Elaine Martin Re-reading Adorno: The 'after-Auschwitz' Aporia in Forum addresses the issue of art after catastrophe. The argument is simple.

Because representation necessarily mediates between an ethical subject — and its reader, there is inevitably a moral peril involved in its artistic rendering. Representation after all requires a medium, medium implies the imposition of form, and form raises the question of literary and visual language as the means of representation. The writer in the aftermath of a catastrophe is confronted with an irresolvable aporetic situation: there was a moral obligation to bear witness to the awful yet the writer was constantly threatened with speechlessness due to the constraints which this event of unimaginable magnitude imposed upon conventional language that had become compromised. The artist or the writer is thus forced to express a horror of unimaginable magnitude by means of an impaired and misappropriated visual or linguistic medium, which seemed to be completely incommensurate with its subject of representation. The crisis of aesthetics thus acquired an ethical dimension.

Adorno is one philosopher who grappled with this aporia---the post-Auschwitz aporia, or the imperative to represent the egregious crimes of Auschwitz and the impossibility of doing so. Adorno’s ‘dictum----"It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz" is generally interpreted as denouncing all art after Auschwitz as invalid with silence the only response. Elaine Martin presents the argument that leads to the aporia:

All-encompassing instrumental rationality fused with irrational ends, technological domination and the reduction of all thought to the calculation of the efficiency of means - these Enlightenment and capitalist tendencies (for Adorno, as a member of the Frankfurt School, the perilous legacies of modernity) had their apotheosis in the Nazi death camps. Absolute reification has halted the process of self-reflection. As a form of supposedly free and individual expression it is irreconcilable with the fact that fascism not only integrated the individual, but along with it those cultural spheres presumed to be autonomous. In the concentration camps human life had been rendered indifferent and by extension expendable. This freedom of individual expression is thus but a façade and a denial of the fact that the death camps brought an end to the very idea of the autonomous subject.

Secondly, what credibility could cultural and artistic discourse possibly have, having themselves emanated from the very same ‘culture’ from which Auschwitz had sprung. The fact that the heinous mass murder of millions had been carried out within the framework of a society at the peak of cultural and artistic achievement meant that the legitimacy of artistic discourse, after this ‘culture’ had gone so catastrophically awry, was suddenly called into question