Beckett, Adorno, and the Possibility of Utopia.

step by step nowhere not single one knows how tiny steps nowhere stubbornly

- Samuel Beckett: Poem dedicated to Herbert Marcuse on his Eightieth Birthday. Art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time, art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be arts temporal end. -Adorno, Aesthetic Theory. Utopia is essentially in the determined negation, in the determined negation of that which merely is, and by concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what it should be. - Adorno and Bloch, Somethings Missing. Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience. - Adorno, Aesthetic Theory The truth-content of a work of art inheres in the determinate negation of untruth. - Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction So, yea, like, The actual meaning, the true content of an artwork lies not in its fallible content, but in its conscious reluctance to collapse into total meaninglessness. The remaining, glimmer is the blinking possibility of utopia. Or something. In those calm wastes he lets his wander till they are the first to close and the head relinquished falls back into place. He himself after a pause impossible to time finds at last his place and pose whereupon dark descends and at the same instant temperature comes to rest not far from freezing point. - Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones. Questions? Questions. How Utopian can Becketts works be said to be, when all it really offers us is a quasiglimmer-of-the-possibility-of-something. Is Adornos claim that a Utopia concretizing itself as something false, it always points at the same time to what it should be justified? Should they not perhaps suffer the same scrutiny as Dystopias: that you need to provide some kind of solution to the problem to be truly Utopian.

Ptolemy Raven Spare