In Cultural Criticism and Society, Adorno famously said that "Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". What he meant by saying this was not as simple as rendering poetry post-Auschwitz as impossible, but that art in general post-Auschwitz would be engaging with the social structures that were present in the socio-political events that caused the Holocaust, allowing for the continued reification of such structures. Tragically, it is impossible for a poet to genuinely address the victims of the Holocaust. But in Violence, Slavoj Žižek points out that poetry has always been an art form for those things that cannot be directly addressed to:
"Poetry is always, by definition, 'about' something that cannot be addressed directly, only alluded to. One shouldn't be afraid to take this a step further and refer to the old saying that music comes in when words fail."What Žižek indirectly relates to here is that aspect of life according to which we rarely address anything directly. We, in fact, refer to them through a medium which essentially transforms things as they "truthfully" are into things that can be culturally understood. This medium may be used by way of metaphor (as in poetry), or – more often – by way of a construct of social reality. When we think we are referring to a material object (such as a car, a book, an animal, or more or less anything else), we are in fact referring to the social concept of that object: that is, the socially-determined implications, purposes, histories, categorisations, and associated terminologies of that object. As such, it is rare (or, perhaps, impossible) that we should ever refer to material things as they are in-themselves.
At first, especially from a metaphysical realist point of view, this doesn't seem plausible. Is it really the case that we cannot refer to an object without redirecting our reference to the object's participation in social reality? In his Logical Structure of the World, Carnap proposes that any scientific object can be defined purely by statements about already-defined objects. But this inevitably presupposes a definition of some axiomatic object which, given the empirical basis of Carnap's philosophy, would surely have to be some indivisibly fundamental material object. The problem with this is not only that it seems unlikely for the natural sciences to find such an object (which would presumably have to be some sort of material Form of the Good), but also that it is in fact impossible for us to genuinely grasp anything in purely material existence.
Regardless of how we comprehend and communicate about an object, it is always transformed from the object-in-itself to the object-for-a-medium. If I am to think of the desk in front of me, the thought in my mind is not the desk but the immaterial concept of the desk: my perception of it, with the immaterial attributes (the word "desk", my ownership of it, the socially determined purpose of a desk, the personally determined purpose of this desk in particular, and so on) appended to it. If I talk to someone about the desk (thereby moving the object-for-a-medium from my own consciousness to the public), there are similar immaterial attributes communicated. When I talk to somebody about a physical object, it is not as though my language somehow shoves the physical object in their mind; rather, the concept of the object is held immaterially in and amongst my language and our mutual understanding of it.
Of course, a response to this comes from reductive materialists, who will claim that such "concepts" are actually just physical objects in my brain – that is, a precise arrangement of electric charges inside my skull. However, this can be challenged by referring back to the example of communication: if two people are talking about a particular object, it is unlikely that the arrangement of electric charges in their brains are identical. What if one person has a particular understanding of that object that the other lacks? Accordingly it is seen that a concept is not simply a material thing because of the varying ways in which it can be manifested. However, this leads us on to the second response from class nominalism. A class nominalist would argue that, in fact, the variance of comprehensions of concepts is perfectly reconcilable with materialism, because when I conceptually refer to a seemingly universal concept (for example, the concept of dogs in the sentence "apples are fruits"), I am just referring to the set of all appropriate material things (following from the example, the sentence simply refers to all apples in the physical world). The objection to this is to ask: what are these "sets" or "classes"? When I refer to the abstract concept of "a class", am I referring to a group of physical things? What physical things are these? Furthermore, we can imagine a world in which the computer had not been invented, but the idea had been developed by some scientists. When these scientists refer to the abstract concept of a "computer", there are no physical things to refer to: does this render the concept meaningless?
As such, it can be concluded that any attempt to refer to material things inevitably condemns us to mere reference to immaterial concepts. To refer back to Žižek's response to Adorno, we can analogously see poetry as he refers to it as the social reality of concepts, and the things that poetry alludes to as everything that we ever think or speak of: just as poetry can never directly address the Holocaust, our thoughts and language can never directly address any of the material world before us.
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