dialectic of enlightenment || endgames: reconstructing adorno's "end of art"

Endgames: Reconstructing Adorno's "End of Art"Author(s): Eva GeulenSource: New German Critique, No. 81, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Autumn, 2000), pp. 153-168Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488551 .

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Endgames: Reconstructing Adorno 's "End ofArt"

Eva Geulen

"The end is the beginning, and one goes on anyway." - Samuel Beckett, Endgame, quoted by T.W. Adorno in "Attempt to Understand Endgame"

I Adorno's reflections on art depend on the notion of an 'end of art;'

but this end is ambivalent.1 This ambivalence is not reducible to the characteristic oscillation between a utopian end of art on the one hand, and its disastrous end, or, as Adorno sometimes says, its "wrong demise," on the other. Already the origin of art as represented by the sirens episode in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, to which its authors return as if magically drawn several times in the course of the Odys- seus chapter, involves more than one end: not only is the origin of art said to coincide with the end of the sirens' song, not only have all songs " fallen ill since Odysseus's encounter with the sirens"2 and are therefore destined to end, whether they are healed or whether they die.

1. For the traditional reading of the end of art in Adomo see Burkhardt Lindner, "il faut 6tre absolument modeme.' Adornos Asthetik: Ihr Konstruktionsprinzip und ihre His- torizitait," Materialen zur dsthetischer Theorie, ed. B. Lindner and W. Martin Liidke (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979) 202ff.

2. Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adomo, Dialektik der Aukldirung, Gesam- melte Werke, ed. RolfTiedemann, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997) 78. All trans- lations have been modified from the English, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982). All subsequent references to Adomo will be cited according to volume and page number in the Gesammelte Werke, except the Dialec- tic ofEnlightenment, where I will also parenthetically provide the English page number.

153



154 Reconstructing Adorno's 'End ofArt'

Moreover, the interpretation itself presupposes an inaccessible end of art, which precedes even its allegorized beginning: "To sing of Achil- les's anger and the travels of Odysseus is already the wistful stylization of what can no longer be sung," Adorno and Horkheimer write on the first page of their chapter (my emphasis).3 From the outset, the Odyssey is a modem artwork, song of its own impossibility, and its existence is as much a paradox and an anachronism as any of its possible interpretations. That the Dialectic of Enlightenment exposes and even dramatizes this paradox by beginning with an end that would have to be located before the dialectic of myth and enlightenment still to be unfolded (and before the ambivalent origin of art), thus undercutting the very pathos of the subsequent readings by its excessive exaggeration - this discloses, precisely in one of its excessive moments, an unexpectedly self-subvert- ing, even ironic dimension of this book, the denegation of which seems to have become the obligation of any self-respecting intellectual.4

While the dissolution of the one end of art into several contradictory ends characterizes almost all post-Hegelian discourse on the end of art, this pluralization shows particularly radical effects in Adorno's case. Symptomatic of the irreducible heterogeneity introduced by such pluralization is the fact Adorno famously issued a verdict on the end of art after Auschwitz5 and then again thought it necessary to object to any such decrees: "At the very moment that one proceeds to censorship and decrees that it must be no longer, art regains, in the midst of the admin- istered world, its right to exist, the denial of which resembles itself an act of administration."6 Any attempt to transform the evident contradic- tion between Adorno's verdict and his verdict on verdicts into one of praxis and theory is illegitimate in light of the contradictions already reigning on each of its sides. For when Adorno declared that to write poetry after Auschwitz is impossible, he already reflected on the problematic of such a verdict by adding that this impossibility also under- mines the status of this very position: "To write a poem after Auschwitz

3. Adomo, Dialektik der Aufkldrung, GW3: 61 (48). 4. One of the most influential critiques was launched by Jiirgen Habermas in Der

philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1985) 130-57. The con- tributions for the volume published on occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Dialectic of Enlightenment are also largely critical: Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost "Dialektik der Aujkldrung," ed. W. v. Reijen & Gunzelin Schmid-Noerr (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1987).

5. Adorno, "Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft," GW 10.1: 30. 6. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, GW 7: 373.



Eva Geulen 155

is barbaric and that also affects the insight which says why it has become impossible today to write poems."7 That and how serious Adorno was about this dilemma reveals itself when his own critique of decreeing any end of art turns out to be so effective and radical as to undermine what is otherwise the very core of Adorno's construction of aesthetic modernity. The central dogma of art's evolution as determined by rational control over the material [Materialbeherrschung] is offered up to critique: "The dilemma whether and how art may be possible which fits into the present, is not solved by the use of technical means which are available and could be used by art according to its critical consciousness"8 (emphasis mine). This example should suffice to suggest that the motif of the end of art touches upon aporias in Adorno's thought that negative dialectic - this exercise in aporia - fails to usurp and which are nevertheless co-articulated with it.

Even though Adorno's two seemingly incompatible positions vis a vis the end of art are obviously interconnected along many pathways, their preliminary separation possesses heuristic value: the juxtaposition of the verdict and its critique can help to isolate and distinguish two related yet different temporal logics operating in his thought. The first, which could be called the logic of the afterlife or "Nachspiel," comes to the fore in Adomo's radicalization of his earlier reflections on poetry after Auschwitz in Negative Dialectics: "Therefore it might have been wrong to say that writing poetry after Auschwitz is impossible. Not wrong, however, is the less cultural question, whether living after Auschwitz is possible for him who was allowed to live and escaped by chance and, by law, ought to have been killed. His living-on requires the coldness, the bourgeois principle par excellence, without which Auschwitz would not have been possible."9 The paradoxical logic of living-on after the end, which found its most condensed formulation with regard to philosophy in the famous opening sentence of Negative Dialectics, also concerns art, whose development is intimately related to the ruin of metaphysical meaning alluded to in that sentence.l0 Art, too, is in a fun- damental sense always already living-on; surviving its own death, it tes- tifies to its own anachronicity. According to this logic, the end is

7. Adorno, "Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft," GW 10.1: 30. 8. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, GW7: 325. 9. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, GW6: 355. 10. "Philosophy which once seemed obsolete survives because the moment of its

realization was missed." (GW6: 15).




already behind us and condemns the survivors to after-life and aftermath, implying both the post-finitum as well as the fatal repetition com- pulsion. In light of this logic, Adorno's verdict on Auschwitz never was a stricture against poetry but a way of saying that after Auschwitz there is no more before Auschwitz. What appears chronologically as its pre- history is always only its historical aftermath.11

The correlate of this logic of survivorhood and aftermath is a another temporal logic that may be termed "Vorgang," prelude and process. It determines the relationships among artworks and genres as well as those between art and arts, and finally between art and aesthetic theory or philosophy. Similar to the logic of aftermath, it is essentially dynamic and processual. According to Adorno, what is anterior to all art, the prelude, so to speak, of all art, is nothing else than the fact that it always only constitutes itself in and as relation, in and as deadly competition, an agon with that in art which is not yet or no longer art, for "art requires something heterogeneous to it, in order to become art."l12 This heterogeneity is not reducible to art's relationship to the social whole, even though Adorno generally tends to privilege that relation. Yet, in all other respects as well, art is war: "So much is true: They [artworks] refuse to be compared. They want to annihilate one another .... Not for nothing did the Ancients reserve the Pantheon of what is compatible to Gods and Ideas, artworks they forced into an agon, one the deadly enemy of the other. ....

This demise [Untergang] is the goal of every work of art in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That art aims to end art is another way of saying the same thing."l13 And in the most condensed form this logic is articulated in a single sentence from the Aesthetic The- ory: "In the end, the artwork's unfolding is one with its ruin."l4

Situated between these two obviously similar but not entirely identical logics of Vorgang and Nachspiel are the numerous negations that render Adorno's aesthetic theory a canon of negativity: ruin, dissolution, aban- donment, liquidation, destruction, and, finally, de-arting [Entkunstung], a term that most obviously displays the processual dimension inhabiting

11. For a more detailed reconstruction of the end of art after Auschwitz, see Sven Kramer, "'Wahr sind Sitze als Impuls ...' Begriffsarbeit und sprachliche Darstellung in Adornos Reflexion auf Auschwitz," DvJS (1990): 501-23.

12. Adorno, "Die Kunst und die Kiinste," GW 10.1: 439. 13. Adorno, Minima Moralia, GW 4: 84. Adorno here borrows from Paul Valery,

whom he quotes at length on this issue in "Valery Proust Museum" GW 11: 181-194, 183. 14. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, GW7: 266.



Eva Geulen 157

all terms. For the significance of Adomo's discourse on the end of art consists not only in the pluralization of the one end, its splitting or dou- bling, but above all in the fact that the end is only given as process.15 In short: there is no end of art to be eulogized or celebrated, there are only endings. The logic of survivorhood or Nachspiel and that of process or Vorgang are neither different ends nor different aspects of one end: they operate, rather, as modes of delay. Judgment on whether an end is good or bad, utopia or demise is no longer contingent upon one's position, because their difference has been displaced onto processes. For Adorno, the ambivalence which has characterized the end of art since the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes in the eighteenth century - between catastrophe and redemption, utopia and demise - remains, under the conditions of modernity and after Auschwitz, strictly undecid- able. This undecidability has become mobile in the two temporal logics of Nachspiel and Vorgang. Art has no end - anymore or yet - because it is permanent crisis, and it makes little or no difference whether the crisis stems from the fact that art should be no longer and survived its end, or whether art envisions, anticipates and acts out its end. "The end of art has not taken place," Adorno writes in the Aesthetic Theory with respect to the Hegelian end of art, but he adds: "Even the gesture of its disap- pearing and falling mute moves on as a differential."'

This very schematic account of Adomo's two logics of endings raises two crucial issues, one regarding their relation to each other and the second regarding the internal limits of Adorno's processualization of the end of art. First, even though the coexistence of the two logics as com- plementary modes of delaying ensures and underwrites the end's permanent undecidability, a certain incompatibility between them persists. An indication of their potential disjunction is the fact that they can easily be coordinated with two different kinds of canons in Adomo's occupation with artworks, literary artworks in particular. While the endless dialectic of the end as Vorgang is generally privileged in interpretations of emphatically modem works by authors such as Beckett or Kafka, the

15. For an analysis of the internal split of "Ent-Kunstung," cf. Alexander Garcia Diittmann, "Ent-Kunstung," L 'Esprit Createur 35.3 (Fall 1995): 53-79, as well as Dtitt- mann, Kunstende. Drei aesthetische Studien (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp) 2001. Christoph Menke argues convincingly that process and relation are constitutive of Adorno's notion of aesthetic experience as such in Die Souverdnitdt der Kunst. Asthetische Erfahrung nach Adorno (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991).

16. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, GW 7: 309.




logic of the aftermath tends to dominate when Adorno deals with fig- ures such as Eichendorff, Borchardt, George and M5rike, who are per se difficult to integrate with an aesthetic theory that demands "il faut 6tre absolument moderne [one must be absolutely modern]."l17 These authors are not just no longer modem (like Wedekind or Ibsen, for example); they were never modem in the first place. The fact that the essays deal- ing with generally a-modem authors are also the very texts which are most promising for a reconstruction of Adorno's theory of language - a desideratum to this day - suggests that the latent tension between the two logics points to another tension, between a particular thought on language and its uneasy subsumption under aesthetic theory. 18

Second, regarding the internal limits of Adomo's double logic, his attempt to dissolve the end of art into negativity as process does not always succeed in escaping the danger of hypostasizing the end once more and thus fails to distinguish itself from a long tradition of employ- ing the topos of the end of art. When Adorno states, for example, that "the quintessence [Inbegriff] of the determined negation that sustains art is its own," the end of art is accorded a privilege that underwrites and perpetuates the problematic history of the end of art since Idealism.19 From Schelling via Wagner to the avant-garde and beyond, the politi- cally disastrous implications of such a sublation of art have been amply demonstrated.20 Where the end of art advances to the Inbegriff or quintessence of art's negativity, it occupies a meta-position that cannot be integrated into the process of ending, simply because it is its Inbegriff - and as Inbegriff of art's negativity, the end of art is then only com- municable as quasi-apocalyptic secret knowledge.

17. Both in writings on literature and on music, Adorno exhibits a peculiar and unexpected preoccupation with anachronistic works. Cf. for example his remarks on the problem of Neo-Classicism in Minima Moralia, GW 4: 248-49 and the essay "Das Altern der modernen Musik," Dissonanzen, GW 14: 143-67. As of now, no systematic analysis of Adorno's notion of anachronicity is available.

18. The outlines of an Adornian theory of language can be found in Alexander Gar- cia Dittmann's analysis of the name in Adorno and Heidegger in Das Gedachtnis des Denkens. Versuch iiber Heidegger und Adorno (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991).

19. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie GW 7: 60. 20. The insight at least if not the consequences to be drawn from it is generally

shared by the left and the right. Cf. Odo Marquard, "Gesamtkunstwerk und Identittitsys- tem. Oberlegungen im Anschlu3 an Hegels Schellingkritik" and "Kunst als Kompensation ihres Endes," Aesthetica und Anaesthetica. Philosophische Uberlegungen (Paderborn, Miinchen, Ziirich, Wien: Ferdinand Sch6nigh, 1989) 100-21. J.irgen Habermas, "Moderne vs. Postmoderne," Adorno- Konferenz 1983 (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1983).



Eva Geulen 159

This is the risk that Adorno's radical processualization of the end of art runs, and it is nowhere greater than in the Dialectic of Enlighten- ment, known for its affinities to the apocalyptic tone. But, I want to argue, it is precisely and only where Adomo and Horkheimer seem to fall prey to the apocalyptic tone, precisely at those moments that seem exaggerated, extreme and excessive that modalities of thinking the end of art surface which might withstand the totalizing temptations of the end of art and therefore might stand a chance of escaping the dangers of Adorno's not always successful maneuvering between processualization and hypostasization of an end of art. Perhaps the foregrounding of this other modality might then, in a last step, lead back to the role of language in Adorno's thought.

II Some ten years ago, Martin Seel suggested that the authors of the

Dialectic of Enlightenment are not entirely immune to the seductions of the U. S. culture industry they hold in such contempt.21 Seel failed to point out, however, that Horkheimer's and Adorno's fascination with abject mass culture is so strong that it results in an uncanny affinity, even a supplemental dependency between art and mass culture. The extent of their uncanny resemblance is particularly palpable in the sec- tions on "style" and "tragedy," which reveal nothing less than the fatal- ity and a priori corruption of the very notion of style in all of art from its inception: "Having ceased to be anything but style," state Adorno and Horkheimer, "the culture industry exposes the latter's secret: The concept of genuine style becomes transparent as the aesthetic equiva- lent of domination."22 And of tragedy they write in the same vein: "As the culture industry unveils the truth of style it also unveils the truth of catharsis."23 A related passage from Minima Moralia unequivocally articulates the uncanny insights wrested from the culture industry's self- display: "Today's archetypes which film and hits prepare synthetically for the desolate perception of the late industrial phase not only liqui- date art but they burst open in the &clatant madness the madness which was already walled in in the oldest artworks and which lends violence even to the most mature one. Brightly the terror of the end illuminates

21. Martin Seel, "Dialektik des Erhabenen" in Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost 1 Iff. 22. Adomo, Dialektik der Aufkliirung, GW3: 151 (130). 23. Adomo, Dialektik der Aufkliirung, GW3: 166 (144).




the lie of its origin."24 The culture industry is nothing other than the great illumination: it unveils and reveals, it is the kind of eschatologi- cal discovery which can only take place at the end, on the day of judgment. The epistemological pattern of this all-encompassing knowledge - which Adorno will attribute to only one other work, Beckett's End- game - is grounded in the spectacle of the apocalypse, whose vocabulary and rhetoric saturate the chapter on the culture industry: "For centuries society has prepared itself for Viktor Mature and Mickey Rooney. As they dissolve, they come to fulfill."25 Under these apocalyptic conditions any distinction between art and mass culture collapses: "Advertising becomes art and nothing else."26 But what collapses along with this distinction is any - even tentative and preliminary - difference between redemption and catastrophe, for where the culture industry functions as the catastrophic unveiling of universal blindness, art is finally redeemed from the need to lie about itself.

Apocalyptic logic and rhetoric spread principal indifference. While Adorno and Horkheimer utilize this indifference for the purposes of gaining knowledge about art - namely the insight into that which has rendered art problematic all along - the logic's auto-dynamic eventually catches up with them. Totalized indifference obliterates any difference between an object and its cognition or its critique, and this leaves the chapter on the culture industry without the resources necessary to legitimize its own critical stance. Precisely because apocalyptic knowledge is always secret knowledge, whose signs the initiate alone is able to decipher, apocalyptic epistemology can legitimize itself only by surren- dering the claim to knowledge altogether. Consequently, the interpretation of the signs of an end is handed over to the signs themselves, which are then said, and made, to speak for themselves, no longer capable of nor requiring any interpretive efforts. Handing over interpretive power to the objects of interpretation themselves is precisely what characterizes the chapter on the culture industry, whose absurd highpoint - and most important insight - is the fact that the objects of the culture industry confess themselves, reveal themselves as lie - and go on anyway. This makes them something other than myth, for any myth that has become transparent ceases to be myth. In contradistinction, the culture industry

24. Adomo, Minima Moralia, GW 4: 303. 25. Adomo, Dialektik der AuJkliirung, GW 3: 179 (156). 26. Adomo, Dialektik der Aufkldrung, GW 3: 186 (163).



Eva Geulen 161

thrives not only despite but because its mythical, deceptive, manipula- tive qualities are utterly transparent: "Mass Culture is bare-faced make- up [ungeschminkte Schminke]."27 This quasi-phenomenological aspect of mass-culture's self-disclosure is perhaps Horkheimer's and Adorno's single most important observation and certainly the only one that can be said to have withstood the test of time. What they have in mind can be illustrated by a commercial that ran in the United States ten years ago when a bank advertised itself with the simple slogan of straightforward manipulation: "One day we will be your bank." In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno's and Horkheimer's bewildered amazement regarding the self-confession of the phenomena finds expression in a colloquial phrase they picked up: "I am a failure, says the American, and that's that."28 "That" is not only that but "that" is also art, which fails and goes on anyway, whose existence, in other words, has always been as paradoxical as that of the culture industry. Yet: "'il faut

continuer'."'29 The spectacle of the "tortures of Tantalus"30 which the culture industry affords is strictly congruous with, even indistinguishable from, the "Sisyphus labor"31 that characterizes high art according to Adorno's Aes- thetic Theory. Certainly, the very analogy between the tortures suffered by Tantalus and those of Sisyphus also marks Adorno's rather desperate attempt to break the continuum his theory of art forms with his theory of the culture industry under the reign of apocalypse. Seeking to eschew the consequences of the apocalyptic dramatization that threatens to absorb the very difference between art and culture industry, the authors dis- place their difference onto that between torture and self-imposed torture in the form of effort and labor. The second (originally unpublished) part of the chapter on the culture industry insists on this difference in no uncertain terms: "Certainly every fixated artwork is decided in advance, but art seeks to sublate the overbearing gravity of the artifact through the might of its own construction, whereas mass culture identifies with the curse of being already decided."32 The motif of effort and strength as the seal of art on the one hand, and impotence, laziness and weakness as the epitheta of the culture industry on the other, are centered around the

27. Adomo, "Aufzeichnungen und Entwfirfe," Dialektik der Aukldirung GW 3: 317. 28. Adomo, "Aufzeichnungen und Entwiirfe," Dialektik derAujkldrung GW3: 238. 29. Adomo, Asthetische Theorie, GW 7: 310. 30. Adomo, Dialektik der Aujkldrung GW 3: 161 (140). 31. Adomo, Asthetische Theorie, GW7: 326. 32. Adomo, "Aufzeichnungen und Entwiirfe," Dialektik der Aujklkirung GW 3: 310.




opposition of tension and laxity. The introduction, or, better, the super- imposition of these criteria, necessary as it may be in light of the difference-absorbing apocalyptic mode, is highly questionable. It belongs to a fetishization, sexually codified and gendered, of labor, effort, strenuous- ness and erection that organizes much of Adorno's prose, particularly in the Aesthetic Theory. Such an opposition of rigor and flaccidity falls behind and contradicts Adorno's own theory of the artwork as a kind of "Einstand" or coexistence of opposites, including the opposition of tension and laxity.33 That their mutual exclusion presumably no longer exists in an artwork renders suspicious Adorno's attempt to instrumentalize this opposition for the purposes of assigning an essential difference between art and the culture industry.

In the final instance, this opposition between tension and laxity is, of course, grounded in the opposition between the artwork as the product of an individual artist and the mass-produced commodities of the culture industry under capitalism. But this attempt to stabilize the opposition between potency and impotence by reference to the opposition between individual production and mass production is fundamentally undialectical and doomed to failure. In short, this distinction remains, as it were, weak, and its problematic implications fully surface in Adorno's "Resum~e on the Culture Industry" from the 1960s. Here the apocalyptic furor has been toned down to the same degree that the opposition between tension and flaccidity has been fortified. Nothing is left from the dialectic of enlightenment as it had unveiled and revealed itself in the earlier text but sheer "anti-enlightenment."34 In this later text, the price Adorno pays for having salvaged the difference between art and the culture industry is that his remarks are now indistinguishable from restaurative and conservative cultural philosophy.

In other words, the radical, exaggerated version of the apocalyptic scenario has significant advantages compared with its moderate later version but at the price of a dilemma: On the one hand the apocalyptic extreme is the necessary condition of and the very medium in which the real threat of neutralizing all differences between high and low becomes conceivable in the first place. (That the disappearance of both kitsch and an intransigent modernism is indeed a real threat and remains a problem to this day has been argued in different contexts by Niklas Luhmann and

33. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, GW 7: 264. 34. Adorno, "R6sum6e ilber Kulturindustrie," GW 10.1: 345.



Eva Geulen 163

Boris Groys.35) On the other hand, however, the apocalyptic mode cuts off all possibilities of differentiation and pays the price for unveiling the threat by becoming indistinguishable from the objects it describes.

But then, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, although victim of the terror of sameness it deplores, also contains the following remarkable sentence: "Complete resemblance is the absolute difference."36 This reversal and leap is no longer dialectical - or, if it were, it would be mythical at worst and theological at best. But it can also be read otherwise and elsewhere, occurring on the level of representation and per- taining to what Schaidelbach once termed, with a somewhat infelicitous formulation, the dimension of "narrative coherency" in Adorno's texts, what Jameson has referred to as the dramatic or performative dimension of his prose.37 What becomes evident from this perspective and on the level of representation is that the chapter on the culture industry is no apocalypse but, rather, its desperate parody, and perhaps the immedi- ate relevance of this text had to undergo a latency period during which it became antiquated before this dimension could emerge. This is not to say that the notion of parody is altogether absent from

the text. On the contrary, the authors frequently refer to the category of parody: The omnipresent radio, for example, is said to be the demonic parody of Max Weber's charismatic leader,38 Adorno and Horkheimer denounce the culture industry as the disfigured fulfillment of a fairytale, "all a parody of the never-never land, just as national society is a parody of the human society."39 In one extreme formulation about laughter in the sitcoms, the authors claim: "Such a laughing audience is a parody of humanity. . . . What is fiendish about this false laughter is that it is a compelling parody of the best, reconciliation."40

However, this apocalyptically inspired use of "parody" is also the foil

35. Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), esp. the chapters on the self-descriptions of art; Boris Groys, "Fundamentalismus als Mittelweg zwischen Hoch- und Massenkultur," Die Kunst des Sammelns (Frankfurt/ Main: Hanser, 1997).

36. Adorno, Dialektik derAuJkldrung, GW3: 168 (144). 37. Herbert Schadelbach, "Dialektik als Vemunftkritik. Konstruktion des

Rationalen bei Adorno," Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Jtirgen Habermas, et al. (Frankfurt/

Main: Suhrkamp, 1983) 66-94, 92; Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism. Adorno and the Resis- tance ofDialectic (London: Verso, 1990) 134.

38. Adorno, Dialektik der Aukldrung, GW 3: 183 (159). 39. Adorno, Dialektik der AuJkldrung, GW 3: 179-80 (156). 40. Adorno, Dialektik derAuJkldrung, GW3: 163 (141).




for another dimension of parody, another parody, and perhaps the other of parody. For the Dialectic of Enlightenment is the parody of an apocalyptic end of art not where it seeks to instrumentalize the concept of parody but precisely where it surrenders entirely to the apocalyptic tirade. The parodic quality of the chapter on the culture industry is thus not a quality embedded in the text as such but only constitutes itself as and in the double relation to the explicitly refigured concept of parody on the one hand and the involuntarily parodied apocalypse on the other. Only in this excessive moment that exceeds both parody and apocalypse does this text catapult itself out of the terror of sameness. This notion of parody, or rather, to use a distinction introduced by Samuel Weber, this "parodic practice"41 also suggests itself as a medium in which the antinomical nexus of the logics of Nachspiel and Vorgang can be coherently articulated: The logic of Nachspiel can be considered a parody of Vorgang and vice versa.

Such a mode of reading Adomo's text opens up the way for de-aes- theticizing his aesthetic theory with a radicality that his texts harbor but which has not been fully explored. In the Aesthetic Theory, Adomo writes: "On its Hegelian summit philosophical aesthetics prognosti- cated the end of art. Aesthetics after Hegel forgot this, art, however, senses it all the more deeply."42 Art and post-aesthetic art after the end of art are Adomo's texts - some of Adomo's texts, sometimes - because they not only temporalize and delay the end of art, they parody it. Parody is anterior to the very degree that it can always only be aftermath. At a time when many of Adomo's texts read like self-parodies avant la lettre, it is perhaps necessary to do justice to the parodic dimension of his texts. And it is not irrelevant for its reconstruction that parody is a concept from the rhetorical register that avoids and pre- empts recourse to the category of mimesis, the very concept which so powerfully guards access to Adorno's practice and theory of language.

III The interdependency of the two logics of "Vorgang" and "Nach-

spiel" in the space of parodic practice is most striking in Adomo's encounter with a text where everything occurs after the end. His reading

41. Samuel Weber, "Upping the Ante: Deconstruction as Parodic Practice," Decon- struction is/in America. A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York UP, 1995) 60-78.

42. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, GW 7: 503.



Eva Geulen 165

of Beckett's Endgame owes its cohesiveness and strength to the compelling logic of parody: "The explosion of metaphysical meaning which alone guaranteed aesthetic meaning lets aesthetic meaning crumble with a necessity and austerity not inferior to that of the traditional canon."43 Reminiscence and parody are therefore the central categories of Adorno's reading, which also spells out the distinction between parody and determinate negation, for parody negates after negation: "Emphati- cally, parody means the use of forms in the age of their impossibility."44 According to Adorno's reading, Beckett's play contains nothing that is not subject to parody: poetry, education, the avant-garde, humor, philosophy - existentialism, in particular, but Hegel's master-slave dialectic as well - and even the menace of the culture industry itself. In short: "With the technique of inversion, the entire play is woven."45 In a post-apocalyptic scenario, parody as the technique of inversion condemns all differences to indifference. As a result, the culture industry's demonic parody of reconciliation is virtually indistinguishable from the indifference that neutralizes the distinction between "hell ... in which simply nothing changes any more, and the messianic state in which everything stood in its proper place."46

Adorno's interpretation culminates - and also disintegrates - in the reading of the play's final scene, for at this point even the difference between indifference and difference collapses as parody erodes the schema of its interpretability: "Differences aside, which might be deci- sive or entirely irrelevant, this scene is identical with the beginning. No spectator and no philosopher could say whether it does not start all over again."47 And Adorno concludes this paragraph with a sentence which parodies the very movement of dialectic itself: "Dialectic dies out [pen- delt aus]."48 That could have been and perhaps should have been the end of the essay, less because it concerns the play's final scene but because in the sentence "dialectic dies out" parody suspends in undecidability what Adorno, as if he could not stop there, finally forces into a decided and signifying indifference at the conclusion of his text. For eventually, as Adorno writes elsewhere in the essay in reference to

43. Adorno, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 281-321, here 282. 44. Adorno, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 302. 45. Adorno, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 320. 46. Adomo, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 321. 47. Adomo, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 314-15. 48. Adomo, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 315.



166 Reconstructing Adorno 's 'End ofArt'

Hamm's sentence that his life has always been a future life, dialectic does not die out but rather comes home: "In this conception, Benjamin's idea of dialectic at a standstill comes home." And where dialectic comes home, it renders absurd but meaningfully absurd the ultimate indifference: "The final absurdity is that the quietude of nothingness and that of reconciliation do not let themselves be distinguished." That, however, amounts to a decision on undecidability and indifference that demands a legitimatization that Adorno can find - unexpectedly - only by recourse to the very existentialism he so fervently denounces in his essay on Beckett: "Hope crawls out of the world, back to where it began, in death."49 Death, in which beginning and end coincide, seals the end of the essay and seals it off against the possibility of beginning again.

Adorno's Beckett exegesis is not only the exemplary execution of his theory of modernity, it also constitutes a strict analogue to the chapter on the culture industry. The problem of the Beckett essay and its radical- ized post-apocalyptic dramatization of parody is not the end of art, but the need to decree the end of modernity. For after Beckett, who executes Proust's idea of protocolling his own death as if it were the mandate of a testament, rien ne va plus. Adorno's attempt to understand Endgame is itself a testament. The construction of modernity it contains dramatizes itself once more and takes leave forever. Dialectic comes home. The end of art is suspended by parody - only to finally triumph as the end of modernity, which sinks back into death as origin and end of all things.

And yet, like the chapter on the culture industry, which implicitly marks a difference between parody and parodic practice, here the difference between dialectic dying out and dialectic coming home constitutes yet another instance of a difference subsisting. It holds open that closure which the essay and modernity alike appear to have reached in the end.

Parody, not the concept but the practice, functions in Adorno's discourse as a corrective of what is said in a way that exceeds the antithet- ical procedure in which two opposed positions are made to correct each other. Such parodic excess cannot be isolated and played off against the thought expressed, for to the extent that it is parodic, it only always surfaces incidentally and relationally. That parody in this sense might con- stitute a crucial dimension of Adorno's texts does not mean that they do not lend themselves to further exegesis, but suggests only that any attempt to reconstruct his theories needs to proceed as a reading of his

49. Adorno, "Versuch das Endspiel zu verstehen," GW 11: 321.



Eva Geulen 167

texts and cannot rely on the terminology they employ, even and espe- cially when that vocabulary includes parody.

That much is already demanded by the Dialectic of Enlightenment. On the occasion of Odysseus's inability to just shut up and escape from the Cyclops - when he insists on exposing the trick of language and pronounces his name, Udeis/Odysseus - Adomo and Horkheimer write: "Speech though it deludes physical force, is incapable of restraint. Its flow accompanies, as parody, the stream of consciousness, thought itself; its unperturbed autonomy acquires an aspect of madness - the manic - when it enters reality through speech, as if thought and reality bore the same name, whereas thought only has power over reality by virtue of distance."50 The curious affinity of the stream of thought and flow of language suggests that in order be thought, thought has to enter the world of speech, discourse. But as discourse enters the "real" world, it is forced, by virtue of being speech, to treat both reality and thought as if they were language, as if they bore the same name. That is to say, the terrible identification of thought and reality betrays both, because discourse forgets and must forget first and foremost the difference between itself and what is not language. The rush of speech, however, accompanies thought not as its parody but "as parody." As parody, as something other than what it says and names, language retains the knowledge that it is neither reality nor thought; discourse is haunted and disfigured by what it must forget when it enters reality. Yet this knowledge is always only a knowledge of language as parody, as something else, said on the side, said otherwise, as allegory. Whenever Adorno speaks of speech, things start to flow. In marked

opposition to the economization and reduction that structures the Beck- ett essay, the image of the stream, flow or rush of language surfaces in those of his texts dedicated to authors whose work already relates to the preceding period as parody and late quotation. The "Speech on Poetry and Society" highlights the ever so slight echo of antiquity in Eduard Moirike's poetry and senses the medieval moment in a few verses by Stefan George: "Nun dratngt der mai/, Nun muss ich gar/ Um dein aug und haar/ Alle tage/ In sehnen leben "[Now May intrudes,/ Through your eye and hair/ must I live forever/ in desire]." Adorno comments: "These four lines which I count among the most irresistible ever given to German poetry are like a quotation, not from another poet, but from

50. Adomo, Dialektik der AuJkldrung, GW 3: 87 (68).



168 Reconstructing Adorno 's 'End ofArt'

that which language has irretrievably missed."''51 This irretrievability is no longer historical but structural, a failure that no speech can rectify, an omission no language can retrieve.

This undercurrent of a latent theory of language runs strongest in Adorno's essay on Eichendorff. The extreme relaxation of economic principles of construction Adorno detects in Eichendorffs poetry seems to have affected his own prose, which surrenders itself unprotected to the stream of thought that concerns the rush of language, the course of discourse. But as extreme and extremely moving as his reading is, it does not always resist the temptation of hypostasization, the temptation, for example, to identify Eichendorff's language as "second nature" in which the first, lost nature returns and performs "reconciliation with the objects by power of language."52 This asks too much, and here Adomo has once more forgotten the negativity of language that it sustains as parody. But in another passage, in which Adomo speaks of Eichendorff as if speaking of himself, he concedes that language in Eichendorff is neither first nor second nature. It is, rather, "as if nature had become a meaningful language for the melancholic. But the allegorical intention in Eichendorffs language is sustained not by nature to which he ascribes it at this point, but by his language in its distance from meaning."53 Dis- tance from meaning and distant meaning are neither the same as the complete disappearance of meaning nor the same as full meaning. In the end, all of Adorno's ends of art, those distant and those near, the false end in the culture industry, the good end in Eichendorff and the ambivalent end in Beckett, are parodies of the end, its passionate parodies.

51. Adomo, "Rede tiber Lyrik und Gesellschaft," GW 11: 48-46, here 66. 52. Adorno, "Zum Geddichtnis Eichendorffs," GW 11: 69-94, here 84. 53. Adomo, "Zum Gedichtnis Eichendorffs," GW 11: 83.



dialectic of enlightenment || endgames: reconstructing adorno's "end of art"

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