ND I.I., Weakness and Support
Adorno turns to modern art and the conservative reaction to it. In a sense, he is saying that, a bit like Heidegger’s philosophy, modern art is a response to a society in crisis—with the crucial difference that modern art, though it reflects fragmentation and chaos, is not merely a mirror-image but represents a new direction in creative production:
What the art-historians assumed is by no means conclusive, i.e. that this loss actually was one, and not instead a mighty step towards the unleashing of the productive forces.
The artistic productive forces, he means. So the loss of the shared, universally legible aesthetic forms—e.g., baroque architecture, figurative painting, folk styles—was not just a loss, for Adorno: embodied in modern art, it repesented creative, productive potential.
But he says that ordering forms have not in fact been lost; indeed they are more powerful than ever. It’s just that they look different:
The lament over the loss of ordering forms increases with their power. The institutions are mightier than ever; they have long since produced something like the neon-lit style of the culture-industry, which spreads over the world like the Baroque style once did.
He is linking the institutions of bureaucratic capitalism with the products of the culture industry: Hollywood movies, pop music, advertising, etc.
Next there’s an interesting and dense sentence that I think is worth paying attention to:
The undiminished conflict between subjectivity and forms reverses itself under the hegemony of the latter into the consciousness which experiences itself as powerless, which no longer trusts itself to change the institutions and their intellectual mirror-images, into identification with the aggressor.
Here’s my unpolished interpretation: the “undiminished conflict between subjectivity and forms” is the conflict between the individual and the macro-forces of society, including its conventions and expectations and dominations. The conflict remains but it “reverses itself” in its outcome, which is not resistance or creative transformation but capitulation. The forms, of society and of culture, now impose themselves irresistibly. The result is that the individual, and therefore subjective critical reason, feels itself to be powerless. This powerlessness ironically produces a more intense need for order, and the individual identifies with the authoritarians.
Presumably, authentic modern art is an exception to this trend, and a hope for resistance.
Next, he identifies the subjugation due to the commodity form as the reason for the apparent formlessness that the conservatives complain about:
What appears as formless to a constitution of the existent modeled solely after subjective reason is what subjugates the subjects, the pure principle of being-for-others, of the commodity form.
The basic being-for-others in capitalist society happens to be the commodity form, with its reduction of almost everything to exchange.
For the sake of universal equivalence and comparability it debases all qualitative determinations in all places, leveling tendentially.
Formlessness is a result of the reduction of qualitative to quantitative difference in the transformation of things and people into fungible commodities.
The same commodity form however, the mediated domination of human beings over human beings, solidifies the subjects in their lack of autonomy; their autonomy and the freedom towards the qualitative would go together.
People are thus left powerless, unable to assert themselves autonomously. Next he returns to the theme of modern art as a form of resistance to this domination:
Under the spotlight of modern art style reveals its repressive moments.
Adorno is contrasting style and form on one side with modern art on the other, because modern art does not have binding conventions, but features rather a fragmentation of style and form. So although modern art deliberately experiments with style and form, when Adorno refers to them he primarily means that which the conservatives lament the loss of, the externally imposed conventions.
Because however the Spirit cannot completely repress their inadequacy, it opposes the contemporary, crassly visible heteronomy against another one, be it past, be it abstract, with values as causae sui [Latin: causing themselves] and the fantasm of their reconcilability with living beings.
The human mind in this society can sometimes see that the dominant forms are inadequate (because false and imposed heteronomously). When it sees this it tends to reject the “crassly visible heteronomy,” that is, the imposed products of the culture industry or the conformity of social life. Instead, it reaches for the past or the abstract—both being characteristics of Heidegger’s philosophy. In the next paragraph he says that this forms the basis for the the conservative and fascist hatred of modern art, and further describes the fantasy of fundamental ontology’s “invariants” as answers to the ontological need.
In the closing passage, Adorno moves into his Utopian mode:
The emancipated consciousness, which indeed no one has in a state of unfreedom; one, which had control of itself, as truly autonomous as it hitherto only pretended to be, would not be constantly afraid of losing itself to an Other – secretly, to the powers which rule it.
If humanity no longer had to make themselves into the equivalents of things, they would need neither a thingly [dinghaft] superstructure, nor would they have to designate themselves, following the model of thingliness [Dinglichkeit], as invariant.
Free human beings would no longer need dominating superstructure of the market and the administered society, nor would they need to find in themselves a solid, invariant, fundamental being.
The doctrine of invariance eternalizes how little has changed, its positivity as what is bad. To this extent the ontological need is false.
In my table of needs, in the previous post, I said the ontological need was ideological but real. I guess things don’t separate out so cleanly.
For me the most striking thing in this final passage of “The Ontological Need” is this:
Probably metaphysics would dawn on the horizon only after the fall of invariants.
When the ontological need is overcome, in that free future, then metaphysics, i.e., a substantive philosophy that could get to what really mattered, might be possible.
But he goes on to say that this is of no help to us now. We are stuck with an ontological need which is false, produced by a genuine need that is real.
Next, “Being and Existence”. But I’ll pause for a few days at least.