In a passage from his 1951 essay “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno evokes a kind of dialectical thought that focuses on an immanent critique of its object by attending to the ideological principles that are at work within that very object. Such thinking “takes seriously the principle that it is not ideology itself which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality.”1 According to this logic, it is not simply the value-positing content of this or that ideology that deserves our critical attention—in the manner prescribed by conventional forms of Ideologiekritik—but rather the very relation between that content and the world in which it is first conceptualized. Any ideological operation that proceeds by way of positing a more or less narrowly defined set of correspondences forecloses in advance any inquiry regarding the contingent, and therefore—in principle—changeable relation of the ideological content to the world in which it is formed and from which it also departs. That is to say, the kind of thinking that would break open the fossilized structures of an ideological formation must first center on an investigation of the ways in which the presupposition of a stable correspondence in actuality works to displace and even dissimulate its own contingency. What kind of judgment, then, would be required to approach this set of concerns? What type of judgment would thinking have to elicit when it wishes to posit such norms or to evaluate such ideas, phenomena, and behaviors? And what is it, in Adorno’s uncoercive gaze, that locates the core of such acts of judgment in works of art and, more generally, in the realm of the aesthetic?
Given Adorno’s refractory modes of argumentation and paratactical development of concepts, there is nothing self-evident about the idea that his version of critical theory as negative dialectics—to say nothing of the uncoercive gaze itself—should speak to the vexed constellation of ideology, judgment, and the aesthetic at all. His thinking of a negative dialectics remains a provocation, even a scandal, to readers who yearn for a more concrete, future-oriented propositional model of critique. Already Thomas Mann, who had enlisted Adorno for consultation regarding the musicological dimensions of his novel Doktor Faustus, writes to him in the course of their twelve-year-long correspondence: “If there were only ever a single positive word from you, my revered one, that would permit as much as a glimpse of the true society to be postulated! . . . What is, what would be, the right thing?”2 Mann’s general disquiet continues to echo in various forms and iterations today. For instance, the philosopher Rüdiger Bubner complains that Adorno at bottom wishes for something that, in Bubner’s view, is inadmissible—namely, to aestheticize philosophy itself.3 In a similar vein, the well-known German philosopher and media theorist Norbert Bolz, who began his career by devoting his doctoral dissertation to Adorno’s aesthetics, in a recent conversation goes so far as to state in a polemical spirit: “Is Adorno part of our theory eclecticism at all anymore? I have my doubts. I am no longer able to learn anything from Adorno and Benjamin. Adorno, perhaps more than other authors, has to be seen as a historical phenomenon.”4 And when the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben sets out to reconstruct the messianic commitments of Adorno’s older friend and erstwhile mentor Walter Benjamin by forging links to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Pauline Epistles, he finds it expedient to cast Adorno as an Other to any messianic, liberatory, or transformative tradition.5 Unlike the scholar of Judaism and philosophy of religion Jacob Taubes, who espies in Adorno’s thinking an unwarranted aestheticization of the messianic, Agamben asserts that the “whole of Adorno’s philosophy is written according to impotential meaning that the as if can only be taken as a warning signal at the heart of this intimate modality of his thought.” In Agamben’s view, “Adorno could never even conceive of restoring possibility to the fallen, unlike Paul, for whom ‘power [potenza] is actualized in weakness’ (2 Cor. 12:9). Despite appearances, negative dialectics is an absolutely nonmessianic form of thought, closer to the emotional tonality of Jean Améry than that of Benjamin.”6 According to this reading, even the subtitle of Adorno’s book of thought-images, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, merely betrays “something akin to resentment” so that, ultimately, “all gestures that could claim to lift the spell are absent.”7 On this view, any judgment as postulated by a negatively dialectical thought only would confirm its own lack of potency, emerging exclusively as an “impotential” that itself harbors no potential for intervention or dialectical reversal.
But, one might ask, would such a rush to judgment about a certain impotence or inconsequentiality of judgment not itself fall prey to the threat of the impotential? What if the forms of judgment that traverse the work of art kept alive not merely the demands of an immanent critique but also—even when they come to pass on the far side of any messianism—opened up unanticipatable possibilities of disclosure that exceed mere impotentiality? Can an artwork produce forms of judgment that extend beyond the particular experience of a singular aesthetic appearance? What does judgment—especially value-positing, ideological, or political judgment—entail when it is mediated by the idiomatic forms of an aesthetic object or event—that is, by forms without which there would be no art?
The significance of the general status of judgment in Adorno’s thinking has not escaped some of his most-attentive readers. For instance, as Alexander García Düttmann suggests in his meditation on the formal question of judgment, Adorno’s strictly hypotactically organized sentences, which are themselves inscribed in mostly paratactically organized paragraphs or sections, relentlessly call into question the possibility of any form of synthetic judgment, the kind of judgment that, at least since Kant, has related the act of judging to the practice of critique.8 And Christoph Menke draws our attention to the ways in which aesthetic judgment can be understood as an act of critical judgment as well as, at the same time, a calling into question of that very judgment, especially in relation to the very “judge-ability” of a phenomenon such as an aesthetic object.9 Yet what concerns us here is something distinct. At stake is a specific case of aesthetic judgment, namely, the particular form of aesthetic judgment that, paradoxically, judges precisely by withholding judgment. This judgment without judgment is inseparable from Adorno’s uncoercive gaze.
In an often-overlooked passage from the section “Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, and Metaphysics” of his unfinished and posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, Adorno reads the poem “Mausfallen-Sprüchlein” (“Mousetrap Rhyme”) by the nineteenth-century German Biedermeier poet Eduard Mörike in a manner that is meant to show, in exemplary fashion, the ways in which the artwork judges precisely by refusing to judge. Adorno cites Mörike’s poem as follows:
Das Kind geht dreimal um die Falle und spricht:
Kleine Gäste, kleines Haus.
Liebe Mäusin, liebe Maus,
Stell dich nur kecklich ein,
Heut nacht bei Mondenschein!
Mach aber die Tür fein hinter Dir zu,
Hörst Du?
Dabei hüte Dein Schwänzchen!
Nach Tische singen wir
Nach Tische springen wir
Und machen ein Tänzchen:
Witt witt!
Meine alte Katze tanzt wahrscheinlich mit.10
[Mousetrap Rhyme
The child circles the mousetrap three times and chants:
Little guest, little house.
Dearest tiny or grown-up mouse
boldly pay us a visit tonight
when the moon shines bright!
But close the door back of you tight,
you hear?
And careful for your little tail!
After dinner we will sing
After dinner we will spring
And make a little dance:
Swish, swish!
My old cat will probably be dancing with.]11
Adorno then proceeds to provide a brief and, one might say, surprisingly apodictic commentary on Mörike’s poem:
The child’s taunt, “My old cat will probably be dancing with”—if it really is a taunt and not the involuntarily friendly image of child, cat, and mouse dancing, the two animals on their hind legs—once appropriated by the poem, no longer has the last word. To reduce the poem to a taunt is to ignore its social content [Inhalt] along with its poetic content. The poem is the nonjudgmental reflex of language on a miserable, socially conditioned ritual, and as such it transcends it by subordinating itself. The poem’s gesture, which points to this ritual as if nothing else were possible, holds court over the gapless immanence of the ritual by turning the force of self-evidence into an indictment of that ritual. Art judges exclusively by abstaining from judgment.12
Why Mörike? If Adorno here chooses a rather unlikely poem by a rather unlikely poet to develop his politically inflected argument about art—after all, literary history considers Mörike and the German Biedermeier period hardly as revolutionary or politically transformative—he returns to him as a subtly subversive poet. Mörike also figures prominently in Adorno’s earlier essay “Lyric Poetry and Society” and as an author with whom other major thinkers also have grappled, including, famously, Benjamin in his frequently used image of the “bucklicht Männlein,” or little hunchback, from Mörike’s literary world, and Heidegger in his exchange with the literary scholar Emil Staiger on Mörike’s poem “Auf eine Lampe” (“Upon a Lamp”).13 Given his intense musical and musicological interests, Adorno also would have been familiar with Austrian composer Hugo Wolf’s musical interpretation of the “Mausfallen-Sprüchlein” as it appears in his cycle of Mörike-Lieder.
To begin to comprehend Adorno’s provocative claim that the work passes judgment precisely by refusing to judge, it is necessary to consider the most important sentence in this passage: “The poem is the nonjudgmental reflex of language on a miserable, socially conditioned ritual, and as such it transcends it by subordinating itself.” In the original German, Adorno’s sentence reads: “Urteilsloser Reflex der Sprache auf einen abscheulichen, sozial eingeübten Ritus, übersteigt es diesen, indem es ihm sich einordnet.”14 Whereas the English translation chooses “subordinates” to render “einordnet,” it is important to note that subordination, which in German would be “unterordnen,” is not quite what is at stake. Because what Adorno says can never be separated from how he says it, we would do well to be attuned to the difference here. A subordination or “Unterordnung” signifies a movement of subservience, relegation, and demotion, a placement under or below something else that is thereby acknowledged as superior or predominant. But “einordnen” is not “unterordnen,” as the former evokes a movement not of subordination but rather of coordination, in which the language of the poem insinuates itself or installs itself into the very logic or even ideological formation from which it, as an artwork, had set out to depart. In other words, the epistemo-political gesture of the language of the poem consists neither in criticizing a status quo that is deemed to be in need of change nor in departing from that which is the case by rendering an external judgment on it, a judgment that would view the posited relation between ideological content and the world in which it occurs as problematic or even untenable. The language of Mörike’s poem is not a form of Ideologiekritik in relation to a detestable social ritual that calls for replacement by other, purportedly more desirable social rituals or even the abolishment of the very idea of social ritual; rather, the poem transcends what it stages precisely by remaining within it. The movement of an aesthetic Einordnen propels thought into the very fibers of that with which it is at odds, without thereby collapsing the difference between the critical impulse of thought and its object or target.
Yet what kind of judgment can be said to be at work in this movement? Adorno speaks of an “urteilsloser Reflex der Sprache,” which is not quite “nonjudgmental,” as the published English translation has it, but more precisely a judgment-free or, most literally, judgment-less reflex of language. The judgmentless judgment of language points to a form of judging that turns upon itself. “Nur durch Enthaltung vom Urteil urteilt Kunst,” Adorno suggests, “art judges exclusively by abstaining from judgment,” in a gesture that paradoxically becomes ever more potent the more it refuses to comply with its own conventional demands—that is, the more it abstains from its own actualization. Adorno is fully aware that Enthaltung and its reflexive verb form, sich enthalten, also have a technical meaning in German legal discourse, where they are employed to designate a formal abstention from voting, a refusal to cast one’s vote in the context of a decision to be made. If this logic leads us to a precinct of thought that is no longer fully governed by a more recognizably Kantian logic of judgment—and particularly by the Urteilskraft of a specifically aesthetic judgment—then where does art’s way of judging through a certain self-recusal or abstention from judgment leave us?
It is as if this form of judgment, which proceeds not by departing from its object but rather by insinuating itself within it, had taken up and extended a Hölderlinian inflection of the concept of judgment. In his early reflection “Seyn, Urtheil, Modalität” (“Being, Judgment, Modality”), Hölderlin argues that “ judgment, in the highest and strictest sense, is the original separation of object and subject which are most deeply united in intellectual intuition, that separation through which alone object and subject become possible, the arche-separation [Urtheil ist im höchsten und strengsten Sinne die ursprüngliche Trennung des in der intellektuellen Anschauung innigst vereinigten Objects und Subjects, diejenige Trennung, wodurch erst Object und Subject möglich wird, die Ur-Theilung].” And he continues: “In the concept of separation, there lies already the concept of the reciprocity of object and subject and the necessary presupposition of a whole of which object and subject form the parts [Im Begriffe der Theilung liegt schon der Begriff der gegenseitigen Beziehung des Objects und Subjects aufeinander, und die nothwendige Vorausezung eines Ganzen wovon Object und Subject die Theile sind].” Hölderlin concludes by writing: “ ‘I am I’ is the most fitting example for this concept of arche-separation as theoretical separation, for in the practical arche-separation it [the ‘I’] opposes the non-I, not itself [‘Ich bin Ich’ ist das passendste Beispiel zu diesem Begriffe der Ur-theilung, als Theoretischer Urtheilung, denn in der praktischen Urtheilung sezt es sich dem Nichtich, nicht sich selbst entgegen].”15 By focusing on the primordial separation or, more precisely, partition [“Theilung,” in Hölderlin’s older spelling], at work in judgment, its Ur-Teil, we see that what distinguishes judgment from intellectual intuition, Anschauung, is the way in which judgment separates what is unified in the Anschauung—namely, subject and object—so that it is only in the act of judgment that the two are made visible as distinguishable entities of reflection. What is more, only after subject and object have been separated by judgment into—at least in principle—distinguishable entities of reflection can the thinking of their relation commence. The question of the ever-shifting relation between subject and object is therefore predicated upon the act of judgment itself. The proposition “Ich bin Ich” is a prime instantiation of the relation-producing effects of a primordially partioning judgment to the extent that, in theoretical judgment, a certain nonself-identity obtains even within identity. In other words, whereas in practical judgment a self is opposed to a nonself, in the kind of primordial partioning performed by theoretical judgment the self is opposed, among other things, to itself—it becomes visible as being traversed by an other that is, precisely, itself.
Is there, in the form of judgment that Adorno wishes to think toward—that is, the form of judgment that judges by refraining from judgment—not also something of the Hölderlinian primordial partitioning at work? If the judgment that comes to pass in the language of Mörike’s poem judges by einordnen itself, by finding its place in the order of things that it also wishes to disrupt, then the judgment can be understood as dividing itself as a form of nonidentity. It inscribes itself into its object through its judgmentless ordering or ordinating procedure while at the same time resisting the very object into which it installs itself. That is to say, the partioning judgment of the Ur-teil is both itself and its own other—an other which is also the self—in that it mobilizes a critical impulse that both leaves the object intact and departs from it, affirming it, as it were, by merging with it, while at the same time remaining fundamentally at odds with it. The tension of this double situatedness is lodged in the primordial partioning effected by the judgmentless judgment itself and vies for recognition in the artwork.
The way in which this recognition of the effects of the judgmentless judgment in the artwork is to be conceptualized requires some clarification. It does not come to pass on any literal level of an artwork—for instance, on the semantic level of a poem. In artworks, Adorno insists, “nothing is literal, least of all their words [am letzten ihre Worte].”16 On the contrary, the nonliterality of works of art requires the constant labor of rigorous interpretation and reinterpretation, not to decode and eventually arrest a final, stable meaning—after all, “their meaning appears as if it were blocked [als ob ihre Bedeutung blockiert wäre]”—but rather to engage in what Adorno calls deutende Vernunft or “interpretive reason.”17 Harkening back to the concept of interpretive reason that he had first developed in his 1931 Frankfurt inaugural lecture “Die Aktualität der Philosophie,” Adorno mobilizes the concept here in order to emphasize the radically interpretive nature of a theoretical engagement with the aesthetic, in which meaning remains an open question mark, not a merely factual or metrical piece of information to be accessed by instrumental reason. For interpretive reason, even authorial intention, or an author’s wish to refuse interpretation altogether, cannot suffice. “That great artists,” Adorno writes, “the Goethe who wrote fairy tales no less than Beckett, want nothing to do with interpretations only underscores the difference of the truth content from the consciousness and the intention of the author . . . . Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation.”18 Interpretation is not something that is added to reason when it engages with the aesthetic; rather, when it engages seriously with the aesthetic, reason comes to the realization that it was always already imbricated with interpretive activity—that interpretation is its constitutive, irreducible category of reflection.
In the case of the judgmentless judgment, which insinuates itself into its object as a primordial partitioning, the judgment’s force, too, is inseparable from the extent to which—and the intensity with which—it engages the faculty of deutende Vernunft. The particular poetico-political judgment that Adorno locates in Mörike’s poem does not unfold on its semantic, literal, or disclosive level. For instance, it is not to be found in the aesthetic immediacy of the constellation of dancing child, mouse, and cat. Rather, it unfolds on the level of what Adorno names a work’s “truth content.” For him, the “truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justification of aesthetics.”19 Adorno here takes up, without explicitly mentioning his source, Benjamin’s evocation of “Wahrheitsgehalt” in the 1924 essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities.20 For both Adorno and Benjamin, the truth content of an artwork does not attach to its propositional structure; it cannot be extracted, with appropriate effort and labor, as the kernel or essence of a work; nor does it reveal in any conventional sense this or that meaning of an artwork, even as it refuses to resign itself to mere meaninglessness.
But what is meant by truth content? The linguistic particularity of the German term “Wahrheitsgehalt” may provide a clue. In German there are two words that translate into English as “content,” for English does not normally distinguish between the two: der Gehalt and der Inhalt.21 One could think of Inhalt as the garden-variety content of a work, its aboutness—say, the way in which the content of Balzac’s Comédie Humaine may be understood to be the singular lifeworld of post-Napoleonic nineteenth-century France, or an Edith Wharton novel may be perceived to have as its content the social norms and cultural politics of the late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century American East Coast upper class, or a Gerhard Richter painting may be viewed as being about German left-wing terrorism of the 1970s. But the kind of content signified by Gehalt would better be thought of as import, substance, significance, or weight. Thus, when the English translation of Aesthetic Theory renders “Wahrheitsgehalt” throughout as “truth content,” the import of Adorno’s Gehalt on the far side of content—of “mere” content, as it were—threatens to be effaced.22 Wahrheitsgehalt, as substance or import, is also what is excessive to a work of art, an uncontainable surplus that reaches beyond both itself and the work in which it sets itself into motion.
With respect to the question of judgment, then, Gehalt and Inhalt as distinct modes of content relate differently to the artwork. If Inhalt can render or provoke judgment, it is an overt judgment, a stated or disclosed judgment, one that comes to pass on the level of the work’s manifest content. Although such judgment is not coextensive with the Kantian precept that would demand the shared or communal form of aesthetic judgment encoded in the statement “This is beautiful,” it does depend on the shared apperception of a judgment’s grounds and validity. For instance, Dave Eggers’s recent dystopian novel The Circle will be read primarily as passing strong judgment on the tyrannical, enslaving aspects of the Internet and its evolving ideology, along with the powerful companies that rule over it—and, ultimately, over us. But Gehalt, as something strangely excessive to the work yet lodged in its very fibers, refrains from such overt judgment. This restraint is neither a mere ruse nor does it happen on the level of authorial or artistic intention. On the far side of intentionality, the elusive surplus of Gehalt betrays an import that judges by refraining from judgment, by holding back. It is to this excessiveness of Gehalt, rather than to the circumscribed precincts and precepts of Inhalt, that Adorno’s insistence upon Enthaltung (“Nur durch Enthaltung vom Urteil urteilt Kunst”) refers us. The critical abstention performed by Adorno’s Ent-haltung calls upon us to become mindful of what comes to pass, respectively, as In-halt and as Ge-halt within the work of art. We might say that Ent-haltung, mediated by the tension between In-halt and Ge-halt, demands a particular critical Haltung (attitude or stance), but one that can only be thought and practiced without a firm Halt (hold). This form of Haltung without secure Halt is a kind of de-stancing, an Ent-haltung.
The “holding” that Gehalt performs, as an Ent-haltung, is simultaneously a disclosive gesture—in the sense that a glimpse of something is offered in and as aesthetic semblance—and a certain kind of withholding or retreat. To relate to this double gesture, it is important to be attuned to the sense of Zurückhalten, the holding back or restraint, that an Enthaltung also occasions with respect to the work of art. The Ent-haltung of Ge-halt, then, is operative not only on the level of a movement of containing something (as in “etwas enthalten”) or refraining from something (as in “sich einer Sache enthalten”), but always also on the level of a withholding, holding back, or retreat of the very content that is being held into the world by aesthetic semblance. This content of the holding (Halten) is held back even as it is offered, and its own Gehalt consists, to a significant extent, in providing an implicit commentary, within aesthetic semblance, on its own withholding—that is, on the singular ways in which a particular work of art withholds precisely in its holding forth. We might say that, through Enthaltung, the Gehalt of an artwork emerges as an each-time idiomatic and self-reflexive commentary on its singular double movement of revealing and withholding. Learning to relate to the Gehalt of a work of art would entail learning to relate—freely (so as to respect the work’s unsaturated future possibilities) yet rigorously (so as to do justice to the stringent demands that are placed upon us by the incommensurable logic, rhythm, and tonality of a particular work)—to how the work teaches us, in turn, to relate to the relation between the holding forth and withholding that it performs.
If one wishes to think the Gehalt of the artwork along the lines of Enthaltung articulated so far, one will soon discover how difficult this concept or semi-concept of Gehalt is to cast into sharp relief in relation to individual works. First, there is the problem of how one knows when one encounters a genuine work of art that inquires into the modalities of its own Gehalt through Enthaltung, and how one knows when one deals with a merely affirmative, commercial, or predigested product of what Adorno denounces as the culture industry. To risk an epigrammatically condensed answer, we might say that, for him, genuine works of art (such as those of Schönberg, Celan, Beethoven, Mahler, Beckett, and others that he so often evokes) open up the possibility of forging a free and unregimented relation to the world in which they were created and to the worlds which they in turn create. The genuine artwork proceeds by “crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social norms and qualifying as ‘socially useful.’ ” In short, the genuine artwork “criticizes society by merely existing [durch ihr bloßes Dasein], for which puritans of all stripes condemn it.”23 If, for Adorno, the genuine work criticizes, and even disrupts, the world in which it was created by merely existing (and prior to the claims and demands made by any Inhalt), then one of the criteria that may be used to ascertain if a product is a genuine work of art is to inquire into whether and how its sheer existence provokes resistance and disruption in the world from which it stems. The artwork’s provocation of the world by merely being in the world is inseparable from its Wahrheitsgehalt, for the genuine work of art embodies Adorno’s conviction that “only what does not fit into this world is true.”24
A further problem relating to our understanding of Gehalt is brought into focus by the question as to what, precisely, comes to pass when one engages with any particular artwork on its own terms. A work will always follow its own idiomatic laws and autonomous formal singularities, as Adorno was well aware in his own studies, later collected under the heading Notes to Literature, of literary artworks by such writers as Goethe, Hölderlin, Balzac, Heine, Proust, Valéry, Kafka, George, and Beckett, among many others. As Adorno suggests in his “Short Commentaries on Proust,” initially broadcast as a radio address to mark the completion of the German translation of Proust’s Recherche and first published in the literary journal Akzente in 1958, the critic’s task is not “to advance an interpretation of the whole that would at best simply repeat the statements of intention which the author himself inserted into his work” but rather “through immersion in fragments to illuminate something of the work’s Gehalt [durch Versenkung ins Bruchstück etwas von seinem Gehalt aufleuchten zu lassen], which derives its unforgettable quality solely from the coloring of the here and now.”25 The remarkable proximity to Adorno’s concept of the uncoercive gaze is striking here. Perhaps it is possible, then, to make vivid some of the potential ways in which the Gehalt of the judgmentless judgment makes itself felt in a work by briefly considering a constellation of specific moments in three remarkably self-reflexive contemporary novels: one German, Martin Walser’s Ein springender Brunnen (A Gushing Fountain); one American, Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal; and one British, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.
Walser’s autobiographically inflected coming-of-age novel, originally published in German in 1998, chronicles both a boy’s German childhood and the haunting ways in which his small town on Lake Constance, for all its apparent quotidian mundanity, slowly but steadily sinks into a new and rather different kind of normalcy, German National Socialism. From what kind of an aesthetic and epistemological perspective could such a work of memory and engagement with the past be fashioned in the first place? The novel commences with the following sentences, which will have left none of the many sentences that follow it untouched: “As long as something is, it isn’t what it will have been. When something is past, you are no longer the person it happened to, but you’re closer to him than to others. Although the past did not exist when it was present, it now obtrudes as if it had been as it now presents itself. But as long as something is, it isn’t what it will have been.” And the text continues: “When something is past, you are no longer the person it happened to. When things were that we now say used to be, we didn’t know they were. Now we say it used to be thus and so, although back when it was, we knew nothing about what we say now.”26 What kind of position can the literary work of art assume in relation both to the mnemonic labor that flows into its evocation and interpretation of a past as well as to the political transformations that suffuse its narrative? The language of the novel finds itself unfolding in a certain ruptured temporality, a time that is “out of joint” as Hamlet might put it, because it is required by its historical inscription to impute a consciousness to the time that it narrates when in fact at the time in which the narration takes place no such consciousness could have existed, and no attendant interpretation could have been predicated upon a constellation of knowledge and experience that came into being only in the long history of its aftermath. In the literary artwork, the remembered voice and the remembering voice are not coextensive but rather at odds with each other, even if the remembering voice mobilized by the text believes to feel a certain elective affinity toward the remembered voice. If, under the sign of these genealogical imbrications, the narrative perspective of Walser’s novel must remain indeterminate, it is precisely this indeterminacy that it takes as the very center of its reflections—rather than seeking to resolve it. To the extent that, as Adorno writes, “the purpose of the artwork is the determination of the indeterminate,” the precision and rigor with which the indeterminate is determined work not to resolve, and thereby undo, the indeterminacy of aesthetic semblance, but rather to engage with the implications and consequences of this indeterminacy for any thinking of the artwork as such.27 A text’s work of determining the indeterminate consists in specifying the idiomatic and each-time singular ways in which the text resists determination. Recognizing that the artwork engages in the work of determining the indeterminate without erasing or undoing it also means arriving at the realization that the artwork lives in and as its own lack. In Adorno’s terms, “All artworks are writing [Schrift], not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their Gehalt. Artworks are language only as writing.”28 We might say that A Gushing Fountain renders something like a judgmentless judgment not only on its constellation of the personal and the political under the sign of an irreconcilable temporality of narration, but also engages in a judgmentless judgment of its own status as a lack or loss that comes to pass in writing. Its Gehalt, it could be argued, is inseparable from this mobilization of an aesthetically mediated judgment that takes place precisely as a refusal to judge—that is, as a way of confronting, without seeking to efface, the tension at the heart of its literary gestures of memory, mourning, and archiving what cannot ultimately be retrieved or redeemed.
A judgmentless judgment of a different kind is at stake in The Dying Animal. The novel’s first-person narrator is David Kepesh, an aged college professor, also active as a public intellectual and cultural critic, whom Roth had introduced as a protagonist in his earlier novels The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Kepesh becomes erotically attached to a twenty-four-year-old student of his, Consuela Castillo, the voluptuous daughter of an affluent Cuban émigré family living in New York City. The Dying Animal is composed as a self-reflexive chronicle of their tumultuous relationship, for the most part from the perspective of several years after its ending, and thus also under the sign of the indeterminacy upon which Walser’s narrator remarks, namely, that “when things were that we now say used to be, we didn’t know they were.” Yet here it is the special imbrication of eros and death that structures the novel’s way of determining the determinate as indeterminate. Throughout the novel, Roth’s narrator is especially attracted to Consuela’s voluptuous breasts, commemorated by a postcard she sends him toward the middle of the work, a reproduction of a 1919 oil painting by Amedeo Modigliani, La Grand nu, housed in the Museum of Modern Art. Kepesh remarks upon the “trademark Modigliani nude, the accessible, elongated dream girl he ritualistically painted and that Consuela had chosen to send, so immodestly, through the U.S. mail.” He notes the painted figure’s “cylindrical stalk of a waist, the wide pelvic span, and the gently curving thighs” as well as “the patch of flame that is the hair that marks the spot where she is forked,” adding, “A nude whose breasts, full and canting and a bit to the side, might well have been modeled on her own . . . . A golden-skinned nude inexplicably asleep over a velvety black abyss that, in my mood, I associated with the grave. One long, undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death.”29 This foreshadowing of finitude anticipates a crucial turn later in the novel: the cancer that drives Consuela to the brink of death and that requires a mastectomy. Contemplating not only his abiding obsession with her and her decision to leave him years ago, but also, at this point in the novel still implicitly, the relation of eros and death in a conversation with his friend George, the narrator is told: “ ‘You tasted it. Isn’t that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That’s all we’re given in life, that’s all we’re given of life. A taste. There is no more.’ George was right, of course, and only repeating to me what I know.”30 The ephemerality of experience, the relation to radical finitude that structures all being-in-the-world, comes to pass in this novel not merely as one theme or motif among others. It judges this experience by ultimately refusing to pass judgment on it, by letting the mere “taste” linger as writing, knowing that this short-lived taste is all that humans are ever allowed: “A taste. There is no more.” The novel does not judge by suggesting, for example, either that this taste-structure of Being is merely a lamentable state of affairs, nor does it triumphantly transfigure this taste-structure by identifying it as the condition of possibility for human experience as such, thereby tacitly redeeming it as a form of ontology or as a quasi-dialectical sublation. Rather, the work lets its judgmentless judgment stand—paratactically, unredeemed, unfinished—among the ruins that are its characters’ lives and remains.
The unredeemed, unfinished, and apodictically posited qualities of a life as it emerges in the aesthetic semblance of the literary work of art also traverses, albeit in different modulations, Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. Like A Gushing Fountain and The Dying Animal, The Sense of an Ending pivots on a narrator’s attempt to forge a thinking relation, in and through writing, to a past whose interpretation and judgment refuse to yield itself fully to him, a judging interpretation that is both absolutely necessary and foreclosed at the same time, potentially readable and effectively unreadable. Tony Webster, the novel’s retired, late-middle-aged first-person narrator, is haunted by a past when close friends from his childhood reemerge in his world, a lifeworld that he had thought he understood but that now unravels ever more quickly because of an uncanny legacy involving his former girlfriend, Veronica, and his former friend, the philosophically astute Adrian, who has committed suicide. As Webster, in part two of the novel, must gradually reconfigure the entire interpretation of his life as narrated in part one, he reflects: “Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”31 The narrator’s potentially self-erasing gesture of reconciliation with finitude implicitly alludes to the trope, taken up by numerous thinkers in the Western tradition, including Plato, Cicero, Montaigne, and Derrida, that to philosophize is to learn how to die. But, as Derrida confesses in his final interview only months before his own impending death, this learning how to die is not fully attainable: “That’s been the old philosophical injunction since Plato: to philosophize is to learn how to die. I believe in this truth without being able to resign myself to it.” He explains: “We are all survivors who have been granted a temporary reprieve [en sursis] . . . . But I remain uneducable when it comes to any kind of wisdom about knowing-how-to-die or, if you prefer, knowing how to live.”32 In order to bring into view the inextricably imbricated ideas of learning-how-to-die and learning-how-to-live from the perspective of the artwork, it would need to be considered if, and under what conditions, a character may change over time and, if so, to what kind of a change, beyond the aleatory contingency of this or that assumed character trait, such development might lead. Thus Barnes has Webster wonder: “Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration.” And he continues: “Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also—if this isn’t too grand a word—our tragedy.”33 Beyond engaging the irreducible and unjudgeable difference between an empirical reality and an aesthetically produced reality, between life and text, Webster here touches upon a certain tragic element in the relative stasis of a character, the basic features of which Freud tells us are more or less firmly in place, with only minor future variations, as early as age five. The tragedy does not lie in the idea that fundamental change in character is foreclosed from relatively early on; it rather lies in the ultimately unbridgeable discrepancy between, on the one hand, a life’s claim to malleability, its supple plasticity—through which it can even become, pace Nietzsche and Foucault, a work of art in its own right—and its inscription in a narrative and a trajectory that are forever at odds with that supple plasticity, even if only on a subterranean, unacknowledged, perhaps even ghostly level. The Sense of an Ending, as a work of art that confronts these tensions in the space of the literary without resolving them, abstains from passing any judgment on them. Its judgment lies in its refusal to judge as the novel concludes with the lapidary statement: “You get towards the end of life—no, not of life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life . . . . There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”34
Having turned to the variegated forms of judgmentless judgment that traverse these three heterogeneous novels, is it not possible now to suspect that the judgmentless judgment informing the movement of Einordnung also sheds light on Adorno’s conviction that the explosiveness of a work is all the more forceful the more deeply it is buried within the material itself? In a letter to Benjamin from November 6, 1934, Adorno avers: “No one is more aware than I am that every single sentence here is and must be laden with political dynamite; but the further down such dynamite is buried, the greater its explosive force when detonated.”35 It is as though that which can make itself felt within a work as the most powerful and transformative form of Gehalt first needed to remove itself from the surface, take itself out of the realm of the more obvious forms of critique in order ultimately to leave no part of its object untouched. The gesture of Einordnung hides its secret dynamite in the most subterranean and cavernous precincts of aesthetic form.
There is a dimension of aesthetic Gehalt and its relation to judgmentless judgment that has not been explicated thus far: the relationship of an artwork’s Gehalt to its historical situatedness. Is the Gehalt of the work of art, beyond its material content, a function of its historical situation? That is, does what it allows to emerge as its import stand in a relation of contingency to the time in which it was produced? If so, how can this relation begin to be thought? Is a work’s Gehalt a mere expression or illustration of what was already the case in the historical contexts in which it was created, or does it provide a genuinely autonomous perspective that is irreducible to the precepts of this or that historical contingency? Like Nietzsche, for whom, when it comes to our most important concepts, it is only possible to provide histories, but not definitions, Adorno views the concept of the artwork as thoroughly genealogical in the sense that the “concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it refuses definition.”36 In other words, there can be no rigorous thinking of the work of art or its concept that ignores its status as having-become. This having-become of the artwork conditions not only its temporal embeddedness but also, by extension, its relation to what it contains or, more precisely, to what it does not contain. “Because art,” he argues, “is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain [Das Gewordensein von Kunst verweist ihren Begriff auf das, was sie nicht enthält”].”37 Adorno here employs the word enthalten, which, as we saw, he also chose in the context of his discussion of Mörike’s poem in the form of the noun Enthaltung (“abstention”) in one of its other senses, namely “to contain.” We might say that he employs enthalten here (rather than the equally common German verb for containing, beinhalten) because he wishes to keep alive the question of how Inhalt and Gehalt relate to various issues pertaining to judgment and the abstention from judgment. For Adorno’s uncoercive gaze, as this particular passage suggests, it would be a mistake to assume that the having-become-ness of art as such and of a particular artwork renders them merely historically contingent phenomena that reflect or stage their own historical moment. Rather, the Gehalt of an artwork takes into account the ways in which it is called upon to negotiate its shifting relations to its own status as having-become, its Gewordensein.
To specify the movement by which artworks negotiate their respective having-become-ness, it is necessary to consider a certain historical doubling of their situatedness. To appreciate this doubling, it is helpful to learn to read a striking image that Adorno offers in Aesthetic Theory: “Kunstwerke begeben sich hinaus aus der empirischen Welt und bringen eine dieser entgegengesetzte eigenen Wesens hervor, so als ob auch diese ein Seiendes wäre.”38 In the published English translation, this crucial sentence reads: “Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if the other world too were an autonomous entity.”39 The richly textured expression that the translation renders in a somewhat impoverished manner as “detach themselves” (as if Adorno had merely written, in a decidedly more pedestrian tone, “sich ablösen”) is “sich hinausbegeben.” Adorno’s elevated diction here evokes a stepping out, a process of going out of something or leaving something behind—to let oneself, or even to give oneself, out. What the image suggests is an artwork’s gradual stepping out of the empirical world (in which it nevertheless will always have originated and with which it therefore remains irrevocably imbricated) and into another world, one created by aesthetic semblance itself. This other world, the world of its aesthetically produced semblance, demands to be related to in an “as if” mode, as if it, like the world from which it originated, were a form of being. (Adorno for good reason speaks simply of “ein Seiendes,” a being or a form of being, not of an “autonomous entity,” as the published translation has it. To the extent that it remains primordially related, even if in a negative dialectic, to the empirical world from which it perpetually departs, autonomy cannot be its own category of being, and Adorno therefore does not mobilize the language of supposedly autonomous entities here.)
It is crucial to develop a feeling for this in-between character of the stepping-out as it emerges in “sich hinausbegeben.” The artwork is neither fully on one side of the border nor the other, neither all on the side of the empirical world in which it originated nor exclusively in the aesthetic world that it itself creates. If the Gehalt of the artwork cannot be thought outside of its historical situatedness, Adorno’s image suggests a certain shuttling between two worlds, a mediation between two forms of genealogical inscription, each with its own legacy and its own potentialities for future transformation. The artwork passes judgment on the empirical world in which it was created only by refraining from judging it—a judgment, for instance, that would merely find fault with this or that aspect of its empirical world. Rather, it judges its world by einordnen itself within it yet stepping away from it at the same time; its withholding of judgment is enacted by a stepping across without arriving and a stepping back without returning. Rather than merely judging, the artwork is continually in the process of taking a step between and across its two worlds; one could even say that the artwork is another name for this “betweenness” itself. As a between, the artwork ceaselessly crosses over from one world to the other, its stepping describing the movement of (its) history.
The stepping across that the artwork performs is not predicated upon the premise that the world in which it originates, and from which it departs, is already fully known and accessible to those who inhabit it. On the contrary, the interpretation of the world in which the work originates is an abiding question mark. It is precisely through the stepping-across performed by the artwork that the world from which the artwork stems is rendered worthy of questioning. The stepping between and across worlds that comes to pass in the work of art exposes the very concept of world to its radical contingency. The world in which it was created is denaturalized, exhibited as something other than self-evident and merely given. Just like the semblance of another possible world that is intimated by the stepping-across broaches questions as to the content and logic of this other world, so too the very world—or, more precisely, what was previously taken to be the world—in which the work was created is retroactively opened up to questioning. Although the thinking of the other world of semblance that Adorno has in mind is not coextensive with a Blochian notion of Vorschein, in which the artwork provides intimations or glimpses of a utopian world to come, the unknown world opened by the work shines a light not only on the transformative possibilities that the new world harbors but also advances the possibility that the world from which it is in the process of departing has hitherto remained largely unthought and therefore deserves to be queried as if for the first time. The stepping between and across worlds that the artwork occasions gives rise to an intense vigilance with regard to these worlds that did not exist in this particular way before.
To suggest, as Adorno does, that the artwork embodies a certain movement between worlds is to focus on a perpetually transitional aesthetic sphere that makes the work what it is even while never allowing it to rest simply in and as itself. Adorno’s conception differs markedly, for instance, from that offered recently by the philosopher Alexander Nehamas in Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Nehamas is concerned with reinstating our understanding of beauty and its semblance or appearance as a key category that connects art and desire with the world in which these occur. Although he concedes that traditional categories of the aesthetic and its theory have become problematic, these problems, for him, “leave beauty untouched, for beauty . . . is part of the everyday world of purpose and desire, history and contingency, subjectivity and incompleteness.” And he adds: “That is the only world there is, and nothing, not even the highest of the high arts, can move beyond it.”40 To be sure, Nehamas’s specific concern lies with the category of beauty rather than with the artwork or with aesthetic form as such. Yet it is striking to note the contrast of his discourse—which wishes to retain the wordily groundedness of beautiful semblance or appearance without even any gesture of transcendence, its permanent and intransigent inscription in the here and now of its world—to the artwork’s stepping between more than one world, as Adorno conceives of it. Whereas for Nehamas an artwork’s beautiful semblance forever connects it with a world that cannot be transcended, Adorno emphasizes precisely the world-making properties that an artwork generates when it allows for a consideration of the ways in which it is both inscribed in the world in which it was created and simultaneously capitalizes on the specific and each time idiomatic ways in which it refuses to be fully coextensive—which also is to say complicitous—with that very world.
In one of his aphorisms, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, whose work was well-known to Adorno, Benjamin, and their early Frankfurt School circle, notes: “Kunst ist das, was Welt wird, nicht was Welt ist” (“Art is what becomes world, not what is world”).41 The artwork’s stepping between and across the world in which it was produced and the world to which it itself gives rise can be seen as an instantiation of this process of werden, or becoming. But it is a becoming that cannot ever fully come into its own in that it cannot simply arrive in a new state of being or a newly fashioned world, as much as it defines itself in terms of its departure from its old world. Its stepping forth, which is always also a leave-taking, a saying good-bye to a world that merely is, does not imply any arrival in the other world, as much as the creation of the semblance of that other world is necessary for the artwork to be a genuine artwork and not simply a form of mimetic plagiary—whether with an affirmative or critical aim matters little—from an already existing world. If art is that which becomes world without being that which already is—or claims to be—world, it does so only by refraining from the sort of judgment that already has decided upon a stable interpretation of a set of relations: the relations between the two worlds to each other; the relation of the artwork to each of these two worlds; and the relation of the artwork to the relation between the two worlds. Whenever the thinking of, or uncoercive gaze upon, these heterogeneous relations is allowed to remain free and open—for instance, when an arresting and final judgment on these relations is permitted to open onto the unpredictable consequences of its deferral—then the particular and singular form of judgment that an artwork may sponsor outlives itself by one more day.