ABSTRACT
The assertion that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric is already obsolete. “Barbaric” no longer gets to what is going in. When even that poetry that is equal to the event and gives in neither to cynicism nor to the beatniks is absorbed by established culture and marketed; when even an uncompromising negativity-assuming it is ever heard-becomes affirmative and serves to demonstrate to the existing culture that there is still “freedom of speech and thought,” then not only the intellectual dimension but even the physical dimension of contradiction has become a dimension of the established world. It is impossible to push ahead and squeeze negation out of the fully reified language: refusal and accusation do not fall on deaf ears but rather on understanding ones, which hear the message and translate it into sociology, psychology or aesthetics. The rest is politics and propaganda, which pretend to be self-criticism. Marxist doctrine is an academic topic in “government-sponsored” seminars and private universities, where it is presented as objectively as possible (“one has to know the strengths and weaknesses of the enemy one wants to defeat”). Samuel Beckett is a great box office hit on Broadway. In an elegant, expensive and exquisite New York “magazine” in which the fully senseless luxury of the “affluent society”
overwhelms the text with a flood of glossy full-page ads (status symbols make you sensual), a long article appears, written by a Negro and filled with hate and conviction, describing the horrors of black existence in an artificially sensationalist style, and announces to the whites the approaching catastrophe: the article is gobbled up with enthusiasm and scholarly interest. Things are more serious in the field of action. The pitifully helpless, tiny peace groups are either suspected of subversion and pulled in front of investigation committees or they compete with each other to keep the subversives out of their ranks (while the truth then comes out that for this society peace is the real subversion). The dockworkers strike, but their own union declares that “military cargo” will continue to be handled. Less seriously: it is an old story that liberal intellectuals quickly cling to the ruling powers and as soon as they get close to the democratic throne, they promote and justify its deeds in good writing. What is new are the misdeeds of a so-called avant-garde, which unloads its impotence in a hatred of the intellect, turning a true social criticism into an object of humor (thereby turning Ionesco on his head: while he showed normal language to be nonsense, this avant-garde treat contradiction and mourning as “fun”).
