Re: Celan and Adorno, Art and Auschwitz (WAS Re: Paul Celan - music on . . .)


<david7gable@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1136062828.904492.93830@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Ian asks whether I think that certain of Adorno's writings "speak a
> great deal about the struggle to come to terms with a decimated Europe
> in which history, tradition, culture seemed unapproachable in the older
> ways?" The short answer is "No, I don't." I don't like the
> form (rhetoric, style) of Adorno's "dialectic" or its content.

I also ask which of them you've read - see below.
>
> First of all, I don't believe that history, culture, and tradition
> necessarily became unapproachable "in the older ways" because of
> World War II, at least not in the sense that Adorno believed they did
> (or believed that he believed they did when he was writing).

So all the earlier notions of the civilising force of culture could still be
maintained after Nazi Kommandants could read Goethe and listen to Schubert
by night, and commit mass murder in the daytime, to use George Steiner's
phrase (something along those lines - I can't remember the exact quote and
don't have it to hand)

> Adorno
> uses great big fat undefined concepts like history, culture, and
> tradition, embedding these grandiose German idealist concepts in a
> German idealist rhetoric and discussing them using that rhetoric.

That's why I asked what you've read - if you had read Adorno's work in any
detail you'd see the extent to which it constitutes a scathing critique of
that type of grandiose Germanic idealism and its totalising tendencies. And
of course in that respect he was heavily indebted to Marx.

> No
> modest concrete particulars are allowed.

Nonsense.

> The whole discussion takes
> place at an impossibly high rhetorical altitude.

That is a rather funny comment coming from you! :)

> I find it largely
> meaningless. (The short clause from your post that I've quoted above
> seems to mean something until you attempt to pull it apart and find out
> what in the real world it is that you're actually talking about. You
> and Adorno are the last of the German Romantics, the ultimate
> starry-eyed idealizers.

The last thing you could call Adorno is 'starry-eyed'.

> You long nostalgically for the days when the
> poeticized rhetoric of German idealist Marxism legislated the future of
> mankind.)

There's nothing nostalgic about Marxism at all, quite the contrary. Nor is
it a form of legislating. How much Marx have you read, also?
>
> Let me mention one other little morsel of Adornoan rhetoric, his
> hyperbolic claim that there can be "no art after Auschwitz."

The precise quote, in the translation I provided before was 'To write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric'. Did you read Adorno's later thoughts, partial
retraction, and further clarification of his statement?

> Human beings are capable of the most monstrous things. There has been
> murder after murder, war after war, holocaust after holocaust.
> That's the sad history of the human race. Or part of it.

And culture is entirely aloof from that?

> But today
> there are grass and flowers growing in Hiroshima, people living,
> working, and consuming culture there. They don't spend every waking
> hour contemplating the bomb

I think you'll find people living in Hiroshima still spend a lot of their
waking hours contemplating the bomb, not least because of the long-term
after-effects.

> or writing German idealist philosophy.
>
> I could appreciate Adorno's remark if it had been the despairing
> remark of a man who had witnessed the horrors of the Second World War
> first hand, seen what the Nazis had done.

He escaped and went to America, rather later than some others did. He was
acutely aware of his likely fate if he had stayed in Europe (and the fate
that Benjamin underwent). He certainly saw what the Nazis had done, saw the
country and culture that he had loved and believed in so strongly decimated
both from within and without. I think the above remark is contemptuous.

> But he was doing more than
> despairing.

That certainly is true. He was attempting to understand.

> He was a kind of cultural imperialist.

Please substantiate that. Adorno was an aesthetician, and like all
aestheticians he had views on what was more or less valuable in art. Don't
we do that here?

> He wanted to seize
> control of the fate of all future European art on the authority of his
> despair (his German idealist despair), define for once and for all what
> was "authentic," what "inauthentic,"

Before using that term, try reading Adorno's 'The Jargon of Authenticity'.
He was the scourge of that concept, especially its appropriation at the
hands of Heidegger.

> co-opt all future European
> culture for his German idealist philosophy including the theory that
> there can be no art after Auschwitz. In Adorno's view, only a
> certain heavy ponderous form of despairing German idealist modernism
> could or would or should be left standing.

Perhaps you could explain his positive remarks about Pierre Boulez, or John
Cage, or Mauricio Kagel, then?

> The ultra-conservative
> Brahmsian neoclassicism of Schoenberg's serial music was good.

You have clearly read hardly anything. Adorno was highly critical of
Schoenberg as well in many ways. To paint him as a 'Schoenberg good,
Stravinsky bad' adherent is woefully simplistic.

> Stravinsky's light French ballet music was an affront to German
> idealism.

That wasn't the major focus of his critique of Stravinsky, which for all its
problems (and I think there are many) still remains one of the most powerful
critiques of that composer, I believe.
>
> But what if your taste runs to something less ponderous, heavy, and
> Germanic than Schoenberg's most turgid serial music?

Actually, Adorno was much less enamoured of Schoenberg's serial music than
of his free atonal works.

> What if it runs
> to the fresh and glinting poetry of that former Resistance fighter Rene
> Char, for example?

I don't know any specific comments by Adorno on Char's work, but I'd be very
surprised if he didn't find it of great interest. I'll check with Wieland to
see if he knows of any references.

> Or to Matisse or Monet or jazz?

'The later work of the former Surrealist Andre Masson, which I saw in Paris
a few years ago, looks to my eyes, which are not expert in matters of
painting, as though there were nothing left of Renoir but the fragrance, the
objects having been reased; over there people talk in fact of a connection
between contemporary painting and Impressionist tendencies. If I am not
mistaken, moreover, at the end even Monet moved toward this kind of
dissolution of the material object in its own aura, to say nothing of
related ventures in music like Debussy's 'Jeux''

(from a letter from Adorno to Thomas Mann, January 18th 1954, printed in
Theodor Adorno - 'Notes On Literature' Vol. 2, translated
Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), pp. 319-320)

Adorno greatly admired Jeux, so presumably one can read great interest in
the late Monet through this comment as well.

I don't know of anything by Adorno on Matisse. As for jazz, of course his
few essays on jazz have been the subject of the most heated debate. I
basically go along with those who say that Adorno's comments do make sense
in the context of the highly commercialised and formulaic jazz that he heard
in the 1930s, though his methodologies are too fixated on melody, harmony
and rhythm (as befits one from a German classical training) without really
appreciating the importance of such factors as timbre. Nonetheless there are
a great many people in the field of jazz and popular music studies who are
deeply indebted to Adorno's work and concepts on this subject, without
necessarily agreeing with him the whole way.

> (I know that you
> think Boulez's later more accessible music is--and I use the word that
> you've applied to it--"capitalist."

I can't remember where I have directly applied that word to Boulez's late
work. Certainly I think some of his early radicalism has become diluted as
he has become a more institutionalised figure.

> I think the word can't have the
> least intelligible applicability here.)
>
The possible effects of both institutions and the marketplace on the course
of contemporary composition is indeed relevant.

I'm going to return once again to a basic question - what have you read of
Adorno? The above would suggest the merest smattering if anything at all. I
think you should read his extremely intricate and detailed work before
making lofty pronouncements on it. I've read a fair amount (though in
English translation) but still find new insights in things I haven't
previously encountered. Above all Adorno's work resists summarisation or
reduction - more acutely so than most writers.

Ian


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