“Blind Representation”: On the Epic Naiveté of the
Cinema
Michael D’Arcy
Postmodern Culture, Volume 25, Number 2, January 2015, (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2015.0006
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/609578
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“Blind Representation”: On the Epic Naiveté of the Cinema
Michael D’Arcy
St. Francis Xavier University
mdarcy@stfx.ca
This essay argues that Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that
is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a
historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno’s
commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the
same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno’s aesthetic theory –
to maintain art’s thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological
forms of its social context.
In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich calls attention to an oddity in the
development of computer-generated images in film. These images, in films such as Terminator 2
(1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), initially appeared “too perfect” or “too real.” In order to appear
like photographic images, the computer graphics of these films needed to be “degraded”: “their
perfection had to be diluted to match the imperfection of film’s graininess” (201-02). This effect
was achieved, for example, by reducing the resolution of the computer-generated images or
softening their edges through computer-generated algorithms, procedures that allowed the
images to blend with film footage. The unwelcome excessive detail and sharpness of computergenerated images, and the attempt to overcome this quality, suggest an ambiguous regression in
technical development, a movement that proceeds in opposing directions simultaneously,
forward and backward: at once a technological advancement and an apparent regression to the
“imperfection” or lack of technical mastery that marked an earlier stage of development.
Framed in these terms, this moment echoes an earlier juncture in the history of thinking
about film, one that also involved a discrepancy between the demands of cinematic work and the
contemporary state of technological advancement. In his 1966 commentary “Transparencies on
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Film,” Theodor Adorno notes the particular situation of cinema at the moment he is writing, in
which “awkward and unprofessional cinema” may play a certain role:
While in autonomous art anything lagging behind the already established
technical standard does not rate, vis-à-vis the culture industry—whose standard
excludes everything but the predigested and the already integrated, just as the
cosmetic trade eliminates facial wrinkles—works which have not completely
mastered their technique, conveying as a result something consolingly
uncontrolled and accidental, have a liberating quality. (199)
Adorno’s interest in film aesthetics is usually associated with his attempt to think about
cinematic construction or montage, which would run counter to the semblance of mimetic
immediacy in the filmic medium. In the passage cited above, however, we get a different
scenario: the construction of film as art is apparently seen as involving not an imminent progress
or mastery of cinematic technique, but rather a relaxing or deterioration of such technique.1 As
Adorno goes on to elaborate, in contrast to the “semblance of immediacy” achieved by the
advanced technological procedures of the cinematic products of the culture industry, “film …
must search for other means of conveying immediacy: improvisation which systematically
surrenders itself to unguided chance should rank high among the possible alternatives”
(“Transparencies” 200).
In light of the division between mass culture and autonomous art associated with
Adorno’s work, the juxtaposition framed above might appear counterintuitive. On one prominent
reading of “Transparencies on Film,” Adorno is interested in thinking about the possibility of
film aesthetics, of film as a mode of reflection involving work on specific, historically mediated,
aesthetic materials.2 Accordingly, his “surrender” to chance is seen as intrinsic to the
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development of cinematic technique, understood as distinct from the broader state of
technological advancement that feeds into the development of the cinema (Miriam Hansen,
Cinema 218). Given that Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park are prototypical Hollywood
blockbusters, the fate of their computer-generated images is apparently not the technological
backwardness suggested in “Transparencies on Film.” In contrast to Adorno’s “awkward and
unprofessional cinema,” the later move to a condition of relative technological backwardness—
the degrading of the computer-generated images—apparently develops according to a calculation
of audience response and expectations and is thus congruent with the reduction of cultural
products to the status of art commodities.
To say this much raises the problem of the distinction between autonomous art and mass
culture that has been a staple of commentary on Adorno and the Frankfurt School more
generally. While it is usually commentaries following from the posthumous publication of
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) that locate the challenge to this distinction, there is a
prominent line of thought in Adorno’s writings on mass culture and on Samuel Beckett, and in
certain moments in the Aesthetic Theory, that either challenges the distinction between art and
mass culture or renders it ambiguous and undecidable. The conclusion of Adorno’s “Trying to
Understand Endgame” (1961), for example, proclaims the loss of distinction between the
nihilistic products of the culture industry and the autonomous artwork, with its promise of
reconciliation or transcendence of historical actuality: “The last absurdity is that the peacefulness
of the void and the peacefulness of reconciliation cannot be distinguished from one another”
(Notes 274). Eva Geulen registers this point when she writes, “what the close of the Beckett
essay formulates so pointedly … can already be found in the excursus on the culture industry in
the Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, the relationship between good art and bad culture industry
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is not merely antagonistic, but strictly reciprocal” (99).3 Given this dimension of Adorno’s
thought, the comparison of his reflections in “Transparencies on Film” with the technological
travails of the 1990s Hollywood blockbuster arguably follows from a logic intrinsic to his
reflections on mass culture and modernism. Extending this line of thought, one underlying
interest of the following reflections is the pertinence of Adorno’s thinking about film for a
contemporary situation in which digitization and the proliferation of new media technologies
raise (again) the issue of the relationship between technology and art.4 Adorno has not, for the
most part, been a central reference point in discussions of art and digital technology. Books by
David Joselit and Mark Hansen on art and new media suggest that Walter Benjamin’s writings
on mass culture, in particular the well-known thesis of the decline of the aura, have a greater
currency in addressing the contemporary media environment than those of Adorno.5 This
assessment apparently reflects a received conception of Adorno as invested in the category of the
autonomous artwork, in contradistinction to mass culture.6 This lingering sense of a division in
Adorno’s work between art and non-art has apparently militated against his currency in attempts
to account for the new media environment.
However, at a moment when the problem of art’s criticality and autonomy is receiving
renewed critical consideration,7 Adorno’s reflections on cinema, and his thinking about the
relationship between technology and aesthetic technique more broadly, merit attention. Where
Benjamin’s well-known writings on film tend to consign the category of autonomous art to
historical obsolescence, Adorno’s reflections on the cinema continue to grapple with the status of
aesthetic technique, as a distinctive form or rationality, in the era of technical reproducibility,
even as this strand of his work suggests the obsolescence of medium-specific artistic reflection
and the concurrent waning of the distinction between art and mass culture. This fraught
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negotiation, in other words, remains cognizant of the claims of both “torn halves of an integral
freedom,” to evoke Adorno’s striking description of cinema and “great art” in his famous
epistolary debate with Benjamin of the 1930s (Adorno and Benjamin 130). For this reason,
Adorno’s reflections on film bear consideration at a moment in which, as Peter Osborne argues,
“art’s authority and critical function remain problems within contemporary culture” (7). One way
that Adorno confronts this problem, especially in his work dating from the 1950s and 1960s, is in
articulating together the formal dynamics of the cinema and the linguistic dynamics of the novel.
I will argue that this co-articulation of novelistic and cinematic language may be seen as a
response to the problem of how to maintain a function of aesthetic technique, as a specific mode
of rationality, in an era in which historical developments have rendered obsolete the project of
medium-specific aesthetic reflection.8 In other words, Adorno’s reflections on novelistic-filmic
language serve a crucial underlying interest of his aesthetic theory—to maintain the possibility of
art’s uneven development, of art’s thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from
the technological forms of its social context.
One of the most pervasive positions in commentary on Adorno and mass culture is that
he is suspicious of the cinematic medium due to its capacity to create a semblance of visual
immediacy. The underlying obstacle for the project of thinking together the categories of film
and art, for the possibility of film aesthetics, has been located in this dimension of film, which
runs contrary to the demands of aesthetic construction and autonomy. The corollary of this
proposition is that the way forward for a critical version of film art lies in its development of
techniques that emphasize the role of rational construction immanent to the cinematic medium.
In more particular terms, Adorno is commonly seen to embrace cinematic montage—the
discontinuous editing associated with the work of Sergei Eisenstein and subsequently with the
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avant-garde cinema of Alexander Kluge and others—as a corrective to the filmic medium’s
tendency to privilege the represented object rather than the components of aesthetic
construction.9
Adorno’s work clearly provides some authorization for this reading. In “Transparencies
on Film,” he writes that an “obvious answer” to the dilemma faced by film “is that of montage
which does not interfere with things but rather arranges them in a constellation akin to that of
writing” (203). As Miriam Hansen has emphasized, however, “Transparencies on Film”
equivocates about the “viability” of montage (Cinema 221-24). Adorno writes, in a continuation
of the passage cited immediately above, that “pure montage, without the addition of
intentionality in its elements, does not derive intention merely from the principle itself. It seems
illusory to claim that through the renunciation of all meaning … meaning will emerge from the
reproduced material itself” (203). This suspicion of cinematic montage reprises Adorno’s earlier
criticism of the methodology of Benjamin’s work-in-progress of the 1930s, when he called
attention to Benjamin’s “questionable procedure of ‘abstention’” (Adorno and Benjamin 282).10
If, on Adorno’s account, one underlying problem with montage is the sacrifice of subjective
rationality and intentionality, this problem also arises in conjunction with the photographic basis
of film: “the photographic process of film, primarily representational, places a higher intrinsic
significance on the object, as foreign to subjectivity, than aesthetically autonomous
techniques…. Even where film dissolves and modifies its objects as much as it can, the
disintegration is never complete. Consequently, it does not permit absolute construction”
(Adorno, “Transparencies” 202).
Taken together, these two aspects of Adorno’s “Transparencies on Film”—its doubts
about the procedure of montage and its suspicion of the photographic basis of film—suggest that
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the threat to autonomy and rationality associated with mass culture and its technologies
continues to preoccupy Adorno’s thinking about film. In other words, the well-known
intervention of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which insists on the sacrifice of subjective
autonomy attending on the development of mass culture, is not far from the reflections of
“Transparencies on Film,” a commentary ostensibly devoted to reflection on the aesthetic
possibilities of film. As commentators have recognized, Adorno’s thinking remains equivocal
and ambivalent regarding the aesthetic capabilities of film.11 Miriam Hansen argues that the
“heart of the problem that Adorno confronts for a film aesthetics appears to be that the
photographic basis of the moving image privileges the representational object over aesthetically
autonomous procedures” (Cinema 220). To frame things in this way, however, is to overly
circumscribe the central issues Adorno addresses. The larger problem for the attempt to reconcile
film with the category of autonomous art is whether it is possible to distinguish a function of
aesthetic technique from the broader condition of technological development in the given
historical context. In this regard, Adorno’s thinking about film converges with his address to the
possibility of aesthetic rationality more generally. An excursus through Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory helps focus the antinomy involved here. Adorno’s formulations in this text indicate that
the distinction between technology and aesthetic technique is fundamental for the preservation of
aesthetic rationality; to erase this distinction runs the risk of collapsing the distance between art
and the empirical world, thus precluding the possibility of aesthetic autonomy. Thinking along
these lines, Aesthetic Theory argues that “even in film, industrial and aesthetic-craftsmanlike
elements diverge under socioeconomic pressure. The radical industrialization of art, its
undiminished adaptation to the achieved technical standards, collides with what in art resists
integration” (217). At issue here, however, is not a secure opposition between artistic technique
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and technology, between art and non-art, but rather a scenario of constitutive heteronomy in
which the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere is invaded by technology: “art is modern when, by its
mode of experience and as the expression of crisis of experience, it absorbs what
industrialization has developed under the given relations of production” (Aesthetic Theory 34).
There is thus an antinomy intrinsic to Adorno’s account of the relation between aesthetic
technique and technology. Autonomous art necessarily integrates the most advanced techniques
of capitalist production—it registers the technological development of its historical moment—
but such integration threatens the status of aesthetic language and critical distance. And as
“Transparencies on Film” suggests, this threat to aesthetic language is brought to a pitch in film:
“the late emergence of film makes it difficult to distinguish between technique and technology as
clearly as it is possible in music…. Film suggests the equation of technique and technology
since, as Benjamin observed, the cinema has no original which is then reproduced on a mass
scale: the mass product is the thing itself” (200).
Adorno’s commentary on montage unfolds as an instantiation of this antinomy. Montage
maintains the principle intrinsic to autonomous art of rational control over aesthetic materials; at
the same time, this situation involves a convergence between montage and forms of rationality
and technological control that are external to art: “Art wants to admit its powerlessness vis-à-vis
late capitalist totality and to initiate its abrogation. Montage is the inner-aesthetic capitulation of
art to what stands heterogeneously opposed to it” (Aesthetic Theory 155). The convergence
between montage and extra-aesthetic forms of rationality is thus a crucial component of the
autonomous artwork, but this dynamic also entails the dissolution of aesthetic rationality as a
distinct category: “the idea of montage and that of technological construction, which is
inseparable from it, becomes irreconcilable with the idea of the radical, fully formed artwork
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with which it was once recognized as being identical…. The technique [montage] no longer
suffices to trigger communication between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic” (Aesthetic
Theory 155-56).
In view of this understanding of the underlying stakes of Adorno’s thinking about
cinema, and the limitation that he sees in the principle of montage, I want to propose an approach
that stakes a distance from the oppositions that have oriented discussions of Adorno and the
cinema so far—the oppositions between avant-garde montage and the standardized practices of
the culture industry, aesthetic construction and the false immediacy of the cinematic image.
“Transparencies on Film” and Aesthetic Theory in fact suggest another approach to the problem
of aesthetic technique instantiated by the cinema. Aesthetic Theory insists that “aesthetic
rationality demands that all artistic means reach the utmost determinacy in themselves and
according to their own function” (35), but this scenario of stringent aesthetic rationality is
subsequently qualified when Adorno introduces the suggestion that a slackening or relaxation of
technique, a “reduction of means,” may serve a crucial function for art: “The current tendency,
evident in media of all kinds, to manipulate accident is probably an effort to avoid old-fashioned
and effectively superfluous craftsman-like methods in art without delivering art over to the
instrumental rationality of mass production” (216-17). At this point we are brought back to the
problem of film’s relationship to aesthetic technique; this passage echoes the scenario, evoked at
the opening of “Transparencies on Film,” of an “awkward and unprofessional” cinema that
submits to a loss of rational control or “systematically surrenders itself to unguided chance.”
This strand of Adorno’s work thus suggests an ambiguous surrender of subjective intentionality,
a relinquishment of rational control that appears not as a weakness or limitation attending on the
dynamics of the filmic medium, but rather as a possible way forward for cinematic reflection.
10
This surrender of subjective control appears to be of a different order than the unfortunate and
unwelcome surrender of subjective intentionality or rational construction evoked in Adorno’s
comments on montage and the photographic basis of film. In contrast to the undesirable sacrifice
of subjective intentionality, Adorno’s “awkward and unprofessional” cinema, with its
oxymoronic scenario of the planned surrender of subjective control, raises the possibility that
such self-relinquishment may in fact be intrinsic to a particular mode or reflection located with
the cinematic medium.12
This mode of reflection is elaborated in a subsequent passage of “Transparencies on
Film” that outlines another approach to the problem of a mode of aesthetic technique germane to
the cinema. After noting that “it appears impossible to derive norms of criticism from
cinematographic technique as such,” Adorno continues,
Irrespective of the technological origins of cinema, film will do better to base
itself on a subject mode of experience which film resembles and which constitutes
its artistic character. A person who, after a year in the city, spends a few weeks in
the mountains abstaining from all work, may unexpectedly experience colorful
images of landscapes consolingly coming over him or her in dreams or
daydreams. These images do not merge into one another in a continuous flow, but
are rather set off against each other in their appearance, much like the magic
lantern slides of our childhood. It is in the discontinuity of their movement that
the images of the interior monologue resemble the phenomenon of writing: the
latter similarly moving before our eyes while fixed in their discrete signs. (201)
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For the purposes of my discussion, what requires consideration here is the unintentional nature of
the mode of experience Adorno evokes. The passage suggests an ambiguous relinquishing of
rational control that is intrinsic to a heteronomy constitutive of the filmic medium. This raises the
problem, however, of distinguishing this experience from the sacrifice of subjective autonomy
involved in the distraction, regression, or loss of critical distance that marks the experience
(Erlebnis) of the culture industry.
To address this question it is useful to consider other points in Adorno’s oeuvre that also
suggest this mode of filmic experience. Minima Moralia’s (1951) comments on cinema
communicate with the above-cited passage from “Transparencies,” while adding an inflection
that connects this reflection on film with Adorno’s understanding of the contemporary status of
novelistic language. Distinguishing a form of filmic “radical naturalism” from the “pseudorealism of the culture industry,” Adorno writes, “if film were to give itself up to the blind
representation of everyday life, following the precepts of, say, Zola, as would indeed be
practicable with moving photography and sound recording, the result would be a construction
alien to the visual habits of the audience, diffuse, unarticulated, outwards…. The film would turn
into an associative stream of images” (Minima 141-42). While the “stream of images” evoked
here appears to be a version of the images of “dreams or daydreams” with which
“Transparencies” associates film experience, what comes into clearer focus in this passage is the
scenario of ambiguous self-relinquishing that is intrinsic to the program of “radical naturalism.”
This program is presented as an alternative to the modus operandi of the products of the culture
industry, and thus presumably offers a path for film as an autonomous aesthetic language. At the
same time, the scenario of film giving “itself up to the blind representation of everyday life” does
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not sound like an operation of aesthetic negation, transcendence, or separation from the empirical
world.
Adorno’s thought process here may be clarified if we consider more closely the notion of
“blind representation.” Elsewhere in his oeuvre, the paradigmatic scenario of “blind
representation” is epic narration: “it is no accident that tradition has it that Homer was blind,”
Adorno states in “On Epic Naiveté,” a commentary that he composed with Max Horkheimer in
1943 during the preparation of Dialectic of Enlightenment. This commentary conceives of “epic
naiveté,” or “narrative stupidity,” as “a stubborn clinging to the particular when it has already
been dissolved into the universal,” a stalling of narrative progress, and a futile “attempt to
emancipate representation from reflective reason” (Notes 25-27). This tendency in language is
not restricted to works usually characterized as epics: nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction
and poetry also exemplify epic naiveté. The conclusion of this commentary indicates the
convergence between Adorno’s reflections on epic language and film:
in those [epic] poems the force of the historical tendency at work in the language
and subject matter is so strong that in the course of the proceedings taking place
between subjectivity and mythology human beings and things are transformed
into mere arenas through the blindness with which the epic delivers itself over to
their representation…. It is the objective transformation of pure representation,
detached from meaning, into the allegory of history that becomes visible in the
logical disintegration of epic language…. It is only by abandoning meaning that
epic discourse comes to resemble the image, a figure of objective meaning
emerging from the negation of subjectively rational meaning. (Notes 28-29)
13
Taking up the problem of interpretation that inheres in the estranged cultural form or object—the
commodity or the allegorical object, disengaged from human aims or use value—Adorno alludes
to the reorientation around language and medium that informs Benjamin’s work in the 1930s.
Adorno’s evocation of the image or figure emerging in language echoes Benjamin’s conception
of the dialectical image: “The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash”
(Benjamin 473).13 Adorno’s account suggests that the image may emerge unbidden, not as a
product of subjective volition. This meditation on language, like Benjamin’s, thus suggests a
circumvention of subjective intentionality or productivity that verges on being a passive or
receptive attitude. This scenario, moreover, converges with Adorno’s accounts of cinematic
experience and language, in “Transparencies” and elsewhere, that foreground the heteronomy
intrinsic to the cinematic medium. At the same time, this strand of thought raises the problem of
the sacrifice of critical subjectivity.
Adorno’s account of historical images as “instruments of human reason” in “The
Actuality of Philosophy” (1931) stipulates that “every other conception of models would be
gnostic and indefensible” (131). If we juxtapose this comment with the emergent image evoked
in “On Epic Naiveté,” or with the writings on film that suggest a relinquishing of intentionality,
it is unclear how these scenarios avoid the “indefensible” gnostic sacrifice of the human subject.
Here reflection on the epic and the novel becomes a crucial reference point. In “On Epic
Naiveté” and elsewhere in Adorno’s oeuvre, the epic and the novel become important for his
framing of an ambiguous, possibly only strategic, relinquishing of critical subjectivity. Epic
naiveté may lose itself in “the attempt to emancipate representation from reflective reason,”
apparently sacrificing its critical distance or capacity, but for Adorno this surrender of reason
may only be a strategic ruse, to evoke Hegel’s notion of the cunning of reason. Adorno’s
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formulations in “On Epic Naiveté,” which balance between regression and enlightenment, the
relinquishing of critical distance and its ambiguous persistence, suggest this possibility of
strategic self-renunciation; narrative “looks” into the abyss, or moves to “the edge of madness,”
hovering on the brink of dissolution, while at the same time epic naiveté is presented as an “antimythological enterprise” (Notes 25-27). This ambiguous self-divestiture is suggested in the
account of Odysseus in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels
after him, throws himself away in order to win himself” (38-39).
The formulation “throwing away in order to win” alludes to a comment by Georg Lukács
in The Theory of the Novel (1920): “this is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, its
‘throwing away in order to win’: creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the
subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ
of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it” (53). The epic subject is
receptive and passive rather than spontaneous or productive, and this condition contrasts with
“the productivity of spirit” at issue in the world of the novel (Lukács 33). But while Lukács
locates this gesture of “throwing away in order to win” with “the subjectivity of the great epic,”
The Theory of the Novel indicates that this scenario is not confined to the epic per se, but remains
a possibility circulating in the historical situation of the novel. For example, according to Lukács,
Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale attains “true epic objectivity” through a submission
to the disintegration of “outside reality” and an abstention from subjective “unification”: “the
separate fragments of reality lie before us in all their hardness, brokenness, and isolation…. This
novel, of all novels of the nineteenth century, is one of the most typical of the novel form; in the
unmitigated desolation of its elements it is the only novel that attains true epic objectivity” (124).
At such moments we face a confusion between the form-giving, productive subject of modernity
15
and the receptiveness and absence of interpretation that Lukács ascribes to epic subjectivity. If
this confusion runs the risk of abandoning systematicity, it also perpetuates the normative
aspiration to overcome the estrangement between meaningful forms and the enabling (material
and other) conditions of such forms.
This line of thought would be taken up by Adorno in his reflections on the epic and the
novel—the logic of the epic is not simply opposed to the novel and the antinomies of capitalist
modernity, but rather situated as part of the project of enlightenment.14 This reflection on the
novel provides a framework for Adorno to elaborate on the condition of the distracted subject of
modernity developed by Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, especially in their writings on film
and mass culture. This point is more or less explicit in “The Position of the Narrator in the
Contemporary Novel” (1954). Here Adorno says that the contemporary novel (a category that for
him includes the work of Kafka, Joyce, Proust, and presumably Beckett) produces both “shocks”
that destroy “the reader’s contemplative security” and a corresponding abolition of “aesthetic
distance,” and he compares this tendency of the novel to the logic of the filmic medium (Notes
34-36). Adorno thus reads the contemporary European novel as coextensive with the distraction
and erosion of auratic distance that Benjamin associated with technologies of mechanical
reproducibility and the experience of modernity more generally.15 This is Adorno’s particular
approach to the weakening of subjectivity that he sees accompanying the development of the
culture industry. But this vein of his work also involves a lingering possibility of the survival of
enlightened thought: to insert the scenario of distracted subjectivity into an account of novelistic
language allows Adorno to avoid the definitive eclipse of rational reflection to which he feared
Benjamin’s thought at times led.16 In this way the form of the contemporary novel converges
16
with the stratagems of Odysseus, as Adorno presents them. As he puts it, the novel is prone to a
strategic and ambiguous “capitulation to the superior power of reality” (Notes 36).
To return to “Transparencies on Film,” while this commentary mentions the novel only in
passing, and actually does so in order to contrast it with the filmic medium, at this point we can
see why the novelistic scenario of cunning self-surrender might converge with Adorno’s
approach to the dilemmas of film aesthetics. The underlying logic of this connection may be
stated in these terms: the problem raised by film aesthetics, of an aesthetic medium premised on
the ambiguous collapse of a critical distance between the medium and the capitalist reduction to
exchange value, is already central to the formal and linguistic dynamics of the novel as Adorno
conceives them. “Transparencies on Film” suggests that if film is to retain the function of critical
reflection, a form of strategic self-relinquishing is required that is distinct from the sacrifice of
subjective autonomy associated with the culture industry, which is to say, a strategic selfsurrender that paradoxically advances a project of reflection inhering in the historical condition
of the filmic medium. We see Adorno working out models for such self-relinquishing, a sacrifice
of the subject that is inscribed within the project of enlightenment, in his writings on the novel
and the epic—for example, in his account of the “epic form of linkage,” in “On Epic Naiveté”:
“the train of thought finally goes slack, language shows a lenience towards judgment while at the
same time unquestionably remaining judgment” (Notes 28). This “slackening” of thought is the
equivalent, in the realm of literary language, of Adorno’s “awkward and unprofessional cinema,”
with its planned surrender to chance. In other words, the scenario of epic naiveté, like the
possibility of “blind representation” Adorno locates with film and epic language, may be
understood as developing art’s thought of uneven development. In each of these cases, aesthetic
technique apparently lags behind a more general state of technological advancement but this
17
apparent backwardness also serves to maintain the possibility of a distinction between
technological development and aesthetic technique.17 Crucially, this particular mode of aesthetic
uneven development does not depend on a scenario of medium-specific aesthetic reflection. In
this regard epic naiveté, or the scenario of “blind representation,” perpetuates a thought of
aesthetic rationality in the historical situation focused in Adorno’s writings on film—a situation
in which film instantiates the collapse of any difference between technology and artistic
technique and the disappearance of art’s critical distance from the reigning forms of social
rationality. As the chapter on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment suggests, such
critical distance is a precondition of any meaningful artistic medium specificity (97-98).
Whatever other issues one might raise in this regard—for example, film’s status as a particularly
hybrid or mongrel artistic medium—the larger point is that Adorno positions film as lacking in
distinction from the empirical world, and film’s problematic relationship with the category of
artistic medium specificity should be understood as deriving from its particular intimacy with the
dynamics of reification.18
The conclusion to be drawn is not necessarily that Adorno gives up on film as a medium
of aesthetic rationality. Nor is it the case that he is unconcerned with the category of medium in
his work on the cinema. In fact, as my discussion above suggests, a particular reflection on
linguistic medium is precisely what allows Adorno to negotiate the apparent loss of art’s critical
distinction, the loss of its critical distance from empirical reality, and the possible collapse of any
difference between technology and artistic technique. Adorno develops this reflection on
linguistic medium in his somewhat fragmentary suggestions about a strategic “lagging behind” in
the development of cinematic technique and in the scenario of strategic submission or “blind
18
representation” evoked in his writings on film, the epic, and the novel. In our contemporary
context of proliferating new media technologies and cultural homogenization, Adorno’s
scenarios of technical backwardness and ambiguous relinquishing of rational control might
appear as a modernist throwback. In fact, contemporary cultural and artistic reflection arguably
suggests the relevance of this strand of Adorno’s thought—one might cite the current
preoccupation in photographic theory and practice with analogue photographic technology and
notions of photographic automatism and indexicality, at a moment when such technology is
being displaced by digital technology;19 or contemporary fiction invested in scenarios of selfabnegation and diminished authorial or artistic control.20 Possibly, along with Adorno’s
intertwined meditations on the novel and the cinema, these contemporary artistic and theoretical
reflections maintain the thought of art’s uneven development, of art’s ambiguous backwardness
vis-à-vis a more general social condition of technological development—the thought, in other
words, of a distinctive form of aesthetic rationality at a moment in which the paradigm of
aesthetic medium specificity appears to be obsolete, even as art’s critical potential remains an
open question.
1
Miriam Hansen argues that Adorno is defending here the relative lack of technical sophistication of young German
filmmakers of the period, such as Volker Schlöndorff, Edgar Reitz, and Alexander Kluge (Cinema 218).
2
See Miriam Hansen, “Introduction” 190 and Cinema 218-24; and Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought 131-33.
3
Peter Hohendahl has suggested that this abandoning of the distinction of autonomous art and its critical capacity is
also visible in certain moments of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: “Adorno seems to push the limits of his theory and
thereby undermines the more familiar negative dialectic. The result is the abandonment of art as a critical
counterpoint (“Ephemeral” 211).
4
On this contemporary question of technology and the category of art as it arises in conjunction with the
development of digital technologies, see Rodowick, especially 2-41.
5
Cf. Peter Osborne’s recent account of contemporary art, where Adorno is a central reference point.
6
For an example of this conception of Adorno as it circulates in new media studies, see Pressman 193.
7
See, for example, Bernstein, Goldstone, Siraganian.
8
At end of her exhaustive reading of Adorno’s writings on film, Miriam Hansen concludes that Adorno’s work on
film aesthetics “does not amount to a coherent theory,” and given this, “for Adorno, the aesthetic possibilities of and
for film have to be gleaned from elsewhere, from his writings on art in general and music in particular” (Cinema
250). To an extent my argument dovetails with Hansen’s claim, while staking a distance from it in my emphasis on
Adorno’s thinking about film and the novel form.
9
See, for example, Koch, “Mimesis”; Miriam Hansen, Cinema 218-25; and Hohendahl, Prismatic Thought 133-35.
19
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin states, “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything.
Merely show” (460).
11
See, for example, Koch, “Uneasy Pleasing” 78.
12
Miriam Hansen connects this strand of Adorno’s thinking on film to his encounter with postserialism in music:
“the admission of chance as an aesthetic principle aligns with his efforts to come to terms with postserialism, in
particular the aleatory aesthetics of John Cage” (Cinema 219).
13
Benjamin’s dialectical image is not an object of vision, intuition, or intentionality, but rather may be recognized in
language; to cite a well-known formulation, Benjamin conceives of the emergent image in terms of “the death of
intention” (463). Adorno’s comments in “On Epic Naiveté” refer to this conception of the dialectical image and
inscribe it in a narrative framework. The move runs counter to Benjamin’s formulations in The Arcades Project
insofar as they conceive the logic of the dialectical image and the work of the dialectical historian as an alternative
to narrative progression and relationship: “History decays into images, not into stories” (Benjamin 476).
14
This point is suggested in the account of the epic in Hegel’s Aesthetics (2: 1045-1050).
15
Cf. Adorno’s notes on Beckett’s The Unnamable: “the novel is completely unrealistic and at the same time
unauratic” (“Notes on Beckett” 177).
16
To say this much suggests Adorno’s interest in inscribing Benjamin’s thought within the project of enlightenment.
Such a program is manifest elsewhere in Adorno’s explicit writings on Benjamin. In “A Portrait of Walter
Benjamin,” he writes, “mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time in him,” stressing Benjamin’s
recourse to concepts, “the only means which philosophy has at its disposal” (Prisms 241).
17
A fuller exploration of this strand of Adorno’s thought would consider the role of naiveté in his writings on music.
See, for example, Mahler (1971), in which Adorno diagnoses an “intertwinement of naiveté and sophistication” in
Mahler’s work, a formal dynamic that Adorno compares to the that of the novel, specifically here “the novel of
novels, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary” (61).
18
See Rodowick 2-46 on film’s status as a particularly hybrid medium, especially resistant to a specialization and
purification along the lines developed by Clement Greenberg. Adorno seems to implicitly recognize this aspect of
film when he states “for the time being, evidently, film’s most promising potential lies in its interaction with other
media, themselves merging into film, such as certain kinds of music” (“Transparencies” 203).
19
See, for example, the 2012 special issue of Critical Inquiry, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Margaret Iverson,
titled “Agency and Automatism: Photography and Art since the 1960s.”
20
J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2005); Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family and A Man in Love (2009); Tom
McCarthy, Remainder (2007) and Satin Island (2015), W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001).
10
20
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