Junk for Code

Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others#16

Rick's sixteenth post on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others takes the ethical turn to compassion in relation to the suffering of others.

My previous response to Rick's fifteenth post can be found here.That response took us to the threshold of the world of becoming behind the veil of a suburban world of stable objects and to the repression of everyday suffering behind the secure mode of life.

The paragraph from Sontag's text that has been selected by Rick says: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” (Sontag, p. 101)

And we have these comments by Rick:

"Art can be, among other things, compassionate action. Is it not an act of compassion to look without blinking at the suffering of others? To face it directly without mixing it with one’s own psychological motivations? Might this not be the first step toward transfiguration?
“But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,/ To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead;"
Walt Whitman, The Wound-Dresser, from Leaves of Grass

Hence we have the embrace of a key concern in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory of the aesthetic as the language of suffering. Adorno says:

"Reason can subsume suffering under concepts; it can furnish means to alleviate suffering; but it can never express suffering in the medium of experience, for to do so would be irrational by reason's own standards. ...What recommends itself, then, is the idea that art may be the only remaining medium of truth in an age of incomprehensible terror and suffering. As the real world becomes dark, the irrationality of art is becoming rational, expecially at a time when art is radically tenebrous itself."

Adorno then ties this conception of the aesthetic to a defence of modern art:

"What the enemies of modern art, endowed with a greater sensitivity than its timid apologists, call the negativity of modern art is the epitome of all that has been repressed by the established culture. That is indeed the direction in which modern art is moving. By cathecting the repressed, art internalizes the repressing principle , i.e. the unredeemed conditon of the world (Unheil), instead of merely airing futile protests against art...It is this , and not the photographic renditon of the unredeemed state or a false sense of beatitude, that defines the position of modern art towards a gloomy objectivity. Everything else is worthless mawkishness."
(Adorno, pp. 27-28)

Art is the remembrance of accummulated historical agony. It lends a voice to suffering in an attempt to express unmet needs and unfilfilled desires in a damaged life. That is the ethical core of art and the aesthetic (the concepts we deploy to talk about art and to interpret what art expresses). It is also the core of Adorno's Aethetic Theory. This core is put up front at the end of Adorno's text:

"Surely it would be better for art to vanish altogether than to forget suffering, which is art's expression and which gives substance to its form. Suffering, not positivity, is the humane content of art...It is difficult to imagine what would become of art as historiography if it wiped out the memory of accummulated suffering."

Expressing the pain of others is the core impulse of art in a damaged life that we live amidst the glitzy seductive culture of consumer capitalism that veils the way our liberal society is socially unjust, economically dysfunctional, culturally divided, politically fractured and ecologically unsustainable.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 7, 2003 12:03 PM | TrackBack