The Return, part two

“I learn by going where I have to go.”
Theodore Roethke (The Waking)

“Is there an instinctual drive to amass wealth? There appears to be no possible doubt about this. We meet this drive every day and in widely varying degrees in different people. It can assume pathological forms, for example, in the miser, who in order to become rich foregoes the satisfaction of other more rational needs, or in the person who strives to become wealthy in order to ward off a fear of impoverishment and the like. The drive has normal forms; indeed a person in whom it is completely lacking will in our society be considered abnormal.”
Otto Fenichel (The Drive to Amass Wealth)

“Hate America?” he said, “I don’t hate America, I regret it.”
Ernest Jones(in conversation with Sigmund Freud)

“The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. “
Wallace Stevens (Opus Posthumous)

“The whole history of spectacular society called for the secret services to play the pivotal role; for it is in them that the features and force of such a society are concentrated to the highest degree. “
Guy Debord (Comments on Society of the Spectacle)

“I think that for once the question should be asked whether it is not also a form of resistance when a human being thinks and writes things the way I write them. Is theory not also a genuine form of praxis?”
Theodor Adorno (interview with Der Spiegel, 1969)

I think that the first part of this post is to relevant to the most recent podcast. https://open.substack.com/pub/aestheticresistance/p/podcast-152?r=12qzc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

And I am pretty sure that the shrinking of symbolization, and of ritual, has had very deep impacts on our relationships (this is discussed in Part One). Certainly in the emotional dimension, and the libidinal. And I think most of the traditional left I know have perhaps greater difficulty than the right. Fascists have a clearer idea of what they want. Their conscience does not require clarity as to motivation. The world is much reduced. And today most leftists I know are deeply unaware of their motivations, of their feelings really. Certainly not all. But the majority. And so the self questioning takes on a Borgesian scale, and quality, which is compounded by the endless assaults of the state, of the status quo. Liberals are very close emotionally to fascists, although they would resist this idea.

I think that in 100 years (if historians exist) they will focus on Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein, not Trump or the Clintons, not on Biden certainly. The focus will be the libidinal aspects of, and the clearly uncanny unconscious of Musk, the very white South African who even created a futuristic truck (that doesn’t work) that resembles the old armoured police vehicles that terrorized his apartheid childhood home (Casspir).

The word *nostalgia*, which originally meant a return to immense suffering (I saw this noted on a kitsch Turkish cop show, oddly enough. Why was I watching a Turkish procedural? Good question). From the Greek nostos and algos (pain and return home). But also linked the German word Heimweh, or homesickness. By the mid 18th century the word came to mean ‘acute homesickness’. Today, the acute part of its meaning and usage has been diluted. It means today ‘a sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past.’ This dilution echoes or mirrors the dilution of radical psychoanalysis. In fact it is in keeping with the dilution of most everything.

Now, in January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor, and Reichstag fire took place four weeks later. And then came the first ‘concentration camps’ and a mass exodus ensued. For the primary theoreticians and clinicians of psychoanalysis, exile was the only rational choice. Fenichel to Oslo, and Freidlander to Paris and Reich to Copenhagen.

“The expulsion from Central Europe gave psychoanalysis a fright from which it never recovered. That psychoanalysis prospered in exile, particularly in the United States, masked the injury; its most audacious theoreticians never recaptured the momentum of the pre-Hitler years. From the hour of exile, a conceptual retreat commenced. Analysts scrambling for visas and entry permits were in no position to boldly advance psychoanalysis. After 1933 psychoanalysis proceeded under the cloud of conservatism.”
Russell Jacoby (Repression of Psychoanalysis)

This reminds of me of the very popular meme that the Frankfurt School were anti-radical (or something). Well, what is claimed is that they worked for the government even after the war. I think the idea of these purity tests suggests that those positing such tests are themselves the repressed, the authoritarian inclined, and the ones who take most naturally to policing. Leftist policing is something I think George Jackson understood. But the point here is that firstly, German Jewish exiles were nervous and anxious about their resident status, and needed work. And, they were fighting the nazis. Even after the war there was enormous ambivalence about rehabbing former Nazis, about the idea of employing them, but also about one’s own ability to survive their reinstatement. Any work to undermine them was seen a more urgent cause.

Jacoby describes Wilhelm Reich as the Job of the psychoanalytic movement. The popular American narrative on Reich is the reaction of the fearful, and for many leftists the fact Stalin rejected Reich, and hence they must, too.

“The setbacks that Reich suffered might unhinge anyone. In 1933 as he fled Berlin the psychoanalytic establishment was already preparing to purge him. He first stopped in Vienna, where he was invited to drop out of the Psychoanalytic Association; he was also instructed to “refrain from lecturing or debating in political meetings—particularly communist ones—here in Austria.’’ His book, Character Analysis, was in page proofs when the official psychoanalytic press, evidently following Freud’s command, rescinded its acceptance, forcing Reich to publish it himself. Ironically it contained no explicit politics. Today many analysts believe it is an indispensable work.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

He was denied residency in Denmark (a harbinger of that inexorable rightward drift of the Danes) and kicked out of the Danish Communist Party (which he actually had never joined) and then out of the International Psychoanalytical Association. He fled to Sweden briefly but was also exiled from there. My own take on Reich is that he was an extraordinarily original and radical thinker, but he was also a man beset with emotional issues and must have been very difficult to get along with. Stalin was both right and wrong in rejecting his work because by that time Reich was already showing signs of mental instability. But his best work remains essential reading.

But this post is about the continuing repression of psychoanalysis, especially by the left, and also by the ideas of repression itself, as well as how a political critique should make use of psychoanalysis. Also, that mental health is historical, in other words the material and cultural conditions of society shape the psyches of those living in those societies with a specific character. The German super-ego of 1930 is not the same as the Swedish super ego of 1950.

“…the historical conditions of each country that shape national character structures should be investigated. Fenichel emphasized that the same instincts assume different forms depending on the fates they have suffered. History stamps neurosis with its insignia. In support of his contention, Fenichel referred to the fact that analysts at the time rarely came across the “classic” neurosis—hysteria. This he believed reflected the historical dynamic of neurosis. The progression of neuroses registered the progression of history; hysteria belonged to an earlier phase of social morality.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

The quote below is relevant, too. Fenichel was for all his flaws, a singularly consistent and uncompromising theorist. And I think he saw the coming wave of ‘feel good’ therapy for the danger it was. Whenever the word ‘love’ is used so casually, it ceases to have any meaning. What is termed ‘Freud’s asceticism’ is among his, Freud’s, greatest virtues.

“Fenichel also did not accept Fromm’s critique of Freud’s therapeutic practice, a recurring objection lodged against Freud by the neo-Freudians. Many neo-Freudians championed Ferenczi; by encouraging affection and love in therapy, he broke with Freud’s asceticism. Fenichel defended Freud’s orthodoxy as more radical than Ferenczi’s reform. The neutrality prescribed by orthodox psychoanalysis, he wrote to Fromm, does not deny the patient’s claim to happiness. Nor did he agree that Ferenczi’s teachings on love radically transcended the social taboos that beset Freud. In fact, in his last years a reactionary flavor permeated Ferenczi’s ideas.”
Russell Jacoby (Ibid)

To stick with asceticism for a moment, and apropos of the last podcast, I think it is important to see the allegorical in places it is usually denied or ignored. I live in Norway, a very cold country. And before that in Poland, which was really just as cold in winter. And I hate winter. Hate it. And yet, and yet I often admit to myself that its probably not an accident that I live here. For this is something purifying and medicinal in that minus 30 degree day that seems like an emotional disinfectant. As if I could not have resolved many of the issues touched on in the podcast had I continued to live in Southern California. Or Thailand or France or central America. Norway in winter is the definition of ascetic.

And I think this is what I am trying, gradually, to get at here. That one never decides anything from neutral conditions, because neutrality doesn’t really exist. Fenichel (in his essay The Drive to Amass Wealth) quotes Freud…

“Nevertheless, we should not neglect to ask whether such instinctual motives,which are in one direction so highly specialized, do not admit of further analysis in respect to their sources, so that only those primal instincts which are not to be resolved further could really lay claim to the name.”
Sigmund Freud (Instincts and Their Vicissitudes )

Now Marxists will quickly quote Marx on money, and circulation, etc. But money is the most allegorical of Marxist categories. And that really isn’t the point anyway. One of the things I think that is consistently forgotten is that symbols might also not be symbols, or rather something can be both literal and symbolic. The drive to amass wealth is both seen as a biological drive (perhaps) but also that biological definition or explanation is itself symbolic.

“The will to become wealthy appears as a subdivision of a desire for possessions. The origin of this striving has been analytically explained in detail. In the deeper layers of the mind, the idea of possessions refers to the contents of one’s own body, which could be taken away. In this connection money—like all possessions —assumes the rôle of parts of the body which one could lose, or which one wishes to regain after the fantasy that they have been lost, and especially the rôle of fæces, which one wishes to accumulate. To these motives for the drive to wealth familiar to the psychoanalyst, there is added a fourth that is of quite a different nature, and whose relationship to the motives previously discussed represents our problem. Our system of production has become historic: it is an economy of commodities which does not produce in order to satisfy the needs of the producer directly, but in order to create products for sale, benefiting the producer only indirectly; and in such an economic system a certain commodity, labor, has the characteristic of producing greater value than its own market price. The possessor of money can therefore transform it into capital, which means that he can purchase both means of production and labor, and because the product belongs to him he can increase his possessions. Whoever produces on a ‘higher scale’, whoever has at his disposal greater capital (means of production and labor), can thereby produce more systematically and therefore more cheaply, so that the producers on a ‘lower scale’ must be driven from the field. This is the cause for the accumulation of capital, for its more and more rapid concentration in fewer and fewer hands. It forces the capitalist under penalty of his own destruction always to produce on the maximal scale.”
Otto Fenichel (The Drive to Amass Wealth)

The idea that Freud is incompatible with Marx is one of those chestnuts that a certain class of leftist thinker clings to because it reinforces a level of puritanism. It keeps Marx clean, objective, and sanitary. Fenichel continues…

“If we add to this the fact that the ideology of a society (the views concerning what is to be esteemed as good and worth striving for) is always the ideology of the ruling class, then it follows that an aim valid for the ruling class is also aspired to automatically by all other classes. That this aspiration of the masses is no mere imitation of the capitalists, but is systematically nurtured by present day education in order to create illusions about the true class relationships (‘Every soldier carries a field-marshal’s staff in his knapsack’), is merely alluded to here. However, the nature and mode of action of the social ideal of thrift would certainly be worth a detailed investigation.”
Otto Fenichel (Ibid)

There is also a final thought from Fenichel: “It is clear that the action of such an ideological influence must be strongest in those classes whose hope for the future can still be sustained by a memory of the past, especially among the petty bourgeois thrown into penury by the advance of capital accumulation, who by their thrift hope to regain something lost, more than among proletarians who have never possessed anything.”

The definition of nihilism is “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless.” From Oxford English Dictionary. We are now living in a sort of default nihilistic culture. Its not so much that individuals have through careful consideration and reflection decided, or concluded, that life is meaningless — it is rather that without adequate symbology, without the capacity to formulate allegory, the culture will atrophy intellectually. And while internet tech may play a role, the fact that this technology was invented and designed in the way it was, is more to the point. A society that needed an electronic teat, a robotic caretaker in a sense is going to be one that eventually determines life is meaningless. At least they may default to that setting. Without philosophy, as an active practice in a society, in some way, there is going to be regression.

But there is resistance to this regression, too. Hence the appearance and abundance of smily faces. Of false optimism and the stigmatizing of anyone deemed a ‘buzz kill’. Sesame Street hates ‘grouches’. The growth of the use of ‘hater’ for anyone criticizing anything speaks volumes.

I thought this week that if I had to describe one characteristic of contemporary western society, it would be the lost ability to have exchanges of decency between people. Especially strangers.

I spoke in the podcast of this ‘dry drunk’ phenomenon. This can be found outside alcoholism rehab centers, its found most everywhere. Therapy culture became not just adjustment therapy but the teaching of how to mask your pathology. It didn’t set out to do that but that’s what its done.

Fenichel’s most famous essay, rightly so, is his treatise on anti-semitism. Allow me a lengthy quote here.

“Freud has taught us that everybody struggles all his life with repressed instincts which continue to exist in the un¬ conscious; that among these original instincts, murderous tendencies and sexual impulses play the chief part, especially those sexual impulses which are considered objectionable, low, and dirty. The lust to kill, love of dirt, and low voluptuousness,—these are the things which people try painstakingly to keep hidden in their unconscious. One means of defense against strivings of one’s unconscious is projection, that is, seeing in others that which one does not wish to become conscious of in oneself. This is a manifestation most marked in certain mental diseases, but it is also present in normal people, as for example, in the crusader against homosexuality, who is really fighting against his own repressed homosexual impulses. To the anti-Semite, the Jew appears to be murderous, dirty, and debauched; thus the former can avoid becoming aware of these tendencies in himself. To him the Jew is the incarnation of the lust to kill, of low sexuality. It will shortly become clear how this projection is facilitated. But it is already comprehensible why riotous impulses are so easily deflected against the Jews. For the unconscious of the rioters, the Jew represents not only the authorities whom they do not dare to attack, but also their own repressed instincts which they hate and which are forbidden by the very authorities against whom they are directed. AntiSemitism is indeed a condensation of the most contradictory tendencies: instinctual rebellion directed against the authorities, and the cruel suppression and punishment of this instinctual rebellion, directed against oneself. Unconsciously for the anti-Semite, the Jew is simultaneously the one against whom he would like to rebel, and the rebellious tendencies within himself. And a racial minority such as the Jew is especially suited to act as the carrier of this kind of projection because of its archaic and emphatic foreignness.”
Otto Fenichel (Elements of a Psychoanalytic Theory of Anti-Semitism)

One could easily substitute ‘black’ for ‘jew’ in the above paragraph if one is thinking of the U.S. Projection is a fundamental process for Americans in the 21st century. As much on the left as the right. Hatred of one’s own unconscious instincts can be seen constantly in political hypocrisy across both parties. Fenichel in his earlier essay notes :“The psychological precursor of that upon which one sits is that which is present in one’s own body. Psychogenetically, the inclination to possession is a derivative of bodily narcissism and is frequently an overcompensation for fear of loss of parts of the body.” (The Drive to Amass Wealth)

For Americans, almost regardless of background, there is a Puritan libidinal cellar, a dark rarely illuminated basement of Puritanical feeling, that inner Cotton Mather of the Id, that surfaces regularly both for the individual and in American culture. Fenichel notes that in Christianity the idea of murdering the Father is at least taken note of, if not exactly condoned. It is spoken of. In Jewish religious narratives and symbology, there is absolutely no mention of it. Cultures where killing God, or the Father is NEVER mentioned tend to be more patriarchal. It is also why people project toward Jews the crime of killing the son of God. So again, with anti-Freudian leftists, anti-Freudian Marxists, there is always a substitute Father that is killed. Those leftists may themselves have nothing to do with killing this Father, but they do attend to the ceremonies of recuperation. (Stalin, for those wondering, makes a great Father). It is not an accident that the Terminator was a Father, albeit without children, biologically, but spiritually he embraced his Dad-ness. Judge Holden, Ahab, Pat Garrett, Wyatt Earp, and those many stand-in Father symbols who were artists such as John Ford (art fathers must have children to qualify, symbolic children) and Hemingway (who was both father and child), Hitchcock and Hawks. John Wayne was certainly. The last American politician to be a Father was Lincoln I suspect. FDR I suppose, too. And Lyndon Johnson, too, though he as the very punishing father. For Americans the West is where nearly all fathers live. Or come from. Rockefeller and Vanderbilt were never Fathers. Musk and Vance cannot ever be Fathers (and Musk fathering fourteen children suggests he is aware of this). Biden is almost the anti-father. All those conspiracy memes about Michelle Obama being a man, or Macron’s wife (sic) {which could well be truer} suggest the need for mythology. The trans movement, too, suggests a deficit of Father material. And I think its not about the art per-se. Pollock and DeKooning are both majestic artists but only Pollock was the Father. (Kline may have been, too.)

“But, the former class feels comfortable and confirmed in this self-alienation, knowing alienation to be its own power and possessing in it the appearance of a human existence. But the exploited class feels itself destroyed through alienation, in which it perceives its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.”
Karl Marx (The Holy Family)

But for contemporary western society, or at least the U.S., the withering family mythology has left in its place a barren empty parking lot. John Berger (as I have noted before) described the earliest homo sapiens as the people of arrival. We are now, fifty thousand years later, the people of departure. And we have already left the car at the long-term lot. Our homesickness is absolutely incurable. This permanent exile from our feelings, our desire, feels like the default plan of the ruling class. But this system of exploitation, this system that must manufacture the pauper, now feels mythic. Capitalism is close to a cult religion in terms of how many think of it. The horizon, the vanishing point, as it were, for our lives is endless credit and debt and calculation. The sense of time has been colonized by petty economic pressures. We are in a state of constant personal emergency. Spikes in autism and dementia start to feel logical. The ruling billionaire class however is just as fraught with anxiety and ambivalence. But the source of this anxiety is more abstract. Their unease is more indirect. They take comfort in knowing others are worse. But, this comfort is fragile, and their sense of self esteem is very much in flux. I cannot imagine a society in human history before this one that has been run by people have never grown up. Run by big children. And children can sometimes suffer ‘night terrors’.

The damage done by the false optimism of late 20th century America, and now 21st century needs to be unpacked a bit. I say this because it is deceptive. The conditioning to ‘want’ optimism is subtle and often hard to recognize. The new sort of ‘woke’ wars are anchored by the fall back position of ‘hurt feelings’. And what is most disturbing about this plague of hurt feelings is that it is the young whose feelings are most hurt. It is worth examining this idea of ‘hurt feelings’ a bit. Pre school children in the US and Canada and parts of the EU are taught to verbally express when they are feeling ‘hurt’. Not physically hurt, not scrapes and bruises but emotionally hurt. Children are taught to identify this feeling of ‘hurtness’ when it occurs. They are taught to vocalize the fact that they are feeling ‘hurt’. I think originally this pedagogic idea was a corrective to emotional remoteness, but today it increasingly seems an expression of adult narcissism.

And here I wanted to note this idea of cheapened culture. Of the erosion of artistic quality. And now given the nepotism and almost onanistic quality of US television, the sense of fascism that resides within. One of the problems, if not ‘the’ problem facing artists today is the eroded sense of an audience. Of a knowledgeable audience. It feels as if artists today, young artists, are working within an aesthetics that requires a certain kind of audience, a certain scale or number of viewers or listeners. But most art is viewed remotely today, and the domination of the platforms of viewing by Capital, by corporate interests, limits the possibilities. Young artists will instinctively adjust their work to fit the paradigms of approval. The artist today, I think, has to begin to consider how to reconfigure their ideas of who they are making art for, and what that means for their own sense of personal expression. In fact, what ‘personal expression’ means today.

Young artists have grown up in these laboratories of narcissistic control. The professionalization of art has far reaching consequences. It is not just the economic aspect, and in fact the economic in this context may not even matter much. It is to track the societal promise of culture and its failures.

“In response to the question “What is to be done?” I usually can only answer “I do not know.” I can only analyze relentlessly what is. In the process, I am reproached in the fol­lowing manner: “If you criticize, you have to say how to do better.” But I consider this a bourgeois prejudice. Historically, there have been countless instances in which precisely those works that pursued purely theoretical intentions altered consciousness and, by extension, societal reality.”
Theodor Adorno (Der Spiegel interview, 1969)

This bourgeois prejudice is part of a general educational regression. It also suggests a kind of temporal impatience. The ruling class propaganda manufacture crises. Everything is ‘urgent’, everything is an emergency. There is, as they say in Hollywood, ‘a clock on it’. This is really just marketing. This emergency will wain and be replaced with another. The so called Climate Emergency is, of course, nothing of the sort. This fetishizing of the thermometer distracts from the accruing problems of waste and pollution. It prevents those targeted from reflecting on why there is abundant food, for example, but growing hunger. I have never once seen a discussion about global warming that introduced the urgency of stopping war. Not once.

“There is a sentence by Grabbe that reads: “For nothing but de­spair can save us.” This is provocative, but not at all dumb. I cannot fault someone living in our world today for feeling despairing, pes­simistic, and negative. Those who compulsively shout down their objec­tive despair with the noisy optimism of immediate action in order to lighten their psychological burden are much more deluded. “
Theodor Adorno (Ibid)

If one enters a discussion, on social media in particular, and voices pessimistic analysis, one will be met with, invariably, anger at this pessimism. If you express optimism, NOBODY will challenge this. Mostly the optimist will get claps on the back.

And a final quote, an exchange, from that Der Spiegel interview…

“SP: So far, as your friend Habermas once put it, your dialectic has, at its “blackest spots” of resignation, surrendered to “the destructive pull of the death drive.”
Adorno: I would rather say that the compulsive clinging to what is posi­tive stems from the death drive.”

This is of course correct. The smiley face is pure death drive. The smiley face optimism of the Empire is really the rictus smile of a skull, a momento mori in a sense. Of course Habermas would not see that. But I noted on the podcast this character I designate as ‘aw shucks’ , the good guy, the false optimist, friend to all. This is the dry drunk, the sociopath. And this sensibility can be seen in U.S. television constantly. Especially in commercials. Its barely worth mentioning, actually. This mask of humility, the Jimmy Stewart midwesterner, I consider among the most dangerous character deformations that exist. And this presentation-of-self (per Goffman) bleeds into other areas, too, like the loss of even the idea of dignity. Here Donald Trump is almost the poster boy for this deficit. And Vance and Musk and Hegseth, although Hegseth I hold out hope can grow. Can learn. I doubt any of the others can.

“Rather, in the wake of a general abjection of high theory, certain writings, of which those by Adorno and Bloch are perhaps metonyms, have come to stand, in their oppositional spirit and their refusal to be reduced to an orthodox doctrine, as the *pharmakon**, both a poison and remedy, that the system is eager to expunge.”
Gerhard Richter (Adorno’s Scars, Bloch’s Anacoluthon)

The system that wants to expunge this work includes many far leftists, many of whom I know personally. And this is because this is the return. The return of the repressed, and that is a very big fear, a very big psychic hole indeed. Richter adds a few paragraphs later:

“Indeed, we could say that for both writers, each in his own way, the kind of aesthetics named by literature is invested with a promise-the promise of literature that, for them, is inseparable from a rethinking of the political.”
Gerhard Richter (Ibid)

This is a discussion about the promise of culture. And this cannot be separated from the return of the repressed, or from the sense of societal malaise so many keep writing about. The importance of theory runs alongside this discussion, for there are, in fact, aesthetic concerns in theory. As Richter notes, and Hullot-Kentor has written about (he who did the second and definitive translation of Aesthetic Theory into English) the first translation of Adorno’s final work, Aesthetic Theory was a kind of watering down of the original, it made syntax simpler, it even added phrases (‘as we saw’, etc) to provide an easier and more familiar tone to the work — and then added chapter headings and paragraph breaks. All of this flying in the face of Adorno’s intention. Why? Optimism, making it friendly, the first translation was the ‘aw shucks’ translation.

“What Adorno and Bloch show is that the promise of literature, if there can be such a thing, lies not in what it reflects or teaches about the political-how it reproduces political issues that seem to be prevalent in the empirical or historical time in which a text is embedded-but rather in its invitation to reconsider, again and again, the traces and non-identical forms of political thinking that are enacted in questions of artistic presentation. “This is not the time,” Adorno writes, “for political works of art; rather, politics has migrated into the autonomous of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works that present themselves as politically dead.”
Gerhard Richter (Ibid)

Richter is unsually articulate about such matters. And it is this has brought him a fair amount of criticism over the last few years. The promise, Richter notes, of literature, but its true of culture overall, always lies in an elsewhere. Something not quite located. And Richter also notes that today, the Academy actually fears intellectuals. The academy will soon be given over to the Musk’s ideas of efficiency no doubt. Universities as bantustans of corporate domination. Today the horror of the contemporary world is that Zionism and the not too distant cry of apartheid South Africa are the most conspicuous models. And both are first cousins to National Socialism.

Adorno said all artworks are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost. Most serious artists arrive as a similar conclusion, that whatever the practice there is a quality of impossibility bound up with it. And this impossibility is unnamable. Beckett seemed particularly concerned with this, but you can look at Handke or Bernhard or even Kafka and there is a recognition that something hovers around the art-object, but that it cannot, in a sense, be caught. That is the temporal aspect of this mystery, the uncanniness is partly found in its fleetingness.

This is all what makes reading exhibition copy or artist statements so enervating. Ms Smith uses textiles to explore gender identity isses from the pov of snails. Etc etc. Its impossible to write good artist statements and its very rare to hear a gallery or museum finding a non-cringe presentation of an artist. This is particularly the case with new artists.

Now, Richter also notes something I have said before, so I feel a bit vindicated. And that is that everything is read, even visual art, even music. And of the errors that many critics made with Abstract Expressionism was to say (as Greenberg never tired of saying) that there was no narrative, only surface. This is patently untrue. Everything has a narrative firstly.

“Once this system of *Unvereinbarkeit* becomes visible in a literary text-and just when such a point has been reached remains an open matter of discussion—what reveals itself to the reader is that in “art works nothing is literal, least of all their words” (AT 87) {Aesthetic Theory, Adorno}. This means that to read artworks and the realm of the aesthetic to which they belong entails a decisive turn away from the realist or mimetic effect that they may simulate on the surface. In an act of dissimulation, they become thinkable only in and as something irreducibly figurative.”
Gerhard Richter (Ibid)

And here we arrive at crucial insight regards art, but also culture overall.

“The traces to be found in the material and the technical procedures, from which every qualitatively new work of art takes its lead, are scars: They are the loci at which the preceding works misfired” (AT 35). For Adorno, the material inscription of the aesthetic event as a political act presents itself in the figure of the scar. A scar, as a trace of corporeal writing, marks the place of a previous incision or injury. A sign of what is no longer, it is also a deeply historical marker. The scar always comes in a double gesture: it represents itself as a concrete and present image of a disfiguration, and it is excessive in that it refers to something that no longer exists, a sign with a signified but without a referent. The scar also bespeaks the Utopian moment of coming to terms with and recovering from trauma, even as it continues to render the forgetting of the trauma impossible.”
Gerhard Richter (Ibid)

So there is an insistence on the material here. Richter adds ” It can be argued, however, that the confusion of aesthetic and non-aesthetic reality is the birth of ideology itself.” For our purposes here the traces of failed artistic practice are found in all artworks, and that all genuine artistic practice contains a political echo –a memory trace even — but here it is interesting to consider if these traces are also the returning of repressed material, so that artworks are also always double meanings. But more, and this is probably in my opinion the most important thing to take away from all this:

“A sustained inquiry into the logic and history of aesthetic ideologies may thus reveal the often subterranean ways in which seemingly disinterested claims of taste or artistically mediated sensate cognition work to create and reinforce an uncritical, organicist view of social norm and a tendentiously violent imposition of highly constructed and contingent world views as the expression of an alleged political necessity.”
Gerhard Richter (Ibid)

Adorno (and Richter) go on to say that ” But upon re-reading Adorno in this context it becomes clear that, rather than relying on a model of transparent communication and the secure ground of referentiality, he conceives of the aesthetic as a space of signs that exhibits first and foremost the ways in which it does not communicate anything but its own non-communicability. As Adorno tells us,”art is integral only when it refuses to play along with communication.”

This is exactly the opposite of how art is taught in schools or Universities. Bad art communicates mostly redundancies. The political aspect of art is found exactly where (per Richter) all instrumentalist interpretation tries and fails to twist ‘meaning’ out of it. I have said often over the years. Art is not a political slogan or pamphlet. Again, which is why exhibition copy or artists statements are often so cringe worthy. Art is not *exploring* anything. If you look at an Agnes Martin for example. What is Martin’s work saying? Nothing. Is it political? Ah, I think it is, by its sheer heterogeneity, by virtue of its impenetrability and this quality of cipher-like inscrutability. With Martin, it is more what isnt there than what is. But to see this requires experience in concentrated viewing, it requires education in the arts. It cannot be explained by another narrative meant to help us experience it. Art is social by its opposition to society (Adorno). One can see why this is unpopular. The art market doesn’t like this sort of thing. It criticises society by simply existing. And as Adorno says ‘puritans of all stripes condemn such ideas.’ It is also why even seemingly mundane decisions of taste are important. Judging JD Vance’s socks is not trivial. Choosing the wrong suit is an important point. Having an opinion on clerestory windows is important.

“what art can contribute to society is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance.”
Theodor Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)

Artists like Robert Wilson chose to work with a fascist fraud such as Marina Abramovic, and this is not insignificant. Why did Wilson not know better? Sometimes selling out takes place in ways that are not so obvious. Dylan does Victoria’s Secret adverts, but people, the public, tend to forget, or not care.

Here is a fine piece on theatre and why it is failing https://cliftonduncan.substack.com/p/how-covid-killed-the-theatre?r=j0b9m

Adorno privileged literature before all other mediums. He saw the literary as inherently allegorical, and that allegory is the real truth of aesthetics.

“For Adorno there can be no rigorous thinking of the aesthetic in terms of its non-communicability and alterity that does not proceed through the materiality of the literary text. This is so in part because literary writing, in its refusal to remain buchstablich or literal, exhibits what is always the case in aesthetic experience: there can be no direct or realist reading of an aesthetic creation that could do justice to art’s irreducibly figurative nature. For Adorno, literary works are figurative or allegorical, and he insists that artworks possess “a word less syntax even in linguistic works. What these works say is not what their words say,” so that meaning cannot be reduced to authorial intention. What Adorno calls the allegorical Wahrheitsgehalt, or truth-content, of a text becomes visible when it divorces itself from its author’s intended meaning, and what speaks in artworks is not the author’s voice but their own formal echoes: “The dynamic of art works speaks in them.”
Gerhard Richter (Ibid)

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