DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM No.

1112/2003

Anthony J. Cascardi

HEIDEGGER, ADORNO, AND THE PERSISTENCE OF ROMANTICISM

ABSTRACT

There are reasons to believe that the history of art, from romanticism to the present day, bears out Hegels remarks that art is a thing of the past. Arguments that now anything goes (A. Danto) provide theoretical grounds that support this view. But both Heidegger and Adorno suggest how Hegels argument can yield constructive insights into arts critical capacities, even as its distance from non-art appears to vanish. Heidegger and Adorno are heirs of Hegels romanticism, and while located intellectually within modernism both reveal how modernism is itself a continuation of romanticism. Salient points of contact between Adorno and Heidegger, and also their differences, can be grasped in terms of shared romantic roots. To think of art as having a critical or disclosive power is a transformation of romantic expressivism. The conviction that art is embodied meaning and irreducible to its material elements is a development of Hegels notion of spirit. Assessing the extent to which postmodern theory confronts or ignores these questions can also clarify its ties to romanticism. Key words: art; expressivism; romanticism.

THE END OF ART

The premise that I take as an instigation for this essay is by now so wellknown as to require only minimal rehearsal: what we know as art in the formal, autonomous sense is over and done, a thing of the past, that serves the needs of contemporary society only insofar as we require some historical points of reference by which to gauge our distance from the past or a repertoire of examples for pedagogic endeavors. For good or for ill, contemporary art is situated and situates usin the moment of the post with respect to much of our own cultural past. Like much recent art theory, it looks awry at what art once was, and regards itself as unconstrained by those practices.

14

Anthony J. Cascardi

But the claim about arts end is not at all new, and its pedigree should give us reason to re-consider our views about its inheritance of the past. The claim is in fact attributable to Hegel, who set it forth at an early point in the Introduction to the Lectures on Aesthetics, where it was picked up by Nietzsche, who commented on it in Birth of Tragedy and by Heidegger, whose discussion of it in The Origin of the Work of Art is quite well known. In Hegel, one encounters a nuanced version of the thesis that blunts its brute force while nonetheless urging it upon us in some larger sense. Hegel was careful not to say that art tout court was finished and that no more artworks could or would be made, but only that art in its highest form, as a mode of spirit capable of revealing what is essential about a given 1 age, was a thing of the past. Moreover, the disclosive function that belonged to art is something that Hegel never thought would cease to exist. On the contrary, he imagined it as taken up by other modes of spirit, such as philosophy, presumably by attaining to expressions grounded in the domains of pure reflection and image-less discourse. Recent theory and practice in the arts seems to have borne Hegel out in some surprising ways even while falsifying his views in others. While there has been little sense that philosophy has superseded art as the highest form of spirit, developments in the arts since at least Duchamps Readymades have produced a steady blurring of the boundaries between what is and what is not art. As the range of what counts as art has gradually expanded to encompass found objects, conceptual art, ordinary movement, musique concrete, everyday materials, and industrial techniqueseverything from the vulgar and the indifferent to the sublimethe specificity of arts identity has narrowed to the point where it seems fair enough to say that it no longer exists as a definable set of practices, certainly not as fine art. That the end of art might have been brought about by this expansion rather than by the forces of contraction or exhaustion is not something that Hegel foresaw, but it did not escape Adornos notice in the Aestetische Theorie. Indeed, Adorno begins by reflecting on the difficulties that emerged as an ever wider spectrum of possibilities was claimed for art, beginning roughly with the avant-garde: The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as contradiction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed consumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken. More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo; everywhere artists rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom than that they immediately sought once again ostensible yet

Georg W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. by T. M. Knox, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975), I, p. 11 (henceforth LA).
1

Heidegger, Adorno, and the Persistence of Romanticism

15

scarcely adequate order. For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole. In 2 it the place of art became uncertain. How to respond to the deep uncertainty that makes everything and nothing art? Most recent philosophers of art have abandoned the project to define art by reference to its essential qualities, or else have been drawn to characterize art so broadly that the effort to pin it down seems destined to collapse. The pluralism epitomized in Arthur Dantos pithy phrase describing modern and contemporary art, anything goes, is consistent with the broadening of art to the point where it recognizes no limits in materials, techniques, subject-matter, or tone. But it is also symptomatic of the very blurring of the things it attempts to clarify and gets no closer to the purpose of art than any of the aesthetic theories Adorno critiques: phenomenology, cultural studies, intention-based approaches, workimmanent studies, etc. All of these fail to register the fact that artworks are concrete modes of expression and that the presentation of meaning in embodied form contravenes philosophys overarching interest in arriving at universal truths. This point is eloquently formulated in the Early Introduction to the Aesthetic Theory where Adorno argues that a general theory of the aesthetically concrete would necessarily let slip [away] what interested [us] in the object in the first place . . . Aesthetics seems sworn to a universality that culminates in inadequacy to the artworks (AT, p. 333). Rather than dialectically take up this challenge, the pluralist stance seems simply to accept the impossibility of delimiting the very thing it is supposed to define. Dantos work as a practicing critic can be remarkably insightful and earnest, but one can only wonder what theoretical entitlements it can claim for itself. How can the proposition that anything goes enable critical judgments of any sort? How can it possibly help disclose the truth content of art? While some of these questions can best be addressed by an engagement with the critical assessments that have shaped the history of modern artClement Greenberg on modernism, Meyer Shapiro on Vincent van Gogh, Michael Fried on American painting and sculpturethere are also some theoretical considerations that can help orient our thinking about the matters at stake. I believe that Adornos intuition about the fundamental tension between the concrete particularity of art and the universalizing ambitions of philosophy is an indispensable point of departure for any aesthetic theory. I will not venture an outline of the contents of the Aesthetic Theory here, but I would say that Adornos development of a dialectical approach opens up a number of further questions about the role of art beyond the particularization of experience. In order to contextualize, and, I hope, to extend Adornos views, I want to look at how both he and

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997), p. 1 (henceforth AT).
2

16

Anthony J. Cascardi

Heidegger have re-shaped some of Hegels ideas, in the hope of showing that some of these can yield constructive insights into arts potential and its critical capacities, even as the distance between art and non-art seems to vanish and as the authority of aesthetic theory seems to wane in the face of arts expanded horizons. In both Heidegger and Hegel, no less than in Adorno, the notion of the end of art only makes sense against some view of what art is or could be. The core of this idea is drawn from their responses to the Romantic promise to disclose the non-cognitive quality of the relationship between self-conscious subjects what could be called the truth of the world. Adorno proposes a conception of art as a mode of sensuous thinking that, while thoroughly enmeshed in the present, is fully subject to the historical and material conditions that bear upon all of human experience. Paradoxically, perhaps, arts ability to press critically against a culture in which truth is thought of as strictly cognitive depends upon its full participation in the modes and materials of production of that same culture. This is especially true of modern art. Adorno: Art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production (AT, p. 34). Accordingly, art must be a social product that also opposes society, 3 the social antithesis to society. For Adorno this means acknowledging arts relationship to the structure of alienated labor that it otherwise opposes. Adorno is considerably more dialectical in his approach to this fact than Heideggerwho can nonetheless provide us with some crucial assistance in developing the consequences of this view. From Heidegger I draw the notion that what counts originally and essentially as art involves a relationship to truth that is something other than what we have in mind when we imagine the cognitive grasping of phenomena by concepts, the formulation of logical propositions, or the mental representation of ideas or states of affairs as they exist in the external world. At its origins and in its essential purpose, in what we might think of as its fullness, art offered a non-cognitive relationship to truth. And now, in late modernity, in cultures that have come to accept cognition as paradigmatic for all types of knowledge, art continues to remind us of that possibility in the face of the worlds forgetfulness of it. (Cf. Adorno: The object of arts longing, the reality of what is not, is metamorphosed in art as remembrance, AT, p. 132.) Rather than ask for a confirmation of its truth as measured against some universal norm, or for an expression of judgment as the assertion of value good or bad, what Heidegger thinks art requires of us is a receptivity to what it may disclose. Indeed, this re-orientation towards the world remains the critical task of art precisely because present conditions vie so strongly against it in their call for a more assertive and aggressive conceptual grasping of things.

Cf. The socially most advanced level of the productive forces, which is one of consciousness, is the level of the problem posed at the interior of the monad (AT, p. 35).
3

Heidegger, Adorno, and the Persistence of Romanticism

17

Now, whether Heideggers views about art can be reconciled with Adornos is far from clear. For, in historical terms at least, Heidegger attaches the force of arts truth-disclosive powers to an archaic moment of culture that stands virtually outside of history, while Adorno locates the critical capacity of art in relation to the historical conditions that go to shape it. Moreover, any effort to think about Adorno together with Heidegger must face the fact of Adornos intellectual animosity towards his compatriot, at least towards the early, existentialist Heidegger, whose work Adorno saw as epitomizing an empty gesturing towards a kind of authenticity whose historical-material content had been suppressed. In a book-length essay originally conceived as part of Negative Dialectics Adorno went so far as to speak of Heideggers existentialist idiom as generating a jargon of authenticity which he (Adorno) described as equivalent to a Wurlitzer organ of the spirit: just as the tremolo of the Wurlitzer organ seems mechanically to mimic the vibrato of the trembling voice, the jargon of authenticity supplies men with patterns for being human, patterns which have been driven 4 out of them by unfree labor. What the so-called jargon masks are the very conditionsfrom the constant fear of unemployment felt among the citizens of capitalist economies to the enforcement of anonymity characteristic of exchange societiesthat impel human beings to seek out authenticity in the first place. The plea for authenticity may well descend from arguments about human dignity in the tradition of Kant and Schiller, but as far as Adorno is concerned what authenticity yields is dignity in an overly subjectivized and therefore degraded form. Not surprisingly, then, any aesthetic theory that might secure a place in Adornos larger critical project must somehow succeed in distancing itself from the philosophy of the subject while still sustaining its critique of modernity; it must demonstrate how a non-cognitive relationship to truth can also avoid appeals to the inwardness of feeling as a way to mask the material conditions of existence. Indeed, Adornos critique of aesthetic theory begins early in his career with a work on Kierkegaard that is relentlessly critical of the association of aesthetic experience with subjective inwardness. Artworks are artefacts and artefacts are made. As such, they have an existence in the external world that has more to do with the conditions of historical life and with modes of production than with subjectivity and that is not in any case contingent on our feelings about them. Feeling (affect) may be important both in the fact and in the manner of its attachment to objects, butextrapolating from Adorno hereit too has a history, just as Marx said the physical senses do. Aesthetic theory needs to recognize that the association of art and affect is conditioned by the same processes that encompass other, non-aesthetic, non-subjective forms of human action in and upon the material world. And so, to re-articulate the question, it is a matter of whether, or in what mode, one can acknowledge the role of

Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press 1973), p. 17.
4

18

Anthony J. Cascardi

art in modeling a non-cognitive relationship to the truth without being drawn into a reliance on notions of affect of the kind that Heideggers early followers found in the language of authenticity.

ROMANTICISM AND ITS LEGACY

In proposing that these concerns can be linked to the fate of Romanticism I want to acknowledge that there are, at the very last, two modes of Romanticism, or two forms of romantic desire for attachment to the world that have serious implications for aesthetic theory. Romanticism in the first sense (call this Romanticism 1) is founded upon a hope for the discovery of affect rather than cognition as the basic mode of a non-empirical affinity between human beings and the world. This form of Romanticism is epitomized in the belief, or the hope, that the natural world partakes of human suffering, sharing it and thereby diminishing it. Various strains of elegiac poetry, as well as several of the so-called poetic fallacies (e.g. the pathetic fallacy), along with key rhetorical tropes such as personification, are all central to this first form of Romanticism. But Romanticism in its second, more self-conscious sense (call this Romanticism 2) involves the additional recognition that the locus of our affective attachment to the world has been displaced from the dynamic scene of nature in its doubling of the passions to the realm of artifice. Indeed, the more skeptical strains of romanticism would suggest that for every self-conscious subject this displacement has always already occurred. The crucial task of spirit will then be to avoid a lapse into naive (unself-conscious) forms of romanticism while also coming to terms with the consequences of this displacement, i.e. not being thrown into further alienation by it. If the always-already quality of disenchantment was fundamental to the argument of Adorno in the early work with Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, then it was up to Adornos much later work, the posthumous Aesthetic Theory, to think of art as a domain in which we could remember the possibility of those modes of relationship to the external world that were fundamentally non-cognitive. But remembering is not reclaiming, and part of Adornos response to Romanticism involves cultivating an awareness of the suffering that comes from the breach of this non-conceptual bond without cultivating a corresponding nostalgia for it. Rather than see artifice as a second nature, Romanticism (2) is self-conscious enough to recognize that we are also displaced from the products of artifice insofar as they are the products of (alienated) human labor. Artworks provide a habitation for the nonempirical elements of spirit all the while recognizing that they are indeed artefacts, and Adorno is committed enough to Marx not to allow us to forget that they are fully subject to the conditions of production and exchange. The first moment in aesthetic theory that underwrites thinking about that element of spirit which escapes cognition lies in Kants prescient formulation

Heidegger, Adorno, and the Persistence of Romanticism

19

that there is something not exhausted by what can be linked to the cognitive component of any given representation. This surplus for Kant is pleasure and pain, and Kants goal was to find a form of judgment that would be adequate to it while still qualifying as judgment (i.e. attaining to universality). For Kant, this meant validating the notion of subjective universal validity. But it was up to Hegel to formulate the principles according to which the work of art itself became the site for spirits efforts to find an adequate embodiment for itself. His outline of Romantic art occupies a crucial place in this account and sheds considerable light both on what Heidegger and Adorno were seeking and on what they were seeking to avoid. Hegels conception of Romantic art takes Romanticism first of all as the province of absolute inwardness; its form, he says, is spiritual subjectivity (LA, p. 519). So far not very self-conscious and rather consistent with the conception of Romanticism (1) described above. The interesting part is that the weight of inwardness in turn produces a split between two worlds: one is a spiritual realm, complete in itself, dominated by the heart which reconciles itself within and now bends back into the true rotation (i.e. return into self) and into the genuine phoenix-life of the spirit, the other is the realm of the external as such which, released from its fixedly secure unification with the spirit now becomes a purely empirical reality by the shape of which the soul is untroubled (LA, p. 527). The central challenge of Romantic art is what to do when faced with the awareness that external appearance cannot any longer express the inner life, and recognizing that if it is still called to do so it merely has the task of proving that the external is an unsatisfying existence and must point back to the inner, to the mind and feeling as the essential element (LA, p. 528). Indeed, this is a problem for which Romanticism appears to have no solution. And it is one reason why Hegel goes on to say that romantic art leaves externality to go its own way . . . and . . . allows any and every material, down to flowers, trees, and the commonest household gear, to enter the representation without hindrance even in its contingent natural expression (LA, p. 527). Indeed, Hegels view of Romanticism is that it allows affect to colonize all manner of materials and techniques but only, as it were, externally. In and of themselves these have no meaning: this subject-matter, by being purely external material, carries with it at the same time the character of being indifferent and vulgar, and only attaining worth of its own if the heart has put itself into it and if it is to express not merely something inner but the hearts depth of feeling, which instead of fusing with the external appears only as reconciled with itself in itself. In this relation, the inner, so pushed to the extreme, is an expression without any externality at all; it is invisible and is as it were a perception of itself alone (LA, p. 527). Since there is nothing in the world of nature or culture, no natural substance or artefact, that can adequately carry the depth of feeling, Romantic art seeks a home in object-less realms. For Hegel, this is quintessentially the medium of sound, which he describes as a medium without objectivity and shape, or a hovering over the waters, or a ringing tone over a

20

Anthony J. Cascardi

world which . . . can only accept and re-mirror a reflection of this inwardness of soul (LA, p. 527). But the recourse to music turns out to be but a temporary solution, made unstable as the space between inward feeling and the world at large grows infected by an intrusive and debilitating reflectiveness. Art in the original sense, as a revelation in concrete particulars of what is true and essential, and as an embodied expression of what is most meaningful, becomes impossible, because the development of reflection in our life today has made it a need of ours . . . to cling to general considerations and to regulate the particular by them, with the result that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims, prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator. But for artistic life and production we demand in general rather a quality of life in which the universal is not present in the form of law and maxim, but which gives the impression of being one with the senses and the feelings, just as the universal and the rational is contained in the imagination by being brought into unity with a concrete sensuous appearance (LA, p. 10). It is not . . . merely that the practicing artist himself is infected by the loud voice of reflection all around him and by the opinions and judgments on art that have become customary everywhere . . . the point is that our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that he himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision abstract himself from it; nor could he by special education or removal from the relations of life contrive and organize a special solitude to replace what he has lost (LA, pp. 1011). The Hegelian critique of reflection sets the immediate stage for Heidegger and Adorno. Heideggers critique of modernity as the historical epoch in which truth came to be determined by our relationship to pre-existing universal categories rather than by anything that is irreducibly particular, sensuous, or affective is built upon a critical assessment of the very same conditions that Hegel describes under the heading of reflection. Adornos critical response to modernity is no less consistent with Hegels diagnosis of the specific conditions that bring about the end of art. Indeed, the very procedure of negative dialectics attempts to go Hegel one better by charging that Hegels own philosophy perpetuates the very conditions of abstraction he was hoping to mitigate. It likewise informs Adornos conviction that art is concrete thinking that resists the universalizing tendencies of philosophy. But the question about the role of art after Romanticism is a question about whether there is a reason to hope for a habitation for spirit in the world, or for a reconciliation of spirit with the world, either in or mediated by art. The question is what role art can play in overcoming the fracturing of spirit into an affective inward domain and a world of objects that cannot possibly bear the weight of that feeling. Both Heidegger and Adorno write in full view of Hegels critical assessment of the elements that work against the great Romantic hope for an affective attachment to the world, but both press forward with an aesthetic theory that ac-

Heidegger, Adorno, and the Persistence of Romanticism

21

knowledges the limitations of an understanding of spirit as sheer inwardness. And yet Heidegger and Adorno transform Romanticism in ways that Hegel could not have foreseen, or at any rate did not foresee. Heideggers reading of the origin of the work of art locates its fundamental affinity with the natural world in their shared dynamism. The way in which art discloses truth mimes the productivity of the natural world, but in an unself-conscious way. Indeed, Heidegger speculated that the essence of art showed up especially well at its origins, which he believed were archaic, or at any rate prior to the modes of consciousness that became dominant in the culture of modernity. Insofar as consciousness can be responsive to art, the task is to relinquish its characteristic mode of appropriation and instead to set itself in a posture of reception. If consciousness is not productive of truth in anything like the Kantian sense it can at least be an enabling factor in the process of disclosure, and this enabling happens best as consciousness renounces its assertive posture towards the world. The Romantic premise that leaves the things of the external world meaningless unless infused by affect is transformed so as to see art as the mode of existence of things as they were in themselves capable of disclosing truth.
ADORNOS RESPONSE

The realities Adorno sees are vastly different, but not so different as to obviate a reading of his aesthetic theory as a transformed or critical Romanticism. Like Heidegger he strives to locate something other than an empirical relationship to the world while attempting at the same time to shun subjective inwardness. Adorno is indebted to Romanticism insofar as he locates something beyond the empirical both in the beauty of nature and in the beauty of art. It is the element in the Aesthetic Theory that he calls the plus. But as his early work on Kierkegaard and his critique of authenticity suggest, he stands resolutely opposed to the notion that this might be located in subjective inwardness. He incorporates Romantic irony to the degree that he is self-consciously aware of the limitations of any effort to construct an aesthetic theory modeled along the lines of any other systematic theory of truth. In artin what Kant would call beauty and sublimitythere is an excess of the non-empirical over and above the material. Adorno calls this excess spirit, and arts claim on it stands in relation to its various other modes. In the present age, where spirit is divided into sundry domains, and in which the possibility of reconciliation seems no longer to measure itself against any consciousness of the whole, this may mean that arts role will be to disclose the means by which that splitting has taken place, and critically to point to what is absent in the fracturing of spirit into its separate parts. For aesthetic theory and for art according to Adorno, this means acknowledging the primacy of suffering as rooted in the division of inwardness of spirit from the realm of external objects: Though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irrationalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something

22

Anthony J. Cascardi

in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential (AT, p. 18). At the same time it means recognizing that spirit is by no means limited to affect. It is, rather, the force of objectification of artworks (AT, p. 86), not subsumable under conventional conceptions of objecthood. It is, Adorno also says, that particular which makes an artefact art (AT, p. 89). Finally, Adornos response to Romanticism points to an issue that can help nuance Heideggers ideas about the disclosive potential of art in relation to the dynamic world of external nature. One of Adornos central questions is how something that is made can also be true (AT, p. 131). His answer is twofold: first, because it partakes of history, and second, because we err in collapsing nature with beauty as a privileged term of judgment or of feeling. He writes: Every act of making in art is a singular effort to say what the artefact itself is not and what it does not know: precisely this is arts spirit . . . This is the locus of the idea of art as the idea of the restoration of nature that has been repressed and drawn into the dynamic of history. Nature, to whose imago art is devoted, does not yet in any way exist; what is true in art is something nonexistent (AT, p. 131). According to Adorno we undertake a false continuation of Romanticism if we harbor the hope that art can restore to nature what history has led us to regard as lost from it. On the contrary, Adorno sees art as having the potential to disclose the truth only insofar as it recognizes itself as participating in the very losses it attempts to recall. If not in nature itself then in the strange idea of the beauty of nature we find traces of the non-subsumable otherness that calls for a further transformation of Romantic ideals.