After Auschwitz:

Adorno and the Aesthetics of Genocide Jonathan Kemp

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric

Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society

Auschwitz wadnt diddly!

-Jachym Topol, City Sister Silver

one,

Suppose, for a moment, that we take Adornos famous remark about

the barbarism of post-Auschwitz poetry not simply as a chronological

marker or end-point, an after-which something follows (in this case,

culture as barbarism); nor as that which can no longer be, lest it

debase, in its very being, the horror and loss of reason expressed by

such an event; suppose we take it not, that is, as a purely temporal

expression of something passed, some event no longer present, - not, in

short, an escape from the past; but suppose, instead, or as well as, we

take it, for a moment, as an after-which that attempts to name the

non-identical by marking it with an aesthetic of negation, genocide,

annihilation; an aesthetic, that is, which takes Auschwitz as its greatest

influence; not just its apotheosis, but its ability to mark, indelibly, the

way we are, the way we live, now; its ability to comment upon, even

make manifest, an entire real world. Suppose we stop thinking of

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Auschwitz as some kind of metaphor or apotheosis of genocide for the

sake of those in Palestine, Rwanda, Timor, Bosnia, Indonisia, Turkey,

Sudan, Kosovo, Iraq, Chechnya, Kashmir, Zaire, Romania, Haiti

What then?

Once we stop thinking of its relevance as a paradigm (Gilroy, 2000,

246) and start, perhaps, instead thinking of its relevance as an

aesthetic? In short, I want to ask if it is possible to understand the after

of Adornos remark as referring to an imitation of, in the manner of..:

in other words, a stylistics of existence which is brutal, barbaric, savage

and inhuman. An aesthetics of genocide.

In this sense, then, Auschwitz might be said to function not only as a

symbol of each and every concentration camp, past, present and

future, but as a kind of sick aesthetic comment on the capitalist mode

of destruction, and an attempt to name the style of that destruction,

that obliteration of the object(ive). As such, Adorno is suggesting that

the holocaust has become a model for - as well as modeling itself upon

- the wide scale process by which meaning is established at any cost.

Which is to say, in short, that the social processes by which reality

functions are a form of genocide. Social reproduction, for Adorno, is

modeled after Auschwitz. To put it yet another way, culture has

become a gas chamber.

But to evoke an aesthetics of genocide? What might that mean?

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 two,

It is clearer now than ever that we do not live in a perfect world.

Further, it is clearer now than ever before that we are unlikely to attain

such a goal if, indeed, it ever was within our reach. For to use

concepts - such as democracy or freedom - that have become

estranged from any reality they claim to represent is to remove us even

further from the realm of what is, of what is going on, here and now.

This, according to Adorno, is the state reached by contemporary

philosophy: it removes us from things as they are(Adorno 1996, 364).

Nevertheless, Adorno claims at the very beginning of Negative

Dialectics that philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on

because the moment to realize it was missed(Adorno 1996, 3). That

something can live on after the moment of its real-ization has been lost

suggests such a profound poverty of conceptual thinking as to make

real thought all but impossible. This poverty, however, results not from a

lack, absence, or negation, but rather from a surplus or excess of

meaning, a mad multiplicity of imponderably complex truths, none of

which can claim supremacy without first establishing such supremacy

through an act of supreme violence. This multiplicity of discourse -

what Deleuze and Guattari call the rhizomatic nature of reality - thus

leads to a vertiginousness arising within the very language used to

articulate any claim to capture that reality. Meaning becomes giddy

and unstable; it stumbles, sometimes falls.

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 At a time when the rhetoric of democracys defenders has become

indistinguishable from that of its enemies, meaning has never been less

clear. Indeed, such ambiguity is the inevitable characteristic of a

language in which not only are words multidimensional, but their

multidimensionality is crushed in the rush for clarity. To paraphrase

Gertrude Stein, a bomb is a bomb is a bomb

Yet never has it been more pressing to understand the full impact of

what Adorno is claiming - that all cultural production is the expression

and articulation of a thinking which bases itself upon genocide, a

thinking which imitates or employs the strategy of a systematic

annihilation of all difference or deviation - all nonidentity. Thus, not only

is Auschwitz the inevitable, logical outcome of instrumental reason, but,

for Adorno, it also functions as an event - an artwork or stylistic - after

which instrumental reason models itself. The invincibility of instrumental

reason after Auschwitz constructs a dialectic that is chillingly negative:

a teleological progress towards, not absolute truth, as Hegel believed,

but absolute genocide, as if the two were now somehow frighteningly

synonymous.

And the gases rush to fill the cavities of/

The poets who grew wild on suffering/
The professors who would have only told more lies/
The minor officials who would have sent cruel notices/
The revolutionaries who would have got the moment wrong/
And writers posing for the camera

Truth is not stable/

Any more than passion/
Truth will expire/
Just as quickly as desire
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 []
The only thought afforded status/
Is that which in the end accords/
With what exists
Howard Barker, Dont Exaggerate

three,

Adornos first use of the phrase after Auschwitz was in the 1955 essay

Cultural Criticism and Society. The closing paragraph of this essay

makes for chilling reading:

The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of

the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape
reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of
doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural
criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of
culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has
become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification,
which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is
now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence
cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to
self-satisfied contemplation (Adorno 1986, 34)

Amongst other things, Adorno here links the holocaust to the culture

that produced it. Hitlers monstrosity, Adorno suggests, was more than

matched by the monstrosity of a culture that could allow the holocaust

to happen in the first place; not to mention the monstrosity of a culture

that refuses to learn anything at all from such an event. According to

Adorno,

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 a new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon
unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that
Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen
(Adorno 1996, 365)

Has unfree mankind done this? Has it risen to the challenge of this

new categorical imperative? Have we ensured that nothing similar will

happen, secured the impossibility of its repetition? Or have we

arranged our thoughts and actions in another way, a way far more

conducive to such repetition, perhaps even contingent upon it? Has

our understanding of Auschwitz as that-which-must-not-repeat-itself

blinded us to the ways in which it is repeating itself every day of our

lives?

For Adorno, Auschwitz confirmed the philosophy of pure identity as

death (Adorno 1996, 362). The nonidentity between the jews and

the Aryan ideal became the target for a genocidal attack which gives

its name to the structures of thought that seek to justify such slaughter.

Indeed, the efficacy of the attack set a standard we have done our

utmost to ensure we can surpass. After all, a culture/country now

values itself for its capacity for mass destruction; this is the gauge of

modern civilization and the aspiration of any country modernizing itself;

this is the task toward which identity thinking has applied itself.

After Auschwitz, democracy means never having to say youre sorry.

four,

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 Towards the end of Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno reneges on

the impossibility or barbarity of post-Auschwitz culture.

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured

man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that
after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems (Adorno 1996,
362)

In this wrong lurks the promise of poetry - the promise that it can

express torture, and that, moreover, the need to lend a voice to

suffering is a condition of all truth(Adorno 1996, 17-18). In this later

work, Adorno thus allows for an aesthetic of negation, acknowledging

the fact that suffering influences expression, or that pain can drive

thought. Despite poetrys barbaric impossibility after Auschwitz, we

must nevertheless still write it, for as Adorno states in Aesthetic Theory,

the artwork is not only the echo of suffering, it diminishes it (Adorno

1997, 39). It is here, in this domain where art and suffering collide and

heal, that the full claim of this essay resides. For Adorno is not

promoting the redemptive function of art, but the opposite: an erasure

or eradication, arts destructive capacity. For the end of suffering for

those in the gas chambers was also the expression of that suffering: this

is what is contained within the concept of Auschwitz, after which it

comes to stand for such suffering. The meaning of Auschwitz is the

disavowal of meaning, a resistance to the wholesale destruction of

those elements considered superfluous or antagonistic to meaning.

Annihilation is thus the expression of a suffering that is denied through its

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destruction: meaning inheres even in the disavowal of

meaning(Adorno 1997, 105). The full impact of this paradox is found in

the phrase after Auschwitz. For only after Auschwitz can the name

Auschwitz mean what is has come to mean. The name of a small

industrial village in Southern Poland has come to represent for us who

live beyond it the most infamous excesses of human cruelty; that is, it

has acquired a meaning it did not have before - and as a

consequence has become a metaphor for the kind of organised mass

murder that is now associated with the most intractable thinking. A

thinking Adorno recognizes as characteristic of advanced capitalist

culture.

After Auschwitz, terrorism means never having to say youre sorry.

Peace surprised us: we needed more time

to pretend we deserved it, more time
to be the survivors,

as if we had plans, as if we knew

what next, as if
our dreams were not all of seagulls and the sea.
Goran Simic, Sarajevo Spring.

five,

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 For Adorno, Auschwitz thus demonstrates irrefutably that culture has

failed(Adorno 1996, 366). Furthermore,

that this could happen in the midst of the traditions of

philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences says more
than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to
take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in
those fields themselves, in the autarky that is emphatically
claimed for them. All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent
critique, is garbage.Whoever pleads for the maintenance of
this radically culpable and shabby culture becomes its
accomplice, while the man who says no to culture is directly
furthering the barbarism which our culture showed itself to be
(Adorno 1996, 366-7)

A fine trap to be caught in, to be sure, wedged between the sharp

teeth of a necessity to speak and a knowledge that to speak is only to

emit another turd. Survival, Adorno claims, can only find expression

through guilt and complicity. If the survivor speaks, s/he wrongs the

victims; if s/he does not speak, s/he wrongs the victims. The survivor is

caught in a double bind, or what Lyotard terms a differend. It is no

longer true (if, indeed, it ever was) that what does not kill me makes me

stronger; rather: what does not kill me makes me grateful.

To speak or not to speak, when both speech and silence are different

modes of condoning what has happened, is a question of artistic

expression, of using language to say something language cannot say,

of using the strategies and tools of untruth or falsity in order to gesture

towards the truth.

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 Whatever we inherit from the fortunate/
We have taken from the defeated/
What they had to leave us - a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death
[]
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning;
Every poem an epitaph
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

six,

As David Carroll points out, however, in his introduction to Lyotards

Heidegger and the jews (1990), the fact that Auschwitz has made

philosophy irrelevant does not diminish the role of the critical faculty

but on the contrary makes it all the more crucial and

necessary(Carroll 1990, xi). What Adorno calls thinking against

itself(Adorno 1996, 365), and what Carroll calls writing against itself

(Carroll 1990, xi) are (almost) all we have. Arts task is thus both to be

art and not to be art at the same time, to be simultaneously

recognisable and unrecognisable, both fragment and totality. Art must

always run the risk of destroying itself. The aesthetic of genocide is

therefore a paradigm in which we must think and work in order to

undermine it: the artwork must both acknowledge and refute a reality

in which the nonidentical is pursued systematically and murderously.

For,

If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the

concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical
accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the
screams of its victims (Adorno 1996, 365)

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 Because thinking against itself hurts, we avoid it, prefering instead the

safety of affirmation, the comfortable identity of concept and object.

Because after Auschwitz all music has become the soundtrack to

genocide, we turn it up further still. Because all thinking that does not

accord with what exists lays down the gauntlet of irrationality, of an

extremity that eludes the concept and hints at madness, we turn away

from it, believing that there is more pleasure - more sanity - to be had

from its denial than its acceptance. Because we do not know how to

die, we do not know how to live. Reason after Auschwitz is after

Auschwitz, a mode of collapse perfected in the concentration camps

and administered ever after to each and every one of us who think we

know what culture is, and how it differs from barbarism.

seven,

If genocide is the logical outcome of identity thinking, and if identity

thinking in turn models itself upon genocide, the promise of a non-

genocidal culture resides in the non-identification of what Adorno calls

the fragment, the trace, or the scar: the loci at which the preceding

works misfired(Adorno 1997, 35). Artworks thus both come out of or

into a tradition, but must critique that tradition, go beyond it, identify its

faultlines and mine them. In this way, according to Adorno, the truth

content of artworks is fused with their critical content(Adorno 1997,

35), which throws into relief the non-correspondence with reality,

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promoting this fragmentary or disintegral aspect as the lever of

change.

The battle of the fragment is thus a battle against a totality in which

the fragment makes sense, and with which it nevertheless has a

relation. For Adorno, art must go beyond its own concept in order to

remain faithful to that concept(Adorno 1997, 29). Fragmented art,

art that turns away from totality, from reification, is an art that insists on

individuality, on the singular multiplicity of arts work, on the

irreconcilability of the dialectic:

The truth content of art, whose organon was integration, turns

against art and in this turn art has its emphatic moments. Artists
discover the compulsion toward disintegration in their own works,
in the surplus of organization and regimen; it moves them to set
aside the magic wand as does Shakespeares Prospero, who is
the poets own voice. However, the truth of such disintegration is
achieved by way of nothing less than the triumph and guilt of
integration. The category of the fragmentary - which has its
locus here - is not to be confused with the category of
contingent particularity: The fragment is that part of the totality
of the work that opposes totality (Adorno 1999, 45)

We cannot assume an artwork to be an expression of something such

as suffering on the part of an individual artist - although that is, in one

sense, exactly what it is - because there is always a fragment lodged

within arts work that has nothing to do with expression, that resists such

a totalizing interpretation, that opposes totality, even if its appearance

is contingent upon such integration, as both a triumph and a guilt.

Absolute integration is genocide, the destruction of nonidentity. Far

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from being barbaric after Auschwitz, a certain poetic or aesthetic

expression, a certain poiesis, is absolutely necessary to counteract the

gravitational pull of identity thinking.

A new way of thinking is required that is not an expression of

annihilation, that does not seek to obliterate difference, but instead

requires difference, expresses difference, embraces difference; a

poetic thinking that does not seek to reduce everything to a simple

logic of the either/or, but instead seeks ways to understand and

articulate non-identity in an attempt to dismantle instrumental reason.

What J. M. Barrie calls a transformation of reason is necessary, for the

sake of our survival.

It remains to be seen whether this can be done, or whether

capitalism has destroyed even the remotest possibility of an ethical life.

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References

Adorno, Theodor W. Cultural Criticism and Society, in Prisms,

trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (MIT Press: Cambridge,

Massachusetts, 1986).

------Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (Routledge: New York

and London, 1996).

------Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (The Athlone

Press: London, 1997).

Barrie, J. M. Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the

Pornography of Horror, in Parallax 30, Vol. 10, No.1, Jan-March

2004.

Carroll, David, The Memory of Devastation and the

Responsibilities of Thought: And lets not talk about that,

Foreword to Jean-Franois Lyotard, Heidegger and the jews,

trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (University of

Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1990).

Gilroy, Paul, Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at

the End of the Colour Line, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 2000.

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