Adorno, Shoah, and The New Yorker

Richard Brody is one of my favorite film critics. His squibs in the “Now Playing” section of The New Yorker are masterpieces of poetic sensibility and compression (like the current one on Children of Paradise) and often the best things in any given issue, while his book on Godard, Everything is Cinema, is masterful. So it’s disappointing to see him resort to the usual tiresome cliché about Adorno on art after Auschwitz in his otherwise moving and perceptive review of the life and work of Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah.

As Brody tells it, Lanzmann’s desire to make Shoah a beautiful as well as a morally forceful film – in Lanzmann’s eloquent phrase, “to make the unbearable bearable” – provides “a resounding response to Adorno’s assertion that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” For response here, read "refutation."

It’s easy to misread Adorno. Understanding him means reading him alongside his friend Walter Benjamin’s definitive statement of dialectical thinking: “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” By saying that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” Adorno was not condemning the power of art. He was saying that the culture that produced the poetry of Goethe and Rilke also produced the language of the Final Solution: culture itself is the problem. It’s impossible to think the two apart from one another, as though civilization was safely walled off from barbarism. Surely Abu Ghraib is the nearest reminder of that.

As a kind of shorthand for a profound resignation about the fate of culture, the phrase “poetry after Auschwitz” needs to be viewed in the wider context of Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, which as he observes in 1947, had “aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty,” only to culminate as “disaster triumphant.” As Adorno and Max Horkheimer elaborate in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “the human being’s mastery of itself, on which the self is founded, practically always involves the annihilation of the subject in whose service that mastery is maintained … self-preservation destroys the very thing which is to be preserved.”

In other words, events like the Shoah are not aberrations, not psychotic breaks from social reality. Rather, they exemplify the logic of technocratic culture at its most extreme. Adorno’s concern is with not succumbing to the collective amnesia and repressions of the fate of the Jews in post-Auschwitz culture, as described in the brilliant epilogue to Tony Judt’s magisterial Postwar, "From the House of the Dead."

Here’s Adorno’s full quote, more or less, from “Cultural Criticism” (1949):

“The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.”

As Michael Rothberg helpfully points out in Traumatic Realism, the phrase “poetry after Auschwitz” is perhaps rendered with greater clarity (but less urgency) if translated into “poetry after reification.” Reification is the agent of poetry’s impossibility, for, as he explains, “the barbarism or irrationality of ‘poetry after Auschwitz’ is that, against its implicit intentions, it cannot produce knowledge of its own impossible social status … this impossibility is neither technical nor even moral … it results instead from an objective and objectifying social process that tends toward the liquidation of the individual,” or what Adorno elsewhere calls the totally administered world, the society of "radical evil”.

Language’s complicity in the catastrophe of the modern means that poetry itself is vulnerable to reification. Poetry that does not acknowledge its own barbarism, then, its tendency to valorize subjective experience as though it floated free of its larger ideological framework, will do nothing to resist the cultural conditions that make an Auschwitz possible. Making it pretty just don’t cut it anymore.

To write poetry after Auschwitz means rejecting traditional aesthetic values like harmony, consonance, and even beauty. These values aim at reconciling tension and thus, for Adorno, can only corrupt the poem. As he writes in Aesthetic Theory:

“Art is true to the extent to which it is discordant and antagonistic in its language and in its whole essence, provided that it synthesizes those diremptions, thus making them determinate in their irreconcilability. Its paradoxical task is to attest to the lack of concord while at the same time working to abolish discordance.”

All critiques of culture, Adorno insists, must begin by implicating themselves in the wreckage they are sifting. This is why the understanding that poetry after Auschwitz has become barbaric is endangered, he warns, of being confused with a merely punitive or reductionist gesture banning all aesthetic expression. If lyric poetry is also a critique of culture – a point he makes strongly in his 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” where he writes “that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism” – then it, too, is always already fully a part of the aporia of culture.

This does not mean that subjective suffering has no right to express itself. Even if, as Adorno claims in the famous conclusion to Negative Dialectics, “all culture after Auschwitz, including the urgent critique of it, is garbage,” “perennial suffering still has as much right to expression as the martyr has to cry out.” The aporia of cultural failure does not mean the collapse of culture into total barbarism, neither does it signal the end of dialectics.

Instead, Adorno tells us in Minima Moralia, it compels seeing things from “the standpoint of redemption,” an act that requires the construction of perspectives that “displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear on day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with objects – this alone is the task of thought.” That such a redemptive stance is to be achieved solely through “felt contact with objects” might seem at first glance a strange claim to make. Yet what Adorno is advocating here is a non-idealist move that, while reducible to vulgar materialism, seeks a return to things, not as essences, but as fragments whose integrity is guaranteed by their loss of wholeness. Located through a micrological sifting of the ruins, these fragments possess the ability to form new constellations of meaning.

Lyn Hejinian offers a nuanced reading of Adorno, suggesting that his maxim “has to be taken as true in two ways.” “First, because what happened at Auschwitz … [rendered] all possibilities for meaning … suspended or crushed.” And second, and more importantly, because the event of the disaster enjoins poets “not to speak the same language as Auschwitz … poetry after Auschwitz must indeed by barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic and often oppositional stance, occupying (and being occupied) by foreignness—by the barbarism of strangeness.”

Adorno was never opposed to the power of art to register the Shoah. His essay on Beckett’s Endgame provide ample evidence of that. Indeed, the whole of Aesthetic Theory, his final work, is devoted to working out this intractable problem. But the clearest statement he issued comes near the end of Negative Dialectics:

“A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler on unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”

Best Poetry Lines Ever, with Special Reference to Edwin Rolfe

As Eileen Simpson recounts in her marvelous book Poets in Their Youth, Berryman and Lowell used to play a game where they challenged each other to name the three best lines in English. Berryman's, as I recall, were from Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole."

For a long time mine were from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":

"But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous gloom and winding mossy ways."

Later, it was Pound, in the late Cantos:

"Do not move.
Let the wind speak
that is paradise."

I won't say that the two lines below, from Edwin Rolfe's "First Love," have replaced either Keats or Pound for me. But they're certainly worth quoting.

"and always I think of my friend who amid the apparition of bombs
saw on the lyric lake the single perfect swan."

Department of Petty Gripes or, Greil Marcus

What's happened to Greil Marcus? Yes, I know many of you have been pondering this urgent question.

Marcus has had a long and distinguished career as an astute commentator on contemporary culture. Mystery Train was a groundbreaking book on the roots of American popular music, though its approach clearly owed a great deal to Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. Much of what he's written on Dylan, especially, has been first-rate, if just barely this side of Bob-dolatry. His co-editing, with Werner Sollors, of A New Literary History of America, was inspired. And then of course there's his magnum opus on avant-garde modalities, The Lipstick of History. That book codified the Marcus style: a free-wheeling and exciting series of associations and vivid, if sometimes, problematic transhistorical leaps poised halfway between New Journalism and more sober scholarly analysis. It was refreshing, even galvanizing, writing: culture critique at its most enthusiastically incisive and an enormous pleasure to read. In retrospect, though, it may also have marked the beginning of his style's decay into mannerism.

Before I go on, I should note that re-reading Mystery Train inspired me to place Lorene Niedecker alongside the blues of Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson. The Marcus method at work!

Marcus belongs to a certain generation of writers that heralded an exciting moment in American music journalism. They were part of the larger vanguard, riding the shockwave rippling out from Mailer, Didion, Wolfe, and Thompson. I associate him with writers like Peter Guralnick, Paul Nelson, Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Robert Palmer, to name a just a few: firebrands who rewrote the rules. Who said that pop music is culture and is here to stay, Roll over, Teddy Adorno, while we borrow a few lines from Benjamin. Cue bewitched crossroads.

If Marcus is preeminent among this group as a critic, Guralnick strikes me as the most erudite and finally most penetrating. Marcus, in his brilliant "Presliad," elevated Elvis to the status of Serious Icon, but it was Gurlanick who gave us the thick description of The King in all his monstrous glory and heartbreaking banality. At the end of the day, though, I'll turn to Marcus first.

The source of my particular petty gripe about what Marcus has been doing lately stems from my having just completed his hugely disappointing 2002 book on The Manchurian Candidate for the usually excellent BFI film guide series. My initial thought was: who better to cover the terrain of this baroque masterpiece of pop anarchy? I'm afraid I must report that John Frankenheimer's crazy political allegory from 1962 has been poorly served here.

In the middle of this slim book, which includes a needless and lengthy plot synopsis, Marcus intones:

"Something -- something in the story, something in the times, in the interplay of various people caught up consciously in the story, and consciously, unconsciously or half-consciously in the times -- came together, with the challenges and warnings of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address still lodged in the hearts of those making the movie" (41).

This is the Marcusian pop-prophetic voice: flabby, self-indulgent prose that gestures vaguely at the main chance through invocation.

He returns to this theme in his conclusion: "What The Manchurian Candidate did prefigure -- what it acted out, what it played out, in advance -- was the state of mind that would accompany the assassinations that followed it" (75).

These stale New Journalistic tics -- the over-vaunted, valorized "Something;" the repetitive play on prefiguration -- is classic Marcus, working up a lather of rhetoric that substitutes exhortation for thinking and which invites the reader to share in intimate revelation; the pop critic as prophet. It "all" came together, man, in the 60s.

This book gives every indication of having been dashed off over a long weekend. Its method can be pretty much summed up like this: hey, I screened this film for these naive undergrads at Princeton; they had no idea what was going to hit them; plus, what's with that crazy dream sequence?

Dear Greil, you might want to look into something called montage. And while you're at it, a smattering of gender theory would not go amiss either. But don't stop there. Check out Jameson's ideas on the political unconscious. I know it's "theory," but it actually would help think through some of the problems the film poses. The book's conceptual weaknesses and its woeful inattention to matters of form are patched over by its chronological jumps (probably sold to the editor as innovative, but really just intellectually empty).

Marcus on The Manchurian Candidate is an embarrassing sentimental journey; a nostalgia piece about the movies of his youth -- and the domestic thrills of the Cold War -- filled with lazy, gratuitous references to the measure of all things, Dylan. The final gambit of the decaying Marcus style, I suppose, would be to read all of Western history and literature through specific lyrics from Dylan like some kind of deranged autodidactic savant. Or, come to think of it, like Harold Bloom shellacking the canon with Shakespeare.

For a critic, nothing is sadder than being a herald of a moment that's already passed.