Adorno’s “No Poetry After Auschwitz”

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, and this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today”

More to the point, perhaps, people have become unable to read poetry. Most of us incapable of the sustained effort it takes to read Paradise Lost. But of course, poetry that is unread is unwritten, insofar as the circuit is broken.

In 2003, at the height of the war-rage of the now dead Bush era (we hope), the Wall Street Journal launched an embarassment: a web site for “poets for the war“.

The poems are pretty awful. Most of them adhere to conventional forms and sound like advertising jingles or country songs:

Many are the judgmental voices
That cut and slice and pry
Before they’ve looked inside themselves
And have had to answer why

That is: many people are being “judgemental”. Yes, we went on the bus to New York City on March 15 2003, to protest the war whilst being harassed by the police, and freezing in the cold, along with people all over the world, because exercising our facility of “judgement” told us that the war would be a bloody grand failure.

Which it was. Baghdad is still in mediaeval chaos although it is now dog-bites-man that it is, and it was livable under Saddam Hussein’s multiconfessional Ba’ath socialism, which disadvantaged Shi’a Muslims for political, not religious reasons…while Israel discriminates, period, against non-Jews for religious reasons. This is the United States’ doing.

The poem goes on to ask them protestors to turn the moral inventory on themselves and ask “why”, and then peters out, without answering the question, or resolving “why” it asked “why” in the first place. It’s jingly nonsense verse in the service of horror, not “poetry” insofar as (1) there’s no such thing as a synonym, therefore (2) there can be verse (correctly formed according to a set of rules, writable by a computer) that isn’t “poetry” (something that adds to collective human survival and flourishing, or individual survival and flourishing that is not zero-sum with respect to a victim).

And the verse at the Wall Street Journal site is precisely this: post-Auschwitz verse. The speaker of this verse has been dehumanized: he or she is someone who supports the war as a member of the military, who has signed up “to get money for school” and finds that she’s now expected to be in a real war.

I have some experience with alienated existence. I signed up for corporate life in the 1970s. The telos of the system has to be internalized: you find yourself a mouthpiece. Therefore the speaker/writer feels victimized, not by the chickenhawk politicians who have sent her to war to advance their careers, but by them protestors who hurt her by questioning her false consciousness, who cut and slice and “pry”: a word selected consciously by the conscientious versifier merely to rhyme but which nonetheless is a cry of protest against the way in which protests against the war question the shaky and alienated accomodation she has made.

Oh, am I being snotty? That’s really too bad. We protested the Vietnam war, and it went on, and it produced a boneyard for no good reason. Unlike some sort of tenured English professor, the usual sort of person who’d make the above analysis, I was part of the technical machine. And as a result I believe we were right to protest Vietnam, and Iraq.

I believe Adorno believed in turn at a deep level that some sort of ethical contribution to human survival and flourishing was a necessary precondition to any aesthetic discussion: the aesthetic question is moot in the boneyard.

My father was genuinely horrified, as the 1950s wore on, at the increasing Philistinism of life in the USA and he described most men as “apes”. But he was flattering men: the great apes have what Marx called species being including natural solidarity: fighting amongst them stays where it belongs, in the competition for females. He’d been granted only the most fleeting of visions of innocence, life prior to World War I.

In this context, poetry isn’t lighting a candle. It’s lighting a cigarette.