From Pseudo-Activity to Critique Adorno, philosophy, participation

From Pseudo-Activity to Critique Adorno, philosophy, participation will daddario

1 This phrase, the ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’, alludes to Marx’s letter to Arnold Ruge in 1844 but shows up in Adorno’s Notes to his lecture on ‘The negation of negation’ in Lectures on Negative Dialectics. In the text, dated 11 November 1965, Adorno writes, ‘negat[ive] dial[ectics] = ruthless criticism of all that exists’(2008: 13).

What does it mean to participate in the thought of performance and in the performance of thought? In ‘Notes on philosophical thinking’, Theodor W. Adorno offers an answer: ‘To think philosophically means as much as to think intermittences, to be interrupted by that which is not the thought itself’ (Adorno 2005a: 131–2). This quotation evokes Adorno’s negative dialectical philosophical procedure, which demands that its practitioner return repeatedly to this moment of interruption where subject and object fail to become distinctive. More than that, Adorno’s philosophical practice offers a method for actively participating in this interruption, which amounts to the performance of a dialectical thinking that Adorno names ‘immanent critique’. Thus, the stakes in theorizing the relationship between philosophy and participation in Adorno’s work include a renewed understanding of the relationship between theory and praxis, a glimpse into the persistence of negative dialectical thought, and a line of sight into the performance of thought practiced by one of the twentieth century’s most assiduous and demanding thinkers. In this essay, I will read across several of Adorno’s texts in order to extract numerous tiles, which, when arranged in a certain way, present a mosaic of a unique dramaturgical philosophical practice that seeks, above all, to produce a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ (Adorno 2008: 13).1 Each tile refracts Adorno’s thought on the embeddedness of society within works of arts and shines a light on his participation in the performance of

everyday life as a cultural critic and philosopher. I am borrowing this metaphor of the mosaic from Adorno’s friend and colleague, Walter Benjamin, who deploys it in the epistemo-critical prologue to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. There, he writes the following: Just as mosaics preserve their majesty despite their fragmentation into capricious particles, so philosophical contemplation is not lacking in momentum…. The value of the fragment of thought is all the greater the less direct [its] relationship to the underlying idea, and the brilliance of the representation depends as much on this value as the brilliance of the mosaic does on the quality of the glass paste. (Benjamin 2003: 28)

For the sake of this essay, the capricious particles refer to selected fragments of Adorno’s texts: a piece on pseudo-activity from his essay ‘Resignation’ (2005b [1969]); shards from ‘Marginalia to theory and praxis’ (2005c [1969]) and ‘On subject and object’ (2005d [1969]); some slivers on Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht and Samuel Beckett from ‘Commitment’ (2002a [1962]); and a few morsels on mimesis mined from Aesthetic Theory (1997 [1970]). Although harvested as fragments, the full momentum of Adorno’s thought inheres in these particles, a fact no doubt due to Adorno’s persistent concern with the relationship between theory and practice, and subject and object, which runs like a golden thread through all his writings. As Benjamin suggests in the above quotation, the value of these fragments emanates from

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their disregard for the whole. In other words, Adorno’s philosophy does not offer a manual for political action or a clear program for how to participate in the social world via a commitment to art. Instead, Adorno’s writing renders insights negatively, similar to the way that the smile of the Cheshire Cat leaves us the labour of imagining the whole of the animal. Since Adorno’s work does not appear frequently in the field of performance or theatre studies, especially not in the United States where I live and work, this essay may only leave readers with the smile when they would like the whole cat. Rather than attempt to offer a total image of Adorno’s views on the relationship between philosophy and participation, my goal here is to scrutinize the brilliance of the glass paste: on the one hand, the dense sedimentation of social mechanisms lodged within artworks that one is capable of sifting only by meeting the work of art at the point where the subject and the object blur into one; on the other hand, and simultaneously, the dense sedimentations of Adorno’s own prose that express his philosophical praxis as a lively engagement with the material world. Less enigmatically, this essay reads Adorno’s negative dialectical practice as a method for participating in the performance of thought. ‘Performance’ in this essay acquires different meanings at different times. In its most general determination, ‘performance’ refers to ‘doing’. This doing finds its dialectical counterpart in thinking, and I seek to map this dialectical relationship in the first section, which investigates Adorno’s writings on theory and practice and on the categories of subject and object. Performance also refers to the dramatic texts of Sartre, Brecht and Beckett, specifically to what they do or fail to do to audiences. Adorno’s writings on these texts reveal a dramaturgical quality to his philosophy that I will discuss in more detail in the second section on committed art and what Adorno calls ‘the shudder’. Finally, performance refers to Adorno’s critical practice itself. How precisely does Adorno’s thought participate in the world? It does so through 125

critique, but this critique has its own distinct set of qualities that become visible when comparing Adorno to other twentieth-century philosophers, specifically Alain Badiou and Michel Foucault. By mapping these three valences of ‘performance’ as they relate to Adorno’s philosophical praxis, I hope to instigate additional conversations on the place of Adorno within theatre and performance studies. theory/practice: subject/object

Adorno’s participation in the thought of performance and in the performance of thought shows itself most clearly in his concern with the dual relationships between theory and practice and between subject and object. In his essay ‘Resignation’, Adorno rehearses his long relationship with doing and thinking as he responds to those who accused him of abandoning the former for the latter. ‘Distance from praxis,’ he writes, ‘is disreputable to everyone. Whoever doesn’t want to really knuckle down and get his hands dirty, is suspect, as though the aversion were not legitimate and only distorted by privilege’ (Adorno 2005b: 290). Far from acknowledging any glimmer of truth in the accusation that he and his fellow members of the Frankfurt School had abandoned action for the armchair comfort of theoretical thought, Adorno uses this essay to unravel the authenticity of that which passed for activity and political participation in Germany in the late 1960s. Adorno names this participation ‘pseudo-activity’ and identifies its stated goal as the construction of and capitulation to a ‘pseudoreality’: Pseudo-reality is conjoined with, as its subjective attitude, pseudo-activity: action that overdoes and aggravates itself for the sake of its own publicity, without admitting to itself to what extent it serves as a substitute satisfaction, elevating itself into an end itself. (Adorno 2005b: 291)

For Adorno, action for action’s sake could never constitute a politically efficacious

A consciousness of theory and praxis must be produced that neither divides the two such that theory becomes powerless and praxis becomes arbitrary, nor refracts theory through the arch bourgeois primacy of practical reason proclaimed by [Immanuel] Kant and [Johann Gottlieb] Fichte. Thinking is a doing, theory a form of praxis; already the ideology of the purity of thinking deceives us about this. (Adorno 2005c: 261)

2 Henry W. Pickford’s gloss on this term, in his preface to Critical Models (2005d), is helpful: ‘Adorno’s confrontation with the student movement in several late texts draws on vocabulary specific to that time. In particular, “action”, “actionism”, etc. mean not planned activism but confrontation and agitation as a direct response to any political conflict.’

In many of his essays, Adorno worked over this thought repeatedly in an attempt to fight through the jargon of, on the one hand, pure thought and, on the other hand, ‘actionism’.2 What would one find on the other side of that binary? For Adorno, a true philosophical praxis could only emerge once one eschewed the logic that makes ‘the practical applicability of knowledge its criterion for knowledge’ (Adorno 2005c: 259). The path to this philosophical praxis leads back to the question of subject and object, since, to deconstruct the ideology of pure thought and pure action as well as the apparatus that sets them in contrast to each other, one must first deconstruct the idea that theory belongs to the subject while practice belongs to the world of objects or refers to some objective situation. A major tenet in Adorno’s philosophy, the dialectic of subject and object, constitutes

not only a focus of thought but also a challenge to the thinker. Theory is to practice what subject is to object. Each term flees from its counterpart and yet freezes in its wake, thus constructing not a binary antithesis but a dialectical relationship that yokes each term to the other in a productive antagonism. In ‘Notes on philosophical thinking’, Adorno elaborates on this productive antagonism and sketches the outline of a theory for practice:

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project since this action is only pseudoaction, and ‘[p]seudo-activity is generally the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society’ (Adorno 2005b: 291). If one is to remain wary of such pseudo-activity, then what is the alternative? Can one avoid the rigidifying mediations of social mechanisms that coax action from political dissidents in order to dissuade them from engaging with the theoretical and ideological strata of those mechanisms? Indeed, in an earlier essay, ‘Marginalia to theory and praxis’, Adorno elaborated on the antidote to pseudo-activity, namely a dialectical understanding of the practical dimension of theory and the theoretical dimension of practice:

Thinking should not reduce itself to method; truth is not the residue that remains after the subject has been eradicated. Rather, it must incorporate all innervation and experience into the contemplation of the subject matter in order, according to its ideal, to vanish within it. (Adorno 2005a: 130)

This sketch depicts a scenario in which the performance of thinking blurs the boundary between subject and object. Thus, when Adorno suggests that, ‘[t]o think philosophically means as much as to think intermittences, to be interrupted by that which is not the thought itself’ (Adorno 2005a: 131–2), he demands the critical thinker’s participation in what appears to be a never-ending task. He asks that one approach an object of study, walk around it, experience the rebuff of the object or an objective situation that comes from trying to penetrate it with thought, and then to repeat this task until the subject vanishes within the object, all the while arguing that this vanishing act can never be concluded. The person who engages in this performance can claim, in Adorno’s own words, the name of ‘thinking actionist’ (Adorno 2005b: 290). Who precisely is this thinking actionist? It is the individual capable of realizing and embodying the following truth: ‘Through its difference from immediate, situation-specific action, i.e., through its autonomization, theory becomes a transformative and practical productive force’ (Adorno 2005c: 264). Yet, despite this argument for the productive power of thinking, Adorno’s dialectical movement always returns to the object, which, far from quivering 126

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beneath the power of the subject, possesses its own ability to act and to penetrate the subject. Here, Adorno diverges from Hegel’s philosophical system (in which the absolute spirit allows for the reconciliation of subject and object) to create a negative dialectics that constantly returns to the point where subject and object come together and then rebuff one another. In ‘On subject and object’, Adorno critiques the German idealist philosophical tradition that, he argues, has hypostasized the separation of subject and object. In place of this tradition, Adorno explicates the mediation of subject and object and, contrary to the supposed dominance of the transcendental subject, theorizes the primacy of object. He writes that, ‘[i]n epistemology, “subject” is usually understood to mean the transcendental subject. According to idealist doctrine, it either constructs the objective world out of an undifferentiated material as in Kant or, since Fichte, it engenders the world itself’ (Adorno 2005d: 250). Adorno does not attempt to announce the dominance of object over subject; rather, he wishes to assert the thoroughly mediated interconnectedness of subject and object in order to unseat the claim to pure thought and the power of mind since ‘mind’s claim to independence announces its claim to domination’ (Adorno 2005d: 246). This manoeuvre allows Adorno to release the irrational power of object from its subservience to subjective thought without laying claim to an external world that exists prior to any critique or subjective reflection. ‘The primacy of the object means … that subject for its part is object in a qualitatively different, more radical sense than object, because object cannot be known except through consciousness, hence is also subject’ (Adorno 2005d: 249). He goes on to suggest that, ‘If subject has a core of object, then the subjective qualities in the object are all the more an objective moment’ (Adorno 2005d: 250). With this, Adorno hints at the performance of thought, which takes as its starting point the understanding that there is no pure subjective thought to start with. The irrational power of the 127

object is its ability to always interrupt subjective thought. The thinking actionist must think through the object to such an extent that the irrational power of the object becomes visible and palpable. Only by abandoning the idealist claims to a transcendental subject endowed with the power to arrange the material world at will can the potency of objects manifest itself. Although subject and object, theory and practice, always conjoin disjunctively and repel each other through this mediation, the thinking actionist must return repeatedly to this point of repulsion and reject the ideology of pure thought and pure action in favour of an allegiance to this neverending performance of thought.

through commitment to the shudder

Moving from the realm of the philosophical concepts of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ to their actual embodiment and performance in the realm of everyday life, in general, and artistic praxis, in particular, one learns that Adorno’s philosophical practice demands the active performance of the subject, but also that the practice does not stop there. Negative dialectical thought, which continually discovers primacy in the object, cripples the claim to active participation of the subject, what Sartre called the ‘commitment’ of the artist. ‘Commitment’ in this sense refers to the act of choosing freedom and, for Sartre, this act unfolded through the art of literature and the practice of writing. ‘[L]iterature,’ he writes in What is Literature?, ‘throws you into battle. Writing is a certain way of wanting freedom; once you have begun, you are engaged, willynilly’ (Sartre 1949: 65).3 In his essay, ‘Commitment’, Adorno critiques Sartre’s argument on committed art that he makes in What is Literature?: Committed art in the proper sense is not intended to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical institutions … but to work at the level of fundamental attitudes. For Sartre, its task is to

For more on Sartre’s notion of ‘commitment’ and its relation to practice, see Ian Birchall’s ‘Sartre and the myth of practice’: ‘For Sartre commitment is both a fact of life and a desirable value. We cannot choose except to choose – we are “condemned to be free” – but we can choose to accept our responsibility and to make meaningful choices.’ (2004: unpaginated)

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5 The best example of this comes from the play No Exit, the title of which conveys the unfreedom of the individual.

awaken the free choice of the agent, that makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to the neutrality of the spectator. (Adorno 2002a: 303–4)

For Sartre, an individual’s choice to participate in social action, the ‘battle’ for freedom as he speaks of it, marks that individual as committed. For Adorno, however, Sartre over-privileges the subject and neglects to take into account the art object produced by the committed individual. ‘Not the least of the weaknesses of the debate on commitment is that it ignores the effect produced by works whose own formal laws pay no heed to coherent effects’ (Adorno 2002a: 303). As Adorno’s philosophical essays on the dialectic of subject and object make clear, a power inheres within art objects that can augment or nullify the gesture of the artist. This potency derives from the fact that, in addition to the intentions of the artist, each work of art carries within it the antagonisms of the society from which it sprang. This is not the case for every work of art, only those ‘autonomous’ works of art of the avant-garde, such as the work of Beckett that I elaborate on below. The antagonisms of autonomous artworks feed back through the form of the artwork itself and shock the world that made the artwork possible. This leads Adorno to conclude that, ‘[s]o long as it [the debate on committed art] fails to understand what the shock of the unintelligible can communicate, the whole dispute resembles shadow-boxing’ (Adorno 2002a: 303).4 That this distinction between the power of the committed individual and the shock of the unintelligible produced by the autonomous artwork mattered a great deal to Adorno reveals itself in the aggressive nature of the argument fashioned in ‘Commitment’. Beyond a mere retort to Sartre or a half-fledged opinion piece, the essay works to undermine the entire foundation of the debate on committed art by re-envisioning the philosophical concepts that inform it. For Adorno, the inability for commitment to materialize as authentic participation derives from the Sartre’s undertheorized approach to the category of the object:

The principle of commitment thus slides towards the proclivities of the author, in keeping with the extreme subjectivism of Sartre’s philosophy, which for all its materialist undertones, still audibly echoes German speculative idealism. In his literary theory, the work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or failure to choose. (Adorno 2002a: 304)

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The word ‘autonomous’ infers that ‘autonomous art’ exists apart from society and social relations, and yet, for Adorno, the separation of autonomous art from society is never complete. The separation is a gesture, an attempt to separate from society. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno analyses this gesture as something essentially social, thereby unearthing the paradox of autonomous art as something that claims independence from society whilst all the while remaining inextricably bound to the society from which it wishes to escape. ‘[Art’s] autonomy, its growing independence from society, was a function of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that was itself bound up with the social structure. Prior to the emergence of this consciousness, art certainly stood in opposition to social domination and its mores, but not with an awareness of its own independence … art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art’ (Adorno 1997: 225). A critique of Adorno’s definition and analysis of autonomous art comes from Peter Bürger’s Theory of the AvantGarde. Although Bürger critiques Adorno, his own definition of autonomous art resonates with Adorno’s definitions; see, for example: ‘[T]he autonomy status of art within bourgeois society is by no means undisputed but is the precarious product of overall social development’ (Bürger 2007: 24).

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More than simply being concerned with Sartre’s literature, Adorno also takes aim at his plays which, he argues, ‘are nevertheless bad models of his own existentialism, because they display in their respect for truth the whole administered universe which his philosophy ignores; the lesson we learn from them is one of unfreedom’ (Adorno 2002a: 304). Despite Sartre’s philosophical claim that ‘human existence equals human freedom’, his plays express the opposite.5 The subjectivist theory and its objective materialization in the work of art are at odds with one another, which, Adorno suggests, betrays the untruth of so-called committed art. In the same essay, Adorno goes on to pay attention to theatre by extending his critique from Sartre to Brecht. This critique of Brecht may excite theatre and performance scholars due to its fastidious dissection of the political thrust of Brecht’s theatre, a thrust that, according to Adorno, presents only a blunt blade. In terms of traditional dramaturgical criticism, much like that proposed by Gotthold Lessing, Adorno’s analyses of Brecht’s theatre offer penetrating insights into the ideological substratum of the latter’s plays. Whereas Benjamin and Brecht fostered a close friendship and working relationship, Adorno and Brecht never saw eye to eye. Susan Buck-Morss relays the fact that, when both of them were exiled from Germany and living in Los Angeles, Brecht was working on a novel based on the story of the Frankfurt Institute. Brecht wanted to call the novel Tui, a word of his own invention based on ‘the abbreviation of “tellect-ual-in”, to refer to inside-out (or upside down) intellectuals … who wanted to fix the economic problems and the 128

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social ones related to them “purely mentally” through all sorts of remedies’ (Buck-Morss 1979: 167).6 With Adorno close by in their new home away from home, Brecht had planned to model a (not-so-flattering) character on his German philosopher acquaintance. Interestingly, for his own part, Adorno’s writings on Brecht frequently led to a similar conclusion, namely, that Brecht’s intellectualism betrayed his political activism and led to an irresolvable conflict embedded in the heart of his dramatic works. These beliefs surface in some of the essay’s most poignant passages, such as the following: Even Brecht’s best work was infected by the deceptions of his commitment. Its language shows how far the underlying poetic subject and its message have come apart. In an attempt to overcome the gap, Brecht affected the diction of the oppressed. But the doctrine he advocated needs the language of the intellectual. The homeliness and simplicity of his tone is thus a fiction. It betrays itself both by signs of exaggeration and by stylized regression to archaic or provincial forms of expression. (Adorno 2002a: 311)

Adorno moves back and forth between the formal level of Brecht’s language and the conceptual level of Brecht’s ideological leanings that buttress the plays’ storylines. To use Adorno’s terminology, Brecht’s plays reveal a dissymmetry between their semblance and their truth content, between that which they appear to be and that for which they stand. For Adorno, the political rhetoric of the plays amounted to very little since Brecht perpetually betrayed his intellectual capacity with intelligible language aimed at penetrating the consciousness of his audiences. Adorno’s analysis reaches its most weaponized pitch a few pages later when he concludes that ‘[Brecht’s] whole oeuvre is a Sisyphean labor to reconcile his highly cultivated and subtle taste with the crudely heteronomous demands which he desperately imposed on himself’ (Adorno 2002: 312). The dialectical movement never ceases in these critiques of Brecht, however; 129

Adorno never sides with or against Brecht. Instead, and here we find another element of his dramaturgical practice, Adorno returns repeatedly to the point where Brecht’s political theatre clashed antagonistically with Brecht’s political commitment. For Adorno: Brecht’s claim that he used theatre to make men think was justified. It is futile to try to separate the beauties, real or imaginary, of his works from their political intentions. The task of immanent critique, which alone is dialectical, is rather to synthesize assessment of the validity of his forms with that of his politics. (Adorno 2002a: 309)

Adorno’s critique merits the adjective ‘dramaturgical’ for two reasons. First, he thinks through theatre and dramatic texts in an attempt to articulate the extent to which artistic form adequately expresses the ideology of its maker, thereby drawing an audience’s attention towards the political dimension of theatre and stage performance. Second, by revealing the social conditions of these forms, Adorno’s critique questions the boundary between art and life to reveal that, separate from Brecht’s subjective commitment, Brecht’s plays live in the world as politically charged objects. This dramaturgy aims at unpacking the dual nature of the work of art. On the one hand, the artwork exists autonomously, as an object that points to a different world by refusing to participate in this one. On the other hand, artworks constitute social phenomena because they are objects made from the materials of this world and by artists who emerge in specific times and specific places. For Adorno, the autonomous work of art, that which points to another world, overpowers the committed work of art that lays claims to changing society. It does so by attempting to break away and, ultimately, by failing to succeed. Despite its claim to autonomy, such a work of art exists as the sediment of the society that gave it birth and, as such, it resonates with the disharmony of social relations as it points to a different world to which it would like to abscond. The only way for a work of art

6 This quotation includes an excerpt from Hanns Eisler that Buck-Morss incorporates into her narrative about Brecht and Adorno. The section from Brecht’s journal reads, ‘Adorno here. This Frankfurt Institute is a gold-mine for the Tui novel.’ Buck-Morss notes that the novel was ‘Published as a fragment posthumously: Bertolt Brecht, Der Tui-Roman: fragment (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973)’.

The original utterance of this famous statement – ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ – appeared in ‘An essay on cultural criticism and society’ in Prisms (1967). Adorno wrote the essay in 1949, it was published in English in 1955, and has been reprinted several times since then. Adorno reprised the statement in a handful of subsequent essays, one of which was ‘Commitment’ (2002a). In those essays, Adorno shows no sign of retracting the statement; t h e s h u d d e r a n d a d o r n o ’ s m i m e s i s however, in Negative Dialectics (2005e), he Adorno’s immanent critique of the dual nature of offers a caveat. In the the artwork (art as autonomous and fait social) section ‘Meditation on metaphysics’, Adorno seeks neither to debilitate commitment nor to offers this thought: ‘Perennial suffering has debilitate the idea of committed art as a whole. as much right to Rather, it seeks to investigate the deployment expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence of such terms in contemporary philosophical it may have been wrong discourse in order to highlight the discrepancies, to say that after to foreground the dialectical nature of art’s truth Auschwitz you could no longer write poems’ content and its semblance, and to establish a (Adorno 2005e: 362–3).

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In ‘On subject and object’ Adorno offers an excellent image of this attempt to shake off one’s subjectivity: ‘What transcendental philosophy praised in creative subjectivity is the subject’s own self-concealed imprisonment within itself. The subject remains harnessed within everything objective it thinks, like an armored animal in its layers of carapace it vainly tries to shake loose’ (Adorno 2005d: 252). 9

program for a truly emancipatory art. While scholars have often focused on Adorno’s writings on music, especially on Beethoven, Mahler and Schönberg,7 there are numerous pathways through the philosopher’s oeuvre that lead to the theatre, many of which culminate in Beckett. Why does Adorno care about theatre at all? One possible answer to that question comes from investigating his concern with art in general: ‘[I]t is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it’ (Adorno 2002a: 312). This line exists in the same paragraph as the repetition of his famous line that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.8

As I mentioned above, the motive force of the artwork becomes palpable through its ability to transmit ‘the shock of the unintelligible’, what Adorno named ‘the shudder’:

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An excellent starting point for Adorno’s works on music is Essays on Music (2002b).

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to succeed and to escape to another world would be to destroy all other works of art, thereby creating the conditions for a new world where no art would be needed. As such, Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory that, ‘[t]he central criterion [of artworks] is the force of expression, through the tension of which artworks become eloquent with wordless gesture. In expression they reveal themselves as the wounds of society’ (Adorno 1997: 237). Neither the plays of Sartre nor those of Brecht conveyed the shock of the unintelligible through this ‘wordless gesture’ because of their pretentions to commitment. Nevertheless, Adorno frequently discussed theatrical works of art that could produce such a shock, especially those by Beckett. Beckett’s work eschews commitment but affects a shudder. The affective force of the shudder makes possible a new, nonrepresentational mimetic force.

The shock aroused by important works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather, this shock is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken…. The experience of art as that of its truth or untruth is more than subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. (Adorno 1997: 244–5)

The theatre performance as a multivalent art event provides the objective conditions that trigger such a ‘moment of being shaken’. Audience members watch the actors channel the affective force of Beckett’s plays, which express their standing as vibrant matter enmeshed in the material conditions of a specific time and place through the interaction of bodily movements, language, scenographic composition and stage properties. As such, I, as audience member, shudder at Nagg and Nell in Endgame when they emerge from their garbage cans. I shudder at Winnie’s exclamation ‘You again!’ when she, lodged in mud up to her waist, pulls a revolver from her bag in Happy Days and contemplates its use. With Nagg and Nell, I enter into communication with the actors-asobjects and contemplate, perhaps, the reduction of their bodies to ash. With Winnie, I shudder because the play forces me to engage with the title, Happy Days, and to consider if using the revolver constitutes the act that would make the day felicitous. And yet, I shudder only because I am shaken. Each Beckett play erupts into my subjectivity, thus propelling me into the performance of negative dialectical thought. I attempt to free myself from the play’s clutches only to realize that I cannot. Its objectivity and my subjectivity are entwined. To shake off the one would be to shake off the other.9 Adorno writes that the shudder ‘is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives 130

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its own limitedness and finitude. This experience [Erfahrung] is contrary to the weakening of the I that the culture industry manipulates’ (Adorno 1997: 245). Repeatedly throughout the Aesthetic Theory and in numerous of his essays, Adorno cites Beckett’s plays as epicentres from which the shock of the unintelligible ushers forth: ‘Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays, or the truly monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomime. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about’ (Adorno 2002a: 314). Alhough some might interpret Adorno’s appreciation as an infatuation with Beckett’s text over and above the embodied performance upon a stage, there is too much attentiveness to the body and to the visceral level of human experience to make this claim. Conclusively, Adorno declares that Beckett’s plays ‘enjoy what is today the only humanly respectable fame: everyone shudders at them, and yet no one can persuade himself that these eccentric plays and novels are not about what everyone knows but no one will admit’ (Adorno 2002a: 314). In other words, Beckett’s plays evoke the ability of subjects to reduce other subjects to mere objects for the ease of their liquidation, yet in exposing the brutal instrumentality of subjective reason Beckett also points to what is ‘other’ within the self. Implicit in Adorno’s call for the subject to attend to the shock of the unintelligible in Beckett’s plays is a reformulation of the concept of mimesis. Plato defines ‘mimesis’ in Book Ten of the Republic as ‘an imitation of things’ that exists ‘at third remove from nature’ (Plato 1996 [c. 380 BCE]: 288). Aristotle removes the pejorative dimension from Plato’s definition and defines mimesis in the Poetics (1996 [c. 335 BCE]) as a simulated representation through which human beings recreate scenes from nature in order to learn from those natural occurrences and to improve one’s being human. Adorno departs from both of these conceptions and theorizes mimesis as the interpenetration of subject and object that unfolds within the space of 131

the shudder and the feeling of being shaken. ‘Adorno’s “mimesis”,’ writes Lambert Zuidervaart, ‘refers to a sensuously receptive, expressive, and communicative mode of conduct among living things’ (Zuidervaart 1991: 282). As with the term ‘mimesis’, the word ‘expression’ also takes on a singular meaning since Adorno assists us in understanding expression ‘not in terms of subjective feelings, but in terms of ordinary situations in which historical processes and functions have been sedimented, endowing them with the potential to speak’ (Adorno 1997: 163). This détournement of the concept of mimesis provides further clarification of Adorno’s dramaturgical procedure. Never content to evaluate solely the form or aesthetic veneer of an artwork, Adorno’s dramaturgy seeks to reveal the embeddedness of society within the work of art. In terms of the mimetic comportment of plays, such as those of Sartre, Brecht and Beckett, this dramaturgy maps the space of the shudder that opens, or fails to open, between subject and art object. It is a dramaturgy of the shudder, which compels the thinking actionist to tune into the dissonance of society. While Adorno practices this dramaturgy in his critique of paintings, music and literature, its potential reveals itself most fully in his critiques of theatre. The formal constitution of Beckett’s plays, such as Endgame, Happy Days and Waiting for Godot, confront audiences with worlds that, while appearing alien, sprang fully formed from the audience’s society. Each of those plays demands that the subject lose itself in the primacy of the object, which means losing itself in the primacy of the social antagonisms that give birth to characters such as Nagg, Nell and Winnie. ‘The primacy of the object,’ writes Adorno, ‘is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the unconscious writing of history, as anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and perhaps of what is possible’ (Adorno 1997: 259). Adorno’s dramaturgy constitutes a historiographical excavation of the space of the now that unfolds when the object penetrates the subject and liquidates the ‘I’.

a brief dialogue

Participation for Adorno amounts to a dramaturgy of society’s embeddedness within artworks and unfolds from the observation that, ‘[t]he immanence of society in the artwork is the essential social relation of art, not the immanence of art in society’ (Adorno 1997: 228). One can deduce what precisely this dramaturgy does by putting Adorno’s ideas in dialogue with other philosophers. Since, for Adorno, philosophical participation begins with a negative dialectical movement as it seeks to map the social situation embedded within the object under scrutiny, this philosophical system frequently finds itself at odds with those of contemporary philosophers who see the essence of philosophical participation as the creation of concepts. By placing Adorno’s critical procedure in dialogue with two other philosophical systems, I believe it is possible to gain a more nuanced understanding of the participatory dimension of Adorno’s critical apparatus. In Philosophy in the Present (2010), Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek discuss the Frankfurt School in general and Adorno in particular in order to carve out an alternative philosophical mode. ‘It seems to me,’ Badiou says, ‘that the problem with philosophical commitment is that it is often thought to be primarily critical…. I think this theme must be absolutely overturned. The essence of philosophical intervention is really affirmation’ (Badiou and Žižek 2010: 80). In other words, the role of the philosopher is to create concepts and think the new, whereas critique, which concerns itself with existing states of affairs, constitutes a productive labour that deals only with what is instead of what might be. Agreeing with Badiou, Žižek registers his own complaint against the Frankfurt School. Although he singles out Max Horkheimer for representing ‘the typically pessimistic perception of the dialectic of Enlightenment’, Žižek relays an anecdote about Adorno that portrays the latter as an armchair philosopher:

[H]e didn’t want to participate in any antiVietnam war demonstrations … he said once to the demonstrators that he would gladly come, but was too old and fat, and anyway the people would merely laugh if he were to come – classic Adorno. (Badiou and Žižek 2010: 87)

Daddario

a d o r n o , p a r t i c i p at i o n , c r i t i q u e :

Here Žižek merely repeats a common accusation against Adorno’s failure to act and intervene. To counter these claims, in addition to citing Adorno’s critique of commitment that I elaborated above, I would argue that Adorno’s negative dialectics already overturns the traditional theme of critique. Negative dialectical critique does not presume the outside eye of the subject to be a final judge on any matter. Negative dialectics bears no relation to pontification. Rather, as each of the texts I have cited illustrates, Adorno’s critique and philosophical interventions enact a productive excavation of dominant ideology that sifts through the sediment of acquired rationalities and then rearranges concepts from the inside out. In this way, this rearrangement of concepts constitutes a philosophical rewiring and a dramaturgical performance that aims to mobilize concepts in new ways. This is certainly the case with the concept of ‘mimesis’ where, once freed from its Aristotelian or Platonic frame, it can begin to elucidate a complex interaction between subject and object. Badiou’s comment is helpful insofar as it serves as a starting point for differentiating Adorno’s philosophical participation from other critical modes. For example, Adorno’s negative dialectical procedure builds on Hegelian dialectics, but ultimately deviates from Hegel’s path as already mentioned above. Interestingly, to differentiate Adorno’s negative dialectics from its genealogical ancestors and to glean its singular characteristics as a philosophical praxis, I find it helpful to bring Michel Foucault into the conversation. Two Foucault sources in particular help to shed light on Adorno’s unique philosophical practice and distinguish it from the mode of affirmative philosophical thought seized upon 132

From Pseudo-Activity to Critique

by Badiou and Žižek. The first comes from his lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics (2008), where, in a methodological introduction to the topic of his seminar, he makes a distinction between dialectical logic, on the one hand, and strategic logic, on the other. For Foucault, dialectical logic ‘puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous’. By distinction, strategic logic tries ‘to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory’ (Foucault 2008: 42). Strategic logic, as Foucault defines it, bears a striking similarity to Adorno’s negative dialectics. Consider Adorno’s tireless mapping of the subject–object relationship. While Adorno may tentatively side with the primacy of the object, he never stops travelling the circuit between those two poles. The strategy of this critical inquiry is to develop the nonidentical relationship between subject and object, thus revealing the mediation of subject and object in order to dispel the myth of an unbridgeable gap between them. A further illumination onto Adorno’s critical procedure emerges from Foucault’s lecture ‘What is critique?’ (2007), in which he sketches a brief historical genealogy that reveals the relationships emerging in the sixteenth-century between power, truth and the subject. The historical tour reveals the birth of what Foucault first calls the ‘critical attitude’ and then defines as ‘[t]he art of not being governed quite so much’ (Foucault 2007: 45). The bearer of this critical attitude seeks not to be governed by dominant ideological positions and performs ‘the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability. Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we could call, in a word, the politics of truth’ (Foucault 2007: 47). To transpose this thought from Foucault’s language into Adorno’s project, I might call this art a critical dramaturgy of the world of objects and, more importantly, of the subject’s qualitative existence as object within the world. 133

This critical attitude and critical dramaturgy names the participatory dimension of Adorno’s philosophy: a ruthless critique of everything that exists, which produces a perpetually shifting viewpoint on the subject’s function as object in society. The performance of negative dialectical critique enables individuals to question the dominant ideology that lodges within concepts and lubricates the social machinery. Such a critique aims to develop a consciousness of the intractability of the subject–object relation. When Adorno critiques Brecht’s plays or attempts to analyze the shudder of Beckett’s theatre, in other words, he is not engaging in an affirmative practice such as that which Badiou practices with his mathematical ontology. Negative dialectics bores down into the object of study and attempts to view the world from that position. While attempting to perform this immanent critique, thought recoils from the object and must try to embed itself again. This circuit of engagement does not constitute a production of concepts, but it is productive in another sense. By naming the shudder as the shock of the unintelligible inherent in Beckett’s artworks, for example, Adorno makes two things possible. First, he opens a pathway between the subject and the object through which that shock might be communicated. Second, he leads one to the realization that the unintelligible is the real state of things. Language and verbal communication, after the horrors of World War II, only tell part of the story of the accumulated suffering embedded within each art object. To discern the rest of it and to orientate oneself in the world, it is necessary to tune into the expression of the art object and to be shaken by it. To tune oneself in this way, it is necessary to understand thinking as a performance between subject and object in which the object selects the key and sets the tempo. For Adorno, no amount of philosophical commitment can match the potency of the art object itself. To tap into that potency, one must adopt a critical attitude towards the ideological frames that seek to mute the object and limit the power of its shock.

One must not confuse Adorno’s dramaturgical critique with the image of an old man pointing his finger at something or someone as if to chastise them for merely existing. In other words, Adorno’s negativity is not at odds with Badiou’s affirmative philosophy. This negativity, rather, sparks a generative process of confrontation that moves beyond subjective commitment towards an ethical practice. A glimpse of this productive confrontation reveals itself from time to time in statements that peak out from Adorno’s writings. For example: ‘As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, even literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation of a just life’ (Adorno 2002a: 317). Deconstructing this sentence may lead to a momentary pause of the dialectical movement of thought rehearsed in this essay and furnish a provisional conclusion. Adorno was fond of applying the tactics used for composing fugues to his own writings, which is why there is frequently a sense of reversal and even a sideways, crab-like motion pulsating throughout his prose. It is possible to create a crab rearrangement of the sentence just quoted, which will transform its meaning and transpose its sentiment to a different key: ‘As eminently constructed and produced, life, even a representation of one, points to a practice from which it cannot abstain: the creation of art.’ In other words, the very performance of everyday life requires an attentiveness to the process of making that performance, an activity which blurs the boundary between art and non-art. Adorno’s philosophy straddles this line between art and life and presents a type of participation in which we, as subjects, can engage. Or, to put it another way, if artworks abstain from the creation of a just life, then to whom does the job of that creation fall? One answer is that it falls to people who, through their critical thinking and critical praxis, create the conditions for a world in which art would not be necessary.

There is, at the same time, a mode of participation in which we, as subjects, cannot adequately engage. Adorno calls this the ‘methexis’ of the work of art: ‘That by which the truth content is more than what is posited by artworks is their methexis in history and the determinate critique that they exercise through their form’ (Adorno 1997: 175). Even more productive than the dramaturgical operation of unpacking society’s embeddedness within artworks, their partaking (methexis) in history and their ability to ‘say what is more than the existing’ (Adorno 1997: 133) serve as a goad to stimulate the performance of thought. An exemplary illustration of this notion exists in Beckett’s Act Without Words II where the characters’ movements receive motivation from a goad that rolls onto the stage and disrupts them from their stasis. In our contemporary situation, Adorno’s own writings play the part of this goad and stimulate us to participate in the ceaseless motions of thinking and doing, or, as Beckett insists, of halting, brooding and praying (Beckett 1990: 211).

Daddario

a provisional conclusion

references

Adorno, Theodor W. (1967 [1955]) Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (1997 [1970]) Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (2002a [1962]) ‘Commitment’, in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, trans. Francis McDonagh, New York: Continuum, pp. 300–18. Adorno, Theodor W. (2002b) Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, Berkeley: University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. (2005a) ‘Notes on philosophical thinking’, in Critical Models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 127–34. Adorno, Theodor W. (2005b [1969]) ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 289–93. 134

From Pseudo-Activity to Critique

Adorno, Theodor W. (2005c [1969]) ‘Marginalia to theory and praxis’, in Critical Models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 259–78. Adorno, Theodor W. (2005d [1969]) ‘On subject and object’, in Critical Models: interventions and catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 245–58. Adorno, Theodor W. (2005e) Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York: Continuum. Adorno, Theodor W. (2008) Lectures on Negative Dialectics, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Bürger, Peter (2007) Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel (2007) ‘What is Critique?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and Catherine Porter, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), pp. 41–82.

Aristotle (1996) Poetics, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher, New York: Hill and Wang.

Foucault, Michel (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978– 1979, eds Michel Senellart, Françoi Ewald, Alessandro Fontana and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Badiou, Alain and Žižek, Slavoj (2010) Philosophy in the Present, ed. Peter Engelmann, trans. Peter Thomas and Alberto Toscano, London: Polity Press.

Plato (1996) The Republic, trans. Richard W. Sterling and William C. Scott, New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Beckett, Samuel (1990) Samuel Beckett: the complete dramatic works, London: Faber and Faber.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1949) What is literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman, New York: The Philosophical Library.

Benjamin, Walter (2003) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, London: Verso. Birchall, Ian (2004) ‘Sartre and the myth of practice’, www.marxists.de, accessed 29 March 2011.

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Buck-Morss, Susan (1979) The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute, New York: The Free Press.

Zuidervaart, Lambert (1991) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: the redemption of illusion, Cambridge: MIT Press.

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