I'm going to give two late cheers for eric's formulation "being
does", at
least insofar as we are talking about cultural being in general
and aesthetic being in particular. But at the same time I want to
reserve my
third cheer for some kind of complement to the verb, and to put in
a plug
for a rather literal interpretation of the word "ideal" in the
cultural,
artistic realm; I think in order to qualify as culture even material
culture really does have to have a utopian, unicorn element, but that
element is nevertheless irreducibly realist.
Mike likes to cite the Rilke poem about the unicorn. The English
translation he gives, though, goes like this:
The Unicorn by Ranier Maira Rilke
This is the creature there never has been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.
I think this is a mistranslation; in the German the unicorn is
"geliebt" or
"beloved", because in Rilke love is intransitive; it's not an object
oriented activity at all. There's actually a good paper on this
poem and how
it was derived from the unicorn tapestries at Cluny at:
http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10065/66/4/Segal+-+Rilke
+&+unicorns+revised+paper+_April+2007_.pdf
It turns out that intransitivity is an important trope in Rilke
generally,
and of course it was a favorite device of the German neoromantic lyric
poets, who believed you could get a kind of unmediated sense of
reality by
stripping verbs of their arguments, like petals from a flower.
Adorno is scathing about all of this. It's sometimes hard to read
Adorno
because he seems so irritated all the time, until we remember that
he really
had a LOT to be annoyed about. In this case, what he is eating him
is the
"jargon" (or "aura", as Walter Benjamin says) of a secular sacred
language,
a language which pretends to be unmediated by human lips.
What infuriates him is the philosophical rehabilitation of the
linguistic
work of Heidegger, a devout Nazi whose main criticism of the
extermination
camps was that they were too newfangled and modern (presumably real
Germans
would have strangled the Jews one by one with their bare hands).
It's really
Heidegger who likes to say things like "Being is" and above all
"death is"
(yes, I know that Hegel said it too). But even Rilke likes to speak of
"encounters" and "statements" as if what was encountered was a
unicorn and
statements were not concretely instances of who says what to whom
and why.
Habermas says, in a book that would have greatly annoyed Adorno if
he had
lived to read it (The Theory of Communicative Action) that our
knowledge has
the structure of propositions. I think Adorno would prefer to say
that it
propositions have the structure of knowledge, but that knowledge is
composed
of questions as well as statements. I'm not sure he would agree
that it is
composed of imperatives; I think imperatives are too sly about their
subjects and objects; in linguistic terms, they don't have enough
argument
structure.
One of the things I most like about the unicorn paper (link posted
above)
is the historical research. Segal points out that unicorns are
reported in
almost all the major cultures, and go back many thousands of years.
Take, for example, the Chinese unicorn, which is probably the oldest
speciment. During the early Ming Dynasty, when Zheng He was sent on
voyages
of discovery to Africa, he captured a pair of giraffes and had them
brought
back to China. The emperor then had them widely exhibited, because
of a
tradition which held that the discovery of a unicorn during the
reign of an
emperor was an extremely auspicious sign. One of them survived, and I
remember seeing an astonishing realistic portrait of it, which for
reasons I
never understood, did not have any of the usual polygonal marks on
its skin.
When I was researching a book on the great Chinese famine of
1962-1963, I
interviewed an old woman who said she had eaten part of the giraffe
(which
is still called a "qilin", or a unicorn, in Chinese) in the Beijing
zoo. She
remarked wistfully that it was a time when
nobody could afford hopes for the future.
The ubiquity of unicorns is really clear evidence that they really do
exist, or rather it would be evidence of their existence except for
the fact
that insistence on the NONexistence of unicorns is an important
feature of
all these instances. To me, it is evidence of something even more
wonderful;
the literally IDEAL component of even material culture, the element of
culture which suggests, not its reproductibility but rather its
perfectibility. And that's what Adorno is really complaining about,
and why
he can't find any culture worthy of the name on television.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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