[-empyre-] complicity

[Joshua Dienstag]

Dear All:

 

Happy New Year and thanks to Nicholas Ruiz for inviting me to join this
fascinating conversation.

 

As a political theorist, my interests and whatever expertise I have are
slightly orthogonal to the discussion so far, so I don't know how helpful
this will be, but anyway:

 

I tend to agree with what I understand Johanna's position to be in regard to
the difficulty of escaping complicity.  In fact, I tend to agree so much
that I'm driven to wonder why anyone could have believed it possible.  As an
historian of ideas, I tend to blame Kant's aesthetics - or rather, Kant's
arbitrary partition of the world of knowledge into the 'spheres' of
epistemology, ethics and aesthetics, each understood  as relatively
self-sufficient realms operating under their own rules.  However often this
partition has been criticized, it remains quite powerful (it continues to
dominate Habermas for example whose 'defense' of aesthetics repeats its
contradistinction from ethics).  When we ask where did the idea of art that
was fully autonomous or somehow 'outside' of economics come from, I would
suggest that the abstract art of the early 20th century and the art
criticism that supported it had their roots here, whether they knew it or
not.

 

Someone mentioned a few posts back the Aesthetics & Politics volume which
has a nice back and forth by Adorno and Benjamin on just these issues.
Incidentally, I don't think Adorno's position is that we're all doomed but
rather his 'pessimism' lies in precisely his belief that there is no
possible full autonomy for art and that neither is there some kind of
complete theoretical solution to human problems - it would be foolish enough
to look for this in philosophy but even more so in art.  But he is even more
critical of those who think that acknowledging complicity means that art
should serve politics or theory (as he thinks Benjamin and Brecht advocate):
"those who trumpet their ethics and humanity in Germany today are merely
waiting for a chance to persecute those whom their rules condemn".  Hence he
prefers 'autonomous' art not because it escapes complicity or because it
offers some kind of objective critique but simply because it gestures at
something outside the cycle of blame and violence which even the most
liberal or radical have been a party to.

 

Here I think we should also hear the common origin of 'licit' and 'license'
- to be licit is in some sense to be licensed by law or by the state.
Complicity then implies - to me anyway - a kind of co-licensing, i.e. not
only that art partakes of the society of which it is a part but  is licensed
by it as well - but then also that the process of licensing runs the other
way.  This, I think, was Adorno's concern, i.e. that 'committed' art,
supposedly radical in its critique of the state (or whatever) perversely
ends up licensing the state by participating in (Kantian) language of
judgment which is as foundational of modern state power as capitalism
(whatever that is) or anything else.

 

Its for reasons like this that I tend to think of pessimism, whether
Adorno's or that of others, as a liberating rather than a limiting
philosophy.  But that's for another post I think.

 

Cheers,

 

Joshua Foa Dienstag

Professor

UCLA / Political Science

 <mailto:dienstag at polisci.ucla.edu> dienstag at polisci.ucla.edu

310-267-5410

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