Returning once more to the questions with which
my project is directly interested, we find that, for Adorno, culture generally
and poetry specifically after Auschwitz are both purposeless and more
purposeful than they were before. Culture is both complicit in the society that
led to Auschwitz and a potential for
resistance against it. It both helps to create a silent coldness that does not
take suffering seriously and is the only voice that suffering has. In short,
for Adorno, the question of whether and how literature is useful after Auschwitz is self-contradictory.
Literature is both useless and useful, and is in fact both for the same reasons: its contradictory state within a growingly objectifying society. Furthermore, because we have a new categorical imperative after Auschwitz, to never let Auschwitz happen again, the contradictory demand becomes all the more urgent. Adorno is not simply confronting an interesting philosophical contradiction, but working to understand the contradiction itself, to identify which aspects aid a society that could lead to another Auschwitz, and to minimize those aspects in the production and reception of culture and cultural criticism, even as he does not have very much hope for success.
Those aspects, as we have seen, are: culture's ideology, which conceives of cultural artifacts as a commercial objects; culture's complicity with the objectification of commercial society; and culture's denial of its material roots, which lets it exist guiltlessly despite the former two aspects.
Literature is both useless and useful, and is in fact both for the same reasons: its contradictory state within a growingly objectifying society. Furthermore, because we have a new categorical imperative after Auschwitz, to never let Auschwitz happen again, the contradictory demand becomes all the more urgent. Adorno is not simply confronting an interesting philosophical contradiction, but working to understand the contradiction itself, to identify which aspects aid a society that could lead to another Auschwitz, and to minimize those aspects in the production and reception of culture and cultural criticism, even as he does not have very much hope for success.
Those aspects, as we have seen, are: culture's ideology, which conceives of cultural artifacts as a commercial objects; culture's complicity with the objectification of commercial society; and culture's denial of its material roots, which lets it exist guiltlessly despite the former two aspects.
As we will see in the next section, Adorno is not alone in asking questions about how literature can help prevent future atrocities like Auschwitz or in approaching literature's efficacy in this goal with ambivalence. Primo Levi asks similar questions and even comes up with similar answers, yet he does so using a literary genre that incorporates his experiences in the Lager and thus reaches conclusions similar to Adorno's from the standpoint of the victim rather than of the observer.
