“There is No poetry after Auschwitz”: Literary Ethics @ the Inauguration of the Millennium.
By William Martin, 1998
Theodor Adorno’s curious manifesto is as much a warning to literary criticism as it is to
literature and culture in general. In one sense or another we must all come to terms with the
contingencies between art and amorality, and those who spend their time theorizing about great
pieces of literature from the past (and the present) have an ethical responsibility towards both
their students and the piece of art itself. That is, securing the artwork (or criticism about it) such
that it cannot be exercised in order to incite (or perpetuate) fascism.
Apropos, our epoch has witnessed the integration of existential or marginal texts into a
literary canon that has often been interpreted to be esoteric, as well as, at times, flagrantly racist
or sexist. There has been a radical questioning in the Academy regarding identity and
subjectivity, and perhaps more importantly, who deserves inclusion in the canon. Propitiously,
literary criticism engenders fruitful dialogues on social irony, introspection and adaptation.
Additionally, interrogating the tension between artists’ freedoms and those of her critic produces
fruitful discourse about the parallel relationship between literature and literary criticism in the
Academy. Expressly, for it is this precarious dialectic between individual creativity and polis
committal that finally demonstrates any given society’s ethics and prejudices.
The last century authenticated an explosion in literary theory in reference to ontological
hermeneutics of texts and their role in identity construction. Negatively this phenomenon
resulted in theoretical attempts to marginalize the freedoms of many an artist and many a critic;
maneuvers undoubtedly induced, at least in part, because of the inter-contingencies between art
and amorality dramatically made manifest throughout the Nuremburg Trials. Positively, the
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Academy reworked and reexamined its own literary presuppositions with a rigor not witnessed
since the Romantics.
That literature has only been studied academically in the Twentieth-Century is the first of
many transformations for the art genre. This is not to suggest however, that literary moral theory
came into being only in this century. Morality-qua-literature, or art, as Plato knew has to be the
foci of any artistic presentation, due to an always already potential to instigate rebellion or
subservience. People are effected by what they read, and that so many people in this century
(regardless of social class) could read made an ethical responsibility between the critic and the
artist mandatory. D. H. Lawrence once suggested that the proper role of the critic was to save a
piece of art from the pedantic moralizing of the author, the question today, however, concerns
who will save the artwork from the moralizing of the critic.
Our topic concerns not so much the ethics of artistic creation as the ethics (and, or
psychology) of particular types of criticism that do not seem to consider ethics retroactively
when considering the value of a piece of art. Primarily problematic is the presupposition that
literary criticism must always be moral, and that its only value resides in its moral function. A
good place to inaugurate a discussion about literary theory in terms of public discourse and selfunderstanding is with comments made by Jurgen Habermas on academic–social interdependency
Habermas reminds us, “In public discourses of self-understanding, which can be touched
off by films, television series, or exhibitions as much as by historical works or ‘affairs,’ we argue
not so much over short-term goals and policies as over the forms of a desired political existence,
and over the values that shall predominate in it” (2). He instructs us, “Present and past
generations are bound up with one another, in their forms of thinking and feeling, their gestures
and their expressions, and their way of seeing [is] a tapestry composed of countless cultural
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threads” (3). That is, literary theory, like other “forms of thinking and feeling,” engages in the
materials it does because “countless threads” make up the matrix of particular works just as they
make up our own individuality. It is precisely because of this matrix that . . .
the view of the [critic ] must not be directed by the interests of readers who come
to the . . . text in search of explanations of their own [moral] position. The moment
that the analytic perspective of the observer blurs with the perspective assumed by
participants in a discourse of collective self-understanding . . . [rationality]
degenerates into . . . politics (Habermas 4).
It is high time that intellectuals radically question the ideologies behind the methodologies we
choose to follow. Literature is itself an art and to reduce it merely to a “Politics of Literature” or
a “Sociology of Literature” debases the process of studying literature as art. This is not to
suggest that sociological, political or historical approaches to literature are not valid and integral
parts of the hermeneutics of literature, only that these already named approaches need to be
balanced with methodologies that still attempt to understand the artistic (and technical) genius of
particular artworks in their technical, aesthetic capacities, regardless of the gender, race or
politics of the artist.
Indisputably, one reason for the contemporary state of methodology-qua-polemic in the
Academy originates in the presupposition that the “Canon,” for the most part, is an always
already hotbed of patriarchal, puritanical control and the ontological discourse of subjection
itself. That notwithstanding, is this genuinely the case? Indeed, it goes without saying that some
literature and some criticism is misogynist and racist in capacity, but does this mean that the
Canon itself must bear the weight of repression that is often accorded to it? Is it proper to use the
legacy of George Bataille’s “Death of the subject,” Michel Foucault’s “Death of the Author,”
conflated with what might amount to a disciplinary confusion concerning Jacques Derrida’s
différance as moral justifications for the reduction of literary study to socio-political manifestos?
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As much as these theorists should be praised for their opening up of various types of discourses
and methodologies, it seems that we have yet to go far enough with them. What unsettles one
here is the ethical paradox by which we claim there is no author in regard to intention (as we
have allowed, for better or for worse, our own hermeneutics to be the judge and jury of the case),
whilst still holding the morals of an author in judgement nonetheless.
Here one may find Habermas’ discussion of public uses of scholarship helpful. He
insists,
The moral point of view . . . concerns the judgement of justice or injustice,
although of course without the strict rules of procedure of a criminal proceeding.
[Literary] knowledge can be put to use for moral controversies that take place in
the context of the everyday . . . . However, this view to justice differs sharply
from that point of view from which members of a current generation seek to
secure for themselves a [literary] heritage that they, as [scholars] and members
of a collective political [and academic] life must inherit in one way or another (4-5).
We do inherit a particularized canon and there is no way to deny it. This unequivocal foreconception or positive prejudice, to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term, is the ground of our
understanding. Thus, a question arises as to why we would want to deny it. “The question is
not,” as Habermas reminds us, “primarily the guilt or innocence of the fore-fathers but rather the
critical self-assurance of their descendants. The public interest of those born later, who cannot
know how they themselves would have acted, directs itself towards a different goal than the
zealous moral judgements of the contemporaries of the Nazi years . . .” (5). Said another way,
those who lived concurrently with the creation of these pieces of art (and criticism about them)
do, in fact, have a right to morally judge them; we who did not live then, however, should be
perpetually aware of why we want to accuse, dishonor and in some ways, eradicate the canonical
culture from which we spring, and in which we engage and participate.
This posture seems to be the unpremeditated result of political bad faith, of hollow
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apologias that not only smell of malevolence but deny the hope inscribed by the sublime
metamorphoses of human art and consciousness. When the criteria for art analysis is
unremittingly reduced to moral and political judgements we are no longer engaging in a piece of
art. Alternatively we are overindulging ourselves in myopic acts of narcissism. We are fastening,
if you will, a mirror to the textual artifact and then conversing about it as if we can envision it,
when all we apportion ourselves to visualizing is our own reflection. There is no denying the
metaphor just elucidated is indicative of the way all literary analysis, to one degree or another, is
performed. This does not mean, however, there is no point in extolling the provocation, genius
or hope our literary heritage concedes us. Moreover, as subjects to a particular cultural matrix
we should embrace these works as much as we critically depreciate them. Jamaican Nobel prize
winner Derek Walcott has remarked that he refuses to damn either of his cultural fathers (one
being the master who owned the plantation and the other being the slave who worked it) for to do
so would be, effectively, to damn himself. I believe we must bear in mind his precedent and
suffer it to constructively minister to us as it seems to have ministered to him.
In this regard Habermas argues, “How we decide questions of accountability for crimes
[including for the purposes of this discussion, literary ones] depend not only on the facts but on
how we view the facts. How much responsibility we ascribe to persons and how much to
historical circumstances, where we draw the boundaries between individual freedom and
constraint, guilt and innocence – these decisions depend on the particular pre-understanding with
which we approach the events” (9). And I would argue that Habermas’ prescription follows for
literary “events” such as works of art. When we accuse an artist of executing a “crime” we no
longer acknowledge her voice, or give it an equality with our own. Furthermore, Habermas
reminds us, “How we see the distribution of guilt and innocence in the past also reflects the
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present norms according to which we are willing to accord one another mutual respect as citizens
in a” university (9). We must accord respect to those that have endeavored to inscribe their
experiences, aspirations and nightmares such that we covenant with them, finding a
commandment in which we visualize ourselves while contrasting the prejudices of their
communities with those of our own.
We must not be so arrogant as to dismiss arbitrarily what an author crafted when she
imposed a pen to paper, or we minimize the significance of scrutinizing literature as a potential
beacon for faith in humanity’s creativity. As Andrew Bowie has suggested,
If great bourgeois art . . . is reduced to its identifiable historical and ideological
determinations or made into the repeated demonstration of interpretive undecidability,
rather than also being understood in terms of challenges to what we think we know,
to what we think is worth doing, and to what we can hope for, our self-understanding
will be immeasurably impoverished (285).
When the criticism of art, or the criticism of expression has reached a state of political paralysis,
it is unquestionable we have reached a state of self-impoverishment.
Here certain points made by Theodor Adorno may be helpful. The use of Adorno’s
statement for the title of this paper is (admittedly) somewhat deceptive. Although Adorno’s
remark appears to allude to the strict ethical obligation artists (and art) need to adhere to when
coming to terms with possible contingencies between amorality and aestheticism, tropologically,
it is rhetorik that enunciates Adorno’s trepidation that cultural materialism and its critical
augmentations may in due time eradicate, once and for all, the possibility of truth from art. In
our own political age it may seem incautious to propose that such an anxiety needs to be
seriously addressed. It is addressed here, however, because an engagement in Adorno’s anxiety
may lead us to a conceivable confluence between the cultural materialists’ principled concerns,
and those of, for lack for a better term, the metaphysicians, who retain the hope that arts can
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counsel in the affective construction of sovereignty
The genuine work of art is, for Adorno, a phenomenological object that relays
instrumental admittance to our nature, a nature which reciprocally communicates back to the
world a signification of constitutional value (Bowie 268). Adorno perpetually emphasized,
against the cultural materialism of those such as Walter Benjamin and others, the potential for
metaphysical freedom via art, a freedom that is often obscured by what Jean Beaudrillard calls
consumerism. This is effectively created through “style,” where one can often enunciate truth by
using language against itself, disclosing perception in a manner that established social forms
cannot (Bowie 270). Adorno’s conception of style suspends upon a notion of “authentic”
mimesis, style derived from art works of the past (i.e. the Canon) (Bowie 271). Moreover, this
issue of authenticity concerns the poignancy of suffering, the dialectic between art’s perpetual
resistance towards the control of the polis and commodity greed. As Adorno asserts, “The
greatest artists were never those who embodied style in the most unbroken and complete manner,
but rather those who took up style as resistance (Härtre) against the chaotic expression of
suffering, as negative truth” (Horkheimer and Adorno 117).
An appendage to this idea explicitly approaches modernist, and post-modernist art,
especially literature. Adorno insists, “the configurations [of language] in great modernist works
possess a clarity and technical rigor . . . [which differs from everyday language] without which
the works would not achieve the status of art” (Bowie 273). For Adorno, non-corroborative
enunciations derive their meaning from their ability to express suffering in a manner made
impossible through the normative political grammars that constitute suffering (Bowie 275).
Thus, Adorno reminds us that art, when negatively reduced “to a supra-subjective
discourse” is little more than “mere ideology generated by reified forms of human interchange”
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(Bowie 275). For Adorno, such reductions are counterintuitive inasmuch as rigorous adherence
to canonical technique – i.e., techniques that engender one toward a metaphysical expanse where
suffering can be enunciated – never comes into efflorescence when always already subsumed to
polis–contingency (Bowie 275). That is, an expanse ineluctably describing something universal,
rather than something reducible perpetually to its political-sociological referents. This is not to
suggest that art cannot be reduced to its political-sociological referents, it always can be. Rather,
I simply insist the Academy should provide habitation for scholarship that is not of this variety.
Regardless of the rhetoric used in this paper, it is not a polemical tract written in order to
coerce division vis-a-vis what constitutes an ethically proper methodological discourse. Rather, I
have attempted to, as Soren Kierkegaard might say, “up-build” my audience toward a future
engagement with the solicitude herein. I side with Bowie’s contention that art always already
consists,“in its involving more significant possibilities than any theoretical account [can]
exhaust,” and that “art make[s] hermeneutic demands [on us] which cultural materialism” as well
as other critical theories, “too often simply ignore or repress” (Bowie 288). Said another way,
Adorno insists that although consumerism effects the production of art, we hardly do justice to
ourselves or anyone else if we, proverbially, “throw out the baby with the bathwater.” Let us not
be so defiant in our ethical agendas that we refuse to reflect on this advice.
Ultimately this paper is a declaration for a particularized freedom, a request for scholarly
latitude such that academic melancholia does not infiltrate the methodological capacities of our
realizations. For as Judith Butler has warned us in a different capacity, “Precisely at the moment
in which choice is impossible, the subject pursues subordination as the promise of existence”
(20). When political dogma annihilates the eventuality of art analysis, the subject-qua-scholar
pursues subordination under the promise of economic existence. And this manner of doing
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scholarship is precarious for various reasons, regardless of the honorable goals prescribed to
particular methodologies at the dawn of their being. That is, despite the reality that the subject is
unremittingly “a site of ambivalence and “the effect of a prior power,” it is essential we also
stress that she is “the condition of [her own] possibility”(Butler 14-5). Not unlike our friend
Derek Walcott, let us spend as much time begetting our possibility via Canon as lamenting our
subjection in it. Only then will our discourses resound with an authentic opportunity for all who
engage in art, and only then will there be a model of equity in which methodology proper can
appropriately be named one of normative ethics.
William A. Martin
McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
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Works Cited
Bowie, Andrew. From Romanticism to Literary Theory. London and New York: Routledge,
1997. This paper is much informed by this work.
Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997.
Habermas, Jurgen. “On the Public Use of History: Why a ‘Democracy Prize’ for Daniel
Goldhagen.” In Common Knowledge. Winter 1997 6 (3). pp. 1-9. Oxford University
Press, 1997.
Horkheimer, Max and T. W. Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklarung. Frankfurt: Fisher, 1971.
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