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June 29, 2006
Romanticism is defined by its "opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values." Tis well known isn't it. iIt is my understanding of Romanticism. Or that Romanticism can be identified as a kind of change (a reaction to a broadly-defined sense of the Enlightenment values, or the historical emergence of "Romantic ideology"), which is in turn constituted as a stable identity; or as an endless, nonteleological process of becoming (Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze).
I'm not sure about the "Romantic ideology". What does that refer to? Self-reflexive autonomy? That art , or even consciousness, can set one free of the ruins of history and culture'? I'm reminded of a remark made by Adorno in Minima Moralia. In considering the viability of cultural criticism, he writes:
Among the motifs of cultural criticism one of the most long-established and central is that of the lie: that culture creates the illusion of a society worthy of man which does not exist; that it conceals the material conditions upon which all human works rise, and that, comforting and lulling, it serves to keep alive the bad economic determination of existence. This is the notion of culture as ideology, which appears at first sight common to both the bourgeois doctrine of violence and its adversary, both to Nietzsche and Marx. But precisely this notion, like all expostulation about lies, has a suspicious tendency to become itself ideology. (p.5)
Adorno tended to think of ideology not in classical Marxist terms, as the "false consciousness" of a given economic class which ought to be submitted to immanent critique, but rather in more broadly humanist terms, as an exclusionary set of ideas seeking to efface difference and dissent and which ought to be resisted by the assertion of particularity. Ideology, in other words, (including the ideology of cultural criticism) cannot cope with reality in its fulness and will always elide its distinctive features.
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