AFFIRMATIVE RESISTANCE
Thomas Mann
In a letter to Thomas Mann dated August 1, 1950, Theodor W. Adorno—anticipating his conception of negative dialectics—described the “writer’s dilemma” in words that apply to the dilemma of art in general: “One either defers to the tact of language, which almost inevitably involves a loss of precision in the matter, or one privileges the latter over the former and thereby does violence to language itself. Every sentence is effectively an aporia, and every successful utterance a happy deliverance, a realization of the impossible, a reconciliation of subjective intention with objective spirit, whereas the essence consists precisely in the diremption of both.” In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, virtually every sentence is an articulation by linguistic means of the aporetic essence of art. The challenge is to lend expression to “the constitutive relation of art to what it itself is not, to what is not the pure spontaneity of the subject.” The ambiguity of the work of art becomes apparent once again, its ambivalence between the desire for reconciliation and its implacable irreconcilability: art as what oscillates between identity and difference, between form and formlessness. It is this in-between that defines the status of the artist’s assertion of form as the form of the formless as much as the formlessness of form. To steer clear of the pitfall of aestheticism, art must acknowledge its self-extension into the non-artistic sphere of fact. On the other hand, in order to avoid becoming an instrument in the image of socio-political commitment or by moralizing, it insists on aesthetic autonomy. Instead of choosing between violence and nonviolence, art votes for itself as the operator of this in-between that can hardly be conciliated in a speculative synthesis. Any assertion of form mediates itself to its (social) other because this other has long leapt ahead of it. And yet art must not amount to no more than worship of the other or the incommensurable, for that way lies the sacrifice of its capacity of form to the religious sentiment of formlessness. Art is what bears, and articulates, the antagonism of form and formlessness.
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