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\settitle{Commitment}{Theodor W.~Adorno}{(1962)}

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\maketitle
%% \begin{quote}\footnotesize
%% 
%% Written in 1962, this essay concludes Adorno's debate with Benjamin by
%% criticizing all directly political art. We are presented by Adorno's frank
%% decision to support the moment of criticism and liberation in artists
%% such as Kafka, Beckett and Sch\"onberg---even if his own sociology of art
%% demonstrates the destruction of the audiences for their ``autonomous
%% works."  It is one of Adorno's key theses that the artistic intentions
%% of, say, Brecht, which he implicitly interprets in terms of Benjamin's
%% reading, are best realized not in terms of Brecht's own political plays
%% but in the supposedly apolitical works of the autonomous avant-garde.
%% 
%% Adorno also disagreed with Sartre's alternative that ``human existence
%% equals human freedom,"  i.e., humans are free by definition regardless
%% of their concrete situation. According to Adorno, the problematic relation
%% of art and society is operative within the works of art, literally
%% in their re-vision of reality which is their material yet which it is
%% their task to transcend. While Adorno shared Sartre's intent, he did
%% not believe there was a shortcut to social relevance.
%% 
%% \end{quote}

Since Sartre's essay {\em What is Literature?}, there has
been less theoretical debate about committed and autonomous
literature. Nevertheless, the controversy over commitment remains
urgent, so far as anything that merely concerns the life of the mind
can be today, as opposed to sheer human survival. Sartre was moved
to issue his manifesto because he saw---and he was certainly not the
first to do so---works of art displayed side by side in a pantheon
of optional edification, decaying into cultural commodities. In such
coexistence, they desecrate each other. If any work, without its author's
necessarily intending it, aims at a supreme effect, none can thereby
truly tolerate a neighbor beside it. This salutary intolerance holds not
only for individual works, but also for esthetic genres or attitudes
such as those once symbolized in the now half-forgotten controversy
over commitment. There are two ``positions on objectivity'' which are
constantly at war with one another, even when intellectual life falsely
presents them as at peace. A work of art that is committed strips the
magic from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an idle pastime
for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them,
in an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political. For the committed,
such works are a distraction from the battle of real interests, in which
none is any longer exempt from the conflict between two great blocs. The
possibility of mental life itself depends on this conflict to such an
extent that only blind illusion can insist on rights that may be shattered
tomorrow. For autonomous works of art, however, such considerations, and
the conception of art which underlies them, are themselves the spiritual
catastrophe of which the committed keep warning. Once the life of the
mind  renounces the duty and liberty, of its own pure objectification,
it has abdicated. Thereafter, works of art merely assimilate themselves
sedulously to the brute existence against which they protest, in forms so
ephemeral (the very charge made {\em vice versa} by committed against autonomous
works) that from their first day they belong to the seminars in which they
inevitably end. The menacing thrust of the antithesis is a reminder of
how precarious the position of art is today. Each of the two alternatives
negates itself with the other. Committed art, necessarily detached as
art from reality, cancels the distance between the two. ``Art for art's
sake" denies by its absolute claims that ineradicable connection with
reality which is the polemical {\em a priori} of the very attempt to make art
autonomous from the real. Between these two poles, the tension in which
art has lived in every age till now, is dissolved.

\subsection*{The Confusions of the Debate on Commitment}

Contemporary literature itself suggests doubts as to the omnipotence of
these alternatives. For it is not yet so completely subjugated to the
course of the world as to constitute rival fronts. The Sartrean goats
and the Val\'eryan sheep will not be separated. Even if politically
motivated, commitment in itself remains politically polyvalent so long
as it is not reduced to propaganda, whose pliancy mocks any commitments
by the subject. On the other hand, its opposite, known in Russian
catechisms as formalism, is not decried only by Soviet officials or
libertarian existentialists; even ``vanguard" critics themselves
frequently accuse so-called abstract texts of a lack of provocation,
of social aggressivity. Conversely, Sartre cannot praise Picasso's
{\em Guernica} too highly; yet he could hardly be convicted of formalist
sympathies in music or painting. He restricts his notion of commitment
to literature because of its conceptual character: ``The writer deals
with meanings."\footnote{Jean Paul Sartre, {\em What is Literature?}, London
1967, p.~4.}  
Of course, but not only with them. If no word which
enters a literary work ever wholly frees itself from its meanings in
ordinary speech, so no literary work, not even the traditional novel,
leaves these meanings unaltered, as they were outside it. Even an ordinary
``was," in a report of something that was not, acquires a new formal
quality from the fact that it was not so. The same process occurs in the
higher levels of meaning of a work, all the way up to what once used to
be called its ``Idea." The special position that Sartre accords to
literature must also be suspect to anyone who does not unconditionally
subsume diverse esthetic genres under a superior universal concept. The
rudiments of external meanings are the irreducibly nonartistic elements
in art. Its formal principle lies not in them, but in the dialectic of
both moments---which accomplishes the transformation of meanings within
it. The distinction between artist and {\em litt\'erateur}\footnote{%
A literary man, a writer of literary or critical works.}
is shallow: but it
is true that the object of any esthetic philosophy, even as understood
by Sartre, is not the publicistic aspect of art. Still less is it
the ``message" of a work. The latter oscillates untenably between the
subjective intentions of the artist and the demands of an objectively
explicit metaphysical meaning. In our country, this meaning generally
turns out to be an uncommonly practicable Being.

The social function of the talk about commitment has meanwhile become
somewhat confused. Cultural conservatives who demand that a work of art
should say something, join forces with their political opponents against
atelic,\footnote{Terrible, hideous, foul} hermetic works of art. Eulogists of ``relevance" are more
likely to find Sartre's {\em Huis Clos}\footnote{{\em No Exit} (play)} 
profound, than to listen patiently
to a text whose language jolts signification and by its very distance
from ``meaning" revolts in advance against positivist subordination
of meaning. For the atheist Sartre, on the other hand, the conceptual
import of art is the premise of commitment. Yet works banned in the East
are sometimes demagogically denounced by local guardians of the authentic
message because they apparently say what they in fact do not say. The
Nazis were already using the term ``cultural Bolshevism" under the
Weimar Republic, and hatred of what it refers to has survived the epoch
of Hitler, when it was institutionalized. Today it flares up again just
as it did forty years ago, at works of the same kind, including some
whose origins now go a long way back and are unmistakably part of an
established tradition.

Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up
indignation against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and
decadent: they know their readers. The insights of social psychology
into the authoritarian personality confirm them. The basic features
of this type include conformism, respect for a petrified facade of
opinion and society, and resistance to impulses that disturb its order
or evoke inner elements of the unconscious that cannot be admitted. This
hostility to anything alien or alienating can accommodate itself much
more easily to literary realism of any provenance, even if it proclaims
itself critical or socialist, than to works which swear allegiance to no
political slogans, but whose mere guise is enough to disrupt the whole
system of rigid coordinates that governs authoritarian 
personalities---to
which the latter cling all the more fiercely, the less capable they are of
spontaneous appreciation of anything not officially approved. Campaigns
to prevent the staging of Brecht's plays in Western Germany belong to a
relatively superficial layer of political consciousness. They were not
even particularly vigorous, or they would have taken much crasser forms
after 13 August.\footnote{Reference to the Berlin Wall. [editor's note]}
By contrast, when the social contract with reality
is abandoned, and literary works no longer speak as though they were
reporting fact, hairs start to bristle. Not the least of the weaknesses
of the debate on commitment is that it ignores the effect produced by
works whose own formal laws pay no heed to coherent effects. So long as it
fails to understand what the shock of the unintelligible can communicate,
the whole dispute resembles shadowboxing. Confusions in discussion of
the problem do not indeed alter it, but they do make it necessary to
rethink the alternative solutions proposed for it.

\subsection*{Philosophy and Art in Sartre}

In esthetic theory, ``commitment" should be distinguished from
``tendency." Committed art in the proper sense is not intended
to generate ameliorative measures, legislative acts or practical
institutions---like earlier propagandist (tendency) plays against syphilis,
duels, abortion laws or borstals\footnote{A reformatory for ``juvenile
adults."}---but to work at the level of fundamental
attitudes. For Sartre, its task is to awaken the free choice of the
agent, that makes authentic existence possible at all, as opposed to
the neutrality of the spectator. But what gives commitment its esthetic
advantage over tendentiousness also renders the content to which the
artist commits himself inherently ambiguous. In Sartre, the notion of
choice---originally a Kierkegaardian category---is heir to the Christian
doctrine ``He who is not with me is against me," but now voided of
any concrete theological content. What remains is merely the abstract
authority of a choice enjoined,\footnote{Attached to (something).} 
with no regard for the fact that the very
possibility of choosing depends on what can be chosen. The archetypal
situation always cited by Sartre to demonstrate the irreducibility of
freedom merely underlines this. Within a predetermined reality, freedom
becomes a vacant claim: Herbert Marcuse has exposed the absurdity of the
philosophical theorem that it is always possible inwardly either to accept
or to reject martyrdom.\footnote{Reference to Marcuse's essay ``Sartre's
Existentialism'', included in {\em Studies in Critical Philosophy}, New Books,
London 1972, pp.~157--90. [editor's note]}
Yet this is precisely what Sartre's dramatic
situations are designed to demonstrate. But his plays are nevertheless bad
models of his own existentialism, because they display in their respect
for truth the whole administered universe which his philosophy ignores;
the lesson we learn from them is one of unfreedom. Sartre's theatre of
ideas sabotages the aims of his categories. This is not an individual
inadequacy of his plays. It is not the office of art to spotlight
alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world,
which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads. In fact, as soon as
committed works of art do instigate decisions at their own level, the
decisions themselves become interchangeable. Because of this ambiguity,
Sartre has with great candor confessed that he expects no real changes in
the world from literature: a skepticism which reflects both the historical
mutations of society and of the practical function of literature since
the days of Voltaire. The principle of commitment thus slides towards
the proclivities of the author, in keeping with the extreme subjectivism
of Sartre's philosophy, which for all its materialist undertones, still
audibly echoes German speculative idealism. In his literary theory,
the work of art becomes an appeal to subjects, because it is itself
nothing other than a declaration by a subject of his own choice or
failure to choose.

Sartre will not allow that every work of art, by its inception alone,
confronts the writer, however free he may be, with objective demands of
composition. His intention becomes simply one element among them. Sartre's
question, ``Why write?", and his solution of it in a ``deeper
choice," are invalid because the author's motivations are irrelevant
to the finished work, the literary product. Sartre himself is not so
far from, this view, when he notes that the stature of works increases;
the less they remain attached to the empirical person who created them,
as Hegel saw long ago. When he calls, the literary work, in Durkheim's
language, a social fact, he again involuntarily recalls its inherently
collective objectivity, impenetrable to the mere subjective intentions
of the author. Sartre therefore does not want to situate commitment at
the level of the intention of the writer, but at that of his humanity
itself.\footnote{Because he is a man {\em Situations II}, Paris 1948, p.~51.}
This determination, however, is so generic that commitment ceases
to be distinct from any other form of human action or attitude. The point,
says Sartre, is that the writer commits himself {\em in the present}, 
%% {\em dans le pr\'esent}; 
but since he in any case cannot escape it, his commitment to it
cannot indicate a program. The actual obligation a writer undertakes is
much more precise: it is not one of choice, but of substance. Although
Sartre talks of the dialectic, his subjectivism so little registers
the particular other for which the subject must first divest itself to
become a subject, that he suspects every literary objectification of
petrefaction. However, since the pure immediacy and spontaneity which
he hopes to save encounter no resistance in his work by which they
could define themselves, they undergo a second reification\footnote{%
The mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing.}. 
In order to
develop his drama and novel beyond sheer declaration---whose recurrent
model is the scream of the tortured---Sartre has to seek recourse in a
flat objectivity, subtracted from any dialectic of form and expression,
that is simply a communication of his own philosophy. The content of
his art becomes philosophy as with no other writer except Schiller.

But however sublime, thoughts can never be much more than one of the
materials for art. Sartre's plays are vehicles for the author's ideas,
which have been left behind in the race of esthetic forms. They operate
with traditional intrigues, exalted by an unshaken faith in meanings
which can be transferred from art to reality. But the theses they
illustrate, or where possible state, misuse the emotions which Sartre's
own drama aims to express, by making them examples. They thereby disavow
themselves. When one of his most famous plays ends with the dictum
``Hell is other people," it sounds like a quotation from {\em Being and
Nothingness},\footnote{Book by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)} 
and it might just as well have been ``Hell is ourselves."
The combination of solid plot and equally solid, extractable idea won
Sartre great success and made him, without doubt against his honest will,
acceptable to the culture industry. The high level of abstraction of such
thesis-art led him into the mistake of letting some of his best works,
the film {\em Les Jeux sont Faits}\footnote{{\em The Game is Up} book
by Sartre (1943), made into a film in 1947.}
or the play 
{\em Les Mains Sales},\footnote{{\em Dirty Hands} (1948)} 
be performed as
political events, and not just to an audience of victims in the dark. In
much the same way, the current ideology---which Sartre detests---confuses
the actions and sufferings of paper leaders with the objective movement
of history. Interwoven in the veil of personalization is the idea that
human beings are in control and decide, not anonymous machinery, and that
there is life on the commanding heights of society: Beckett's moribund
grotesques suggest the truth about that. Sartre's vision prevents him
from recognizing the hell he revolts against. Many of his phrases could
be parroted by his mortal enemies. The idea that decision as such is
what counts would even cover the Nazi slogan that ``only sacrifice makes
us free."  In fascist Italy, Gentile's absolute dynamism made similar
pronouncements in philosophy. The flaw in his conception of commitment
strikes at the very cause to which Sartre wishes to commit himself.


\subsection*{Brecht's Didacticism}

Brecht, in some of his plays, such as the dramatization of Gorky's {\em The
Mother} or {\em The Measures Taken}, bluntly glorifies the Party. But at times,
at least according to his theoretical writings, he too wanted to educate
spectators to a new attitude, that would be distanced, thoughtful,
experimental, the reverse of illusory empathy and identification. In
tendency to abstraction, his plays after {\em Saint Joan} trump those of
Sartre. The difference is that Brecht, more consistent than Sartre and a
greater artist, made this abstraction into the formal principle of his
art, as a didactic poetics that eliminates the traditional concept of
dramatic character altogether. He realized that the surface of social
life, the sphere of consumption, which includes the psychologically
motivated actions of individuals, occludes\footnote{{\em occludes}: to close
up or block off; obstruct} 
the essence of society---which,
as the law of exchange, is itself abstract. Brecht rejected esthetic
individuation as an ideology. He therefore sought to translate the true
hideousness of society into theatrical appearance, by dragging it straight
out from its camouflage. The people on his stage shrink before our eyes
into the agents of social processes and functions, which indirectly and
unknowingly they are in empirical reality. Brecht no longer postulates,
like Sartre, an identity between living individuals and the essence of
society, let alone any absolute sovereignty of the subject. Nevertheless,
the process of esthetic reduction that he pursues for the sake of
political truth in fact gets in its way. For this truth involves
innumerable mediations which Brecht disdains. What is artistically
legitimate as alienating infantilism---Brecht's first plays came from
the same milieu as Dada---becomes merely infantile when it starts to
claim theoretical or social validity. Brecht wanted to reveal in images
the inner nature of capitalism. In this sense, his aim was indeed what
he disguised it as against Stalinist terror---realistic. He would have
refused to deprive social essence of meaning by taking it as it appeared,
imageless and blind, in a single crippled life. But this burdened him with
the obligation of ensuring that what he intended to make unequivocally
clear was theoretically correct. His art, however, refused to accept this
{\em quid pro quo}\footnote{One thing in place of another.}:
it both presents itself as didactic, and claims esthetic
dispensation from responsibility for the accuracy of what it teaches.

Criticism of Brecht cannot overlook the fact that he did not---for
objective reasons beyond the adequacy of his own creations---fulfill
the norm he set himself as if it were a salvation. {\em Saint Joan} was the
central work of his dialectical theatre. ({\em The Good Woman of Szechuan} is
a variation of it in reverse: where Joan assists evil by the immediacy
of her goodness, Shen Te who wills the good must become evil). The play
is set in a Chicago halfway between the Wild West fables of {\em Mahagonny} and
economic facts---But the more preoccupied Brecht becomes with information,
and the less he looks for images, the more he misses the essence of
capitalism which the parable is supposed to present. Mere episodes in
the sphere of circulation, in which competitors maul each other, are
recounted instead of appropriation of surplus-value in the sphere of
production, compared with which the brawls of cattle dealers over their
shares of the booty are epiphenomena\footnote{{\em epiphenomena}: a secondary
phenomenon accopanying another and caused by it.}
incapable of provoking any great
crisis. Moreover, the economic transactions presented as the machinations
of rapacious traders are not merely puerile, which is how Brecht seems
to have meant them; they are also unintelligible by the criteria of
even the most primitive economic logic. The obverse\footnote{{\em obverse}:
facing the observer or opponent} 
of the latter is a
political na\"ivet\'e which could only make Brecht's opponents grin at the
thought of such an ingenuous enemy. They could be as comfortable with
Brecht as they are with the dying Joan in the impressive final scene of
the play. Even with the broadest-minded allowance for poetic licence,
the idea that a strike leadership backed by the Party could entrust a
crucial task to a nonmember is as inconceivable as the subsequent idea
that the failure of that individual could ruin the whole strike.


\subsection*{Brecht's Treatment of Fascism}

Brecht's comedy of the resistible rise of the great dictator {\em Arturo Ui}
exposes the subjective nullity and pretense of a fascist leader in a harsh
and accurate light. However, the deconstruction of leaders, like that of
all individuals in Brecht, is extended into a reconstruction of the social
and economic nexus\footnote{{\em nexus}: a connected group or series}
in which the dictator acts. Instead of a conspiracy of
the wealthy and powerful, we are given a trivial gangster organization,
the cabbage trust. The true horror of fascism is conjured away; it is
no longer a slow end-product of the concentration of social power, but
mere hazard, like an accident or crime. This conclusion is dictated
by the exigencies of agitation: adversaries must be diminished. The
consequence is bad politics, both in literature as in practice before
1933. Against every dialectic, the ridicule to which Ui is consigned
renders innocuous the fascism that was accurately predicted by Jack
London decades before. The anti-ideological artist thus prepared the
degradation of his own ideas into ideology. Tacit acceptance of the claim
that one half of the world no longer contains antagonisms is supplemented
by jests at everything that belies the official theodicy\footnote{defense of
God's goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.} 
of the other
half. It is not that respect for historical scale forbids laughter at
house painters, although the use of that term against Hitler was itself
a painful exploitation of bourgeois class consciousness. The group which
engineered the seizure of power in Germany was also certainly a gang. But
the problem is that such elective affinities are not extraterritorial:
they are rooted within society itself. This is why the buffoonery of
fascism, evoked by Chaplin as well, was at the same time also its ultimate
horror. If this is suppressed, and a few sorry exploiters of greengrocers
are mocked, where key positions of economic power are actually at issue,
the attack misfires. {\em The Great Dictator} loses all satirical force, and
becomes obscene, when a Jewish girl can bash a line of storm troopers
on the head with a pan without being torn to pieces. For the sake of
political commitment, political reality is trivialized: which then
reduces the political effect.


Sartre's frank doubt whether {\em Guernica} ``won a single supporter
for the Spanish cause" certainly also applies to Brecht's didactic
drama. Scarcely anyone needs to be taught the {\em fabula docet}\footnote{{\em
fabula docet}: the fable's ``message''}
to be extracted
from it---that there is injustice in the world; while the moral itself
shows few traces of the dialectical theory to which Brecht gave cursory
allegiance. The trappings of epic drama invite the American phrase
``preaching to the converted." The primacy of lesson over pure form,
which Brecht intended to achieve, became in reality a formal device
itself. The suspension of form turns back against its own character as
appearance. Its self-criticism in drama was related to the doctrine of
objectivity ({\em Sachlichkeit}) in the applied visual arts. The correction
of form by external conditions, with the elimination of ornament in
the service of function, only increases its autonomy. The substance of
Brecht's artistic work was the didactic play as an artistic principle. His
method, to render immediately apparent events into phenomena newly alien
to the spectator, was also a medium of formal construction rather than a
contribution to practical efficacy. It is true that Brecht never spoke
as skeptically as Sartre about the social effects of art. But, as an
astute and experienced man of the world, he can scarcely have been wholly
convinced of them. He once calmly wrote that when he was not deceiving
himself, the theatre was more important to him than any changes in the
world it might promote. Yet the artistic principle of simplification
not only purged real politics of the illusory distinctions projected by
subjective reflection into social objectivity, as Brecht intended, but
it also falsified the very objectivity which didactic drama labored to
distil. If we take Brecht at his word and make politics the criterion
by which to judge his committed theatre, by the same token it proves
untrue. Hegel's {\em Logic} taught that essence must appear. If this is so, a
representation of essence which ignores its relation to appearance must
be as intrinsically false as the substitution of a lumpen proletariat
for the men behind fascism. The only ground on which Brecht's technique
of reduction would be legitimate is that of ``art for art's sake,"
which his version of commitment condemns as it does
Lucullus.\footnote{Reference to Brecht's last play on the Roman general
Lucullus. [editor's note]}

\subsection*{Politics and Poetic Tone}

Contemporary literary Germany is anxious to separate Brecht the artist
from Brecht the politician. The major writer must be saved for the West,
if possible placed on a pedestal as an all-German poet, and so neutralized
{\em au-dessus de la m\^el\'ee}\footnote{At the top of the (bunch).}. 
There is truth in this to the extent that both
Brecht's artistic force, and his devious and uncontrollable intelligence,
went well beyond the official credos and prescribed esthetics of the
People's Democracies. All the same, Brecht must be defended against
this defense of him. His work, with its often patent weaknesses, would
not have had such power if it were not saturated with politics. Even
its most questionable creations, such as {\em The Measures Taken}, generate
an immediate awareness that issues of the utmost seriousness are at
stake. To this extent, Brecht's claim that he used his theatre to make
men think was justified. It is futile to try to separate the beauties,
real or imaginary, of his works from their political intentions. The
task of an immanent critique, which alone is dialectical, is rather to
synthesize assessment of the validity of his forms with that of his
politics. Sartre's chapter ``Why write?" contains the undeniable
statement that: ``Nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible
to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism."\footnote{{\em What is
Literature?}, p.~46}
Nor could one be
written in praise of the Moscow Trials, even if such praise was bestowed
before Stalin actually had Zinoviev and Bukharin murdered.\footnote{Reference
to {\em The Measures Taken}, written in 1930, which contained an implcit
justification in advance of the Trials.  Zinoviev and Bukharin were condemned
in 1938. [editor's note]}
The political
falsehood stains the esthetic form. Where Brecht distorts the real social
problems discussed in his epic drama, in order to prove a thesis, the
whole structure and foundation of the play itself crumbles. {\em Mother Courage}
is an illustrated primer intended to reduce to absurdity
Montecuccoli's\footnote{Montecuccoli: (1609--1680) A military man, who wrote
{\em Memorie della guerra}}
dictum that war feeds on war. The camp follower who uses the Thirty Years'
War to make a life for her children thereby becomes responsible for their
ruin. But in the play, this responsibility follows rigorously neither
from the overall situation of the war itself nor from the individual
behavior of the petty profiteer; if Mother Courage had not been absent
at the critical moment, the disaster would not have happened, and the
fact that she has to be absent to earn some money remains completely
generic in relation to the action. The picture-book technique which
Brecht needs to spell out his thesis prevents him from proving it. A
sociopolitical analysis, of the sort Marx and Engels sketched in their
criticism of Lassalle's play {\em Franz von Sickingen}, would show that Brecht's
simplistic equation of the Thirty Years' War with a modem war excludes
precisely what is crucial for the behavior and fate of Mother Courage
in Grimmelshausen's original drama. Because the society of the Thirty
Years' War was not the functional capitalist society of modem times,
we cannot even poetically stipulate a closed functional system in which
the lives and deaths of private individuals directly reveal economic
laws. But Brecht needed the old lawless days as an image of his own,
precisely because he saw clearly that the society of his own age could
no longer be directly comprehended in terms of people and things. His
attempt to reconstruct the reality of society thus led first to a false
social model and then to dramatic implausibility. Bad politics becomes
bad art and {\em vice versa}. But the less works have to proclaim what they
cannot completely believe themselves, the more telling they become in
their own right; and the less they need a surplus of meaning beyond their
being. For the rest, the real interested parties in every camp would be
probably as successful in surviving wars today as they have always been.

Aporia\footnote{{\em aporia}: A figure in which the speaker professes to be at
a loss what course to pursue, where to begin, to end, what to say, etc.}
of this sort multiply until they affect the Brechtian tone itself,
the very fiber of his poetic art. Undoubted though their uniqueness may
be---qualities which the mature Brecht may have thought unimportant---they
were poisoned by the untruth of his politics. For what he justified was
not simply, as he long sincerely believed, an incomplete socialism, but
a coercive domination in which blindly irrational social forces returned
to work once again. When Brecht became a panegyrist\footnote{{\em panegyrist}:
one who extols or praises, either by writing or speaking.}
of its harmony, his
lyric voice had to swallow chalk, and it started to grate. Already the
exaggerated adolescent virility of the young Brecht betrayed the borrowed
courage of the intellectual who, in despair at violence, suddenly hastens
towards a violent practice which he has every reason to fear. The wild
roar of {\em The Measures Taken} drowns out the noise of the disaster that
has overtaken the cause, which Brecht convulsively tries to proclaim
as salvation. Even Brecht's best work was infected by the deceptions
of his commitment. Its language shows how far the underlying poetic
subject and its message have come apart. In an attempt to overcome the
gap, Brecht affected the diction of the oppressed. But the doctrine
he advocated needs the language of the intellectual. The homeliness
and simplicity of his tone is thus a fiction. It betrays itself both by
signs of exaggeration and by stylized regression to archaic or provincial
forms of expression. It can often be importunate, and ears which have
not let themselves be deprived of their native sensitivity cannot help
hearing that they are talked into something. It is a usurpation and
almost contempt for victims to speak like this, as if the author were
one of them. All roles may be played except that of the worker. The
gravest charge against commitment is that even right intentions go wrong
when they are noticed, and still more so when they then try to conceal
themselves. Something of this remains in Brecht's later plays in the
linguistic gesture of wisdom, the fiction of the old peasant sated with
epic experience as the poetic subject. No one in any country of the
world is any longer capable of the earthy experience of South German
muzhiks: the ponderous delivery has become a propaganda device to make
us believe that the good life is where the Red Army is in control. Since
there is nothing to give substance to this humanity, which we have to
take on trust as realized, Brecht's tone degenerates into an echo of
archaic social relations, gone beyond recall. The late Brecht was not
so distant from official humanism. A journalistically minded Westerner
could well praise {\em The Caucasian Chalk Circle} as a hymn to motherhood,
and who is not touched when the splendid girl is finally held up as
an example to the querulous lady beset with migraine? Baudelaire, who
dedicated his work to the coiner of the motto {\em l'art pour l'art}, would
have been less suited to such catharsis. Even the grandeur and virtuosity
of such poems as {\em The Legend of the Origin of the Book of Tao Te Ch'ing
on Lao-Tzu's Journey into Exile} are marred by the theatricality of total
plain-spokenness. What his classical predecessors once denounced as the
idiocy of rural life, Brecht, like some existential ontologist, treats
as ancient truth. His whole oeuvre is a Sisyphean labor to reconcile
his highly cultivated and subtle taste with the crudely heteronomous
demands which he desperately imposed on himself .


\subsection*{The Problem of Suffering}

I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which
inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in
Sartre's play {\em Morts Sans S\'epulture},\footnote{%
Play: {\em The Victors} (but literally, {\em Deaths without burial})} 
``Is there any meaning in life
when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?'',
is also the question whether any man now has a right to exist; whether
intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed
literature because of the regression of society. But Enzensberger's
retort also remains true, that literature must resist this verdict,
in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not
a surrender to cynicism. Its own situation is one of paradox, not merely
the problem of how to react to it. The abundance of real suffering
tolerates no forgetting; Pascal's theological saying. {\em On ne doit plus
dormir},\footnote{One should not sleep anymore.} 
must be secularized. Yet this suffering, what Hegel called
consciousness of adversity, also demands the continued existence of art
while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering
can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being
betrayed by it. The most important artists of the age have realized this.

The uncompromising radicalism of their works, the very features defamed
as formalism, give them a terrifying power, absent from helpless poems
to the victims of our time. But even Sch\"onberg's {\em Survivor of Warsaw}
remains trapped in the aporia\footnote{A perplexing difficulty.}
to which it, autonomous figuration of
heteronomy\footnote{Subjection to the rule of another being or power;
subject to external law. Opposite of {\em autonomy}}
raised to the intensity of hell, totally surrenders. There is
something painful in Schönberg's compositions---not what arouses anger in
Germany, the fact that they prevent people from repressing from memory
what they at all costs want to repress. It is rather the way in which,
by turning suffering into images, despite all their hard implacability,
they wound our shame before the victims. For these are used to create
something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world
which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer
physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains,
however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of
this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of
its opposite. The esthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn
prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some
meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. This
alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade
them could stand upright before justice. Even the sound of despair pays
its tribute to a hideous affirmation. Works of less than the highest
rank are even willingly absorbed, as contributions to clearing up
the past. When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the
themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to continue to play
along with the culture which gave birth to murder. There is one nearly
invariable characteristic of such literature. It is that it implies,
purposely or not, that even in the so-called extreme situations, indeed
in them most of all, humanity flourishes. Sometimes this develops into
a dismal metaphysic which does its best to work up atrocities into
``limiting situation" which it then accepts to the extent that they
reveal authenticity in men. In such a homely existential atmosphere, the
distinction between executioners and victims becomes bluffed; both, after
all, are equally suspended above the possibility of nothingness, which
of course is generally not quite so uncomfortable for the executioners.


\subsection*{Kafka, Beckett and Contemporary Experimentalism}

Today, the adherents of a philosophy which has since degenerated into a
mere ideological sport, fulminate in pre-1933 fashion against artistic
distortion, deformation and perversion of life, as though authors, by
faithfully reflecting atrocity, were responsible for what they revolt
against. The best exemplification of this attitude, still prevalent among
the silent majority in Germany, is the following story about Picasso. An
officer of the Nazi occupation forces visited the painter in his
studio and, pointing to {\em Guernica}, asked: ``Did you do that?''. Picasso
reputedly answered, ``No, you did.'' Autonomous works of art too, like
this painting, firmly negate empirical reality, destroy the destroyer,
that which merely exists and by merely existing endlessly reiterates
guilt. It is none other than Sartre who has seen the connection between
the autonomy of a work and an intention which is not conferred upon it but
is its own gesture towards reality. ``The work of art,'' he has written,
``{\em does not have} an end; there we agree with Kant. But the reason is that
it {\em is} an end. The Kantian formula does not account for the appeal which
resounds at the basis of each painting, each statue, each book.''\footnote{
{\em What is Literature?}, p.~34}
It
only remains to add there is no straightforward relationship between
this appeal and the thematic commitment of a work. The uncalculating
autonomy of works which avoid popularization and adaptation to the market
involuntarily becomes an attack on them. The attack is not abstract,
not a fixed attitude of all works of art to the world which will not
forgive them for not bending totally to it. The distance these works
maintain from empirical reality is in itself partly mediated by that
reality. The imagination of the artist is not a creation 
{\em ex nihilo}\footnote{Out of nothing}; only
dilettanti and esthetes believe it to be so. Works of art that react
against empirical reality obey the forces of that reality, which reject
intellectual creations and throw them back on themselves. There is no
material content, no formal category of an artistic creation, however
mysteriously changed and unknown to itself, which did not originate in
the empirical reality from which it breaks free.

It is this which constitutes the true relation of art to reality,
whose elements are regrouped by its formal laws. Even the avant-garde
abstraction which provokes the indignation of philistines, and which has
nothing in common with conceptual or logical abstraction, is a reflex
response to the abstraction of the law which objectively dominates
society. This could be shown in Beckett's works. These enjoy what is
today the only humanly respectable fame: everyone shudders at them, and
yet no one can persuade himself that these eccentric plays and novels
are not about what everyone knows but no one will admit. Philosophical
apologists may laud his works as sketches for an anthropology. But they
deal with a highly concrete historical reality: the abdication of the
subject. Beckett's {\em Ecce Homo}\footnote{Behold the man.} 
is what human beings have become. As though
with eyes drained of tears, they stare silently out of his sentences. The
spell they cast, which also binds them, is lifted by being reflected
in them. However, the minimal promise of happiness they contain, which
refuses to be traded for comfort, cannot be had for a price less than
total dislocation, to the point of worldlessness. Here every commitment
to the world must be abandoned to satisfy the ideal of the committed work
of art---that polemical alienation which Brecht as a theorist invented,
and as an artist practiced less and less as he bound himself more tightly
to the role of a friend of mankind. This paradox, which might be charged
with sophistry, can be supported without much philosophy by the simplest
experience: Kafka's prose and Beckett's plays, or the truly monstrous
novel {\em The Unnameable}, have an effect by comparison with which officially
committed works look like pantomime. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear
which existentialism merely talks about. By dismantling appearance, they
explode from within the art which committed proclamation subjugates from
without, and hence only in appearance. The inescapability of their work
compels the change of attitude which committed works merely demand. He
over whom Kafka's wheels have passed has lost forever both any peace
with the world and any chance of consoling himself with the judgment that
the way of the world is bad; the element of ratification which lurks in
resigned admission of the dominance of evil is burnt away.

Yet the greater the aspiration, the greater is the possibility
of foundering and failure. The loss of tension evident in works of
painting and music which, have moved away from objective representation
and intelligible or coherent meaning has in many ways spread to the
literature known in a repellent jargon as ``texts."	Such works drift
to the brink of indifference, degenerate insensibly into mere hobbies,
into idle repetition of formulas now abandoned in other art forms, into
trivial patterns. It is this development which often gives substance
to crude calls for commitment. Formal structures which challenge the
lying positivism of meaning can easily slide into a different sort of
vacuity, positivistic arrangements, empty juggling with elements. They
fall within the very sphere from they seek to escape. The extreme case
is literature which undialectically confuses itself with science and
vainly tries to fuse with cybernetics. Extremes meet; what cuts the last
thread of communication becomes the prey of communication theory. No firm
criterion can draw the line between a determinate negation of meaning
and a bad positivism of meaninglessness, as an assiduous\footnote{%
Unremitting, persistent, constant.}
soldiering on
just for the sake of it. Least of all can such a line be based on, an
appeal to the human, and a curse on mechanization. Works of art which
by their existence take the side of the victims of a rationality that
subjugates nature are even in their protest constitutively implicated in
the process of rationalization itself. Were they to try to disown it,
they would become both esthetically and socially powerless: mere clay. The
organizing, unifying principle of, each and every work of art is borrowed
from that very rationality whose claim to totality it seeks to defy.


\subsection*{French and German Cultural Traditions}

In the history of French and German consciousness, the problem of
commitment has been posed in opposite ways. In France, esthetics have been
dominated, openly or covertly, by the principle of {\em l'art pour l'art},
academic and reactionary tendencies.\footnote{We know very well that
pure art and empty art are the same thing and that esthetic purism was a
brilliant manoeuver of the bourgeois of the last century who preferred to see
themselves denounced as philistines rather than as exploiters.  {\em What is
Literature?}, p.~17.}
This explains the revolt
against it. Even extreme avant-garde works have a touch of decorative
allure in France. It is for this reason that the call to existence and
commitment sounded revolutionary there. In Germany, the situation is the
other way round. The liberation of art from any external end, although
it was a German who first raised it purely and incorruptibly into a
criterion of taste, has always been suspect to a tradition which has deep
roots in German idealism. The first famous document of this tradition is
that senior masters' bible of intellectual history, Schiller's {\em Treatise
on the Theatre as a Moral Institution}. Such suspicion is not so much
due to the elevation of mind to an Absolute that is coupled with it---an
attitude that swaggered its way to hubris in German philosophy.  It is
rather provoked by the side that any work of art free of an ulterior
goal shows to society. For this art is a reminder of that sensuous
pleasure in which even---indeed especially---the most extreme dissonance,
by sublimation and negation, partakes. German speculative philosophy
granted that a work of art contains within itself the sources of its
transcendence, and that its own sum is always more than it---but only
therefore to demand a certificate of good behavior from it. According
to this latent tradition, a work of art should have no being for itself,
since otherwise it would---as Plato's embryonic state socialism classically
stigmatized it---be a source of effeminacy and an obstacle to action for
its' own sake, the German original sin. Killjoys, ascetics, moralists
of the sort who are always invoking names like Luther and Bismarck,
have no time for esthetic autonomy; there is also an undercurrent of
servile heteronomy in the pathos of the categorical imperative, which
is indeed on the one hand reason itself, but on the other a brute datum
to be blindly obeyed. Fifty years ago Stefan George and his school were
still being attacked as Frenchifying esthetes.

Today the curmudgeons whom no bombs could demolish have allied themselves
with the philistines who rage against the alleged incomprehensibility,
of the new art. The underlying impulse of these attack is petty bourgeois
hatred of sex, the common ground of Western moralists and ideologists of
socialist realism. No moral terror can prevent the side the work of art
shows its beholder from giving him pleasure, even if only in the formal
fact of temporary freedom from the compulsion of practical goals. Thomas
Mann called this quality of art ``high spirits," a notion intolerable
to people with morals. Brecht himself who was not without ascetic 
traits---which reappear transmuted in the reserve of any great autonomous art
towards consumption---rightly ridiculed culinary art; but he was much too
intelligent not to know that pleasure can never be completely ignored in
the total esthetic effect, no matter how relentless the work. The primacy
of the esthetic, object as pure refiguration does not smuggle consumption
or false harmony back by a detour. Although the moment of pleasure, even
when it is extirpated\footnote{%
To pull or pluck up by the roots; to root up, destroy, or remove root
and branch}
from the effect of a work, constantly returns to it,
the principle that governs autonomous works of art is not the totality
of their effects, but their own inherent structure. They are knowledge
as nonconceptual objects. This is the source of their greatness. It is
not something of which they have to persuade men, because it should be
given to them. This is why today autonomous rather than committed works
of art should be encouraged in Germany. Committed works all too readily
credit themselves with every noble value, and then manipulate them at
their ease. Under fascism, too, no atrocity was perpetrated without a
moral veneer. Those who trumpet their ethics and humanity in Germany
today are merely waiting for a chance to persecute those whom their
rules condemn, and to exercise the same inhumanity in practice of which
they accuse modern art in theory. In Germany, commitment often means
bleating what everyone is already saying or at least secretly wants
to hear. The notion of a ``message" in art, even when politically
radical, already contains an accommodation to the world: the stance
of the lecturer conceals a clandestine entente\footnote{An
understanding.}
with the listeners,
who could only be truly rescued from illusions by refusal of it.


\subsection*{The Politics of Autonomous Art}

The type of literature that, in accordance with the tenets of commitment
but also with the demands of philistine moralism exists for man,
betrays him by traducing that which alone could help him, if it did
not strike a pose of helping him. But any literature which therefore
concludes that it can be a law unto itself, and exist only for itself,
degenerates into ideology no less. Art, which even in its opposition to
society remains a part of it, must close its eyes and ears against it:
it cannot escape the shadow of irrationality. But when it appeals to this
unreason, making it a {\em raison d'\^etre}, it converts its own 
malediction\footnote{A curse; the utterance of a curse.}
into a theodicy\footnote{%
a writing, doctrine, or theory intended to ``justify the ways of God
to men."}.
Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a
hidden ``it should be otherwise."  When a work is merely itself and
no other thing, as in a pure pseudoscientific construction, it becomes
bad art---literally pre-artistic. The moment of true volition, however,
is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose
crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should
be. As eminently constructed and produced objects, works of art, even
literary ones, point to a practice from which they abstain: the creation
of a just life. The mediation is not a compromise between commitment
and autonomy, nor a sort of mixture of advanced formal elements with
an intellectual content inspired by genuinely or supposedly progressive
politics. The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect
pumped into them: if anything it is the opposite. Nevertheless, an
emphasis on autonomous, works is itself sociopolitical in nature. The
feigning of a true politics here and now, the freezing of historical
relations which nowhere seem ready to melt, oblige the mind to go where
it need not degrade itself. Today, every phenomenon of culture, even
if a model of integrity, is liable to be suffocated in the cultivation
of kitsch. Yet paradoxically in the same epoch it is to works of art
that has fallen the burden of wordlessly asserting what is barred to
politics. Sartre himself has expressed this truth in a passage which
does credit to his honesty.\footnote{See Jean-Paul Sartre, {\em
L'Existentalisme est un Humanisme}, Paris 1946, p. 105.}
This is not a time for political art, but
politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where
it seems to be politically dead. An example is Kafka's allegory of toy
guns, in which an idea of nonviolence is fused with a dawning awareness
of the approaching paralysis of politics. Paul Klee too belongs to any
debate about committed and autonomous art: for his work, {\em \'ecriture par
excellence},\footnote{writing by excellence} 
has roots in literature and would not have been what it was
without them---or if it had not consumed them. During the First World
War or shortly after, Klee drew cartoons of Kaiser Wilhelm as an inhuman
iron eater. Later, in 1920, these became---the development can be shown
quite clearly---the {\em Angelus Novus}, the machine angel, who, though he no
longer bears any emblem of caricature or commitment, flies far beyond
both. The machine angel's enigmatic eyes force the onlooker to try to
decide whether he is announcing the culmination of disaster or salvation
hidden within it. But, as Walter Benjamin, who owned the drawing, said,
he is the angel who does not give but takes.

\bigskip\noindent
{\em Translated by Francis McDonagh.}


\end{document}