By LUCAS FIASCHETTI ESTEVEZ*
The dialectical and immanent critique of culture undertaken by Theodor Adorno enables us to think about the irresolute insertion of culture in our time
The latent overlap of profound crises in modern capitalist society — whether at its center or on its periphery — ends up having a relevant impact not only on the place occupied by culture, but also on the way in which artistic manifestations can represent, work and tension an aesthetic, and at the same time political, response to the impasses of the present time.
The dialectical and immanent critique of culture undertaken by Theodor Adorno enables us to think about this irresolute insertion of culture in our time. Theodor Adorno's insistence on analyzing the aesthetic object from the perspective of its immanent legality, which includes a diagnosis of the period that is based on a critical theory of society, allows cultural phenomena to be considered at the same time as autonomous and dependent on the general state of worsening barbarism and social disintegration. In this sense, addressing aesthetics is at the same time bringing to light political and social issues.
That said, it is important to remember that the cultural critique undertaken by Theodor Adorno was conceived in a historical context of profound change in the direction of Marxism. After all, the high horizon of expectations at the beginning of the 20th century was gradually replaced by widespread erosion. In a turbulent scenario of deepening contradictions in the capitalist system, the Soviet experience was marked by authoritarian tendencies, while fascism was gaining followers, including among the working masses.
Thus, the perception that capitalism was consolidating itself as a perennial reality was increasingly hegemonic, which led part of Marxism to turn its attention to the strategies for reproducing the system. It is in this context that the intellectual project of the Frankfurt School, the so-called “Critical Theory of Society”, was conceived. In general terms, we must remember here that the analysis of Frankfurt culture is based on this same epochal diagnosis regarding the stabilization of capitalism. In this context, it becomes an urgent task of critical theory — as an updated Marxist approach to capitalism — to understand the role of culture as an integrating and reifying element of capitalism. status quo.
Thus, it was necessary to redefine the relations between the material life of society and the spiritual life beyond the molds of orthodox Marxism. For the Frankfurtians, culture must be seen under an immanent contradiction, namely, at the same time that it is determined by elements external to itself, it also holds a certain degree of autonomy in the face of such externality, and is therefore not reduced to a mere reflection or epiphenomenon of the laws of society.
In this sense, culture also reveals itself as a driving force of social reproduction, and not just its auxiliary line. While it is ideological, it is consolidated through real social practices that are the basis of capitalist material life. Under this interpretation, culture tends either to reinforce regressive characteristics of sociability or to be a space for the release of transformative and critical impulses. However, in view of the stabilization of capitalism and the loss of its negative and contestatory forces, culture becomes rigid as an affirmation of the existing, while autonomous art — which is also a product of the bourgeois world itself — is sucked into the same system of standardized production.
In this sense, it is important to differentiate Adorno's cultural criticism from interpretations that treat the work as an independent reality in itself, as well as from those that only take into account the context and social coercion that the environment exerts on its production. Theodor Adorno understands that, on the one hand, we must consider external elements as those belonging to the social reality of a given era, which indicate the stage of development of the forces of production and the social relations involved in the production of artistic works.
On the other hand, there is the work of elaboration and the internal laws that led to the constitution of the work, which can be evaluated based on the identification of which techniques and processes of aesthetic elaboration were used by the artist and how he responds to the hegemonic demands in vogue, thus making it possible to glimpse the level of his autonomy.
Starting from these two dimensions, Theodor Adorno operates a dialectical operation between them, which understands both the forces of production and the internal constitution of the work as interdependent moments of the same process. In this sense, Theodor Adorno insists on the urgency of analyzing the aesthetic object based on its immanent legality, which includes within itself a diagnosis of the period regarding the external pressures that constrain or liberate the object.
Likewise, the progressive or reactionary character of a work can only be understood at the intersection of these dimensions, since the general stage of technology and social relations always establishes a reciprocal relationship with the internal dimension of the object. In the face of external determinations, the work can affirm or deny them — it can reproduce current clichés and contribute to their perpetuation, as well as point to an alterity that does not yet exist. In the terms presented here, we can then consider a work of art with critical potential as one that, through the elaboration of its material, goes beyond the very conditions in which it was generated, proposing something new that denies the present, overcoming it.
Thus, interpreting the critical potential of a work involves deciphering its social content and its position in relation to the dominant ideology. In this way, understanding the work is only possible when the conditions of its material constitution are considered as historical conditions, that is, when the analysis occurs based on the mediation between the individual work and society. Through this scheme, social conflicts are inscribed in the work itself as problems inherent to its material.
When Theodor Adorno places the inherent problems of the work as the center of gravity of criticism, we understand how his approach gives freedom to what the work itself intends to say to society, what position and to what social, economic and political demands it responds. Thus, we decipher in the work not only its internal logic but also its general idea, what is intended and what is done based on it.
According to Theodor Adorno, it is necessary to understand to what extent the musical material of a work mobilizes a questioning of the current stage of technique and tradition. However, the author emphasizes how the content of a work cannot be understood in an ahistorical and axiologically neutral way, but only in its relationship with philosophical thought, with the stage of technique and with criticism oriented towards the emancipation of men. In this way, it can be understood that the work taken in itself, in isolation, is not endowed with any meaning.
In some of his writings, Theodor Adorno describes in detail what should be understood by cultural criticism, a fundamental idea for understanding the theme presented here. Adorno notes how the so-called “criticism” is generally understood as a kind of denunciation, an insinuation by those who possess the culture regarding what is lacking or lacking in it.
Furthermore, criticism tends to come from a place that understands culture as something isolated, a sphere separate from the social process. Finally, so-called “cultural critics” disseminate discourses that value art for art’s sake, based on a kind of essentialist character of culture. Ultimately, cultural criticism ends up becoming a lament about decadence, with a clear elitist bias — one that is only satisfied by valuing the forms of the past.
In order to distance himself from such positions, Theodor Adorno comments on how the critic cannot understand himself as “the representative of an immaculate nature or of a higher historical stage, but is necessarily of the same essence as that which he thinks he has at his feet” (ADORNO, 2001, p.7). Most of the time, even if he is unaware of it, the critic cooperates with the culture he criticizes. In fact, his supposedly independent position creates a negative reaction from the public towards him, since he cultivates a kind of resentment in society that sees him as someone who considers himself above everyone else, as if he were judging art neutrally.
As Theodor Adorno notes, by adopting a contemplative attitude toward culture, the “traditional” critic tends to specialize in inspecting it, as if it were an object at his disposal. Thus, the critic’s supreme fetish becomes the very concept of culture, seen as a sphere separated from the social whole where the practice of freedom would be possible. Even if such critics complain about the superficiality and decadence of culture, they themselves are part of this superficiality that only pays attention to the intertwining of culture and commerce, forgetting the content of the works.
On the other hand, the very possibility of the existence of criticism rests on bourgeois ideals, precisely those that concern freedom of opinion and judgment. However, cultural criticism falls back on its own truncated dialectic, since criticism of the norm generally ends up confirming the norm. For Adorno, the transformation of the nonconformist impetus of criticism into its opposite is of an eminently historical nature, the result of a process in which there is less and less room for a qualitatively distinct criticism.
Cultural criticism, therefore, also reveals the “false emancipation” engendered by bourgeois promises. In this state of affairs, the discussion about the immanence of the particular contents of works is replaced by superficial debates concerning the style or values they supposedly convey—that is, when the debate does not lead to the writing of sensationalist profiles of the artists, with a fragment of information about their private lives made public.
This regressive and fetishized notion of culture finds its historical form in the culture industry. According to Theodor Adorno, this was only possible due to the ambiguous process of the autonomization of art, which allowed it to develop in its own space, detached from the interests of the old nobility. Over the course of history, however, the market and its rules have colonized the production of cultural commodities to such an extent that the isolation of art has become its opposite, namely, cultural goods mediated entirely by external criteria, which now reach the media. e the purposes of its production.
By failing to reflect on the concept of culture itself, criticism “shares with its object the obfuscation,” that is, that opacity inherent to the social world that hides the class relations engendered within it. Always in accordance with the state of the art, culture becomes an instance of legitimization of this order. In this context, cultural criticism has as its limit either the non-reflective apology of the cultural industry or the condemnation of the existing from a supposedly lost principle of cultural purity, as the Nazis did with their cliché of “degenerate art” or the Soviet State with its “decadent bourgeois culture.”
On the other hand, the dialectical and immanent critique proposed by Theodor Adorno is qualitatively distinct, since it starts from an awareness of the aporias of culture itself. In this way, we would have a critique of culture that focuses on what exists, animated by the same impetus as social critique, that is, with the task of pointing out the emancipatory and anti-authoritarian tendencies embedded in the realm of the Spirit.
Finally, we must ask ourselves the following question: how can and should a dialectically oriented cultural critique be carried out? For Theodor Adorno, “the procedure of cultural critique is itself subject to permanent critique, both in its general assumptions, in its immanence to the current society, and in the concrete judgments it enunciates” (Ibid., p.18). Thus, dialectical cultural critique also affirms its commitment to a qualitatively distinct culture, since it accepts it as a social fact permeated by countless contradictions.
According to Theodor Adorno, “what distinguishes dialectical criticism from [traditional] cultural criticism is the fact that the former elevates criticism to the very suspension of the concept of culture” (Ibid., p.19). In this way of approaching the subject, it is necessary to recognize the survival, even if timid, of the autonomy of culture and how it responds, through the place it occupies, to what is foreign to it, to the “material process of life”. As Adorno says, “dialectical criticism positions itself dynamically by understanding the position of culture within the whole” (Ibid., p.19) — it takes the object, surrounds it and goes beyond it, imploding it.
Last but not least, dialectical criticism should not be understood as a method. In fact, it is guided by the object itself and glimpses its relations with the social whole. Ultimately, it abolishes the very separation between the subject of knowledge and the object. There is no set of a priori analytical procedures. For Theodor Adorno, accepting a “method” of analysis would limit the object itself. In immanent and dialectical criticism, the contradiction between the objective idea of the work and the artist’s claim is taken seriously, just as the inconsistencies and consistencies of a work in relation to social existence are named.
Taking this idea to its limit, understanding the negativity of culture means making it possible to evaluate the “truth or falsehood of its knowledge”, given that the antinomies of culture are themselves taken as social antinomies, in principle, irresolvable by current politics, with horizons without depth and without criticism.
Aware of the contradictions of the process, Adorno recognizes that there is a risk that dialectical criticism itself will be dragged “by its object into the abyss” (Ibid., p.25) in the face of the growing dependence of culture on the economic apparatus. According to Theodor Adorno, “the more totalitarian the society, the more reified the spirit will also be, and the more paradoxical will be its attempt to escape reification by itself” (Ibid., p.26).
To escape such a conformation between the spirit and the world, criticism must urgently go beyond itself and abandon any “self-sufficient contemplation” (Ibid., p.26). In other words: it must take risks, insisting on works of art that abolish through their radicality the very separation between aesthetics, society and politics.[1]
*Lucas Fiaschetti Estevez is a doctoral candidate in sociology at USP.
Reference
ADORNO, Theodor W. Cultural criticism and society. In: Prisms: cultural criticism and society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 7-26.
Note
[1] Adorno’s critical theory of culture, presented here in an introductory manner, will be the subject of a short extension course offered by the Laboratory of Social Research, at the University of São Paulo, in October. The classes will be taught in person by researchers Lucas Fiaschetti Estevez (PhD student, PPGS/USP) and Bruno Braga Fiaschetti (Master’s student, PPGS/USP) on Thursdays, from 17:30 p.m. to 19:XNUMX p.m. Registration is open through the link: https://sociologia.fflch.usp.br/minicurso_adorno.
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