Late Style, First Art: The Fates and Politics of Modernism

I. Introduction: Late Modernism

In "The Aging of the New Music," Theodor W. Adorno excoriates Pierre Boulez and his disciples for their deadly development of the New Music initiated by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In less than a generation, the tradition of New Music had evaporated: negation and critique had descended into formalism, pseudo-objectivity, a conflation of technical and aesthetic necessity, "the juggling of tone rows as a substitute for tonality, without really composing at all."¹ By 1955, it was already clear to Adorno that the great tradition of modernism had withered: "The current paralysis of musical forces represents the paralysis of all free initiative in this over-managed world, which will not tolerate anything that would remain outside of it or at least not be integrated as an element of opposition."² If the idea of modern culture as not tolerating "anything that would remain outside of it" now sounds dated, a remnant of a time when social uniformity and homogeneity were presumed to be necessary conditions for social reproduction, the idea of incorporating and integrating all apparent challenges to the status quo as elements of opposition into an all-embracing "cultural pluralism" has become the all-too-effective modus operandi of late capitalism. When everything, or nearly everything is permitted, when any cultural item can find a friendly niche, culture stops mattering.

Although in the final paragraph of "Aging" Adorno is still responding to what he titles the "European catastrophe," his diagnosis of the situation of art, culture, and the humanities is remarkably apt for our present moment. He writes:

Nobody really believes in "culture" any more, the backbone of spirit [Geist] has been broken, and anyone who pays no attention to this and acts as though nothing had happened, must crawl like an insect, not walk upright. The only authentic artworks produced today are those that in their inner organization measure themselves by the fullest experience of horror, and there is scarcely anyone, except Schoenberg and Picasso, who can depend on himself to have the power to do this.

The reference to Schoenberg and Picasso is not idle: although he has just completed a lament for the moment of high musical modernism, Adorno is still insistent that nothing other than the project of artistic modernism can be adequate to criticize current circumstances. He makes this explicit in his concluding sentences:

Though today all art has and must have a bad conscience to the extent that it does not make itself stupid, nevertheless its abolishment would be false in a world in which what dominates needs art as its corrective: the contradiction between what is and the true, between the management of life and humanity. The possibility of winning back the power of artistic resistance depends on not shrinking from the fact that what is objectively, socially required is now preserved exclusively in hopeless isolation.³

The reference to "hopeless isolation" is code for the autonomy of art and aesthetic rationality from the logics and values propping up contemporary social practices. The isolation of the solitary artist abandoned to his or her subjective capacities for art-making images the autonomy of modernist art that remains Adorno's ideal. Subjective autonomy and autonomous work mutually define one another. I will be arguing below that although some version of Adorno's contrast between "the management of life and humanity" continues to depend on a conception of "the true" as sustained through modernist art practices versus what "merely is" that has been the underlying impetus of artistic modernism for the past one hundred and fifty years, nonetheless, against Adorno, I will argue that the aging of modernism is now literal and emphatic. Because the aging is emphatic, the full weight of the notion of "hopeless isolation" as Adorno understood it can no longer be defended. The internal developments that lead from high modernism to late modernism, that is, the continuing of modernism after the dynamic history of modernism has concluded, itself forces art to abandon its hopeless isolation. Equally, with a little historical lag time, extrinsic social forces, above...