Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie / Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie, Heft 30/31

The title of this paper, »The Mutilated Subject Extinguished in the Arena of Aesthetic Experience,« should be understood in terms of what I have said about the dialectic of aesthetic experience. The subject vanishes into the work of art because he is extinguished in this violent and deadly combat with the work. The subject who vanishes into the work of art is a mutilated subject. How are we to understand this?

For Adorno a central question of aesthetics is, »How is genuine aesthetic experience possible?« This question arises because of what Adorno sees as the mutilation of the individual subject in the modern world – that is, the deformation or withering of the very capacity for experience as a result of the violent and invasive forces of what he calls »the totally administered society.« How can a subject with such a diminished capacity for experience possibly use his exact imagination to understand an artwork by recreating its internal logic?

In fact, the purpose of aesthetic violence is precisely to dismantle the mutilations of the subject that prevent genuine aesthetic experience. What I am calling aesthetic violence is a force of negation – the negation of false modes of experience, including those that have become commonplaces in the aesthetic realm. This negative force is part of the power or artistic force of the work – the force of the aesthetic logic internal to the work.

If the violence of the modern world has mutilated the subject, then, aesthetic violence, which is both similar to and different from that violence, acts as a kind of homeopathic counter-force. But this counter-violence does not effect what we might simplistically think of as a healing. Instead, as we shall see, it is not simply the subject’s mutilations that are dismantled or extinguished. In an important sense the subject himself is extinguished along with his mutilations.

Adorno’s portrayal of the reification and alienation produced by advanced technological society is well-known. The subject mutilated by reification and alienation is a subject cocooned in a false comfort, in an illusion of progress that disguises inhumanity, and he is in denial about what has happened to him. It is a subject who lives in an environment of what Adorno calls das Immergleiche – »what is always the same«. The cocoon of false consciousness is spun, we might say, by the repetitions of das Immergleiche . The falseness affects not only the capacity for insight – which would require seeing through the illusions – but also the organs of perception. The mutilation of the subject renders him not only stupid, so to speak, but also deaf and dumb.

This context of mutilating repetitiousness is the result of social domination, and it also reflects and perpetuates domination. The mutilated subject is dominated by a false universal, the Immergleiche , but also dominates the other, the object, that which is foreign to the subject, by subjecting it to the false universalizations of mutilated experience. Hence Adorno’s emphasis on the primacy of the object and the non-identical; for him those terms formulate freedom from domination. For Adorno, it is not as though some of us are mutilated and incapable of true experience while others, the lucky ones or the cultured elite, are undamaged and free. There is no living within the totally administered society without falling prey to it. At the same time, some vestiges of the capacity for thought and experience remain.

The mutilation of the capacity for thought also affects, of course, our thinking about aesthetics, and in the arena of his own writing with its provocative exaggerations Adorno attempts to shock us into something more genuine by dismantling our false and familiar ideas about aesthetic experience. One of them is the notion that aesthetic experience is pleasurable, a form of »fun«. In fact, says Adorno, the more works of art are understood, the less they are enjoyed.4

In the process of encountering and working to understand the work of art, the mutilated subject experiences the work’s impact not as pleasure but as violence in many forms: as shock, as disruption, as explosion, as entrapment and coercion, as threat of annihilation or threat of madness. At the same time, of course, the subject senses something else as well – a faint hint of truth and freedom contained in the work’s forceful logic, and the possibility that this arena of deadly combat will also be a sheltered space in which perhaps to survive the extinguishing of mutilation. The encounter with the work of art, in other words, is experienced both as struggle against the work of art and for the experience of truth and freedom that it promises.

Adorno gives us a vivid sense of the coexistence of mutilation and the awareness that something could be different in his book Minima Moralia, subtitled Reflections from Damaged Life , written during his North American exile in the 1940 s. A major focus of the short pieces that make up the book is the way that pleasure and enjoyment have become integrated into the fabric of false comfort. In one of them, called »How Nice of You, Doctor« (»Herr Doktor, das ist schön von Euch«); the title echoes a line from Goethe’s Faust ), for instance, Adorno writes:

»There is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiant silliness, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite. Even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror; even the innocent »how lovely!« becomes an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely, and there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better.«5

Adorno is saying that if it is not accompanied by thought, aesthetic pleasure in beauty furthers falsehood. Genuine aesthetic experience requires »consciousness of negativity« in conjunction with »holding fast to the possibility of what is better.« In the terms I have been using, it requires enduring the work’s accurate attack on mutilation while being exposed to its intimations of the possibility of freedom. In the arena of aesthetic experience there is no escaping the combat to the death.

Initiating the Engagement: Shock

How does the mutilated subject enter the arena of aesthetic experience? It is important to remember that for Adorno, the work of art acts upon the subject. In one of its modes of violent action, the artwork initiates the aesthetic encounter by shocking and stunning the subject. The mutilated subject is taken by surprise and overwhelmed. That artworks have the immanent character of being an act, writes Adorno, »endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden,« and this suddenness »is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work.«6

Shock is an important aspect of this sudden, overwhelming action on the part of the artwork. The shock stops the subject in his tracks, disabling his usual forms of non-seeing and non-hearing and compelling a different kind of attention. Adorno is of course not the only one to speak about this initial shock in the encounter with the artwork, or with beauty. Nor is it only modern and deliberately provocative works of art that shock in this way. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, for instance, referring to the effect on Dante of his glimpse of Beatrice, coined the term »aesthetic arrest« – an aesthetic heart attack, so to speak, to refer to the sudden shocking impact of beauty on the observer.7

The work of art, or the beautiful (in the case of Dante and Beatrice a beautiful young woman), seems to present itself as a thing, an object, located not in the abyss but in some place or other outside the subject. But with the initial shock, the apparent spatial differentiation between the subject and the work of art has already been collapsed, and the subject has been displaced. Internally dislocated, the stunned subject stands aside from his usual self. (This is the meaning of »ecstasy« – standing outside.) Momentarily at least, the whole of his mind is filled with the work. As Adorno says, he has vanished into the work. But note that we cannot even say »the subject« to mean the same subject as before the encounter, because the subject’s usual ways of responding have been temporarily disabled.