Short Essay

"The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own.  Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.  Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism.  To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

-Theodor W. Adorno

Joanna reporting from Thanksgiving weekend.  Adorno writes that "there is nothing innocuous left," that even the apparently "simple" pleasures of life are actually lies which serve the forces of cruelty and terror and repression by concealing their very existence, by encouraging those of us who can afford it to ignore them.  For him, the only true pleasure can be found in contemplating "horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity, holding fast to the possibility of what is better."  It is not a new argument.  It is, however, a call to action.  

From an ethical point of view, Marxism is not all that different from certain strands of Christian thought, particularly those whose ideology derives from the Sermon on the Mount.  It is this moral code that is taken up by Hegel in his discussion of Lordship and Bondage.  This exploration of a hypothetical first encounter between two subjects, or self-consciousnesses, describes the dialectical link between Fear and Desire that ultimately results in battle, and the emergence of one superior and one inferior subject (the beginnings of society, perhaps).  Hegel goes on to explain, however, in a characteristic twist of logic, that the apparently superior Lord is actually inferior, and the Bondsman in fact is superior.  This is because the Lord exists only as an empty vessel of sensation, a receptacle for pleasure and nothing more.  The Bondsman, on the other hand, acts upon the objective world, realizing a part of himself, effecting real change as he creates in order to satisfy the Lord's demands.  And in the process, he learns the (Beatitudinal) values of self-discipline and humility.

Exactly what Hegel meant to describe by his thought experiment is obscure, but there can be no doubt that Marx read the piece historically, with the Lord representing the ruling class and the Bondsman representing the downtrodden workers.  So Marx's ethic is clearly aligned with that of the Sermon.  But while Christ promised his poor flock the Kingdom of Heaven, Marx was a fierce atheist, and so religion, like the pleasures scorned by Adorno, comes to be viewed in this discourse simply as another distraction, and worse, a lie told to conceal the real horror that surrounds us.

In the past century, of course, we have attempted to compensate for God's absence by creating aesthetic productions whose beauty can help us escape the prosaic awfulness that increasingly surrounds us.  But although this may comfort us it cannot save us; the Nazi obsession with aesthetic perfection is no coincidence.  For this reason, and for many others, perhaps, the beautiful can no longer be beautiful; only the ugly can.  And only in gazing upon the horror of reality (the reality of horror), and in it discovering the possibility of realizing a better world, will we be able to rediscover the truly beautiful.