But, the term “barbaric” is not only a
description of contemporary society, it also serves as the opposite of
“cultural.” Culture and barbarism form a dialectic, such that the two are
opposing notions that, at the final stage, synthesize. Culture incorporates
barbarism, just as barbarism incorporates culture. Although what makes this
process most problematic for Adorno, and what causes the dialectic, is
culture's servitude to society's growing objectification of humanity, as we see
by the recurrence of the theme of dialectics in Adorno's thought, something's
status as a dialectic is important in-and-of-itself. In this sense, to
call writing poetry “barbaric” is to point to the contradiction in contemporary
culture: that poetry has combined with its opposite. This claim is similar to
the claim that culture is the product of both the mental and material worlds or
that it both serves society and has the potential for rebellion against it.
Thus, the impossibility of writing poetry is not a literal
impossibility, even of poetry as a function, but the impossibility inherent in
culture from its roots as that which comes from the mental world. I can sit
down and write a poem about contemporary society, but my writing enacts
impossibility and contradiction at every level: it is both subservient and
rebellious, conceives of itself as mental but comes from both mental and
material worlds at once, and is both cultural (by definition) and barbaric
(because it helps perpetuate a barbaric society).
We
see support for this kind of thinking in the three other essays by Adorno
already discussed as well as in “Commitment.”[1]
In “Is Art Lighthearted?,” we see a move from lighthearted to serious and vice
versa, making lighthearted art impossible. In “Liquidation of the Self” and
“Art and the Arts,” the impossibility of poetry is directly linked to its
necessity, such that even in its impossibility, culture is self-contradictory
and, in both essays, this combination of impossibility and necessity is itself
based on further contradiction (the disappearance of the individual self
combined with society's reduction of the self to an entirely physical [and thus
individual] being in “Liquidation of the Self” and the arts' position as both
distinct from the other arts and yet under the general concept of “art” in “Art
and the Arts”). In “Commitment,” Adorno argues that both committed art (art
with an obvious political goal) and autonomous art (art, the goal of which is
itself artistic: art for art's sake or art whose goal is reproduction, for
example) are both flawed. Committed art rings false when it attempts to support
a political stance that also rings false (“Commitment” 250-1); autonomous art
often ignores the material world entirely and thus allows it to perpetuate
(253). Thus, when he reiterates his claim about the barbarity of writing poetry
after Auschwitz, he does so partly as a
criticism of committed poetry and partly as a concept to work against (251-2).
“The question of whether art should exist at all” is a question of whether
anything like culture can be meaningful in a world where Auschwitz is a
potential, but “literature must resist precisely this component” because “the
abundance of real suffering permits no forgetting” (252). Again, poetry is both
impossible and necessary (though now, it is necessary as a means of remembering
suffering), so again, poetry is working from a standpoint of contradiction.
[1] This reading is also supported by Bernstein's analysis in
Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics.
