Category Archives: Theodor Adorno

From the archives: The subterranean history of Europe and the martyrs of love

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Originally published 1 May 2012:

Beneath the known history of Europe there runs a subterranean one. It consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization. From the vantage point of the fascist present, in which the hidden is coming to light, the manifest history is also revealing its connection to that dark side, which is passed over in the official legend of nation states, and no less in its progressive critique. …

Most mutilated of all is the relationship to the body. … Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus. In humanity’s self-abasement to the corpus nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material. The compulsion toward cruelty and destruction stems from the organic repression of proximiity to the body, much as, according to Freud’s inspired intuition, disgust came into being when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. …

In the fiendish humiliation of prisoners in the concentration camps, which — for no rational reason — the modern executioner adds to the death by torture, the unsublimated yet repressed rebellion of despised nature breaks out. Its full hideousness is vented on the martyrs of love, the alleged sexual offenders and libertines, for sexuality is the body unreduced; it is expression, that which the butchers secretly and despairingly crave. In free sexuality the murderer fears the lost immediacy, the original oneness, in which he can no longer exist. It is the dead thing which rises up and lives. He now makes everything one by making it nothing, because he has to stifle that oneness in himself. For him the victim represents life which has survived the schism; it must be broken and the universe must be nothing but dust and abstract power.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno
Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp. 192-196.

The subterranean history of Europe and the martyrs of love

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Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Photo: Jeremy J. Shapiro.

Adorno is not particularly known for his writings on eros (indeed there are few). But, after doing a reading of and research into Howard Barker’s early play The Love of a Good Man, I came across the below passage from the 1947 Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer, which could stand as a legend not only for The Love of a Good Man but also for most of Barker’s middle and late plays as well:

Beneath the known history of Europe there runs a subterranean one. It consists of the fate of the human instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization. From the vantage point of the fascist present, in which the hidden is coming to light, the manifest history is also revealing its connection to that dark side, which is passed over in the official legend of nation states, and no less in its progressive critique. …

Most mutilated of all is the relationship to the body. … Love-hate for the body colors the whole of modern culture. The body is scorned and rejected as something inferior, enslaved, and at the same time is desired as forbidden, reified, estranged. Only culture treats the body as a thing that can be owned, only in culture has it been distinguished from mind, the quintessence of power and command, as the object, the dead thing, the corpus. In humanity’s self-abasement to the corpus nature takes its revenge for the debasement of the human being to an object of power, to raw material. The compulsion toward cruelty and destruction stems from the organic repression of proximiity to the body, much as, according to Freud’s inspired intuition, disgust came into being when, with the adoption of the upright stance and the greater distance from the earth, the sense of smell, which attracted the male animal to the menstruating female, fell victim to organic repression. …

In the fiendish humiliation of prisoners in the concentration camps, which — for no rational reason — the modern executioner adds to the death by torture, the unsublimated yet repressed rebellion of despised nature breaks out. Its full hideousness is vented on the martyrs of love, the alleged sexual offenders and libertines, for sexuality is the body unreduced; it is expression, that which the butchers secretly and despairingly crave. In free sexuality the murderer fears the lost immediacy, the original oneness, in which he can no longer exist. It is the dead thing which rises up and lives. He now makes everything one by making it nothing, because he has to stifle that oneness in himself. For him the victim represents life which has survived the schism; it must be broken and the universe must be nothing but dust and abstract power. [1]

Footnotes
  1. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp 192-196. [↩]

From the archives: Politics and a critique of tragedy

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In response to Karen Malpede’s essay “On Being a So-Called Political Playwright” which appeared at Howlround on 29 February, I repost the below brief entry, originally published on 3 March 2010.

An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre. Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is: “Write what you know.” All too often, this leads to a paralysis of imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class, the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages. The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger world.

Sarah Kane’s statement “I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That’s why I try to please myself” is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility. It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone, any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member, should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The Culture Industry’s corporations through the media (its music, its newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation (room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer’s conception of the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary American dramatists apparently “know” best.

David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well, rather than being limited to Barker’s individual body of work:

Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre … which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with “theatre.” This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible.

“Raising Hell: Introduction”
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (13-14)
Emphasis my own.

Josefina Ayerza on Lacan’s “Woman Does Not Exist”

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It’s likely that what Marx and Freud were to the twentieth century, Adorno and Lacan will be to the twenty-first. It took nearly a hundred years for the importance of the former pair to become clear, and it’s likely it will take another hundred years, if we last that long, to begin to fully absorb the latter. As both the former affected the culture, imagination, and consciousness of modernity in the pre-catastrophic society, so will the latter define the spiritual, psychic dislocations of the post-catastrophic world. Here on Superfluities Redux I have written quite a bit on Adorno, less on Lacan, though it’s increasingly clear to me that one without the other, like Marx without Freud, provides an incomplete analytic and imaginative structure for experiencing this post-catastrophic society.

In America, perhaps the most active advocate for Lacan’s views has been practicing psychoanalyst Josefina Ayerza, the webmistress of the lacan.com Web site and editor of Lacanian Ink, a multidisciplinary journal dedicated to Lacan’s thought and an application of his concepts to aesthetics. Tomorrow night, Thursday 1 March, at 6.00pm, she will be speaking at Cooper Union’s Great Hall, 7 East 7th Street (between Third and Fourth Avenues) in New York. “Josefina will be addressing Lacan’s Woman in that she does not exist,” says the email notice for the event. “The jouissance woman experiences — yet knows nothing about — puts us on the path of ex-istence. And why not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance?”

Why not indeed? I am mulling over a project that might bring both Adorno’s and Lacan’s perspectives to bear on contemporary drama — still early in the mulling stage, but there is never any time like the present, which phrase itself has an Adornian, Lacanian flavor to it. In the meantime, more (though not much more) about tomorrow’s event at Cooper Union here. (In 1995, Ayerza conducted a “session” with Richard Foreman, the lovely results of which are here.)

Friday video: Adorno’s String Quartet

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It’s properly more of a “Friday audio,” but below you can hear the first half of Theodor Adorno’s Streichquartett from 1921, composed when Adorno was 18, just as he began his studies at the University of Frankfurt. For a time, Adorno studied composition with Alban Berg. And something to read as you listen, from Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (1949):

What radical music perceives is the untransfigured suffering of man [...] The seismographic registration of traumatic shock becomes, at the same time, the technical structural law of music. It forbids continuity and development. Musical language is polarized according to its extreme; towards gestures of shock resembling bodily convulsions on the one hand, and on the other towards a crystalline standstill of a human being whom anxiety causes to freeze in her tracks [...] Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.