22:24 Conf. "On Complexity", Rennes | |
University of Rennes 2, December 2, 2016
Deadline: Oct 1, 2016
On Complexity
Exploring the Enigmatic in Art
Summary:
In modernity, the word "hermetic" is generally used to designate
certain poetic works (those of Hopkins, Mallarmé or Celan, for
example), while the question of the complexity, obscurity or
unintelligibility of art is only raised in relation to literature. In
truth, however, the problem of the hermetic in art is equally present
in music, in painting, in cinema, and so on. Taking as its point of
departure select pages of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory that highlight this
paradoxical situation in art criticism, this one-day conference aims to
explore the question of meaning in art from a theoretical standpoint,
but also and especially in the analysis of specific artworks - and in
particular those artworks that reveal their meaning in aesthetic
experience only with great difficulty, or seem to refuse to reveal
their meaning altogether. Such artworks force us to renounce the
hermeneutic ease with which we determine meaning in art, and ask us
instead, starting from the true conditions of our aesthetic experience
of them, to seek a philosophical interpretation of their truth content.
Announcement :
This conference will take place at the University of Rennes 2 in the
month of December 2016. It is organized by Christophe David (Lecturer,
History and Criticism of the Arts, EA 1279, University of Rennes 2) and
Frédéric Monvoisin (Research Institute on Cinema and the Audio-Visual
Arts, EA 185, University of Paris 3). It will take place as part of
"The Ambiguity of Images" program initiated by Bruno Boerner
(University of Rennes 2) and Christophe David.
Argument :
The most widely spread conception of meaning in art sees "spirit" or
meaning in art as embodied in its "letter," and thus the path of
interpretation would be indicated to the critic by this unity. For the
hermeneutics of artworks each work has as many meanings as it has
interpreters. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argued against the
hermeneutics of art that would "satisfy an infinite number of proposed
interpretations, none of which it can satisfy without violating
others." This generous infinity would support what Adorno called, not
without irony, an "objective ambiguity" of artworks. This position, of
which Adorno was highly critical, corresponds to the one the late Odo
Marquard defended as "pluralizing hermeneutics." According to his
theory, the meaning of the artwork is the reason in the series of
meanings produced by each of its interpreters. The aesthetics of
reception of Hans Robert Jauss- who takes Gadamer's hermeneutics over
for himself in order the better to challenge Adorno - perfectly
embodies this position.
Our first goal, therefore, is to examine the twenty or so pages of
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory that conceptualizes the "meaning/spirit" of
art against the hermeneutical standpoint. What, for example, is
aesthetic experience when it refuses to trace meaning back from the
spirit to the letter? What is aesthetic experience that breaks with the
idea of art that makes it a symbol of some kind, and instead
acknowledges the unbridgeable gulf between the letter and the spirit?
Aesthetic experience, Adorno contends, is based on separation because
the indelible tension between the letter and the spirit is internal to
artworks as such: "Each sentence is literal, and each signifies. The
two moment are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but yawn apart,
and out of the abyss between them blinds the glaring ray of
fascination." Or again: "The spirit of artworks ignites on what is
opposed to it, on materiality." Adorno's aesthetics play the letter
against meaning/spirit and understands this quality as that of an
"enigma," of an ongoing "question mark."
Of course, not all works which present themselves as art can be rightly
understood by this enigmatic literality. For Adorno, there are
ridiculous works that have no meaning whatsoever, "rational" works
whose meanings are too obvious, and, finally, there are works that,
indeed, "speak like elves in fairy tales: 'If you want the absolute,
you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it.'"
The temptation of giving normative primacy to this extreme form is
certainly present in Adorno, who appears to suggest sometimes that this
is not an exceptional occurrence, and that, on the contrary, all art,
qua art, is enigmatic in this way.
Thus we arrive at the key thesis to which this daylong conference in
devoted: "the much touted complexity of art is the falsely positive
name for its enigmatic quality." Art would in itself protest against
the hermeneutic goal of revealed meaning. "Hermeneutics, let us be!"
the enigmatic quality of artworks would seem to say.
In this way, the task of art criticism is redefined by being
redirected: the point is not to resolve what is enigmatic in art, but
on the contrary, to pay attention to the structure of what is
enigmatic: "As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by
the structure." Adorno in fact appears to return to the question of
"truth content" as Benjamin had formulated it in his thesis on The
Concept of Aesthetic Criticism in German Romanticism, only to push it
forward polemically, in the whole field of modern aesthetics.
Far from considering enigmatic works as elitist, or as reserved for
pretentious and complacent audiences, Adorno entirely reversed matters,
and saw the most enigmatic artworks as demonstrating the true power of
critique: "The hermeneutic works bring more criticism to bear on the
existing state of affairs than do those that, in the interest of
intelligible social criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory fans
and silently acknowledge the flourishing culture industry."
We may even examine unsuspected alliances in aesthetic experience from
this standpoint, that is, in art that fights against reification:
"Today, hermetic and committed art converge in the refusal of the
status quo. Interference is prohibited by reified consciousness
because it reifies the already reified artwork."
In these pages of his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno evokes Goethe and
Beckett's refusal of any attempt to interpret the meaning of their art
- a refusal that Klee's drawings, as approximate scrawled writing,
would illustrate in its own way.
This is not to suggest that the sensible critic of enigmatic works
would ultimately be condemned to a respectful silence before what is
enigmatic in art. The enigmatic quality of these works suggests instead
that their critical appreciation requires the kind of speculative
imagination that is characteristic of true philosophy. The speculative
critic of enigmatic art, however, must make a clean break with the
perspective that submits the enigmatic quality of art to the
supposition of hermeneutically revealed meaning. Only on the basis of
this rupture can art criticism strive toward "truth content" and
examine the structure of enigma in art. In this way we may rediscover
the meaning of art as the meaning of our own aesthetic experience of it
and how that meaning is attained: "aesthetic experience is not genuine
experience unless it becomes philosophy." For only philosophy seeks to
ponder in art, as in everything essential and enigmatic, the ambiguous
relation of the determinate and the indeterminate [die
Zweischlächtigkeit des Bestimmten une Unbestimmten].
Indicative bibliography :
Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Suhrkamp, 2012, pp. 179-205; Théorie
esthétique, French translation by Marc Jimenez, Klincksieck, pp.
170-193; Aesthetic Theory, English translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor,
Continuum, London/New York, 1997, pp. 118-136.
Peter Szondi, "Reading "Engführung", An Essay on the Poetry of Paul
Celan", Boundary 2, Vol. 11, n°3, 1983.
Walter Benjamin, "Two poems on Hölderlin", in Selected Writings, Volume
1 : 1913-1926, Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 18-36.
Walter Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities", in Selected Writings,
Volume 1 : 1913-1926, op. cit., pp. 297-356.
Walter Benjamin, The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism, in
Selected Writings, Volume 1 : 1913-1926, op. cit., pp. 116-185.
Modalities of submission :
This call for papers is addressed to scholars working in aesthetics, in
philosophy of art, sociology of art, history of art, musicology,
literary criticism, literary theory, cinematographic studies, etc.
The theoretical questions we would like to explore in this one-day
conference are as follows:
The possibility of the complexity, the obscurity or even the
unintelligibility of certain works; the importance (even hypothetical)
of the linguistic paradigm (spirit/letter) in the recognition of this
possibility (as Adorno writes, Sprache sind Kunstwerke nur als Schrift
[Artworks are language only as writing]); the necessity to think
another relation to the work than that of hermeneutics for which the
work has always, on principle, a meaning (preferably unambiguous) to
deliver, and so on. But what we hope, above all, is to examine
literary, musical, and graphic works directly in order to test Adorno’s
thesis on art in our own criticism of art, as opposed to rehearsing an
academic analysis of Adorno’s own views of art, however important this
may still be.
The propositions of talks in French, German, English or Spanish
(include a title and a summary of 15-20 lines) should be sent by
October 1st 2016 to Christophe David (Christophe.t.david@wanadoo.fr
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