic, and that returns to Hegel’s critique, in the introduction to his lectures on aesthetics, of the possibility of defending art by referring to its ends. From the most abstract perspective, the choice Brecht imposes is no choice at all: both theater for pleasure and theater for learning are theater “for” something; that is, both are to be judged by their effectiveness as a means to some external end. If the work of art is not to “have its end and its aim in itself,” but is rather to be valued as a means to some other end, then the appropriate focus of judgment shifts away from the work of art both to the end it claims to serve and to the efficacy of its status as a means.10 For Hegel’s critique, it matters not at all whether the purported ends are noble or base: Hegel’s offhand list includes “instruction, purification, improvement, financial gain, striving after fame and honor” (64). The point is rather that neither moment—neither that of the work of art’s status as a means (essential or arbitrary?), nor that of the status of the ends to which it is subordinated (desirable or not?)—is self-evident. This applies as well to today’s academic empathy-peddlers, amateur subjectivity-modelers, community do-gooders, and civic boosters as it does to yesterday’s radical theater.

In the early 1950s Adorno is, to say the least, suspicious of the ends to which Brecht is committed. More devastatingly, however, Adorno points to the implausibility of the work of art as a means. In order to do what it claims to do—namely, to “strike in images the being of capitalism” (416)—Brechtian theater has recourse to the technical means available to drama as a medium. But from the perspective of propositional truth, of the revolutionary doctrine the work of art is supposed to contain, these technical means are distortions. And here Adorno does not merely disagree with Brecht, but rather shows Brecht necessarily disagreeing with himself. In Saint Joan of the Stockyards, for example, Brecht legitimately requires a certain level of coincidence to condense an entire ensemble of contradictions onto the single figure of Joan. But “that a strike leadership backed by the Party should entrust a decisive task to a non-member is, even with the greatest latitude for poetic license, as unthinkable as the idea that through the failure of that individual the entire strike should fail” (417). The point here is not that Brecht should have written a treatise on revolutionary action rather than a play, but rather that a play cannot be at the same time a treatise on revolutionary action—or at least, not a good one. Indeed, the very requirement that Saint Joan be a play falsifies the treatise it also claims to be. The ostensible thesis of Saint Joan—that individual do-gooding is a compensatory substitute for collective action—is subverted by the fact that everything hinges—necessarily, since this is a play—on the success or failure of Joan’s individual do-gooding. Rather than, as might be expected, bluntly refuting Brecht’s claims, Adorno folds them delicately into what they seek to oppose, effectively aligning Brecht’s dramaturgy with formal aestheticism. For the next move is to insist that Brecht’s didacticism is in fact a formal principle rather than a political one. “Brecht’s technique of reduction would be legitimate only in the field of ‘art for art’s sake,’ which his version of commitment condemns as it does Lucullus” (419).

The brilliance of Schwarz’s late intervention is to see that this critique is devastating to Brecht’s claim to didactic effectiveness, but not to the play for which this claim is made. The loss is not as great as it might seem: after all, Schwarz reminds us, the Brechtian “lessons” are “of modest scope” and it is not obvious that they remain today ahead of historical developments (43). “Thus, against claims to the contrary, the truth of the plays would not lie in the lessons passed on, in the theorems concerning class conflict, but rather in the objective dynamic of the whole” (44). This is not to say that Brecht’s plays have no cognitive content or that they have no political potency, but rather that their content and their politics are mediated by the self-legislating nature of the autonomous work. As a corrolary, when the work falters as a work, as Mother Courage does in its third act, the ostensible contents and politics of the play scatter to the wind like so many good intentions.

Schwarz’s revelatory re-reading of Saint Joan, which indeed brings this objective dynamic forward, deserves careful attention on its own account, but one aspect is particularly important here. “Relying on his exceptional gift for pastiche, [Brecht] presented the vicissitudes of class conflict and the calculations of the canned-goods cartel… in verses imitative of Schiller, Hölderlin, Faust II, expressionist poetry, or Greek tragedies (perceived as German honoris causa).” In Hölderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny,” for example, which Schwarz highlights as central to the play’s system of citation, human destiny is figured as heroic errancy: to wander without consolation, “Like water from crag / To crag hurled down.” In Saint Joan, it is rather falling stock prices that are “Thrown like water from crag to crag.”11

In its barest outline, specifically modernist pastiche as a reciprocal commentary between the heroic past and the prosaic present is hardly new with Brecht; in terms of conspicuous virtuosity, the “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Ulysses had already developed this mode much further than Brecht ever cared to. But the Brechtian difference is a profound one, which in Schwarz goes by the circumspect label “unity of process” (49), otherwise known as history, or what in yet more abstract terms is the Hegelian “identity of identity and difference.” In other words, the peculiarly Brechtian sting lies not in the difference between the classical source and the modern material, but rather in their identity, which is not only in the design of the artist. The petty brutality of the businessman is the endpoint of romantic striving rather than its negation: “something of Mauler already existed in Faust” (56).

But there is no lesson in this identity, no external end to which the dramatic image is subordinated; rather the two moments of Faust and Mauler are posited as an identity in the dramatic image. That is all. What is presented is not a doctrine but a figure: Faust-as-Mauler, a poetic idea. We learn nothing from this figure about the way capitalism works; rather, Brecht opens up a line of questioning by way of a sensuous configuration. The Brechtian idea is a matter of positing available contents in a particular way: a familiar action (say) as the product of alterable motives rather than human nature; or bourgeois ruthlessness as continuous with bourgeois revolution.

In a well-known series of lists, Brecht contrasts traditional (dramatische) and epic (epische) form.12 Some of the categories are primarily formal (is the sequence of events linear or in curves?), while others are more obviously ideological (are people unchangeable, or are they rather changeable and changing?). But the ideological commitments, which are indeed crucial, cannot be considered lessons. Even if the epic idea—say, “human nature is not given”—could be demonstrated to be correct, all that a play can demonstrate is its plausibility: an Aristotelian category rather than a particularly Brechtian one, and one which Brecht jealously preserves by framing his implausibilities as implausible. Saint Joan is successful precisely because it does not break fundamentally with the norms of art inherited from the early romantics. Doubtless, it critiques these norms, but it critiques them as poetry: indeed, it fulfills rather emphatically Schlegel’s demand that any critique of poetry be itself “poetry through and through and equally a living, vibrant work of art.”13

None of this, and this is the point to emphasize, blunts the materialist edge of Brecht’s critique. Meaning is produced through a poetic critique of poetry, but this does not mean that meaning is restricted to the realm of poetry. The meaning, that is, is deeply compatible with the set of extractable lessons that Brecht is prevented from presenting without crippling distortion by the limitations of the form. Brecht’s critique of Hölderlin and Goethe is along the lines of Marx’s critique of Hegel or indeed Adorno’s critique of Heidegger: by introducing concrete content back into abstract language, Brecht posits an identity between vulgar, everyday social content and sublime, abstract thought. The sublime existential risk of a world universally without guarantee becomes the risk of losing some money. (For others its endpoint, the “Unknown” in Hölderlin’s song, is simply unemployment). Brecht’s poetic idea—the petty manipulation of the stock market (petty in its motivations if not in the damage it wreaks) narrated in the language of human destiny—requires no particular accuracy in its depiction of the operations of the stock market, and is entirely produced by, rather than hindered by, dramatic condensation. When St. Joan is considered, perversely, as being about poetry rather than about capitalism (or about revolutionary organization), it loses none of its Marxist sting, because the ground that unites Faust and Mauler is the historical identity (Schwarz’s “unity of process”) of a class. “Unheroic as bourgeois society is, it nonetheless required heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and the subjugation of nations to bring it into being.”14 The bourgeoisie emerged in blood and glory, but soon enough had to subordinate its grand ideas, and anyone who still thought them, to the business of making money.

Pastiche—again, quite different from the pastiche that is practically standard modernist operating procedure, and also entirely different from the postmodern re-animation of dead forms—functions somewhat differently in The Threepenny Opera, where class-typical behavior is transposed across classes. The obvious example is bourgeois industry transposed to lumpens: Peachum’s begging industry and, climactically, Mac’s “What is the robbing of a bank against the founding of a bank?”15 But the example on which Brecht seems to have expended the most energy, at least following his “hints for actors,” is that of love—or, more accurately, the ideology of love, that discredited “damned ‘can-you-feel-my-heart-beating’ text” (239). When Mac, the notorious criminal, marries Polly, daughter of the begging-agent, his second concurrent wife, in a horse shed, catered by members of his gang, the elements are in place for broad parody. And indeed we get some of that: a bit about the distinction between Chippendale and Louis Quatorze (244), generally omitted from contemporary productions, is pure Marx-brothers buffoonery. But the irony is not as straightforward as it appears.

The actors should avoid representing these bandits as a gang of those pathetic individuals with red kerchiefs about their necks who lively up fairgrounds and with whom no respectable person would drink a glass of beer. They are naturally dignified men: some portly, but all (aside from their profession) sociable. (433)

The spectacle of criminals putting on a bourgeois wedding in a stable is absurd not because the criminals are buffoons but because they are, aside from their profession, bourgeois. (Mauler, the captain of industry in St. Joan, is equally—aside from his profession—sociable). Even the genuine buffoonery conforms to this pattern. The omitted laugh line mentioned above comes at the expense of “Captain” Macheath, the pretentious lumpen, who doesn’t know the difference between Chippendale and Quatorze but pretends he does. Here the buffoonery seems to operate in the expected direction. But his henchmen, who do know the difference, allow themselves to be corrected. So Mac’s ignorance is a luxury, not a deprivation: he isn’t an ignoramus, but a philistine.

So when Mac, in the midst of setting up house in a barn with a stolen Chippendale grandfather clock, intones, a few moments later, “Every beginning is hard,” he is not citing Goethe’s famous line from Hermann und Dorothea, but repeating the cliché it has become. Brecht, on the other hand, is citing Goethe. Goethe’s line continues: “Every beginning is hard; hardest is beginning a household”—this last word translating Wirtschaft, more commonly enterprise or business. This entire scene, with its semi-rustic setting in the middle of London, is a commentary on Hermann and Dorothea: disreputable Mac, in the position of the refugee Dorothea, is repeating the words of the respectable father (and indeed is making a practical match), while it is Polly, at the center of the conflict between the household as centrally an enterprise and the household as centrally a love match, who occupies the position of the son, and who indeed embodies the contradictory impulses embodied in Goethe’s “Wirtschaft”:

It is absolutely desirable that Polly Peachum should impress the audience as a virtuous and agreeable girl. If in the second scene she has demonstrated her entirely disinterested love, now she exhibits that practical outlook without which the first had been mere frivolity. (434)

The manifold overtones of this parody could be pleasurably pursued into the deepest nooks and crannies of the scene, but the import of this moment for now is that while the scene is clearly about class—specifically, the economic content of bourgeois sentiment—it is only about class by being first about poetry.

Of course, there is more to theater than poetry. “Epic theater is gestic,” wrote Benjamin. “To what extent it can be poetic in the traditional sense is a separate matter.”16 But what is the Brechtian Gest? For Benjamin, it is a matter of interruption, which is to say a question of framing. Benjamin draws the appropriate conclusion from this:

In short, the action [is] interrupted. We may go further here and consider that interruption is one of the fundamental procedures of all form-giving. It reaches far beyond the sphere of art. It is, to pick out just one aspect, the basis of quotation. Quoting a text implies breaking ties with its context. It makes sense, therefore, that epic theatre, which is based on interruption, is quotable in a specific sense. The quotability of its texts would be nothing extraordinary. That of the gestures it makes use of is another matter entirely.

“To make gestures quotable” is one of the essential accomplishments of epic theatre.17

But the issue of quotation, far from being “a separate matter” from that of Brecht’s traditional literariness, is the core of his traditional literariness. The quotation—the twisting and turning repetition of Hölderlin’s “crag to crag,” the ironic repetition of Goethe’s “Every beginning is difficult”—is precisely gestic; indeed, as we have seen, the latter poetic gesture is intimately bound up with an ensemble of other gestures: those of Polly, Mac, and Mac’s subordinates. “From where does epic theater take its gestures?” asks Benjamin. “The gestures are found in reality.”18 Surely correct, but not very helpful. From what order of reality does epic theater take its gestures? Brecht “makes gestures quotable” precisely by quoting them—which is to say they are already quotable. The order from which they are taken is textual. The “damned ‘can-you-feel-my-heart-beating’ text” (239) may refer to romantic Lieder, just as “Every beginning is difficult” refers to Goethe. But it belongs equally to the ways lovers act with each other, just as uttering platitudes belongs to the way people act at a wedding. These are two different kinds of text—the gesture proper may experience itself as spontaneous, while the literary gesture is part of a self-overcoming aesthetic field—but they are both texts nonetheles, or else they would not be quotable. When, in The Godfather, Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, fleetingly registers the fact that his own hands do not shake as he lights a cigarette during a life-or-death bluff, this is a powerfully effective actorly gesture. But since it belongs only to the narrative situation, it is not a social citation and therefore not a Brechtian gesture—a fact which does not preclude an esoteric citation of other filmic cigarrette-lightings. As the notes for actors make clear, narrowly gestic elements are a matter of embodied ideology, a social script: “Efforts not to slip on a slick surface become a social gest as soon as slipping would mean losing face.”19 The procedure followed in both Brechtian pastiche and gestic acting is the same, namely citation, or framing a preexisting text in order to create a unit of meaning.

With reference to music the question of gesture acquires a new density. In “On the Gestic Character of Music,” which precedes Brecht’s first published comments on gesture, Kurt Weill proclaimed that “today the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment.”20 Weill is contending here with the Brechtian problem of the entertainment-commodity. But what is proposed here is both more radical and less prudish than his statement suggests. The target of Weill’s criticism is the “theater of the past epoch,” which was “written for sensual enjoyment. It wanted to titillate, to irritate, to arouse, to upset [kitzeln, erregen, aufpeitschen, umwerfen] the spectator.”21 So “to irritate” and “to upset” are included under the heading of “sensual enjoyment.” Indeed what Weill forbids to what he calls “gestic music” is to provoke any kind of affective state in the spectator. This is not really a surprise, being very much in line with Brecht’s anathematization of such theatrical effects as “coerced empathy.”22

But surely the production of affective states in listeners is part and parcel of what music is: to take only the most basic element, any perceived musical beat is enough to organize the internal or external movements of a listener.23 In the first episode of the 1967 television series The Prisoner, the fact that the village is a totalitarian dystopia is established not by the video panopticon, which can in the end be evaded, but by the fact that the soothing music cannot be turned off. Hegel, no expert on music, did however understand this: while poetry expresses (ausspricht) an idea—which is then part of the meaning of the work—music can at most provoke one (den Anstoß geben)—an idea which is then merely “ours,” not part of the work itself.24 Weill seems to have painted himself into a corner: the thing music is forbidden to do is precisely the thing that distinguishes music from the other arts.

We will come to Weill’s solution in a moment. But we should take a minute to appreciate that any solution to Weill’s dilemma will also solve a dilemma for us. For what music does par excellence—provoke affective states in listeners—absolutely forecloses, under current conditions, the possibility of its being a medium for artworks. For any provoked effect is, under current conditions, always already a commodity—as Schwarz puts it elsewhere, “In a capitalist regime, any form of utility suffices to make anything or anyone ‘an official member of the world of commodities’ (Marx, Das Kapital II, 20.8).”25 If “in a capitalist society, production for the market permeates the social order as a whole, then concrete forms of activity cease to have their justifications in themselves. Their end is external, their particular forms inessential.”26 In other words, no commodity can plausibly produce a meaning—whose end is by definition essential—and no musical subjective effect is, under current conditions, not a commodity.27 This has the unhappy consequence that the music one likes is, insofar as its ends are bound up with effects for which one likes it, excluded from the category of art. So the question of how to produce music whose aim is not to produce effects is an urgent one.

The paradigmatic modernist solution—the purely music-immanent exploration of music as a medium—is, however, precisely what Weill seeks to overcome:

The recent development of music has been predominantly aesthetic: emancipation from the nineteenth century, struggle against extra-musical influences (program music, symbolism, realism), return to absolute music. […] Today we are a step further. A clear separation is taking place between those musicians who… as if in a private club, work on the solution to aesthetic problems, and others who will undertake to engage any audience whatever.28

Even as the moment of music-immanent development is seen as a forward step, two contrary imperatives are suggested at once: to engage an audience beyond the specialized restricted field of musicians and experts, and to produce meanings beyond those that only the restricted audience cares about, which is to say meanings that are not purely music-immanent. These two imperatives seem to be aligned, and they have a certain populism in common. In fact, as Weill is well aware, they are deeply in conflict. In a market society, the first imperative can be satisfied only by risking the market—“any audience whatever.” But the second imperative, to produce political meanings of the kind Weill is after, is one that the market is indifferent to; one which, in fact, is unmarketable, since meanings that can be sold—that is, meanings for which there is a demand—are not meanings at all, but commodities. A political meaning that satisfies a demand is not a meaning, but a purchasable point of social identification.

What is Weill’s solution? His own commentary in “On the Gestic Character of Music” and elsewhere is not particularly helpful on this score. But his practice is quite clear. The “Cannon Song” from Threepenny Opera is a martial variant of a barroom singalong, what might be classified generically as a barrack-room ballad. Like all good singalongs, it may well move a listener familiar with the piece to want to sing along, and the reason that it has this power might be something brain science or some other discipline can one day explain. Then again, some listeners may not be so moved, and the failure to be moved is in principle susceptible to explanation. But for Weill, this effect or its lack is irrelevant. The “barrack-room ballad”—the phrase is Kipling’s—is in Weill’s hands a gest, which is to say, a citation. Cannon Song frames the gesture, and in so doing creates a meaning, which is to present military camaraderie as deeply creepy.

Brecht’s text is also a citation, a pastiche of Kipling’s martial ditties like “Screw Guns”:

For you all love the screw-guns—
the screw-guns they all love you!

So when we call round with a few guns,
o’ course you know what to do—hoo! hoo!

Jest send your Chief an’ surrender —
it’s worse if you fights or you runs:

You can go where you please,
you can skid up the trees,
but you don’t get away from the guns.29

In Brecht’s text, racism and genocide move from (barely) subtext to text in a way that is deliberately unsubtle. On the page it falls a bit flat, but in Weill’s rousing mess-hall setting it is quite spectacular:

The troops live under
The cannons’ thunder
From cape to Cooch Behar.
And if it rained one day,
And they had chanced to stray
Across a different race,
Brown or pale of face,
They made them, if they liked,
Into their beefsteak tartare.30

What is the source of “Cannon Song”’s creepiness? Like so many of the songs in Threepenny, the tempo marking is already a citation: “Foxtrot-Tempo.”31 The basic rhythm is indeed a foxtrot (foursquare rhythm with accents on the offbeats), and the introductory trumpet part develops a jazzy motif, culminating in the ragtime cliché of bar six. But the “swing” of the initial motif is written in as a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note, and meant to be played as written, so it jerks rather than swings. The antiphonal saxophone line recalls jazz call and response—except it arrives a beat early, interrupting and disrupting the trumpet line rather than repeating and endorsing it. The introductory bars do not lead to the tonality of the verse, but rather have no obvious tonal center or direction. The angular melodic line of the introduction—as becomes clear when, in the first repetition of the initial idea, the interval of a fifth is tightened up to an augmented fourth in bar three—is not about to subordinate itself to the business of dancing. Meanwhile, the instrumentation—in particular, the use of the lower brass—emphasizes the relationship between popular dance music and marching music, a connection which bears on the meaning of the song. When the song lands on a tonal center (bar seven), the underlying harmonic movement becomes conventional, tied to the cycle of fourths (see particularly bars 14-16), which can be intuited or arrived at analytically. But this structure is estranged by avoiding triads, and the movements they imply, almost entirely: the harmonic surface consists of paired sets of fifths juxtaposed on the on and off beats. The result is both estranging—the movements are conventional, but now robbed of any illusion of necessity—and vaguely orientalizing, which is emphasized by the largely pentatonic melody. The song finally becomes diatonic and tonally centered only with the martial refrain, which, in a series of descending half notes (“cape to Cooch Behar”), spells out a minor chord (F# minor) and lands on its dominant—the first conventionally outlined chord of the song. This is the music of the beer hall—or the recruiting station. But the middle voice, a teetotaler or a pacifist, already puts this tonality in doubt. The dominant lasts disorientingly long, tightening up into a diminished chord rather than resolving. Finally, at the height of the barbarism of the lyrics, arrives a cadence that centers on another fully spelled out dominant, which occurs in bar 34, at the climax of the song (the “beefsteak” before “tartare”). But the implied cadence is doubly false, both misleading about where it is going and where it is coming from. It ought to lead to A minor, but leads to D minor instead. And while the melody at “They made them, if they liked” (measure 32) suggests that we are still essentially in F# minor, measure 33 is already in D minor. So the false cadence is not only false, but rather than lead somewhere surprising, it leads exactly nowhere. The overall effect, if one cares to look at it this closely, is to remove all sense of naturalness from the underlying conventional structures. The song hews just close enough to conventional forms—foxtrot, march, barrack-room ballad; cycle of fourths, largely nachsingbare melody, climactic cadence—to borrow their effects, while at the same time denaturalizing them by formal means which are not effects except inasmuch as they aim at the variously translated Brechtian “disidentification effect,” which in the terms of the present study is not strictly an effect but rather a set of techniques for forestalling or framing effects and subordinating them to interpretations. All this is simply to read as immanent to the song what it is hard to imagine any listener denying, namely that the product of these formal distortions is deeply creepy.

“Today the composer may no longer approach his text from a position of sensual enjoyment.” If one imagines setting a war anthem in a state-sanctioned patriotic film, the first thing on the composer’s mind would be producing the singalong effect, an identificatory esprit de corps, in as many people as possible. If one imagines setting one in a commercial film, the first thing on the composer’s mind would be the same, but for a different reason: to appeal to as many people as possible who already want to experience identificatory esprit de corps. Brecht’s and Weill’s version functions entirely differently, since you need not feel the force of the singalong (though you do need to understand its system of references, if not with any specificity) to understand Weill’s meaning, which is to fuse the brutality of Brecht’s lyric with the social cohesion of military esprit de corps, not after all so different than that of the dance hall, and in doing so to impose an interpretation.

But chances are you will feel its force: “Cannon Song” remains, all this aside, a rousing air. This is irrelevant to “Cannon Song”’s meaning as a work of art, but it is far from irrelevant to “Cannon Song”’s success as a popular entertainment. As Brecht says, “Theater remains theater, even when it is didactic theater; and so long is it is good theater, it is entertaining.”32 If “Cannon Song” failed as a rousing air, that would not change its meaning; but nor would Threepenny have been, in the five years before the Nazis came to power, translated into eighteen languages and been performed more than 10,000 times, and nor would we be talking about it today.33 “Up to the stable scene the audience seemed cold and apathetic, as though convinced in advance that it had come to a certain flop. Then after the Kanonen song, an unbelievable roar went up, and from that point it was wonderfully, intoxicatingly clear that the public was with us.”34

“No opera here!” (245) demands Mac, in a work called an opera, a word intended as little ironically as the “threepenny” that precedes it.35 The gesture is echoed (but not cited) some twenty years later, in Rio de Janeiro, by Janet de Almeida and Haroldo Barbosa:

Why Argue with Madame?

Madame says the race won’t improve
That things are going downhill because of samba
Madame says samba brings sin
That samba should be put out of its misery
Madame says samba is nothing but race mixing
Color mixing and cachaça
Madame says that the democratic samba
Is cheap music with no value

Let’s be done with samba
Madame doesn’t like anyone to samba
All she can say is samba is shameful
Why argue with Madame?

Doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo doo
Doo doo doo

Next Carnaval, sure,
My block from up in the ‘hood will sing opera
On the street among the press of thousands
You’ll see us all singing a concerto
Madame has a screw loose,
She only talks poison, my God what a shrew
Samba, democratic, Brazilian
To the roots, that’s what has value.36

The cast of characters seems straightforward: Madame; the protagonist, who lives in a working class neighborhood, belongs to a samba school, and is presumably in Madame’s employ; and the samba school, a metonym for the “press of thousands” at Carnaval, itself a metonym for the Brazilian people. Digging a little deeper, one learns that “Madame” was a real person, the conservative cultural critic Magdala da Gama de Oliveira, otherwise known as “Maggy,” who occupied highly visible perches on radio and in the journal Diário de Notícias, and whom the journalist and composer Fernando Lobo had recently apostrophized in a critical essay as “Madame.”37 So from a historical perspective the position of the protagonist becomes more complicated: he is still working class, but the conflict between him and Madame is only metaphorically a class conflict, since the cultural conflict it centers on takes place entirely among journalists: not only “Maggy” and Lobo but also Almeida and Barbosa were journalists as well as, in the case of the latter three, composers.

As suggestive as it is, this historical meaning is essentially a private one. It is a professional spat, not without interest, that a little research allows us to eavesdrop on. It is symptomatic of a recognizable ideological field. But no attempt is made to inscribe this historical meaning in a normative field, and as far as the meaning of the song goes, we are pretty much back where we started.

Or we would be but for the little wordless interlude before the final stanza, which is a close paraphrase of measures 20-24 of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1.38 Here the historical meaning of the song—the appropriation of the political subjectivity of the working class by the progressive bourgeoisie—is inscribed directly in the musical material. Not content to be more democratic and sensible than Madame (and presumably a better dancer), the protagonist must show himself to be more erudite as well: an advantage not available to the man from the hill neighborhoods. Without the interlude, “singing a concerto” is the approximate speech of one who doesn’t have any very precise idea of what a concerto is. After the interlude, “singing concertos” is a winking reference, in case we missed it, to what has just been accomplished. In other words, the lyrical voice identifies with the working class—but only when “Madame” is in the third person, that is when he addresses himself to the “people,” which is to say the lower orders plus the progressive bourgeoisie. But the borrowed passage from Tchaikovsky is, out of earshot from the hills, addressed only to Madame, to the bourgeoisie as such.

Much more can be said about this peculiar combination of popular identification and ironic distance, which has not disappeared from progressive Brazilian discourse, than is relevant to the argument at hand. What is important for the moment is that musical form only has meaning here as a citation, of which there are now two: the borrowing from Tchaikovsky, and what, in the light of the Tchaikovsky, appears as a borrowing of the samba form. But in neither case does musical form mean anything outside of its status as a citation: to the world of erudite music on one hand, and to the world of (idealized or real) communally organic musical form on the other. However, citation works here precisely the opposite of how it works in Brecht and Weill. In the earlier case, citation is a technique of disidentification, for freeing the dramatic work from the obligation of producing an empathic relation to the action and replacing it with a questioning one. In the later, it is a technique for producing a double identification: the first one public and universal (the identification of the lyrical voice with the people), the second private and particular (the identification of the lyrical voice with the cultural elite).

One is tempted to point out that the choice of Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto is a particularly appropriate one, since there too a folk dance, in this case Ukrainian, is contrasted with a Romantic theme, or because its long introductory melody, from which Almeida’s and Barbosa’s quote is taken, is an easily digestible line that can be absorbed by the culture industry without difficulty.39 But in the above-cited interview, where Barbosa sings a bit of the interlude, there is nothing to suggest he regards the song as anything but a jeu d’esprit, an unframed gesture.40 The framed, Brechtian equivalent might involve one actor saying something quite reasonable to another while surreptitiously winking to the audience. But the unframed wink is not an idea about duplicity but rather duplicity itself.

It would have been convenient for the current discussion if João Gilberto, in rescuing the song from oblivion, had overcome this duplicity in Brechtian fashion. However, bossa nova is a resolutely anti-theatrical form (“Retrato em branco e preto,” which Gilberto performs immediately before “Pra que discutir com Madame” in a famous concert, begins with a cluster of small intervals that mimics—in Chico Buarque’s lyrics, in Tom Jobim’s composition, and in Gilberto’s interpretation—a man mumbling to himself) and has no interest in working through theatricality and coming out the other side.41 Rather, in Gilberto’s performance the social conflict that Almeida’s and Barbosa’s lyric embodies is turned—as is the case with bossa nova generally—into a problem that musical form attempts to supersede. Though both the approach and the politics are quite different, the problem invented and confronted by the bossa nova generation is Weill’s: “to create a music capable of satisfying the musical needs of broader strata of society, without giving up artistic substance.”42 In other words, the project of the bossa nova generation is to exploit fully the real advances made possible by class segmentation, while creating a music that in principle does not depend on that segmentation for its reception. Or, in yet other words, to produce an art music that is not an elite music, a music that is samba and Tchaikovsky at once.

Compared to the work of the bossa nova composers, “Pra que discutir com Madame” is, but for the interpellated Tchaikovsky, compositionally banal. It seems likely that it was revived by Gilberto for its thematic relevance to the bossa nova project rather than any particular formal interest. However, the basic innovations of bossa nova form are, in Gilberto’s performance, in place: the chord structure is highly textured with elaborations from the upper extensions; the guitar rhythm is complex, derived from samba: the thumb operating, on the pulse, independently from the other fingers, which structure the rhythm in syncopated variations that suggest (though this is an illusion) a complete improvisational freedom from repetition; the vocal line combines a vibrato- and glissando-free technique, an almost conversational vocal quality (essential to its fundamental anti-theatricality), extraordinarily precise intonation, and, most importantly, the constant suggestion of a completely unfettered relationship to both the pulse and the syncopated line. When these elements are all performed by one person, such that the relationship among the three central elements of pulse, chordal rhythm, and vocals is at every point intended, the result is a performance of exceptional musical density. An index of this density is that in concert Gilberto often repeats an entire form three or more times—and yet one never has a sense of repetitiveness, to the point of not recognizing the repeat when it comes. But bossa nova remains a popular art form: not only are the songs themselves, even when they are of substantial formal interest, accessible, but the individual elements are within the reach of anyone who wants to learn them.

Much more can be said about the aesthetic ideology of bossa nova, which is the musical exponent of a developmental populism whose central ideologeme, full of contradictory implications, is the development of productive forces unmediatedly in the interests of the entire national population. The point to emphasize at the moment, however, is that the eclipse of bossa nova is not an artistic endpoint but an historical one, as developmental populism is decisively displaced by military coup, dictatorship, and integration with North American capital. Bossa nova itself continues to evolve after its historical relevance has faded, reaching an artistic zenith in the early 1970s with Jobim’s “Águas de março.”43 But by the time “Águas de março” had been recorded (1972), a new movement, Tropicália, had already come and gone. Indeed, bossa nova had already become a subject for pastiche by the musicians of the Tropicália movement: Caetano Veloso’s “Coração vagabundo,” from 1967, is a superb bossa nova—but it is a master’s thesis on Tom Jobim’s compositional technique, not a development of it or out of it.44

After the coup, the drive to modernize the Brazilian economy continues, but now severed from the drive to develop the economy more or less evenly. The new music of the dictatorship period, Tropicália, brutally reorients the dialectic of the most ambitious Brazilian music. The elements to be drawn together musically are no longer high and low—between which no identity, real or ideal, is imagined—but modern and archaic elements, which are not to be synthesized but allowed to exist in patent contradiction. In the manifesto-song “Tropicália,” for example, the refrain sections are organized into paired opposites.45 But these are organized along the lines of temporal contradiction, not class contradiction: bossa nova versus straw huts, Ipanema versus Iracema—but never straw huts versus Ipanema.46 In another manifesto-song, “Panis et Circenses,” these contradictions become a matter of form.47 The melody is deliberately insipid—an awkward live performance from the period serves as well as a valiant effort by the great Marisa Monte to show how hard it is to make “Panis et Circenses” into a conventionally good song. This little melody, performed as flatfootedly as possible; a military fanfare; an anticlimactic perfect cadence followed by an awkward silence; a half-note accompaniment that kindergarteners could perform; all of these are buried under the weight of contemporary recording techniques, particularly tape montage—a decelerando performed by a thumb on the tape reel, desultory dinner conversation, the Blue Danube—under the direction of Rogério Duprat, who had trained with Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. As Roberto Schwarz says of this Tropicalist effect, which exposes tacky content to “the white light of the ultra-modern,” it is “like a family secret dragged into the street.”48

Tropicália, which has been glossed over far too quickly here,  marks a pivotal moment. The brutality and rapidity of the transition from a proto-socialist to a right-wing society integrated with Northern capital having taken place practically overnight, Tropicália registers all the contradictions of what will come to be called postmodernism in a form that still marks them as monstrous. However, the mark it left on Brazilian music was probably less in the music itself, and more in the training it afforded a generation of Brazilian musicians. Indeed, already by Veloso’s 1969 “white album,” an entirely new project, developed from but distinct from that of Tropicália, had emerged in its full outlines.49 The first thing one notices about Veloso is the album’s diversity of covers: a traditional Bahian maritime song, a cynical tango from the 1930s, an overwrought ballad from the 1940s, and a recently recorded bossa nova. Then there are pure pastiches: a march in the style of the electic Carnaval bands, a Portuguese fado, and a stab each at brit-pop psychedelia and album rock.50 Only with the final two tracks on the album—one each by Veloso and by Gilberto Gil, his primary collaborator and guitarist on the album—do we approach recognizable tropicalist procedures. “Acrilírico”—a portmanteau word combining “acrylic” (new and synthetic) and “lyric” (ancient and organic) and producing “bitter” between them—is a spoken concrete poem including taped sound fragments. Gil’s “Alfômega,” perhaps the distillation of the gleeful antisociality of Trópicalia, cruelly builds concretist wordplay around the Portuguese word for illiteracy, and sets it within what is essentially a rock song, performed here in a way that can only be described as groovy—leaving the question open as to whether the setting is a specimen of advanced or peripherally derivative culture. But surely, in the light of what has gone before, these last two tracks are not to be understood any differently than the other ten: Tropicália is included in the miscellany, not the principle of the miscellany itself. From the standpoint of the 1969 album, the logic of Tropicália has already been superseded.

Except where to do so would deform the musical material beyond recognition, the album’s material is treated uniformly throughout, so “Chuvas de verão” (a samba-canção by Fernando Lobo, from the same period as “Pra que discutir com Madame”) can serve to illustrate the procedure followed in the album as a whole. The orchestral embellishments and interludes in Francisco Alves’s 1948 recording are dispensed with. (The flute line is alluded to in a brief whistled introduction which, unlike the original, does not deviate from the structure of the song itself). The entire rhythmic and harmonic structure—the former greatly diversified and loosened up, though aligned closely with the pulse and still, like the original, a samba-canção—are brought within Gil’s guitar line, whose virtuosity is entirely unobtrusive. The vocals are sung without vibrato or glissando, pitched very precisely, and recorded close to the microphone, such that the vocal quality is intimate: even when the vocals sweep upward (for example at the first vocal line and particularly at “trazer uma aflição”), the dynamic range is kept narrow, so that the dramatic effect of the wide interval emphasized in the original recording is minimalized and, as it were, internalized. (Even in “Atrás do trio elétrico,” the vocals are double-tracked rather than sung loudly). In other words, though the song is not a bossa nova, the procedures followed so far follow bossa nova sensibilities. The studio production is peculiarly noteworthy. Rogério Duprat adds an orchestral part that is, on its own, a fine and tasteful accompaniment, far better than the original to which it also occasionally alludes. But the aural qualities of the orchestral line are completely different from the guitar and vocal parts: it is as though the latter were recorded in a bedroom, the former in a cathedral. The overall effect is the opposite of most studio production. Instead of producing the illusion of a seamless performance, where “the process of fusion reaches out to the spectator, who is fused right in and now represents a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art,” the result is a “radical separation of the elements.”51 And this is for entirely Brechtian reasons. The orchestral line is far too high in the mix. Since the orchestral accompaniment is intermittent, this serves to separate it further from the guitar and vocal basis rather than drowning it out; but it also dramatizes the “great primal war” between structure and embellishment, which cannot be simply eliminated, as it is part of the popular form. Instead of being combined to produce an effect, the elements are separated to problematize a relationship.

In confirmation of all this, the orchestral parts are mixed down in just one channel, so that if one earphone is removed, or the balance is turned all the way to one side, they can be completely eliminated. (The guitar and vocal parts are mixed down in both channels, and so cannot be eliminated). The struggle between structure and embellishment is thus decided in favor of structure. This is far too easy. Like the last minute of The Hurt Locker, it answers the question it was supposed to be asking: totally obscured is the role embellishment plays in the structure itself. What is important to note at present, however, is that this procedure is quite different from the Tropicalist one. Whereas earlier Duprat and his collaborators had used the recording studio to ironize brutally the cultural raw materials that were brought into it, here the studio frames the musical material—which now appears as structure rather than as raw material—without assuming a position superior to it. There is, in other words, no irony in the new relation to the material.

The one possible exception makes an interesting case. The recording of Chico Buarque’s “Carolina” was received scandalously, as an ironic attack on Buarque. Without context, it is hard to see why. Buarque’s recording is dominated by an orchestral accompaniment that is by turns saccharine (strings) and tacky (muted horns), and with an embarrassingly—for a Brazilian recording, almost unbelievably—lame percussion line, played on hi-hat. Indeed the whole recording is not a bad approximation of a bad American approximation of bossa nova. Buarque himself does not do much with the vocal line except occasionally sing it out of tune. Not even Buarque himself much cared for “Carolina,” which comes out as a far more interesting piece of music in Veloso’s version.52 The song is stripped bare in precisely the same fashion as “Chuvas de verão” (the orchestral line does not even enter until the final fifteen seconds or so of the song), with Gil producing a marvelous distillation and revision of the rhythmic and harmonic structure on guitar, adding some color and complexity to the basically uniform pulse—a discreet rock shuffle is briefly introduced—and diatonic structure of the source material.

Nonetheless, it is hard to see Veloso’s “Carolina” as other than parodic. Buarque is at that moment a hero of the large and culturally hegemonic Left, which is friendly to Marxism even where the latter is not fully incorporated conceptually. Veloso, though he emerges from this Left—one of his first musical commissions was incidental music for a production of a Lehrstück of Brecht’s, The Exception and the Rule—is a figure for what looks in retrospect like an insurgent liberalism. Buarque is, meanwhile, a talented amateur but an amateur nonetheless. “Professionalism” is a privileged term in Veloso’s vocabulary as it was for Brazil’s first “cannibal” modernisms; it entails the market, without doubt, but it more immediately refers to the anti-imperialism of cultural import substitution, the development of a local culture industry sufficiently specialized to be able to compete with progressive first-world culture on the latter’s own terms. This is the aesthetic ideology of peripheral modernists from James Joyce to Oswald de Andrade to Chinua Achebe, and it relegates amateurism to “dilettantism” (according to Júlio Medaglia, a vanguard composer and tropicalist arranger) and putatively authentic culture to “macumba for tourists” (according to Oswald de Andrade, in a phrase the tropicalists were fond of citing). When Veloso sings “Carolina” with lazy intonation—seen nowhere else on the album and virtually nowhere else in his oeuvre—it is hard not to see the gesture as deliberate. Further, the lyrics—a reminiscence of a failed seduction—lend themselves easily to a political interpretation, the cold Carolina representing the bourgeoisie that turns its back on “a blooming rose, everybody dancing, a falling star,” the lyrical voice representing the revolutionary vanguard trying to show it all these things. Whether the song is taken to be purely romantic or as a political allegory, the lyrical voice paints himself in a too-flattering light. Veloso’s interpretation, sung barely above a whisper, provides just enough internal distance from the lyric to turn it into a dramatic monologue, the dashing revolutionary revealing himself as a lazy lothario whom Carolina may have been wise to ignore.

In an early account, Veloso claims that the inspiration for the recording was a girl, the “antimuse of Brazil” (“antimusical” being a key word in the bossa nova manifesto-song “Desafinado,” “Out of Tune”) singing “Carolina” on a televised amateur talent contest.53 This is scarcely credible. On the other hand, it confirms, precisely in its incredibility, everything said above. As much as the inflated sentiments of 1940s popular song, traditional maritime melodies, Carnaval marches, Portuguese fado, and so on, a robust sub-professional musical culture is a part of (a precondition of) the exceptional professional musical culture in Brazil. In other words, this account is an attempt to make “Carolina” consistent with the rest of the album, and if this is implausible, that marks a failure of “Carolina,” not a misunderstanding of the aims of the album. A later account is more plausible, and more interesting still. “When I recorded ‘Carolina’ in an estranging way [is the Brechtian adjective intentional?]… [i]t was not necessary to attack Chico to affirm our position. We were certain that Chico’s creation itself would benefit by its own relativization.” To “relativize” without “attacking,” indeed to turn into art by relativizing, to estrange: in other words, to frame. This is the mode of the album itself. And indeed, it is this account that finally fits the musical facts. The ambivalences of “Carolina” are highlighted, even as the musical distillation itself is nonjudgmental, even reverential.

On the procedure outlined here, and on the logic of the separation of elements it entails, all of the lyrical content of the album is radically relativized in the same way as that of “Carolina.” “Os Argonautas” may move you to a beautiful seafaring resignation (“To navigate is necessary; to live is not”); “Atrás do trio elétrico” may make you want to dance behind a massive Carnaval bandstand (“Behind the electric trio, only the dead don’t go”); “Alfômega” may fill you with a properly rock euphoria entirely inappropriate to its content. Because they are good songs, they probably will; and the affective jolt they provoke is their market raison d’être. But whether they do or not, they are unavoidably about these affective states, which is a raison d’être of a completely different order.

The approach to producing meaning is quite in line with that pursued by Weill and Brecht; the meaning produced is, of course, quite different. The post-Tropicália project is, as Veloso and Gil write in a song (from the 1993 album Tropicália 2) about Brazilian Cinema Novo, “conversas sobre jeitos do Brasil,” conversations about characteristic Brazilian ways and attitudes. What emerges from the album as a whole is a musical portrait of Brazil, elaborated from a certain standpoint, necessarily incomplete, and by no means excluding foreign influences.54 Indeed, this is the mode of Veloso’s career henceforth. Tropicália 2 is, from the standpoint of the current argument, misnamed: it is, practically track for track (though none of the songs are repeated) a sequel not to the original Tropicália but rather to Veloso’s 1969 “white album.”55 This mode has become in no small measure that of ambitious Brazilian music itself, from musicians as divergent in their tastes, approach, and level of seriousness as Lenine and Daniela Mercury.

The ideological limits of this project are obvious. In principle there is no reason these ways and attitudes cannot, as they are in Brecht and Weill, be class attitudes, professional attitudes, historical attitudes, and so on. But in that case the national frame would be relativized, and in practice the relevant categories tend to be regional, and historical in the very limited sense of being credited with having contributed to the Brazilian national character. The project sits entirely comfortably with Veloso’s liberalism (and with contemporary American, and increasingly globally hegemonic, cultural neoliberalism). A rather better son of the bourgeoisie than he imagined in 1964, Veloso’s world view is one of profound sympathy with the lower orders, who after all make most of Brazil’s music. But the sympathy does not extend to an inclination to share political or economic power with wider strata of society, and indeed Veloso’s attitude toward a real democratization of political and economic power can in the balance hardly be viewed as progressive.56

As may have been glimpsed here and there in the above account, this attitude has its own, particularly Brazilian trajectory. But it is not unique to Brazil. A profoundly egalitarian attitude combined with a high tolerance for material inequality emerges, in Schiller, virtually with the aesthetic itself:

In the aesthetic state everything—even the tool that serves—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest. […] Here, in the realm of aesthetic appearance, the ideal of equality—which the political fanatic would fain see realized—will be fulfilled.57

Of course, the thing that, more than any other, reorganizes material, hierarchical relationships into mere differences—classes into niches—is the market. Roberto Schwarz summarizes the tropicalist position:

[The] reconciliation of the present with itself, in all its levels, without exclusions, was the—more satirical than complacent?—imitation of or subjective assimilation to the point of view of commercial cultural programming. Radio stations and TV also cover the gamut of the public’s interests, without regard to what is regressive or advanced, so long as they are profitable. A world full of differences and without antagonisms begins to look like an enormous market.58

Schwarz is speaking here of Tropicália; if it is correct that the post-Tropicália moment subtracts the irony from the tropicálist procedure, then the satirical option disappears, and one is left only with the complacent assimilation to the market. And indeed, Veloso embraces this interpretation. In concert, before singing a song in Spanish, Veloso launches into a digression about how singing in foreign languages grants a kind of privileged access to the Other. A beat, then: “It’s also good for market exposure.” Veloso means both statements sincerely, but the laugh line only works because of their asymmetry: the second puts the first in doubt, but not the reverse.

A cynical position is, however, preferable to a naïve one, and Veloso recognized early on that not recognizing market considerations—“many times the only decisive ones”—was no longer an option.59 “The important thing for us,” wrote Weill in a letter to the Musikblatter des Anbruchs in 1929, “is that here, for the first time, the breakthrough into a consumer industry has been achieved.”60 Both Weill and Veloso, in order to reach “broader strata of society,” skirt the edges of Gebrauchsmusik, music that fulfills a certain, in this case affective, need. Weill risks the market by choice. For Veloso, as we shall see, there is no choice to be made; after the dramatic foreclosure of the real possibility of a non-market society, he understands himself to be already contending with a situation in which it is unmediatedly the case that “any form of utility suffices to make anything or anyone ‘an official member of the world of commodities.’” In an 1974 interview, Veloso outlines with remarkable concision the overpowering of restricted fields by the culture industry: “On one hand, Music, violated by a new communicational process, is forced into both innovation and slavery; on the other hand, Music protected and impotent.”61 Cynicism and clear-headedness, both present, become difficult to discern.

We have arrived at least at an approximate sense of the ideological content of Veloso’s “conversation about Brazilian ways”: a liberal image of a country full of differences but without conflicts, an image that looks uncannily like the market. The practice of pastiche is directly implied by the real absorption of culture into the market, a process which Veloso both ambivalently celebrates and observes with stark clarity. The old meanings—modernist ones, bossa nova ones—are suddenly irrelevant, not because they have ceased to signify or evolve, but because the networks that found their significations and developments relevant have been overpowered by a market, which doesn’t. When bossa nova retreats into informal networks that no longer seem to have any relevance when confronted with the explosion of the Brazilian culture industry, a new set of possibilities, bound up with the relativization and appropriation of superseded styles, emerges. This relativization should be absolute; it should entail a properly postmodern irony, in which, due to the absence of meta-narrative sustained by non-market networks, the only principle of selection available is the whim of the artist, which is then necessarily placed in a position superior to the styles it subsumes. Indeed, this the case with Tropicália, with the advantage over paradigmatic postmodern culture that this shift is registered as intolerable: slavery or impotence. Veloso, however, overleaps this logic.

The inevitable issue from bossa nova is commercially stillborn and, culturally, insulating itself from the market, which it nonetheless needs to survive. We are trying to resume the lost trajectory.62

Astoundingly, Veloso conducts this autopsy in the name of continuity, rather than of a radical break. The new set of possibilities is seen in terms of a “lost trajectory,” which is none other than the “linha evolutiva” or evolutionary line that Veloso has done so much both to invent retrospectively and to introduce into Brazilian musical discourse as an unavoidable concept, but which cannot, if it is to function as a principle, be subordinated to his own taste.

It is with great difficulty that a few moments of organicity are achieved in our work; every once in a while something recognizable condenses, only to be lost in the confusion soon after; we make a samba without even thinking about it, it turns out to be so beautiful, we rejoice, believing we’ve realized something fine in the trajectory of this language—but there are so few musicians who are able to hear it, enrich it, understand what it can mean, learn from it or, in the course of history, re-teach it; and even those that there are have few opportunities to respond to each other.63

One wonders if, despite being central to Tropicália, Veloso was ever a tropicalist at all: the post-tropicalist project is already expressed here, full-blown, complete with liberal-nationalist overtones, in 1965. But the important thing to note here is that the market cares about an “evolutionary line” or a “lost trajectory” about as much as it cares about second-wave protest bossa nova. Veloso writes, as usual, with remarkable precision. What is at stake is not what music means, but what it “can mean” in terms of a national musical development when framed by someone who understands it. The entities who could plausibly care about such an evolutionary line are precisely two. First, the nation, the referent of “we” and “our”—but purely in the sense of an imagined community, not a national market, because the national market is none other than the “confusion” in which the evolutionary line gets “lost.” Second, the musicians who are able to discern in their practice a matter in hand to be developed, in other words a Bourdieusian restricted field of musicians “responding to each other”—but it is precisely the lack of this field that Veloso laments. Neither of the entities to which an “evolutionary line” could plausibly matter exist. The market, however, does exist. As we saw above, music “needs” it; there is no longer any other mode of distribution equal to the culture industry. But Veloso, despite everything, is not making music for the culture industry, which is, again, the confusion in which everything worth saving is lost.

In other words, Veloso’s musical practice entails a politics quite separate from his appeal to the market, which veers uneasily between realism and cynicism, and despite his liberal nationalist ideology, which veers uneasily between empathy and paternalism. He has discovered, in the market, a condition of possibility for a form of meaning that is, in principle and of necessity, autonomous from the market. One way of thinking about this is to say, a bit pathetically, that already in 1965 Veloso’s work is oriented toward producing meanings for an audience that is “to come”; and at least in this sense his work represents a certain resistance to the present, however feeble. Another way is to say that in a neoliberal moment, when the market as the horizon of all human endeavor is the strongest (but also practically the only) arrow in capital’s ideological quiver, and universal valorization practically its only (but also its most socially devastating) imperative, Veloso presents a valuable model.

The one genre which Veloso has proven unable to master, though undeniably a part of the Brazilian landscape, is rock. It is easy enough to see why: “I composed the songs [on his first of three rock albums, Cê] and planned out the album before I had even formed the band.”64 Veloso has produced some interesting covers of rock songs, perhaps most notably Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” but they are interesting because, in separating the elements and tightening up their interrelations, he uncovers the songwriting behind the rock song.65 But as we shall see shortly, songwriting is not essential to rock—it may even be inimical to it—and it would be hard to make the case that his covers improve upon the originals. His two best rock songs, “Abraçaço” and “A bossa nova é foda,” from his most recent album, almost manage to abjure songwriting: “I let things flow as they wanted to, the songs, because the band was already together. I present an idea, they do it, everything works out.” Which is not to say that spontaneity is a musical value, but rather that spontaneity can be a useful constraint on songwriting, forcing other musical values to occupy more space.66

The White Stripes’ “Hello Operator” is about as far from songwriting as it is possible to get and still remain recognizably music.67 Though a suggestion of private meaning seeps through, the lyrics make as little public sense as the children’s rhyme “Miss Susie,” from which the first two lines are borrowed.68 They are not set to a melody, the pitch being determined by English speech patterns, as is the rhythm, which is regularized just enough to conform to a beat. The vocal quality is an assertive juvenile whine. The drum part under the lyrics consists entirely of quarter notes, on the beat, four to a measure, with the bare minimum—accented snare on beats 2 and 4—to qualify it as a rock beat. The guitar part is also minimal: two open chords, a fourth apart, each held for half a beat on the first beat of each measure. (The guitar will fill some of the empty space with simple blues lines; elsewhere, the drum part will add exactly one eighth note to the straight quarter note pattern). There is nothing in the basic structure of the verse that an able-bodied non-musician couldn’t learn to play—indeed nothing that a non-musician couldn’t come up with on her own—in a pair of afternoons.

The verse of “Hello Operator” is, in other words, the precise minimum organization of sound required to make a rock song—but not necessarily a rock song there would be any reason to listen to. Once the rock song has been stripped down to its minimal constituent parts, the question is what is the minimum necessary to make a compelling rock song. And the answer is stated, as clearly as a beethovenian symphonic theme, immediately following the verse, in the drum solo.69 The phrase “drum solo” in a rock context summons the wrong connotations, as this one is played entirely on the rim of a snare drum, is short (four bars and an introductory bar), is repeated twice, and consists in its second half entirely of quarter notes. It is also quiet, so quiet that the hum from a guitar pedal can be heard under it until the latter is muted at the beginning of the first full measure—an apparently non-musical sound that reads as accidental, but, since it could have been fixed in the studio, must be understood as intentional. The solo is, in other words, emphatically framed. It consists of two ideas. The first—two quarter notes comprising half a measure—barely counts as an idea. The second is a cliché about as old as recognizably American popular music: it is none other than the ragtime cliché from bar six of “Cannon Song,” the rhythm Debussy hammers to death in “Golliwog’s Cakewalk.”70 What “Hello Operator” is then about, what reverberates back to the beginning and culminates in the climax of the song, is the exploration of this idea, the relationship between an absolutely minimal musical phrase, two quarter notes, and a minimal syncopation with the same duration.

After the idea is presented by the drum, the guitar displays the pattern in a different light. Leading out of the drum solo, the guitar, transposing the syncopated pattern a half beat, changes its value and its musical function: rather than beginning on a downbeat, it ends on one. The initial statement of the idea on the snare drum is quiet and tentative, beginning from nothing, wavering from the pulse; the chordal guitar line, tightly aligned with the pulse, asserts the shifted pattern at volume, landing hard on a downbeat, and a new section develops the transformed idea. The relation between the two statements is that of premise and inference. And as the transformed pattern is repeated, the guitar introduces a new chord: the subdominant, whose introduction has the expected effect of confirming the other two chords as tonic and dominant, and produces the unexpected illusion of opening up the harmonic possibilities of the song: in Lou Reed’s immortal words, three chords and you’re into jazz.

(With regard to the question of the rhythmic relationship between the drums and the guitar, this may be the place to point out that in much of the White Stripes’ music, the guitar and drums switch their usual rock functions. Keith Richards can push or drag the beat, Charlie Watts’s job is to pull him back in; but in “Hello Operator” the guitar maintains the pulse, while the drum line is allowed to waiver. That this is possible is itself part of the meaning of the song: what is essential is an element strongly tied to the pulse and an element loosely tied to the pulse, not the traditional division of labor between drums and guitar. Why this is necessary is beyond the scope of this chapter, but it may suffice to point out that common to all the musical forms emerging from the blues is a conception of musical time as produced by musical events, rather than as a homogenous medium in which musical events occur. In the later evolution of the blues, for example, the tension between adhesion to and liberty from the pulse is, as it were, professionalized and brought within individual musicians’ roles. In a piano concerto, the failure of the soloist and the conductor to cohere rhythmically is fatal to the performance; in rock a degree of rhythmic incoherence is not only tolerable but constitutive.)71

The song is bookended by elaborations of the central idea. The first is a two-bar guitar introduction based on an impure fifth scalar tone. Since it precedes the first explicit statement of the idea, it initially reads as an improvisation. But in retrospect there can be no doubt that the introduction is composed. It sounds moderately complex, but it is assembled out of precisely four elements, which derive from the two simple ideas presented in the drum solo: straight quarter notes, the syncopated pattern (what we will first hear on its own as the drum version), the same pattern transposed half a beat (which we will first hear on its own as the chordal guitar version, but which has yet a third value here, landing on a backbeat instead of a downbeat), and straight eighth notes, a variation on the minimal straight quarter notes phrase. The break is repeated precisely halfway through the song, and also provides an ecstatic climax. What ought to be a guitar solo, essentially postponing the climax once all the ideas have been stated, is played on a heavily distorted harmonica. (As with the switch in rhythmic function between guitar and drums, the arrangement, though extremely basic, isolates musical elements in their function by changing the standard instrumentation.)72 To end the song, the single guitar line re-enters, in unison with the harmonica, with a third variation on the developed two-bar idea from the introduction. The unison is rough; again this could be accidental, but since another take or two would fix the problem, it must be regarded as intentional. After the rigorous separation of elements throughout the song, the climactic gesture of the convergence of guitar and harmonica is that of two lines of thought—the harmonica and guitar are mixed down into separate channels—simultaneously leading to the same conclusion. The affirmative value of these two bars is hard to exaggerate: it is a musical Q.E.D.

As if to confirm this, the name of the album on which the song appears is De Stijl, a movement which famously championed the abstraction, simplification, separation, exposed articulation, and balance of elements. The album title doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already, but it is a useful reminder that the simplification involved in “Hello Operator” aims at abstraction rather than primitivism.73 As de Stijl’s foremost theoretical exponent put it: “Arms, legs, trees, and landscapes are not unequivocally painterly means. Painterly means are: colors, forms, lines, and planes.”74 The first thing one would want to say about the reading of “Hello Operator” undertaken above is that, unlike our earlier analyses of Weill and Veloso, the esoteric meaning of the song—it is about the musical potential of a rhythmic cliché, about what musical elements are necessary to rock, and why—has no obvious relationship to an exoteric meaning. The adolescent aggression of the vocal quality could almost qualify as a kind of social gesture. But the nonsense lyrics, and the fact that the development of the idea occurs only elsewhere than the verse, are designed to undercut this possibility, though they cannot foreclose it entirely. (We shall return to this issue later.) As one of the narrators in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad remarks, “the songs… have titles like ‘Pet Rock’ and ‘Do the Math,’ and ‘Pass Me the Kool-Aid,’ but when we holler them aloud in Scotty’s garage the lyrics might as well be: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”75 Aggressivity is, tautologically, social. But as much as possible aggressivity is here reduced to a timbral quality, a tenor whine. “Hello Operator” is, in this sense, abstract: its musical idea is developed in near-complete isolation from non-musical or referential content, to which it can therefore no longer be subordinated. Simplicity then becomes a gesture of attention rather than inattention. If a country song is, in the great songwriter Harlan Howard’s famous formulation, three chords and the truth, then the White Stripes’ definition of a rock song is three chords and an idea.

The well-nigh neo-plasticist songs like “Hello Operator” form one of the axes of the White Stripes’ project: to produce a theory of rock that is purely music-immanent. Even when these songs, as with the possibly even more successful “Fell in Love with a Girl,” do not state an explicit musical thesis, the challenge they set is the same.76 The aim is to produce a rock song to which nothing could be usefully added and from which nothing could be taken away without harm—songs that aim at producing a rock song with the minimum necessary elements, and which are therefore necessarily about what these minimum necessary elements are. “Fell in Love with a Girl” consists of three elements: a drum pattern (with no variations), a rhythmic-harmonic pattern (two variations) and a melodic pattern (three variations). Since the variations overlap, there are essentially three total variations: two make up what are structurally verse and a third makes up what is structurally chorus, though the same ideas underlie both. But since they don’t overlap perfectly—and because the first version of the rhythmic-harmonic pattern (which is repeated under the third variation of the melodic pattern that occupies the place of the chorus) implies the second—there must be a repeat. The repeat finishes and the song is over, at one minute and fifty seconds: there is nothing further the song can say. As Joss Stone’s cover demonstrates, the song can hold one’s interest—quite a different matter—for twice that time, at the cost of overpainting it with cherubs.77

The White Stripes’ project continues along another axis, however, one which will probably be more obvious. White Stripes albums are larded with historical references (the B-side of the “Hello Operator” single is a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”), and it is instructive to compare the function of these to Weill’s and Veloso’s.78 The most conspicuous example on De Stijl is a simplified but basically straight cover of Blind Willie McTell’s “Your Southern Can Is Mine.” An affirmative relationship to the material in Veloso’s vein would be hard not to read as claiming an identity with McTell that would be difficult to defend. A negative, disidentificatory one in Weill’s vein would be equally indefensible: from what perspective, exactly, would a Piedmont Blues song be ironized? The lyrical material—a song that, at least on the surface, celebrates domestic abuse—raises the stakes along the same ethical axis, but with the polarity reversed. At the level of musical form, identification is dishonest, disidentification unthinkable; at the level of lyric, identification is unthinkable, disidentification dishonest. The performance is infused with a mischievous glee (but McTell’s is infused with a similar glee) at raising the same sets of hackles for completely contradictory reasons.

The White Stripes give up the game in the last twenty seconds of the track, but we will return to that in a moment. The riddle to the presence of “Your Southern Can Is Mine” on De Stijl can be solved entirely immanently. The relationship to the social material behind “Your Southern Can Is Mine” is neither affirmative nor critical, but nonexistent; it is raised only in order to be refused. The relationship is, rather, purely musical. In both McTell’s original and the White Stripes’ cover, the guitar part is built out of two elements: a quarter note pattern, accented on the offbeats (in McTell’s version, the effect is like stride piano played on guitar) and a syncopated pattern of the same length: none other than the second, shifted statement from “Hello Operator” of the ragtime rhythm we first saw in bar six of “Cannon Song.”79 In other words, both “Your Southern Can Is Mine” and “Hello Operator” work on the same musical material. The relationship to the material is un-ironic in the sense that McTell’s music is taken absolutely seriously. But there is no identity asserted between the White Stripes and McTell, precisely because no identity is asserted of either one separately. The only identity asserted is between McTell’s musical material and the White Stripes’—a musical identity between ragtime guitar and rock—and that identity isn’t so much asserted as demonstrated.

The White Stripes simplify the song harmonically, stripping down to open fifths a couple of common turnarounds that form the harmonic bones of the song. An early rival is said to have complained of the White Stripes’ early performances that they sounded like they wanted to play the blues but didn’t know how. Of course this was meant as a critique. But “wanting to play the blues without knowing how” is not a bad description of a key moment in the historical development of rock. These relatively straight covers tend to strip adornment and abstract from the original, but leave the core of the song intact. Many of these are blues covers like “Your Southern Can is Mine,” but the cover of Bob Dylan’s “One More Cup of Coffee” would also fit in this category.80 These ask the same question of what elements are necessary—and it is a surprise to discover that Dylan’s original includes a number of unnecessary ones—but also open up a historical element that is, nonetheless, a purely musical history.

A non-musical clip appended to the end of “Your Southern Can is Mine”—and of the album De Stijl—confirms all this. Without context, the clip is mysterious. One man asks another if something is wrong, why is the other acting so uncomfortable. The second man responds that he was in a traffic accident the night before, but nobody got hurt. The clip sounds old; there is a difference of power and class between the two men, but the accents are hard to place. The staginess of the first voice suggests nothing so much as a 1940s film. In fact the first man is Alan Lomax, and the second is Blind Willie McTell himself.81 The moments that precede the included clip give the context. Mctell has just recorded some songs for Lomax, for inclusion in Lomax’s folk song archive for the Library of Congress, in Lomax’s hotel room in Atlanta. As Lomax apparently cannot tell, but is obvious to contemporary listeners, McTell is uncomfortable because Lomax has been trying to bully him into singing some “complainin’ songs.” By the time Lomax asks expressly for “Ain’t it Hard to be a Nigger, Nigger?” (McTell reponds, cautiously: “Well… that’s not… in our time”), a modern listener will be squirming almost as badly as McTell. The clip included on De Stijl begins “You keep moving around, like you’re uncomfortable.” Why include this clip? Because Lomax is asking McTell to do what we tend to want McTell to do, which is to connect his music to an historical experience, as the product of an historical identity. McTell refuses, for reasons that may be philosophical or may be pure cautiousness. But the clip isn’t about McTell, it’s about Lomax; his position is an unquestionably false one, requiring someone to assert an identity that is instead being forced upon him—“Ain’t it hard to be a nigger, nigger?”—but it’s also the position we are in, as long as we take the ethical bait of “Your Southern Can is Mine.”

The straight, geneaological covers are to be distinguished from another aspect which we will not spend much time on here, namely the deformative covers: covers that turn a country song (“Jolene”), a pop song (Burt Bachrach’s “I Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”) or a camp pseudo-bolero-cum-tango (Corky Robbins’s “Conquest,” a hit for Patti Page in 1952) into a rock song.82 There is nothing pure about any of these aspects: a swamp-rock cover of Robert Johnson’s “Stop Breaking Down,” which takes a fleetingly brief (two-second or so) slide-guitar coda from Johnson’s recording and turns it into the principle of the new performance, is both deformative and geneological, and very far from merely domesticating like the Rolling Stones’ version.83 Nor is there, despite expectations, anything ironic about it, any position of superiority taken with regard to the material: despite the violence done to the appearance of the original, the idea at its core is preserved and taken seriously. It is not difficult to see that the idea of the deformative cover lines up with the pure rock constructions, asking the same question from a different angle: what makes some songs amenable to this treatment and not others? What constitutes, in other words, a rock musical idea?

This orientation also goes some way towards explaining the presence of a trifle like “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” on the album. It doesn’t take a trained ear to recognize it as Richie Valens’s “La Bamba” dressed up as punk-pop. But of course it is already a mistake to call it “Richie Valens’s ‘La Bamba,’” because “La Bamba” is itself a rock version of a traditional son jarocho. In the other direction, there is a long history of rock songs that are “La Bamba” dressed as something else: “Twist and Shout” (The Isley Brothers, The Beatles), “Wild Thing,” (The Troggs), “Hang on Sloopy” (The McCoys), “Louie Louie” (The Kingsmen), “Good Lovin’” (The Rascals), “Get Off My Cloud” (The Rolling Stones), “Stand” (R.E.M.), “Closer to Free” (The Bodeans)… and these are only ones that have some plausible claim to substantiality: once you start finding it in the chorus to Abba’s “Name of the Game,” you realize there’s no end in sight. The I-IV-V7-I cadence of “La Bamba,” with its strong melodic implications, is part of the DNA of rock. That is, “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” aligns the genealogical meaning of blues covers like “Your Southern Can Is Mine” with the formal meaning of songs like “Hello Operator.” Even though “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” isn’t much of an accomplishment, it has a clarifying value for us because unlike the blues, “La Bamba” is a one-off. While there is no doubt a national, regional, or ethnic mythology built around son jarocho, that mythology is not even plausibly part of the history of rock. Only “La Bamba” is part of the history of rock: once the trail turns ethnographic, the White Stripes’ project has nothing to say about it. Valens’s own relation to “La Bamba” is purely musical: the song was in U.S. pop circulation before his version, and the song would not have been a part of the Anglophone rocker’s musical heritage in any meaningful sense.84 Indeed, it doesn’t matter if the genealogy suggested by “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl)” is the right one: “Louie Louie,” a more obviously recent assemblage—an amalgam of ersatz Jamaican sentiment and a Cuban riff borrowed from René Touzet—precedes “La Bamba” as a rock recording. Whether the trail ends in Veracruz or the Caribbean, and whether either one is real or imagined, doesn’t really matter. But the facts that Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (As Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys) covered “La Bamba” before the Rolling Stones existed, that Jimmy Page famously borrowed from Valens and cites “La Bamba” as an early obsession, and that The Plugz recorded a pretty good punk version, tend to validate “La Bamba”s centrality to the musical history of rock.85

Spotting musical references, borrowings, and influences—real, imagined, and misunderstood—is as endemic to pop music criticism as purple ekphrasis, especially among journalists who have no vocabulary for analyzing a musical object. But the White Stripes make extensive use of pastiche proper—songs whose musical content is “This is what a Bob Dylan (Led Zeppelin, Cream, Jane’s Addiction) song sounds like.” These, together with the genre excercises—from blues shuffle to scottish reel—add up with the straight covers to a project remarkably like Veloso’s: a collection that assembles itself into an account, and in so doing produces a meaning behind the back of the market. But once the similarity is pointed out, the difference becomes immediately clear: the meaning is of an entirely different order. Veloso’s meaning is unavoidably a nationalist meaning, not in any very complex sense, though there are certainly complexities to be teased out, but in the bare sense that the unifying principle proposed by his post-Tropicália musical orientation can only be Brazil. Non-Brazilian elements are not shied away from, but they are understood as sources, and in that sense internal to Brazil after all. The unifying principle behind the White Stripes doesn’t immediately appear that different, as the elements are nearly all assembled from within the U.S. But the hallmark of Veloso’s nationalism, his generous musical catholicism—which has both positive and negative implications—is completely missing from the White Stripes. The genealogy they produce is a genealogy of rock, not of the United States. Music from outside the history of rock is only included if it can be reduced to an idea that can be the basis of a rock song. Non-rock music also descended from the blues—funk, R&B, soul, to say nothing of jazz—is completely excluded. As their cover of “Lord, Send Me an Angel” shows clearly enough, this has nothing to do with a fear of treading on racially sensitive territory.86 Once the paths that lead out of the blues diverge, the White Stripes have nothing to say about the ones that don’t lead to rock.87 Indeed, even the history of rock is, given the formal restrictions imposed by the imperative toward abstraction, a limited one: missing genres, particularly those that require more expansive musical elaboration or ornamentation, are relegated to later projects and different bands.88

Until now we have more or less ignored or derogated lyrical content, in keeping with the White Stripes’ practice, which tends to suppress the importance of lyrical content by restricting it to private obscurity, nonsense, or purely generic meanings. But lyrical content cannot be ignored entirely: it can be reduced to “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck,” but not to “darn darn darn darn darn.” Adolescent agressivity is clearly an indispensable element. But adolescent aggressivity is framed or otherwise relativized rather than expressed. When Jack White says categorically, “I never write about myself. I’m not going to pretend like ‘Oh, I’m waitin’ on a train, and my baby’s comin’ back,’” he’s not saying anything that’s not already true of every lyricist, including many who are taken to be, or let themselves be taken to be, expressing some kind of train-taking or other authenticity.89 But the White Stripes are careful to internalize the literary frame, so that any imputation of expression is not only a categorical mistake but also a literary one. To take an almost arbitrary example, the bridge of “There’s No Home for You Here,” with its perfectly simple, perfectly direct hatred of bourgeois normalcy, is distilled rock sentiment:

Waking up for breakfast
Burning matches
Talking quickly
Breaking baubles
Throwing garbage
Drinking soda
Looking happy
Taking pictures
So completely stupid
Just go away

Though in the bridge and the title the target might as easily be tourists, the song is generically a kiss-off song, so the hatred is aimed at a specific woman as well as at monogamy in general:

I’m only waiting for the proper time to tell you
That it’s impossible to get along with you
It’s hard to look you in the face when we are talking
So it helps to have a mirror in the room

I’ve not been merely looking forward to the performance
But there’s my cue and there’s a question on your face
Fortunately I have come across an answer
Which is go away and do not leave a trace

The situation is clear enough. But the speaker’s self-regard, apparent already in the self-understanding of breaking up as a performance, is literalized in the fact that he is looking not into the girl’s face but into a mirror as he delivers the coup de grace. So adolescent aggression is presented as inseparable from adolescent self-regard: hardly a novel thought, but one that serves its purpose, which is to relativize the content of generalized antisociality that is necessary to the song. The point is not to write great poetry—great poetry would not be a rock lyric—but to write a rock lyric that is minimally self-framing.

A second technique—and one which may also be at work in “There’s No Home for You Here,” with its hatred of soda drinkers and picture takers—is the substitution of a private meaning for the public one that ought to be the core of the song. “Ball and Biscuit,” in the song of that title, evidently refers to an illicit sexual practice, a drug recipe, or some kind of mindblowing combination of the two:

Let’s have a ball and a biscuit sugar
And take our sweet little time about it

The lyric, mostly spoken in a bullying drawl over a slow blues-rock, hovers—the vocal equivalent of Jim Morrison’s image on an album cover—between sexually threatening and ridiculous:

Right now you could care less about me
But soon enough you will care, by the time I’m done
…
Go read it in the newspaper
Ask your girlfriends and see if they know
That my strength is ten-fold girl
And I’ll let you see if you want to before you go

The drug-related possibility quickly loses plausibility as the song turns out to be, more than anything else, about the gestural content of guitar solos. There are three guitar solos in the song—an absurd number for anyone, much less the White Stripes who tend to avoid them or keep them short. All three are spectacular, and spectacularly hyperbolic, the middle one introduced by “I can think of one or two things to say about it”—“it” still having the same grammatical referent as “take our sweet little time about it,” namely “a ball and a biscuit”—and concluded by “Do you get the point now?” immediately before a third solo is launched into. The gestural equivalence of rock guitar solos and sexual swagger has never been lost on anyone, but again it is self-framing rather than profundity which is aimed at, and if ever a work of art managed to fuse fun as an object of inquiry and inquiry as an object of fun, this is it. However, it takes only a moment’s research to discover the literal referent of “it”: “ball and biscuit” is slang for an old omnidirectional microphone fomerly used by the BBC, one of which was hanging from the ceiling at the studio where the song was recorded.90 This doesn’t change the meaning of the song, which says nothing about microphones and still promises a “girl” a transcendent and dangerous sexual experience. But that experience, the lyrical core of the song, is nothing, just a suggestive piece of language: a fact which both evacuates the meaning of the lyric and heightens the meaning of the social gesture of the form itself, since the meaning insists without a literal signifier.

Why is this derogation or relativization of the lyrics necessary? To the degree that the function of a pop song (the reason there is a market for it) is to amplify, monumentalize, and universalize an experience which is of necessity (because appealing to a market) general, which is to say trivial, then these techniques are straighforwardly Brechtian disidentification techniques. They present the “fun,” or affective charge, of adolescent antisociality (or of swaggering male sexuality), but by making themselves about the affective charge of adolecent antisociality (or of swaggering male sexuality), they wrest their autonomy from the requirement to produce that effect, which would otherwise subsume it. But one has also to remember the peculiar place that music holds in Hegel’s system: either it is, after literature, the art form closest to philosophy (that is, to the idea as such), or it is not really art at all. But these two judgments refer to two different objects: music with lyrics, and music without. Hegel had no concept of music-immanent meaning, and so misunderstood instrumental music. But song as such is still illuminated by Hegel’s understanding, in that both of his judgments are real dangers to be avoided. As long as music accompanies lyrical content, it is liable to become a matter of giving bodily amplification to a meaning that is aimed at by the lyrics, which assume primacy. (If Schumann’s “Abends am Strand” gives some sense of the possibilities this fact opens up at an earlier moment in music history, a glance at any journalistic pop review will confirm the limits imposed by it for music that confronts normativity only as the market).91 In this case, music produces an effect, which the listener suffers, rather than a meaning. The song as such tends to the kind of synthetic mush that Weill despised.

But the second judgment must equally be avoided. In the last scene of the concert film Under Great White Northern Lights, Meg White sits next to Jack White on a piano bench while he sings and plays their song “White Moon.”92 About halfway through the song, Meg White begins weeping, which continues throughout the song. Surely, the song is provoking an affective state, one that music has been known to produce even in Brechtians. But what is “White Moon” about? At first glance it appears to be nonsense; on closer inspection, it centers on Rita Hayworth, or rather images of her, in various contexts but mainly as a pinup above an army bunk during World War II. Obscurities remain, but there is nothing particularly shattering about the lyrical content. If one feels that there ought to be, this is because the song is musically a dirge. So Meg White is crying not because of the words, but in spite of them: in other words, her reaction is provoked rather than mediated through something expressed. This musical motive force might seem to be a desirable thing. But, to continue paraphrasing Hegel, the reason she is crying therefore is “merely hers,” which is to say not part of the song at all. Perhaps she has a visceral reaction to this song, but if so it is idiosyncratic. (To insist that the song is about Ida Lupino would be incorrect; but it makes no sense to say it is incorrect not to cry when listening to it.) On the other hand the film has provided Meg White with ample reasons to cry: the stress of a punishing concert schedule, performing in a ridiculously exposed context in front of thousands of people, nights spent in hotels too wired to sleep but too tired to get off the couch, with an ex-husband who seems to spend precious down-time worrying about the next night’s tempos. Relief? Exhaustion? Fury? All possible, but even more obviously these reasons are “merely hers” rather than part of the song.

Music’s motive force is thematized within the song: “Oh Rita oh Rita, if you lived in Mesita, I would move you with the beat of a drum.” One is immediately suspicious, not that Jack White has deliberately set up this scene, which would be sadistic, but that the White Stripes, who seem to have had a hand in making the film—presumably the matching his-and-hers red and white propeller planes were neither a logistical necessity nor the filmmmaker’s idea—include this scene as an allegory of the paradox of music’s motive force. At any rate, the point is made. If the music is subordinate to the lyrics, then the song is a pop commodity. If one finds this line a little too direct, one can at best say that music is reduced to producing amplificatory effects. If, on the other hand, music circumvents lyrical content altogether, then it does not even pass through the illusion of meaning, instead directly producing effects that are not part of the song itself. The problem confronted is the same as that which led Weill to “approach his text from a position [other than] sensual enjoyment”: In Jack White’s terms, if “it’s just… trying to make us feel good, [you] could just as well be making drugs or a computer game.”93

Two kinds of meaning are aimed at by the White Stripes. First, purely music-immanent meaning, which is to say the exploration of musical ideas in the way neo-plasticism and other abstract pictorial movements explore painterly ideas. Second, a music-immanent theory of rock, which necessarily includes social content but which, also necessarily, abstracts from it as much as possible. For both kinds of meaning, lyrical content has to be retained, but neutralized, and the logic is straighforwardly Brechtian: fun—or whatever other effect—is to be included, but an internal distance from it is required if meaning is to be plausibly asserted.

Kurt Weill, Veloso, and the White Stripes produce music under substantially different historical conditions. Nonetheless, the family resemblance of their approaches is not coincidental. All three understand musical meaning in the same way—as either music-immanent or gestural-citational—and the obstacle to it posed by the market—which nonetheless cannot be avoided—in the same way. While all three recognize the horizon of purely music-immanent meaning, it is only the White Stripes who attempt to produce it within a market-transmitted form. This is apparently paradoxical, as The White Stripes are furthest from the possibility of a modernist, medium-immanent form of meaning sustained by a restricted field—a form of meaning which is rejected by Weill for political reasons, and by Veloso for historical ones. But perhaps there is no paradox; only when the old, non-market, classically modernist horizon is all but forgotten does the attempt to assert a medium-immanent meaning within a cultural field saturated by exchange value begin to seem necessary.

This return to the ambition of music-immanent meaning is, from the perspective of the current study, conceptually the most unexpected development among the three projects. But it comes at a cost. White Stripes concerts ended with a rock version of the variously-titled “Boll Weevil Song,” best known through a Lead Belly version recorded by Alan Lomax in 1934.94 There is a certain pedagogical force to the exercise itself, which is made explicit when the song is taught to the audience as a singalong. In a typically self-aware move, the act of teaching the song is (as it was in Lead Belly’s version) incorporated into the lyrics. But while the pedagogical element of the White Stripes’ project is not negligible, it has no ambitions beyond the purely music-immanent. Of course, if what has been said above is true, music-immanent pedagogy is the only kind of pedagogy music can be expected to accomplish. But there can be no mistaking the fact that the White Stripes’ project is, in terms of its political content, the least substantial of the three. Indeed, it is hard to imagine it having a politics at all. There is nothing that exempts political meanings from the logic of the White Stripes’ project, or indeed from the logic of the commodity form. Any political meaning must either be relativized—in which case it is a politics that is interesting only so far as it is a rock politics, and thus music-immanent after all—or immediately fall prey to a market logic where it becomes a consumable point of identification, no different than other pop identifications.

But it is the aim of the present study to show how, under present circumstances, the production of artistic meaning—that is, the production of the unvalorizable within a society that subordinates every activity to the production of value—is itself a politics. It is not merely a matter of producing a line of flight along which artists can, within a value-saturated cultural field, produce non-values, which is to say meanings—though artists may certainly experience it that way. Rather, in a neoliberal regime—whose essence is the demand that everything be valorized—the production of the unvalorizable lodges a “foreign body” at capitalism’s ideological weak point. The political effectivity of such an act is necessarily beyond the scope of this essay. We are concerned with the problem of securing meaning against the ideological horizon of a fully market-saturated society. Meanings circulate or fail to circulate, compel or fail to compel. Success in the former, which is easily quantifiable, does not guarantee success in the latter, which is not. Nonetheless, one would want to avoid repeating Schönberg’s dogmatic error that because Threepenny was popular, it must not have been understood.

70. The pattern, in Weill’s cut time, is written: . The shifted version would be, again in cut time: .“Hello Operator” would be transcribed in 4/4 time, where it would look different, but the difference is purely customary—cut time being used for quick march-derived tempos—and has no bearing on the rhythm.↑

Special thanks to the editors of Radical Philosophy for allowing me to reprint my review from issue 174 (July/August 2012): 31-33.

According to J. M. Bernstein, “the point of [Horkheimer and Adorno’s] Dialectic of Enlightenment was to explain why the dialectic of class had come to a standstill.” The “conflictual dialectic of proletariat and bourgeoisie,” Bernstein writes, “is unavailable for interpretive purposes” (31). It bears noting that this is the only appearance of the term “class conflict” in the 428 pages of The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2004). Bernstein’s point is made again by Simon Jarvis in the same volume when he writes that the “concept of class…designates not a real entity but a real illusion” (94). “There is,” he insists, “no such thing as a ‘class.’” Because to “classify a diverse group of people under a single concept inevitably misleadingly identifies them” (94). What real or potential use could emerge from this rereading of Marx? It’s a matter of understanding the sea change in Marxist analysis that Adorno initiated when he criticized the basic Marxist tenet that “economics has priority over domination; domination may not be deduced otherwise than economically” (Negative Dialectics). That domination exists without private property was presumed to point to a more basic fact about civilization than any economic analysis could explain. For Adorno the fact that “human beings…are always being humiliated” has absolute priority over any economic analysis (48). At stake is nothing less than a vision of Marxism as an analysis of humiliation, of shame, not exploitation.

The stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential revision of Marxism emerges in the new translation of their dialogue Towards a New Manifesto. The title is an inspired misnomer; it is hard to see how “Discussion on Theory and Praxis”—the original title in Horkheimer’s Nachlass—would attract any but the most dedicated readers. But what makes the brief volume—113 generously spaced pages—so engaging and what partially legitimates the English title, is the space devoted to a reassessment of key Marxist concepts. We should “write a manifesto that will do justice to the current situation,” Adorno says (92) and he adds a surprising addendum: it should be “a strictly Leninist manifesto” (94). Despite Adorno’s thoroughgoing use of Marxist terminology, his explicit engagement with Marx is slim (roughly four essays in an extensive body of writing are devoted to class analysis). In the twelve discussions that make up Towards a New Manifesto nearly half revolve around the problem of work and “political concreteness.” But as Adorno and Horkheimer make clear, their theory “no longer has anything in common with Marx, with the most advanced class consciousness; our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat” (99).

Horkheimer formulates the basic problem for any contemporary Marxism: “in whose interest do we write, now that there is no longer a party and the revolution has become such an unlikely prospect?” (49) Horkheimer’s answer is striking and central to all Frankfurt School analyses, class struggle has shifted to the superstructure: “It is in language that the idea that all should be well can be articulated” (50). More tersely still: “All hope lies in thought” (39-40). To which Adorno replies: “In Marx language plays no role, he is a positivist.” Kant, rather than Marx, saw how “the concept of freedom…can be grasped only in relation to the constitution of mankind as a whole” (50). That language retains in itself the universal claims denied by the particular interests of individuals stands at the foundation of Adorno’s lifelong commitment to the work of art as a form of dialectical overcoming, through a mode of mimetic exacerbation, of capitalist contradictions. Works of art can perform a kind of “second reflection” of capitalist modes of production (93). Put another way, the political power of the work of art is fully predicated on the unreflective modes of work embodied in wage labor. Horkheimer clarifies the problem: “Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings” (31). He later puts it in Marxist terms, “classes must be abolished because the time is ripe for it, the forces of production are strong enough” (87). For Adorno, this new prospect for freedom is in fact a path to “catastrophe” (87). Whenever workers are given “free time” they are discovered to be “obsessively repeating the rituals of the efforts that have been demanded of them” (32). Adorno describes all the newly won freedoms, the sense that “everything seems to be improving” (35), as “a kind of false classless society” (33). The “perfect classless society” is “in reality the very opposite.” Horkheimer blasts back: “That’s too reactionary” (33). But Adorno is unrelenting: “this entire question of spare time is so unfortunate” because “people unconsciously mimic the work process” (33-34). What could it mean to say “people,” not owners or workers, mime the work process at home? Adorno further broadens the point when he explains how “the appeal to class won’t work any more, since today [we] are really all proletarians” (34). Owner and worker mime labor in their “relaxed” moments. The new manifesto is tailored to bourgeois and proletarian alike.

At their worst, Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of identity thinking is blandly reductive: “All [that self-determination] means [in German idealism] is that the work my master formerly ordered me to do is the same as the work I now seek to carry out of my own free will”; Kant’s “transcendental apperception: labor made absolute” (25-26). And speaking of exchange value: “People like advertisements. They do what the ads tell them and they know that they are doing so” (54). Along this sweeping line of thought Horkheimer remarks that “The USA is the country of argument.” Adorno picks up the (banal) idea: “Argument is consistently bourgeois” (73). Adorno goes on to confuse the matter when he also insists that the “mistrust of argument is at bottom what has inspired the Husserls and Heideggers” (72) and their fall into “pure irrationalism” (67).

Horkheimer, the more pessimistic and less historicist of the two, suggests “we have to reject both Marxism and ontology” (21). Or rather, it is the ontological and theological roots of Marxism—a “faith in progress” (19-20), something Adorno suggests when he speaks of “a new political authority [that] will emerge” at the limits of despair (60; my emphasis)—that Horkheimer rejects. Horkheimer blanches, for instance, at Adorno’s literalist attempts to identify theory and practice. “Even the most rarefied form of mental activity contains an element of the practical,” Adorno contends (75). There’s no difference, he says, between “thinking” and “eating roast goose” (80). Horkheimer rejects the identification and observes how thinking “must have a connection to a world set to rights” (80-81) and must be “targeting true practice” (96).

Although Horkheimer is far more pessimistic than Adorno—“today we have to declare ourselves defeatists…There is nothing we can do. We…have to declare that basically we cannot bring about change” (90)—he is also more practical. He places his diminishing hopes on a “more or less worn-out version of the American system” (21); “planning,” he suggests, “would offer the best prospect” (21). The view of planning is broadly redistributive: “Automation. We should take greater care to help others, to export the right goods to the right people, to seek cures for the sick” (53). Along these lines Horkheimer announces the second thesis of the new manifesto: “If there is so much affluence…we must give to those who have nothing” (106). But this is a fleeting thought within the general tenor of the manifesto, and it stands in tension with his more determined insistence on “the notion of difference” (78). He is “in favor of the chaotic” (27); one “should think differently and act differently” (79). But even here Horkheimer’s scruples are evident. He fears that the use of vague words like “change” and “otherness” are simply “metaphysical gilding for bourgeois desires” (83) and prefers instead the “animal qualities” of “a not-too-strenuous life, having enough to eat, not having to work from morning to night” (86-87).

The conversations conclude on a brief discussion of “Individualism.” It is here, in the most concise terms, that the larger problems of the manifesto project are revealed. It was Marx’s mistake, Horkheimer declares, to be “concerned to ensure that all men would be equal”! (111) Rather than equal, Horkheimer affirms that “human beings should be subtly different” (111; my emphasis). Adorno picks up the thought insisting that “Marx was too harmless,” “he did not concern himself with subjectivity” (111). And it is subjectivity or “difference” that lies at the center of the new manifesto. Adorno’s most surprising assertion, and his most misguided, appears with his concluding thought. The “idea that people are products of society down to the innermost fiber of their being” was dismissed by Marx as “milieu theory.” The future of Marxism lies in the reinstitution of this idea “first articulated by Lenin” (112). The battle that Marx fought against “milieu theory” was against the idea that culture determined consciousness. His great achievement was to see that economics was not a matter of culture but of exploitation. Which is to say Adorno’s emphasis on domination and difference (how bourgeois culture shapes being), rather than exploitation and the proletariat, is pre-Marxist in orientation. Post-Marxism is pre-Marxism redux.

What chiefly distinguishes the commodity-owner from the commodity is the circumstance that the latter treats every other commodity as nothing more than the form of appearance of its own value. Born leveler and cynic, it is therefore always on the jump to exchange not only soul but body with any other commodity, be it plagued by more deformities than Maritornes herself. With his five and more senses, the owner of the commodity makes up for the latter’s lack of a feel for the concrete in other commodities. His commodity has for him no unmediated use value. Otherwise he would not bring it to market. It has use value for others. For him its only unmediated use value is to be the bearer of exchange value, and so to be a medium of exchange. That is why he wants to dispose of it in exchange for commodities whose use values appeal to him. All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, use values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this change of hands constitutes their exchange, and their exchange relates them to one another as values and realizes them as values. Commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use values. (K 100 / C 179).1

This is a knotty passage (and one whose gender politics are thankfully not entirely legible in English). Its difficulty and indeed “literariness” seem all out of proportion to the matter in hand. Should it not be among the easiest things in the world to distinguish commodity-owner from commodity? Is it not rather an odd flourish to stack the deck by personifying the commodity, and then to feign perplexity in distinguishing the personification from the person? But the operation is the opposite of this: we have been told in the previous paragraph that “the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations” (K 100 / C 179). So it is not only that the commodity is personified, but rather, it proving easier to talk of the commodity as a “she” than the owner as an “it,” that the owner is. The distinction is therefore between two logical standpoints—something which the fact that one of them is occupied by a consciousness tends to obscure—and the distinction is simply this: from the standpoint of the commodity, all commodities are qualitatively indifferent. If you imagine a market without buyers and sellers, you are left with a mass of commodities that are exchangeable in various ratios, but none of which is not exchangeable, which is to say none of which possesses any qualities that cannot be expressed as quantity. (The basis of this qualitative indifference, established in Marx’s previous chapter, does not concern us at the moment.) But from the standpoint of the commodity owner—who, because he owns a commodity and not some other kind of thing, is both buyer and seller—his commodity is qualitatively different from all the others in that his alone has no qualities. To be more precise, his has only one quality that matters, which is its lack of qualities: that is, its qualitative equality with other commodities: its exchangeability.2

All other commodities—that is, the commodities he encounters as a buyer rather than a seller—are, for his “five and more senses” full of qualities. Quality, use value, counts for him as a buyer: otherwise he would not want to buy. Quality, use value, counts nothing for him as a seller: otherwise he would not be willing to sell. Of course, as a seller, he knows that the commodities he brings to market must “stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values” (K 100 / C 179). “But”—and this is a Hegelian “but,” the conjunction which changes everything—“only the act of exchange can prove whether or not [the human labor expended in them] is useful for others, whether the product of such labor can therefore satisfy alien needs” (K 100-101 / C 180). We thus find ourselves in a chicken-and-egg loop—exchange value precedes use value precedes exchange value precedes use value—that Marx’s imaginary commodity owner wants no part of: “he wants to realize his commodity as value…whether or not his own commodity has any use value for the owner of the other commodity” (K 101 / C 180). The problem can only be resolved—for the time being, for it will reemerge in several forms, including what our contemporary Keynesians will call a liquidity trap—by giving the contradiction “room to move” (K 118 / C 198). Marx is preparing the ground for the appearance of money, which turns the relationship to a single buyer into a relationship with the market, and provides a practical basis for the radical exchangeability of the commodity.

For our present purposes, however, what is important is that even in the case of the individual buyer, and therefore also in the case of the market, it is only the exchangeability that matters to the commodity owner, as frustrated as he might be by the fact that its use value is from one angle prior. If he sells you a salad bowl and you use it as a chamber pot, that is strictly your business. As far as the seller is concerned, the use value of “his” commodity only makes its appearance as exchange value: “only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful to others.” The commodity owner wants to realize the exchange value of his commodity by producing something that is a use-value for others. But he isn’t in the business of legislating or even knowing what that use-value should be; he doesn’t even know it has a use value until it sells. Indeed, the more potential uses it has—it slices, it dices, it’s a typewriter and a shoe store and a status symbol and a peepshow—the less he legislates what its actual use-value should be, and the happier he is.

If this were the only possible state of affairs, there would be no reason to demonstrate its peculiarity. So what is the other of “a society of commodity producers” (K 93 / C 172)?  We are given several options in the previous chapter: Robinson Crusoe, the medieval corvée, the peasant family, hints of various historical non-capitalist societies, and finally the famous “association of free people, working with the means of production held in common, and, in full self-awareness, expending their many individual labor powers as one social labor power” (K 92 / C 171). These are all others of commodity production, but its determinate other, the other that the capitalist market produces as its own internal frame, is Hegel’s image of collective labor, which Marx here and there explicitly recalls. This image appears most explicitly in Hegel’s idealized evocation of Greek ethical life, an evocation which refers not to the Greek polis as it actually was or as Hegel imagined it actually was, but rather to its own immanent horizon, an ideal Greek customary life must presuppose but can only realize in an unsatisfactory, contradictory and unstable way:

The individual’s labor to satisfy his own needs is as much a satisfaction of the needs of others as his own, and the satisfaction of his own needs is achieved only through the labor of others. As the individual in his individual labor already unconsciously accomplishes a common labor, so again he also produces the common as his conscious object; the whole becomes, as whole, his work, for which he sacrifices himself, and precisely thus is himself restored by it. (265 / §351).3

The problem—the satisfaction of “universal” or social needs through individual labor, irreducibly particular talents and drives—is the same in Marx and Hegel, though for Marx “full self-awareness” will mark a crucial difference. Marx, however, considers this problem by means of a different social formation, namely capitalism, one in which there is nothing customary about what is produced or who produces it; one in which, as we have seen, exchange precedes use. In Marx’s version—“only the act of exchange can prove whether or not [such labor] is useful for others, whether the product of such labor can therefore satisfy alien needs”—the two subordinate clauses appear to say the same thing. The function of the second clause is to emphasize the shift from the neutral “other” to “alien” (fremde); that is, to point out the peculiarity of commodity exchange in which “the needs of others,” taken for granted in the Hegelian version of customary life, are reduced to a cipher whose index is exchangeability. As Fredric Jameson has recently reminded us, the logic of alienation (Entfremdung) in Marx is intimately related to that of Hegelian externalization (Entäusserung, though neither Hegel nor Marx adheres rigorously to the linguistic distinction).4 The other or negative horizon of commodity exchange is what Hegel calls die Kraft der Entäusserung, “the power of externalization, the power to make oneself into a thing” (483 / §658).

Let us then take a moment to establish the precise contours of this negative, Hegelian horizon of commodity exchange. Plenty has been said about the lordship and bondage theme in Phenomenology of Spirit, and we have no interest in revisiting it here, even if the relation of buyer to seller—logically encompassing the two moments of indifference and petulance—does, in its utter failure to produce anything like subjectivity (it produces instead a market where the parties can safely face one another in the aggregate rather than as antagonists) ironically recall it. What is important here is how we get out of this dialectic. As is well known, this is through the labor of the bondsman who, in forming and shaping the thing, in externalizing himself in the production of the lifeworld of both himself and his master, comes to find in that world not the master’s power but his own:

Thus the form [of the product of labor], set outside himself, is not an other to him, for this form is precisely his own pure being-for-self, which to him becomes the truth. What he rediscovers, precisely through labor which appears to harbor only an alien purpose, is nothing other than his own purpose, arrived at through his own means. (154 / §196)

This is Hegel’s materialism—the exact opposite, it might be said in passing, of causal or vulgar materialism—and indeed it represents a kind of ideological core to Phenomenology of Spirit. But the point to be made here is that the object the bondsman shapes is not just made—Marx’s commodity will also be the product of labor—but intended: a purpose arrived at by his own means. The thing is not a cipher whose use is indexed by its exchange, but rather a use whose purpose is legible, which is to say normative. The master can and presumably does find another purpose in it; but that will now be an occasion for conflict. The owner of commodities, on the other hand, doesn’t care what purpose a buyer finds in his commodity, as long as someone will buy it.

What we have arrived at is the distinction between the exchange-formula C-M-C (Commodity-Money-Commodity or Hegelian Sittlichkeit, the satisfaction of individual needs as the universal satisfaction of needs through the social metabolism, as use-values are exchanged through the medium of money) and M-C-M, the same relation but now understood as the kernel of capitalism itself, where use-value is only a vanishing moment in the valorization of capital. What we have arrived at is the distinction between an object whose use (or purpose or meaning) is normatively inscribed in the object itself—a meaning that is in Hegel’s terms universal, which is simply “allgemein,” available for everyone and not therefore a private matter—and an object whose use is a matter of indifference from one position, and a matter of possibly intense but necessarily private concern from another. What we have arrived at is the distinction between an object that embodies, and must seek to compel, conviction, and one that seeks to provoke interest in its beholder—or perhaps all kinds of different interest from different beholders. What we have arrived at, no doubt through an unusual route, is the distinction between art and objecthood.5

The distinction is of course Michael Fried’s, but it has become central to the debate over the dominant strand in contemporary cultural production, or, more likely, the dominant strand in the cultural production of the very recent past, a period for which the term “postmodernism” will do as well as any other. Everything Fried finds objectionable in the “object” is on the other hand perfectly legitimate for a certain class of objects we are already familiar with, namely commodities. Or, to put this another way, Fried’s “formalist” account of the distinction between art and non-art is also an historicist one, fully derivable from the Marxian problematic of the “real subsumption of labor under capital,” or the closure of the world market.

To return, then, to Capital. As we just saw, one way of understanding Marx’s analysis is to say that in commodity exchange, the site of purpose or intention shifts. If I make a bowl for myself, it is a bowl because I wanted to make a bowl, and I will be concerned about all kinds of concrete attributes the bowl might have. If it is shallow rather than deep, wood rather than metal, these attributes are as they are because I intend them to be that way, and we are in the world of Hegelian externalization. If I make a bowl for the market, I am primarily concerned only with one attribute, its exchangeability: that is, the demand for bowls. And that demand, and therefore all of the concrete attributes that factor into that demand, are decided elsewhere, namely on the market. So while I might still make decisions about my bowls, those decisions no longer matter as intentions even for me, because they are entirely subordinated to more or less informed guesses about other people’s desires. This has obvious repercussions for cultural interpretation. If a work of art is not a commodity—or if it is not only a commodity, which is to say that a moment of externality to the commodity form is analytically isolable, which is to say that there is something in the work that is not a commodity—then it makes entirely good sense to approach it with interpretive tools, since it can plausibly be intended to mean something. (In the passage from Hegel cited above—“his own purpose, arrived at through his own means”—“Sinn,” a multivalent word translated here as “purpose,” could also be translated as “meaning,” and indeed the conflict immanent in the normativity of the formed object will, in Phenomenology of Spirit, devolve in skepticism and stoicism to a mere conflict of interpretation. But that is another story.) If a work of art is only a commodity, interpretive tools suddenly make no sense at all, since the form the object takes is determined elsewhere than where it is made, namely on the market. So it is not really that interpretation as such no longer makes any sense, so much as that interpreting the artwork no longer makes any sense. It is rather the desires represented by the market that are subject to analysis and elucidation.

It might seem absurd to say the art commodity is uninterpretable, but think for a moment of an industrial spectacle like James Cameron’s Avatar. The sight of critics producing a welter of completely incompatible (but also generally plausible) interpretations was an amusing one that did not go unnoticed by the critics themselves. This empirical profusion is insignificant in itself: all of these interpretations could be wrong. But it is also possible that since the film is only concerned with producing a set of marketable effects, it cannot at the same time be concerned with producing the minimal internal consistency required to produce a meaning. And in fact, James Cameron himself is pretty clear that this is the case. When asked why female Na’vi have breasts, Cameron replies: “Right from the beginning I said, ‘She’s got to have tits,’ even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.”6 Cameron is more precise than he probably means to be when he says that “makes no sense.” Pressed in a different interview, Cameron responds that the female Na’vi have breasts “because this is a movie for human people.”7 In other words, people—enough of them anyway—will pay to see breasts, so the breasts go in. But this “makes no sense”: there is no point in interpreting it, because the salient fact is not that Cameron wanted them there but that he thought a lot of other people would want them there, and the wildly inconsistent ideology of the film is likewise composed of saleable ideologemes that together make no sense. This is not to say that all art commodities are similarly inconsistent: some audiences will pay for ideological or narrative or aesthetic consistency, so we have Michael Moore, middlebrow cinema, and independent film. But this consistency doesn’t add up to a meaning, since what looks like meaning is only an appeal to a market niche.

But this is nothing new but rather a very old line, essentially Adorno’s critique of the culture industry.8 The lineaments of that critique are well known; it will be enough for the present to remind ourselves that in that essay Adorno has no interest in explicating works because in commercial culture there are no works to critique and no meanings to be found. The culture industry as it appears in Adorno is simpler than ours, seemingly only differentiated vertically rather than splintered into potentially infinite socio-aesthetico-cultural niches, but the essential situation is the one we are attempting to understand. “The varying production values in the culture industry have nothing to do with content, nothing to do with the meaning of the product” (DA 132 / DE 124) because the varying production values are aimed at different markets rather than different purposes, and this principle is “the meaningful content of all film, whatever plot the production team may have selected” (DA 132 / DE 124). So while one can ask sociological questions about art commodities—Why do people like violent movies?—interpretive questions—Why is there a love scene in the middle of Three Days of the Condor?—do not have interesting answers.

It will not have escaped notice that, under conditions of Hegelian externalization, meaning is equated with intention, while under market conditions, “meaning” is simply what can be said about the appropriation of commodities. Sociological questions have answers without necessarily involving intentions; interpretive questions, if they have answers, require intentions. It may be worth taking a moment to emphasize the fact that this equation is deeply Hegelian, and that there is nothing in it that is threatening to Marxist interpretation as such. The strong claim for the identity of intention and meaning (very briefly, the claim that meaning includes neither causes nor effects of the meaning in question) already implies the social.9 The medium of meaning is (always in the Hegelian sense) a universal, which is to say a social machine, be it language as such or a particular signifying network like literature or the royal court. (Meaning is necessarily a socially symbolic act.) While meanings exist sub specie aeternitatis, the media or social machines in which they mean are, it seems almost too obvious to point out, historical: if one insists on understanding meaning proper as externalization, one must begin with an account of the social machine. (Always historicize.) Further, nothing in the reduction of meaning to intention prevents us from chasing down what a meaning might entail as a logically necessary consequence (as opposed to an effect) or condition of possibility (as opposed to a cause), even if these are not intended. Indeed, this is Marx’s procedure in the chapter we have been discussing. The future capitalist, for now simply an owner of commodities, wants to sell his goods. That is all. “In their confusion, the commodity owners think like Faust: In the beginning was the deed. They have already acted before thinking” (K 101 / C 180). The logical contortions embodied in the act of exchange (the confusion or embarrassment, Verlegenheit, of the commodity-owners—indeed, their ideology) are nowhere in the mind of the capitalist, but are rather the logical preconditions of the act of exchange itself. In this Hegelian-Marxian sense, the unconscious is simply everything entailed or presupposed by an action that is not present to consciousness in that action: in Phenomenology of Spirit, the ignorance of the provincial type at court, which necessarily turns every attempt at sincerity into its opposite, or the politics of the “beautiful soul,” who imagines himself to be beyond politics but whose very aloofness from politics is itself a politics. An intention includes such necessary presuppositions or entailments. (The identity of intention and meaning insists upon a political unconscious.)10

Finally, the identity of meaning and intention does not entail any position on the desirability of something like cultural studies, if the latter is taken to mean the sociological study of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. What it does entail is the distinction between such study—which will be crucial in what follows, in the form of a sociological understanding of the universal in which contemporary artworks make their way—and interpretation. And indeed, this last position can also be derived from Hegel. In the section in the Phenomenology on “the matter in hand,” the relation between sociological motivation (ambition) and scientific purpose (die Sache selbst, the matter in hand) is, as it is in Bourdieu, undecidable: it is always possible that a given intervention is attempted for money or fame or position. But this very undecidability means that nothing concrete can be said about the relation of ambition to work, which is to say that, as regards what is in the work (as opposed to what caused it or what effect it may have) nothing useful can be divined from sociological research.

To return, then, to the art-commodity and its other. For Adorno the art-commodity had a plausible other or negative horizon, namely modernism (even if this is usually referred to collectively in the essay as “bourgeois artworks,” and usually in the past tense), where Hegelian externalization—compensatory, tragic, but an externalization nonetheless—holds. Adorno accounts for this possibility by the residual phenomenon of tributary backwaters within capitalism, spaces left behind by the expansion of capital. The persistence of such spaces “strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection” (DA 141 / DE 133). What differentiates Adorno’s culture industry from the self-representation of our contemporary moment is that the art-commodity now has no other. Fredric Jameson, bringing the problem up to the day before yesterday, simply says, matter-of-factly, that “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally.”11 From this, everything follows.

The logic of this transition is already available in Marx, in a draft chapter for Capital I that was not available in the West until the 1960s. What we have is often fragmentary, but the basic distinction in the “Results of the Immediate Process of Production” between the “formal subsumption” and the “real subsumption of labor under capital” is clear.12 Under conditions of formal subsumption, an industry or production process is drawn into a capitalist economy, but “there is no change as yet in the mode of production itself” (R 106 / C 1026). Under conditions of “real subsumption,” on the other hand, the production process itself is altered, such that the producers are no longer selling their surplus product to the capitalist, but are instead selling their labor to the capitalist, who will eventually be compelled to reorganize the production process altogether. (Production, as well as exchange, has both a C-M-C or “customary” in the Hegelian sense and an M-C-M or capitalist form. The latter haunts the former until the phase change to capitalism proper, when the former haunts the latter.) Logically speaking, the distance between formal and real subsumption is vanishingly small (just as C-M-C and M-C-M are the same process, examined from different standpoints); but the status of the product of labor, and eventually the work process itself, is fundamentally different under each. Indeed, as will no doubt already be apparent, “formal subsumption” allows for Hegelian externalization to continue under capitalism, since it is, for example, only accidental surplus that is sold: “Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the manifestation of his own nature. He later sold the product for £5 and thus became a dealer in commodities” (R 128 / C 1044). Under “real subsumption,” on the other hand, we are already in the world of Marxian separation, where the whole production process is oriented towards exchange. But what this logical proximity means is that directly “capitalist production has a tendency to take over all branches of industry… where only formal subsumption obtains” (R 118 / C 1036). In order for formal subsumption in a given corner of industry to obtain with any permanence, it must be afforded some degree of protection: professional guilds, research-based tenure, Adorno’s well-funded state cultural institutions, or, as we shall consider shortly, something like Bourdieu’s concept of a field of restricted production.

For once underestimating capitalism, Marx seems to think in these fragments that the arts are, by their very nature, unsuitable candidates for real subsumption (see R 133 / C 1048). Little did he imagine that once the means of distribution were fully subsumed, whatever is genuinely inassimilable in artistic labor would cease to make any difference; that the artist, when not genuinely a cultural worker, would be forced to conceive of herself, in true neoliberal fashion, as an entrepreneur of herself; that any remaining pockets of autonomy would effectively cease to exist by lacking access to distribution and, once granted access, would cease to function as meaningfully autonomous. Adorno has no trouble imagining a still-incomplete real subsumption, which is the culture industry, with modernism as the last holdout of merely formal subsumption.13 For Jameson, finally, the real subsumption of cultural labor under capital is an established fact. The result is a “dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture” that is at the same time “a prodigious expansion of culture throughout the social realm” (48).

This end of autonomy directly implies the end of modernism. If canonical modernism conceived of itself as autonomous—as producing the “critical distance” (48) that Jameson sees as having been “abolished,” along with any “autonomous sphere of culture…in the new space of postmodernism” (48)—then today we tend to understand this critical distance as nothing more than modernism’s aesthetic ideology; modernist artworks are and were commodities after all.14 So far we have done no more than reconstruct the logic that lends the contemporary common sense we began with its plausibility.

Nobody could be more skeptical of modernism’s self-representation than Pierre Bourdieu. And yet Bourdieu produced, in his two-field theory of aesthetic production, an account of the real referent of modernism’s self-representation in the development of a “field of restricted production,” which lies behind the ability of artists to “affirm, both in their practice and their representation of it, the irreducibility of the work of art to the status of a simple commodity.”15 This dual affirmation is key, for the ideological representation of autonomy has its basis in the real autonomization of aesthetic practice in the struggle by artists to institute a “field of restricted production,” which forcibly substitutes for the “unpredictable verdicts of an anonymous public” (54)—the problem of the seller of commodities—a “public of equals who are also competitors” (58). In other words, the establishment of a field of restricted production forcibly carves a zone of formal subsumption out of the field of large-scale production which is really and entirely subsumed under capital. (It is worth pointing out that such a restricted field is not a market in any meaningful sense: judgments by peers, struggles over the significance of particular interventions, are precisely the opposite of purchases on a market, which cannot provoke disagreement because, as we have seen, no agreement is presupposed.) Adorno’s more ad hoc version of the two-field hypothesis conceives of its restricted zone as a residual rather than an emergent space; but he and Bourdieu share an understanding of the essentiality of such a zone to meaning as such, as well as a sense of its precariousness.

In Bourdieu’s account, the establishment of such a zone directly implies the tendency of art produced in a restricted field to gravitate toward formal concerns, toward the progressive working-out of problems specific to individual media. What a restricted public of (for example) painters, critics of painting, and connoisseurs of painting share is nothing other than expertise in painting. “Painting was thus set on the road towards a conscious and explicit implementation or setting-into-work of the most specifically pictorial principles of painting, which already equals a questioning of these principles, and hence a questioning, within painting itself, of painting itself” (66). In other words, modernism: “Especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, art finds the principle of change within itself, as though history were internal to the system and as though the development of forms of representation and expression were nothing more than the product of the logical development of systems of axioms specific to the various arts” (126). But for the characteristic “as though,” which marks this as an imaginary relation whose real referent is the logic of the restricted field, the words could have been written by Clement Greenberg.16 Indeed, the Bourdieusian restricted field is the condition of possibility of modernism as such, the condition of possibility of a Hegelian concern for “the matter in hand” under full-blown capitalism.

With the collapse of an autonomous field, with the real subsumption of aesthetic labor under capital, the possibility of something bearing a family resemblance to modernism abruptly disappears. What had been central was a problem to be addressed—a problem in which the general market, because it is a market, has no interest—and all the old solutions had been ruled out of bounds not because they were not nice to hang on a wall or to read, but because they had been absorbed into the game of producing new ones. For this reason, what appears as loss from the perspective of autonomy is at the same time a tremendous liberation of formal energies. The leapfrogging, dialectical modernist game—in which every attempt to solve the central problem represented by a medium becomes, for every other producer, a new version of the problem—becomes more hermetic and difficult to play over time. One can immediately see that the isolation of an autonomous field is not only the necessary condition of possibility (within market society) for the production of any meaning whatsoever, it is also a condition that leads to the increasing difficulty of producing meaning or, more accurately, the increasing formalization of meaning itself. Meanings are made possible by autonomization, but these meanings themselves are increasingly only formally meanings—that is, they are legible as intentions, but the only meanings they convey are specifically painterly, musical, writerly, etcetera. The very dynamic that makes modernism possible tends at the same time to restrict its movement to an increasingly narrow ambit.

With the real subsumption of art under capital and the end of the modernist game, then, all of the old “solutions,” each one of which had been invalidated by subsequent solutions, suddenly become available for use. A certain historicism—Jamesonian postmodern pastiche—becomes possible. Such a historicism is null as historicism, since what it doesn’t produce is precisely anything like history; but on the other hand it is practically bursting with the excitement at being allowed to apply its galvanic fluid to the great gallery of dead forms, which are suddenly candidates for resuscitation. Friedian “objecthood” is also liberated at this same moment: the reaction of the spectator, or customer, assumes importance in precise correlation to the recession of the formal problem confronted by the artist.

But, as is probably obvious by now, liberation from the strictures of the old modernist games is at the same time subjection to something else, namely the “anonymous market” from which the autonomous field had wrested a degree of autonomy. If artworks can now make use of all the old styles (or become objects), it is not clear why one would call them artworks at all, since the honest old art-commodity, precisely because it was more interested in the appeal to a market (the effect on an audience) than on formal problems, was able to make use of the old styles (or be an object) all along. In other words, there is nothing new in unabashedly borrowing indiscriminately from the great gallery of dead forms, or in appealing theatrically to consumer desires. These procedures are in fact the norm. The innovation of postmodern pastiche is—by definition—not formal, but in the collapse of art into what was already the status quo of the culture at large. Postmodernism’s innovation is precisely in evacuating the distinction between industrial spectacle—Cameron’s ideological mishmash—and the Jamesonian postmodern art-object, assembled from its “grab bag or lumber room of disjointed subsystems and raw materials and impulses of all kinds” (31).

Of course, this is the point. And indeed there is nothing implausible about a scenario in which artworks as such disappear, to be entirely replaced by art-commodities, and in which the study of artworks would have to be replaced with the study of reception, of desires legible in the market, and so on. There is a deeply egalitarian promise in such a scenario, precisely because the formal concerns addressed by artworks are in general the province of a few—in the absence of a strong public education system, are necessarily the province of a few. The problem is that a world where the work of art is a commodity like any other is the world neoliberalism claims we already live in and have always lived in, a world where everything is (and if it isn’t, should be) a market. The old vanguardist horizon of equivalence between art and life—which only made sense as a progressive impulse when “life” was understood as something other than the status quo—reverses meaning and becomes deeply conformist. Against this market conformism the assertion of autonomy—even as its very plausibility now seems in doubt—becomes vital once again.

A host of consequences follows from this reversal. The assertion of autonomy means that an artwork must contain its own interpretation; that is, the artwork must be a theory of itself. The assertion of autonomy, in other words, demands a return to immanent critique, to the notion of self-legislating form; in other words, to the conception of literature formulated by the German Romantics at the turn of the 19^th century: “Poetry should represent itself in every representation, and be at every point at once poetry and the poetry of poetry” (Friedrich Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment 238 [1798]).17 In fact, the Romantic reinvention of literature and the other arts undergirds more contemporary critical practice than we like to imagine, and indeed alone justifies a practice like close reading. The assertion of aesthetic autonomy returns the discipline of literary studies, which, absent such an assertion, can only flounder in search of a relevance it lacks by definition, to theoretical coherence.

A more substantial consequence is that the charge of “elitism,” or the class stratification of aesthetic response, accrues to the claim to universal heteronomy rather than to autonomous art. For if nothing essential distinguishes between art and non-art, the only distinction left—and some distinction is necessary in order for the word “art” to have any referent, not to mention in order to populate the institutions that still exist to preserve, transmit, and consecrate it—is between expensive art and cheap art, or art whose means of appropriation are expensive or cheap to acquire. Indeed, rather than affirm emphatically the status of the work of art as nothing more than the luxury good that it undoubtedly also is, it would be prettier to claim heteronomy as a critique of autonomy. But this would mean affirming a meaning, and as we have seen this would necessarily entail a claim to autonomy from the market even as that claim is disavowed.

Under contemporary conditions, the assertion of aesthetic autonomy is, in itself, a political assertion. (A minimal one, to be sure.) This was not always the case. In the modernist period, for example, the convincing assertion of autonomy produced, as it does now, a peculiar non-market space within the capitalist social field. But there is no natural political valence to modernism’s distance from the market, since modernism does not make its way under anything like the dominance of market ideology that we experience today.18 (It was also easier to confuse personal with aesthetic autonomy. Today their opposition is clear. Personal autonomy—choice—takes place in the market. Aesthetic autonomy—meaning—can take place only in a non-market. Outside of the work, the assertion of autonomy is advertising copy.) Modernism tends to be hostile to the culture market, but all kinds of politics (Heidegger as much as Adorno) are hostile to the market. Indeed, Lisa Siraganian has suggested that underlying the panoply of modernist radicalisms is nothing other than a deeper commitment to classical political liberalism, to a zone of deliberative autonomy.19 Modernist hostility to the market only acquires a definite political valence after modernism: when the claim of the universality of the market is, as it is today, the primary ideological weapon wielded in the class violence that is the redistribution of wealth upwards. The upwards redistribution of wealth in the current conjuncture would be unthinkable without this weapon: the entire ideology of neoliberalism hinges on the assertion that this redistribution is what a competitive market both produces and requires as a precondition. If the claim to autonomy is today a minimal political claim, it is not for all that a trivial one. A plausible claim to autonomy is in fact the precondition for any politics at all other than the politics of acquiescence to the dictates of the market.

In the new dispensation, in other words, the assertion of autonomy is no longer a commitment to liberalism. The horizon of the liberal commitment to disagreement is agreement. Aesthetic autonomy today is, on the other hand, locked in a life or death struggle with the market. Our social machine is not the market itself but rather capitalism, which requires (among other things, like exploitation) both markets and institutions autonomous of them. There is then nothing archaic about the institution of art, nothing rear-guard about the assertion of autonomy. As with the enlightenment in Hegel (who referred rather to “the struggle of Enlightenment with Supersition”), capitalism is not one thing but rather the struggle between two things. (To be more precise, it is many such struggles, or one such struggle with many forms of appearance). Autonomous institutions, “matters in hand,” are, in other words, not mere spaces of critique, somehow removed from the social machine; they are rather integral to it. The assertion of autonomy is the assertion that, rather than in the heat-death of the closure of the market, or in the static symbiosis of markets and regulation, history lies in the struggle between autonomy and the market.

But how to make the claim to autonomy plausible? Haven’t we, in outlining the collapse of modernism, done no more than confirm the wisdom that the work of art is a commodity like any other? In fact, it is the claim to universal heteronomy that is implausible. Markets—and this was recognized in some of the precursors to neoliberal discourse—depend on a host of non-market actors and institutions, even as these are always at the same time under threat from the market itself.20 And a major consequence of Bourdieu’s discovery of the restricted field was the demonstration that the field of large-scale cultural production, the culture industry as such, is utterly dependent on the persistence of the restricted field.21 If the old modernist autonomy has been revealed to be an aesthetic ideology, there is no reason to believe that the new heteronomy therefore represents the truth. Like modernist autonomy, it is a productive ideology: it frees artists to do something other than the old modernist games, and it allows them to work in the culture industry without facing the accusation of selling out, which now seems like an anachronistic accusation indeed. But that doesn’t mean that aesthetic heteronomy corresponds to the actual state of affairs, though it must refer to something real in order to be effective. And at any rate, it takes half a second to realize that both heteronomy and autonomy are, taken separately, deeply contradictory positions that could not be occupied by any actual cultural production worth talking about. Pure autonomy would have no relation to the world; pure heteronomy would be indistinguishable from it. Rather, the question is: how and where is autonomy asserted, what are the mechanisms that make it possible? How, in short, does heteronomy produce or presume the autonomous?

Two answers suggest themselves, though both Fried and Jameson have their own solutions with which readers will already be familiar. The first is what one might call, in search of a better term, positive historicism, as a necessary logical advance from null historicism or pastiche. As long as an artwork is making a claim to be an artwork, the very heteronomy proclaimed by historicism can only be the appearance of heteronomy. The “grab bag or lumber room” is only an apparent grab-bag or lumber-room; it is in fact governed by a principle of selection. If it is an actual grab bag or lumber room, it is the internet or an archive or a mall or simply everyday experience itself, and we don’t need artists for those. As a disavowed principle of selection it may be weak or inconsistent; but from disavowed principle to conscious principle is but a tiny Hegelian step, and weak or null historicism turns into strong or positive historicism. So in this case the legible element of form, its meaning—the moment of intention—is not so much in the formal reduction of an art into the problem of its medium as it is in the process of framing: in the selection a particular formal or thematic problem as central, and the rewriting of the history of the medium or genre or even socio-cultural aesthetic field as the history of that problem. Possibly because of the one-time dominance of the album form, this solution is most abundantly audible in popular music. (Meanwhile, in large-format photography, precisely because it does open up an entirely new arena to be formally reduced to the problem of medium, and because this arena can be explored on the basis of an already existing restricted field, this solution is less urgent.)22

One of the best examples in music is the Brazilian Tropicália movement, one of the first pastiche postmodernisms. But it becomes obvious almost immediately that Tropicália’s “lumber room” is a national lumber room, and that the materials it cobbles together are only those materials that register what had been the thematic center of Brazilian modernism. Brazilian modernism had been concerned with the perverse coexistence of the archaic and the hypermodern typical of Brazil’s insertion into the world economy as a relatively wealthy peripheral economy. Tropicália, rather than search for a form adequate to express this content, will scour the cultural landscape for forms that already embody it: for example, slave culture electrified in trio eléctrico or submitted to modernist compositional technique in bossa nova.23 The two musical forms—a street music invented for Carnaval in Salvador and a chamber music invented for bourgeois living rooms in Rio—would seem to have nothing to do with each other until Tropicália asserts their identity, at which point they can only be understood as forms of appearance of the same essential contradiction. And indeed now purely commercial forms like iê-iê-iê (from “yeah, yeah, yeah”: derivative pop) can be seen, properly framed, to take part of this same contradiction from the other direction, since the attempt to keep up with the metropolitan culture industry is already the failure to keep up with it. A more formalized version of the historicist solution can be seen in the U.S. in, for example, the White Stripes project, which was essentially a theory of rock in musical form, and Cee-Lo Green’s most recent album The Lady Killer, which produces a history of that sliver of black music that for a time assumed a dominant presence in the mass market, from the girl groups of the early 1960s to Prince and Michael Jackson even Lionel Richie in the early 1980s.24

A second possibility, which bears a family resemblance to the first but is closer in structure to Fried’s version of the problem than to Jameson’s, is the aestheticization of genre. In a recent discussion, David Simon, the creator of the television show The Wire, points to genre fiction as the one place where stories other than the now-standard, character-driven family narratives of contemporary high populism can be reliably found.25 But why should genre fiction be a zone of autonomy? Isn’t genre fiction the quintessential art commodity? In an interview, this time with Nick Hornby, Simon repeatedly says, in various ways, “Fuck the average reader.”26 This is a completely modernist statement, an assertion of autonomy from the culture market.27 But how can someone who writes for TV possibly imagine his work as autonomous from the culture market? Because a genre, already marketable or it wouldn’t be a genre, is also governed by rules. The very thing that invalidates genre fiction in relation to modernist autonomy—“formulas,” Adorno called them—opens up a zone of autonomy within the heteronomous space of cultural commodities. The requirements are rigid enough to pose a problem, which can now be thought of as a formal problem like the problem of the flatness of the canvas or the pull of harmonic resolution. “Subverting the genre” means doing the genre better, just as every modernist painting had to assume the posture of sublating all the previous modernisms. Simon’s only concession to the market is to the genre itself: Simon has to “solve the problem” of the police procedural—in other words, to produce a new way of satisfying the requirements of the genre—and he is free within that genre to use what narrative materials he likes. Ultimately, he is free to orient the entire work towards a plausible left project, namely a classically realist mapping of social space.

The assertion of autonomy implied in positive historicism, above, can lead to an attractive politics, as it does (not without ambivalence) in Tropicália, but it can also produce no legible politics at all beyond the minimal one entailed in the claim to autonomy (The White Stripes, Cee-Lo). Similarly, even when the aestheticization of genre doesn’t lead to an obviously attractive politics, it does lead to better art, or rather to the possibility of art as such—a possibility which, I have tried to show, today itself entails a minimal politics. A time-travel narrative can only have one of two endings: either history can be changed, or it can’t: Back to the Future or La jetée. So the problem of the time-travel flick is how to keep these two incompatible possibilities in play until the end, and if possible even beyond the end, so you can have a sequel. And James Cameron can, within this genre, make all kinds of intentional choices that can only be read as intentional choices, because they can only be understood as manipulations of a formal problem. And Terminator II can be a work of art, while Avatar is only an art commodity.

Omair Hussain: Critical theory today is concerned with a rejection of modern, bourgeois society, understood as being founded on an ideology of oppression. Your work is marked by a return to the bourgeois philosopher par excellence: Hegel. How does Hegel’s articulation of bourgeois subjectivity provide a way of thinking about the limits and potentials of modern society? How can we understand Hegel’s framework as being critical?

Robert Pippin: Hegel is the first to argue that philosophy has an historical and a diagnostic task. A traditional understanding of philosophy is distinguished by two central, normative questions, and its conviction that these questions can be answered by the exercise of pure human reason: What ought we to think, and what ought we to do? To Hegel, this conception of philosophy is insufficient and, in the Kantian sense, un-critical—that is, not aware of the conditions of its own possibility. Instead, Hegel argues that philosophy’s task is the comprehension of its own time in thought. That’s an extremely powerful and influential formulation, although it is not at all clear exactly what it means.

Certainly, Hegel has in mind the self-justification of the use of coercive violence by a single authority in the state against all other members, otherwise known as politics. Under what justification could the coercive power of law, the ability to take away one’s freedom, operate? Hegel was skeptical of the “pure,” practically rational inquiry into this problem undertaken, say, by Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’s Leviathan. Human rationality, to Hegel, is not a faculty possessed by human beings, like sensibility or the imagination, which they exercise in isolation as monadic units. He thinks of rationality as the considerations we offer each other when our actions affect what others would otherwise be able to do. Rationality is a social practice and it has a history, as do the elements connected with it, such as the concept of subject or agent.

There are two senses in which Hegel is critical. First, in a way that is deeply indebted to Kant, he calls for rigorous reflection on the conditions that make possible reason, that make possible the exercise of justifying ourselves to each other. Hegel thereby articulates how various attempts at such justification have broken down. Out of these failures he tells a story about how, considering the history of these practices, Western societies have come to get better at this kind of justification. He ended up thinking that the society he saw coming into view in 1820s Germany had gotten so much better in this regard that the basic institutional structure of that society counted as something like a resolution of the problem. What features of that society inspired such optimism? First and foremost, the distinction between the state and civil society. It is a gross confusion to think of the state as nothing but the administrative arm of modern civil society; for Hegel, civil society encompasses the institutions of property, the accumulation of capital, the regulation of contract, the formation of social clubs, the private exercises of religion, and so on. Hegel argued that modern societies had made a distinction between the properly political and the merely administrative. He thought that the modern institutions of the so-called bourgeois or nuclear family, along with the existence of private property as a means to the realization of individuality and the representative Rechsstaat, the state governed by the rule of law, were adequate solutions to this problem because they embodied successful modes of reasoning. Hegel showed how in other societies, at other times, the considerations they advanced, on the basis of “because you are my serf, or a woman, or my wife,” for instance, failed because they could not be offered and accepted by mutually equal subjects, which is the gold standard in Hegel’s account.

Now, one sense in which Hegel is not critical follows from what I have just said: He thought he saw coming into view a resolution of this social conception of rationality in institutions that embody mutuality of subjectivity, or genuine equality, in a way that rises to a general resolution of the problem of practical rationality. Today, I do not think anyone in his or her right mind would argue this is true. So, a great deal of post-Hegelian philosophy has been committed to identifying what is going wrong and clarifying what the nature of the wrongness of post-Hegelian society is. Some of the categories you sometimes hear on the Left can be used in a purely moralistic way, suggesting that what’s going wrong is that some people are taking advantage of others for their own gain. That is wrong, certainly, but the question is whether that moral category of injury to another for one’s own gain adequately captures what’s going wrong, in general. After all, that is always what’s going wrong, in any society: There are criminals, egoists, and cruel and selfish people. The task of post-Hegelian philosophy has been to find a more concrete historical analysis committed to understanding how and why, in post-Hegelian societies, the strategies for justification are breaking down internally, as is visible in various social pathologies and other expressions of irrationality. For Hegel, one crucial element of such an investigation was the history of fine art.

One of the things I am working on is to understand what Hegel might have said about art created by Western artists after 1863. In particular, I have in mind the exhibition of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, the first modernist painting—an explosive and epochal event from which the West has not yet recovered.

OH: For some time now, the dominant model for what counts as critical in art, under the broad label “postmodernism,” has consisted in the idea of “resistance”: Art is critical insofar as it resists and challenges racist, sexist, classist, or generally authoritarian assumptions of modern bourgeois society. But this approach tends to neglect the historical dimension of the peculiar problems modern society poses for art, and vice-versa. How is this critical potential of art, as Hegel understood it, expressed in the art practices and theory prevalent today—or has it simply been left behind?

RP: To answer that, one has to go back to a fundamental philosophical question: What distinct human need does art, as art, speak to? This question highlights a danger we court if we consider art nothing more than a kind of sensible embodiment of a politically critical idea. This is already a betrayal of what is distinctive about art. Things that simply embody and convey a political idea may have interesting and important functions when exhibited in galleries, but it poses the question, enormously disputed over the last 50 years, of art’s raison d’être. Why should there be art? To ask this question seriously we have to be willing to concede that many things that are referred to, celebrated, and purchased as art might not be art. By extension, people can be wrong about what they think art is, as art.

With Hegel, you need four distinctions. First, “pre-art art,” or art in the process of truly becoming art, such as the statuaries and architecture of the Egyptian world which is, to Hegel, in a way so frozen and dead that it is not yet the sensible embodiment of what he calls spirit, or Geist. Then there is “art art,” referring to the one period in the history of the human race when Hegel thought art fulfilled its own nature perfectly: Greek art, sculpture, architecture, literature, and so forth. Thirdly there is “post-art art,” or art in the process of overcoming itself as art. Hegel thinks of this mostly as romantic art, and especially the late romantic art of his own period. Finally there is what we just talked about, “non-art art,” or art that is in contestation about its status, but which we might want to conclude is not really art, however valuable it may be in another respect. Now, if we hold onto the notion that there may be something distinctive that art contributes, it poses the question, “Contributes to what, exactly?” With Hegel, the official answer to that question is that art is an intuitive, sensible mode of intelligibility of the Absolute. By the Absolute he means some comprehensive understanding that we are both subjects of our lives—we run them, deciding what to think and what to do—yet we are at the same time objects. We are material objects in space and time, extended matter subject to the laws of nature, and we are potentially objects for other subjects, for whom we are nothing but objects in their way. What the Germans meant by the absolute was the final comprehension of the speculative truth that we are, in this sense, both object and subject at the same time.

Hegel argued, up until the later lectures in Berlin, that art was an indispensable mode of intelligibility of this crucial feature of human life. In that respect I think he would see the art of the 19th century, the art of Édoard Manet or Paul Cézanne, for example, as being politically and socially critical, despite the fact that most today do not understand such works as political at all. From the Hegelian point of view, every painting allegorizes its own relation to the beholder, and in doing so allegorizes the relation of social intersubjectivity and mutual understanding. If something is going wrong there, we should expect to see it in visual art. Clearly, something is going wrong in Manet. The conventions of pictorial credibility have begun to lose their hold. Manet’s works are a direct attack on the illusion that the picture plane is transparent and that pictorial “illusion” can be created by the post-Renaissance techniques of vanishing point and aerial perspective. The possibility of conventional pictorial credibility is being criticized by Manet in pictures like Déjeuner sur l’herbe or Olympia, where all the conventional notions of what we would need in order to understand what the paintings are trying to tell us are under attack.

In that sense I do not think Hegel would regard the heavily conceptualized, polemical variety of art that you have called postmodern as being terribly effective. From a Hegelian point of view it is kind of boring. It makes the same point over and over again. There is no great mystery about merely the existence of oppression in the world. We can be reminded of it again and again, but after a while that tends to lose some of its grip, and the deeper question is what forms of mutual intelligibility are beginning to fail and how that can be most properly and determinately represented in art. It is in this regard, in short, that Hegel would have conceived of art as a political enterprise.

OH: Your response points to a peculiar bind in which modern art finds itself. “Post-art art” is actually art in the process of overcoming itself. This predicament is tragic, as your discussion of Manet suggests, but it also allows for a new significance. The uncertainty of post-art art gives it a freedom to take risks and transform itself. What did it mean for Hegel that post-art art is in the process of overcoming itself as art? Is this something to be lamented, or is there a progressive character to this self-overcoming?

RP: Hegel recognized how important art, and especially poetry, had become to the German society in which he lived. However, he also insisted that, compared with the significance of art in the tragic festivals of the ancient Greeks or in its religious function in medieval and early modern society, art would never again mean for us what it had meant to earlier societies. It would never recover that degree of importance.

Hegel had a lot of reasons for saying this, but I think Hegel made a terrible mistake in arguing that this equivalent, but incommensurable, mode of intelligibility of the basic problem of the Absolute no longer needed a sensible intuitive mode of intelligibility because we had understood it so well at the conceptual and rational practical level, because of various things he believed about the achievements of modern, bourgeois society. A big problem for anyone interested not only in Hegel, but also in the whole Left Hegelian critical tradition, is to try to figure out the non-self transcendence of art—that is, to figure out what actually is the continuing task for art in contemporary society, within these premises that Hegel has established.

OH: Despite the fact that Hegel saw emerging in society something like, as you put it, “a general solution to the problem,” he also speaks to the incomplete, or unrealized, character of subjectivity in modern society. In contrast, most critical social theory since has rejected the category of subjectivity as an Enlightenment “illusion” that we should rid ourselves of. But if we understand subjectivity in modern society as a task, rather than a fact to be affirmed or rejected, the question becomes far more interesting. What do you think Hegel would have to say about such renunciations of “subjectivity”?

RP: This kind of critique of human subjectivity is essentially the result of those Paul Ricoeur called the “masters of suspicion”: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These are the first to suggest that the domain of conscious intention, decision, and judgment is merely an appearance, while the true determinates of what we take ourselves to be consciously determining are actually inaccessible to consciousness. The domain of our conscious attentiveness is a kind of illusion, a pretension to run the show of our own lives, whereas it is actually some manifestation of the relation between the mode of production and the relations of production in a given society, or the will to power, or the unconscious. What poststructuralism did, which is essentially a post-Heideggerian phenomenon, is intensify the skepticism about the possibility of running any show, by destabilizing the attempt to identify these so-called true forces of determination—the unconscious, the will to power, economic relations of class, and so on. Such an intense skepticism that we could ever come to any determination about those latent forces leaves one in a of condition of complete indeterminacy—a “floating signifier.”

The central response from the Hegelian tradition we have been discussing is that the conclusion of utter indeterminacy points immediately to its own practical unintelligibility. In other words, suppose you are convinced that human subjectivity, in this somewhat crude sense of “running the show,” is an illusion. What would it be to properly acknowledge this fact, in one’s life, from the first-person point of view? Are you supposed to wait around indefinitely, to see what your indeterminate forces do? There’s some enormous overcorrection in the history of Western thought since roughly Marx and Nietzsche, in which all sorts of babies are being thrown out with all kinds of bath water. The dimension of a free life that Hegel is interested in has not, by virtue of these critiques, been superseded or gone away, unless we have some way of understanding what it would be to actually acknowledge such a departure in life. The postmodernist critique of subjectivity is “overdone” to the extent that it leaves us with no concrete way to understand what the actual position of subjectivity should look like to an agent.

The problem of freedom, as Hegel understands it, is not freedom from the interference of external impeding forces. Hegel is one of the first to offer a critique of the liberal democratic tradition for its emphasis on isolating the realm of entitlement to mere non-interference. You can be un-coerced, and do what you take to be appropriate, and still have a relationship to what you do that is not identification, that is not affirmative toward it. We are finite beings, of course. Much of what we do falls within a constructed realm of possibilities that we do not determine. But, for Hegel, what is crucial is the kind of recognitive relation between that realm of possibilities and what you actually do, and the conditions for you to be able to enjoy that kind of identification are social and public. They are largely determined by the kind of world you grew up in, or the kind of world you have to deal with when you are grown up. So the problem of freedom, for Hegel and those who follow him, is not freedom from external constraint, but the establishment of the social conditions under which the life you lead seems to be the one you have determined.

OH: This brings to mind the relationship between Hegel’s philosophy and his own historical moment, when history plausibly seemed to be the story of humanity’s movement toward freedom and rationality. As you have pointed out, this sounds naïve to us today. But then how are we to account for how our world is, at least in some sense, historically continuous with Hegel’s moment, and yet also seems to have no place for the possibility of free, self-legislating subjects?

RP: First, certain aspects of the character of modern society are not anticipated by Hegel, Feuerbach, or Marx. A number of things make part of Hegel’s analysis difficult to reconceptualize and potentially even irrelevant. Hegel is constantly attentive to what he calls the mediations of the relationships between the individual and the universal norms of the society. These mediations encompass the features of society that make it so you are not facing the requirements of normative justifiability in your society as an abstract individual. A big part of the question, “What should I do?” consists in figuring out what to do qua mother, qua father, qua businessman or businesswoman, qua citizen, qua soldier. One of Hegel’s most important insights is that society degenerates into a kind of abstract moralism if we do not understand that the embodiment of some of these universal norms in concrete roles is not bad, but is actually the only way for finite human beings to ever instantiate these norms of mutuality and equality that Hegel is interested in. But this requires a structure of mediations that is very thin in contemporary society. Hegel would never have anticipated the mass commercial culture that we have right now. The sheer size of it makes the idea of mediation difficult. The intense need for the constant expansion of the economy has created a culture that requires both saturation via need creation, or advertising, and new techniques and powers to create these needs. If you had confronted Marx with things like the billion dollar market in diet dog food that exists today, he likely would have thrown up his hands in despair, and justly so. Part of what we are discovering is that there is no limit thus far. When applied to contemporary society, the Hegelian framework, with its concentration on things like mediation, is in some ways just not going to fit. The degree of anonymization of contemporary society has called for a new form of analysis.

At some point the Hegelian categories just run out, and then you get the Frankfurt School’s account, and the accounts of structuralism, poststructuralism, Freudian or Lacanian psychoanalysis, all of them trying to get at what’s going wrong in the basic, fundamental structure of human desire formation. Let’s say that the problem is deeper than one Hegel could deal with. Nietzsche was one of the first to see that the problem in sustaining a massive common culture is that the resultant form of life sustains no great desire. It is flat, boring, and uninspirational. Hegel did not fully understand the nature of this issue. It would have astonished him that, just as Enlightenment rationalism was beginning to pay off on all its great claims, with decreased infant mortality, public health, the rule of law, and so on, all the great artists and intellectuals of 19th century Europe rose up in disgust and said, “No, it’s not what we wanted.” It was the beginning of the great bourgeois self-hatred that you see so much of in art.

I don’t have an adequate answer to what kind of extension and replacement of this Hegelian account of the mediated levels of rational society is needed to account for this vast mess of manipulation and desire creation that we have in the contemporary world. It even confounds the idea of unified political action, because the problem seems so much deeper—how does political action reach to such fundamental levels of desire, excitement, sustainability? Everything seems to be prior to any possible political action. That is one of the great conundrums of our day. We seem to be creating more reasons why these problems are not reachable by rational discourse. Yet, it is obviously dangerous to respond to this situation by aestheticizing politics, in the manner of the National Socialists, with the big rallies, uniforms, and flags.

Nonetheless, some dimension of what Hegel was interested in is not irrelevant. A dynamic, self-correcting process within society, however bounded it may be by things it cannot really affect, still appears to be at work. We are all living through perhaps the greatest social transformation in the history of the human race: the end of a gender-based division of labor. Why did that happen, after five thousand years of human civilization? One can still point to what German social theorists called the Spuren der Vernunft, or “traces of reason,” continuing to operate in history.

OH: To return to art, then, and its inseparability from larger social questions, one of the things at stake in the idea of artistic autonomy is the possibility that something could be an end in itself, for itself. In the past this autonomy has been understood in terms of the subject being able to sympathize with this possibility of being an end in itself. However, in discussions of art today, autonomy has come to be widely seen as a conservative category. What do you think it means that we have now come to express such skepticism, and perhaps even contempt, for autonomy?

RP: There are two major meanings of the autonomy of art. The one you are talking about, which tends to be labeled conservative, is the strand of late 19th century and early 20th century l’art pour l’art, or “art for art’s sake.” All art has to do in order to be worthy is to be beautiful. There is no purpose, function, or end served by being beautiful other than being beautiful, and one takes a certain pleasure in the irrelevant nobility of the existence of beautiful things. However, in the German tradition, the autonomy of art meant something very different, going back to Kant’s insistence that art should not be viewed as merely a means to the pleasure of the subject, nor only as an implement of religious worship or political glory. Such views entailed a profound miscategorization of the distinctness of the aesthetic intelligibility of what matters to us. Kant was the one who started the idea of conceiving of art in a completely new way, not connected to politics, religion, or even philosophy. Art was a distinct modality of making sense. What really excited the Germans so much was Kant’s insistence that this way of making sense was sensible. For Kant it was a form of pleasure, but a distinct kind of pleasure, in the apprehension of the beautiful. This distinctness of art should not be understood the way prior classical aesthetics had understood the value of art in terms of perfectionism, the representation of a perfect ideal, nor should it be understood as sensible in terms of the empiricist aesthetics of people like Hume and Burke, who saw art as a means to a kind of pleasure comparable to drinking wine. To view art as an empirical pleasure, in this way, would mean that art had no distinctive relation to the subject, which is precisely what Kant is getting at by calling art “distinct.” Kant argued that through the experience of the aesthetic we actually come to appreciate what he called the purposiveness of nature, that is, its compatibility with our nature as moral and rational and free beings, in the sense of a potential harmony between our natural side and our moral and rational side. We enjoy this harmony in a certain way in the pleasurable experience of the beautiful.

Far from merely asserting art to be the purpose of art, Kant’s insistence on the autonomy of art is meant to connect the aesthetic mode of making sense of things deeply important to us with the highest human aspirations for self-understanding and the realization of freedom, because it is only in terms of our destiny as free moral and rational beings, subjects of our own life, that the experience of nature as having a kind of complement to that destiny is so pleasurable. It is a complicated position, but the autonomy of art for Kant is the insistence that it is not for politics, religion, or pleasure, rather than autonomy in the sense that it does not have any other importance aside from being art. For Kant it has profound importance, especially in terms of the problem we discussed earlier: So much of the modern layout of the problem, the hard-to-pin-down but pervasive sense of the “wrongness” of society, seems to bypass politics by pointing to a level of engagement that is so deep behind consciousness that we cannot reach it. Art, precisely because it is a mode of non-discursive intelligibility, which does not consist in propositions, arguments, and syllogisms, nonetheless makes sense of ourselves in a way that actually resonates with what is now coming onto the scene as more important than the conscious deliberative capacities of individual subjects. This hope with respect to art underwent transformations through Schiller, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Frankfurt School, up to the present day, but this whole tradition is fundamentally different from the notion of autonomy that has been properly labeled conservative or right-wing—the idea, espoused by Hilton Kramer and often found in The New Criterion, that everything today looks ugly and we ought to go back to Beaux-arts buildings. That line of criticism does not even touch the radicality of this German Idealist and Romantic tradition that starts in the early 19th century and extends into the present day.

OH: You mentioned the Frankfurt School as an attempt to continue thinking about autonomy as understood by the German Idealist tradition. Something in Adorno’s work that seems to bear on this discussion is his insight that the ways in which we, as individuals in late capitalism, confront the autonomous artwork tell us something about how we experience the possibility of freedom. We experience the autonomy of the artwork pathologically, painfully, in the recognition that the artwork calls for something we have been unable to arrange for. Might this pathological character help us get a better handle on the discontent with the notion of autonomy, in both senses you have discussed, that seems to have become more prevalent and deeper, especially from the 1960s to the present?

RP: I do not think so. Adorno is talking about high modernist art, specifically. He is like Clement Greenberg in this respect. The way that fine art can serve as a kind of critique, as an experience of negativity, is precisely by virtue of its super-formal properties. The art he’s talking about is music, and he’s especially interested in Webern, Berg, and music that defies the traditional understanding of the comprehension of music. In this refusal, in stripping itself down to its pure formality, such art does not allow itself to be incorporated into the culture industry. This refusal is one moment of a rather indeterminate resistance taken up for the sake of what will not make sense within the conventions of the culture industry, and hence is a site of resistance.

I have a deep problem with Adorno as a theorist of postmodernism because his basic philosophical outlook is that the modern Enlightenment enterprise, by which he means everything from modern natural science as the supreme cognitive authority in the world, to capitalism as the private ownership of the means of productions to an extensively concentrated degree, creates what he calls “identity thinking.” That is to say, it creates a situation in which our conceptual norms of how the world is become ironclad. Whatever does not meet them is excluded as irrelevant, irrational, or marginal. Adorno thinks there is a conceptual hunger, or passion, to identify the elements of the real or the human with the kind of things we already have available to measure and conceptualize those things, and this entails an imposition of a particular, self-interested form of rationality and conceptualization. Successfully prosecuting this identification excludes potential disruptions to it or critiques of it. Art is upheld as a potential disruption of this identification, as something that falls out of the great enterprise of the Enlightenment, capitalist machine.

There are many aspects of Adorno’s thought I respect, but at its a core, I think Adorno has a terribly naïve and unsophisticated view of how the Enlightenment works, and hence a very Romantic and not terribly interesting view of modern art as the attempt to interrupt the capitalist and Enlightenment identification process. Adorno is willing to say the relationship between freedom as a possibility and unfreedom in the modern world has become so intertwined that these moments of resistance do not really have much of a future, that he can only hope they will keep alive this aspiration of resistance, until the possibility of some alteration of the social conditions, some collapse at the end of the so-called “dialectic” of Enlightenment. I’m not at all sympathetic to that way of looking at art.

For the rest of the interview visit http://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/after-hegel-an-interview-with-robert-pippin/