175sibility of giving utopia a concrete form. In the complexity suggested in the drawings
and fully realized in the paintings, the “dark side” of the world of New Babylon also
is depicted. Drawings and paintings show a condition in which wanderlust and the
lack of permanent ties are untrammeled, but they also make it clear that this condi-
tion is inseparably bound up with the death drive, with groundlessness and indeter-
minacy. A painting, as Constant said way back in his Cobra period, is an animal, a
night, a scream, a human being, or all of that together. This notion continues to have
its repercussions in the work of his New Babylon period. As a result, the paintings
make visible something that Constant was still able to conceal in the maquettes and
the narratives—the fact that this utopian world is not perfect and harmonious, that
the dismantling of all the conventions leads to a zero point of human existence in
which the authenticity that is striven for is reduced merely to a torrent of perceptions
and sensations; it is no longer an ideal but a caricature. In this sense New Babylon is
a striking proof of the impossibility of giving utopia a concrete form and of making
poetry the only moment of reality: one cannot “dwell” in New Babylon.
To the extent that New Babylon represents the social criticism of the situa-
tionists in a concrete form, these remarks can also be applied to them. Debord, for
instance, in his criticism of urbanism states that the proletarian revolution will lead to
individuals and communities constructing their own environment and appropriating
their own history. The land as a whole will be restructured according to the needs of
the workers’ councils. Space will become flexible to provide possibilities of play.^38
Here too the relation between revolution and utopia was short-circuited, as though
the proletarian revolution and the establishment of workers’ councils would be suf-
ficient guarantees for the realization of a condition in which alienation is abolished.
The basic misunderstanding here has to do with the interpretation of the con-
cepts of “alienation” and “authenticity,” which are seen as opposites. Both are dif-
ficult categories to pin down. It is questionable, however, whether they would really
be mutually exclusive, as the avant-garde logic assumes. The avant-garde had ele-
vated the achieving of authenticity to a fundamental aim, reacting to the empty dis-
play and insincerity that characterized nineteenth-century culture.^39 History has
shown, however, that the figure of authenticity is one that is constantly receding and
eludes one’s grasp. The authenticity that the avant-garde imagined winning by its re-
peated iconoclastic gestures proved to be momentary and intangible. The quest for
authenticity always had to start all over again, because the result lent itself all too eas-
ily to commodification, to recuperation, that is, by the logic of consumption, the very
thing against which the whole quest was set up. This led in the long run to an im-
passe, which is responsible for the antinomial condition of art and architecture today.No Way Out: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states that the commitment of art to utopia is the
source of the most important of the antinomies that govern its present condition: “At174