Adorno and Bataille: theoretical comparisons and contrasts

Adorno's Negative Theology And The Religious Dimension Of Art

Religion in art can perform a variety of roles. A religious picture, literary text or piece of music can be didactic in intent, spreading knowledge of religious teachings, ideologies and practices; it can serve a commemorative purpose, reminding present generations of the significance of past episodes, or the examples of particular individuals, in shaping present religious belief and practice; it can be inspiring in an emotional or spiritual sense, acting to create a suitable emotion or feeling of a religious nature in its audience. Art with religious content or purpose can be contemplative or bombastic in character, and can convey a message that is conservative or radical in political, social or cultural terms; it can operate on an individual or a collective level, and inspire engagement with the world or withdrawal from it; it can work through great formal simplicity or abstruse complexity. What religious art of all kinds shares, however, is a concern with being more than merely decorative. Religious art inevitably has a message. As is suggested by the brief summary of some of the extraordinarily varied forms of religion in art above, such messages can transcend the narrow limitations of particular religious systems or ideologies; but in a modern world characterized by a falling away of traditional religious belief and practice, what role does religion play in art? If it retains a validity, at what level does it operate and what it its significance? If modernism has undermined the place of religion in society, what purposes can be served by a continuing religious presence in art?

For the social and cultural critic and theorist Theodor Adorno (1903-69), art is integrated into the society that produces it, and cannot be considered separately from the economic, political and ideological circumstances of its creation. This position reflects the continuing influence of Marxist theoretical approaches to art which can be found underlying even Adorno's most radical writings.

However, Adorno tended to distance himself from a crude materialist or historical-contextual reading of art, focusing on a close reading of the work itself and claiming such thorough analysis from the inside would enable a reading of the work's social meanings without cumbersome references to external contexts.

Those social meanings, however, remained central to any accurate and meaningful understanding of the work, whether literary, musical, or visual in nature.

There is an apparent paradox in this view, for Adorno also insisted on the autonomy of art, simultaneously arguing that art was the product of its context and that it was vitally differentiated from that context. At the heart of this position is the concept of "negativity," which is a key one for Adorno in a variety of contexts. A recent scholar of Adorno's aesthetic theories has summarized this position as follows:

The basic thesis of the aesthetic of negativity rests on a simple equation: aesthetic difference, the distinction between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic, is, in truth, aesthetic negativity. Only by conceiving of works of art in their negative relationship to everything that is not art can the autonomy of such works, the internal logic of their representation and of the way they are experienced, be adequately understood. The distinctiveness, the uniqueness of art, is that it sets itself apart, that it separates itself off. It is just as inadequate to explain the autonomy of art in terms of distinction, coexistence, or complementarity as it is to subordinate art to externally imposed ends. What art actually is, is contradiction, rejection, negation. Determinations of this kind are basic to Adorno's aesthetics.

The reconciling element of this paradox is provided by Adorno's emphasis on the role of human labor and human experience in creating works of art. For Adorno any concept of metaphysical meaning in art was extrinsic to its real value, which was in its exploration and expression of these profoundly human issues:

[Adorno] did not, however, give up the concepts of society and history as necessary codeterminants for the aesthetic realm. His criticism is filled with a strong sense of social history as the condition under which artworks are produced and consumed. This is not a matter of the artwork reflecting social conditions but rather a matter of human labor.

For Adorno, works of art are expressions of human creativity and have a truth content in reflecting the conditions of their creation. It is this commitment to reading art as the product of human experience that underlies Adorno's claim in his Aesthetic Theory that "art is the sedimented history of human misery."

A great work of art possesses a truth content that reflects this, while escaping any particularizing contexts that would limit its universal significance and autonomy, and serves as a pointer to a world in which misery is defeated and the creative potential of human beings is finally, fully, realized. It could be said that for Adorno art possesses an almost religious significance in terms of its role as an agent of revelation. Adorno's view of the importance of art is thus concerned more with potentials than with actualities:

Whether art is still possible today cannot be decided from above, from the perspective of the relations of production. The question depends, rather, on the state of the forces of production. It encompasses what is possible but not yet realized: an art that refuses to let itself be terrorized by positivist ideology.

This combination of autonomy and rootedness in context has important consequences for Adorno's view of religion in artistic production. Fundamentally, the argument of this essay will be that while rejecting the embodying of religious meaning in art and artwork in the institutionalized sense of churches or other organized religions, Adorno identified and insisted upon a revelatory role for art itself in terms of its engagement with the human condition and human values.

Adorno was in many ways a writer and thinker profoundly influenced by religion. He made extensive use of religious languages and concepts throughout his writings: to quote the modern scholar and translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, "theology is always moving right under the surface of all Adorno's writings ... theology penetrates every word."

Religion is in its essence metaphysical, and naturally tends to argue for a significance that lies in transcendence; its values seek to place themselves beyond any particular historical or cultural circumstances, to escape the limitations of context. Adorno rejected any notion of transcendence in art, but did argue for a view of art that emphasized its role as a communicator of potentialities rather than solely as a product of actualities, and for "the inevitable intertwining of material and ideal or spiritual reality."

This understanding of art can be related to what has been called Adorno's "negative theology" of disenchantment: "whoever believes in God cannot believe in God."

This is not a negative theology in the sense that there is no God, but rather that He cannot be represented, as there is no means by which human structures of knowing can access or experience His reality. It is not possible to speak meaningfully of God in any positive way at all, for God is an "ultimate end" and, as such, cannot be comprehended in human understanding, limited as it is by intentionality in language -- this is the clear argument of the Negative Dialectics -- but can only be discussed in terms of what He is not. In other words, God can only ever be conceptualized and approached through negative rather than positive theology; and indeed, the only theology that is possible in the modern world is negative theology. The consequence of this for religion in art is potentially wide-ranging, tending to undermine its very position -- if religion rests on the notion of God, a notion that cannot be represented, then by definition a religious art that satisfies Adorno's central criterion of truth content cannot exist.

It can be argued, however, that there remains hope for religion in art within Adorno's scheme of things despite this objection, in the key implication of his argument about the nature of negative understanding. Using Adorno's own terms of argument, it can be convincingly proposed that negative theology is itself a form of representation. This is not a matter of closing the door on theology and religious standpoints, but of bringing them within the boundaries of the political and the social. This can be done (for Adorno, it must be done) through art, which is uniquely placed to effect this subsumation. Art is in fact utterly fundamental to this process. Adorno wrote in an essay on the work of the German playwright Bertold Brecht and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that "This is not the time for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art."

Art provides a realm through which politics can bring about an engagement between human actuality and human potential; it is precisely its autonomy as a realm of the aesthetic, differentiated from the non-aesthetic, that allows it to perform this role. Elsewhere, Adorno argues, in culture and society, such engagement is stultified by acceptance and reproduction of the status quo. In the realm of art there can be questioning, opposition, tension and, potentially, revolution.

In this sense, the transcendence of religion becomes the transcendence of social and political transformation. To paraphrase the observation quoted above, Adorno looks to religion migrating into the autonomous work of art, rather than to "religious art" per se. It is revealing that Adorno naturally tended to employ a language imbued with religious meaning when giving an account of the aspiration to a better society, a better way of being, that he believed had to be at the heart of all valid human endeavor. His long-time friend and collaborator Max Horkheimer emphasized the importance of this point in an interview given just after Adorno's death in 1969:

[Adorno] always talked of longing for the other without using the words heaven or eternity or beauty or anything like that. And I believe that is in fact the greatness of his questioning; that when he enquired into the world he ultimately meant the 'other', but he was convinced that the 'other' could not be grasped by description, but rather by conceiving the world as it is under the aspect that it is not the only one towards which our thoughts are directed.

Adorno's own position on the significance of art in providing a realm in which such a conception could be nurtured echoes Horkheimer's view of the significance of religion in the development of human societies:

Historically, these concepts have found their most common expression in religion. The truth of religion, according to Horkheimer, lies in the individual and social needs it expresses: the need for a better, more just world ... Acceptance of a transcendental being is motivated by dissatisfaction with existing conditions, and it is precisely belief in such a being that sustains hope for a better world.

For Horkheimer, the role once played by religion has been subsumed into a mass political programme of revolutionary transformation. For Adorno, such socio-political movements were not his main concern, believing as he did that the dialectical process through which history moved on was an internal rather than an external process, and he saw needs that had once been answered by religion finding their only means of expression in the modern world through art.

This commitment to the importance of art in enabling a conception of human potentialities not accessible through any other means was complicated by the advent of modernism. Adorno's attitude to modernism was complex and paradoxical, but was fundamentally pessimistic. He saw the history of human development since the "Enlightenment" of the eighteenth century as one not of progress, but of regression, in an external sense of the whole political, social and aesthetic environment of human life, and (crucially) in an internal, intuitive sense as well. This theorization is most fully laid out in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, published in 1947, which Adorno wrote with Max Horkheimer while the two German theorists were in wartime exile in the United States. In the preface to this work Adorno goes so far as to claim that modern man has "a fallen nature," which is evident throughout modern history, culture, philosophy, and economic and social organization. This reflects his ironic use of the term "enlightenment" and his view that the social and intellectual phenomenon known as "the Enlightenment" had essentially turned upon itself and brought about its own destruction. Enlightenment, argues Adorno (with Horkheimer), was supposed to have ushered in a new age of individual freedom, choice and pluralism and the triumph of reason, bringing about demythologization. In fact, it has produced precisely the contrary effect. Modern individuals find themselves driven more and more into conformity and uniformity rather than choice and individuality, and, far from being ruled by reason, are still subject to myth as a guiding influence in their lives both individually and collectively. Myth no longer acts primarily through the forms of organized religion, but provides many of the structures and intellectual systems that the religion-myths provided. Adorno's most important point about all these developments is that they have been located at an unconscious level; so that modern man is able to imagine himself to be free when in reality he is not; modern mass culture, with its deadening of the senses and crushing of individuality, plays a vital role in bringing about this ignorance of modern individuals as to the reality of their own position. In effect the old restrictions of religious and social repressive pressures are still present, but in different forms, and forms that are not recognized for what they are: "Freedom to choose an ideology -- since ideology always reflects economic coercion -- everywhere proves to be freedom to choose what is always the same."

Adorno follows Marx in seeing this degenerative phenomenon associated with the enlightenment and its legacies as essentially the product of economics -- specifically, of modern industrial and investor capitalism. Thus culture, including artistic production, is transformed into a tool of the capitalist class rather than being a true expression of human creativity and individuality, and embodies uniformity and an aversion to questioning and change. The result, argues Adorno, was a "circle of manipulation" and a society "alienated from itself."

Adorno's deep aversion to the producers and manipulators of modern culture -- film, music, print -- reflects his conviction that the "culture industry" (as he calls it) is not concerned with truth, creativity or freedom but with creating and manipulating consumers. People become objectified, their very imaginations become objectified, and subjected to the power of exploitative capitalism.

In summary, it is important to note that Adorno is not a believer in the idea of progress, but rather of its opposite -- degeneration and decay. He is convinced that modern history is the history of decline, and that this is as much a spiritual or inward matter as it is an outward, environmental, social and political one. Adorno used the example of art in many of his writings to illustrate this point. He saw earlier artistic movements such as Romanticism and Expressionism as reflecting the presence of a current of protest against the establishment, embodied in an assertion of individuality, creativity, and difference, and believed that no similar movements existed in his own day. A brilliant musicologist in his own right, Adorno gave particular attention to music in this respect, viewing (for example) jazz, which he detested, as the epitome of the valueless, decadent culture of the modern age. Jazz did not create, question or develop, merely re-iterated and endlessly devoured itself. It went nowhere, which is where Adorno believed the age that had produced it was going.

Adorno thus, in many respects, regarded 'modern art' as exemplifying the negativity that he saw as essential to the contemporary human condition. He saw much modern art as compromised by its own compromise with the norms of the society that produced it, and therefore as unable to fulfil the almost visionary function he believed was essential to art; such works, he argued, seek to critique the society of which it is part, but simultaneously "makes an uncompromising reprint"

of that same society, sacrificing autonomy and differentiation as a result. He also saw the modern art of the post-war period as lacking in tension and critical engagement -- and, as a result, as producing a negation of the innovative tensions and energies of the art produced in the early twentieth century period he referred to as "high modernism"

(it is notable that the historical context for his Aesthetic Theory was provided by the rise of modernism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and its decline during the 1940s and 1950s

). Furthermore, such artistic production denies the essential mainspring of art's power to differentiate itself, its aesthetic qualities, by de-aestheticizing itself and presenting qualities of fragmentation and dissonance. The tensions embodied in the society that produces modern art are reflected in that art, but in a way that Adorno calls "non-repressive," allowing "non-integratable" elements to persist without the resolving synthesis this dialectical process requires.