Abstract
For Adorno, as for Brecht, and even for Sartre, the raison d’être of new and advanced works of art was to provoke, antagonise and activate their producers, spectators and situations: building awareness of the mechanisms of domination (an emancipatory or transformative project, which Rancière takes issue with). I write ‘their’ to privilege the peculiar space/time carved out of the here-and-now by this special type of object. For art, here, operates much like Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, which is ‘an angel that does not give but takes instead’ (C 94). Artistic practice must not act as if it can immediately fulfill spectators’ spiritual emptiness, work through their suffering, their ethical and moral degeneracy, and their passivity. Art does not provide answers to its questions, and it is not a cure-all. Its value lies in its ability to unsettle certainty and generate doubt — casting different lights on the familiar. For, ‘the task of art today is to bring chaos into order’ (MM 222). Art, then, is always a question mark: an address to the resonant chest, a call to the soul and spirits.
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Notes
Leslie, E. ‘Shudder — Shutter — Shatter,’ Animate Projects (London, 2009) http://www.animateprojects.org/writing/essay_archive/e_leslie_2 (accessed 09/09/2013). ‘The greater the effort to participate in the realisation of the work,’ Adorno argued, ‘the more contemplation the subject invests in the work, the more successfully, does the subject, forgetting itself, become aware of the work’s objectivity’ (AT 266).
https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-culture-media-sport (accessed: 09/09/2013. ‘Marx’s once-scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today obvious fact on which “liberals” and “socialists” agree. The absolute identification of politics with the management of capital is no longer the shameful secret hidden behind the “forms” of democracy; it is the openly declared truth by which our governments acquire legitimacy.’ Rancière, J. [1995], Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, Trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 113.
An exaggeration, of course. See: Beech, D. and Roberts, J. (Eds) The Philistine Controversy (London: Verso, 2002).
Pickford, H. W. ‘Preface,’ Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), ix.
Jay, M. ‘Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament,’ The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, Ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 144.
Adorno, T. W. [1963], ‘Notes on Human Science and Culture,’ Trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 37.
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© 2014 James Hellings
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Hellings, J. (2014). The Politics of Spectatorship: Shocking Spectators. In: Adorno and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315717_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315717_8
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