the particular grouping points to. Adorno describes such a grouping when he writes of his attempts to organize his book Aesthetic Theory. He found, he says, that the book had to be written in »equally weighted, paratactical parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation […]. Their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea«20.
The constellation is not meaning itself; it is a figure of meaning. There is no constellation without the space in which it appears, the void of heaven’s cracked vault, to echo Lear. Each star in the constellation is in fact only a fragment of a whole that cannot be fully grasped, since it includes the void. Further, for Adorno, it is not simply that the full meaning cannot be grasped and veers off into the infinite the way for Freud dreams point down into the impenetrable underworld. The fragments themselves, scintillating though they may be, bear the marks of violence. They are broken off. Blank spaces forcibly intervene to interrupt their continuity with one another.
Tour de force
The artwork is fragmentary and broken because it has tried to incorporate into itself the violence done to the subject; but it is also fragmentary and broken because it, like the subject, is finite and cannot be pure spirit. A force or forces beyond the grasp of the work breaks it apart, leaving it in fragments. Conversely, the artwork attempting to encompass truth within itself becomes a tour de force. In this sense every artwork, Adorno says, is a tour de force. This does not mean that it requires expertise and displays its virtuosity to an impressed public. Rather, this means that immense force is required even to achieve the work’s broken and fragmentary enigmaticness. It is as though the artwork reaches toward the abyss in its attempts to bind something into its constellation, but as it approaches its utmost capacity it has to bear an immense strain.
Like the subject within the arena of aesthetic experience, the work as tour de force is always in danger of being overwhelmed. After listening to Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, a friend said to me, weeping, »I’m not sure I can survive this.« If my friend was worried about whether he would survive the excruciating beauty of the Hammerklavier sonata, conversely the pianist Arthur Schnabel commented that the idea of the Hammerklavier went beyond anything Beethoven could actually write. The composed piece, in other words, is incommensurable with its own idea. »The experience of art as that of its truth or untruth«, Adorno writes, »is more than subjective experience: it is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. At the same time«, he continues, »the experience is mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense.«21
The shock and the terror, the fear and trembling I have been discussing, are the points of subjective intensity at which objectivity in the sense of truth invades the subject. This is the point of contact with infinitude in which the subject vanishes into the work of art. But this is the same point at which the work becomes fragmented and enigmatic through the irruption of objectivity into it in the form of its idea. It is not only the subject who is shocked and broken when truth invades him. The Hammerklavier too trembles and breaks under the strain.
At this point I would like to turn to a piece of Adorno’s own writing to illustrate these ideas. As we saw in Adorno’s comments about structuring his book Aesthetic Theory, Adorno’s writing too has an aesthetic dimension. It too is composed of fragments that take the form of a constellation that is a tour de force. The piece is from his essay »Titles«, included in Notes to Literature (Noten zur Literatur). It is about the title of Kafka’s novel Amerika. In it we can see the relationship between the work as constellation and the work as tour de force, as well as the broken, fragmentary quality and the intrusion of death. Adorno writes:
»For Kafka’s America novel, the title he used in his diary, The One Who Was Never Heard of Again [Der Verschollene], would have been better than the title under which the book went down in history. That too is a fine title; for the work has as much to do with America as the prehistoric photograph »In New York Harbor« that is included in my edition of the Stoker fragment of 1913. The novel takes place in an America that moved while the picture was being taken, the same and yet not the same America on which the emigrant seeks to rest his eye after a long, barren crossing. – But nothing would fit that better than The One Who Was Never Heard of Again, a blank space for a name that cannot be found. The perfect passive participle verschollen, »never heard of again,« has lost its verb the way the family’s memory loses the emigrant who goes to ruin and dies. Far beyond its actual meaning, the expression of the word verschollen is the expression of the novel itself.«22
In the six sentences that make up this small piece we become aware both of an abrupt, uneven movement from one sentence to another and of threads of associative links that draw us along and embroil us in an ever tighter web of connections. We move from a comparison between the original title and the final title of Kafka’s book to an old (Adorno says prehistoric) photograph that Adorno possessed, and then to the image of an emigrant looking for a resting place. Then suddenly a blank space is mentioned, and something that has been lost. Then the family has forgotten and the emigrant has »gone to ruin« and died. And in the final sentence, Adorno speaks of the aesthetic concept of expression and tells us that it is the expression contained in that single word verschollen that is the expression of Kafka’s novel. A scintillating constellation has been formed around the idea of expression. But the notion of expression itself remains enigmatic, the blank space at the center of the constellation called Der Verschollene.
Not only are we dealing here with fragmentary thoughts that nevertheless hint at coherence, but the elements that are brought into the constellation are themselves broken and ruined: Adorno evokes things ancient, barren, ruined, exiled, lost, blurred and erased to form the constellation around his topic, the word or title der Verschollene. Even the word verschollen, as Adorno points out, is only the after-effect of a verb that has vanished into the void. The shudder that grips the subject in the arena of aesthetic experience finds its reflection here, in the blurred photograph of an »America that moved while the picture was being taken.« Of course Adorno’s topic here is not only Kafka’s novel but also America, the land of Adorno’s own emigration and exile. Thus his topic is also the damaged life, the mutilation of experience. In this little piece Adorno conjoins recognition of horror – the horror of vanishing from human memory – and the enigmatic suggestion that true expression may be possible in art, in this case, Kafka’s novel.
Erschütterung again
In closing, I will return to Adorno’s notion of Erschütterung and to my earlier statement that it is not only the subject’s mutilations but to some extent the subject himself who is extinguished in the arena of aesthetic experience as he vanishes into the work of art. If the shock of Erschütterung forcibly negates the mutilations that are denial of the truth, one of those denials is the notion of the dominating subject itself – »the I, that internal agent of repression,« as Adorno refers to it, the subject in its false identification with the false universal, das Immergleiche. The work of art forces the subject to look into the abyss. As Adorno puts it, this experience of Erschütterung or shudder is »radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience […]. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives its own limitedness and finitude. […] This subjective experience directed against the I is an element of the objective truth of art.«23
Of course, as Adorno points out, the experience of liquidation is a semblance; people do not literally die of aesthetic experience. But to the extent that in aesthetic experience the subject is subordinated to the work of art, to the extent to which aesthetic experience is indeed an experience of the primacy of the object, the subject’s attention is literally reshaped as he strains to follow the internal logic of the fragmentary and enigmatic work. It is as though the artwork, having trapped the subject, now forces him to perform arduous labors almost beyond his endurance. It is those labors we are not sure we will survive. And indeed, in this process, which Adorno, following Hegel, calls the Arbeit des Begriffs,
