Deception Theory

Adorno vs. Jauss: Aesthetic Value in the Face of Commodification

Explicitly or implicitly, reception theories of literature often position themselves against Marxist aesthetics, which they claim reduces art to a mere epiphenomenon of the superstructure – a passive reflection of society’s underlying economic forces. 

Hans Robert Jauss has engaged explicitly and willingly in that dispute. Already in his famous German inaugural address of 1967, titled "Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory", he generalizes what he imagines the above mentioned aesthetics to be by hand-picking some of the worse pieces written by Lukács (while pretending they were not already thoroughly contested by other renowned ambassadors of that same critical tradition, such as Brecht and Adorno), which he mixes up with concepts taken from Goldmann, whom he misreads, and ends up highlighting a major contradiction in that line of thought. The "contradiction" he identifies is the following: if there really is, as Marxists claim, a homology between a pre-existing basic social structure and artistic phenomena, then the result can only be the complete identity of form and content, which is impossible given that their reciprocal influence is denied once one posits, as Marxists themselves generally do, economics as the determinant factor (cf. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005, pp. 13-14). 

A literary critic should pay more carefully attention to the words he uses. "Homology", for a start, does not mean "identity". Secondly, what in preeminent Marxist criticism is structurally homologous are not form and content; it is on the contrary the form of the social and the fundamental forms worked out by the artist in order to organize the material he chooses to work upon that are homologous, which is completely different from what Jauss is making out of the position he elected to bout by identifying all Marxist critique with the infamous "theory of reflection". But who really in the Marxist camp sustained such a rudimentary model at the end of the sixties apart from some (to employ a Joycean expression) "reptrograd leanins"? 

Now let’s shift, for a contrast, to the position put forward by Adorno in his philosophical testament, published posthumously three years later. Already in the very first pages of Aesthetic Theory (London/New York: Continuum, 2004, pp. 6-7), it becomes clear that, in the best versions of Marxist aesthetics, things are not as black and white as Jauss had claimed (and it is not as if the ideas of the Frankfurt School philosopher on art and society were unknown at the time he made his public address, notably in Germany). It is worth quoting:

If art opposes the empirical through the element of form – and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation – the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. [...] They [artworks] are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them. The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world’s factual façade converges with the real essence. [...] The moment a limit is posited [resuming Hegel’s argument against Kant], it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moralizing, is the critique of l’art pour l’art, which by abstract negation posits the χωρισμός of art as absolute. [trans. R. Hullot-Kentor]

Well, a moralizing alternative solution to Adorno’s "somber" approach is exactly what Jauss preached a couple of years after the publication of Aesthetic Theory, except that, to put it mildly, he completely misses the bull’s eye in his discussion of the latter. Artworks according to his normative aesthetic of reception must lead to symbolic practices geared towards solidarity, reason why he attacks the Frankfurt School thinker, for not searching to build a bridge between the solitary contemplative artistic experience and engagement in dialogical practices; instead of focusing on negation, art should seek to create an objective binding meaning (cf. Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008, pp. 13-21). To say the least, the whole question is poorly formulated, since such a bridge, the adequacy of artistic products to an ideal would mean sacrificing quality from the start (not to mention the fact that nothing guarantees that dialogical practices in the present conditions, in which social language is constantly penetrated by commoditized mediations that ossify and devitalize significations, would by themselves lead to qualitative social change or even to solidarity). 

Taking the reasoning to the end, a work such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin would stand, according to such highly noble criterion, as superior to, say, The Castle, for, even though literarily speaking Stowe’s novel is awful, it "communicates better" and usually rouse empathetic feelings, whereas Kafka’s book might lead to incomprehension and eventually leave the reader indifferent, if not more confused than ever. In that optic, if I’m allowed to caricaturize a bit, we would be better off without books like Finnegans Wake or The Unnamable, as they do not contribute an inch in creating the objective binding meaning Jauss nostalgically dreams of, whereas a cheesy Paulo Coelho novel might just fit in perfectly. Jokes aside, and to state it plainly, the problem is not in the moral intention itself, as intentions are not the decisive factor in the composition (or, for that matter, the reception) of a work of art. What is crucial is the work’s formal coherence and the truth content it expresses (Flaubert already, in a famous letter to Louise Colet, sustains exactly the same). As Terry Eagleton puts it in The Event of Literature (New Haven/London: Yale University, 2012, p. 69): "Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not an embarrassingly second-rate novel because it has a specific moral purpose – so does Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Tolstoy’s Resurrection and Orwell’s Animal Farm – but because of the way it executes it. One might contrast it in this respect with The Grapes of Wrath, The Crucible or Ibsen’s Pillars of Community." 

Moreover, let’s not forget that for Adorno art cannot move within the circle of mutual understanding rooted in the ordinary uses of language in everyday communication, for the simple reason that the kernel of our most significant experiences – personal as well as social – cannot be apprehended except as the very inadequacy between language (not only ordinary language, but also in its theoretical or scientific uses) and that which it intends to designate or describe. There is where the mimetic language of art, operating at the objective level of form, may express that which cannot be expressed in direct dialogical or communicative fashion: "Though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irrationalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. [...] Suffering conceptualized remains mute." (Aesthetic Theory, p. 24) 

That’s what distinguishes consequent works of art from most pop narcotics, what separates, let’s say, Spielberg’s maudlin Schindler’s List, the multiple Oscar awarded worldwide box office success, from a generally execrated movie like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. By sticking to historical reality (or to what we know of it) and pretending to portray the events as faithfully as possible from the point of view of those who took part in them, the former ultimately falsifies the whole thing by turning the barely imaginable horror of the holocaust into a commodity fit to the Hollywood melodramatic frame (which comprises blind sympathetic identification, heroic exemplarity, clear consensus over what is good and what is evil) and its over-stereotyping standards (the Jew is but a grotesque caricature of the Jew, and the same goes for the Nazi), with its cheap symbolism and implausible moral absolutes (so that you can watch it in the evening after work, eventually get moved by the story, and go right back to your ordinary life, which in any case gets away confirmed and legitimized). As dreadful as it really is, Pasolini’s last movie, on the other hand, by being almost unbearable (even if one manages to watch it to the end, it is a considerably indigestive experience), to the point of being to this day and age still banned in several countries (not much for its extremely graphic scenes of violence, I suspect, but above all for depicting fascism as the latest flower of the enlightened and highly refined European civilization), does way more justice to the intolerable truth of what took place during WWII, as well as to actual victims of fascism anywhere. 

All that is not to say, as some rather poor reading of Adorno might suggest, that only nearly excruciating works are legitimate – reading Huckleberry Finn remains a very pleasant experience, which does not change the fact that it is a novel way superior to the much less amusing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as it articulates incomparably better than this latter the deep truth of Antebellum American society –, for what is decisive is precisely the "feeling of truth" (as Antonio Candido would have it) conveyed by the work, wherein resides its true moral dimension.