All artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such: they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content.
“[Dagegen sind] alle Kunstwerke Schriften, und zwar hieroglyphenhafte, zu denen der Code verloren ward und zu deren Gehalt nicht zuletzt beiträgt, dass er fehlt. Sprache sind Kunstwerke nur als Schrift.”
— Theodor Adorno - Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, S.189 (via spurloser)
Das Barbarische ist das Buchstäbliche. Gänzlich versachlicht wird das Kunstwerk, kraft seiner puren Gesetzmäßigkeit, zum bloßen Faktum und damit als Kunst abgeschafft.
“
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Theodor W. Adorno: Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, S. 15. (via diesebastionbehrisch)
Daß das, woran Kunst wie auch immer mahnt, nicht ist, löst Wut aus; sie wird aufs Bild jenes Anderen übertragen, es wird beschmiert. Archetypen des Vulgären, das die Kunst des emanzipatorischen Bürgertums in ihren Clowns, Dienern und Papagenos zuweilen genial im Zaum hielt, sind die grinsenden Reklameschönheiten geworden, in deren Preis zugunsten von Zahnpastenmarken die Plakate aller Länder sich vereinigen, und denen solche, die um soviel weiblichen Glanz sich betrogen wissen, die allzu blendenden Zähne anschwärzen und in heiliger Unschuld die Wahrheit über den Glanz der Kultur sichtbar machen. Dies Interesse zumindest wird vom Vulgären wahrgenommen. Weil ästhetische Vulgarität undialektisch die Invariante sozialer Erniedrigung nachmacht, hat sie keine Geschichte; die Graffiti feiern ihre ewige Wiederkehr.
“
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Adorno - Ästhetische Theorie. (GS) S. 356f.
Theodor W. Adorno: Freizeit, Zeit der Freiheit? Leben als Konterbande. Deutschlandfunk, 25 Mai 1969 (on the youtube channel of eDysfunktion)
Text in GS Bd10/2 Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II S. 645-655
my friend and I have been having a back-and-forth email conversation between us and the philosophy department head trying to convince him that Radiohead does not totally fall under Adorno’s criticisms of popular music in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. It’s hilarious, actually, cause he says they do but my friend and I keep saying, “have you listened to Kid A? Have you listened to ____?” and so we’re trying to sum up Radiohead’s career in an email. It’s kind of a shitshow, but it’s also hilarious. I’m going to send him some Godspeed You! Black Emperor and say HA EVALUATE THIS! I love being a musical elitist. I’m such an asshole.
In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, re-arranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he inevitably produces, as his family once did, refuse and lumber. But now he lacks a store-room, and it is hard in any case to part from left-overs. So he pushes them along in front of him, in danger finally of filling his pages with them. The demand that one harden oneself against self-pity implies the technical necessity to counter any slackening of intellectual tension with the utmost alertness, and to eliminate anything that has begun to encrust the work or to drift along idly, which may at an earlier stage have served, as gossip, to generate the warm atmosphere conducive to growth, but is now left behind, flat and stale. In the end, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing.
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Theodor W. Adorno - Minima Moralia, Reflections on a Damaged Life (51 Memento) (via writinghomes)
It would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom counterfeits as positivity. If in fulfillment of the wish a future art were once again to become positive, then the suspicion that negativity were in actuality persisting would become acute; this suspicion is ever present, regression threatens unremittingly, and freedom—surely freedom from the principle of possession—cannot be possessed. But then what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering.
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The Most Dangerous Failures: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. 1997 ed. p.261.
on art history / zur kunstwissenschaft, nr. 343
Es ist die Geste des Lösens. Die Spannung der Gesichtsmuskulatur gibt nach, jene Spannung, welche das Antlitz, indem sie es in Aktion auf die Umwelt richtet, von dieser zugleich absperrt.
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Theodor W. Adorno - Philosophie der Neuen Musik, S. 122
und weiter: “Musik und Weinen öffnen die Lippen und geben den angehaltenen Menschen los. Die Sentimentalität der unteren Musik erinnert in verzerrter Gestalt, was die obere Musik in der wahren am Rande des Wahnsinns gerade eben zu entwerfen vermag: Versöhnung. Der Mensch, der sich verströmen läßt im Weinen und einer Musik, die in nichts mehr ihm gleich ist, läßt zugleich den Strom dessen in sich zurückfluten, was nicht er selber ist und was hinter dem Damm der Dingwelt gestaut war. Als Weinender wie als Singender geht er in die entfremdete Wirklichkeit ein. […] In der Potentialität der letzten Phase der Musik meldet sich ein Wechsel ihres Standorts an. Sie ist nicht länger Aussage und Abbild eines Inwendigen, sondern ein Verhalten zur Realität, die sie erkennt, indem sie nicht länger im Bilde sie schlichtet. Damit verändert sich bei äußerster Isolierung ihr gesellschaftlicher Charakter.”
a translation:
“It is the gesture of release. The tension of the facial muscles, the tension which both directs the face into action on the environment and seals it off from that environment, is released. Music and tears open the lips and set the arrested human being free. The sentimentality of inferior music recalls in its caricature what superior music is truly capable of shaping at the boundary of frenzy: reconciliation.* One who lets himself go in tears, or in a form of music no longer resembling him in any way, at the same time lets the stream of everything he himself is not, everything which had been dammed up behind the wall of the objective world, flow back through him. As one who weeps, or one who sings, he goes forth into alienated reality […] The potentiality of the most recent phase of music indicates a change in position. It is no longer the statement and image of an inner factor, but rather an attitude towards reality, perceived by music, but no longer glossed over in the images. In the extreme isolation resulting therefrom, the social character of music changes.” Adorno - Philosophy of modern music, 2003, p. 129 (the book was also translated as Philosophy of new music, from where i stiched in the sentence marked with *, that i couldn’t find from the first version.)
“Adorno, tief unglücklich über die Entwicklung, verlangte nach einer Spraydose.”
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He or she who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses.
