Adorno: “’Endgame’ typifies the dignity of modern art by examining the drama of an era which can no longer tolerate that which constitutes it. The dustbins in which the characters live are the emblems of the culture that was reconstructed after Auschwitz.” The things constituting the era in question are exemplified in Beckett’s plays, but are namely those of Boredom, Repetition, and a Theological Insecurity or concern with the meaninglessness of existence ( “ after Auschwitz who can still venture to assert that life has a meaning!”) (lectures p.13). He was concerned with “the question whether thought can bear the idea that a given reality is meaningless and that mind is unable to orientate itself; or whether the intellect has become so enfeebled that it finds itself paralysed by the idea that all is not well with the world.” (lectures p.20) This echoes similar concerns of the protagonists of Beckett’s plays (need examples). Adorno sees in Beckett Negative Dialectics at work.
In order to understand Negative Dialectics, one must first understand the positivist, Hegelian concept of the dialectic; which is that of the engine of development and progress whether it be self-knowledge or world history. These are governed by dialectic between conflicting and contradictory expressions of mind and spirit. Development is characterized by a tension between conflicting forces and resolved as a new synthesis is achieved. Synthesis creates new internal contradictions, and then further resolution. According to this theory, this will only cease with the end of history. An important part of this process is “The Negation of the Negation” – the stage in the development that grows from its predecessor and NEGATES it. It is then in its own turn NEGATED by the development and resolution of its own internal contradictions. For example, Capitalism formed from negating/destroying Feudalism.
“Unlike the kind of dialectics that the late Hegel called for, one in which the affirmative could be discovered at the end of all the negations, this concept [negative dialectics] calls for the very opposite.” (lectures p.20) For Adorno, “the thesis that the negation of the negation is positive (progressive and developmental) […] cannot be sustained. The negation of the negation does not result in a positive, or not automatically. The situation today is one that secretly everyone finds deeply dubious, but it is also one that is so overpowering that people feel they can do nothing about it, and perhaps they can do nothing about it.” (lectures p. 17) This seems reflected in the line “nothing to be done” from Waiting for Godot as well as a conversation on p.5 of Endgame between Clov and Hamm starting with “Have you not had enough?” and concluding with the line “All life long the same questions, the same answers.”
Negative Dialectics would refute the claim that the Dialectical process in history leads to development. It is concerned with the critique of the relation of concept to thing, the identity of concept and thing being a vital nerve of idealist (predominant) thought.
“Negative Dialectics = ruthless criticism of all that exists.” (lectures, p.13) Adorno suggests that in the universe there exists the object and its concept, or the idea that is attached to the object, which affects how it is perceived and is thereby made communicable, reduced to a word and an idea. Negative Dialectics is non-identity thinking, which stands opposed to identity thinking. Identity thinking aims at the categorization of all particular objects under their general concepts. As a result, the particular is usually dissolved into the universal. However Negative Dialectics, which is non-identity thinking, seeks to identify the falseness of the claims of identity thinking. Negative Dialectics assesses the relation between concept and object, between the set of properties implied by the concept and the object in reality. It operates within the ‘force-field’ between concept and object, or idea and the material world. It confronts the object and examines contradictions between the objects idea of itself and its actual existence. When viewed in this mode of thinking, concepts can connote what their particular object is and is not. Take Freedom for example, “in the so-called free society in which we live the inequality of social power ensures that the claimed identity between concept (freedom) and object (the present state of affairs) is false […] Through the examination of the formation of concepts and the disjuncture between them and the objects they seek to cover, Adorno’s dialectical method aims to disclose the processes of mutual constitution and alteration between object and totality. In this examination the object is also assessed in terms of what it appears to be and what it is (its essense) – revealing the univeral within the particular.” (Held ppg 216, 217)
Illustrating a link between Negative Dialectics and the works of Beckett, Adorno states in “Aesthetic Theory” : “ What is today called a ‘message’ is no more to be squeezed out of Shakespeares’ great dramas than out of Beckett’s works […] As a negation of the absolute idea, content can no longer be identified with reason as it is postulated by idealism; content has become the critique of the omnipotence of reason, and it can no longer be reasonable according to the norms set by discursive thought.” (p.27)
Adorno goes on to say “In recent years it has been fashionable to accuse Beckett of simply repeating his basic idea; he exposed himself to this accusation in a provocative fashion. In this his consciousness was correct that the need for progress is inextricable from its impossibility. The gesture of walking in place at the end of Godot, which is the fundamental motif of the whole of his work, reacts precisely to this situation […] The fulfilled moment reverses into perpetual repetition that converges with desolation. His narratives […] no more offer objective descriptions of social reality than – as the widespread misunderstanding supposes- they present the reduction of life to basic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in extremis […] The narratives are marked as much by an objectively motivated loss of the object as by its correlative – the impoverishment of the subject. Beckett draws the lesson from montage and documentation, from all attempts to free oneself from the illusion of a subjectivity that bestows meaning […] Beckett’s plays unfold like forces in infinitesimal physics, a second world of images springs forth, both sad and rich, the concentrate of historical experiences that otherwise, in their immediacy, fail to articulate the essential: the evisceration of subject and reality. This shabby, damaged world of images ((Connotations of the story Nag tells about the Trousers compared to the world)) is the negative imprint of the administered world. To this extent, Beckett is realistic.” (p.31 of Aesthetic Theory)
“Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for then they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial, they unfold its history. His work is ruled as much by an obsession with positive nothingness as by the obsession with a meaninglessness that has developed historically and is thus in a sense merited.” (p.153 of Aesthetic Theory)
Adorno is fascinated by the non-conceptual, which is to say the opposite of CONCEPT-which is synonymous with reason, rationality, and consciousness. The NEGATIVE, or non conceptual (unconscious) is a moment of experience that cannot be coopted by capitalism.
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