The major reference works on culture like to begin their reflections with Cicero, who used agriculture as a metaphor for intellectual processes in the expression cultura animi – ‘cultivation of the mind’.1 It soon becomes clear, however, that this solitary source in antiquity offers little assistance in relation to the history of the concept and the problem. Although the word cultura appears sporadically in the Western tradition, not infrequently in the context of cultus, it was at a very late stage that it acquired the semantic content and ideological charisma with which we are familiar today. It was only during the eighteenth century that the concept of culture started to gain in significance, as the economically and socially advancing bourgeoisie was beginning to define its own values and interpretations. In Herder, ‘culture’ is closely related to the idea of humanity, a state of civilized behaviour, which – as he describes it in Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind – only emerged through an infinitely long process of evolution. Herder accordingly associates Kultur (culture, civilization) with Kultiviertheit (cultivation), although he already notes sceptically:
Nothing can be more vague than the term [cultivation] itself; nothing more apt to lead us astray than the application of it to whole nations and ages. Among a cultivated people, what is the number of those who deserve this name? in what is their preeminence to be placed? and how far does it contribute to their happiness? I speak of the happiness of individuals; for that the abstract being, the state, can be happy, when all the members that compose it suffer, is a contradiction, or rather a verbal illusion, evident to the slightest view.2
Leaving aside the fact that pessimistic tones can already be heard in this remarkable paragraph, the overall impression is suggested that culture has something to do with happiness, that Herder’s philosophy of culture has clearly eudaemonistic traits. The evolutionary aspect alone – which was later taken up in Hegel’s philosophy of history3 – allows all that is past to be viewed in Herder from the horizon of the present as a movement of ascent, in a secularized expectation of salvation.
It is obvious that the experience of the advances made in productive forces during the Industrial Revolution4 entered into these conceptions of perfectibility.5 The bourgeoisie, which was increasingly playing the leading role in society, was now actively exploring and defining new value systems and forms of behaviour, new forms of sociability and politics that were in harmony with the new state of technology and the resulting improvement in the standard of living. Whereas the high bourgeoisie, which was profiting from industrialization, had sufficient reason to base optimistic views of cultural progress on these new achievements, the petty bourgeoisie was only too well aware of the social effects of mechanization and industrial-capitalist profit-making.
It was therefore hardly an accident that the first significant critique of culture came from an intellectual descended from this social sphere. In 1749, Rousseau famously gave a decisively negative answer to the prize question set by the Académie in Dijon regarding what the sciences and arts had contributed to the improvement of morals.6 Rousseau associated culture with ‘artificiality’ and ‘unnaturalness’, which he primarily perceived in aristocratic forms of behaviour, their luxury, their extravagant wastefulness at the expense of the oppressed and the exploited. Since the only way of correcting this state of affairs was to eliminate inequality, Rousseau attempted to provide historical and genetic evidence that equality existed in the original state of humanity, the ‘état d’animalité’, when humans were supposedly at one with nature and there were no endogenous factors driving them away from it. It was amour propre, love of oneself and the desire to take priority over others and to outdo competitors, that had led to ‘inégalité parmi les hommes’.7 Rousseau was thus tracing an affective structure that had been identified before him by Hobbes and Spinoza, who spoke of appetitus or conatus as the instinctive source of human actions – and which, beyond the realm of philosophical terminology, we may identify with profit-seeking. His critique of culture, which appealed to Nature – as both a retrograde and ultimate utopia – to act as a corrective, was thus directed not only against hedonism, luxury and the fashions of aristocratic culture, but also within the Enlightenment itself against the self-referential perfectibilism of a sated bourgeoisie with an unquestioned belief in progress. The Jacobins and the social-revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century were able to draw potential political implications from this.
In Rousseau’s critique of culture, the ideologemes of the conservative provincial aristocracy, which felt pushed into a marginal position by the upstart aristocrats at court,8 and those of the petty bourgeoisie, threatened with being overrun by the rise of industrial capitalism, appear to be bound together. His critique thus represents the initial phase of this pessimistically inflected form of discourse. The second phase can be dated to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this case, however, it primarily concerned the educated bourgeoisie, among whom individual theorists expressed their ‘discontent with culture’ in ways that had mass appeal.9 The style and above all the ideological goals of this critique of culture were decisively defined by Nietzsche. Faced with advancing industrialization, with the natural sciences and technological disciplines in the midst of a rapid rise, and the humanities and cultural disciplines becoming increasingly obliged to justify themselves, writers such as Nietzsche made efforts to open up fresh horizons for philosophy, which had supposedly lost its purpose, for the unsettled educated bourgeoisie. Although such authors made concessions to the new spirit of the age to the extent that they rejected all forms of antiquarian, historicist thinking and all ‘nostalgia for the past’ in general (as Nietzsche presented it in ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’), and in this way were able to catch up with modernity, they also castigated ‘so-called industrial culture’ as ‘altogether the most vulgar form of existence that has ever been’.10 As a remedy against this culture, Nietzsche held up the ideal of the ‘noble’ artist who, not unlike the Übermensch, ‘breathes’ power.11 Nietzsche regarded his ideal of culture as being realized in a ‘unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will’,12 with a destiny ‘to promote the production of the philosopher, the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting of nature’.13
Nietzsche’s critique of culture was already strongly orientated towards the philosophy of life. It was mainly directed against the ossified dogma, lacking all vitality, of academic philosophers and philologists that was often enough to become the object of satirical mockery around and after 1900. During this period, thinkers such as Georg Simmel endorsed Nietzsche’s conclusions. In a volume of essays entitled Philosophische Kultur (1911) and in his book Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur (1916),14 Simmel complained that culture – still regarded by him and other philosophers of the period as representing an objectification of the mind – was constantly in danger of losing contact with life, becoming sterile and congealing into formality.
During this historical period, the critique of culture mainly served the function of pushing forward a mental process of self-purification and renewal within the educated classes – and a Dionysian aspect, a body-affirming vitality in the sense adopted by the Life Reform Movement,15 was intended to contribute to this. Freud introduced the idea of liberating the libido into the debate as well. However, in an effort to preserve its own sphere, cultural criticism continued to immunize itself against everything technological, from which only disaster or even barbarism appeared to emanate.
The phenomenon regarded in this negative way was given the name ‘civilization’. This is seen most clearly in Oswald Spengler, who wrote that ‘the “Decline of the West” comprises nothing less than the problem of Civilization’.16 While ‘culture’ for Spengler signified a climax, ‘civilization’ marked the degeneration that was inevitably to follow: ‘The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture.’17 While ‘culture’ represented ‘life’, Spengler associated ‘civilization’ with withering and death: ‘Culture and Civilization – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it … Culture and Civilization – the organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts”.’18
Reckless and distorted though Spengler’s hypotheses and theories appear to us today, to his contemporaries they seemed utterly plausible. The Decline of the West was one of the most widely debated works of cultural criticism during the 1920s and also represented a challenge for left-wing intellectuals. The young Adorno was not unaffected by this, and in 1955 he published an essay in Frankfurter Hefte entitled ‘Was Spengler Right?’ ‘Where among all of Spengler’s disputatious critics’, the essay asks, ‘was there one who was his peer?’19 Adorno therefore attempted nothing less than to adopt a similar role – albeit with a considerable delay and in the light of the experiences of the Second World War, the emergence of totalitarian dictatorships and the development of a ‘civilization in which innocent millions were done to death in gas-chambers’,20 which afterwards simply went back to its normal routine.
Adorno admits that some of Spengler’s ‘predictions’, such as his ‘thesis of the metamorphosis of democracy into dictatorship’ had been borne out as a result of the emergence of totalitarianism. Also ‘striking’ was the prediction of certain phenomena of ‘modern mass society, especially its atavistic aspects for which he developed the image of “modern cave-men”, and this long before contempt for the masses itself became an article for mass consumption’.21 Adorno elsewhere mentions, not without admiration, ‘Spengler’s sharp eyes’,22 but he reconstructs the motifs and the cui bono of Spengler’s hypotheses critically. Despite the accurate diagnoses and prognoses (for instance, the prediction of a ‘mounting intellectual indifference’,23 which Adorno saw as being manifested in the positivism of the social sciences), Spengler’s pessimism ultimately implied an affirmation and reinforcement of existing conditions instead of an indictment of them. His contempt benefited the elites ‘whose approval the author of The Decline of the West craved’.24 Adorno counts Spengler as one of the ‘fore-runners’ of fascism, even though Hitler had never been ‘fein genug, well-bred enough’ for him.25 He reproaches him for having mistaken ‘the “natural” qualities of previous history’ – which he had only been able to see as belonging to a blindly coursing fate – for ‘Nature and the nature of things itself’. Spengler had thereby slandered the Enlightenment: ‘He was a patron of that dark doom whose coming he had so gloomily forecast.’26
Lorenz Jäger has correctly described Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, first published in hectographed form in 1944, as representing a leftwing response to The Decline of the West, ‘with a similarly grand claim to present a comprehensive interpretation of history’.27 As its title suggests, the two authors were concerned with showing that Enlightenment is always ambiguous. On the one hand, it was a precondition for freedom – that is, for leading humanity out of the constraints of Nature using the tools of reason. On the other hand, however, in the form of instrumental rationality – that is, in the reified form of objectified structures and institutions – it was susceptible of becoming impenetrable for ‘each individual’. According to them, this became manifest in every form of bureaucracy in the state and the economy,28 and in the unsurpassable brutality, the barbarism of the systematic, industrial-scale murder committed by the Nazi henchmen. ‘The absurdity of a state of affairs in which the enforced power of the system over men grows with every step that takes it out of the power of nature, denounces the rationality of rational society as obsolete.’29
Horkheimer and Adorno were concerned among other things with showing that totalitarian features prevail even in societies with democratic constitutions, through systemic moments that are already phenomenologically evident from the products of the culture industry alone: ‘Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.… The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else.’30 According to Adorno, who wrote the chapter ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, the monopolistic character of production enforces identical structures; there is no space for diversity or resistance in this world concerned only with business and with profit. The schematization of ‘formats’ (hit songs, stars, soap operas, etc.) affects not only their outward form of serial production. In addition, it also penetrates into the content, the structure of which is so standardized that the story can be anticipated from the very first moment. Adorno wanted to show how the culture industry makes everything interchangeable and debases the aesthetic quality to the level of a commodity. For him, criticism of the all-encompassing predominance of exchange-value is also undertaken from a psychosocial point of view, as he is concerned to highlight its effects on people’s affective structure and mental-cognitive constitution: everything, he argues, leads to a disenfranchisement and debasement of consciousness. Although the products of the culture industry are intended to divert people from the compulsions of work by providing ‘amusement’, drawing consumers into an apparently different sphere, the mechanized labour process with its unvarying rhythms reproduces itself in the manufacturing of ‘amusement commodities’: ‘What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time. All amusement suffers from this incurable malady.’31
In Adorno’s critique of the culture industry, the analytic instruments for which were provided by Marx’s and Lukács’s theory of alienation and reification,32 the old opposition between culture and civilization still shines through, as well as the pattern of high culture followed by decay. Admittedly, this analogy does not weaken the substance or legitimation of Adorno’s approach. His method of negative dialectics protected him, at least in most cases, from adopting emphatic stances regarding what culture ought to be. He did not wish to be an ‘advocate of culture’ like the representatives of a bourgeois cultural criticism that he regarded as ‘imprisoned within the orbit of that against which it struggles’.33 For him, such critics were merely a ‘salaried and honoured nuisance’ who work their way up to being experts and judges and in the process acquire an ‘arrogance’ based on the fact that ‘in the forms of competitive society in which all being is merely there for something else, the critic himself is also measured only in terms of his marketable success – that is, in terms of his being for something else’.34 Adorno usually only described culture ex negativo, to avoid any conformist affirmation. To demonstrate the extent to which the bourgeois concept of culture had degenerated, he turned again and again to the example of the Nazis, whose canon of culture included only its shell, such as the names of classic authors for whom they demanded narrow-minded reverence – without noticing the potential for criticism and resistance which, according to h im, is inherent in culture a priori.
Admittedly, Adorno occasionally offers positive examples of what culture is: ‘Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture which is in itself contradictory.’35 A desire to define this ontologically would imply fetishizing it:
But the greatest fetish of cultural criticism is the notion of culture as such. For no authentic work of art and no true philosophy, according to their very meaning, has ever exhausted itself in itself alone, in its being-in-itself. They have always stood in relation to the actual life-process of society from which they distinguished themselves. Their very rejection of the guilt of a life which blindly and callously reproduces itself, their insistence on independence and autonomy, on separation from the prevailing realm of purposes, implies, at least as an unconscious element, the promise of a condition in which freedom were realized.36
This paragraph contains in a nutshell the most important criteria for defining culture according to Adorno – or at least it reveals what are, for him, its central semantic connotations. Ultimately, culture coincides with the ‘authentic work of art’, which is characterized by ‘autonomy’, as the governing force for a utopian claim to freedom, an emergence from the realm of purposes, or – speaking less philosophically – from the sphere of labour with its conditions of exploitation and mental and physical disintegration.37 Cultural theory is thus subsumed into aesthetics, in a theory of the ‘work of art’ as a monad, which, although it is inseparable from social processes, nevertheless has the power to resist them. Adorno believes the work of art is capable of asserting itself, as an inner form of organization, against a thoroughly and monopolistically organized society. As evidence for this he invokes everything that enjoyed respect and repute in the classic avant-garde – from an opaque Symbolism with Mallarméan leanings to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. Depersonalization (‘Je est un autre’), dissonance and disintegration, although their inherent tendency is to generate neuroses, paradoxically become the guarantors of an anti-ascetic form of hedonism.38
There is no concealing the fact that Adorno, through this aesthetic of the ‘autonomous’ work of art, was in fact providing his own educated bourgeois preferences with a consistent form of legitimation. It was no accident that this aesthetic was capable of being adapted seamlessly by precisely those high priests of elitist culture whom he mocked as philistines, and that it could even be integrated into a quietist model of iconicity whose interpretative glass-bead game forever amounted to no more than a demonstration of harmonious coherence.39
Adorno’s concept of autonomy has certainly passed through different theoretical waters than that of the various immanentist trends that have been taken in by the ideology of self-styled autonomous art. The latter is incapable of admitting to its commodity-like nature, precisely because it secretly knows that the law governing its stylistic differentiation, the logical conclusion of which is the recognizable logo of the works themselves, follows the competitive mechanisms of a market that promotes continuing innovation. Adorno, by contrast, was well aware of the character of art as a commodity. But although he always showed his reverence for Benjamin during the postwar period – perhaps from a sense of guilt over failure to provide support during Benjamin’s exile – he did not wish to follow his politicization of the issue in his ‘Work of Art’ essay, which famously concludes with the epigrammatic sentences, ‘This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art.’40 Adorno accepted in principle Benjamin’s theory that works of art had to be appropriate to the most advanced state of the productive forces; and he also agreed with his view of the transition from cult-value to exhibition-value.41 However, while Benjamin – closer to Brecht here – wished in principle to see the aura destroyed, Adorno rescued it by stopping at Benjamin’s phenomenological description of the aura (‘We define … the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be’).42 Adorno: ‘What is called aura in this passage is something that is familiar to artistic experience. It generally goes by the name of “atmosphere”. The atmosphere of a work of art is the connection of its moments in so far as they point beyond themselves.’43 The auratic moment, Adorno continues, does not deserve any sort of Hegelian ban, because ‘Careful analysis reveals aura to be an objective property of the work of art.’44
With this type of formulation, he was able to hold the work of art, as the epitome of his concept of culture, away from any economic causal nexus. He regarded the latter as operating – to an extreme extent – only in the culture industry. In the United States, where he suffered such a culture shock, he experienced the way in which the culture industry, the aesthetic of triviality, had entered so-called ‘high art’ in the form of the consumerist iconography of Pop art. However, with his orientation towards the classic avant-garde, he had not reflected on the problem this raised. Pop art was cynically implementing a demand raised by early left-wing movements for the elimination of the contrast between high and low culture,45 which always also represented a class antagonism. When Warhol assimilated his works to the phenotype of commodity aesthetics (such as product packaging) to the extent of making the two visually indistinguishable, he was sarcastically demonstrating the commodity character of all art under capitalism.
Adorno remained in his normative positions and trimmed his concept of art so that that only opacity, mysteriousness, dissonance and blackness remained as criteria.46 Otherwise able to speak eloquently about the commodity character of cultural objectifications, he was here subscribing to idealist premises in the belief that it was possible to distil something ontologically (and thus essentialistically) from art that was untouched by, and undebasable by, the economy. This shows the limitations of his approach, which like no other was to shape the thinking of the critical intelligentsia of 1968.
In structural terms, Adorno’s procedure was hardly different from that of Lukács, whom he often criticized. They both raised their own personal preferences to the level of a universally valid standard – nineteenth-century realism in the case of Lukács, and the avant-garde inclined towards abstraction in the case of Adorno. Adorno gave practically no empirical attention to artistic processes at all. For this would have meant grasping in categorical terms the polymorphism of everything that throughout history has counted as art. Adorno subscribed only to the conceptual standard of ‘modern art’.
Despite all the revivals in the field of abstraction, however, modern art had ultimately come to an end already around 1960. The name ‘Zéro’47 – quite unintentionally – was an indication of this terminal state, and while Clement Greenberg’s demand for ‘flatness’ insisted on flattening within aesthetics, from today’s point of view it can also be regarded in a figurative sense as a demand for semantic shallowness. Along with the ‘expansion of art’48 there came greater awareness of the fact that art is a consensus term that needs to be approached not through analyses of its essence, but instead historically and functionally. The institutional analysis49 of the ‘Artworld’50 by Arthur Danto and George Dickie promises greater insights here than an aesthetic theory that is perpetually asserting apodictically what works of art allegedly ‘want’. When Adorno, usually with aphoristic brevity, spoke in an unmistakably affirmative way about the twentieth century’s ‘-isms’, he was regarding them as something decreed by nature, as they appeared to be sufficiently justified by their expressive or ideological achievements. He never reflected on the mechanisms of selection initiated in the art market or on the processes of canonization arising through the accreditation provided by the museums. Another blind spot in his theory was the fact that in celebrating the authentic work of art he was still subliminally paying tribute to the aesthetics of genius – which by no coincidence first arose at the time when the capitalist art market was starting to establish itself. With the prospect of acquiring economic capital, the market even today finds indispensable the consecration of artists that is provided by the system of gallery-owners, art critics and the associated museum personnel, as Bourdieu in particular has shown in his analyses of ‘symbolic capital’.51
What remains, then, of Adorno’s critique of culture? The gloomy diagnoses of his critique of the culture industry may still have force – and everything that has since supervened in the entertainment industry in the age of digitalization would have driven him to irretrievable despair. However, in view of the objections presented above, the elitism of his theory of the work of art seems to me to be a most unsuitable alternative – no matter how fascinated we may still be by h is thinking even today.
1 Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King (Harvard University Press/Loeb Classical Library: Cambridge, Massachusetts, rev. edn, 1945), pp. 158–61, II 13: ‘Cultura autem animi philosophia est; haec extrahit vitia radicitus et praeparat animos ad satus accipiendos eaque mandat iis et, ut ita dicam, serit, quae adulta fructus uberrimos ferant.’ / ‘Now the cultivation of the soul is philosophy; this pulls out vices by the roots and makes souls fit for the reception of seed, and commits to the soul and, as we may say, sows in it seed of a kind to bear the richest fruit when fully grown.’ It should be noted that strictly speaking, Cicero is not discussing cultura animi here, but rather describing cultura as philosophia animi. This is by no means a minor distinction, but it has not been taken into account in the endless lexicographic traditions in which the formula has been passed down, as the source reference is almost never used. On the term cultura, see Karl Ernst Georges, Ausführliches lateinisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch (Hahn: Hanover, 1992; reprint of 8th edn, 1913), vol. 1, col. 1793.
2 Johann Gottfried Herder, Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man (1784–91), trans. T. Churchill (Johnson: London, 1800), p. v.
3 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet, intr. Duncan Forbes (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1975), p. 54: ‘World history is the progress of the consciousness of freedom – a progress whose necessity it is our business to comprehend.’
4 See T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1968); Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The Industrialization of Europe 1760–1970 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1981); Dieter Ziegler, Die Industrielle Revolution (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft: Darmstadt, 2005), pp. 13–14.
5 The idea of perfectibilitas, the perfection and improvement of people’s living conditions, is already found earlier than the eighteenth century in Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal and Malebranche, as well as in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes – for example, in Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, ‘Digression sur les anciens et les modernes’ (1687) in Oeuvres de Fontenelle, ed. Georges-Bernard Depping (Belin: Paris, 1818; reprinted Slatkine: Geneva, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 353–65, here p. 357.
6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours qui a remporté le prix à l’Académie de Dijon, en l’année 1750, sur cette question proposée par la même académie: ‘Si le rétablissement des sciences et des arts a contribué à épurer les moeurs’, par un citoyen de Genève (Barrillot: Geneva, n.d. [? 1751]); also in Œuvres complètes, ed. B. Gagnebin and M. Raymond, vol. 3 (Gallimard: Paris, 1964), pp. 1–107.
7 See Rousseau, ‘Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes’ (Amsterdam, 1755); in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, op. cit., pp. 109–225.
8 See Renato Galliani, Rousseau, le luxe et l’idéologie nobiliaire: Étude socio-historique (Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution: Oxford, 1989).
9 See Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, the original German title of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. James Strachey (Hogarth Press: London, 1963; International Psycho-Analytical Library, no. 17).
10 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001), p. 56.
11 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1997), p. 120 (‘in both cases the aristocratic culture breathes power’).
12 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1997), p. 123.
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, in Untimely Meditations, op. cit., p. 160.
14 Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur: Gesammelte Essais (Klinkhardt: Leipzig, 1911) and ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’ [1916], trans. D. E. Jenkinson, in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (Sage Publications: London, 1997), pp. 75–89.
15 See Ulrich Linse, ‘Die Lebensreformbewegung (Sammelrezension)’, in Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 17 (1977), pp. 538–43; Wolfgang R. Krabbe, Kulturkritik und Lebensreformbewegung, 1870–1930 (Fernuniversität: Hagen, 2005), part 1: Kulturkritik und Lebensreformbewegung.
16 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1927), p. 31. German original: Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Braumüller: Vienna, 1918).
17 Ibid., p. 31.
18 Ibid., p. 353. As early as 1914, Thomas Mann – who then still held pro-war attitudes – in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man reprimanded his brother Heinrich Mann for being a ‘literatus of civilization’, implying not only decadence but also Francophilia, and above all a lack of literary cultivation. See Hermann Kurzke, ‘Die Quellen der “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen”: Ein Zwischenbericht’, in Internationales Thomas-Mann-Kolloquium: 1986, in Lübeck (Francke: Berne, 1987; Thomas-Mann-Studien, vol. 7), pp. 291–310, esp. pp. 298–9 (with numerous references).
19 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Was Spengler Right?’, Encounter, vol. 26 (1966), pp. 25–8, here p. 26. German original: ‘Wird Spengler rechtbehalten?’, in Adorno, Kritik: Kleine Schriften zur Gesellschaft (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1971; edition suhrkamp, 469), pp. 96–103.
20 Adorno, ‘Was Spengler Right?’, p. 26.
21 Ibid., pp. 26, 28.
22 Ibid., p. 28.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid., p. 29.
27 Lorenz Jäger, Adorno: Eine politische Biographie (Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag: Munich, 2005), p. 173.
28 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 38.
29 Ibid., pp. 38–9.
30 Ibid., p. 120. See also Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, trans. Anson G. Rabinbach, New German Critique, vol. 6 (Fall 1975), pp. 12–19, reprinted in Adorno, The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Routledge: London, 1991), pp. 98–106.
31 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. 137.
32 See Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret’, in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 163–77; here p. 165: ‘In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’ Georg Lukács, ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Merlin Press: London, 1971), pp. 83–222.
33 Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967), pp. 19–34, here p. 20.
34 Ibid., p. 20.
35 Ibid., p. 22.
36 Ibid., p. 23.
37 Elsewhere, he writes, ‘That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as an expression of suffering and contradiction, to maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life. Culture cannot represent either that which merely exists or the conventional and no longer binding categories of order which the culture industry drapes over the idea of the good life …’ – Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, in The Culture Industry, op. cit., p. 104.
38 ‘By representing deprivation as negative, they [works of art] retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied. The secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise.’ Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., pp. 139–40.
39 Max Imdahl, who explicitly appealed to Adorno, stated for example as the quintessence of his interpretation of Picasso’s painting Guernica that ‘the cohering of incoherence and coherence is the real message’ – Max Imdahl, ‘Zu Picassos “Guernica”: Inkohärenz und Kohärenz in moderner Bildlichkeit’, in Rainer Warning and Winfried Wehle (eds.), Lyrik und Malerei der Avantgarde (Fink: Munich, 1982), pp. 521–65, here p. 560.
40 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Fontana: Glasgow, 1973), pp. 219–53, here p. 244.
41 Ibid., p. 227: ‘This is comparable to the situation of the work of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.’
42 Ibid., pp. 224–5: ‘The concept of aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend the social bases of the contemporary decay of the aura.’
43 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Christian Lenhardt (Routledge & Kegan Paul: London and Boston, Massachusetts, 1984), p. 386.
44 Ibid., p. 386.
45 See Leslie A. Fiedler, Cross the Border – Close the Gap (Stein and Day: New York, 1972).
46 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, op. cit., p. 58: ‘If works of art are to survive in the context of extremity and darkness, which is social reality, and if they are to avoid being sold as mere comfort, they have to assimilate themselves to that reality. Radical art today is the same as dark art: its background colour is black. Much of contemporary art is irrelevant because it does not take note of this fact, continuing instead to take a childish delight in bright colours. The ideal of blackness is, in substantive terms, one of the most profound impulses of abstract art.’
47 See Klaus-Gereon Beuckers (ed.), Zero-Studien: Aufsätze zur Düsseldorfer Gruppe Zero und ihrem Umkreis (Münster: Lit, 1997; Karlsruher Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte, vol. 2).
48 See Jürgen Claus, Expansion der Kunst (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970).
49 See George Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Pegasus: New York, 1971); Dickie, ‘Defining Art’, in American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 3 (1969), pp. 253–66.
50 On the ‘Artworld’, see Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Artworld’, in Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964), pp. 571–84; Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981); Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press: New York, 1986); Danto, The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2001).
51 Bourdieu regards ‘symbolic capital’ as representing ‘the capital of consecration – implying a power to consecrate objects (this is the effect of a signature or trademark) or people (by publication, exhibition, etc.) and hence of giving them value, and of making profits from this operation’ – Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1996), p. 148. He regards the art market as a sphere in which symbolic capital is converted into economic capital. However, he also points out that the economy penetrates every pore of aesthetic and intellectual endeavours, even when they are opposed to the market under the banner of the avant-garde. One should not believe ‘that there is no economic logic in this charismatic economy founded on the sort of social miracle which is an act free of any determination other than the intrinsically aesthetic intention. We shall see that there are economic conditions for the economic challenge which leads to its being oriented towards the most risky positions of the intellectual and artistic avant-garde, and for the aptitude to maintain oneself there in a lasting way in the absence of any financial counterpart; and there are also economic conditions of access to symbolic profits – which are themselves capable of being converted, in the more or less long term, into economic profits’ (Rules of Art, p. 216).
Translated by Michael Robertson