Adorno - Brecht - Realismo Dialetico PDF
Adorno - Brecht - Realismo Dialetico PDF
Adorno - Brecht - Realismo Dialetico PDF
nl/hima
Gene Ray
Geneva University of Art and Design
[email protected]
Abstract
Bertolt Brecht and Theodor W. Adorno stand for opposing modes and stances within an artistic
modernism oriented toward radical social transformation. In his 1962 essay Commitment,
Adorno advanced a biting critique of Brechts work and artistic position. Adornos arguments
have often been dismissed but, surprisingly, are seldom closely engaged with. This paper assesses
these two approaches that have been so central to twentieth-century debates in aesthetics:
Brechts dialectical realism and Adornos sublime or dissonant modernism. It provides what still
has been missing: a close reading and immanent critique of Adornos case against Brecht. And it
claries one methodological blind spot of Adornos formalist conceptualisation of autonomy: he
fails to provide the detailed analysis of context that his own dialectical method immanently calls
for. The paper shows how and why Brechts dialectical realism holds up under Adornos attack,
and draws conclusions for contemporary artistic practice.
Keywords
Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Marxist aesthetics, realism, modernism, the sublime,
political theatre
1. I thank Steve Corcoran, Steve Edwards, Anna Papaeti and Dmitry Vilensky for their
helpful responses to drafts of this essay, which revises Ray 2010.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2010 DOI: 10.1163/156920610X533306
4 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
2. Arts double character as both autonomous and fait social announces itself unfailingly from
the zone of its autonomy. Adorno 1997, p. 5, and 1998a, p. 16. In this and subsequent citations
from Adorno, Brecht and Max Horkheimer, I have modied the published English translation.
3. The argument is formulated concisely in the opening paragraph of Adorno 1997, pp. 12,
and 1998a, pp. 911; standing rm [Standhalten] is thereafter a codeword by which Adorno
invokes this argument, for example in Adorno 1997, p. 40, and Adorno 1998a, p. 66.
4. Adorno 1992a and 1998b. Commitment is the standard translation of the essays title
(Engagement in the original). I use both here, treating them as a semantic pair and opting for
the one that resonates most estrangingly in any given sentence.
5. Adorno 1992a, p. 84, and 1998b, p. 419.
6. The ad hominem aspect of Adornos attack on Brecht is easily dismissed; the critique of
Brechts works is more serious. Jameson 1998 can be read as a general answer to Adorno, but
Jameson does not provide any close engagement with the substance of Adornos arguments.
7. Brecht uses the phrase the new dialectical realism in an important letter to Eric Bentley,
written from Santa Monica in August 1946, reprinted in Brecht 1990, p. 412.
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 5
In the polemics over realism, Brecht had to defend his earlier innovations
against charges of formalism and against a rigid and restricted conception of
realism based on models from the bourgeois tradition. His strategy, then, was
to broaden the category by demolishing simplistic separations of form and
content and by exposing the narrowness and rigidity of criteria derived
exclusively from particular historical forms in this case, from the bourgeois
novels favoured by Lukcs. Brecht writes:
Keeping before our eyes the people who are struggling and transforming reality,
we must not cling to tried rules for story-telling, venerable precedents from
literature, eternal aesthetic laws. We must not abstract the one and only realism
from certain existing works, but shall use all means, old and new, tried and
untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put reality
into peoples hands as something to be mastered.10
For time ows on, and if it did not it would bode ill for those who do not sit at
golden tables. Methods exhaust themselves, stimuli fail. New problems surface
and call for new means. Reality changes; to represent it, the mode of representation
must change as well. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes out of the old,
but that is just what makes it new.11
In contrast to ocial versions of socialist realism, then, the realism Brecht calls
for is precise in aim, but exible, even experimental, in means and method. It
aims at representations of reality that are workable, operable, practicable
helpfully applicable to transformative practice and permanently open to
correction and revision.
What makes them workable is that they are de-reifying: they show society,
not as a static and naturalised fate or second nature, but as a eld of forces and
processes in motion, unfolding in time, subject to development. The individual
appears in such representations not just as a psychological subject, but also as
a nexus or ensemble of social relations that are historical and therefore
changeable. The name for this mode of radical thinking, this critical stance or
Haltung oriented toward transformative practice, is, of course, dialectics.
Brechts exible realism is dialectical, in this radical, Marxist sense. The rst
test of dialectical realism is whether or not, in context, it produces this eect
of de-reication or estrangement. Verfremdung is, then, the general category
for all the diverse artistic techniques for producing this eect, which, in turn,
becomes a moment in a larger process of radical learning. These artistic
principles what I now call dialectical realism can be actualised today,
provided that artists mark the distance between Brechts time and our own and
aim their interventions at the struggles and crises that constitute the
contemporary conjuncture.
point. Hegels Logic taught that essence must appear, he notes.14 In other
words, essence must take concrete, determinate form in time and place. To
represent the social essence in a form other than the one in which it actually
appears in history is to represent something dierent. If, in order to construct a
memorable parable, amusing satire or eective piece of agitation, a committed
writer or artist attempts to slip essence into a dierent form, Adorno concludes,
then this is a falsifying representation that is politically untrue, even if it is
produced in the name of a true cause. Why? Because the process of aesthetic
reduction short-circuits the chain of mediations that joins essence and the
social facts that are its specic appearance-form.15 Brecht wants to foster
critical spectatorship, but the imperatives of partisan struggle lead him to
render reality as something less complex and threatening than it is. The theory
that submits to such imperatives ends by teaching submission. For Adorno,
this is most clear when Brecht glories the Party without mediations16 or
degrades himself as a eulogist of agreement.17 Ultimately, this is not just
Brechts failure, Adorno argues; it is a structural problem with all committed
art that renounces its autonomy in order to instrumentalise itself politically.
Art can only do poorly what theory already does better, and dishonesty about
this becomes political untruth. Art that accepts its autonomous status only
has to answer to local aesthetic criteria and earns the medal of political truth
by insisting on its dierence from praxis and real life. But, because Brechts
art is bad theory, Adorno contends, especially given Brechts position, it
therefore fails as art as well. Adornos specic criticisms of Brechts works are
underwritten by the structural-categorical argument, but try to demonstrate it
through an immanent immersion in particular works: by showing how
particular works fail as theory and recoil into dishonesty and untruth, Adorno
also aims to show the impossibility of art merging with theory under the sign
of commitment.
This is the gist of Adornos critique of Brecht. It can be tested by directing
critical questions toward any of its three levels: the structural argument, the
specic criticisms, or the notion of theory on which the whole case turns.
14. Das Wesen erscheinen mu. Adorno 1992a, pp. 845, and 1998b, p. 419. The dialectical
point, from the Doctrine of Essence, is that essence must appear as something other than itself;
that is, as a dialectical unity with a determinate appearance-form. Adorno is citing Hegel 1969,
p. 479.
15. The process of aesthetic reduction [Brecht] undertakes for the sake of political truth cuts
truth o and leads it on a parade. Truth requires countless mediations, which Brecht disdains.
Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 416.
16. Adorno 1992a, p. 82, and 1998b, p. 415.
17. Adorno 1992a, p. 86, and 1998b, p. 421. Adorno alludes here to The Measures Taken.
10 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
20. See Horkheimer 2002a. The role and responsibility of science expressed in Galileos great
mea culpa speech (Scene 14 in the post-Hiroshima versions: Brecht 1967d, pp. 133941, and
Brecht 1994, pp. 1079) draws very near to the position Horkheimer marks out in 1937:
committed, but outside church- (read: market- and party-) discipline. Arguably, Brechts
formulations of this problematic in the Short Organon are less radical in its critique of science.
There, Brecht having resumed the battle for a theatre worthy of the scientic age, the techno-
domination of nature inherent in the bourgeois-scientic project goes uncriticised. However,
Brechts enlistment there of Galileo, Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer for an aesthetics of the
exact sciences that makes room for the beauty and pleasure of experimental research is blown up,
perhaps intentionally, by the explosive naming of Hiroshima in Section 16, several pages on.
Brecht 1967c, pp. 6689, and 1992, p. 184.
12 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
21. Horkheimer 2002a, p. 270, and 2002b, p. 216. Or, again, Horkheimer 2002a, p. 272,
and 2002b, p. 219: The theory that in contrast drives on the transformation of the social whole
has for now the eect of intensifying the struggle to which it is bound.
22. Disputes over the politics of the Frankfurt Institute at other moments (or the degree of
its commitment to a Marxist or Marxian critique of capitalism, and so on) need not bog us down
here. At this critical moment of 1937, struggle means class-struggle, and Horkheimers
positioning of Frankfurt critical theory commits it to the side of the working class. Frankfurt-
antifascism is not liberal.
23. I register the gap between 1937 and 1962 in passing; a full accounting of it, which would
require analysis of the Cold-War and West-German contexts, is beyond what I can do here, but
would obviously bear on the question of Adornos own commitments.
24. To be strict, reconciliation for Adorno would go beyond classless society, as usually
conceived, for it would also have to include the liberation of nature, internal and external.
However, this supplement is interpreted, it certainly includes the passage out of capitalism that
classless society entails.
25. Hereafter, when truth and untruth (and its cognates) appear in italics, it is to indicate
this special usage and underscores its dierence from others based on an allegedly value-neutral
correspondence-theory of truth.
26. Brecht 1967e, p. 638, and 2001a, p. 13.
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 13
struggle through dicult moments, for example all that inspires tenacity
and resilience, and staves o resignation and despair. Are we, then, slipping
into the abyss of apologetics for terror? We are, at least, in waters deep and
murky, and any evaluation in this direction is instantly contestable. Still, the
paradox holds: sometimes, doing bad contributes to the good, while sometimes
doing good leads to the bad. Or, in the form we are considering: artful lies and
ctions can sometimes serve the truth. It does depend on the situation. About
these kinds of problems, to paraphrase Marx, clarity only begins post festum.
we have a silly gangster organisation, the Cauliower Trust. The true horror of
fascism is conjured away; it is no longer something incubated in the concentration
of social power, but is accidental, like misfortunes and crimes.27
earlier, in 1931, then Adornos criticisms would carry more weight. At that
moment, a representation of fascism that is falsifying in the ways Adorno
pointed out would also have been politically untrue, for the underestimation
of the Nazis and lack of clarity about the social forces behind them could have
had catastrophic consequences for praxis: precisely this kind of confusion
contributed to the Nazis rise to power. A sober and accurate estimation of
fascism would have claried the urgent need for a united front between
Communists and Social Democrats to bridge the split in the German Left.
Obviously, no single artistic representation can be held responsible for the
poverty and defects of political consciousness at that crucial moment. But,
possibly, if enough eyes had been opened, the Nazi-takeover might have
been averted.
However, to go beyond such an assertion and actually demonstrate the
political untruth of a given representation, it would be necessary to establish a
minimally accurate baseline against which the representation in question
could be assessed. Then it would be necessary to demonstrate how the defects
of this representation actually damaged the antifascist struggle in the moments
of a specic and unfolding situation. This Adorno does not try to do. With
good reason: to do so would itself require a feat of historical representation.
For what constitutes the essence of both German fascism and fascism per se is
still a hotly debated question especially since it touches upon the relation
between fascism and capitalism and the role of anti-Semitism. And, even
within the tradition of critical Marxism, divergent theories of fascism are
continuously being revised and corrected in light of ongoing research.28 But,
let us take it a few steps further. Assuming we can condently establish what
social forces and processes combined to produce particular forms of fascism,
we would still need to mark the dierence between our reected retrospection
and the eorts of those who had to grasp fascism from within that moment of
struggle and crisis. Representations produced under such pressures can only
be adequate in the most provisional way; to treat them as denitive would
itself be a falsifying distortion. Retrospective evaluations of Brechts works
would require a detailed discussion of both the actual social reality that forms
the context of those works and the representations of that reality available
at the time.
Strategy entails representations that interpret reality. For the working class
on the defensive, the struggle against the Nazis was above all a strategic
problem of alliances.29 A practical unication of working-class parties and
28. A moment in this process is documented in Dobowski and Wallimann (eds.) 1989.
29. As has been amply demonstrated in autopsies of the Lefts strategic failures during those
years. See, for example, Poulantzas 1979 and Claudin 1975. Of the analyses of fascism produced
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 15
organisations should therefore have been the priority. If we accept that a united
front between the Social Democrats of the SPD and Communists of the KPD
would have been the necessary, not to say sucient, condition of blocking the
Nazis, then we would have a criterion: representations of fascism that foreclosed
the possibility of a united front, after events had claried the urgent need for
it, would be both false and untrue. But the exact point at which this urgency
became clear, or should have become clear, would be dicult to establish. It
could probably be shown that the ocial position of the Third International
from 1928 until 1935 was both false and untrue in precisely this way. Moreover,
certain defects of the Comintern-position could probably be tracked back to
the strategic realignments compelled by the Stalinist doctrine of socialism in
one country. The strict subordination of the parties to the imperatives of
Soviet foreign policy certainly distorted political analysis and strategy during
these years,30 and it is there, in those distortions, where the false can be seen to
become the untrue, in Adornos sense.
But we cannot implicate Brecht in this, by simply identifying his
representations with ocial Stalinist ones at least, not without much more
evidence and argumentation than Adorno provides. Adorno seems to assume,
on the basis of The Measures Taken, that Brecht gloried the Party blindly and
uncritically, and that there is no distance at all between his positions and
representations and the Partys. Adorno certainly does not demonstrate this,
and I doubt that it could be demonstrated, even for works produced in the
early 1930s, when Brecht was closest to the KPD. When we immerse in the
particulars, as Adorno insists we do, and work to dig out the truth and untruth
entangled in the social ow of time, then the rigours of empirical testing cut
both ways. What has been claried is that each of Brechts anti-Nazi works
from Roundheads and Peakheads, nearing completion just as the Nazis came to
power, to Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, written in 1937, Ui of 1941, and
Schweyk in the Second World War, written mainly in 1943 each has to be
evaluated carefully in light of unfolding events and the urgent eort to
comprehend them. They need, that is, to be assessed as specic interventions in
specic situations.
on the Left from within that moment, Trotsky 1971 is probably the most incisive treatment of
these fatal missteps and faulty interpretations. Without doubt, it would have been extremely
dicult to overcome the historical mistrust and hostility between the SPD and KPD.
Nevertheless, that, and no less, is what the conjuncture objectively demanded.
30. As Claudin 1975 documents copiously. Obviously, this is not to imply that SPD-analyses
and responses to Nazism were any less disastrous.
16 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
A Fairytale of Horror
Roundheads and Peakheads, begun in 1931, would have been a better choice
than Ui for Adornos critical attentions. A stage-manuscript of this horror-
parable was circulating by the end of 1932. When he left Germany the day
after the Reichstag burned, Brecht took with him the proofs of a revised
version subtitled Rich and Empire Go Gladly Together. In exile, he revised it
again, with Sten and Eisler; versions in Russian and English were published
in Moscow in 1936 and 1937, and a German edition was brought out in
London by the Malik Verlag in 1938.31 It was rst staged, with Eislers music,
in Copenhagen in 1936. Unlike Ui, then, the genesis of Roundheads and
Peakheads reaches back before the Nazi-takeover and, as a representation
of fascism, presumably bears more directly the traces of class-struggle in its
pre-1933 conjuncture.
The epic parable focuses on the Nazi-displacement of class-antagonism into
race-antagonism. This displacement consists of a recoding that invests
ideological meanings in arbitrary physical attributes, destroying solidarities
and producing realignments among groups in class-struggle. The shape of the
head becomes the marker of standing in the new rgime; those with the wrong
head-shape, purportedly evidence of foreign origins and an abject spirit, will
be dispossessed and exterminated. The work depicts the susceptibility of the
impoverished peasantry and Mittelstand the petty-bourgeois shop-owners,
small producers and salaried employees to this ideology. The Pachtherren, the
estate-owners, give Iberin-Hitler dictatorial powers because he alone can
repress the rebellious renters and crush their communist Sickle League; at the
same time, they think they can manage and exploit Iberins racial turn.
Roundheads and Peakheads began as an adaptation of Shakespeares Measure for
Measure. The Verfremdungseekt of the parable derives, in large part, from the
combination of a feudal setting and elevated poetic diction with contemporary
scenes and language: in the streets of the old city, Iberins Huas or SS talk in
Nazi-jargon and Umgangssprache. However, the feudal setting is also a source
of the main defects of the work. The altered balance of social forces and state-
crisis that conditioned the Nazi-takeover is inadequately represented. The
Junker estate-owners are depicted, but they were only one class making up the
dominant power-bloc in Weimar the other, the grande bourgeoisie, is absent.
And with it, so is the master-logic of capital-accumulation. The antagonism
between rural landlords and tenants cannot simply stand in for that between
31. Die Rundkpfe und die Spitzkpfe, oder Reich und Reich gesellt sich gern: Ein Greuelmrchen.
For the German, I have used the London Malik version reprinted in Brecht 1967f; for the
English, I have preferred N. Goold-Verschoyles 1937 translation, reprinted in Brecht 1966.
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 17
capital and waged labour. The sickle is there, but the hammer is missing;
the workers and their unions and parties are absent. As a result, the real
political problem of the German Left and the working-class movement at that
moment how to overcome the SPD/KPD split and form a united front
cannot emerge.32 This is, indeed, a serious fault of the work in its conjuncture,
and I doubt that allowances for the distantiations of the parable-form would
succeed in extricating it from this criticism.
In light of Adornos battery of arguments concerning the exigencies imposed
on art after Auschwitz, an additional defect must be registered. At the
beginning of the work, Brecht eectively ngers the genocidal threat of Nazi
blood-and-soil ideology. In Scene Two, an Iberin militiaman reads it aloud
from a newspaper: Iberin says expressly that his single aim is: extermination
of the Peakheads, wherever they are nesting!33 By the end, however, this racist
aspect has become a discardable, merely opportunistic factor. The Peakhead-
landlords are able to restore themselves to power, and the class-antagonism is
now projected outward in a war of expansion. In retrospect, at least, this
reects a fatal underestimation of the Nazi-investment in anti-Semitism. To
sum up, my reading does not so much prove the political untruth of Roundheads
and Peakheads as it shows how far truth and untruth remain entangled in it.
The critical task is to do the untangling, not to issue a crude retrospective
condemnation of the playwright.
32. When it does nally appear, in the peat-bog soldiers, episode of Fear and Misery of the
Third Reich, added to the work in 1945 (Scene 4 in Brecht 1967b, and 2009), it is, of course, too
late. There the retrospective lesson is: the united front that went unmade in the streets and
factories was realised impotently in the concentration-camps under the gaze of the SS.
33. Ausrottung der Spitzkpfe, wo immer sie nisten! Brecht 1966, p. 186, and 1967f,
p. 929. Tom Kuhns rendering (To ush out the Ziks, wherever theyre hiding!) misses the strongly
dehumanising resonance of the German. Wipe out comes closer to the sense of ausrottung, but
in combination with nesting [nisten], we have the rhetoric of pest-control, right out of Hitlers
speeches. Kuhns translation is in Brecht 2001b, p. 20.
18 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
If the social outside always shows up within artistic form, as its polemical a
priori,34 then this structural constant cannot by itself be the basis for
dierentiation and assessment. This alone should point us back to the outside,
to specic eects in actual reception-situations, but Adorno declines to make
this move. He supports his conception of dissonant modernism with a formalist
tendency to discount context. But this tendency leads him to treat
representations as if each one were denitive meant to stand for all time,
rather than to intervene in specic situations. If there is a use by date, Adorno
does not notice. In the case of his critique of Brecht, this tendency becomes a
destructive avoidance. To conclude: dialectical immersion in particular works
entails a simultaneous immersion in the social contexts for which they were produced.
The dialectical point, to which Adorno should be held, is that works do not
stand alone: the work is the work together with its context. Evaluations of the
quality of Brechts representations and the net-balance of their truth-content
cannot simply be carried out categorically. Nor do specic criticisms alone
suce to render a summary judgement, without seriously taking into account
the real context of struggle. If this is right, then Adorno has failed to back up
his judgement of Brecht in anything like an adequate way.
Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy if he wins.
W. Benjamin
The essay Engagement is also one of the places where Adorno revisits his
1951 assertion that after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.35 Elaborating
this claim, he advances Samuel Beckett as the artistic counter-model to Jean-
Paul Sartre and Brecht. Without getting into all the issues and problems
opened up by this after-Auschwitz formula, I at least need to insist that
Adorno is pointing here to the catastrophic character of capitalist modernity
as a whole. The catastrophe is the whole dialectic of enlightenment and
domination as it has unfolded and continues to unfold in the late-capitalist
era of culture-industry and administered integrations. To Adornos Auschwitz,
we need to add Hiroshima.36 These two events are the test-pieces which
34. Adorno 1992a, p. 77, and 1998b, p. 410. Or again, Adorno 1992a, p. 92, and 1998b,
p. 428: The eect-complex [Wirkungszusammenhang] is not the principle that governs
autonomous art; this principle is in their very structure [ihr Gefge bei sich selbst].
35. Adorno 1976, p. 31, and 1992b, p. 34.
36. This paragraph and the one that follows summarise a case I argue more fully in Ray 2005
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 19
conrm that the catastrophe is not somewhere in the future, still to be avoided,
but has already taken place and is continuing, in the sense that the global
social process that produced them continues to churn on. More specically,
they demonstrate what administered state-violence is now materially capable
of. All this conrms that social reality, unfolding as history, has killed o the
myth of automatic progress. The future of humanity in any form, let alone
emancipated ones, is from now on open to doubt, and can no longer be taken
for granted. And this has consequences for the representation of social reality.
Crucially, these genocidal techno-administrative powers were developed in
a specic global conjuncture of class-struggle: they are products of defeats
suered by the exploited, and from now on are aimed at the exploited, as the
weapons of state-terror. It does not follow that the revolutionary process is
dead or that humanity will never reach classless society. But it does mean that,
on the side of the exploited, the political and cultural forms of class-struggle
have to process and reect these new realities. The old postures, images and
marching music that asserted the advent of classless society as imminent,
inevitable or otherwise automatic have been falsied by history, in a very
precise sense. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are two events of qualitative genocidal
violence that cannot be folded back into any redemptive narrative of progress.
The potentials they announce enter history as irredeemable moments that
explode toxically in every direction. Revolutionary theory and practice now
must take this into account: the qualitative event that arrives to reorder
everything is not necessarily progressive. The Novum, or radically new, now
appears as the ambiguous Angelus novus the machine-angel or angel of
history that announces either a leap toward emancipation or else an absolute
ruination more terrible than any momentary defeat.37 Which one, none can
and 2009a. The critical conjunction of Auschwitz and Hiroshima remains controversial indeed,
taboo in some academic circles, but, in these texts, I show why they must be grasped together:
in dierent ways, each realises a qualitatively new power of genocidal violence. Together, both
transformations of quantity into quality are the material basis of a new logic of global-systemic
enforcement.
37. I use Novum here, as well as the more usual event, to invoke the use of this term in
Jameson 1998, pp. 125, 127 and 1758. Adorno brings in Walter Benjamins Angelus novus, the
machine angel at the end of 1992a, p. 94, and 1998b, p. 430. Jameson, ne as his book on
Brecht is, elides the catastrophe exactly at this point. What Benjamin and Adorno clarify for us
is that welcoming the new as such, as Brecht perhaps wished to, is now a dubious risk, for its
arrival may be the straight gate to self-rescue or utter obliteration; after 1945, it has objectively
changed from a symbol of political truth and progress to a problem and enigma. This change is
strongly intimated, though not elaborated, at the end of Brechts post-Hiroshima Galileo (Brecht
1967d and 1994).
20 G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324
38. Thus, it is no longer enough merely to represent capitalism per se, as if Auschwitz and
Hiroshima had not taken place, for these events clarify tendencies and potentials that belong to the
essence of capitalism as it has actually developed in time. We need to follow up seriously on
Thompson 1980 and Kovel 1983: weapons of mass-destruction have to be grasped not as things,
but as social processes. My point has been that, as potentially terminal leaps in the powers of
enforcement, these processes in turn change the state-form and the modes of capitalist social
control. The so-called war on terror, with its politics of fear and emergency, is the contemporary
appearance-form of these processes that have become tendencies. There remains much work to be
done in thinking through the enforcement-functions of state-terror, grounded in the fatal merger
of science, state and war-machine. I make a beginning in Ray 2009b. And this problem of genocidal
powers of enforcement is, of course, now converging with another fruit of the techno-domination
of nature: processes of ecocide and climate-change that threaten biospheric collapse.
39. Ray 2005 and 2009a.
40. White 2009.
G. Ray / Historical Materialism 18 (2010) 324 21
IV. Conclusion
Adornos case against Brecht, then, comes down to this: art must not try to do
what theory already does better, and, in any case, preaching to the converted
does not win anyone for the revolution. For the reasons given, Adornos
preference for the sublime anxieties of uncommitted art should not scare us
away from Brecht or contemporary forms of dialectical realism. If it is the
immense pressure of misery itself that forces us to think, what we think still
needs to pass through our reections and representations. Any artistic
representation of social reality that provokes or fosters radical learning is a
contribution to emancipation. In certain contexts, and given an adequate
critical reception, sublime works and images may have this eect. Committed
works of dialectical realism are likely to be more helpful. We cannot expect
that any single representation, however ambitious and monumental, will give
us the essence of social appearance with exhaustive perfection, as Alexander
Kluges nine-and-a-half hour gloss on Eisensteins unmade lm of Capital
should remind us.42 Such totalising nality is in any case antithetical to Brechts
conception of an open, exible and provisional dialectical realism. But, if the
pressures of crisis and war, mega-slums and absolute poverty, climate-change
and ecological degradation lead us to try again to organise a passage beyond
the master-logic of capital-accumulation, then we will need artistic as well as
theoretical representations of social reality. The more representations the
better, then, so long as they are dialectical so long as they dissolve social facts
into processes and the logics driving them. This kind of radical realism will
always contribute to that Great Learning by which alone we can make our
collective leap.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1976 [1951], Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, in Prismen, Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
1992a [1962], Commitment, in Notes to Literature, Volume 2, translated by Shierry
Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press.
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