Buch lesen: «Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie / Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Heft 30/31»

ABHANDLUNGEN

Shierry Weber Nicholsen

The Mutilated Subject Extinguished in the Arena of Aesthetic Experience

Adorno and Aesthetic Violence1

Introduction

Where does subjective aesthetic experience take place? This apparently paradoxical question leads us to a crucial aspect of Theodor Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience. On the face of it, one might think that subjective experience takes place within the subject. No, says Adorno; »the viewer’s« – or reader’s, or listener’s; Adorno is not concerned here with the specific medium of the artwork – »relation to art is not one of incorporating the work. On the contrary, the viewer [seems] to vanish in the work of art.«2 In order to understand Adorno’s statement that the viewer vanishes into the work of art, we must understand his conception of the dialectic of aesthetic experience. I will begin by noting three crucial elements in this dialectic. First, aesthetic experience is an active process between subject and object, between the experiencing subject and the work of art. Second, this process takes place in a place or space that Adorno calls the »arena« of aesthetic experience. Third, there is an element of violence in the encounter within that arena.

To elaborate: Aesthetic experience is an active process, but the subject and the object are active in different ways. The experiencing subject acts by using what Adorno calls his (I use the masculine pronoun generically) »exact imagination« to recapitulate the internal logic of the work, recomposing the work with his ear, repainting it with his eye. The artwork itself is active: »Artworks have the immanent character of being an act,« he says, »even if they are carved in stone.«3 An arena is a space that is empty except for the activity that takes place there. The word arena evokes associations with gladiatorial combat – a combat to the death. In fact, we must imagine a deadly combat taking place in this arena between the subject and the work of art. For as far as the experiencing subject is concerned, the work of art acts by inflicting what I will call »aesthetic violence« on the subject.

My focus in this paper will be on this element of violence in subjective aesthetic experience. Violence may seem an alarming word to use in connection with the aesthetic. Those of us who are lovers of art may be reluctant to identify violence as a key element in our aesthetic experience. Perhaps we think instead of pleasure or delight, of being deeply moved, of awe and gratitude. But there is a dimension of forceful impact, shock and sudden change in the experience of powerful works of art that can be called violent. This dimension of aesthetic experience is easily ignored or minimized in an idealized representation of aesthetic experience. But it is central to Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience and intimately linked for Adorno with the truth content of art. It deserves our full attention. My aim in this paper is to explore some of the phenomenology of this dimension of aesthetic experience. Adorno claimed that in psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true. In a similar vein, I will speak of aesthetic violence and attempt to draw out the most disturbing aspects of this dimension of aesthetic experience.

The title of this paper, »The Mutilated Subject Extinguished in the Arena of Aesthetic Experience,« should be understood in terms of what I have said about the dialectic of aesthetic experience. The subject vanishes into the work of art because he is extinguished in this violent and deadly combat with the work. The subject who vanishes into the work of art is a mutilated subject. How are we to understand this?

For Adorno a central question of aesthetics is, »How is genuine aesthetic experience possible?« This question arises because of what Adorno sees as the mutilation of the individual subject in the modern world – that is, the deformation or withering of the very capacity for experience as a result of the violent and invasive forces of what he calls »the totally administered society.« How can a subject with such a diminished capacity for experience possibly use his exact imagination to understand an artwork by recreating its internal logic?

In fact, the purpose of aesthetic violence is precisely to dismantle the mutilations of the subject that prevent genuine aesthetic experience. What I am calling aesthetic violence is a force of negation – the negation of false modes of experience, including those that have become commonplaces in the aesthetic realm. This negative force is part of the power or artistic force of the work – the force of the aesthetic logic internal to the work.

If the violence of the modern world has mutilated the subject, then, aesthetic violence, which is both similar to and different from that violence, acts as a kind of homeopathic counter-force. But this counter-violence does not effect what we might simplistically think of as a healing. Instead, as we shall see, it is not simply the subject’s mutilations that are dismantled or extinguished. In an important sense the subject himself is extinguished along with his mutilations.

Adorno’s portrayal of the reification and alienation produced by advanced technological society is well-known. The subject mutilated by reification and alienation is a subject cocooned in a false comfort, in an illusion of progress that disguises inhumanity, and he is in denial about what has happened to him. It is a subject who lives in an environment of what Adorno calls das Immergleiche – »what is always the same«. The cocoon of false consciousness is spun, we might say, by the repetitions of das Immergleiche. The falseness affects not only the capacity for insight – which would require seeing through the illusions – but also the organs of perception. The mutilation of the subject renders him not only stupid, so to speak, but also deaf and dumb.

This context of mutilating repetitiousness is the result of social domination, and it also reflects and perpetuates domination. The mutilated subject is dominated by a false universal, the Immergleiche, but also dominates the other, the object, that which is foreign to the subject, by subjecting it to the false universalizations of mutilated experience. Hence Adorno’s emphasis on the primacy of the object and the non-identical; for him those terms formulate freedom from domination. For Adorno, it is not as though some of us are mutilated and incapable of true experience while others, the lucky ones or the cultured elite, are undamaged and free. There is no living within the totally administered society without falling prey to it. At the same time, some vestiges of the capacity for thought and experience remain.

The mutilation of the capacity for thought also affects, of course, our thinking about aesthetics, and in the arena of his own writing with its provocative exaggerations Adorno attempts to shock us into something more genuine by dismantling our false and familiar ideas about aesthetic experience. One of them is the notion that aesthetic experience is pleasurable, a form of »fun«. In fact, says Adorno, the more works of art are understood, the less they are enjoyed.4

In the process of encountering and working to understand the work of art, the mutilated subject experiences the work’s impact not as pleasure but as violence in many forms: as shock, as disruption, as explosion, as entrapment and coercion, as threat of annihilation or threat of madness. At the same time, of course, the subject senses something else as well – a faint hint of truth and freedom contained in the work’s forceful logic, and the possibility that this arena of deadly combat will also be a sheltered space in which perhaps to survive the extinguishing of mutilation. The encounter with the work of art, in other words, is experienced both as struggle against the work of art and for the experience of truth and freedom that it promises.

Adorno gives us a vivid sense of the coexistence of mutilation and the awareness that something could be different in his book Minima Moralia, subtitled Reflections from Damaged Life, written during his North American exile in the 1940 s. A major focus of the short pieces that make up the book is the way that pleasure and enjoyment have become integrated into the fabric of false comfort. In one of them, called »How Nice of You, Doctor« (»Herr Doktor, das ist schön von Euch«); the title echoes a line from Goethe’s Faust), for instance, Adorno writes:

»There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent »how lovely!« becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.«5

Adorno is saying that if it is not accompanied by thought, aesthetic pleasure in beauty furthers falsehood. Genuine aesthetic experience requires »consciousness of negativity« in conjunction with »holding fast to the possibility of what is better.« In the terms I have been using, it requires enduring the work’s accurate attack on mutilation while being exposed to its intimations of the possibility of freedom. In the arena of aesthetic experience there is no escaping the combat to the death.

Initiating the Engagement: Shock

How does the mutilated subject enter the arena of aesthetic experience? It is important to remember that for Adorno, the work of art acts upon the subject. In one of its modes of violent action, the artwork initiates the aesthetic encounter by shocking and stunning the subject. The mutilated subject is taken by surprise and overwhelmed. That artworks have the immanent character of being an act, writes Adorno, »endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden,« and this suddenness »is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work.«6

Shock is an important aspect of this sudden, overwhelming action on the part of the artwork. The shock stops the subject in his tracks, disabling his usual forms of non-seeing and non-hearing and compelling a different kind of attention. Adorno is of course not the only one to speak about this initial shock in the encounter with the artwork, or with beauty. Nor is it only modern and deliberately provocative works of art that shock in this way. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, for instance, referring to the effect on Dante of his glimpse of Beatrice, coined the term »aesthetic arrest« – an aesthetic heart attack, so to speak, to refer to the sudden shocking impact of beauty on the observer.7

The work of art, or the beautiful (in the case of Dante and Beatrice a beautiful young woman), seems to present itself as a thing, an object, located not in the abyss but in some place or other outside the subject. But with the initial shock, the apparent spatial differentiation between the subject and the work of art has already been collapsed, and the subject has been displaced. Internally dislocated, the stunned subject stands aside from his usual self. (This is the meaning of »ecstasy« – standing outside.) Momentarily at least, the whole of his mind is filled with the work. As Adorno says, he has vanished into the work. But note that we cannot even say »the subject« to mean the same subject as before the encounter, because the subject’s usual ways of responding have been temporarily disabled.

The subject rightly experiences this shock as involuntary. This involuntary displacement of attention is accompanied by a well-justified fear and trembling, even a terror. It is the terror of the unknown, of what is beyond us. Though he disparaged Rilke’s line about beauty being »the beginning of terror,« in fact Adorno acknowledges that terror in the aesthetic encounter. He does so in his term »Erschütterung,« perhaps the central term with which he designates the impact of what I am calling »aesthetic violence«. Erschütterung has been translated into English as »shudder,« but to me »shudder« does not convey the full import of Adorno’s term. I prefer to translate Erschütterung as »shaken to one’s foundations.« As Adorno puts it, »The shock aroused by important works […] is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible.«8 What shakes us so profoundly is the sudden dawning of an awareness of something beyond our ordinary grasp – something that will profoundly disrupt our current organization of experience.

The Invitation and the Trap

Another aspect of the artwork’s approach to the subject is its allure. One of the functions of beauty in the artwork is to attract the subject, to draw it in. It functions like an invitation, perhaps even a seduction, to the unwary. There is something like an erotic element in this invitation; union of a kind is being proposed. Indeed, attention is a form of merging with what is perceived.

Again, Adorno is not the only one to articulate this aspect of the aesthetic encounter. The critic Adrian Stokes, best known for his studies of the Quattrocento in Italy, writes in psychoanalytic terms of the »invitation in art.« Psychically, he writes, the sensuous beauty of art first invites us to come inside and lose ourselves in the work. The experience is both like falling in or into love and like returning to the mother’s breast. But once this merger of our attention with the activities of the artwork has occurred, we are, as it were, helpless, and we are forced to experience the destructive forces which the work has incorporated into itself and subjected to the organization of aesthetic form.9

Because there is an element of the involuntary in our response to the powerful allure of beauty, an element of suspicion also hovers around the work’s invitation. Perhaps we are being seduced and entrapped. After all, how can we know what we are getting into? As the psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer, a friend of Stokes, puts it in his book The Apprehension of Beauty, how are we to read the mysteries in beauty? We do not know whether the beautiful – in this case he is speaking of a woman – is Beatrice or the lethal Belle Dame sans Merci.10

Thus the artwork that shocks and seduces can also be experienced as a trap. It holds us in bondage; we are enthralled, as we say. We have unexpectedly and involuntarily fallen into this trap, and now it holds us and will not let us go. To use an extreme image, the work of art is in some sense like the Venus fly trap – the carnivorous plant that lures insect into its depths, only to consume them. To be sure, the work, for Adorno, does not simply digest the mutilated subject for its own purposes, nor does it simply chew him up and spit him back out. But it certainly does not leave him unscathed.

For Adorno, as I have noted, the viewer does not incorporate art but rather vanishes into the work of art. It is equally true, however, that the work enters into and merges with the subject. But as Adorno says, this does not mean that the subject has incorporated the work into himself. Rather, the work has invaded the subject and displaced what he originally was. If as Adorno says, the subject of aesthetic experience becomes internally active by internally recreating the immanent logic of the artwork, this activity is at the same time a submission. Essentially, the artwork has overpowered and trapped the subject by making the subject himself into the arena of aesthetic experience. There is nothing left between artwork and subject but what transpires in the arena that was originally the subject himself.

Terror and the Abyss

The artwork’s capacity to overwhelm the subject is one of the primary forms of what I am calling aesthetic violence. The subject feels he has become involved in something – or something has entered him – that is beyond his capacity to master and assimilate in his usual mutilated mode of functioning. In the most fundamental way, what the mutilated subject encounters in the arena of aesthetic experience is something that is emphatically not das Immergleiche, not the familiar »always-the-same.« What is beyond one’s capacity by definition produces anxiety. It is potentially ungraspable and potentially lethal. One cannot see its bounds; perhaps it is infinite. This is what Adorno refers to as Erschütterung, being shaken to one’s foundations. The potentially infinite has entered into the subject’s very structure.