James Duesterberg

 

 

In the essay �On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Adorno explores of the role of the subjective in lyric poetry as a potential site for a progressive aesthetic. The privileging of subjective experience in capitalist-era lyric poetry is paradoxically able to reveal the very problems that capitalism’s individualist social structure creates, by expressing a subjective and thus intrinsically felt yearning for objective and universally human beauty and truth.

 

Adorno starts by situating his analysis of lyric poetry firmly in the context of the most basic and essential project of critical theory as Horkeimer defined it in “Traditional and Critical Theory,” and as defined in Adorno’s own “Essay as Form.” While acknowledging that a critical work on lyric poetry “will make many of you [his lecture audience] uncomfortable,” since one might fear that such a “delicate,…fragile thing” (37) as lyric poetry would be destroyed by a hard sociological analysis of its origins, Adorno claims that by inquiring into the “social element” of lyric poems, it will “reveal something essential about the basis of their quality” (38). On the other hand, finding this aesthetic quality will reveal the work’s truth about society, and thus function as social critique per se. The critique of lyric poetry, as with the critique of all works of art (38), will “discover how the entirety of a society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art” (39). Herein lies the power of critical theory: it teases out those qualities in art that both manifest ideology and thus reveal it, and those that go beyond ideology, “giv[ing] voice to what ideology hides” (39) – seemingly providing a way of resisting that ideology.

 

From here, then, he is able to construct a progressive reading of lyric poetry that, rather than subsuming its qualities under an ethics of progressivity, allows a space for inherent and essential artistic value, which itself (especially when coupled with a critical analysis which points out these social relevancies) is progressive.

 

Lyric poetry’s special aesthetic and progressive quality lies in its use of subjectivity. “The ‘I’ whose voice is heard in the lyric is an ‘I’ that defines and expresses itself as something opposed to the collective, to objectivity; it is not immediately at one with the nature to which its expression refers” (41). From this alienation the aesthetic beauty of the lyric emerges; this “alienation” experienced by a “pure subjectivity” creates a sense of longing that is both aesthetically beautiful and socially progressive, in its depiction of alienated humanity; the aesthetic and socially progressive qualities are inseparable, however, because the neither would resonate without the other. The aesthetic quality of the work moves us only because it speaks to a real alienation; in turn, the socially progressive testament to our alienation is made “real” by its aesthetic power.

 

Adorno ties the power of the lyric poem to the conditions of language; just as lyric poetry embodies a “subjectivity that turns into objectivity,” language both is an expression of pure subjective impulse, and the “medium of concepts…that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society” (43), and it is through this double nature that the subjective is able to both reach it’s aesthetic fullness and come to embody the objective and social: “the unself-consciousness of the subject submitting itself to language as to something objective, and the immediacy and spontaneity of that subject’s expression are one and the same; thus language mediates lyric poetry and society in their innermost core” (43).

 

Questions:

-Does Adorno’s introductory ad hominem refer to concerns about the preservation of the “aura” of lyric poetry? Can we speak of “aura” in Adorno the same way as in Benjamin, or is Adorno actually invested in an auratic conception of art?

 

-Adorno writes on 45 that his “thesis is that the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism.” Given what he says about the social progressive function of lyric poetry in the rest of the essay, would it be possible for an aesthetically authentic lyric poem to exist that expressed a social harmony, or is (successful) lyric poetry contingent on a capitalist economy and superstructure and its resultant alienation? How would (or how does) Adorno construe classical lyric poetry?

 

-How does Adorno’s thesis in this essay fit in the context of his theory of aesthetics and specifically the role played by mediation? Is he attempting to carve out a space for the immediate in subjective experience? Does this contradict what he says about mediation in his other essays?

 

-How do Adorno’s analyses of the Morike and George poems elucidate the qualities in lyric poetry that he is referring to? Are his analyses sufficient to prove (or at least suggest) the conclusions he draws? How do these analyses, and the essay as a whole, function as critical theory according to Horkheimer and others’ definitions?