“Blind Representation”: On the Epic Naiveté of the Cinema

Michael D’Arcy (bio)
St. Francis Xavier University

Abstract

This essay argues that Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno’s commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno’s aesthetic theory – to maintain art’s thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context.

In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich calls attention to an oddity in the development of computer-generated images in film. These images, in films such as Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), initially appeared “too perfect” or “too real.” In order to appear like photographic images, the computer graphics of these films needed to be “degraded”: “their perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of film’s graininess” (201-02). This effect was achieved, for example, by reducing the resolution of the computer-generated images or softening their edges through computer-generated algorithms, procedures that allowed the images to blend with film footage. The unwelcome excessive detail and sharpness of computer-generated images, and the attempt to overcome this quality, suggest an ambiguous regression in technical development, a movement that proceeds in opposing directions simultaneously, forward and backward: at once a technological advancement and an apparent regression to the “imperfection” or lack of technical mastery that marked an earlier stage of development.

Framed in these terms, this moment echoes an earlier juncture in the history of thinking about film, one that also involved a discrepancy between the demands of cinematic work and the contemporary state of technological advancement. In his 1966 commentary “Transparencies on Film,” Theodor Adorno notes the particular situation of cinema at the moment he is writing, in which “awkward and unprofessional cinema” may play a certain role:

While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established technical standard does not rate, vis-à-vis the culture industry—whose standard excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles—works which have not completely mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality. (199)

Adorno’s interest in film aesthetics is usually associated with his attempt to think about cinematic construction or montage, which would run counter to the semblance of mimetic immediacy in the filmic medium. In the passage cited above, however, we get a different scenario: the construction of film as art is apparently seen as involving not an imminent progress or mastery of cinematic technique, but rather a relaxing or deterioration of such technique.[1] As Adorno goes on to elaborate, in contrast to the “semblance of immediacy” achieved by the advanced technological procedures of the cinematic products of the culture industry, “film … must search for other means of conveying immediacy: improvisation which systematically surrenders itself to unguided chance should rank high among the possible alternatives” (“Transparencies” 200).

In light of the division between mass culture and autonomous art associated with Adorno’s work, the juxtaposition framed above might appear counterintuitive. On one prominent reading of “Transparencies on Film,” Adorno is interested in thinking about the possibility of film aesthetics, of film as a mode of reflection involving work on specific, historically mediated, aesthetic materials.[2] Accordingly, his “surrender” to chance is seen as intrinsic to the development of cinematic technique, understood as distinct from the broader state of technological advancement that feeds into the development of the cinema (Miriam Hansen, Cinema 218). Given that Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park are prototypical Hollywood blockbusters, the fate of their computer-generated images is apparently not the technological backwardness suggested in “Transparencies on Film.” In contrast to Adorno’s “awkward and unprofessional cinema,” the later move to a condition of relative technological backwardness—the degrading of the computer-generated images—apparently develops according to a calculation of audience response and expectations and is thus congruent with the reduction of cultural products to the status of art commodities.

To say this much raises the problem of the distinction between autonomous art and mass culture that has been a staple of commentary on Adorno and the Frankfurt School more generally. While it is usually commentaries following from the posthumous publication of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) that locate the challenge to this distinction, there is a prominent line of thought in Adorno’s writings on mass culture and on Samuel Beckett, and in certain moments in the Aesthetic Theory, that either challenges the distinction between art and mass culture or renders it ambiguous and undecidable. The conclusion of Adorno’s “Trying to Understand Endgame” (1961), for example, proclaims the loss of distinction between the nihilistic products of the culture industry and the autonomous artwork, with its promise of reconciliation or transcendence of historical actuality: “The last absurdity is that the peacefulness of the void and the peacefulness of reconciliation cannot be distinguished from one another” (Notes 274). Eva Geulen registers this point when she writes, “what the close of the Beckett essay formulates so pointedly … can already be found in the excursus on the culture industry in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, the relationship between good art and bad culture industry is not merely antagonistic, but strictly reciprocal” (99).[3] Given this dimension of Adorno’s thought, the comparison of his reflections in “Transparencies on Film” with the technological travails of the 1990s Hollywood blockbuster arguably follows from a logic intrinsic to his reflections on mass culture and modernism. Extending this line of thought, one underlying interest of the following reflections is the pertinence of Adorno’s thinking about film for a contemporary situation in which digitization and the proliferation of new media technologies raise (again) the issue of the relationship between technology and art.[4] Adorno has not, for the most part, been a central reference point in discussions of art and digital technology. Books by David Joselit and Mark Hansen on art and new media suggest that Walter Benjamin’s writings on mass culture, in particular the well-known thesis of the decline of the aura, have a greater currency in addressing the contemporary media environment than those of Adorno.[5] This assessment apparently reflects a received conception of Adorno as invested in the category of the autonomous artwork, in contradistinction to mass culture.[6] This lingering sense of a division in Adorno’s work between art and non-art has apparently militated against his currency in attempts to account for the new media environment.

However, at a moment when the problem of art’s criticality and autonomy is receiving renewed critical consideration,[7] Adorno’s reflections on cinema, and his thinking about the relationship between technology and aesthetic technique more broadly, merit attention. Where Benjamin’s well-known writings on film tend to consign the category of autonomous art to historical obsolescence, Adorno’s reflections on the cinema continue to grapple with the status of aesthetic technique, as a distinctive form or rationality, in the era of technical reproducibility, even as this strand of his work suggests the obsolescence of medium-specific artistic reflection and the concurrent waning of the distinction between art and mass culture. This fraught negotiation, in other words, remains cognizant of the claims of both “torn halves of an integral freedom,” to evoke Adorno’s striking description of cinema and “great art” in his famous epistolary debate with Benjamin of the 1930s (Adorno and Benjamin 130). For this reason, Adorno’s reflections on film bear consideration at a moment in which, as Peter Osborne argues, “art’s authority and critical function remain problems within contemporary culture” (7). One way that Adorno confronts this problem, especially in his work dating from the 1950s and 1960s, is in articulating together the formal dynamics of the cinema and the linguistic dynamics of the novel. I will argue that this co-articulation of novelistic and cinematic language may be seen as a response to the problem of how to maintain a function of aesthetic technique, as a specific mode of rationality, in an era in which historical developments have rendered obsolete the project of medium-specific aesthetic reflection.[8] In other words, Adorno’s reflections on novelistic-filmic language serve a crucial underlying interest of his aesthetic theory—to maintain the possibility of art’s uneven development, of art’s thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context.

One of the most pervasive positions in commentary on Adorno and mass culture is that he is suspicious of the cinematic medium due to its capacity to create a semblance of visual immediacy. The underlying obstacle for the project of thinking together the categories of film and art, for the possibility of film aesthetics, has been located in this dimension of film, which runs contrary to the demands of aesthetic construction and autonomy. The corollary of this proposition is that the way forward for a critical version of film art lies in its development of techniques that emphasize the role of rational construction immanent to the cinematic medium. In more particular terms, Adorno is commonly seen to embrace cinematic montage—the discontinuous editing associated with the work of Sergei Eisenstein and subsequently with the avant-garde cinema of Alexander Kluge and others—as a corrective to the filmic medium’s tendency to privilege the represented object rather than the components of aesthetic construction.[9]

Adorno’s work clearly provides some authorization for this reading. In “Transparencies on Film,” he writes that an “obvious answer” to the dilemma faced by film “is that of montage which does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of writing” (203). As Miriam Hansen has emphasized, however, “Transparencies on Film” equivocates about the “viability” of montage (Cinema 221-24). Adorno writes, in a continuation of the passage cited immediately above, that “pure montage, without the addition of intentionality in its elements, does not derive intention merely from the principle itself. It seems illusory to claim that through the renunciation of all meaning … meaning will emerge from the reproduced material itself” (203). This suspicion of cinematic montage reprises Adorno’s earlier criticism of the methodology of Benjamin’s work-in-progress of the 1930s, when he called attention to Benjamin’s “questionable procedure of ‘abstention’” (Adorno and Benjamin 282).[10] If, on Adorno’s account, one underlying problem with montage is the sacrifice of subjective rationality and intentionality, this problem also arises in conjunction with the photographic basis of film: “the photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher intrinsic significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous techniques…. Even where film dissolves and modifies its objects as much as it can, the disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction” (Adorno, “Transparencies” 202).

Taken together, these two aspects of Adorno’s “Transparencies on Film”—its doubts about the procedure of montage and its suspicion of the photographic basis of film—suggest that the threat to autonomy and rationality associated with mass culture and its technologies continues to preoccupy Adorno’s thinking about film. In other words, the well-known intervention of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which insists on the sacrifice of subjective autonomy attending on the development of mass culture, is not far from the reflections of “Transparencies on Film,” a commentary ostensibly devoted to reflection on the aesthetic possibilities of film. As commentators have recognized, Adorno’s thinking remains equivocal and ambivalent regarding the aesthetic capabilities of film.[11] Miriam Hansen argues that the “heart of the problem that Adorno confronts for a film aesthetics appears to be that the photographic basis of the moving image privileges the representational object over aesthetically autonomous procedures” (Cinema 220). To frame things in this way, however, is to overly circumscribe the central issues Adorno addresses. The larger problem for the attempt to reconcile film with the category of autonomous art is whether it is possible to distinguish a function of aesthetic technique from the broader condition of technological development in the given historical context. In this regard, Adorno’s thinking about film converges with his address to the possibility of aesthetic rationality more generally. An excursus through Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory helps focus the antinomy involved here. Adorno’s formulations in this text indicate that the distinction between technology and aesthetic technique is fundamental for the preservation of aesthetic rationality; to erase this distinction runs the risk of collapsing the distance between art and the empirical world, thus precluding the possibility of aesthetic autonomy. Thinking along these lines, Aesthetic Theory argues that “even in film, industrial and aesthetic-craftsmanlike elements diverge under socioeconomic pressure. The radical industrialization of art, its undiminished adaptation to the achieved technical standards, collides with what in art resists integration” (217). At issue here, however, is not a secure opposition between artistic technique and technology, between art and non-art, but rather a scenario of constitutive heteronomy in which the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere is invaded by technology: “art is modern when, by its mode of experience and as the expression of crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production” (Aesthetic Theory 34). There is thus an antinomy intrinsic to Adorno’s account of the relation between aesthetic technique and technology. Autonomous art necessarily integrates the most advanced techniques of capitalist production—it registers the technological development of its historical moment—but such integration threatens the status of aesthetic language and critical distance. And as “Transparencies on Film” suggests, this threat to aesthetic language is brought to a pitch in film: “the late emergence of film makes it difficult to distinguish between technique and technology as clearly as it is possible in music…. Film suggests the equation of technique and technology since, as Benjamin observed, the cinema has no original which is then reproduced on a mass scale: the mass product is the thing itself” (200).

Adorno’s commentary on montage unfolds as an instantiation of this antinomy. Montage maintains the principle intrinsic to autonomous art of rational control over aesthetic materials; at the same time, this situation involves a convergence between montage and forms of rationality and technological control that are external to art: “Art wants to admit its powerlessness vis-à-vis late capitalist totality and to initiate its abrogation. Montage is the inner-aesthetic capitulation of art to what stands heterogeneously opposed to it” (Aesthetic Theory 155). The convergence between montage and extra-aesthetic forms of rationality is thus a crucial component of the autonomous artwork, but this dynamic also entails the dissolution of aesthetic rationality as a distinct category: “the idea of montage and that of technological construction, which is inseparable from it, becomes irreconcilable with the idea of the radical, fully formed artwork with which it was once recognized as being identical…. The technique [montage] no longer suffices to trigger communication between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic” (Aesthetic Theory 155-56).

In view of this understanding of the underlying stakes of Adorno’s thinking about cinema, and the limitation that he sees in the principle of montage, I want to propose an approach that stakes a distance from the oppositions that have oriented discussions of Adorno and the cinema so far—the oppositions between avant-garde montage and the standardized practices of the culture industry, aesthetic construction and the false immediacy of the cinematic image. “Transparencies on Film” and Aesthetic Theory in fact suggest another approach to the problem of aesthetic technique instantiated by the cinema. Aesthetic Theory insists that “aesthetic rationality demands that all artistic means reach the utmost determinacy in themselves and according to their own function” (35), but this scenario of stringent aesthetic rationality is subsequently qualified when Adorno introduces the suggestion that a slackening or relaxation of technique, a “reduction of means,” may serve a crucial function for art: “The current tendency, evident in media of all kinds, to manipulate accident is probably an effort to avoid old-fashioned and effectively superfluous craftsman-like methods in art without delivering art over to the instrumental rationality of mass production” (216-17). At this point we are brought back to the problem of film’s relationship to aesthetic technique; this passage echoes the scenario, evoked at the opening of “Transparencies on Film,” of an “awkward and unprofessional” cinema that submits to a loss of rational control or “systematically surrenders itself to unguided chance.” This strand of Adorno’s work thus suggests an ambiguous surrender of subjective intentionality, a relinquishment of rational control that appears not as a weakness or limitation attending on the dynamics of the filmic medium, but rather as a possible way forward for cinematic reflection. This surrender of subjective control appears to be of a different order than the unfortunate and unwelcome surrender of subjective intentionality or rational construction evoked in Adorno’s comments on montage and the photographic basis of film. In contrast to the undesirable sacrifice of subjective intentionality, Adorno’s “awkward and unprofessional” cinema, with its oxymoronic scenario of the planned surrender of subjective control, raises the possibility that such self-relinquishment may in fact be intrinsic to a particular mode or reflection located with the cinematic medium.[12]

This mode of reflection is elaborated in a subsequent passage of “Transparencies on Film” that outlines another approach to the problem of a mode of aesthetic technique germane to the cinema. After noting that “it appears impossible to derive norms of criticism from cinematographic technique as such,” Adorno continues,

Irrespective of the technological origins of cinema, film will do better to base itself on a subject mode of experience which film resembles and which constitutes its artistic character. A person who, after a year in the city, spends a few weeks in the mountains abstaining from all work, may unexpectedly experience colorful images of landscapes consolingly coming over him or her in dreams or daydreams. These images do not merge into one another in a continuous flow, but are rather set off against each other in their appearance, much like the magic lantern slides of our childhood. It is in the discontinuity of their movement that the images of the interior monologue resemble the phenomenon of writing: the latter similarly moving before our eyes while fixed in their discrete signs. (201)

For the purposes of my discussion, what requires consideration here is the unintentional nature of the mode of experience Adorno evokes. The passage suggests an ambiguous relinquishing of rational control that is intrinsic to a heteronomy constitutive of the filmic medium. This raises the problem, however, of distinguishing this experience from the sacrifice of subjective autonomy involved in the distraction, regression, or loss of critical distance that marks the experience (Erlebnis) of the culture industry.

To address this question it is useful to consider other points in Adorno’s oeuvre that also suggest this mode of filmic experience. Minima Moralia’s (1951) comments on cinema communicate with the above-cited passage from “Transparencies,” while adding an inflection that connects this reflection on film with Adorno’s understanding of the contemporary status of novelistic language. Distinguishing a form of filmic “radical naturalism” from the “pseudo-realism of the culture industry,” Adorno writes, “if film were to give itself up to the blind representation of everyday life, following the precepts of, say, Zola, as would indeed be practicable with moving photography and sound recording, the result would be a construction alien to the visual habits of the audience, diffuse, unarticulated, outwards…. The film would turn into an associative stream of images” (Minima 141-42). While the “stream of images” evoked here appears to be a version of the images of “dreams or daydreams” with which “Transparencies” associates film experience, what comes into clearer focus in this passage is the scenario of ambiguous self-relinquishing that is intrinsic to the program of “radical naturalism.” This program is presented as an alternative to the modus operandi of the products of the culture industry, and thus presumably offers a path for film as an autonomous aesthetic language. At the same time, the scenario of film giving “itself up to the blind representation of everyday life” does not sound like an operation of aesthetic negation, transcendence, or separation from the empirical world.

Adorno’s thought process here may be clarified if we consider more closely the notion of “blind representation.” Elsewhere in his oeuvre, the paradigmatic scenario of “blind representation” is epic narration: “it is no accident that tradition has it that Homer was blind,” Adorno states in “On Epic Naiveté,” a commentary that he composed with Max Horkheimer in 1943 during the preparation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. This commentary conceives of “epic naiveté,” or “narrative stupidity,” as “a stubborn clinging to the particular when it has already been dissolved into the universal,” a stalling of narrative progress, and a futile “attempt to emancipate representation from reflective reason” (Notes 25-27). This tendency in language is not restricted to works usually characterized as epics: nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction and poetry also exemplify epic naiveté. The conclusion of this commentary indicates the convergence between Adorno’s reflections on epic language and film:

in those [epic] poems the force of the historical tendency at work in the language and subject matter is so strong that in the course of the proceedings taking place between subjectivity and mythology human beings and things are transformed into mere arenas through the blindness with which the epic delivers itself over to their representation…. It is the objective transformation of pure representation, detached from meaning, into the allegory of history that becomes visible in the logical disintegration of epic language…. It is only by abandoning meaning that epic discourse comes to resemble the image, a figure of objective meaning emerging from the negation of subjectively rational meaning. (Notes 28-29)

Taking up the problem of interpretation that inheres in the estranged cultural form or object—the commodity or the allegorical object, disengaged from human aims or use value—Adorno alludes to the reorientation around language and medium that informs Benjamin’s work in the 1930s. Adorno’s evocation of the image or figure emerging in language echoes Benjamin’s conception of the dialectical image: “The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash” (Benjamin 473).[13] Adorno’s account suggests that the image may emerge unbidden, not as a product of subjective volition. This meditation on language, like Benjamin’s, thus suggests a circumvention of subjective intentionality or productivity that verges on being a passive or receptive attitude. This scenario, moreover, converges with Adorno’s accounts of cinematic experience and language, in “Transparencies” and elsewhere, that foreground the heteronomy intrinsic to the cinematic medium. At the same time, this strand of thought raises the problem of the sacrifice of critical subjectivity.

Adorno’s account of historical images as “instruments of human reason” in “The Actuality of Philosophy” (1931) stipulates that “every other conception of models would be gnostic and indefensible” (131). If we juxtapose this comment with the emergent image evoked in “On Epic Naiveté,” or with the writings on film that suggest a relinquishing of intentionality, it is unclear how these scenarios avoid the “indefensible” gnostic sacrifice of the human subject. Here reflection on the epic and the novel becomes a crucial reference point. In “On Epic Naiveté” and elsewhere in Adorno’s oeuvre, the epic and the novel become important for his framing of an ambiguous, possibly only strategic, relinquishing of critical subjectivity. Epic naiveté may lose itself in “the attempt to emancipate representation from reflective reason,” apparently sacrificing its critical distance or capacity, but for Adorno this surrender of reason may only be a strategic ruse, to evoke Hegel’s notion of the cunning of reason. Adorno’s formulations in “On Epic Naiveté,” which balance between regression and enlightenment, the relinquishing of critical distance and its ambiguous persistence, suggest this possibility of strategic self-renunciation; narrative “looks” into the abyss, or moves to “the edge of madness,” hovering on the brink of dissolution, while at the same time epic naiveté is presented as an “anti-mythological enterprise” (Notes 25-27). This ambiguous self-divestiture is suggested in the account of Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels after him, throws himself away in order to win himself” (38-39).

The formulation “throwing away in order to win” alludes to a comment by Georg Lukács in The Theory of the Novel (1920): “this is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, its ‘throwing away in order to win’: creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it” (53). The epic subject is receptive and passive rather than spontaneous or productive, and this condition contrasts with “the productivity of spirit” at issue in the world of the novel (Lukács 33). But while Lukács locates this gesture of “throwing away in order to win” with “the subjectivity of the great epic,” The Theory of the Novel indicates that this scenario is not confined to the epic per se, but remains a possibility circulating in the historical situation of the novel. For example, according to Lukács, Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale attains “true epic objectivity” through a submission to the disintegration of “outside reality” and an abstention from subjective “unification”: “the separate fragments of reality lie before us in all their hardness, brokenness, and isolation…. This novel, of all novels of the nineteenth century, is one of the most typical of the novel form; in the unmitigated desolation of its elements it is the only novel that attains true epic objectivity” (124). At such moments we face a confusion between the form-giving, productive subject of modernity and the receptiveness and absence of interpretation that Lukács ascribes to epic subjectivity. If this confusion runs the risk of abandoning systematicity, it also perpetuates the normative aspiration to overcome the estrangement between meaningful forms and the enabling (material and other) conditions of such forms.

This line of thought would be taken up by Adorno in his reflections on the epic and the novel—the logic of the epic is not simply opposed to the novel and the antinomies of capitalist modernity, but rather situated as part of the project of enlightenment.[14] This reflection on the novel provides a framework for Adorno to elaborate on the condition of the distracted subject of modernity developed by Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, especially in their writings on film and mass culture. This point is more or less explicit in “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel” (1954). Here Adorno says that the contemporary novel (a category that for him includes the work of Kafka, Joyce, Proust, and presumably Beckett) produces both “shocks” that destroy “the reader’s contemplative security” and a corresponding abolition of “aesthetic distance,” and he compares this tendency of the novel to the logic of the filmic medium (Notes 34-36). Adorno thus reads the contemporary European novel as coextensive with the distraction and erosion of auratic distance that Benjamin associated with technologies of mechanical reproducibility and the experience of modernity more generally.[15] This is Adorno’s  particular approach to the weakening of subjectivity that he sees accompanying the development of the culture industry. But this vein of his work also involves a lingering possibility of the survival of enlightened thought: to insert the scenario of distracted subjectivity into an account of novelistic language allows Adorno  to avoid the definitive eclipse of rational reflection to which he feared Benjamin’s thought at times led.[16] In this way the form of the contemporary novel converges with the stratagems of Odysseus, as Adorno presents them. As he puts it, the novel is prone to a strategic and ambiguous “capitulation to the superior power of reality” (Notes 36).

To return to “Transparencies on Film,” while this commentary mentions the novel only in passing, and actually does so in order to contrast it with the filmic medium, at this point we can see why the novelistic scenario of cunning self-surrender might converge with Adorno’s approach to the dilemmas of film aesthetics. The underlying logic of this connection may be stated in these terms: the problem raised by film aesthetics, of an aesthetic medium premised on the ambiguous collapse of a critical distance between the medium and the capitalist reduction to exchange value, is already central to the formal and linguistic dynamics of the novel as Adorno conceives them. “Transparencies on Film” suggests that if film is to retain the function of critical reflection, a form of strategic self-relinquishing is required that is distinct from the sacrifice of subjective autonomy associated with the culture industry, which is to say, a strategic self-surrender that paradoxically advances a project of reflection inhering in the historical condition of the filmic medium. We see Adorno working out models for such self-relinquishing, a sacrifice of the subject that is inscribed within the project of enlightenment, in his writings on the novel and the epic—for example, in his account of the “epic form of linkage,” in “On Epic Naiveté”: “the train of thought finally goes slack, language shows a lenience towards judgment while at the same time unquestionably remaining judgment” (Notes 28). This “slackening” of thought is the equivalent, in the realm of literary language, of Adorno’s “awkward and unprofessional cinema,” with its planned surrender to chance. In other words, the scenario of epic naiveté, like the possibility of “blind representation” Adorno locates with film and epic language, may be understood as developing art’s thought of uneven development. In each of these cases, aesthetic technique apparently lags behind a more general state of technological advancement but this apparent backwardness also serves to maintain the possibility of a distinction between technological development and aesthetic technique.[17] Crucially, this particular mode of aesthetic uneven development does not depend on a scenario of medium-specific aesthetic reflection. In this regard epic naiveté, or the scenario of “blind representation,” perpetuates a thought of aesthetic rationality in the historical situation focused in Adorno’s writings on film—a situation in which film instantiates the collapse of any difference between technology and artistic technique and the disappearance of art’s critical distance from the reigning forms of social rationality. As the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests, such critical distance is a precondition of any meaningful artistic medium specificity (97-98). Whatever other issues one might raise in this regard—for example, film’s status as a particularly hybrid or mongrel artistic medium—the larger point is that Adorno positions film as lacking in distinction from the empirical world, and film’s problematic relationship with the category of artistic medium specificity should be understood as deriving from its particular intimacy with the dynamics of reification.[18]

The conclusion to be drawn is not necessarily that Adorno gives up on film as a medium of aesthetic rationality. Nor is it the case that he is unconcerned with the category of medium in his work on the cinema. In fact, as my discussion above suggests, a particular reflection on linguistic medium is precisely what allows Adorno to negotiate the apparent loss of art’s critical distinction, the loss of its critical distance from empirical reality, and the possible collapse of any difference between technology and artistic technique. Adorno develops this reflection on linguistic medium in his somewhat fragmentary suggestions about a strategic “lagging behind” in the development of cinematic technique and in the scenario of strategic submission or “blind representation” evoked in his writings on film, the epic, and the novel. In our contemporary context of proliferating new media technologies and cultural homogenization, Adorno’s scenarios of technical backwardness and ambiguous relinquishing of rational control might appear as a modernist throwback. In fact, contemporary cultural and artistic reflection arguably suggests the relevance of this strand of Adorno’s thought—one might cite the current preoccupation in photographic theory and practice with analogue photographic technology and notions of photographic automatism and indexicality, at a moment when such technology is being displaced by digital technology;[19] or contemporary fiction invested in scenarios of self-abnegation and diminished authorial or artistic control.[20] Possibly, along with Adorno’s intertwined meditations on the novel and the cinema, these contemporary artistic and theoretical reflections maintain the thought of art’s uneven development, of art’s ambiguous backwardness vis-à-vis a more general social condition of technological development—the thought, in other words, of a distinctive form of aesthetic rationality at a moment in which the paradigm of aesthetic medium specificity appears to be obsolete, even as art’s critical potential remains an open question.

Footnotes

[1] Miriam Hansen argues that Adorno is defending here the relative lack of technical sophistication of young German filmmakers of the period, such as Volker Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz, and Alexander Kluge (Cinema 218).

[2] See Miriam Hansen, “Introduction” 190 and Cinema 218-24; and Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought 131-33.

[3] Peter Hohendahl has suggested that this abandoning of the distinction of autonomous art and its critical capacity is also visible in certain moments of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “Adorno seems to push the limits of his theory and thereby undermines the more familiar negative dialectic. The result is the abandonment of art as a critical counterpoint (“Ephemeral” 211).

[4] On this contemporary question of technology and the category of art as it arises in conjunction with the development of digital technologies, see Rodowick, especially 2-41.

[5] Cf. Peter Osborne’s recent account of contemporary art, where Adorno is a central reference point.

[6] For an example of this conception of Adorno as it circulates in new media studies, see Pressman 193.

[7] See, for example, Bernstein, Goldstone, Siraganian.

[8] At end of her exhaustive reading of Adorno’s writings on film, Miriam Hansen concludes that Adorno’s work on film aesthetics “does not amount to a coherent theory,” and given this, “for Adorno, the aesthetic possibilities of and for film have to be gleaned from elsewhere, from his writings on art in general and music in particular” (Cinema 250). To an extent my argument dovetails with Hansen’s claim, while staking a distance from it in my emphasis on Adorno’s thinking about film and the novel form.

[9] See, for example, Koch, “Mimesis”; Miriam Hansen, Cinema 218-25; and Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought 133-35.

[10] In The Arcades Project, Benjamin states, “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show” (460).

[11] See, for example, Koch, “Uneasy Pleasing” 78.

[12] Miriam Hansen connects this strand of Adorno’s thinking on film to his encounter with postserialism in music: “the admission of chance as an aesthetic principle aligns with his efforts to come to terms with postserialism, in particular the aleatory aesthetics of John Cage” (Cinema 219).

[13] Benjamin’s dialectical image is not an object of vision, intuition, or intentionality, but rather may be recognized in language; to cite a well-known formulation, Benjamin conceives of the emergent image in terms of “the death of intention” (463). Adorno’s comments in “On Epic Naiveté” refer to this conception of the dialectical image and inscribe it in a narrative framework. The move runs counter to Benjamin’s formulations in The Arcades Project insofar as they conceive the logic of the dialectical image and the work of the dialectical historian as an alternative to narrative progression and relationship: “History decays into images, not into stories” (Benjamin 476).

[14] This point is suggested in the account of the epic in Hegel’s Aesthetics (2: 1045-1050).

[15] Cf. Adorno’s notes on Beckett’s The Unnamable: “the novel is completely unrealistic and at the same time unauratic” (“Notes on Beckett” 177).

[16] To say this much suggests Adorno’s interest in inscribing Benjamin’s thought within the project of enlightenment. Such a program is manifest elsewhere in Adorno’s explicit writings on Benjamin. In “A Portrait of Walter Benjamin,” he writes, “mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time in him,” stressing Benjamin’s recourse to concepts, “the only means which philosophy has at its disposal” (Prisms 241).

[17] A fuller exploration of this strand of Adorno’s thought would consider the role of naiveté in his writings on music. See, for example, Mahler (1971), in which Adorno diagnoses an “intertwinement of naiveté and sophistication” in Mahler’s work, a formal dynamic that Adorno compares to the that of the novel, specifically here “the novel of novels, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary” (61).

[18] See Rodowick 2-46 on film’s status as a particularly hybrid medium, especially resistant to a specialization and purification along the lines developed by Clement Greenberg. Adorno seems to implicitly recognize this aspect of film when he states “for the time being, evidently, film’s most promising potential lies in its interaction with other media, themselves merging into film, such as certain kinds of music” (“Transparencies” 203).

[19] See, for example, the 2012 special issue of Critical Inquiry, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iverson, titled “Agency and Automatism: Photography and Art since the 1960s.”

[20] J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2005); Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family and A Man in Love (2009); Tom McCarthy, Remainder (2007) and Satin Island (2015), W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001).

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