The Terror of the New
In 2001, German avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen caused an international scandal when he made the following remarks about the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center:
Well, what happened there is, of course—now all of you must adjust your brains—the biggest work of art there has ever been. The fact that spirits achieve with one act something which we in music could never dream of, that people practice ten years madly, fanatically for a concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole Cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. There are people who are so concentrated on this single performance, and then five thousand people are driven to Resurrection. In one moment. I couldn’t do that. Compared to that, we are nothing, as composers.1
Critics denounced these remarks and sought to explain them by reference to Stockhausen’s characteristic megalomania, his occasional claims to have been educated in the distant star system Sirius, and the many controversies marking his long career as one of the most important composers of the twentieth century. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times took a more theoretical tack, charging Stockhausen with a failure to distinguish between art and life: “Art may be hard to define,” Tommasini wrote, “but whatever art is, it’s a step removed from reality.” He went on:
A theatrical depiction of suffering may be art; real suffering is not. Because the art of photography often blurs this distinction, it can make us uncomfortable. Real people, sometimes suffering people, have been photography’s unwitting subjects. That’s why we have photojournalism, to keep things clearer. The image of a naked, fleeing, napalm-burned Vietnamese girl is truth, not art. Images of the blazing twin towers, however horrifically compelling, are not art.2
Tommasini’s argument, though expressing a common sentiment, remains unconvincing. Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters, which includes among its documentary transcriptions radio reports of the attacks of September 11 and was inspired by Andy Warhol’s 1962–1963 series of painted silk-screened photographs of car crashes, disasters, and suicides, is only the readiest example of “real suffering” that is also art. Nina Berman’s photographs of Marine Sergeant Ty Ziegel’s horrifically disfigured face and crippled body—you may remember her iconic photograph of Ziegel and his bride—are another. Berman’s photos of Ziegel were featured in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and have been exhibited widely in galleries and museums across the world. Whatever their putative truth content, Berman’s photos are both “horrifically compelling” photographs of an actually suffering person and aesthetically crafted objects exhibited in museums for the pleasure and edification of audiences. They are both “real” and “art.”
Anthony Tommasini is a prestigious critic and has written for the New York Times for many years. It is unimaginable that he is ignorant of the robust, long-lived tradition of innovative art practice that works to blur the line between reality and art. He may well not consider the work of Chris Burden, the Viennese Actionists, Karen Finley, and Marina Abramovitch to be art, but he must know that others do. Thoughtless Tommasini may be, but not naïve. Rather than consider him merely thoughtless, however, I would argue that Tommasini is stretching his argument not because he really believes art is divorced from reality, nor because human suffering is a forbidden subject, but because Stockhausen’s comments reveal discomfiting resonances between modern ideologies of art and the use of political violence.
Stockhausen had the sort of ego that would have scorned the idea that between artists and audiences there is any kind of equivalence. Such a genius knows better than his or her readers, listeners, and viewers, and moreover has an obligation to educate them, even and especially if this includes shocking them out of their preconceptions. The creator leads, the audience follows. Moreover, the artist’s role is explicitly rebellious, revolutionary, anticonventional—if not to épater les bourgeois or transform consciousness, at the very least to “think outside the box.” Stockhausen was right, in his way, to connect the violent resistance of al Qaeda to the Luciferan—or Satanic—rebellion so central to modern conceptions of aesthetic production. There is a line from Blake to Baudelaire to Kathy Acker, and that line connects de Sade, Duchamp, Stephen Daedalus, Wagner, Nietzsche, Dada, Andy Warhol, and The Threepenny Opera.
While I do not think anyone could reasonably argue that this tradition of Satanic modernism leads directly to Osama bin Laden, Stockhausen’s understanding of 9/11 as a work of art fits within a broadly high-modern conception of innovative aesthetic production. Theodor Adorno’s analysis of aesthetic autonomy buttresses this. For Adorno, the work of art—and especially the new work of art—manifests an immanent presence that by its very existence performs a negation, critique, and transformation of the social world from which it is created. Consider the following:
The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed.
Art is the social antithesis of society.
Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger.
Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants.3
Such statements are characteristic of a terror aesthetic in which art opposes contemporary society with formal and conceptual, if not physical, violence. Stockhausen, indeed, was not the first to suggest kinship between terrorism and art. In Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel Mao II, the novelist Bill Gray asserts, “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists . . . Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”4 Nor were Stockhausen and DeLillo the last. Hilary Plum’s novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets addresses this very question, in its lyrical meditation on the limits of both writing and bombing as ways of “altering the inner life of a culture.”
It remains doubtful whether early twentieth-century avant-gardes, much less DeLillo’s novelist’s “raids on human consciousness,” ever achieved the spectacular power Stockhausen dreamed of or the philosophical force Adorno attributed to them. Art, innovative or not, does or does not make anything happen, on a scale of decades, and in ways so complex and difficult to pin down it might take a master artist to depict them. Gertrude Stein, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, describes the infamous opening night of The Rite of Spring by focusing on Guillaume Apollinaire and the way he held his handkerchief. A seminal moment of aesthetic innovation is represented not as a spectacular event, but as background to a functionally metonymic detail. Modernism is condensed into a gesture. The part is the whole, and vice versa.
The whole of our parts is the so-called global war on terror. We, meaning you and me and all of us, are and are not part of that war. It concerns us in terms of aesthetics because we live and breathe aesthetic production and consumption. And it concerns us in terms of politics because it affects us politically, more or less. Mostly less, to be honest—few of us will feel the chill touch of Big Brother on our shoulder. But we sense—we know—we believe we ought to be concerned with what the US does, both abroad to others and at home to us, from trivial acts of degradation like forcing us to remove our shoes at the airport to not-so-trivial acts of torture and totalitarian surveillance.
As aesthetic producers and consumers, we operate within a cultural logic that fetishizes novelty. As political beings, we are responsible to a greater or lesser degree for shaping our collective life. What do these things have to do with each other? The answer is not clear. Certainly there are traditions in which the artist’s responsibilities include cultural critique and social intervention. Innovation in this domain is a technique for subverting preconceptions and conventions and making space for utopian possibility. As Adorno understands aesthetic production, it is through innovation itself that the artwork achieves its social reality as a negation of society. Yet if the cultural logic of commodity capitalism is itself one of constant innovation, how can innovation possibly be understood as the form of its critique?
It has been twelve years since the attacks of September 11, twelve years since Stockhausen’s comments, and we have had twelve years of aesthetic responses to terror and to the global war on terror, some innovative in the way we mean by the word experimental, some innovative in other ways, but most fairly conventional. From James Cameron’s Avatar to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic and Seven American Deaths and Disasters, from Deborah Eisenberg’s Twilight of the Superheroes to Joss Whedon’s blockbuster Avengers, from PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake to Sinan Antoon’s novel The Corpse Washer, from the numerous soldier-posted YouTube videos of songs like “Fobbit Rap,” “Hadji Girl,” and “The Homecoming Song,” to Jena Osman’s Public Figures, Philip Metres’s Abu Ghraib Arias, and Hilary Plum’s They Dragged Them Through the Streets, a staggering amount and variety of aesthetic production has responded to diverse aspects of what we’re calling the global war on terror.
But what do we even mean, finally, by this term—this whole of our parts—the so-called global war on terror? Do we understand it? It is not an event, or even a series of events, or even a network of events, but rather maybe something like a lifeworld, an era, a Zeitgeist. Like the Sixties, the Cold War, or even modernity, the global war on terror is an abstract index, a very thin question mark in place of a robust complexity. It is part of a bigger complexity we used to call globalization, which is itself interwoven with other great complexities of the present: the digital revolution, the great recession, and global climate change. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see where or when one complexity ends and another begins. Even before the NSA started monitoring our Facebook posts, Google searches, and cell-phone calls, the war on terror had already stained the very fabric of our lives.
Which is to say that responding to the phenomenon is like responding to capitalism, or society, or the atmosphere. It is our environment. It is our world. It is not just a war, or an event, or a moment, just as modernism is not only The Rite of Spring. Part of our problem is that we cannot even see our world, our moment, as it is happening, or even as it has just happened. Always already caught up in the next thing, we are distracted from the present by the new.
Returning to Stockhausen and Adorno, what their terror aesthetics suggest is that innovation is not a solution, but a symptom. We have been laboring for a century under the tyranny of the modern demand to “make it new,” under an idea of art as innovation, as the social antithesis of society, as shock therapy for conventional thought, an idea that bears disturbing affinities with both terrorism and the commodity logic of the empire that ostensibly makes war against it. What was truly scandalous in Stockhausen’s statement about 9/11 was his thoughtless exposure of the revolutionary utopian claims of modern aesthetic production, and the fact that the new always demands not only the destruction of the past, but the annihilation of the present. [2013/2014]