If read in light of Adorno's recurring theme
that Western society is increasingly objectifying, the claim that “cultural
criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture
and barbarism” (Adorno, CCS 34) points to the growing uselessness of any
form of criticism due to society's objectification of the mind and idolization
of culture. This reading is supported by the term “final,” which suggests that
we have reached a culminating point in history (a point after which the
dialectic between culture and barbarism will be complete), similar to how we
are reaching the point at which criticism becomes useless. Moreover, if culture
becomes barbarism finally, then Adorno would argue that culture can no
longer fulfill its purpose of criticizing society, a conclusion supported by
the fact that Adorno's other claims about barbarism are about the barbarism of society
(i.e. “the barbarism of economic hegemony” [25]). So, given this reading,
when Adorno calls poetry (standing in for culture in general) “barbaric,” he
equates it with society, and thus suggests that the dialectic between culture
and society, too, has reached a final stage. Culture is becoming entirely
subsumed under society. Hence, the impossibility of writing poetry is the
impossibility of poetry as that which is supposed to rebel against society, but
no longer can. This reading accords with Brodsky's: poetry's impossibility is its
inability to fulfill a function.
The
reading of poetry as unable to fulfill its function is supported by three other
of Adorno's essays in which he discusses his claim about poetry as barbaric,
two of which claim to point to what Adorno “meant.” In “Is Art Lighthearted?,”
Adorno claims that “the statement that it is not possible to write poetry after
Auschwitz does not hold absolutely, but it is certain that after Auschwitz,
because Auschwitz was possible and remains possible for the foreseeable future,
lighthearted art is no longer conceivable” (“Is Art Lighthearted?” 251). Although
this claim seems to disagree with its predecessor in CCS (we will see below [p.
36-8] ways of reading it so that it does not), it also clarifies that
earlier claim. In this text, Adorno argues that lighthearted art has become
serious because we cannot reconcile it with a horror-filled world, and serious
art has become lighthearted because the only way for a text to be serious is
for it to show us the absurdity of our present condition. Thus, to say that lighthearted
art is impossible is to say that our present social condition has made it
impossible for lighthearted art to fulfill its function: being lighthearted
(whereas the goal of serious art is not that it be serious but that it seriously
represent the world).
In his lecture
“Liquidation of the Self,” Adorno makes a similar claim, limiting the
impossibility of culture: “just as I said that after Auschwitz one could not
write poems – by which I meant to point to the hollowness of the
resurrected culture of that time – it could equally be said, on the other hand,
that one must write poems” (“Liquidation of the Self” 435, emphasis in
source). Here again, what looks like a claim that disagrees (or at least
complicates) the passage from CCS first serves to elucidate it for us. What
Adorno “meant,” according to him over fifteen years later, was that culture at
the time was hollow, or (in other words) could not fulfill its function of
being meaningful.
Finally, in “Art
and the Arts,” we see a claim almost identical to that in “Liquidation of the
Self”: “While the present situation no longer has room for art – that was the
meaning of the statement about the impossibility of poems after Auschwitz – it
nevertheless has need of it” (“Art and the Arts” 387). In this essay, Adorno is
concerned with the opposition between the concept of art as subsuming all of
the arts and the concept of each of the arts existing independently of the
others. He claims that both concepts have truth in them, but the latest push to
the former by artists attempting to blur the boundaries between the arts (make
musical paintings, poetic music, etc.) is a push away from material reality
(where the individual arts differ) and thus away from the horror of society.
So, to say that the meaning of his earlier statement is that “the present
situation no longer has room for art” is to say that the development of the
material (temporal) world has relegated “art” entirely into the abstract
sphere, such that the arts can no longer fulfill their function of being both
material and abstract. In each of these examples, we see the same themes.
Poetry, according to Adorno, is not entirely impossible, but sometimes
possible and even necessary, and poetry's impossibility stems from a contemporary
inability, based on society, and it is a practical impossibility.[1]
[1] See also: Bernstein 20-1, 384.
