The following ad supports maintaining our C.E.E.O.L.

service

ArtandAestheticsandtheCrisisofCulture
ArtandAestheticsandtheCrisisofCulture
byStefanMorawski
Source:
PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1+2/1990,pages:104116,onwww.ceeol.com.
AESTHETICS AND ETHICS IN CONTEMPORARY POLlSH THOUGHT
Steran Morawski
My scheme in this paper is to pinpoint first the main issues of interwar thought
on the crisis of culture and then to focus on contemporary conceptions with respect
to this question. In the final concluding section, I shall tackle present-day art and
aesthetics in the context of their interplay with the broader cultural background.
Let me stress that their intertwining does not mean simple interdependency., Art
and aesthetics beyond any doubt uncover the fact of the erosion of some of the
most fundamental values. However, artists and students of aesthetic problems give
vent to the rages and hopes of our times because they were and are directly in-
cited by the crisis of culture. Thus, if there is a dependent relation, it rather follows
in a single direction.
I have to leave aside the eighteenth and nineteenth century antecedents. It is
instructive that the apogee of the conceptions which examine the decline of culture
emerged in the period between 1912 and 1932. The slaughter of World War I
triggered off multifaceted critical analyses of social and existential reality. Already
in 1912 Rathenau in a short study Zur Kritik der Zeit (following the Weberian
analysis of the Geist des Kapitalismus) tried tentatively to argue that the demands
of organizing a more complex organization of social life as well as technological
development bring on modernization, uniformity, managerial rules, and the primacy
of pragmatic values. Civilization takes command over das Seelische; sciences,
loyalty to the state, calculated rationalism and bureaucracy win priority at the price
of a degradation of the old ethos based on religion, community and intimacy.
Spengler wrote his great work during the period of the Great Cataclysm. In the
1920s Berdiayev published reflections On the Sense ofHistory, Ortega y Gasset' s
The Revolt o/the Masses opened up new vistas in 1930, and in the following year
Jaspers spoke alarmingly in his Die geistige Situation der Zeit of the victorious
urbanization, democratization and Americanization which had resulted in the loss
of self-identity and a feeling of helplessness. At the end of that decade Maritain
launched his project of an integral humanism with its theocentric orientation, and
Mannheim discussed in the year 1935 the process of thorough social reconstruc-
tion bound to the emergence of rational functionalism which was said to have spread
over all areas of culture. The early 1940s produced Toynbee's studies on the
vicissitudes of our civilization, the masterpiece of Adorno and Horkheimer on the
dialectic of enlightenment and penetrating theses on the philosophy of history by
Benjamin. They drew on Jewish theology which contains the following elements:
a lost paradise, mankind's recurring defeats, and the nostalgia for an Urgeschichte
which then becomes transformed into an utopian project of regained freedom and
justice. The remarks on Bachofen and Fourier plus the gravitation to the Jewish
Praxis International 10:1/2 April & July 1990
0260-8448 $2.00
Praxis International
105
messianism are the reverse side of Benjamin's critical attitude towards the present-
day culture. There are no linear developments which lead to the expected realm
of On the contrary, the course of history has to be ruptured,
the dIscontInuIty between ruinous civilisation and the liberatory dream must be
accepted as irrevocable.
I mention here only the most renowned examples to which one should add Freud's
1930 essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. The questions these writers dwelt on
included the decline of culture and the inevitable approaching spiritual desert
(Spengler, Witkiewicz, Benjamin, Freud) (insofar as our lot is doomed to catas-
trophic defeat conditioned by cosmos-like cycles), the extinction of spiritual needs
and humanity's instinctive prerequisites and the dream of a rescue deriving from
our protest and resistance (Heidegger, Jaspers, Berdiayev, Schweitzer, Huizinga,
Adorno and Horkheimer) which, among other possibilities, can and should rely
on religious faith or proper philosophical thinking. Another question of the same
significance concerned the very foundation of the perceived cultural crisis: it was
to be either nature or nature-like history (Freud and Spengler) or a social world
which deprived human beings of supreme values (among others, the religious one
without which, as Berdiayev, Maritain and Toynbee maintained, mankind must
go astray and its culture become barren). The crucial question pertained to the
specific social mechanisms which were delineated as poisonous and damaging to
the whole of culture. Spengler (when describing a Faustian type of culture with
its characteristic features propelling mankind towards the last stage) grappled with
the same symptoms which other thinkers emphasized, without referring to
metaphysical premises or Biblical metaphors of the Deluge and Day of Wrath.
The cult of money, superficial democratization, the idealization of technology and
science, the absence of authentic philosophy, the replacement of a chivalrous ethos
by conventional moral codes, the oscillation of the state of mind between extremes
(i.e. mere hedonism or mere intellectualism): these Spenglerian motifs return in
another context in the work of such critics as Ortega y Gasset, Huizinga, K. Jaspers
and Berdiayev. Polish writers were especially sensitive to the growth of a
materialistic world view through their encounter with political demagogues and
Soviet authoritarianism. An ant-like society governed by illiterates and which
destroys privacy and civil liberties marked for themthe very end of culture. Some
scholars (Znaniecki) thought that efforts could and must be made to counter these
developments while others (Witkiewicz) found that there is no defence left because,
alas, the masses are happy when their elementary needs are gratified and gain
confidence by means of powerful pressure groups. Ortega y Gasset inveighed against
the welfare society which, by functioning smoothly, reduces everything and
everybody to one dimension, namely the gaining of maximum comfort. He railed
against the appalling wilderness of the big metropolis where anonymity and
specialization allegedly merged together with widespread vulgarity, humbug and
violence. Thinkers like Jaspers, Russerl and Heidegger observed the monstrous
examples of a decline in civilization's moral culture. But they emphasized first
of all that symbolic culture (religion, the arts, philosophy, science) commits suicide
through its overinstitutionalization. Those arguments reiterate in Berdiayev's or
Maritain's discourse although for them the primordial cause of the spiritual
opaqueness or nihilism was forgetting God and neglecting the Church. Adorno
Access via CEEOL NL Germany
106 Praxis International
and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944-1946) elaborated the
Lukacsian idea of ubiquitous reification and alienation. Nothing was said there
about the Soviet Union, most probably because of the historical context. Instead,
German Nazism and the American cultural industry were interpreted as the two
disastrous outcomes of instrumental reaSOD. Enlightenment, which had started as
a program of human emancipation, had reached - they concluded - the border
of Unreason, enslaving both rulers and ruled.
Synthesizing the above selected and juxtaposed ideas we can identify the common
thread which ties together those phenomena characteristic of the interwar cultural
crisis. The syndrome embraces massification (false or apparent democracy),
bureaucratization of which the utmost expressions were despotic police-states,
domination of pragmatic values (leaning on the managerial organization, functional
expediency and welfare as the ultimate goal), supremacy of the instrumental reason
(tied to technology and the idea of exact sciences as the major achievements of
the human mind), degradation of religious feelings (barring the human ethos from
the secret transcendent sources), and deterioration of philosophical ideas, borrowed
chiefly from comrnonsense or scientific theorems and methodological devices.
Culture then was explicitly or implicitly understood as a set of peculiar values,
menaced by the civilization which exerts its dynamic influence to further an opposing
axiological pattern that is founded on material worth, institutional framework and
scientific-technological attainments. Culture can then mean a way of being or a
way of having. The first is the quest for the highest possible meaning of life, the
second the conquest of nature and the most effective administration of social reality.
When did the turn from one to the other begin? According to Spengler, civiliza-
tion is the final stage of the cultural cycle lasting for about 1,000 years, but the
Faustian physiognomy of culture bears already all the features of the final collapse
of civilization. Hence the year 1700 can be seen as the borderline. Berdiayev and
Maritain established it earlier - in the aftermath of the Renaissance which dethroned
religious values. Ortega y Gasset as well as Adorno and Horkheimer pointed to
the beginning of the nineteenth century as a result of the Industrial and French
Revolutions. Most thinkers shared their conviction. From Freud's perspective (the
conflict between the libido and culture which makes us self-controlled and neurotic),
the critical stance is preserved in the reservoir of mankind's history, but he too
conceded that the sequence from religion as the dominating illusion to sciences
and technology results from socio-historical occurrences. The more there is of
culture and its regulation the richer the accummulation of taboos and frustrations.
Modern times accelerated the flow of intrinsic stimuli.
Whichever turning point in the past we accept, it was obvious to all critics that
the negative factors they identified exploded in the twentieth century. They were
grasped as negative from the evaluative viewpoint held by each of them separately
but they converged in most points. It was World War I, that expansionist murderous
rivalry, which shook minds as the most spectacular symptom of the cultural illness.
One has to choose between opposed sets of values and norms. The choice depends
on a worldview adopted consciously or unconsciously. Philosophy of culture is
the clearest expression of such a commitment. It opts for either the religious, ecstatic
or the comfortable existence ... it determines whether the ambush waiting for us
is missionary enthusiasm and utopian blueprints, or the eagerness to cultivate good
Praxis International
107
management and everyday profits. The option against the second which, according
to all these thinkers, gives priority to the seductive gains of civilization and men
falling prey to them, implies the crisis of culture. For only the first choice means
the reassessment of the genuine hierarchy of value.
The year 1945 should be regarded as a line of demarcation; Heidegger, Adorno,
Jaspers, Arendt and Toynbee elaborated their ideas and simultaneously concepts
laid down earlier were developed and enriched. However the whole civilizational
and cultural pattern changed as a result of a fourfold revolutionary transformation:
in information, technology (rooted in the exact sciences) and the socio-political
sphere (which manifested itself in two forms: the strengthened Leviathans and,
on the other hand, the emergence of an alternative movement contesting the status
quo in all its aspects). World War 11 unmasked the death throbs of culture to a
much greater extent than the years 1914-1918. Moreover, it brought nuclear
nightmare and ecological problems which did not exist before. Earlier in the United
States, Henry and Brooks Adams together with certain Freudians proclaimed a
pessimistic prophecy against the dominating trend of thought. Now, after the United
States reached the top position among the most advanced countries, it came forth
with analyses concerning the critical status of culture. The disproportions between
the disorienting triumphs of civilization and a culture in danger of strangulation
became more and more evident. The naturalistic tendency which prevailed in the
epoch of the Adams brothers receded entirely. No one dared to speak about what
appeared to be a crisis-like, socio-cultural entropy. The great naturalist, K. Lorentz,
who is the exponent of the same methodological attitude regardless of whether
its object is nature or society, when treating the facets of the crisis in Der Abbau
des Menschlichen (1983) speaks only metaphorically of the "sacculinization" of
mankind (from the crustacean, sacculina carceni, a symbiont which degenerates
as a result of a parasitic existence). Indeed, a regressive evolution is seen as
derivative of a social debilitation. The mind threatens the soul. The neo-Freudian
orientation reached its peak in the fascinating works dating from the fifties by
Norman Brown and Herbert Marcuse, but it marked the end of this approach's
influence rather than the opening of new horizons. Spengler had no successors
- he was recalled only as a brilliant diagnostician of culture under the pressure
of a civilizational development. The idea of a cultural crisis shifted towards
phenomena which advanced as the fundamental symptoms of the newly visible
pattern. Production for production's sake as well as increasing consumerism, the
prevailing technological scientific syndrome, the supremacy of social organization,
the unprecedented demographic growth, the spread of mass-media masterminding
everyday life - all these elements clash with the philosophical self-analysis of
scientific rationality, the paradoxical recurrent' 'illiteracy" (because the educa-
tional systems, overloaded with mind-numbing contents and removed from the
pressing issues of our times, have failed), the religious revival in its diverse
manifestations, the counter-cultural revolt against rigid codes and worldviews
imposed by political and academic headquarters. Why is there a crisis? There is
such a great number of authors, books and arguments that I can select only the
most salient examples. Take the reports of the Club of Rome and E. Schumacher' s
formula that "small is beautiful". They campaigned against the calculated growth
of production which widens the gap between the North and the South, stabilizes
108 Praxis International
inequality in each social system, destroys the resources of Nature by blind exploi-
tation and petrifies the hierarchical order. Take the denlystification of the myth
of the machine by Lewis Mumford and many others, undermining the axiom of
technological society which makes us slaves of hardware and sophisticated artifacts
and lifts the computer to the rank of a sacrosanct idol. Let us remember Feyerabend's
books wrestling with Scientific Reason, his crusade for the neodadaist "anything
goes" , his argument that it is not the context of verification but of discovery which
is principal. Take many other scholars who speak of tacit knowledge and point
to the gradual decline of the scientific ethos from the times of Bacon and Newton
until our own epoch. The truth which is and should be a power falsely pretends
to be the primary basis of a worldview. Let us recall Paul Goodman' s or Illich' s
programme of deschooling society in order to get rid of absurd learned rubbish
and the manipulated training of conformist children and youngsters. Let us assess
the brilliant analyses of Baudrillard concerning the abundance of goods exchanged
according to the rhythm of fashion, the vertigo of advertisenlents intertangled with
the rule of obsolescence, the frenetic obscenity (as he calls it) of everything for
sale. No feeling of alienation, no sense of tragedy, no intimacy and even no creative
imagination can be saved in a hyper-realist society, where consciousness is numbed
by the multi-dimensional spectacles offering pleasure but leaving their audiences
totally passive. Take G. Debord's or R. Vaneigem's assault on the present-day
Leviathans which allow for clever managerial governing under the disguise of
democratic slogans. Leviathans which produce military-technological-scientific
complexes, dependent on the Corporations or Political Bureaus, generating an
anonymous, uniform and standardized social existence. Let us remember Roszak's
penetrating reflections on where the wasteland ends, on our hyperintellectualized
heritage, the elimination of genuine communities, the robbing of people of their
spontaneity and authenticity. Take John Paul 11' s encyclical letters and homilies
on the Secrets of Transcendence without which harm is done to hunlan ethos. And,
primarily the innumerable works on the religions of the Far East which are expected
to rectify the disfigured or decrepit West European minds. The new gnosis is thus
considered to be a palliative for a senseless existence amidst super-affluence. Finally,
the self-consciousness of philosophy which crosses the thresholds of a meta-
philosophical anxiety: Derrida's deconstructivism levels philosophy with literature,
depriving it of any firm frame of reference with the exception of intertextual
connections and infinite interpretations. Deleuse' sand Guattari' s "rhi sonlatic"
theorem refers to the amorphous plant stem instead of the routinely assumed by
philosophers grass-roots of existence. Moreover, they too dislniss any differences
between Artaud's vision and strict philosophic procedures. P. Sloterdijk speaks
of the preponderance of "zynische Vemunft' 'which took the place of critical reason,
still tied to some ultimate values. The more so when we are reminded that the
Parisian thinkers drew radical consequences from Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein
and recent hermeneutic conceptions. Their main counterpart which articulates the
sharpest critique of the above thinkers remains either the theological-philosophical
belief in the absolute truth of Being and the telos of human destiny or the defence
of emancipatory reason in a renewed continuation of the principles of the Frankfurter
Schule (Habermas) or else E. Bloch's philosophy of hope and concrete utopia.
As the ideas of the cultural crisis gained their apogee at the turn of the last two
Praxis International
109
decades, I have no need to ask forgiveness for not taking into account quite a number
of authors. It would be, however, simplifying the problem to hide the fact that
there are many advocates of the opposite view. For instance, van Lier argued that
either man will realize a full symbiosis with the world of machines, or perish.
Other proponents of technological expansion say that only microprocessors can
be the salvation for an overcrowded and overworked mankind. J. F. Lyotard
appraises the postmodern condition and unconditioned pluralism based on differen-
tiation plus competition (le differend) because, as he sees it, it defends us against
mental totalitarianism. Daniel Bell approves of the postindustrial society based
on scientific production which became highly operational. For those authors the
idea of a crisis is blatant speculation or nonsense. Still another group is in agree-
ment with the criticisms of the existing culture but cleanses them of romantic
nostalgia for a "Gemeinschaft" forever lost to the past. Typical instances of such
an approach are provided in "The Third Wave" by A. Toffler or J. Naisbitt's
detailed description of the current mega-trends which he endorses as urging self-
correction in terms of the existing culture. I signal these facts not for the sake
of completing a panorama of solutions but to conclude my summary presentation
in a cautious way.
A crisis cannot be grasped in general. It is always a debacle from somebody's
viewpoint according to accepted axiological criteria. As culture is a value-generating
domain, we should each time inquire which culture it is, under which circumstances
and pressures it ranks values in this or that manner, and why and whether civilization
(understood as a complex of instrumental activities, material goods and hierarchized
institutions) becomes its prime mover. The conclusions seem to confirm pure
relativism. I deem that this is not the case. Is it not illuminating that the values
which are hailed by all critics of the cultural crisis are constantly recurrent themes
and precisely those which are cherished through the ages in different civilizations?
The critics' appeals and warnings do not say that we are between the hammer
of science, technology, hitherto education, and organizational strategy and the anvil
of their disappearance. They ponder instead, following the Adorno-Horkheimer
strategy of thought - a one-sided development of our culture and its disasters which
make impossible the realization of freedom together with equality, authentic self-
exploration and creativity of every individual together with the commonwealth,
operative reason together with an awareness of the existential secret. Thus the
peculiar set of values chosen as the genuine core of culture is not reducible to
the caprice of nostalgic eccentrics or backward-looking scholars. Perhaps we should
assent to it as the permanent stock of human axiology against the idolizing of science,
technology, the world of the mass media, and the pragmatic mind. It is entirely
possible that the convictions expressed by the thinkers mentioned above are firm
enough to stand the test of time. Perhaps with them we can still believe that the
tendency to bestow supreme value on the achievements of modern civilization is
not inevitable - that it can be reversed by collective protest and action.
Most representatives of thought dealing with the crisis of culture admitted that
it would be a mistake to exempt any part of it as immune or impervious to the
illness permeating all aspects of mind and practice. Hence art was often mentioned
as facing the naked hostility of new civilizational developments and forced to adopt
new narratives based on tenets alien to its tradition. Such a rough estimate of the
110
Praxis International
situation of artists does not give full justice to the rather intricate interconnections
between the reflections on the cultural crisis and its artistic counterpart. The
assumption of the cultural crisis often rekindled the old debate about the possible
exceptionality of art and its special place in the struggle against the detested new
hierarchy of values which are the putative or evident progeny of the modem civiliza-
tion. This standpoint opened distant vistas, betting on a better future for mankind
precisely by art, and ruling out any adjustment of the status quo. The kernel of
the controversy of whether the cultural crisis is irrevocable or not by odd coincidence
reappeared here in the hidden form of a permanent contest pervading the artistic
vocation. In the interwar period we can distinguish four main solutions to the
problem under examination: (1) Art is said to be the token of a cultural crisis as
well as a parallel symptom of it, relative areas which are more or less resilient
but equally unable to resist the distress of the troubled consciousness, the sense
of drifting and dismay; (2) Some thinkers plausibly mentioned that the artist must
promote his heroic protest even if he receives unavoidable, stunning blows. He
does not agree to be totally dismissed or incited to worship the new gods. He strikes
back by using contempt, scorn, irony, anger etc. (3) Yet other authors developed
the idea that artists, who are maltreated by the new civilizational wave, themselves
suspend their own heritage under mounting external pressures. They can, however,
safeguard their dignity and rise again despite the repeated harrangues. It is not
a condescending attitude to believe that art complies with the world in a highly
beneficial way if only it does not bend to sheer pragmatic demands (of course,
this does not mean that it evades the obligations to enrich man's extra-aesthetic
realm). Thus art as an eternal value in fact never starts from society. (4) Finally,
there was presented the view according to which art keeps aloof from the world
devoid of sense and pervaded. by crisis, opposes the convergence of alienated forces,
and continues to denounce fraud and farce, or, despite the pessimistic undertones,
remains devoted to utopian visions. I derive the fourfold distinction from the
conception of: 1) Spengler, Freud; 2) Witkiewicz, Ortega y Gasset and Benjamin;
3) Heidegger, Berdiayev and Maritain; 4) Adorno. None of these was posited as
an incontestable proposition. All the authors, regardless of their suppositions,
proceeded from the premise that art in the era of a crisis must succumb to the
same civilizational disease, but they differed about the degree and the means of
its potential response. They did not engage in aggressive polemics between
themselves as they belonged to the same family of critics, radical or moderate,
who did not set up any new hierarchy of values, but attacked the old one. Spengler
defied the idea of lofty art by showing how new social conditions violate the old
borders between the aesthetic kingdom and life around it, and how the position
of a genius grew continually more fragile. History turned a new page of Caesarism,
corrupting the creative mind. Art is no longer organic; it became subjected to
mechanization and mere intellectualism (Der Mensch und die Technik 1931). The
rules of the market became art's deadly sins. Freud's conception of art is built
on the axiom that it cannot eliminate the opposition between the principle of reality
and that of pleasure. The artistic creation like any other is a symbolic mask covering
the repressed instinctive energy which, of course, resurfaces, a fact which the origin
of the function of jokes and witticisms highlights in a particularly distinct way.
As a substitute for genuine gratification art does not help to escape from the crisis
Praxis International
111
of culture. At best it masquerades happiness by means of the aesthetic Vorlust,
and thus the costs of sublimation are inevitably traumatic frustrations. Ortega y
Gasset wrote prolifically in the early twenties about the new poetry, music, theatre,
fine arts and novel, as compared to the traditional creative work. These reflections
led to his influential essay on the dehumanization of art (1925) which was a kind
of prologue to the Revolt ofthe Masses. He confrrmed the view launched by Spengler
that the eschatological mission of art is over. New art is deprived of its trans-
cendent aspirations; it recalls sport, games and pastimes and corresponds to the
age of youth which takes priority in habits and manners. The artists - stated the
Spanish philosopher - do not attach any great significance to the function of their
messages. In a word, the status of art dwindles because culture succumbs to civiliza-
tional forces which crush the inherited axiological hierarchy. Nevertheless, we
are told simultaneously, this new production embedded in the artist's awareness
of self-defeat (his sensibility lets him treat his own world with irony as a useless
"farce' ') is at odds with the prototypical man in the street and his superficial aesthetic
tastes. Thus art as a sign of the crisis becomes also the sign of dissent. The revolt
of the artist against the revolt of the masses should be translated into a clash between
the aristocracy of the spirit and the spiritual barbarians.
St. I. Witkiewicz stressed the same idea. Art cannot hide before the democratic
trend. It is debased mass culture which predetermines the death of the best art
imbued with metaphysical, existential values. Nonetheless, the genuine artists do
not give up. They contest against all forms of instrumental control by neurotic
eruption, unexhausted experimenting with form, mockery of the cosmetic devices
of their up-to-date colleagues, turning their backs on the mass audience, vying
against the victorious trends and continuing a search for the no longer attainable
absolute.
Benjamin's double standards (approval of the new breed of art as a result of
historical necessity and challenge to the prevailing moods and attitudes) are to be
seen through all of his oeuvre. The often cited essay on the serial reproduction
of artworks in the technical era (1936) refers to the first standard. His Pariser
Passagen (a reflection on Baudelaire and the surrealists) underlie the second
standard. No doubt the apparent incommeasurability of the two criteria derives
from the Brecht-Lacis impact, their impassioned critique on the one hand, and
the influence of Adorno together with the Frankfurt thinkers on the other hand.
In Heidegger as well as in Berdiayev and Maritain we come across the same
reasoning concerning the status of the artist within the framework of trash culture,
which harasses real values or makes them irrelevant. All these thinkers - omitting
Freud's discourse - repeated the negative arguments mentioned above with respect
to trivialized contemporary art but in counterdistinction to the views also cited
above they did not stop at emphasizing the moral obligation to challenge - by heroics
or irony - the status quo. It is not enough to run against the prevalent order, they
said. The duty is to reverse the tendency and such a reversal is possible. Heidegger
saw strong reasons to continue Rilke-like poetry or van Gogh-like painting which
aim at alethea. The true artist should and can be the caretaker of an existential
becoming, sweeping aside not only all everyday nuisances but also a metaphysical
being, which is fixed for all time. Berdiayev, just as all religious-minded
philosophers, assumed that art can be reborn. The return to the everlasting Divine
112 Praxis International
Source is to be demanded, the more so as the teurgic impetus which he presented
in The Sense of Creation (1915) is inherent in man's best drives and aspirations.
Berdiayev had doubts about whether culture by itself does not desacralize each
of its elements, reducing the religious Secret to the symbolic shibboleth of a given
cult. Maritain did not share these fears since his theo-centered humanism was much
more earth-bound. Art can go astray in agonizing times like ours, but the way
back to the sacrum is always open and inviting. He emphasized oscillations with
regards to the avant-garde movements, their metaphysical nostalgia which needs
pure form. What about the crisis of art? Does it take place or not? No simple alter-
native emerges at this point. The critical status of art is obvious because of the
decline of culture but the first and the second are potentially strong. No final verdict
is passed; it is the free will of man (as an individual and collective subject) that
decides about a good or evil apocalypse.
Adorno, whose views did not differ in this respect from Horkheimer, although
the latter did not elaborate them that extensively, took another position. The culture
of our epoch is really in the stage of decay and we cannot help it. There are never-
theless at least two domains of spiritual activity in which the menaced axiology
can be rescued and transformed in the future: philosophy (strictly speaking, negative
dialectics) and art. Both can be shelters of criticism against the status quo and
utopian projects. In The Dialectics ofEnlightenment the genuine mimetism is juxta-
posed with the false one. The previous one, originally connected with magic, cannot
be revived, but there occurs also "aesthetic magic" , founded on Schein, a self-
sufficient, self-contained artistic microcosmos. Art, when not deceitful (a fact which
takes place most often within the framework of the cultural industry) fulfills the
primary condition of constituting the alternative autonomous micro-world. In the
historical epoch of a self-defeating Instrumental Reason great art - always a struggle
for freedom - unveils the feigned order of things, the Whole, in fact disintegrated.
It is the artist who exposes the Wahrheit der Unwahrheit. In other words, art informs
about the crisis of culture by reflecting it. The alternative reality remains anchored
in the socio-historical basis, here and now. That is why Beckett is the most out-
standing prophet of our fear-inspiring civilization by showing the inevitability of
the catastrophe and at the same time, having the courage not to accept it.
What then is the difference between, let us say, Adorno and Benjamin or
Witkiewicz? A significant difference is that according to the first the catastrophe
is not decreed once and for ever. Art as the radical negation of the status quo
forebodes another organic society founded on Humanittit. Art should observe the
traditional paradigms. There are some similar traits in Benjamin's understanding
of allegoric modernism and Adorno' s concept of modern art as Mimesis ans
Verhiirtete und Entfremdete. Nevertheless, Benjamin opted for a surrealist thrust
to counter serial production which was based on transgressing the aesthetic prin-
ciples similarly to Breton's formula of' 'the window onto the world". Witkiewicz' s
option also dwelt on demolishing the inherited aesthetic order. Adorno's thought
followed another course. The dictatorship of the mass media goes together with
the disenchanted world which undermines the survival of art (Entkunstung). So
the paradigmatic practicing of art is not only self-defensive but also rescues the
whole of culture from a merciless attack. I do not forget that Adorno' s ideas were
developed after 1945 and that their full embodiment is contained in the posthumously
Praxis International
113
issued Aesthetic Theory. However, all authors of monographic studies agree that
its Grundmotive were signalled or else analysed in his essays from the late 1930s
and early 1940s. The paradoxical solution rests, in this case, on philosophical-
artistic truths rendering the essence of the cultural crisis as abnormalcy, and willy
nilly on participation, despite the refusal of the satanical forces (dissonant music
is the phenomenon corresponding to the entirely administered society). It seems
to me that Adorno's conception is not quite consistent. Art has to be the basis
of protected values and the anticipation of the positive era but its modernist
expression reflects the alienation and meaninglessness triggered by the system of
obsessive commodities. The absurdity of the world around us embraces culture
and art. Thus this conception oscillates between art versus crisis and art in crisis.
Possibly, this inconsistency determines the peculiarity of Adorno' s views.
The inter-war fourfold pattern of thought on the crisis of art must be confronted
with the aesthetics of artists, both theoretical and practical, of that period. The
best minds were obviously aware of the fact of a degrading culture. Valeryand
Malraux, Eliot, Kafka, Klee and Schonberg voiced their opinions in an unequivocal
fashion. There existed a catastrophic trend which began from Eliot's The Waste
Land, comprises the whole oeuvre of St. I. Witkiewicz, touches upon E. Barlach,
K. Kollwitz and M. Beckman, involves Joyce's Ulysses and the poetry of Cz. Milosz
in the late Thirties, and culminates in Th. Mann's Doctor Faustus. I cite at random
a few examples of this attitude. All those artists practiced art in a manner which
corresponds to the signalled above conceptions ofWitkiewicz, Benjamin or Adomo.
In the post-World War 11 period some of the ideas previously set forth were
continued - for example, by Adorno, accompanied by H. Marcuse. It is note-
worthy that the latter's Adorno-oriented Permanence of Art, his last work, was
preceded by Eros and Civilization (1956), an emancipatory reinterpretation of Freud.
Similar stands were found in other intellectual doctrines. It will do to quote the
papal homilies and encyclics or the renaissance of the Russian icon and the works
of Father Florenski; religious thinkers reiterated the conviction of art's potential
renewal, with which we are familiar from the times of Berdiayev and Maritain.
Roszak shares this view. The hermeneutic analyses of Gadamer defending the
actuality of the beautiful, entrenched in feasts and rituals as well as in the self-
sufficient work of art prolonged the perspective of the Heideggerian conception.
Yet one should hardly maintain that those approaches are most frequent and
significant. On the contrary, there are legitimate reasons to state that the pattern
of thought on the crisis of art underwent a considerable transfonnation. The majority
of scholars pondering on production for the sake of production or on consumption
for the sake of consumption, on the mystification of technology or the international
revolution as beneficial powers, agree that art had alas to surrender to the new
civilizational flood. Jean Beaudrillard' s case is quite telling as regards this particular
question. Art becomes absorbed by the mass media; the spectacle of a constant
simulation brought finally the hyper-realist culture. Within these frontiers one is
too weak to distinguish between reality and virtuality; the same vertigo of adver-
tised commodities is the most palpable result of one and another. Vaneigem and
Debord drew from this state of affairs the accusation of the art establishment which
plunged into a crisis so deep that also the contest of the new avant-garde became
apparent. No absolution or repentance is admissible within this context. At the
114 Praxis International
opposite end, J. F. Lyotard holds the view that art flourishes precisely thanks to
enfranchisement from' 'le grand recit", the terror-laden conception which lay claim
to absolute certainty whence and hither mankind is making its way. Derrida' s attitude
is the same. Its premises claim that deconstructivism has to put right the ailing
culture. What is arresting in those standpoints taken by the French philosophers
and by the exponents of the neoanarchist Internationale Situationiste is their frame
of reference. They do not speak of art but of anti-art or, if one prefers another
name, post-art. Thus five fundamental facts must be established with respect to
the examined issue in the recent context:
1. The crisis of art was grasped and chronicled by the artists themselves who
influenced directly the approaches of the intellectual outsiders, dealing with
the phenomenon;
2. The idea of anti-art vis-a.-vis the crisis of culture was formulated in a different
manner and with different aims. The artists asked whether culture is really in
a critical situation and if so, should they conform with it or contest it;
3. Depending on their definite position either the dialectics of disenchantment and
re-enchantment (continuing the Weberian formula) appeared as the topical
solution;
4. The artists' stratagems acted on the deliberation of the theorists of culture in
their wrestling with the issue of the invincible commercialization of all values
versus the utopian transcendence of the status quo;
5. The artist's anti-aesthetics forced the academic aestheticians to follow the avenue
chosen by the former and to attempt critical self-reflection.
With equal if not greater strength than their forerunners (the dadaists and producti-
vists), the artists of our time responded to the civilizational challenge and the new
revolutionary changes which I listed in the previous section. Already the theatre
of the absurd (by its very label) and the anti-novel brought on the process of an
all-over reification, referred directly to the mainstream of social life. Of course,
there occurred in each case a revolt against the existing artistic management and
its idols, although the purpose was chiefly not to upset professional adversaries
with a new' 'ism" but an outburst of boundless energy with regard to the cultural
establishment. The decisive factor in the new strategy from pop-art to concep-
tualism was the question ofwhether they conceive the world around us as conforming
to the premises of healing mankind or indicted it because of the distressing enslave-
ment of every individual. Here runs the main line of demarcation. Their anti-art
is engaged in either fostering new civilizational alternatives or dispensing with
them in a search for other options which could restore the expected state of things.
It is not a facile task to locate each artist, his endeavours and achievements along
the continuum between the two extremes of: "Yes, I voluntarily approve" and
"No, I categorically reject". Anyhow, among the former there is no clear agreement
as to the prevalence of the crisis of culture. Some say that it is overwhelming us
and we cannot take up any offensive against its channels; others deny any critical
status of culture. The exponents of such an approach were, no doubt, Andy Warhol
and R. Buckminster Fuller, followed by many hyper-realists and artists fascinated
by the computer, video, laser applications etc. At the opposite vanguard point e.g.
the Viennese activists, Beuys, J. J. Lebel, Beck and Malina, the Fluxus people,
Praxis International
115
the militant nea-feminist performers, the early Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, Cortazar
and Godard. Here was unanimous agreement that culture is endangered. All offered
their Own myths of liberation. That is why from their perspective the disenchantment
of the world became unbearable whereas the tech-artists in their majority believe
that the new weaponry is really Promethean, Le. that it can re-enchant the world.
Their opponents, when they are inclined at all to envisage any Wiederzauberung,
ally themselves with the counterculture or alternative movements against the
technological Deities and Mass Media Ceremonies.
The artistic approaches paralleled the ideas of the philosophers of culture who
enacted insights already current in the anti-art programmes and manifestos,
stimUlating in turn growth of the self-consciousness of the recent avant-garde. The
feedback has been working for quite some time and became enhanced with the
debate on modernism versus post-modernism, chiefly with the controversy between
Habermas and J. F. Lyotard. It also is connected with our problem. Its concern
is whether culture is dying or simply assuming a new shape, and whether the pursuit
of the emancipating reason should be treated as a disastrous delusion or whether
there is a sound method in this madness. From the viewpoint of Lyotard, the
dialectics of disenchantment and re-enchantment has to be swept aside. Its removal
would be the best possible therapy for the mind and each type of creative practice,
because we do not yet know what will emerge from the experienced breakthrough.
What we should know for certain is that the captivating nostalgia after any absolute
has become discredited. From the premises of Habermas, which I am inclined
to share, art or anti-art cannot escape from the ought against the status quo and
in consequence from design of a future that justifies the present-day refusaL In
this sense modernism is alive. The struggle for the highest stake takes place.
Habermas' assumptions entail the concept of a second or rather third disenchant-
ment which is self-paralyzing. It means a blatant resignation from any resistance,
the kneeling down before the altars of ubiquitous commercialization, the rejection
of any ethos of the Ich kann nicht anders type.
Finally, the anti-aesthetic clue. Irrespectively whether instrumental rationality
is considered positive or threatening because it turns means (technology, communi-
cation, advertisement) into goals, anti-art made it unequivocal that the traditionally
settled aesthetic procedures have to be given up. If our observations pertaining
to Documenta are also in this case precise, the aesthetician reflecting upon a return
to the canvas beyond the once sanctioned artistic virtuosity faces the dilemma of
a fragmented, kaleidoscopic culture which no longer confirms the meaningfulness
of art .. An anti-aesthetics which stems from anti-art can meet the following, at
least, four countermoves which try to regain the legitimacy of aesthetics without
art as its subject-matter:
1. It deals with the mass production for TV and film, detective stories, books
on drugs, devotional publications, Church fairs, light music, etc. It is an art
consciously banalized, nurtured by the abused schemes of a plot, characters,
iconography, melody and harmony in high artistic circulation. The artists'
paradigms correspond to it but by means of the dismissal of the original novelty
and taking for granted that this type of production a priori presumes quick
consumption and oblivion:
116 Praxis International
2. Another domain of inquiry would be the aestheticization of the phenomena of
social life, sport-gardens, parks and primarily the ways of expressing oneself
in fashion, codes, gestures, public speaking, civil manners, in a word - decorum.
The boundary between the former area and this one contains, for instance, art-
like journalistic reports, diaries, memoires, as well as industrial design as a
whole, with beautiful goods for sale;
3. Aesthetics may also concentrate on the beauty of Nature, referring to the classical
paradigms of measure, symmetry, properties and harmony;
4. Its field of reflection could be absolute, a divine order of things, with beauty
as transcendence which is hardly sizeable and expressible in a verbal medium.
The countermoves evoke a strong rejoinder. It is said in connection with (1)
that it concerns aesthetically uninteresting matter, often of almost non-existent
importance; in the second case, it is argued that today no discernible style of life
can be found as it could be in the times of Castiglione or Wilde, whereas the para-
artistic compositions of parks or public spectacles etc. do not reveal the facets
of ingenious creativity. With reference to (3), doubts arise concerning the restrictive
character of classical beauty and the assumption that symmetry, proportion, harmony
engender by themselves the artistic realm; in the last case, the objection is that
it is theo-aesthetics, founded on philosophical-religious options, and thus that it
concerns more ontology than aesthetic or artistic values.
Of course, one can continue the rebuttal by pointing out to the arbitrariness of
the pros and cons. From our standpoint much more significant is the fact that all
countermoves set out from the premise of a crisis of culture. The first insofar as
that which is worth considering here pertains to the trivialization and democratization
of art and the ways of transplanting the artistic high achievements into a saleable
low circulation. The second, because the question of what role is played here by
the principles of commodity and pastime has to be examined; why does art rather
remind us of fashion, and with which sense is the asesthetic decorum of public
places or ceremonies endowed (does it drug or awaken the mind)? The third and
fourth points are most certainly of a self-defensive nature: they aim at recreating
man's union with the cosmic and transcendent powers in order to profoundly
re-enchant the present-day social world.
We live among debris, the scattered fragments of broken mirrors. Anti-art and
anti-aesthetics are still lanterns which help us orient ourselves in the civilizational
labrynth with the purpose of getting out of it. The thread of Ariadne is not beyond
their potential. This is the task of all sensitive and reflective people of our time.
The thread must be unravelled from a worldview able to set culture again on its
way. Either by saying, as John Paul 11 did, "Do not be afraid" to start on a
pilgrimage towards the abandoned Christ, or by re-establishing an earthly ethos
of freedom and community without transcendence or by pointing to another possible
salvation. Innovation and tradition in an organic epoch will then reappear, and
could be realized in their normal interplay. If my survey and analysis seem to
be sheer platitudes or mere trickery with indeterminate terms and meanings, then
please hold me guilty and explain why the consciousness of a crisis has set me
on a misleading trail.