Disjecta Membra: Adorno in a Letter to Elisabeth Lenk, 1964
The question about the legacy of theoretical consciousness and artistic production is indeed central to my own intellectual fate, that is to say, still unresolved — I continue to hope, against all reason, that I will yet be able to realize something of what I thought I could accomplish as an artist, and that competent people also thought I could accomplish, so I am not afraid of being caught in the Nero-like qualis artifix pereo [“What an artist dies with me!”]. This implies, admittedly, that I don’t, after all, consider the two to be as incompatible as you suggest; I have had the experience precisely with artists of the highest caliber that lack of reflection and adequate intellectual awareness — often overcompensated for by ad hoc pseudo-theories based on Weltanschauung — today, when there is nothing for them to hold onto, has also affected their own production in the most grievous way. The greatest example of this is Schoenberg, who in the lesser texts of his so-called major works truly raged against himself. However, I am of the opinion that the reason for the falseness lies in the relationship between the two spheres, [in the fact] that so many artists are trying to achieve the atrocity of a synthesis of intellectual content and art. In other words, they pump some sort of ideas into the works and mistake that for meaningful content. The relation of the intellect to art can only consist in the intellect, above all the critical intellect, giving directives as to what is possible and what is not possible; it cannot become the immediate object or content of art. Beckett, a person who embodies truly indescribably advanced consciousness and at the same time maintains a strict distance from all interpretation of his works, and from mine as well, seems exemplary to me in this regard. And I myself forget, when I am composing, literally everything that I have ever thought about it, without, I hope, forgetting it after all. //
Jacques Hérold, Untitled, 1959. Gallery of Surrealism.
From The Challenge of Surrealism: The Correspondence of Theodor W. Adorno and Elisabeth Lenk, Translated by Susan H. Gillespie, University of Minnesota Press, 2015, 78-79.
