An Objection – Using Adorno against his Own Claim
One might argue that we have placed too much
emphasis on this passage by Adorno, especially because he contradicts it in Negative
Dialectics (ND) with the claim, “It may have been wrong to say that
after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems” (362).
Indeed, as we have seen, in several of his other essays, Adorno argues that the impossibility of writing poetry is coupled with its necessity. There are several ways to understand these contradictory claims. Rothberg argues that Adorno's theory changes from CCS (written in 1949) to his texts from the 1960s (he only cites Negative Dialectics and “Commitment,” but the other texts are from the 1960s as well [Rothberg 26,45]).
Certain aspects of this shift are apparent: in all later texts other than “Commitment,” we lose the description of writing poetry as “barbaric” and retain only that it is “impossible”; in the texts that express the necessity of culture, his argument is based on our obligation to give voice to suffering (i.e. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream” [ND 362], and “the abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting” [“Commitment” 252]).[1] Yet, as we have seen, if the nature of contemporary culture is contradiction (the second interpretation [p. ???]), then the combination of impossibility and necessity is one that fits with Adorno's understanding of culture in CCS. Indeed, the necessity of culture, despite its complicity with objectifying society (the first interpretation [p. ???]), exhibits a predicament with no simple answer.
Culture is problematic, but we cannot remove it. Moreover, we might argue that Adorno's later move to the topic of suffering puts culture in an even more precarious position than did CCS, because it opens up the question that plagued Adorno's dreams (“Liquidation of the Self” 435): the question of whether it is possible to live after Auschwitz (“Liquidation of the Self” 435, ND 363), a question we will examine in the next section.
Indeed, as we have seen, in several of his other essays, Adorno argues that the impossibility of writing poetry is coupled with its necessity. There are several ways to understand these contradictory claims. Rothberg argues that Adorno's theory changes from CCS (written in 1949) to his texts from the 1960s (he only cites Negative Dialectics and “Commitment,” but the other texts are from the 1960s as well [Rothberg 26,45]).
Certain aspects of this shift are apparent: in all later texts other than “Commitment,” we lose the description of writing poetry as “barbaric” and retain only that it is “impossible”; in the texts that express the necessity of culture, his argument is based on our obligation to give voice to suffering (i.e. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream” [ND 362], and “the abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting” [“Commitment” 252]).[1] Yet, as we have seen, if the nature of contemporary culture is contradiction (the second interpretation [p. ???]), then the combination of impossibility and necessity is one that fits with Adorno's understanding of culture in CCS. Indeed, the necessity of culture, despite its complicity with objectifying society (the first interpretation [p. ???]), exhibits a predicament with no simple answer.
Culture is problematic, but we cannot remove it. Moreover, we might argue that Adorno's later move to the topic of suffering puts culture in an even more precarious position than did CCS, because it opens up the question that plagued Adorno's dreams (“Liquidation of the Self” 435): the question of whether it is possible to live after Auschwitz (“Liquidation of the Self” 435, ND 363), a question we will examine in the next section.
[1] Two other significant shifts between the
version of the claim in ND and that in CCS are the use of the term
“poems” as opposed to “poetry” and the inclusion of an agent in the second
person. Thus, one might argue that Adorno is claiming that he might have been
wrong about something that he never originally claimed. One might also argue
that these differences represent interesting shifts in Adorno's thought from
the time he wrote CCS to the time he wrote ND, a shift (for example)
from relying on terms that represent abstract concepts (like “culture” and
“poetry”) to the instances of those concepts (like “poems”). This shift would
make sense given that Adorno's contemporaries and like-minded thinkers in the
Frankfurt School had made similar moves (i.e. Horkheimer's move from Hegel's
concept of “Spirit” or “being” to the concept of a “manifold of beings in the
world” [Jay 47], see also footnote 5 [p. 13 above]). At the same time, though,
because this paper is mostly concerned with CCS, we are mostly concerned here
with essays other than CCS insofar as they help us to understand what is going
on in CCS. Thus, a thorough examination of the shifts between it and other
works by Adorno is outside of this paper’s scope. For a discussion of the
evolution of Adorno's thought, specifically on the topic of poetry after Auschwitz, see Rothberg 25-58.
