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Today
it goes without saying that nothing concerning art
goes without saying, much less without thinking. Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist. (p 1) |
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Introduction
to Adorno
(by WVan Reijen)
Both the early romantics and Adorno react to the fact that
money
and 'valid' rules derive from a single social logic
- the trans-subjective
logic of the exchange of equivalents. In the words of Novalis, "Money
is the general, self-constituted value of all things." "
Money,
the essence of his work and his being, is alien to man
, and this
alien creature controls him and he worships it."
Criticism however, cannot develop outside of capital , in a social vacuum. It needs a medium that does not simply dispose of existing reason. With the help of 'aesthetic subversion' it should call attention to its deficient mode and thus finally bring it to its actual existence. This medium constitutes art, both for the early romantics and for Adorno , and it is the central concept that can undermine reason in Schelling's "intellectual view." With this view, the 'categorical imperative of theory,' it is perhaps easiest to understand important aspects of Adorno's aesthetic theory. The term "Aesthetic Theory" is as ambiguous as the term "intellectual view." "Theory" implies that the subjects to be studied are determined by reason. On the other hand, aesthetics themselves cannot be determined by reason. "Fortunately, works of art need not endure..." their immanent telos, according to Adorno, is to withstand the pressure of the categorical purposes of reason. Aesthetic Theory and its subject - art - must remain intellectual yet cannot simply deny reason but must absorb it in its substance . In numerous places Adorno speaks of the "spirit of the works of art" which points beyond subjects that are purely determined by reason through the way that they concentrate on the clear, concrete and predetermined. It is between spontaneous immediateness and the highest intellectuality, works of art find their place . (paraphrased from Adorno: An Introduction , by Willem van Reijen, p77 .) |
Adorno's
Aesthetic Theory
(selections)
What ordinary language and conformist aesthetics have termed the enjoyment of art, on analogy with real enjoyment, has probably never existed and will probably never exist. To fetishize the enjoyment of art is to be a crude and insensitive person, who tends to give himself away by describing something as a Åfeast for the eye.Ô (p 18) The masses want the shameful difference separating art from their lives eliminated, because if art were to have any real effect on them it would be that of instilling a sense of loathing, which is the last thing they want. These are some of the subjective predispositions that make it possible to line up art on the side of consumer goods. Objective vested interests do the rest. (p 24)
The idea of freedom, which is closely related to
that of aesthetic autonomy, owes its existence to domination; indeed, freedom
is a kind of generalized domination....Thus they (works of art) reflected
and internalized the domination of society.(p 26)
(from) 4 Art as the Language of Suffering (p 27-8)The only possible ingress into art is the idea that something on the other side of realityës veil - a veil woven by the interaction of institutions and false needs - objectively demands art. It demands a kind of art that can speak for what is hidden by the veil....What the enemies of modern art, endowed with greater sensitivity than its timid apologists, call the negativity of modern art is the epitome of all that has been repressed by the established culture. By cathecting the repressed, art internalizes the repressing principle, i.e. the unredeemed condition of the world, instead of merely airing futile protests against it. Art identifies and expresses that condition, thus anticipating its overcoming. (from) 5 Philosophy of History and the New (p 28-32)Immersing oneself in the historical dimension is quite a useful thing to do, provided one does it with a view to uncovering what has remained an unresolved problem in the past. History of ideas as it is practiced today has, however, come to see its task in interpreting away innovation as such.
In the new of art, individual and society are being
tied into a knot.
Fantastic art in romanticism, mannerism and baroque depicts something non-existent as though it had being. These invented entities are modifications of empirical reality, the effect being the presentation of the unreal as real. This effect is facilitated by the fact that the work of art originated in reality. Now, modern art takes the burden of reality so seriously that fiction and fantasy have fallen by the wayside completely. Nor does modern art merely want to duplicate the facade of reality, On the contrary, true modern art makes an uncompromising reprint of reality while at the same time avoiding being contaminated by it. Kafkaës power as a writer, for example, is due to his negative sense of reality. Previously, styles and artistic practices were negated by new styles and practices. Today, however, modernism negates tradition itself....modernism in its earliest theoretical articulations, with Baudelaire, takes on a fatalistic ring. The new is intimately related to death. In this sense, Baudelaireës satanism is an identification with the negativity of social conditions, although he himself thought of it as a critical motif.
World weariness runs into the enemy: to the world....In art,
direct protest is reactionary. Even critical art has to surrender
itself to that which it opposes. That is why in Baudelaire
the image of nature is strictly prohibited.
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a leading and influential member of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, an important community of radical scholars which included Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. Adorno's books include Dialectic of Enlightenment (w/ MH), Negative Dialectics, and the Jargon of Authenticity. Translated from German by C. Lenhardt, Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York, 1984. pub. 1970. |
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