{"id":1493,"date":"2020-06-29T09:53:15","date_gmt":"2020-06-29T07:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/?p=1493"},"modified":"2025-03-03T12:27:02","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T10:27:02","slug":"ross-shields-reading-the-aesthetics-of-resistance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2020\/06\/29\/ross-shields-reading-the-aesthetics-of-resistance\/","title":{"rendered":"Ross Shields: READING THE AESTHETICS OF RESISTANCE"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Aesthetics of Resistance<\/em>. Already the title demands interpretation. Depending on whether the preposition \u2018of\u2019 is interpreted as a subjective or as an objective genitive, it could refer either to \u2018the aesthetic position upheld by those fighting for the resistance\u2019 or to \u2018the aesthetic aspect of resistance as such.\u2019 As one might expect, Peter Weiss\u2019s novel supports both readings, insofar as it concerns a group of resistance fighters who conceive of art\u2014whether ancient, aristocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian\u2014as closely related to their own political activity: \u201cIf we want to take on art, literature, we have to treat them against the grain, that is, we have to eliminate all the concomitant privileges and project our own demands into them.\u201d[1]<\/a> The aesthetic position of those fighting in the resistance is that art is eminently political. But the first person plural is misleading, and introduces an additional ambiguity concerning the novel\u2019s message: does \u201cwe\u201d stand for the unnamed narrator and his comrades in the 1930\u2019s, for Weiss\u2019s milieu in the 1970s, or for the international readership of the perpetually advancing present?<\/span><\/p>\n

A complete answer to this question would have to embrace all three options: Weiss certainly projected his own interests and concerns onto his protagonists, and it is impossible for contemporary readers to avoid projecting their own interests and concerns onto his\/their reflections. In my case, \u2018we\u2019 stands for the researchers and staff of the Leibniz-Zentrum f\u00fcr Literatur- und Kulturforschung<\/em>, who selected the novel for our 2019 Klausurtagung<\/em>\u2014a two day affair devoted to intensive discussions of a single text. For us to take on Weiss\u2019s novel means to treat it against the grain, to project onto it the demands of the contemporary political juncture.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Margaret Thatcher\u2019s dictum that \u201cthere is no alternative\u201d has been transformed from a political slogan into a metaphysical principle. One of its chief contemporary intellectual proponents is Yuval Noah Harari, whose three most recent books are not only global best sellers, but have garnered public endorsements from the likes of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. In 2018\u2019s 21 Lessons for the 21st<\/sup> Century<\/em>, Harari is blunt in his support of Thatcher\u2019s neoliberal ideology: \u201cAt the end of the day, humankind won\u2019t abandon the liberal story, because it doesn\u2019t have any alternative. People may give the system an angry kick in the stomach but, having nowhere else to go, they will eventually come back.\u201d[2]<\/a> The grounds for this claim are laid out in Harari\u2019s previous book, which articulates a philosophy of Dataism<\/em> or the supposedly scientific consensus that everything from great works of art to metabolic processes to economic exchanges can be understood in terms of data processing and decision making. According to Harari, \u201cfree-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren\u2019t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. They are, in essence, competing data-processing systems.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

To illustrate the different modes of data processing at stake in capitalism and communism, Harari considers how the price of a loaf of bread is determined within either system. Under communism, a central agency determines the amount of bread that is produced every day, how it is distributed, and how much it costs; under capitalism, the price of bread is decided by the individual bakers, and individual people are allowed to choose whether they will purchase it or not, and from whom. Under communism, decisions are made from the top down, and are unable to keep pace with the rapid flows of information that characterize the contemporary world; under capitalism, decisions are made from the bottom up, and therefore identical to the information they process. The neoliberal economic theory of Friedrich A. Hayek looms large over Harari\u2019s argument, according to which bottom-up data processing is simply more effective than the top-down sort:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCapitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To rub in the point, he makes a collage of two pictures: on the left, the aging leadership of the Soviet Union, sitting in wicker chairs with arms outstretched in a feeble salute. The sky above Moscow is faded, lending the whole composition an air of nostalgia\u2014as if the chairman and his council were waving goodbye to a futureless past. On the right, a pair of young stockbrokers on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, with arms upraised in the energetic gesture of a sporting event. The camera\u2019s shallow depth of field blurs the electronic tickers in the background, which seem to display the streaming symbols of The<\/em> Matrix<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Whether or not Harari\u2019s brand of pop-cybernetics is useful to describe socioeconomic structures, his insistence that there are only two kinds of data-processing systems\u2014centralized or distributed\u2014is symptomatic of the widespread ideology that presents neoliberalism as the only option, for both present and future. Equally problematic is how he tacitly correlates these economic structures to particular modes of political organization:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLike capitalism and communism, so democracies and dictatorships are in essence competing mechanisms for gathering and analyzing information. Dictatorships use centralized processing methods, whereas democracies prefer distributed processing.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, the terms of his analogy might as well be inverted. Capitalism could be said to display an tendency toward centralization, insofar as the accumulation of wealth in a handful of banks and corporations transfers decision-making power from democratically elected governments to CEO\u2019s and boards of directors, and often to disastrous political consequences. Nor is it certain that communism necessarily involves the centralization of decision-making power in a totalitarian government, even if this was the tragic outcome of the Soviet experiment. One could object that capitalism requires extensive international regulation to open up the space for its \u2018free\u2019 market, or insist that the unrealized dream of communism is not to control value but to abolish it. But an immanent critique of Harari\u2019s neoliberal apology would accept the terms of his informatic metaphor while addressing its problematic dualism: the notion that there are only two possible forms of data processing: inefficient centralized processing and efficient distributed processing. Aesthetics\u2014which has always concerned the processing of data, or that which is given to the senses\u2014rejects this binary opposition, and so gives the lie to Harari\u2019s argument.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aesthetics would seem to be the last place to turn for an alternative. The harmonious relation of part to whole conceived by classical aesthetics has been criticized for projecting the ideal of a nonviolent (and apolitical) integration of individual and collective. At best, the theory of aesthetic autonomy, according to which the work of art is a self-contained whole, offers an ideological retreat from the dominant logic of capitalist rationalization: what Adorno has called a \u201cnature reserve for irrationality.\u201d[6]<\/a> At worse, it advances a model for what Benjamin has criticized as the fascist \u201caestheticization of politics.\u201d[7]<\/a> As politics is converted into a spectacle, art is repurposed as propaganda. Prompted by these misgivings, theorists in the wake of Benjamin and Adorno have developed a critical aesthetic theory that rejects the totality of classical aesthetics in favor of openness and fragmentation, with the aim of reintegrating art into daily life.[8]<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

Instead of aestheticizing politics, the critical work politicizes aesthetics by transforming art into protest: against the art institution, against the art market, against the very ideal of aesthetic autonomy. And yet, following Harari\u2019s line of argumentation, one could object that the position of critical aesthetics unwittingly reflects and even celebrates the capitalist structure of commodity exchange, along with the network of atomized individuals supporting it. There is no better emblem of decentralization than a Dadaist collage, where an inscrutable logic circulates among images and text torn from disparate spheres of social reality. That this is more than a facile analogy is indicated by the extent to which the avant-gardist aesthetic has been absorbed into the culture and advertising industries, which routinely borrow from the repertoire of its various -isms. Nor has the movement been able to maintain the critical attitude that necessitated its emergence: what B\u00fcrger has described as the \u201cfailure of the avant-garde\u201d\u2014the fact that the avant-gardist protests against the art institution are now accepted as works of art by that institution\u2014is a marvelous success from the point of view of investors, who tend to be more interested in the activity of other collectors than in the form or content of the art collected.[9]<\/a> Despite its intentions, the avant-gardist negation of aesthetic value has paved the way for the unprecedented valorization of art as capital.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once again, aesthetics seems to be the last place to turn for an alternative to neoliberal ideology. The classical work of art may resist commercialization, but can be criticized for its totalitarian character; the critical work may reject the latter, but bears a formal and material affinity with capitalist structures of commodity exchange. If, on the other hand, one were to insist on the irreducibility of art to either of these paradigms\u2014if aesthetic experience can be reduced to neither centralized nor distributed data processing\u2014then the work of art might be seen to reflect, in its formal structure, an alternative to both dictatorial communism and neoliberal capitalism. One of the strengths of The<\/em> Aesthetics of Resistance <\/em>lies in how it refutes the simple opposition assumed by Harari\u2019s informatic dualism. Although Weiss\u2014who alludes to both Benjamin and Adorno\u2014condemns the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy for being apolitical, he is equally critical of the avant-gardist \u201ctotal annihilation of art\u201d as something that could only appeal to those who were already \u201csated with cultivation [Bildung<\/em>].\u201d[10]<\/a> Refusing both extremes, Weiss develops an interpretation of aesthetic modernism that emphasizes the formal ambiguity of complex compositions in which neither the whole nor its parts predominate: \u201cSuch surprising depictions, based not on a closed aspect but on a multivalence, supplied more details than static arrangement could about the mechanisms we lived among. Characteristic of that ambiguity was its ability to get the imagination to search for relations and analogies, thereby expanding the realm of receptivity.\u201d[11]<\/a> For Weiss, the aim of aesthetic cultivation is not\u2014as it was for Schiller\u2014the construction of an ideal \u201crealm of beautiful semblance,\u201d but the comprehension of the complex material relations that constitute the political and economic world.[12]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Weiss develops his concept of aesthetic cultivation through an interpretation of Picasso\u2019s Guernica<\/em>, which locates the painting\u2019s relation to politics in the formal demands it makes on the viewer: \u201cThe picture challenged us to use the first impression merely as an impetus to take the givens apart and examine them from different directions, then to fit them back together, thereby making them our own. This confirmed the rule I was familiar with from my earliest artistic investigations.\u201d[13]<\/a> This rule is, of course, the conviction of the unnamed narrator and philosophical leitmotiv of The<\/em> Aesthetics of Resistance<\/em>: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cthat there [is] no distinction between social and political materializations and the essence of art.\u201d[14]<\/a> <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How are we to understand this statement? Evidently, it does not imply that we should all become artists in order to change the world (Hugo Ball, Joseph Beuys). Nor is it Weiss\u2019s contention that art has the power to defamiliarize experience and transform everyday life (Viktor Shklovsky, Jacques Ranci\u00e8re). In fact, the philosopher who comes closest to articulating Weiss\u2019s position may be John Dewey, who, though hardly an orthodox Marxist, was denounced by Hayek as \u201cthe leading philosopher of American left-wingism.\u201d[15]<\/a> In Art as Experience<\/em>, Dewey relates aesthetics and politics as two modes of experience:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe enemies of the esthetic are neither the practical nor the intellectual. They are the humdrum; slackness of loose ends; submission in practice and intellectual procedure. Rigid abstinence, coerced submission, tightness on one side and dissipation, incoherence and aimless indulgence on the other, are deviations in opposite directions from the unity of an experience.[16]<\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With Dewey, one can argue that Weiss\u2019s identification of sociopolitical manifestations with the essence of art is predicated on the affinity of political and aesthetic experience: both involve the critical examination of what is given, the recognition of latent structures, and the rearrangement of existing forms into novel constructions. On this view, art does not prescribe new political structures, but reflects the process through which they are created.<\/span><\/p>\n

The analogy between art and politics should not be construed as ahistorical. Weiss\u2019s analysis of Picasso\u2019s Guernica<\/em> is set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, where communists, socialists, liberals, and anarchists were challenged to stake out common ground against Franco\u2019s military dictatorship:\u00a0<\/span>\u201cThe whole of Europe was a field of antagonisms, different kinds of independent energies had to flow together in Spain and look for a synthesis. Each of us had the task of fusing divergences into a unity.\u201d[17]<\/a> <\/span>This message took on a new significance in 1970\u2019s West Germany, where The<\/em> Aesthetics of Resistance<\/em> provoked reflection on the failure of the left and how communism could have been different.[18]<\/a> <\/span><\/p>\n

In the contemporary political juncture, where the effects of capitalist expansion have not only led to a resurgence of right-wing nationalism, but are threatening to destroy the climate on which we all depend, this book will inevitably be received in a different light, according to the changing meaning of resistance. Today, the immediate task is not to fuse divergent political ideologies into a pragmatic coalition, but to direct international cooperation toward a well-defined global aim. Since the achievement of this aim will necessarily entail the limitation of individual, corporate, and national interests, it is foreclosed by the false choice between centralized and decentralized data processing, which identifies any checks against the supposedly free market with totalitarian rule. Weiss\u2019s reflections on the complex nature of aesthetic and political organization remind us that there is always an alternative.<\/span><\/p>\n

The concept of the political efficacy of art that I have won from The Aesthetics of Resistance<\/em> is modest. I am not suggesting that art can overcome the impasse of neoliberalism, defeat the radical right, or fix global warming. As Sartre famously remarked, it is unlikely that Guernica<\/em> won \u201cone single soul for the Spanish cause.\u201d[19]<\/a> The resistance of aesthetics instead consists in the mode of experience that art affords, which promotes individual consciousness and political awareness by exploding the dualisms with which we tend to simplify things: centralization and decentralization, totality and fragmentation, communism and neoliberal capitalism, dictatorship and democracy. Although the formal complexity and ambiguous compositions met in works by the likes of Picasso, Woolf, and Sch\u00f6nberg most obviously support this sort of experience, it can be drawn out of all art to various degrees. Indeed, what distinguishes these modernists from the artists who came before and after them is how they set aesthetic experience (in the sense defined by Dewey) as the aim of artistic production.[20]<\/a> But no work of art can be reduced either to the whole or to the sum of its parts; either to systematicity or to formlessness. Strictly speaking, the opposing ideals of classical and critical aesthetics are not two distinct aesthetic positions, but the theoretical limits between which art unfolds. By analogy, totalitarian governance and social atomism are not oppositional political materializations, but the two extremes at which politics ends.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ross Shields<\/a> is a research associate at the ZfL, currently working on his project\u00a0\u201cFormation is Life\u201d. Organicism and Aesthetic Modernism<\/a>.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

[1] Peter Weiss,\u00a0The Aesthetics of Resistance<\/em>, transl. Joachim Neugroschel (Durham: Duke UP, 2005), 33; \u201cWollen wir uns der Kunst, der Literatur annehmen, so m\u00fcssen wir sie gegen den Strich behandeln, das hei\u00dft, wir m\u00fcssen alle Vorrechte, die damit verbunden sind, ausschalten und unsre eignen Anspr\u00fcche in sie hineinlegen.\u201d Peter Weiss, Die \u00c4sthetik des Widerstands<\/em> (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2005), 51.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st<\/sup> Century<\/em> (London: Vintage, 2018), 24.<\/span><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow<\/em> (London: Vintage, 2016), 430.<\/span><\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Ibid<\/em>. 434.<\/span><\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Ibid<\/em>. 435.<\/span><\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Theodor W. Adorno, \u00c4sthetische Theorie<\/em> (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2014), 499. My translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit<\/em> (2. Fassung); in: Gesammelte Schriften<\/em>, Bd. 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1980). My translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Cf<\/em>. R\u00fcdiger Bubner, \u201c\u00dcber einige Bedingungen gegenw\u00e4rtiger \u00c4sthetik,\u201d in: Neue Hefte f\u00fcr Philosophie<\/em>, Nr. 5 (1973), 38-73.<\/span><\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Peter B\u00fcrger, Theorie der Avantgarde<\/em> (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2013), 53. My translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Aesthetics <\/em><\/span>47; translation modified; \u201cdoch f\u00fcr den Ruf nach totaler Zertr\u00fcmmrung der Kunst hatten wir nichts \u00fcbrig, solche Parolen konnten sich diejenigen leisten, die \u00fcbers\u00e4ttigt waren von Bildung, wir wollten die Institutionen der Kultur erst einmal heil \u00fcbernehmen, sehn, was dort vorhanden war und unserer Lernbegier dienstbar gemacht werden konnte.\u201d \u00c4sthetik <\/em>71. For Weiss\u2019s critique of the \u201cEigenwert eines Kunstwerks,\u201d see 228. Cf<\/em>. Peter B\u00fcrger, \u201cExkurs zu Peter Weiss\u2019 \u2018Die \u00c4sthetik des Widerstands,\u2019\u201d in: Aktualit\u00e4t und Geschichtlichkeit. Studien zum gesellschaftlichen Funktionswandel der Literatur<\/em> (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 18.<\/span><\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Aesthetics <\/em>295, translation modified; \u201cSolch \u00fcberraschende Darstellungen, die nicht von einem geschlo\u00dfnen Aspekt, sondern von einer Vieldeutigkeit ausgingen, gaben tieferen Aufschlu\u00df \u00fcber die Mechanismen, zwischen denen wir lebten, als die statische Anordnung es vermochte. Bezeichnend f\u00fcr sie war, da\u00df sie die Phantasie dazu anleiteten, nach Beziehungen, nach Gleichnissen zu suchen und damit den Bereich der Aufnahmef\u00e4higkeit zu erweitern.\u201d \u00c4sthetik <\/em>416.<\/span><\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Friedrich Schiller, \u00dcber die \u00e4sthetische Erziehung des Menschen<\/em> (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 122. My translation.<\/span><\/p>\n

[13]<\/a>\u00a0 Aesthetics <\/em>295; \u201cIndem das Bild uns aufforderte, den ersten Eindruck nur als Anla\u00df zu benutzen, das Gegebne auseinanderzunehmen und von verschiednen Richtungen her zu \u00fcberpr\u00fcfen, es dann aufs neue zusammenzusetzen und es sich somit anzueignen, best\u00e4tigte sich die Regel, die ich von fr\u00fchsten k\u00fcnstlerischen Untersuchungen kannte.\u201d \u00c4sthetik <\/em>416.<\/span><\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Aesthetics <\/em>296; \u201cda\u00df es keine Trennung gab zwischen den sozialen und politischen Materialisationen und dem Wesen der Kunst.\u201d \u00c4sthetik <\/em>417.<\/span><\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom<\/em> (London: Routledge, 2006), 26.<\/span><\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> John Dewey, Art as Experience<\/em> (New York: Perigee, 2005), 42.<\/span><\/p>\n

[17]<\/a> Aesthetics <\/em>179; \u201cGanz Europa war ein Feld von Antagonismen, verschiedenartige, eigenwillige Energien mu\u00dften in Spanien zusammenstr\u00f6men und nach einer Synthese suchen. Es war Sache eines jeden von uns, das Divergierende zu einer Einheit zu bringen.\u201d \u00c4sthetik <\/em>253.<\/span><\/p>\n

[18]<\/a> For the reception of Weiss\u2019s novel, see Karen Hvidtfeldt Madsen, Peter Weiss und Die \u00c4sthetik des Widerstands<\/em> (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universit\u00e4ts-Verlag, 2003), 3f.<\/span><\/p>\n

[19]<\/a> Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?<\/em>, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 11.<\/span><\/p>\n

[20]<\/a> I have argued this point in my dissertation Hanging-Together:<\/em> Kant, Goethe, and the Theory of Aesthetic Modernism<\/em> (Columbia University, 2019).<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

VORGESCHLAGENE ZITIERWEISE: Ross Shields: Reading the Aesthetics of Resistance, in: ZfL BLOG, 29.6.2020, [https:\/\/www.zflprojekte.de\/zfl-blog\/2020\/06\/29\/ross-shields-reading-the-aesthetics-of-resistance\/<\/a><\/span>].<\/span>
\n<\/span>DOI: https:\/\/doi.org\/10.13151\/zfl-blog\/20200629-01<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n