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Adorno and Aesthetic Violence1

Introduction

Where does subjective aesthetic experience take place? This apparently paradoxical question leads us to a crucial aspect of Theodor Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience. On the face of it, one might think that subjective experience takes place within the subject. No, says Adorno; »the viewer’s« – or reader’s, or listener’s; Adorno is not concerned here with the specific medium of the artwork – »relation to art is not one of incorporating the work. On the contrary, the viewer [seems] to vanish in the work of art.«2 In order to understand Adorno’s statement that the viewer vanishes into the work of art, we must understand his conception of the dialectic of aesthetic experience. I will begin by noting three crucial elements in this dialectic. First, aesthetic experience is an active process between subject and object, between the experiencing subject and the work of art. Second, this process takes place in a place or space that Adorno calls the »arena« of aesthetic experience. Third, there is an element of violence in the encounter within that arena.

To elaborate: Aesthetic experience is an active process, but the subject and the object are active in different ways. The experiencing subject acts by using what Adorno calls his (I use the masculine pronoun generically) »exact imagination« to recapitulate the internal logic of the work, recomposing the work with his ear, repainting it with his eye. The artwork itself is active: »Artworks have the immanent character of being an act,« he says, »even if they are carved in stone.«3 An arena is a space that is empty except for the activity that takes place there. The word arena evokes associations with gladiatorial combat – a combat to the death. In fact, we must imagine a deadly combat taking place in this arena between the subject and the work of art. For as far as the experiencing subject is concerned, the work of art acts by inflicting what I will call »aesthetic violence« on the subject.

My focus in this paper will be on this element of violence in subjective aesthetic experience. Violence may seem an alarming word to use in connection with the aesthetic. Those of us who are lovers of art may be reluctant to identify violence as a key element in our aesthetic experience. Perhaps we think instead of pleasure or delight, of being deeply moved, of awe and gratitude. But there is a dimension of forceful impact, shock and sudden change in the experience of powerful works of art that can be called violent. This dimension of aesthetic experience is easily ignored or minimized in an idealized representation of aesthetic experience. But it is central to Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience and intimately linked for Adorno with the truth content of art. It deserves our full attention. My aim in this paper is to explore some of the phenomenology of this dimension of aesthetic experience. Adorno claimed that in psychoanalysis only the exaggerations are true. In a similar vein, I will speak of aesthetic violence and attempt to draw out the most disturbing aspects of this dimension of aesthetic experience.

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.

The subject rightly experiences this shock as involuntary. This involuntary displacement of attention is accompanied by a well-justified fear and trembling, even a terror. It is the terror of the unknown, of what is beyond us. Though he disparaged Rilke’s line about beauty being »the beginning of terror,« in fact Adorno acknowledges that terror in the aesthetic encounter. He does so in his term »Erschütterung,« perhaps the central term with which he designates the impact of what I am calling »aesthetic violence«. Erschütterung has been translated into English as »shudder,« but to me »shudder« does not convey the full import of Adorno’s term. I prefer to translate Erschütterung as »shaken to one’s foundations.« As Adorno puts it, »The shock aroused by important works […] is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible.«8 What shakes us so profoundly is the sudden dawning of an awareness of something beyond our ordinary grasp – something that will profoundly disrupt our current organization of experience.

The Invitation and the Trap

Another aspect of the artwork’s approach to the subject is its allure. One of the functions of beauty in the artwork is to attract the subject, to draw it in. It functions like an invitation, perhaps even a seduction, to the unwary. There is something like an erotic element in this invitation; union of a kind is being proposed. Indeed, attention is a form of merging with what is perceived.

Again, Adorno is not the only one to articulate this aspect of the aesthetic encounter. The critic Adrian Stokes, best known for his studies of the Quattrocento in Italy, writes in psychoanalytic terms of the »invitation in art.« Psychically, he writes, the sensuous beauty of art first invites us to come inside and lose ourselves in the work. The experience is both like falling in or into love and like returning to the mother’s breast. But once this merger of our attention with the activities of the artwork has occurred, we are, as it were, helpless, and we are forced to experience the destructive forces which the work has incorporated into itself and subjected to the organization of aesthetic form.9

Because there is an element of the involuntary in our response to the powerful allure of beauty, an element of suspicion also hovers around the work’s invitation. Perhaps we are being seduced and entrapped. After all, how can we know what we are getting into? As the psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer, a friend of Stokes, puts it in his book The Apprehension of Beauty, how are we to read the mysteries in beauty? We do not know whether the beautiful – in this case he is speaking of a woman – is Beatrice or the lethal Belle Dame sans Merci.10

Thus the artwork that shocks and seduces can also be experienced as a trap. It holds us in bondage; we are enthralled, as we say. We have unexpectedly and involuntarily fallen into this trap, and now it holds us and will not let us go. To use an extreme image, the work of art is in some sense like the Venus fly trap – the carnivorous plant that lures insect into its depths, only to consume them. To be sure, the work, for Adorno, does not simply digest the mutilated subject for its own purposes, nor does it simply chew him up and spit him back out. But it certainly does not leave him unscathed.

For Adorno, as I have noted, the viewer does not incorporate art but rather vanishes into the work of art. It is equally true, however, that the work enters into and merges with the subject. But as Adorno says, this does not mean that the subject has incorporated the work into himself. Rather, the work has invaded the subject and displaced what he originally was. If as Adorno says, the subject of aesthetic experience becomes internally active by internally recreating the immanent logic of the artwork, this activity is at the same time a submission. Essentially, the artwork has overpowered and trapped the subject by making the subject himself into the arena of aesthetic experience. There is nothing left between artwork and subject but what transpires in the arena that was originally the subject himself.

Terror and the Abyss

The artwork’s capacity to overwhelm the subject is one of the primary forms of what I am calling aesthetic violence. The subject feels he has become involved in something – or something has entered him – that is beyond his capacity to master and assimilate in his usual mutilated mode of functioning. In the most fundamental way, what the mutilated subject encounters in the arena of aesthetic experience is something that is emphatically not das Immergleiche, not the familiar »always-the-same.« What is beyond one’s capacity by definition produces anxiety. It is potentially ungraspable and potentially lethal. One cannot see its bounds; perhaps it is infinite. This is what Adorno refers to as Erschütterung, being shaken to one’s foundations. The potentially infinite has entered into the subject’s very structure.

With the entry of the potentially infinite, the arena of aesthetic experience ceases to be merely a space that extends horizontally. It opens up vertically, to the heavens, the infinite and ungraspable, the void and the abyss. For the presence of the potentially infinite is also the possibility of our own death, the death of ourselves as we have known ourselves. In a similar vein, the psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer, speaking of a child’s »amazement« at an unbelievably new experience, cites the Jewish Book of the Dead with its admonition, »Stand close to the dying, because when the soul sees the abyss it is amazed.«11 A glimpse of the abyss – that which is without form and potentially without bounds: this is the fearful infinity into which the subject may vanish. It is as though the subject, finding himself in the arena of aesthetic experience, hears the gates closing behind him, senses the overwhelming power of his entrancing opponent, and looks up amazed into an infinite sky.

Will this mean catastrophe or deliverance? The contemporary psychoanalyst Michael Eigen has captured this vital ambiguity and the inexorable quality of its logic in an essay on the writer Flannery O’Connor. He calls it »the Sword of Grace.« Eigen is writing of the issue of religious faith in O’Connor’s fiction, but the inexorability and ambiguity apply equally to her writing and to the aesthetic encounter as Adorno conceives it. »In O’Connor’s fiction faith is a violent business,«12 Eigen writes. Her stories, he says,

»move toward some central shock or jolt, which may convey a certain mystery, but which also seems to rise inevitably from the nature of her characters and life itself. […] Often these telling moments are catastrophic and do not always result in a reorientation of the characters in question. Many of her characters break under the strain of a potential conversion experience they refuse or are unable to sustain. In extreme terms, one either changes or dies, possibly both. The logic of the Biblical call to die to be reborn can be ruthless.«13

Eigen raises the question of whether the strain of the encounter with mystery, as he calls it, can be sustained, whether we will survive it. The same question arises with the aesthetic encounter. It exposes us to the infinite and the abyss. Can we bear it?

Exposure to the infinite threatens to destroy the mind with its limited powers of coherence and control. The work of art can arouse emotions of such overpowering intensity that we feel brought to the brink of madness. The abyss and the most primal are close. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a case in point. Not only does the old King Lear go mad in the course of the play, but in the final scenes of the play, confronted with Cordelia’s death, Lear is so undone by overwhelming grief that he can only howl. If he had words, he says, he would »use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack«14 – in other words, so that the abyss he is exposed to would be laid bare.

The threat of madness also takes the form of feeling invaded by the forces the work of art stirs up. Earlier I compared the work of art to a Venus fly trap. We can also compare it to a Trojan Horse: something that presents itself as a gift unleashes a swarm of conquerors. As we all know, the approach of madness is often experienced as an infestation of bugs or worms. Adorno points out that the tendency of modern artworks to be composed of multiple small pieces that are not readily grasped as a unity is disturbing in precisely this way. He uses the word Gewürm, a multiplicity of creeping things.15 This is what is evoked in the disturbed mind of the listener, he says – masses of creeping, crawling things, maggots swarming in carrion. The old mutilated mind is prey to the fear that it itself has become the carcass.

The Brink and the Enigma, Truth and Constellation

If the aesthetic encounter brings with it violence, terror and suspicion, surely the question arises, How does this terrifying violence and suspicious seductiveness differ from the ordinary violence and deception that pervade the totally administered society, sometimes in naked form and sometimes clothed in the garb of »fun«? Put in a different way, what makes the aesthetic encounter worth the risk?

Certainly the shock and terror of the »aesthetic arrest« are a far cry from the pleasure and enjoyment promised by the culture industry. But the violence of the work’s impact is accompanied by a promesse de bonheur, a promise of a different kind of happiness. That happiness is intimately connected with truth. If, as Adorno says, the more works of art are understood, the less they are enjoyed, it is because what opens up to and overpowers the beholder is their truth.16 Truth flashes out as the abyss opens before us. Or as Charles Williams says, writing about the figure of Beatrice in Dante, beauty »arrests« us because it presents a glimmer of truth, something that is far beyond our grasp, but nevertheless awakens, as he puts it, a »noble awe« and a »noble curiosity«17. In other words, the shock that shakes the subject to his foundations is the shock of an intimation of truth that both exposes horror and points to freedom from it.

But though the glimpse promises truth, the artwork does not fulfill this promise. The truth is never fully conveyed to us. The work hints, but it does not speak clearly. If in some sense the scales of mutilation are ripped from our eyes, still we are left, so to speak, on the brink. Adorno refers to this essential characteristic of the artwork as the enigma. »Enigmaticness,« he writes, »peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer that it requires – like that of the sphinx – were always the same, although only by way of the diversity, not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception – that is the enigma.«18

The enigmatic quality of art is related to the way it brings the subject to the brink of the abyss and gives him a glimpse into it. The truth that inheres in the artwork is a truth intimately related to the subject himself. To echo Michael Eigen writing about Flannery O’Connor, the mystery it seems to convey seems at the same time to arise inevitably from our very nature and what we have become. Standing at the brink and looking down into the abyss, we are aware that the sword of grace, in Eigen’s phrase, hangs over our heads. The experience is shot through with infinitude. We realize that we will not escape. The question is, will we survive, and in what form? It is those very questions that the artwork will not answer. We are left in the arena of aesthetic experience with that uncertainty.

For Adorno, it is the brokenness of the work of art, its inherent fragmentary quality, that signals the presence of the enigma and the abyss it points to. Despite all resolutions, all happy or tragic endings, Adorno says, every artwork breaks off. It is fragmentary. Modern works point up the fragmentary quality with their discontinuities and ruptures. Such works, Adorno says, are organized paratactically. What this means is that the work is a set of fragments arranged in and around a space – the same space that becomes the arena of aesthetic experience in which subject and object are merged. The abyss is at the center of the work, and the work’s fragmentary quality points to it.

Freud notes something similar in his book on the interpretation of dreams. Every dream, he says, has a point where it is unplumbable, a tangle of dream thoughts that cannot be unraveled. This is the dream’s navel, the point where its origin meets the infinitude of the unknown which is the ground from which it emerges.19 For Adorno too, Erschütterung includes a terror that extends to the depths of the primeval fear of the dark or the unutterable grief into which Lear is plunged. But for him the abyss is not only the darkness of the archaic or the unconscious but also the infinitude of the heavens, the realm of Geist or spirit, a realm that is terrifying in its own right.

Adorno often uses the image of a constellation to convey the enigmaticness of the artwork, the way it hints but does not speak directly. In these terms, the work of art consists of a grouping of stars, points of meaningfulness, arranged around something that is invisible but that the particular grouping points to. Adorno describes such a grouping when he writes of his attempts to organize his book Aesthetic Theory. He found, he says, that the book had to be written in »equally weighted, paratactical parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation […]. Their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea«20.

The constellation is not meaning itself; it is a figure of meaning. There is no constellation without the space in which it appears, the void of heaven’s cracked vault, to echo Lear. Each star in the constellation is in fact only a fragment of a whole that cannot be fully grasped, since it includes the void. Further, for Adorno, it is not simply that the full meaning cannot be grasped and veers off into the infinite the way for Freud dreams point down into the impenetrable underworld. The fragments themselves, scintillating though they may be, bear the marks of violence. They are broken off. Blank spaces forcibly intervene to interrupt their continuity with one another.

Tour de force

The artwork is fragmentary and broken because it has tried to incorporate into itself the violence done to the subject; but it is also fragmentary and broken because it, like the subject, is finite and cannot be pure spirit. A force or forces beyond the grasp of the work breaks it apart, leaving it in fragments. Conversely, the artwork attempting to encompass truth within itself becomes a tour de force. In this sense every artwork, Adorno says, is a tour de force. This does not mean that it requires expertise and displays its virtuosity to an impressed public. Rather, this means that immense force is required even to achieve the work’s broken and fragmentary enigmaticness. It is as though the artwork reaches toward the abyss in its attempts to bind something into its constellation, but as it approaches its utmost capacity it has to bear an immense strain.

Like the subject within the arena of aesthetic experience, the work as tour de force is always in danger of being overwhelmed. After listening to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, a friend said to me, weeping, »I’m not sure I can survive this.« If my friend was worried about whether he would survive the excruciating beauty of the Hammerklavier sonata, conversely the pianist Arthur Schnabel commented that the idea of the Hammerklavier went beyond anything Beethoven could actually write. The composed piece, in other words, is incommensurable with its own idea. »The experience of art as that of its truth or untruth«, Adorno writes, »is more than subjective experience: it is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. At the same time«, he continues, »the experience is mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense.«21

The shock and the terror, the fear and trembling I have been discussing, are the points of subjective intensity at which objectivity in the sense of truth invades the subject. This is the point of contact with infinitude in which the subject vanishes into the work of art. But this is the same point at which the work becomes fragmented and enigmatic through the irruption of objectivity into it in the form of its idea. It is not only the subject who is shocked and broken when truth invades him. The Hammerklavier too trembles and breaks under the strain.

At this point I would like to turn to a piece of Adorno’s own writing to illustrate these ideas. As we saw in Adorno’s comments about structuring his book Aesthetic Theory, Adorno’s writing too has an aesthetic dimension. It too is composed of fragments that take the form of a constellation that is a tour de force. The piece is from his essay »Titles«, included in Notes to Literature (Noten zur Literatur). It is about the title of Kafka’s novel Amerika. In it we can see the relationship between the work as constellation and the work as tour de force, as well as the broken, fragmentary quality and the intrusion of death. Adorno writes:

»For Kafka’s America novel, the title he used in his diary, The One Who Was Never Heard of Again [Der Verschollene], would have been better than the title under which the book went down in history. That too is a fine title; for the work has as much to do with America as the prehistoric photograph »In New York Harbor« that is included in my edition of the Stoker fragment of 1913. The novel takes place in an America that moved while the picture was being taken, the same and yet not the same America on which the emigrant seeks to rest his eye after a long, barren crossing. – But nothing would fit that better than The One Who Was Never Heard of Again, a blank space for a name that cannot be found. The perfect passive participle verschollen, »never heard of again,« has lost its verb the way the family’s memory loses the emigrant who goes to ruin and dies. Far beyond its actual meaning, the expression of the word verschollen is the expression of the novel itself.«22

In the six sentences that make up this small piece we become aware both of an abrupt, uneven movement from one sentence to another and of threads of associative links that draw us along and embroil us in an ever tighter web of connections. We move from a comparison between the original title and the final title of Kafka’s book to an old (Adorno says prehistoric) photograph that Adorno possessed, and then to the image of an emigrant looking for a resting place. Then suddenly a blank space is mentioned, and something that has been lost. Then the family has forgotten and the emigrant has »gone to ruin« and died. And in the final sentence, Adorno speaks of the aesthetic concept of expression and tells us that it is the expression contained in that single word verschollen that is the expression of Kafka’s novel. A scintillating constellation has been formed around the idea of expression. But the notion of expression itself remains enigmatic, the blank space at the center of the constellation called Der Verschollene.

Not only are we dealing here with fragmentary thoughts that nevertheless hint at coherence, but the elements that are brought into the constellation are themselves broken and ruined: Adorno evokes things ancient, barren, ruined, exiled, lost, blurred and erased to form the constellation around his topic, the word or title der Verschollene. Even the word verschollen, as Adorno points out, is only the after-effect of a verb that has vanished into the void. The shudder that grips the subject in the arena of aesthetic experience finds its reflection here, in the blurred photograph of an »America that moved while the picture was being taken.« Of course Adorno’s topic here is not only Kafka’s novel but also America, the land of Adorno’s own emigration and exile. Thus his topic is also the damaged life, the mutilation of experience. In this little piece Adorno conjoins recognition of horror – the horror of vanishing from human memory – and the enigmatic suggestion that true expression may be possible in art, in this case, Kafka’s novel.

Erschütterung again

In closing, I will return to Adorno’s notion of Erschütterung and to my earlier statement that it is not only the subject’s mutilations but to some extent the subject himself who is extinguished in the arena of aesthetic experience as he vanishes into the work of art. If the shock of Erschütterung forcibly negates the mutilations that are denial of the truth, one of those denials is the notion of the dominating subject itself – »the I, that internal agent of repression,« as Adorno refers to it, the subject in its false identification with the false universal, das Immergleiche. The work of art forces the subject to look into the abyss. As Adorno puts it, this experience of Erschütterung or shudder is »radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience […]. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives its own limitedness and finitude. […] This subjective experience directed against the I is an element of the objective truth of art.«23

Of course, as Adorno points out, the experience of liquidation is a semblance; people do not literally die of aesthetic experience. But to the extent that in aesthetic experience the subject is subordinated to the work of art, to the extent to which aesthetic experience is indeed an experience of the primacy of the object, the subject’s attention is literally reshaped as he strains to follow the internal logic of the fragmentary and enigmatic work. It is as though the artwork, having trapped the subject, now forces him to perform arduous labors almost beyond his endurance. It is those labors we are not sure we will survive. And indeed, in this process, which Adorno, following Hegel, calls the Arbeit des Begriffs, the labor of thought, the subject is in fact extinguished to some degree, divested of his old mutilated and dominating self, and becomes not a new self but Geist, spirit. This is the way in which aesthetic violence differs from the violence of the totally administered society.