In his trenchant and insightful response to Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, Oleg Gelikman highlights the ambivalent role Adorno assigns to novelty in the modernist break with traditional aesthetics. Although he applauds the modernist intent to abandon exhausted models of universalizing aesthetic normativity, Adorno accuses the fetish of newness for its own sake, the need always to innovate and leave behind the past, of complicity with the very forces it tries to negate. First, in its haste to plunge headlong into the future, it mimics the logic of capitalist fashion, where profits follow from planned obsolescence and new commodities demand to be bought by consumers wanting to be “up to date.”1 It has a mimetic relationship to the reproduction of capital through the ceaseless expansion of the market. Second, by becoming an abstract and transcendental invariant, the need for newness loses its connection with genuine historical change, becoming instead paradoxically a mark of repetition. It partakes of a kind of mythical thinking that operates on the ahistorical level of the eternal return. Third, by over-emphasizing the voluntarist and subjectivist role in creating novelty, which suggests total mastery of aesthetic material, it duplicates the technical domination of nature in the dialectic of enlightenment. And finally, by devaluing all that went before, discarding the past as without merit, it severs its ties with the redemptive energies revealed when the past is rubbed against the grain; a past whose residues, as Walter Benjamin knew, can be recombined in new and arresting constellations in the present and future. Seeing itself instead as liberated from the fetters of the past, conceptualizing the future as unconquered territory for appropriation, it rushes headlong into the abyss.
The real historicity of artworks, Adorno claims, lies in the heterogeneous residue of the traditions out of which they emerge and against which they measure themselves, their sedimented materiality, not their claim to total novelty. Although shapable by formal construction in the present, this aesthetic material is irreducible to the dominating innovation of the current creator, who is wrong simply to negate and devalue what went before. The substance of the work is never, however, a timeless essence, hovering above historical change. Nor can the smooth continuity of tradition be repaired once it is ruptured, contrary to revival efforts such as neo-classicism.2 Genuine art, Adorno insists, is a negative dialectic of tradition and innovation, of historicism and formalism, of a past that is—luckily—not fully overcome and a future that is not yet born.
The one-sided cult of the new in modernism is evident as early as the operas of Richard Wagner, which Adorno calls “the first case of uncompromising musical nominalism” (Adorno 2002:589),3 the first time in which generic normativity or even the precedent of historical convention is left behind entirely in favor of new formal innovation: “Art has been caught up in the total process of nominalism’s advance ever since the medieval ordo was broken up. The universal is no longer granted art through types, and older types are being drawn into the whirlwind” (Adorno 1997:1999). How can artworks survive the utter destruction of their traditional substance, the sedimented residue of past practice? Gelikman sees Adorno providing an answer by defending a modernism that is rescued from its fetish of absolute newness and its nominalist destruction of essential truth. Instead, he provides a vision of an art that restores a non-dominating balance between past material and present innovation, one which is itself a model for a redeemed society beyond the present “administered world.” In the words of Aesthetic Theory cited by Gelikman, “ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense, reality should imitate the artworks.”
Gelikman provides us a cogent reading of Adorno’s argument about the dangers of the cult of newness in modernism, but doesn’t take it far enough in a critical direction. I will suggest several ways in which Adorno’s claims can be enhanced through a more complex reading of the varieties of modernism than he posits in the work drawn on by Gelikman. In particular, I want to focus on the issue of nominalism as a source of the cult of novelty, which negates the value of tradition and supports subjective innovation above all else. There were in modernism, I hope to show, other variants of nominalism that led it in a different direction.
Before investigating those alternatives, one point must be made about the modernist attitude towards tradition itself. “Tradition,” Adorno urges, “is not to be abstractly negated but criticized without naïveté according to the current situation: Thus the present constitutes the past” (Adorno 1997:41). Modernism, he charges, fails to acknowledge this necessity; it does not “negate previous artistic practices, as styles have done throughout the ages, but rather tradition itself; to this extent it simply ratifies the bourgeois principle of art” (Adorno 1997:21). Adorno was not alone in advancing this claim.4 But the generalization is too sweeping, failing to recognize, for example, the importance of what Stephen Spender called the “revolutionary traditionalists” among the leading English-language modernist poets. Whereas unreflecting traditionalists doggedly upheld past standards that had become hollow or wallowed in nostalgia, poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound found a new tradition in works like Joyce’s Ulysses: “The revolutionary traditionalists were eclectic drawing on the whole European Hellenic and biblical culture, and sometimes going still further afield to the art and literature of China and other parts of Asia, to Buddhism as well as Christianity” (Spender 1963:225). Moreover, as Harold Rosenberg argued in the l960s, “the famous ‘modern break with tradition’ has lasted long enough to have produced its own tradition,” although “the new cannot become a tradition without giving rise to unique contradictions, myths, absurdities—often creative absurdities” (Rosenberg 1965:9).
One of those creative absurdities concerns how the nominalist impulse in modernism could work not to obliterate the past and generate a fetish of newness, but to undermine precisely that impulse.5 Rather than unleashing the sovereign will of the self-assertive, dominating subject by denying the prior existence of rational universals, which is how nominalism has often been understood,6 it could also lead to the evacuation of the strong creative self, capable of radically negating the past and starting ex nihilo. It needs to be remembered that ever since Duns Scotus stressed the haecceitas or “thisness” of an object over what Aquinas and the Scholastics had seen as its quidditas or generic “thatness,” nominalism has meant not only the denial of real universals, but also privileging absolute particularity over typical exemplarity.7 That is, objects, including aesthetic ones, were not to be understood as organic wholes derived deductively from a series of eternal aesthetic principles. Although Platonic aesthetics attempted to restore such principles during the Renaissance, by and large nominalism won out, with new, unfocused genres like the novel carrying its banner. As Umberto Eco put it,
all that remains is the intuition of particulars, a knowledge of existent objects whose visible proportions are analyzed empirically … as for artistic inspiration, this consists in an idea of the individual object which the artist wants to construct, and not of its universal form.
(Eco 1986:189)
The constructive impulse in nominalism could certainly lead to the modernism that Adorno rightly saw as abstractly negating tradition and elevating the sovereign will of the creator. But it could also be challenged by that valorization of “existent objects” as intuited particulars Eco sees as another part of the nominalist legacy. This counter-current in modernism is most evident in the provocations of a seminal artist Adorno never seriously discusses, Marcel Duchamp, who, in fact, came to call his own work “pictorial nominalism.”8 By this term, Duchamp seems to have meant a number of overlapping things. It indicated a self-conscious repudiation of the belief that works of art expressed the genius, or even the craftsmanlike talent, of the artist. It suggested that works were not metaphors for deeper meanings or new languages that might be direct expressions of spiritual distinction. It referred to the artist’s indifference to the intrinsic beauty of the object or lack thereof, as well as the good taste or lack thereof of the beholder. It meant the abandonment of the quest for the masterpiece, the perfect embodiment of the entelechy or essence of a medium.9
Perhaps most importantly, it meant the selection of objects from the already existing world, found not made (at least, not by the artists), and designating, judging, naming them art objects worthy of display. Duchamp abandoned painting and invented the “readymade” to become, in Thierry de Duve’s words, “the nominalist of a past culture” (de Duve 1991:142). Also named for the first time, in addition to the object as artwork, was the enabling context of the institution of art. Now, who had the power to give the name, who had the cultural capital to designate and judge, was itself understood to be a function of that institution, whose discrete and contingent existence was itself named by Duchamp’s transgressive gesture. The creative will of the artistic genius, his sovereign forming power over the material world, was replaced by a weaker enunciative power granted by the institution, which allowed only choice from an already given menu of possibilities.
For these reasons, de Duve can write of the readymade that “it reinterpreted the past with such a pertinence that it endowed it with a new resonance. From this came the emphasis I put on the link with tradition and on a ‘progressive’ rehabilitation of that word” (de Duve 1991:188). Duchamp’s resistance to the cult of the new, his disdain for the creative genius and the authentic, original work of art, helped produce the condition that obtains in what is now called postmodernism: denial of the narrative of constant innovation and refusal to grant any one movement the status of a genuine avant-garde. Gelikman neglects the distinction between modernism and postmodernism, and finishes his essay by ruminating on “the future of modernism,” as if it really has one. Rather, its troubled future was already present in high modernism’s bifurcation of the nominalist impulse: one part going toward formalist constructivism, the sovereignty of the artist’s self-asserting will, and the abstract negation of tradition; and the other resisting beautiful form, foregrounding the power of the institution, abandoning the fetish of the new, and accepting the recycling of what was already made (and not by the creative genius). We might call one aesthetic nominalism and the other its anti-aesthetic twin. Adorno only helps us so far in realizing these alternatives as latent in nominalism itself, which he identifies too quickly with only the former.
The real task is grappling with the difficulty of representing or evoking the past in contemporary art, now that the abstract modernist fetish of the new has been pretty much laid to rest. Tradition in any conventional sense of smooth continuity was already undermined during the era of Spender’s “revolutionary traditionalists.” The provocation of the readymade, recycling in citation marks the artifacts of everyday life, is also clearly a spent force. Despite the foolish pronouncements of certain theorists who interpreted victory in the Cold War as “the end of history,” we are clearly still struggling to come to terms with both the past as doggedly alive and the present as itself part of history. Artists in the twenty-first century are inventing new ways to address these challenges,10 but whether they find a way to create works (or post-works) that will justify Adorno’s injunction for reality to imitate art remains to be seen.
1 Adorno’s reduction of one to the other earned him Peter Bürger’s reproach:
Adorno pays for his failure to precisely historicize the category of the new. Since he neglects to do so, he must derive it directly from the commodity society. For Adorno, the category of the new in art is a necessary duplication of what dominates the commodity society … But it must be borne in mind that in the commodity society, the category of the new is not a substantive but merely an apparent one. For far from referring to the nature of the commodities, it is their artificially imposed appearance that is involved here.
(Bürger 1984:61)
2 See Adorno (1992–3).
3 Gelikman cites this line in a slightly different translation.
4 See, e.g., Renato Poggioli’s discussion of the modern artist’s “alienation from tradition” in Poggioli (1968:127).
5 As Rosalind E. Krauss (1985) demonstrated, the alleged fetish of novelty and originality in modernist art was often belied by a reliance on techniques of reproduction and copying, which are embodied in the ubiquitous figure of the non-narrative grid. The Duchampian readymade, of which more in a moment, was also a mass produced item with no original aura of authenticity.
6 For a trenchant discussion of the links between medieval nominalism and the freeing of the willing, self-asserting subject, see Part II, Chapter 3 of Blumenberg (1983).
7 For a useful account of the impact of nominalism on medieval aesthetics, see Chapter 8 of Eco (1986).
8 The term was used by Duchamp in a 1914 note from The White Box, and is developed by Thierry de Duve into a general theory of his work in Pictorial Nominalism (1991).
9 For an account of this quest, see Beltung (2001).
10 See, for example, the exhibition catalogue for the show Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History, curated by Nato Thompson at the MASSMoCa in 2006–7, and especially my introductory essay, “Aesthetic Experience and Historical Experience: A 21st-Century Constellation.”
Adorno, T. (1992–3) “On Tradition,” Telos 94 (Winter): 75–82.
——(1997) Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——(2002) “Wagner’s Relevance for Today,” in R. Leppert (ed.) Essays on Music Richard Leppert, Berkeley: University of Califonia Press.
Beltung, H. (2001) Invisible Masterpiece, trans. H. Atkins, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Blumenberg, H. (1983) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. R. M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bürger, P. (1984) Theory of the Avant-garde, trans. M. Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
de Duve, T. (1991) Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. D. Polan and T. de Duve, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eco, U. (1986) Beauty and Art in the Middle Ages, trans. H. Bredin, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Krauss, R.E (1985) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Poggioli, R. (1968) The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. G. Fitzgerald, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
Rosenberg, H. (1965) The Tradition of the New, New York: McGraw Hill.
Spender, S. (1963) The Struggle of the Modern, Berkeley: University of Califonia Press.
Thompson, N. (2006) Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History (exhibition catalogue), North Adams, MA: MASSMoCa.