Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

thoroughly negative one, showing as it does the negative aspects of what is called
reality. With the gesture of negation that it uses in order to reflect societal reality
mimetically, it reveals something about that reality that usually remains hidden. This
hidden essence of reality is exposed as something that is unacceptable, a nonessence,
while at the same time the need for something else, for a real essence, is
suggested: “Even while art indicts the concealed essence, which it summons into
appearance, as monstrous, this negation at the same time posits as its own measure
an essence that is not present, that of possibility; meaning inheres even in the disavowal
of meaning.” 78
Adorno firmly insists on giving the negative a privileged status because he is
convinced that only by a gesture of negation does one have the right to appeal to the
“other,” to the “utopian.” 79 To him the objective of modern art is to make people
aware of the terrifying character of everyday reality. Under these circumstances,
negativity is the only way to keep the idea of the utopian alive. Indeed, the utopian is
inconceivable in a positive form, for no image is powerful enough to illustrate the
utopian in a positive way without making it appear ridiculous and banal.
The utopian element in Adorno’s work is essentially negative—utopia, after all,
means “nowhere.” While it still refers to the notion of the existence of the “other,”
this “other” cannot and must not be named, because then it runs the risk of no
longer remaining the “other” but of becoming “the same.” Utopia, then, can only acquire
form in a negative manner, by continually confronting reality with what it is not:
“Insofar as we are not allowed to cast the picture of utopia, insofar we do not know
what the correct thing would be, we know exactly, to be sure, what the false thing
is. That is actually the only form in which utopian thinking is given to us at all.” 80
Works of art create a privileged field for the dialectic operations of negativity.
This is because they assume a concrete formal shape. This means that they go a
stage further than abstract negations, which have little persuasive power because
they are not very determinate. Adorno takes Samuel Beckett’s work as an example.
Its value lies in the way his texts take the form of a determinate negation of meaning.
It is not a case here of absence of meaning—in that case Beckett’s texts would
be irrelevant rather than illuminating. Meaninglessness is given form in them through
the concrete negation of meaningfulness. As a result it is possible to preserve the
memory of what meaning is capable of being. It is precisely here that the value of his
work is to be found. 81
This complex interplay of mimesis, negativity, and utopia underlies various of
Adorno’s definitions of modern art. He states, for instance, that “art is modern
through mimesis of the hardened and alienated; only thereby, and not by the refusal
of a mute reality, does art become eloquent; this is why art no longer tolerates the
innocuous.” 82 While the modern social system is characterized by reification and
alienation, art is able to register a protest against it only by relying upon mimesis to
make this reification its own. In doing so it carries out an operation of determinate
negation by exposing reality as a combination of broken fragments. As a result some-
4 Architecture as Critique of Modernity