The ideological function of performance: Adorno and Goethe

Goethe's Faust (Penguin Classics: 2005) is a tragedy about a reticent, tortured scholar who makes a wager with the devil, Mephistopheles. Mephisto will make Dr. Faust's earthly wishes come true, and elevate him to a moment of utter glory; however, if the great doctor grasps this moment too tightly, if he bids for it to stay, he will be damned to serve the devil in hell after death - for the rest of eternity.

Adorno is clearly a fan of Goethe in general and Faust in particular - he paints an interesting picture of the play's author in Minima Moralia (Verso: 2005):

"Goethe, acutely aware of the threatening impossibility of all human relationships in emergent industrial society, tried in the Novellen of Wilhelm Meister's Years of Travel to present tact as the saving accommodation between alienated human beings...But what has happened since makes the Goethean renunciation look like fulfilment. Tact and Humanity - for him the same thing - have in the meantime gone exactly the way from which, as he believed, they were to save us."

Here, we have an interesting sort of irony - the author of a great tragedy was himself ensnared by tragic circumstances; he tried valiantly to restore humanity to industrial society but was destined to fail, fated to be crushed under the weight of the objective social reality.

More specifically, in relation to Faust, the reader can feel the resonances between this play and Adorno's philosophy - indeed, the prologue to Goethe's great work is a scene in heaven, where God and the devil are negotiating over the fate of Dr. Faust. Here, we have a sort of dialectical unity between good and evil - they may seem like two completely opposed concepts, but to Goethe they are involved in the same overall process. This concept forms the foundation for the series of dialectical reversals in relation to ethics that we find in Adorno, expressed most simply as "good is the mode of appearance of evil".

One can see a lot of Adorno in the character of Dr. Faust himself - the disillusioned scholar locked away in his room, annoyed by all other people and railing against the evils of the world.

However, we find an even more interesting Adornoian resonance right at the beginning of the play, in the prelude, where the director, the resident poet and a comic argue about the role of theatre in relation to the audience:

"Above all else have plenty happening.
They come to watch, they want to see something.
If lots is going on before their eyes
And they're astounded while they stare
Then right away first prize
And popularity are yours for sure (lines 89-94),"

Says the director.

But the poet vehemently disagrees - "you have no sense how poor such labour is (104)" - he argues that this approach of pandering to the masses causes the artist "to criminally throw away his highest right/ And natures gift, the right of his humanity (136/137)". Adorno, the insatiable critic of mass culture, would clearly agree with the poet.

The comic has a more nuanced perspective - he notes that buried in any low-brow cultural product, there will always be (to use an exhausted Zizekian expression) a kernel of truth:

"All live this life, by most unrealised,
And always interesting wherever seized.
In motley images not much that's clear,
A little light of truth (my emphasis) in plenteous error,
That way we brew the best drink of them all
That quickens everyone and edifies them as well (168-173)."

But the comic reaches the somewhat Adornoian truth of theatre and performance art in general just a few lines later:

"They admire panache, still love the world of seeming (181)."

This is the ideological function of performance: we focus on the quality, the believability, of the acting, instead of penetrating the political content of the work, instead of trying to the decipher the way in which it is constructed. By doing this, we are reinforcing the importance of the fetishised appearances of phenomena instead of attempting to demask these appearances and to understand the contradictions which underlie them. For audiences, for citizens, to "love the world of seeming" is essential to upholding the obfuscations which are necessary for the functioning of capitalism.

Agamben's language fetishism

Early in Capital (Penguin, 1990 edition), Marx describes Aristotle's valiant attempt to discover the secret of the commodity: "'there can be no exchange,' he says, 'without equality, and no equality without commensurability'. Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. 'It is, however, in reality, impossible that such unlike things can be commensurable,' i.e. qualitatively equal (pg. 151)".

The common element in "such unlike things" that facilitates the process of exchange is, of course, the human labour expended in their production - Marx discovered this, why could a genius like Aristotle not?
The German philosopher is kind to the great Greek, not attributing this failing to any intellectual deficiency, but rather to "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived" - "the secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are human labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion (pg. 151)". In so far as slavery and a rigid, hierarchical social structure were entrenched in Ancient Greek society, "the concept of human equality" had certainly not acquired widespread recognition in this setting - in truly historical materialist fashion, Marx is arguing that Aristotle was unable to think outside the limits of his historical context.

We must treat Giorgio Agamben's attempted synthesis of the differing arguments on the origins of language - internal or external? nature or culture? - with the same sympathy (in Infancy and History, 2007: Verso). Indeed, at first sight, he appears to have resolved this debate with ease:

"What marks human language is not its belonging to either the esosomatic or endosomatic sphere, but its situation, so to speak, on the cusp of the two, and its consequent articulation in both their difference and their resonance...We can likewise conceive of endosomatic and esosomatic, nature and culture, as two distinct systems which, resonating in language, produce a single new system (pg. 66)." He notes, however, that "there must be a mediating element which enables the two systems to resonate (pg. 66)" - this is Chomsky's universal generative grammar.

The idea of language transgressing the popularly conceived boundary between nature and culture, between internal and external, was definitely a new one when Agamben wrote this essay in 1978. So how is it that he can think outside the limits of popular opinion, of his historical context?
The question is a false one - in reality he does not, he cannot. Instead, he deflects the struggle between conceptions of the origin of language in nature or culture onto an opposition within the concept of language itself - the semiotic versus the semantic.

The fact that this is a symptom of his inability to surpass the situation of his enunciation is cleverly concealed - he describes the difference between the semiotic and the semantic before his apparent synthesis of the natural and cultural origins of language:

"The semiotic is nothing other than the pure pre-babble language of nature, in which man shares in order to speak, but from with the Babel of infancy perpetually withdraws him. The semantic does not exist except in its momentary emergence from the semiotic in the instance of discourse, whose elements, once uttered, fall back into pure language, which reassembles them in its mute dictionary of signs. Like dolphins, for a mere instant human language lifts its head from the semiotic sea of nature."

We have the semiotic - a concrete, silent system of signs - representing the unalterable conditions of "nature" into which we are born, and the semantic - the supple system employed in discourse - aligning with the less concrete, external (what is speech but an externalisation of language?) cultural conditions of our existence.
This is the nature of Agamben's "language fetishism" - a conceptual contortion, a symptom, produced by "the historical limitation inherent in the society in which he lived".

Zizek: The function of unattainable utopia

What is a utopian ideal? What do we do with it?
The logical answers appear to be: a vision for a better future that we should strive to actualise.
But what about utopias that simply cannot be brought into reality? What is their function?

In September last year, Benjamin Kunkel of the New Statesman wrote a brief review of Slavoj Zizek's (Verso, 2012) book The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. The political leaning of the article's publisher suggests that we would encounter a celebratory espousal of the brilliance of its object's author; however, the title indicated otherwise - The unbearable lightness of Slavoj Žižek’s communism. The author is basically frustrated by the fact that, despite the Slovenian's furious and brilliant critique of advanced capitalism, he proposes no concrete alternative. His visions of a communist utopia are obscure and undefined. To Kunkel's credit, he does propose a few somewhat-solid ideas for the future -

"Imagine, in any case, a society whose productive assets are, in one way or another, the property, as Marx said, of “the associated producers”. Such a society might also entail, let’s say, strict depletion quotas for both renewable and non-renewable natural resources; welfare guarantees not only for workers but for people too young, old or ill to work; and democratic bodies, from the level of the enterprise and locality up to that of the state, wherever it hadn’t withered away."

- which make his critique of Zizek's "unbearable lightness" more credible. Indeed, he is only able to criticise this philosopher's work on the basis of these solid alternatives - his thesis is founded on the assumption that some concrete proposals for a communist utopia actually exist. Without this assumption, the article in its actual form couldn't exist. Kunkel's proposals are the condition of possibility of the critique he builds.

In this way, I would argue that Kunkel and Zizek are actually very similar - my thesis here is that the latter's "unattainable utopia" is the condition of possibility of his furious criticism of advanced capitalism.

I came across this phenomena in Zizek's Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010). After some hundreds of pages of pure rage directed at reality, the author draws his attention to the possibility of a better future. In true Zizekian style, his supposedly concrete ideas of utopia come from literature - Kafka, Platonov and others - and the reader gets the impression of a vague world beyond the world, an obscure, unattainable dreamscape. For example, he introduces Kafka's short story about Josephine, a performer in a community of mice who, despite her beautiful voice and huge, captive crowd, is not a celebrity. While she is up on stage, all the worker-mice listen - when she is finished, they practically ignore her, she is accorded no special status. While this post-celebrity, egalitarian world is no doubt a beautiful idea, we are left asking: how? How would this actually work on a societal level? And how would we get there?
 

Zizek doesn't care to answer. Well, that isn't exactly true - the non-answer is on some level intentional, or at least functional. Rather, he cares not to answer. So then what is the function of this impossible utopia and the unexplained transition? The gap between the real world and Zizek's ideal one is essentially the genesis of his furious, brilliant criticism.

Indeed, every critique of concrete reality is enunciated from the position of a different, ideal world. For example, those of us who criticise US foreign policy are essentially taunting the state's leaders with the gap between the reality of this policy (brutal, violent self-interest) and its articulated ideals (freedom, peace, justice, etc). The argument is conducted from the world of the ideals - we are angry precisely because reality doesn't align with the way we believe it should be. (At this point, I should mention in passing Etienne Balibar's assertion [from Politics and the Other Scene - Verso, 2002]: the best way to reinforce a dominant ideology is to criticise the reality which it supports on the basis of its ideals - so by whingeing about the injustice of US foreign policy we are actually supporting this country's hegemony). We are effectively positioned on this ideal world, directing our anger at the real one - we must be in this position in order to criticise actual reality.

Very few of us on the left deny that Zizek makes many good points about the deficiencies of capitalism. But very few of us are impressed by the alternatives he proposes. Our frustration at the latter comes from a very linear idea - that good criticism should naturally lead to good, concrete proposals. But it doesn't actually work like that - the fact that Zizek's mind dwells in a perfect, undefined, impossible utopia means that he will be enraged by pretty much anything which falls short of this utopia in the real world - and that includes pretty much everything in existence. He converts this anger into a logical argument with lucid brilliance. This is the structural function of his stupid utopianism - if he enunciated a practical, attainable, vision for the future, he could not make the heavy critiques that he does, he would not be so enraged by capitalism (the question of which comes first - the ideal or the anger - is irrelevant for this discussion). The very impossibility of Zizek's utopia, which Kunkel criticises, is the condition of possibility of his belligerent work.

The next question is: so what?
If Zizek doesn't provide practical answers to the problems that he uncovers, the criticisms that he makes seem ultimately pointless. 

At this point, we must remember that his writings don't exist in isolation - there are other authors, other people, out there. And Zizek's pertinent criticisms of capitalism pave the way for others to propose concrete solutions - someone might read his work and say, for instance, "hey, the way that multinational corporations are implicated in the disintegration of the Congolese state is pretty messed up - we should lobby for these corporations to stop promoting the exploitation of workers by warlords". Someone will read the criticism, interpret the problem, and create a practical answer.
So we arrive at a paradoxical conclusion: Zizek's impossible utopianism is the condition of possibility of a concrete, attainable one.

Kunkel's review, in a way, is testament to this - his thesis about the Slovenian philosopher's vagueness allows him to enunciate some ideas for concrete communism.