On Negativity and Aesthetics: Kluge's Farewell to Adorno
Keywords:
Theodor W. Adorno, Alexander Kluge, Reception Aesthetics, Experience, Montage
Abstract
For Theodor W. Adorno, the relevance of art lies in its capacity to penetrate, through its formal construction, the semblance of a false reality, thereby participating in the self-transcendence of reason. This article argues that, despite the timeliness of this insight, Adorno’s negativism, his conceptualization of reconciliation, and his formalist understanding of art have made it difficult to see how this account can explain art’s relation to social change. Alexander Kluge’s work, it is then argued, can help transcend such limitations in Adorno’s aesthetics. Art, Kluge agrees with Adorno, should work toward social change through the construction of a critical consciousness. Yet, this is not to happen through their correct interpretation, as Adorno thought. Art’s emancipatory potential, instead, lies in the power to engage the spectators’ capacities, enabling them to have their own experiences. With this, Kluge contends, art participates in the reconfiguration of rationality and of the public sphere.
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References
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Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment.’ New Left Review I/87-88, (September-December 1974): 75-89.
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Adorno, Theodor. ‘Sociology and Psychology.’ New Left Review I/46, (November-December 1967): 67-97.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past.’ In Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry Pickford, 89-104. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Transparencies on Film.’ New German Critique, No. 24/25, (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 199-205.
ADORNO, Theodor. History and Freedom. Lectures 1964-1965. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
ADORNO, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.
ADORNO, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Bowie, Andrew. ‘Alexander Kluge: An Introduction.’ Cultural Critique, No. 4 (Autumn, 1986): 111-118.
Bowie, Andrew. ‘New Histories: Aspects of the Prose of Alexander Kluge.’ Journal of European Studies, xii (1982): 180-207.
Bowie, Andrew. Review of Geschichte und Eigensinn, by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Telos 66, (December 1985): 183-190.
Bray, Michael. ‘Openness as a Form of Closure: Public Sphere, Social Class, and Alexander Kluge’s Counterproducts.’ Telos 159, (Summer 2012): 144–71.
Bruck, Jan. ‘Brecht’s and Kluge’s Aesthetics of Realism.’ Poetics 17, (1988): 57-68.
Buck-Morss, Susan. ‘Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered.’ October 62, (Autumn, 1992): 3-41.
Cachopo, João Pedro. ‘Truth and Enigma: Adorno and the Politics of Art.’ New German Critique 135, Vol. 45, No. 3, (November 2018): 73-95.
Dawson, Jan and Kluge, Alexander. ‘Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jan Dawson.’ Film Comment (November–December 1974): 51–57.
Fore, Devin. Introduction to History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt. Translated by Richard Langston, with Cyrus Shahan , Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, and Joel Golb. New York: Zone Books, 2014.
Forrest, Tara. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 13-21. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Freyenhagen, Fabian. ‘Adorno’s Critique of Late Capitalism: Negative, Explanatory and Practical.’ In Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Edited by Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger, 175-192. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
FREYENHAGEN, Fabian. Adorno’s Practical Philosophy. Living Less Wrongly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
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Habermas, Jürgen. ‘The Useful Mole that ruins the Beautiful Yard.’ In The Liberating Power of Symbols. Philosophical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 116.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Alexander Kluge: Crossings Between Film, Literature, Critical Theory.’ In Film und Literatur: Literarische Texte und der neue deutsche Film. Edited by Susan Bauschinger, Susan L. Cocalis and Henry A, 169-196. Lea. Bern: Francke, 1984.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 50-71. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film (1966)”.’ New German Critique, No. 24/25, (Autumn, 1981 - Winter, 1982): 186-198.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Space of History, Language of Time: Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966).” In Eric Rentschler, ed., German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, 193–216. New York: Methuen, 1986.
HANSEN, Miriam Bratu. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. ‘Introduction to Reception Aesthetics.’ New German Critique, No. 10, (Winter, 1977): 29-63.
Huyssen, Andreas. ‘An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 271-282. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855.
Kluge, Alexander and Eder, Klaus. ‘Debate on the Documentary Film: Conversation with Klaus Eder 1980.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 197-208. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander, and Liebman, Stuart. ‘On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview With Alexander Kluge.’ October 46, (Fall 1988): 23-59.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘On Film and the Public Sphere.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 33-49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘Straw in the Ice: Stories.’ Grey Room 53, (Fall 2013): 88–108.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘The Air Raid on Halberstadt, 8 April 1945 (extract)’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 155-172. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 283-290. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
KLUGE, Alexander. Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome. Translated by Christopher Pavsek. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
KLUGE, Alexander. Neue Geschichten, No. 1-18, ‘Unheimlichkeit der Zeit’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977.
KLUGE, Alexander. Schlachtsbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Unglucks. Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1978.
KLUGE, Alexander. The Devil’s Blind Spot, Tales from the New Century. Translated by Martin Chalmers and Michael Husle. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Liebman, Stuart. ‘Why Kluge.’ October 46, (Fall 1988): 5-22.
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” In MARX, Karl and ENGELS, Friedrich. Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Collected Works 3:229–348. New York: International, 1975.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. Geschichte und Eigensinn. vol. 2 of Der unterschätzte Mensch: Gemeinsame Philosophie in zwei Bänden. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2001.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. History and Obstinacy. Translated by Richard Langston, et. al. New York: Zone Books, 2014.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. Maßverhältnisse des Politischen: 15 Vorschläge zum Unterscheidungsvermögen. Frankfurt am Main.: S. Fischer, 1992.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
O’CONNOR, Brian. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
PADDISON, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Pauls, Alan. ‘”El Capital” de Marx filmado por Alexander Kluge.’ In PROA. Accessed September 2020. http://proa.org/proacine/2011/08/01/el-capital-de-marx-filmado-por-alexander-kluge-por-alan-pauls/.
Pavsek, Christopher. ‘Negt and Kluge's Redemption of Labor.’ New German Critique, No. 68, (Spring–Summer 1996): 137-163.
PAVSEK, Christopher. The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Roberts, David. ‘Alexander Kluge and German History.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 127-154. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Introduction.’ In The Persistence of Modernity. Translated by David Midgley, i-iii. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment.’ In Habermas and Modernity. Edited by Richard Bernstein, 35-66. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Truth, Semblance, and Reconciliation,’ ‘Truth, Semblance, and Reconciliation.’ In The Persistence of Modernity. Translated by David Midgley, 1-35. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Yesterday Girl, directed by Alexander Kluge. 1966, Frankfurt am Main: Kairos Film. DVD.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. ‘Theodor W. Adorno.’ In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2015 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Commitment.’ New Left Review I/87-88, (September-December 1974): 75-89.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Free Time.’ In Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry Pickford, 167-176.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Sociology and Psychology.’ New Left Review I/46, (November-December 1967): 67-97.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past.’ In Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry Pickford, 89-104. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Adorno, Theodor. ‘Transparencies on Film.’ New German Critique, No. 24/25, (Autumn 1981–Winter 1982): 199-205.
ADORNO, Theodor. History and Freedom. Lectures 1964-1965. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
ADORNO, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.
ADORNO, Theodor. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E.B. Ashton. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Bowie, Andrew. ‘Alexander Kluge: An Introduction.’ Cultural Critique, No. 4 (Autumn, 1986): 111-118.
Bowie, Andrew. ‘New Histories: Aspects of the Prose of Alexander Kluge.’ Journal of European Studies, xii (1982): 180-207.
Bowie, Andrew. Review of Geschichte und Eigensinn, by Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Telos 66, (December 1985): 183-190.
Bray, Michael. ‘Openness as a Form of Closure: Public Sphere, Social Class, and Alexander Kluge’s Counterproducts.’ Telos 159, (Summer 2012): 144–71.
Bruck, Jan. ‘Brecht’s and Kluge’s Aesthetics of Realism.’ Poetics 17, (1988): 57-68.
Buck-Morss, Susan. ‘Aesthetics and Anesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered.’ October 62, (Autumn, 1992): 3-41.
Cachopo, João Pedro. ‘Truth and Enigma: Adorno and the Politics of Art.’ New German Critique 135, Vol. 45, No. 3, (November 2018): 73-95.
Dawson, Jan and Kluge, Alexander. ‘Alexander Kluge interviewed by Jan Dawson.’ Film Comment (November–December 1974): 51–57.
Fore, Devin. Introduction to History and Obstinacy by Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt. Translated by Richard Langston, with Cyrus Shahan , Martin Brady, Helen Hughes, and Joel Golb. New York: Zone Books, 2014.
Forrest, Tara. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 13-21. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Freyenhagen, Fabian. ‘Adorno’s Critique of Late Capitalism: Negative, Explanatory and Practical.’ In Conceptions of Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy. Edited by Karin de Boer and Ruth Sonderegger, 175-192. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
FREYENHAGEN, Fabian. Adorno’s Practical Philosophy. Living Less Wrongly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Habermas, Jürgen. ‘The Public Sphere: An Encyclopedia Article.’ New German Critique, No. 3 (Autumn, 1974): 49-55.Langston, ‘Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,’ in volume 1 of The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, ed. Beverley Best, et. al., (London: SAGE, 2018): 323
Habermas, Jürgen. ‘The Useful Mole that ruins the Beautiful Yard.’ In The Liberating Power of Symbols. Philosophical Essays, trans. Peter Dews (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 116.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Alexander Kluge: Crossings Between Film, Literature, Critical Theory.’ In Film und Literatur: Literarische Texte und der neue deutsche Film. Edited by Susan Bauschinger, Susan L. Cocalis and Henry A, 169-196. Lea. Bern: Francke, 1984.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Cooperative Auteur Cinema and Oppositional Public Sphere: Alexander Kluge’s Contribution to Germany in Autumn.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 50-71. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. ‘Introduction to Adorno, “Transparencies on Film (1966)”.’ New German Critique, No. 24/25, (Autumn, 1981 - Winter, 1982): 186-198.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Space of History, Language of Time: Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966).” In Eric Rentschler, ed., German Film and Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, 193–216. New York: Methuen, 1986.
HANSEN, Miriam Bratu. Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. ‘Introduction to Reception Aesthetics.’ New German Critique, No. 10, (Winter, 1977): 29-63.
Huyssen, Andreas. ‘An Analytic Storyteller in the Course of Time.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 271-282. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
KANT, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Translated by J. M. D. Meiklejohn. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855.
Kluge, Alexander and Eder, Klaus. ‘Debate on the Documentary Film: Conversation with Klaus Eder 1980.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 197-208. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander, and Liebman, Stuart. ‘On New German Cinema, Art, Enlightenment, and the Public Sphere: An Interview With Alexander Kluge.’ October 46, (Fall 1988): 23-59.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘On Film and the Public Sphere.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 33-49. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘Straw in the Ice: Stories.’ Grey Room 53, (Fall 2013): 88–108.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘The Air Raid on Halberstadt, 8 April 1945 (extract)’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 155-172. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Kluge, Alexander. ‘The Political as Intensity of Everyday Feelings.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 283-290. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
KLUGE, Alexander. Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome. Translated by Christopher Pavsek. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.
KLUGE, Alexander. Neue Geschichten, No. 1-18, ‘Unheimlichkeit der Zeit’. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977.
KLUGE, Alexander. Schlachtsbeschreibung: Der organisatorische Aufbau eines Unglucks. Munich: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1978.
KLUGE, Alexander. The Devil’s Blind Spot, Tales from the New Century. Translated by Martin Chalmers and Michael Husle. New York: New Directions, 2004.
Liebman, Stuart. ‘Why Kluge.’ October 46, (Fall 1988): 5-22.
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” In MARX, Karl and ENGELS, Friedrich. Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Collected Works 3:229–348. New York: International, 1975.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. Geschichte und Eigensinn. vol. 2 of Der unterschätzte Mensch: Gemeinsame Philosophie in zwei Bänden. Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 2001.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. History and Obstinacy. Translated by Richard Langston, et. al. New York: Zone Books, 2014.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. Maßverhältnisse des Politischen: 15 Vorschläge zum Unterscheidungsvermögen. Frankfurt am Main.: S. Fischer, 1992.
NEGT, Oskar and KLUGE, Alexander. Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. Translated by Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
O’CONNOR, Brian. Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
PADDISON, Max. Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Pauls, Alan. ‘”El Capital” de Marx filmado por Alexander Kluge.’ In PROA. Accessed September 2020. http://proa.org/proacine/2011/08/01/el-capital-de-marx-filmado-por-alexander-kluge-por-alan-pauls/.
Pavsek, Christopher. ‘Negt and Kluge's Redemption of Labor.’ New German Critique, No. 68, (Spring–Summer 1996): 137-163.
PAVSEK, Christopher. The Utopia of Film: Cinema and Its Futures in Godard, Kluge, and Tahimik. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.
Roberts, David. ‘Alexander Kluge and German History.’ In Alexander Kluge. Raw Materials for the Imagination. Edited by Tara Forrest, 127-154. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012.
Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Introduction.’ In The Persistence of Modernity. Translated by David Midgley, i-iii. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Reason, Utopia, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment.’ In Habermas and Modernity. Edited by Richard Bernstein, 35-66. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
Wellmer, Albrecht. ‘Truth, Semblance, and Reconciliation,’ ‘Truth, Semblance, and Reconciliation.’ In The Persistence of Modernity. Translated by David Midgley, 1-35. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Yesterday Girl, directed by Alexander Kluge. 1966, Frankfurt am Main: Kairos Film. DVD.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. ‘Theodor W. Adorno.’ In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. Winter 2015 Edition. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2015/entries/adorno/.
Published
2022-12-02
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Philosophy and art
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