As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Peter Bürger’s “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism” from Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91).
Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) is one of the landmark texts on aesthetic theory published in the twentieth century. One of the book’s significant claims is that modernism and the avant-garde should be defined as distinct aesthetic movements;[1] specifically, he defines modernism as the less radical cousin of the avant-garde.[2] This distinction is important to note because it is also the crux of Bürger’s thesis in a later article, “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism,” a historicist critique of Adorno’s “modernist” aesthetic theory that was published in Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91). By acknowledging the pre-established position Bürger was bringing to this article, we can question how useful his distinction may be when constructing an Adornian aesthetic theory today.
First, Bürger claims that his historicizing approach is novel because it problematizes Adorno’s aesthetic theory without being anachronistic. He criticizes other scholars for reducing Adorno’s aesthetics into “one simple category (negativity) or discovering something beyond it.”[3] This warns against the direction some Adornian scholarship would take in the 1990s, especially by several feminist scholars. For example, Maggie O’Neill’s collection Adorno, Culture and Feminism (1999) declares that one must go beyond Adorno because concepts such as his “feminine character” are essentialist.[4] While O’Neill rightly identifies the problems of consolidating Adorno with feminist theory, this risks missing the radical negativity of the feminine character as a construction.[5] In this light, Bürger’s approach seems quite reasonable, especially where it appears to follow Adorno’s argument that: “A successful work . . . is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions . . . in its innermost structure.”[6] Confronting Adorno’s problems directly in one’s method rather than glossing over them certainly seems more dialectical. And Bürger argues that Adorno’s aesthetic theory demands to be problematized but, crucially, it must be problematized in its specific moment: what Bürger calls Adorno’s “anti-avant-gardism,”[7] an attitude that discriminated against expressionism as a hang-up from Romanticism.
However, it would be undialectical to suggest that we must defend Adorno against any contemporary criticisms. Refusing to take Adorno’s theory beyond his death in 1969 is limiting. It would ignore more recent scholarship that fruitfully applies Adorno’s aesthetic theory to diverse political contexts. In particular, it would dismiss the excellent postcolonial work on Adorno’s literary theory by Neil Lazarus, Robert Spencer, and Rajeev Patke. Considering Bürger’s criticism that the Adornian critical aesthetic is limited to the high modernism of Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Beckett, and Schönberg,[8] it seems counterintuitive to block new developments in the debate. Of course, Adorno does not necessarily have to be taken out of context—his musings on fascism, exile, and art’s political potential remain relevant today. It just does not have to be a binary approach; we can appreciate and criticize Adorno’s aesthetic theory in its own right and explore it in new contexts.
Bürger cast Adorno as an anti-avant-gardist precisely because he questions how far Adorno’s aesthetic theory could be applied politically. Bürger argues that Adorno discriminates against expressionism because it has its roots in Romanticism; Adorno despises the avant-garde’s self-expression, politics, psychology, and moralism, “which modernism tried to separate from the aesthetic sphere.”[9] Bürger almost wishes that Adorno had embraced that radical element of the avant-garde rather than the lofty autonomy of modernism.[10] In the last three decades, this question of creating a political aesthetic theory out of Adorno’s work has preoccupied scholars such as Lambert Zuidervaart, J. M. Bernstein, and Espen Hammer. They look to Adorno’s idea that some art can be critical, allowing us to think in a reified world. Intriguingly, Zuidervaart,[11] Bernstein,[12] and Hammer[13] call this critical art “modernism.” If these critics agree that “modernism” is a sufficient term, does a contemporary theory of critical aesthetics need to adopt Bürger’s avant-garde/modernist distinction?
A re-examination of Adorno’s aesthetic theory suggests that Bürger’s aesthetic distinction is perhaps too stark. Some writers in Adorno’s theory contradict Bürger’s narrative that Adorno was an anti-Romantic, anti-realist reader. What about Adorno’s love for the German Romantic tradition of Goethe, Heine, and Wagner? Or his love for Ibsen’s plays despite their realism? Of course, these figures still constitute a relatively narrow European bourgeois canon. But Bürger gives the impression that one just needs to nudge Adorno towards the so-called “avant-garde” to make his aesthetic theory perfect.[14] This suggests that re-contextualizing Adorno is acceptable only if we turn him into an avant-gardist.
Yet these quibbles pale in comparison to the genuine usefulness of (ironically) re-examining Bürger’s Telos article 27 years after its publication. As Nigel Mapp has shown, the Adornian scholars’ project of developing a “modernist,” Adornian aesthetic theory is still being worked out.[15] Bürger’s article can help in this effort. One of his article’s most important insights is that Adorno’s theory is contradictory. For example, Bürger suddenly suggests that Adorno switches the two aesthetic definitions: the avant-garde becomes apolitical and modernism becomes committed.[16] This certainly correlates with the moments where Adorno’s theory becomes personal in Minima Moralia despite Adorno criticizing committed art elsewhere.[17] Is Minima Moralia‘s fragmented form just a clichéd modernist trope? Bürger’s point that Adorno criticizes Stravinsky’s montage but pardon’s Joyce’s montage[18] is equally fascinating—it exposes where Adorno is surprisingly totalizing. Although Bürger does base his thesis on what seems like an exceptional example in Adorno’s work, the intent is illuminating—it shows that we need to confront the problems of Adornian aesthetic theory if we were to appropriate it for our own.
Does critical literature need to be high art? Does it have to be a particular aesthetic? Can art be practical? Is the application of Adorno against the point? And why art? As with any adequate problematization, re-reading Bürger’s essay will give Adorno scholars and readers in general some pause for thought: to start asking more questions for a truly critical, aesthetic theory in 2018.
Notes
1. Peter Bürger, Theory of The Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 60.
2. Peter Bürger, “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism,” Telos 86 (1990): 53.
3. Ibid., p. 49.
4. Maggie O’Neill, Adorno, Culture and Feminism (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 22.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006), p. 96.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Spearman, 1967), p. 32.
7. Bürger, Theory of The Avant-Garde, p. 50.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 53.
10. Ibid., p. 59.
11. Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 39.
12. J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2006), p. 11.
13. Espen Hammer, Adorno’s Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), p. 2.
14. Bürger, Theory of The Avant-Garde, p. 59.
15. Nigel Mapp, Adorno and Literature (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 5.
16. Bürger, Theory of The Avant-Garde, pp. 56–57.
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), p. 79.
18. Bürger, Theory of The Avant-Garde, p. 56.
