Artistic progress obeys you-can’t-do-it-like-that, not you-can’t-do-that-any-more

Evidence

Were the differences between various forms of representational painting merely the result of differences in the objects being represented? The casual way in which Adorno dismissed every kind of representational painting as conformist restoration can only be explained as an effect of the undertow of a mentality that expected sudden change: as an expectation that sudden change would result from a mimesis of gloom, in an all too literal sense. But Adorno himself remarked, It cannot generally be distinguished whether someone who abandons all forms of expression is a medium of reified consciousness or represents a speechless, expressionless expression that denounces that reification.' 95 But what was it that made the difference in any particular case? Precisely the difference between this and a perfect mimesis of reification that was Adorno's reason for regarding Beckett and Celan so highly. His evaluation of these two figures might have shown him that art does not progress according to the formula You can’t do that any more’ but instead according to the formula `You can’t do it like that any more’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 684

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Adorno/late-style highlights on modernism’s formal prohibitions as historical compulsion rather than stylistic preference.
• SEED: Angle: distinguish ‘no longer possible’ as material exhaustion versus stylistic dead end, using Adorno’s own Beckett/Celan valuations as the counterexample.