Notes on culture’s failure and the social catastrophe
Gene Ray
The problem of violence and its social origins is old and vexed. If it is not to be attributed to an imputed human nature already conceding inevitability, then violence must be grasped as the product of social forms and processes. However, the public debates following the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq under the sign of a globalized “war on terror” have made clear that the longstanding disputes over the roots and springs of violence remain unresolved. Critical reflection on the social character of violence quickly touches the foundations and legitimacy of existing forms of society and their conflict-generating stratifications and concentrations of power.
In its traumatic character, violence has affinities with the traditional aesthetic category of the sublime, which names the mixed feelings of terror and pleasure triggered by encounters with excessive power or magnitude. That in the twentieth century, a period of unprecedented global violence, sublime strategies of “negative” or indirect representation reached new peaks of development in art should be no surprise. The Frankfurt critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno was among the first to explore this conjunction. His theory of modernism contains a coded rewriting of the sublime that positions it as the only adequate artistic response to historical catastrophe. However, as a cliché of contemporary cultural writing, the formula “after Auschwitz, no poetry” has been distorted and domesticated by its severance from Adorno’s critique of enlightenment culture and capitalist modernity—a severance that allows it to be unjustly reduced to a moralizing judgment of taste. For Adorno the catastrophe is social, rather than some exceptional genocidal eruption within a continuing and reassuring historical progress.
In his 1757 book on aesthetics—published two years after the Lisbon earthquake—the young Edmund Burke proposed that anything connected to terror is potentially a source of the feeling of the sublime. Today, it seems timely to ask whether this category from eighteenth-century aesthetics still has anything relevant to say about the world. The sublime names an aesthetic response to nature’s capacity to strike us with fear, terror, awe, and astonishment. Terror is key. As Burke put it: “Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime” (Burke 1990: 54, emphasis added). For Burke, there can be no sublime without terror, and wherever there is terror there is also, at least potentially, the feeling of the sublime. In Immanuel Kant’s formulations, this moment of terror is specified as the power of raw nature to overwhelm and render helpless our faculty of imagination (Kant 1987: 106, 120–21). The exemplars of the sublime remained, at least through the nineteenth century, raging storms, earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, avalanches, and the like—what we now call natural disasters—or else the vast desolation of mountains, deserts or ice fields, the starry sky or the high seas.
A direct encounter with the violence or overwhelming immensity of nature could precipitate a plunge into pure, undiluted terror. But to contemplate such scenes from a position of relative safety renders the feeling of terror somehow delightful and fascinating. The sublime always has to do with terror, then, but not pure, immediate terror: It is rather terror mediated by a certain physical or temporal distance and compounded with enjoyment and fascination—a strange and singular mix of pleasure and pain.
In the twentieth century, however, the unprecedented scale and intensity of two world wars radically transforms the traditional category of the sublime. Over the course of this bloody century, eruptions of human violence come to displace nature as the exemplary object of the sublime. The catastrophic violence humans inflict on other humans becomes more terrible and terrifying than the power and size of nature. To inflect Georg Lukács’s Marxist–Hegelian idiom, we could say that the sublime begins as an effect of first nature. But in the twentieth century these complex feelings become associated more with the self-made disasters of society, or second nature. This shift in the object of the sublime—from first to second nature—is a long time taking hold in critical discourses but is consolidated in the decades following 1945.
The trauma of the Second World War was decisive. By most estimates, this global bloodletting took between 50 and 60 million lives, although some recent accounts put the number as high as 70 million. Of the dead, something like two-thirds were civilians. I want to suggest that two events of violence in particular compelled the displacement of first nature within the category of the sublime. Auschwitz and Hiroshima both realize qualitative leaps in the human power and capacity for organized violence.
Very schematically: Auschwitz realizes the qualitatively new potential for systematic genocide inherent in the technics and logics of rationalized industrial commodity production, when these are put at the disposal of state administration and directed toward the aim of mass murder. Hiroshima realizes the qualitatively new potential for genocidal destruction inherent in the project of modernist science, when all the state-directed resources of research and development and rationalized production are mobilized for the war machine. The extermination camp or factory and the all-too-real doomsday weapon—the so-called weapon of mass destruction (WMD)—set the new standards for terror and sublimity. The shift, again, is from the power, violence, and size of first nature to the violent potentialities of second nature, or society itself. Viewed in this way, beyond all the obvious differences in their specific historical character and in the political forms and aims of the governments that realized them, Auschwitz and Hiroshima are shorthand for qualitatively new powers of violence gained by the nation-state. That these possibilities were historically realized is a new social fact (I follow Adorno [2000: 50] here in his critical appropriation of Émile Durkheim’s notion of “fait social”) that quite properly should terrify us far more than the random natural disasters of old.
This shift is indeed a radical transformation of the sublime. In the traditional sublime— above all as formulated by Kant—the encounter with the power or size of first nature is ultimately the occasion for reaffirming human freedom and dignity. The helpless distress of the imagination before the power and violence of raw nature turns out merely to have been the trigger for a reassertion of the faculty of reason and for a reflection on man’s supersensible dignity and destiny (Kant 1987: 106, 121). As the basis for moral freedom and human autonomy, reason is the capacity that ostensibly raises humanity above mere sensible nature and the blind play of forces, drives, and instincts. So humans need not be in terror of natural power, for they are reassured of their superiority over it. After 1945, however, this compensatory pleasure of self-admiration becomes highly improbable.
In light of the transformation of the sublime, we can read Adorno’s argument concerning the predicament of culture “after Auschwitz” across the four passages in which it is advanced and revisited. The first occurs at the end of the programmatic essay “Cultural Critique and Society,” written in 1949. In it, Adorno positions critical theory’s dialectical approach to culture as a necessary corrective both to a “transcendental” ideology critique that rejects Kultur in toto and an “immanent” critique that restricts itself to the criteria that culture itself has generated. Cultural critics of this latter kind aim to reassert art’s autonomy and deplore its corruption by commerce and other contemporary social forces. But because they never manage to attain a sufficiently critical position vis-à-vis culture as such, they ultimately contribute to its fetishization and reification as Kultur: “They help to weave the veil” (Adorno 1976: 9; 1992b: 20).
Critical theory shows the inadequacy of classic ideology critique, for contemporary culture tends to merge with society as a totality of processes—the untrue whole or Ganzen. The totality of life-processes tends to become Kultur: “Today ideology means society as appearance” (Adorno 1976: 25; 1992b: 31). Adorno and Horkheimer’s term “Kulturindustrie,” introduced in 1947 in Dialectic of Enlightenment, names this tightening nexus of relations and processes, which tends to eliminate artistic autonomy as it instrumentally valorizes, adapts, and absorbs culture (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969, 2002). With regard to the project of enlightened emancipation, these tendencies are disastrous, for they corrode and block the autonomous subjectivity that is the very condition of any critical enlightenment. It is this historical development that Adorno calls “integration society” (Einheitsgesellschaft) or, more provocatively, “absolute integration” (Adorno 1976: 30; 1992b: 34; 1966: 353; 1995: 362).
In this context, the place-name Auschwitz appears in the passage that ends the essay as a kind of eruption:
The more total the society, so also the more reified the spirit [Geist] and more paradoxical its plan to wrest itself from reification on its own. Even the utmost consciousness of disaster threatens to degrade into chatter. Cultural critique finds itself facing the last stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism: after Auschwitz, to write a poem [ein Gedicht] is barbaric, and this situation eats into even the process of knowing and speaking about why it has become impossible to write poetry [Gedichte] today.
(Adorno 1976: 30–31; 1992b: 34, translation modified)
Auschwitz is not itself the disaster, but rather proof of the genocidal potential of the social tendencies toward absolute integration and the elimination of autonomous culture and its subjectivity. In social terms, the catastrophe has happened and is ongoing, and Auschwitz, as Adorno will put it in Negative Dialectics, is only its “first test-piece” or sample (Adorno 1966: 353; 1995: 362).
What is it about Auschwitz that thereafter makes writing poetry both barbaric and “impossible”? The claim entailed by the term “impossible” is obviously not empirical, for poems still are written. And there is more at stake than a simple judgment that writing poems would now be extremely distasteful. Adorno’s reticence to say more makes the sentence rather cryptic. His later revisitations will clarify much. In the meantime, we are on notice: the social tendency to eliminate the autonomous subject is backed up by the capacity and willingness to murder categories of individuals industrially. Writing poems as if nothing has changed is so inadequate a response that it slips over into barbarism. Poetry seems to stand synecdochically for all of the inherited forms of art and culture. The passage implies a summary judgment—a social verdict against art.
Adorno reconsiders this verdict in the 1962 essay “Engagement.” In a polemic against the committed writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertolt Brecht, he writes:
I am not inclined to relax the severity of the proposition, that to go on writing lyric poetry [Lyrik] after Auschwitz is barbaric; in it is expressed negatively the impulse animating committed literary work. The question of a character in [Sartre’s] Morts sans sepulture, “Is there sense in living, when there are people who beat you until your bones break?,” is also the question whether art should still exist at all; whether spiritual regression in the concept of committed literature is not urged on by the regression of society itself. But [Hans Magnus] Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must withstand this very verdict, must be in such a way that it does not by its very existence after Auschwitz give itself up into the hands of cynicism. It is literature’s own situation that is paradoxical, and not one’s attitude toward it. The excess of real suffering tolerates no forgetting; Pascal’s theological dictum “On ne doit plus dormir” is to be secularized. But this suffering, what Hegel called the consciousness of affliction, also demands the continuation of the very art it forbids; hardly anywhere else does suffering still find its own voice, the consolation that does not at once betray it.
(Adorno 1981: 422–23; 1992a: 87–88, translation modified)
Whereas the first formulation only expresses the untruth of contemporary art, Adorno now begins to acknowledge the remnants of truth that may still belong to it. Art, he concedes, still gives suffering “its own voice.” In Negative Dialectics, published four years later, he writes: “The need to let suffering be spoken is the condition of all truth” (Adorno 1966: 27; 1995: 17–18). Thus Adorno acknowledges that art must go on after Auschwitz, even if it can only do so truthfully by finding a way to bear its failure without cynicism and to give suffering its own voice without immediately betraying it. Adorno begins, in the same essay, to unfold a case for a “negative” modernist art— exemplified by the unflinching but rigorously indirect work of Beckett—that would avow Auschwitz without ever speaking its name. This call for “negative presentation” of the social catastrophe is Adorno’s rewriting of the sublime (Ray 2005: 19–32; 2009).
Philosophy too must find a way to bear culture’s failure, in which it participates. Critical reflection on this predicament is the burden of Negative Dialectics.In“After Auschwitz,” the first of the “Meditations on Metaphysics” that end this work, Adorno concedes the possibility that his first formulation may have been too one-sided:
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the martyred one has to scream; thus it may have been wrong [to have proposed] that after Auschwitz not one more poem can be written.
(Adorno 1966: 353; 1995: 362–63, translation modified)
The phrase “perennial suffering” here is remarkable. In Adorno, “perennial” points to the dynamic stasis of capitalist society, in which instrumental reason and universalized exchangeability drive the “ever new production of the always-the-same” (Adorno 1976: 13–14; 1992b: 23). Contrary to what a precipitous reading would expect, the suffering referred to here is not that of the victims of Auschwitz. Rather, it is the social misery generated continuously by “late capitalism”—by antagonistic society in the last stage of the dialectic of enlightenment.
In the second “Meditation,” given the heading “Metaphysics and Culture,” Adorno elaborates culture’s aporia:
Culture shudders at stench because it itself stinks; because its palace, as Brecht put it in a magnificent line, is built out of dog shit. Years after this line was written, Auschwitz demonstrated culture’s failure irrefutably. That it could happen in the midst of all the traditions of philosophy, art, and the enlightening sciences says more than merely that these traditions—spirit—were unable to take hold of people and change them. In these branches themselves, in the emphatic claim of their autarky, untruth is squatting. After Auschwitz, all culture, including the urgent critique of culture itself, is garbage. In restoring itself after what took place without resistance in its own landscape, culture has become entirely the ideology it was potentially since the time when, opposing material existence, it presumed to inspire that existence with light—the same light refused it by the division of spiritual from manual labor. Those who plead for the preservation of this radically guilty and shabby culture make themselves its accomplices, while whoever spurns culture directly promotes the barbarism that culture revealed itself to be. Not even silence leads out of this circle; silence only rationalizes individual subjective incapacity with the status of objective truth, thereby once more degrading truth into lie.
(Adorno 1966: 357–58; 1995: 367, translation modified)
Culture’s failure, its complicity with untruth, has been exposed “irrefutably.” To go on now, culture accommodates itself to a structural barbarism liable to genocidal explosions. But to give up and fall into silence cedes the field; to become hostile to culture gives barbarism a hand directly. Can’t go on, go on. The echoes of Beckett are no accident. Adorno’s negative modernism does not relieve art of its guilt or restore culture to its old glory. For him, it is the only reach for truth left for art after culture’s exposure.
Adorno returns to his “after Auschwitz” verdict once more in 1967, in “Is Art Lighthearted?”
Art, which if not reflective is no longer possible at all, must swear itself off of lightheartedness. Compelling it to do so above all is what happened in the recent past. The proposition that after Auschwitz not one more poem can be written does not hold utterly, but it is certain that after this event, because it was possible and remains possible into the unforeseeable future, lighthearted art is no longer tenable. Objectively, it degrades into cynicism, however much it would like to rely on the goodness of human understanding.
(Adorno 1981: 603–04; 1992a: 251, translation modified)
Here, for Adorno, the provocation “after Auschwitz” is not an absolute prohibition, but it does mark the end of the old joy in artistic mimesis and representation. The element of semblance and free play is an inherent structural element of all art and cannot be revoked. But after Auschwitz it cannot be art’s undiluted principle—at least not without collapsing into cynicism. Culture in class society has always been “subject to a historical dynamic” between the lightness of its impulse to autonomy and the seriousness that is not blind to social facts and so sees its own performative contradiction (Adorno 1976: 600–02; 1992a: 248–50). Art must now bear this tension consciously and seek forms that will be neither one nor the other alone.
The dialectic of culture and barbarism continues to unfold. Adorno would have been the last to exempt it from history. The task of a critical theory of culture is to track and analyze this unfolding in the ciphers of contemporary social facts and works of art. Adorno argued that Auschwitz was a kind of irreversible liquidation of metaphysical optimism. But for the reasons I have already indicated, we have to include Hiroshima to properly grasp what has changed. For these two events together accomplish a terrible and deep-reaching ruination that shakes—or should shake—human self-confidence and optimism to the core.
After 1945, we could say, a gap opens between, on the one hand, a fundamental uncertainty that surrounds our notions of humanity and the future, and, on the other hand, the officially proclaimed and manufactured optimism surrounding the overproduction and consumption of commodities. Objectively, the meaning of what happened is that the myth of automatic progress is dead—the future will from now on be in doubt. But the postwar “economic miracles” of reconstruction and growth make it possible to repress the meaning of this history in everyday life: Despite what happened, I’m optimistic because I have a house full of things and next year I hope to buy a new car. For critical theory, in the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, the Enlightenment notion of progress that informs Kant’s sublime becomes naïve, when not obscene. For these staggering events establish that society, in its capacities for violence, has escaped rational, humane control and generated atrocities that cannot be folded back into any redemptive narrative of progress.
It is important to note that the new powers of violence out of the box after 1945 belong to the modern nation-state, with its monopoly on violence and its power to declare the state of emergency or exception—that is, as the rightwing legal theorist Carl Schmitt famously put it, the sovereign power to declare the existence of an absolute and intolerable enemy (Schmitt 1996: 27–45; 2006). The state, in declaring a state of emergency, invokes the rule of law to exempt itself from the rule of law: it gives itself permission to do whatever it deems necessary to crush the enemy, and the state alone will decide when it is safe to return to normality. It is the declared state of emergency that self-authorizes the state to take control of whole sectors of science and the economy and to mobilize all techno-instrumental capacities toward political ends, including the end of terror.
Whatever we are officially told today, terror remains above all the prerogative of the nation-state. Objectively, we have far more to fear from the state than from its challenging others, however brutal and excessive certain of those others—al-Qaeda and such— may be. The contemporary sublime is linked irreducibly to state terror and violence, and events since 2001 and the so-called “war on terror” do not change that at all. In the end, the terrible, sublime new powers that the state holds in reserve are products of capitalist modernity itself—that is, of techno-productive power and administrative reason developed within the frame of the modern nation-state and under the globally dominant logic of capitalist social relations. This is to say that second nature is capitalist: it is the society and world system that capitalist modernity produced. And so to speak of the sublime today is to speak of the terror of wars and genocidal eruptions, but also, necessarily, of the terror and violence of the nexus of social relations and processes as a global totality. It is no secret that the global logic of this totality is war—an unceasing and unforgiving war of all against all. When Thomas Hobbes penned this memorable phrase in the seventeenth century, he was describing a projected hell—the anarchic state of nature from which the modern state and the rule of law supposedly deliver us. But we will be excused, I trust, for having doubts about this kind of deliverance.
In the ideology of capital, competition is a social asset and spur to progress; war, in contrast, is a mistake, a slip into excess or miscalculation to be corrected by a return to the market. Unhappily, this distinction between competition and war is spurious. Under capitalism, competition is generalized and enforced. What I want to insist on is that the logic of competition is a logic of war that pushes against and takes aim at all values and logics that would constrain it—and for this reason it in fact leads to war, in the common sense of open armed conflict. This would be the structural barbarism that Adorno famously called “perennial catastrophe”—of which Auschwitz was only “the first test-piece” (Adorno 1976: 16; 1992b: 25; 1966: 353; 1995: 362).
One challenge for critical thought today is to grasp the current wars and occupations not merely as resource wars or imperialist adventures—they certainly are those—but more fundamentally as wars of systemic enforcement. In other words, we need to understand how violence is structurally generated by the very same social relations and logics that seemed to provide us with—or at least promise—material security and prosperity based on a superabundance of commodities. And more than that, we need to grasp how the brutal atrocities that strike us with fear today in fact function as means by which the global status quo maintains its power and hold over us—declaring and at the same time continuously generating the absolute enemy, from which, we are told, the state alone can protect us.
The “war on terror” is an efficient way of generating fear and maintaining the conditions of emergency—which perhaps have turned permanent war and crisis into a conscious modus operandi and new normality. After the atrocities of September 2001, Bush performed the speech acts of emergency, famously activating the friend–enemy distinction and invoking the reasons of state and language of exception—even as he enjoined Americans to go shopping. The laws granting expanded and exceptional powers quickly followed. The problem is that with such a schizophrenic normalization of emergency, it is difficult to see how the situation can end. According to the strategic calculation of the militarists of the “full spectrum dominance” school, the US has a better chance of maintaining its top position against rival nation-states and emerging blocs in a situation of generalized fear and terror and continuous emergency than in one characterized by a relative absence of war, in which democratic aspirations from below could hope and work for their global realization. It is the attempt to understand this new situation in terms of a logic of systemic enforcement that I admire about Retort’s (2005) analysis, in Afflicted Powers, of what they call “military neo-liberalism” and the functions of failed states and weak citizenship.
From these critical propositions I draw three conclusions:
First, unlike the sublime terror of first nature, that of second nature is social in origin and should in theory bear the openings for a social solution. However, since these capacities are the products of capitalist modernity and its relentless logics, if there is a way out for us, it can only be through a passage to a different social logic and order—a system of human relations not based on domination and exploitation. “Capitalism,” Walter Benjamin warned us, “will not die a natural death”—though it may deliver us up to common ruin (Benjamin 1999: 667).
Second, the real terror is the threat that system change is no longer possible—the threat that there is no way out of this capitalist thing, this race to the bottom. This is the threatening claim of established power that history has ended, having realized itself in the current status quo. “There is no alternative,” as Margaret Thatcher pompously put it. This is of course a claim, not a certain fact. The fact is we don’t know—and can’t know in advance—whether or not a system change to something better than capitalism is possible. But this absolute insistence that it isn’t may be the most threatening terror of all, a paralyzing terror that would rob us at once of history and a future. This is indeed the terrifying, sublime, spectacular message continuously repeated by the voice of power today.
Third, as far as the power of art to respond to this predicament goes, we had better abandon all illusions before entering through the gallery gates. The promise of art to improve us and raise us out of barbarism was always overblown; Adorno in any case insisted that Auschwitz was the end of any claims for the power of culture; not even art’s “right to exist” can be taken for granted today (Adorno 1997: 1).
I take as sound Adorno’s dialectical verdict on culture and his formulation of its post-1945 predicament. His case for an astringent modernism of negative presentation is another matter. There are two compelling arguments for detaching the dialectical critique of culture from the modernist advocacy. In the first place, Adorno did not anticipate how much the forms of remembrance and representation would be instrumentalized and sucked into the so-called culture wars over the course of the 1970s and 1980s. Here, the rise to dominance of Adorno’s negative way within the administered art system becomes a sign of its neutralization. Even a sublime art of indirection loses its efficacy and power to avow truthfully when it becomes conventionalized and formulaic. The historical moment when a negative modernism could claim to be the most valid or even the only acceptable artistic response to the social catastrophe has passed (Ray 2005, 2009). It is an open question what can replace it.
Second, Adorno’s rejection of committed artistic works is also subject to a historical dynamic. This aspect of Adorno’s theory reflects the experiences of Stalinism and the Cold War; its assumptions must be revisited in light of the social struggles of 1968 and their subsequent defeat, the rise of globalizing neo-liberalism, and the collapse of Soviet-style bureaucratic regimes and social orders. Committed avant-garde cultural practices—above all those of the Situationist International (active from 1957 to 1972)— have demonstrated the blind-spots of Adorno’s polemics against artistic engagement and shown the way beyond them (Ray 2007a, 2007b, 2007c).
Adorno circled the wagons around the remnant autonomy of the modernist artwork. This kind of retreat is an abandonment of the socially revolutionary impulses of the artistic avant-gardes. Even within the paradigm of the institutionalized and administered bourgeois artwork, Adorno’s call for a sublime art of negative presentation on the model of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame is a gambit whose time is past. Moreover, we have to acknowledge that the dialectic of public remembering and forgetting has to a very large extent been instrumentalized by power today. Practices of mourning adequate to this situation merge with the radical critique of existing society. This is so because violence is always traumatic; and everything that belongs to the critical processing of trauma is, in psychoanalytic terms, mourning. Mourning, however, cannot end so long as violence persists; and violence persists so long as it is installed in the dominant social logic.
At the level of representation, there certainly are counter-images to the images of state terror. As markers of a finally unrepresentable excess of trauma, such counter-images can be understood by means of a historicized notion of the sublime. The leaked images of Abu Ghraib are in this sense an answer to the officially disseminated images of the “shock and awe” night bombardment of Baghdad. This kind of image war is real enough: counter-images can produce real material effects and, as Retort (2006: 88) has suggested, can initiate at least momentary shifts in the balance of forces. And what Benjamin called “dialectical images” can generate energies for reigniting the social struggles we inherit as the unpaid debts of history (Benjamin 1999: 463–64; 2003: 390–91). But I doubt that art is any longer the privileged site for the production and circulation of such imagery. The internet would seem to be a far more important global medium for this today. And the fact is that art—even the most critical forms possible within institutions today— cannot in itself be the solution to our problem. What we need is to gain collective control over globalized social relations and processes, and this cannot be done within a differentiated sphere of relative autonomy that is only a subordinated part of a social totality. For this reason, the most effective forms of anti-capitalist art and culture will likely emerge not in the “art world,” but in the openings created beyond the art institutions by social movements and struggles. These are in any case the very tough challenges that we—we latecomers, objects of capital, potential subjects of struggle, and a history beyond capitalism—inherit without wanting to. In the end, this is merely to say that terror will remain a central part of our reality unless and until we break its hold over us.
This essay incorporates and substantially amplifies for the current volume parts of a text published as “History, Sublime, Terror: Notes on the Politics of Fear” (Ray 2008). The author thanks John Hall for his skillful help with these alterations.
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