According to Adorno,
Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by reality’s compulsion to identity. Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work’s own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. (2002: 4) For Adorno, the principle that governs reality is that of identity – a process of reducing non-identical singularities into identical entities – and the function of art is to aid the non-identical to be emancipated from the process of identification. Thus, aesthetic identity, that is, the process of constituting an artwork, can accommodate the singularities that are removed from reality and achieve ‘a heightened order of existence’. In Adorno’s terms, an artwork formed by the principle of aesthetic identity is a ‘semblance’ (Schein), which Adorno defines as the aesthetic unity posited against empirical reality (105). However, although an aesthetic semblance can preserve the non-identical that is excluded by reality, it is still an identity within which the non-identical may be erased by the principle of aesthetic identity. Therefore, Adorno contends that the process of forming an aesthetic semblance is one of integrating different elements that derive from the empirical world and of establishing its own autonomy against reality; however, there inevitably remains the heterogeneous in semblance (ibid.). In other words, the structuring of a semblance ineluctably entails the logic of negativity.
Those non-identical elements that resist the identifying process of semblance formation become what Adorno designates as ‘expression’. An artwork can thus be regarded as a field of incongruent forces that consist of constructing semblance and disruptive expression: while the former is closely associated with the positive power of society, the latter is always a force of dissonance (110). It is vital to point out that, for Adorno, aesthetic forms such as ‘particularity, development and resolution of conflict’ are based on and separated from empirical reality – in the gap between artistic semblance and empirical reality, the artwork ‘adopts its stance toward the
empirical world in which conflicts appear immediate and as absolute cleavages’ and this distancing becomes ‘an act of knowledge’ (145). It therefore can be inferred that dramatic forms such as development, conflict, and denouement are socially determined – that is, these dramatic forms originate in how we perceive the possibilities of reality and how we are structured within these possibilities. It is not difficult to imagine that, for today’s audiences, conflicts in some plays in the past have lost their relevance, or that certain ways of denouements are regarded as unrealistic. However, the effectiveness of dramatic forms by no means derives from how accurate these forms imitate empirical reality. As Adorno states, ‘[w]henever art seems to copy society, it becomes all the more an “as-if”’ (226). It is the distance created by ‘as if’ that determines the gap between art and social reality.
Following Adorno’s theory, I contend that, although the dramatic structures of the Palermo improvisation and the story of the Russian guard reproduce the logic of rationality employed during the war and in the camp, it is the extreme moments of ethical decision-making that potentially disrupt the logic of reality. For Bond, there can never be possible resolution for the ethical conflicts in both cases. This impossibility of resolution disrupts the conflict-denouement structure despite the fact that it is still necessary to complete the aesthetic semblance in which impossible decisions must be made according to the result of the negotiation between radical innocence and the enforcement of military discipline. It is this paradoxical structure caused by the ethics of the Real that makes the dramatic semblance negative rather than affirmative.
In Adorno’s theory, the force of aesthetic negativity is preserved through mimesis and expression:
Artistic expression comports itself mimetically, just as the expression of living creatures is that of pain. The lineaments of expression inscribed in artworks, if they are not to be mute, are demarcation lines against semblance. Yet, in that artworks as such remain semblance, the conflict between semblance – form in the broadest sense – and expression remains unresolved and fluctuates historically. (110)
‘Semblance’ can be understood both as the artwork in general and as a specific constructing force as opposed to ‘expression’ decided by the logic of mimesis. What Adorno means by mimesis is not imitation but an attitude towards objectivity that is different from the subject-object antithesis. Mimetic comportment of expression implicates ‘the objectification of the non-objective’ (111) – namely, what is expressed in expression is not a graspable object or any impulse to be objectified but those non-identical elements. One of the non-identical elements that resists artistic construction and moral thematization is the body, especially the body in pain. As Adorno argues, the new imperative after Auschwitz – Auschwitz should never happen again – must involve ‘a bodily sensation of the moral addendum’ because any moral reflection must consider the insufferable bodily anguish (1999: 365). Also, Adorno’s insistence on the primacy of bodily mortality exemplifies a philosophical gesture against a society determined by the logic of self-preservation (Zuidervaart 2007: 146).
However, although Adorno compares artistic expression to animalistic pain, it is not the case that expressive artworks imitate literally any experiences of physical pain. Obviously, both the Palermo improvisation and the story of the Russian guard entail the representation of violent acts and bodily pain, and this may invoke the ‘moral addendum’ and preserve the moral significance of bodily mortality. But more importantly, the expressive power derives from the moments of ethical impasse in which the subject is forced to die or relinquish the cause that determines the subject as a subject. The expressive power emanating from the conflict between subjective radical innocence and objective rational order is mimetically preserved in Bond’s dramaturgy. As Adorno states, ‘[i]f art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a better world’ (2002: 9). In these extreme moments, the longing of radical innocence for an impossible but better world order in which the subject can be exempted from impossible decision-making is retained mimetically. As Simon Jarvis argues, in Adorno’s modernist aesthetics, it is the ‘mimesis of the
systematic framework which impoverishes experience’ (122) that constitutes the power of mimesis. Dialectically, however, mimesis is not semblance as a copy of empirical reality; rather, mimesis designates the capacity of preserving non-identical relationships among disparate entities. Adorno seeks to posit art as a mimetic comportment by which not only the rationality of identity logic can be revealed but non-identical elements can also be preserved to serve as a promise for an alternative reality.
J. M. Berstein, in explicating Adorno’s aesthetics, argues that ‘[w]ithin works of art, universality is conveyed through form while particularity is conveyed through moments of dissonance or decomposition’ (2004: 157). This structure can be detected in the Palermo improvisation and the story of the Russian guard. Arguably, the military command is a universal in terms of dramatic form – this ‘universal’ form constitutes one of the core dramatic structures in Bond’s later plays – and it also carries its performative force in the sense that it must be obeyed by reducing any possibilities of resistance. In this regard, the moments of resistance constitute the particularity that not only challenges the authority of the command but also discloses other routes of dramatic development. This unresolved opposition between authority and resistance makes art enigmatic. As Adorno states, ‘[a]rt’s enigmatic image is the configuration of mimesis and rationality. […] The indefatigably recurring question that every work incites in whoever traverses it – the “What is it all about?” – becomes “Is it true?”’ (2002: 127). For Adorno, the truth content of artworks is different from an idea as artworks cannot be reduced to embodying specific ideas. The truth content of artworks resides precisely in this terrain of irreducibility. Instead of conveying the author’s intention or idea, what the artwork reveals is enigmatic. The truth-content of the artwork unearths ‘the possibility of a nature which “is not yet”’ (Jarvis 104) and makes the artwork ‘an occasion for the subject to liken itself to a state of unfinishedness’ (Huhn 8).
Following Adorno’s aesthetics, we can infer that the power of the Palermo improvisation and the story of the Russian guard originates from the non-identity between the dramatic rational construction that seeks closure and the ethical demand that disrupts any resolutions. As Tom Huhn
points out, for Adorno, the mimesis of the artwork corresponds to the unfolding of subjectivity and the possibility of subjective movement (7). Also, as Terry Eagleton observes, in Adorno’s aesthetics, artworks are ‘at once determinate and indeterminate’, which is demonstrated through ‘the discrepancy between their mimetic (sensuous-expressive) and rational (constructive-organisational) moments’ (1990: 353). In other words, the non-identity that renders the artwork enigmatic also attests to the indeterminacy of the subject’s potential – in Bond’s terms, this is the nature of radical innocence. Although Adorno explicates the aesthetic logic of Bond’s post-Auschwitz dramaturgy, it is Levinas’s theory that can more clearly disentangle the ethical implications of Bond’s dramaturgy.