SOCIOLOGICAL POETICS and AESTHETIC THEORY by the Same Author

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SOCIOLOGICAL POETICS AND AESTHETIC THEORY By the same author THE SOCIOLOGY OF LITERATURE MARX AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY THE NOVEL AND REVOLUTION THE MYTH OF MASS CULTURE A SHORT HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGICAL THOUGHT Sociological Poetics and Aesthetic Theory Alan Swingewood Lecturer in So logy London School of Economics Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-0-333-43490-1 ISBN 978-1-349-18771-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-18771-3 © Alan Swingewood 1987 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1987 978-0-333-40458-4 AIl rights reserved. For infonnation, write: Scholarly & Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1987 ISBN 978-0-312-00039-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-312-00040-0 (pbk) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Swingewood, Alan. Sociological poetics and aesthetic theory. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Literature and society. 2. Literature Philosophy. 3. Literature-Aesthetics. I. Title. PN98.S6S95 1987 801 86-15633 ISBN 978-0-312-00039-4 ISBN 978-0-312-00040-0 (pbk.) Contents Preface vii P ART I THEORIES OF AESTHETIC FORM 1. Poetic Theory and Sociological Method 3 Poetics, Interpretation and Criticism 3 Sociology, Marxism and Poetic Theory 7 Russian Formalism: Main Characteristics 11 Mimesis, Defamiliarisation and Science 13 Limitations of Formalist Poetics: Marxist Criticisms 16 Sociological Poetics: Bakhtin 19 Modernism and the Dialogic Imagination 21 Genetic Structuralism and Poetic Theory: Goldmann 25 2. Sociological Aesthetics 35 Aesthetics and Aesthetic Value 35 Marxism I: From Marx to Trotsky 37 Simmel: Sociology of Aesthetic Form 50 Marxism II: Lukacs and the Theory of Realism 54 The Frankfurt School: Critical Theory and Aesthetic Value 60 Structuralist Aesthetics: from Mukarovsky to Goldmann 67 PART II ELEMENTS OF SOCIOLOGICAL POETICS Introduction: Art and the Social 77 3. Ideology and Cultural Production 79 The Concept of Production 79 v vi Contents Production Aesthetics: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Concept of Aura 80 Epic Theatre: Art as Ideology 84 Production Aesthetics: Critical Observations 87 Ideology and Art 88 Decentred Text and Ideology 93 4. Historical Poetics 99 What is Historical Poetics? 99 Genre and Society 102 Genre and Popular Culture 106 Tradition and Culture 109 Hegemony 113 Author 115 5. Sociological Stylistics 119 Style and Sociology 119 Realism, Modernism and Narrative 124 Stylistic Analysis: Lukacs and Adorno on Kafka and Modernism 127 Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Everyday Life 131 6. Discourse, Reading, Reception 135 Theory of Discourse 135 The Reader and the Production of Meaning 137 Reception Aesthetics 142 Conclusion 148 Conclusion: Aesthetics and Politics 150 Bibliography 153 Index 161 Preface In this book I have examined and criticised some of the major contemporary literary, aesthetic and cultural theories as they bear on the possibilities of a sociology of literature and art. Part I is largely historical, tracing the development of a sociological poetics and sociological aesthetics from their origins in nineteenth-century positivism, historicism and Marxism to their complex elaboration in modem Marxism, Formalism, Structuralism and literary theory. Part II explores the elements which constitute the basis of a socio logy of literature and art, historical, cultural and socio-political. I have not written a critique of modem literary and aesthetic theory or provided a detailed analysis of specific poetic and aesthetic texts and forms. The few examples cited are entirely arbi trary although relevant to the argument. I should emphasise the sociological nature of this enterprise and thus 'the silences of the text'. ALAN SWINGEWOOD vii .

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Aesthetic Theory

Draft Introduction The concept of philosophical aesthetics has an antiquated quality, as does the con- cept of a system or that of morals. This feeling is in no way restricted to artistic praxis and the public indifference to aesthetic theory. Even in academic circles, essays relevant to aesthetics have for decades now noticeably diminished. This point is made in a recent dictionary of philosophy: "There is scarcely another philosophical discipline that rests on such flimsy presuppositions as does aesthet- ics. Like a weather vane it is 'blown about by every philosophical, cultural, and scientific gust; at one moment it is metaphysical and in the next empirical; now normative, then descriptive; now defined by artists, then by connoisseurs; one day art is supposedly the center of aesthetics and natural beauty merely preliminary, the next day art beauty is merely second-hand natural beauty.' Moritz Geiger's description of the dilemma of aesthetics has been true since the middle of the nineteenth century. There is a double reason for this pluralism of aesthetic theo- ries, which are often even left unfinished: It resides on the one hand in the funda- mental difficulty, indeed impossibility, of gaining general access to art by means of a system of philosophical categories, and on the other, in the fact that aesthetic statements have traditionally presupposed theories of knowledge. The problem- atic of theories of knowledge returns directly in aesthetics, because how aesthetics interprets its objects depends on the concept of the object held by the theory of knowledge. This traditional dependency, however, is defined by the subject matter itself and is already contained in the terminology."1 Although this well describes the situation, it does not sufficiently explain it; the other philosophical disciplines, including the theory of knowledge and logic, are no less controversial 332 DRAFT INTRODUCTION 333 and yet interest in them has not flagged to a similar extent.
Art and Society in Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

ARTICLES Art and society in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Francisco Fianco Universidade de Passo Fundo Abstract The main theme of this text is the relations between art and society as woven by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, giving special emphasis, among others, to the concepts of disartification of art, truth content, authentic art and dissonance. To fulfill this purpose, we shall use the text of Adorno already mentioned, as well as other texts by the same author on specific issues and the support of scholars such as Rodrigo Duarte, Marc Jimenez and Marcia Tiburi, among others. Keywords: art; society; Aesthetic Theory; Theodor Adorno; contemporary art. Introduction The relations between art and society have always been complex, especially regarding to the dependence or submission of one in relation to the other. If a work of art, like any other cultural production, cannot be separated from the social context in which it occurs, it cannot be summed up to it or instrumentalized by it. Contemporary aesthetic phenomena lead us to perceive, much more explicitly than could ever have been perceived in the long historical trajectory of influence between both these spheres, that when devoid of its intrinsic truth, its autonomy, when subjugated to the social context, art itself loses its character of spontaneous production and becomes ideological propaganda. Of course, it would be naive to pretend that only in the XXth century, with the mass media advent, art would have been limited or influenced, although not consciously and intentionally, by a determined network of values and conceptions, even preconceptions, supported by a specific social, economic and historical configuration, which ended up giving these art works their individuality, enabling them to differentiate from the thousands of other art works already produced.
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46 I 47 A Habermasian Critique The thinkers presented in this paper, Jürgen Habermas, of Danto in Defense of Gombrich’s G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Danto and Ernst Gombrich, de- Theory of Visual Communication vote signifi cant time to the problem of modernity. For all of the fi gures discussed save Gombrich, the issue of Stephen Snyder aesthetic modernity is linked to the changing role of philosophy. The aesthetic question discussed here cen- ters on the critical problems encountered when explai- ning the shift of art away from mimetic representation to a non-representative form in which it seems as if “anything goes”. From an art critical perspective, the locus of artistic evaluation moves from being a matter of taste to a matter of judgment. Following the criti- cisms Habermas levels at Hegel, I use the aesthetic di- mension of the problem of modernity as a point of de- parture for exploring the advantages that Gombrich’s empirically based aesthetic theory offers. Though Hegel is considered by most philosophers to be the last of the systematic metaphysicians, the other fi gures discussed in the paper are representatives of the post-metaphysical era. Coming from the Frankfurt School, Habermas is rooted in the philosophical tradi- tion of Marx and Hegel. Nonetheless, he seeks to brid- ge the gap between the Continental and the Analytic traditions. Danto, known for his Analytical Philo- sophy of History, explicitly rejects metaphysics and the idea that a philosopher can have future historical knowledge based on the presumption of a unifi ed no- tion of history.
Art and Emancipation: Habermas's

New German Critique Art and Emancipation: Habermas’s “Die Moderne— ein unvollendetes Projekt” Reconsidered Gili Kliger The Fate of Aesthetics While, by Habermas’s own admission, his remarks on aesthetic modernity always had a “secondary character to the extent that they arose only in the context of other themes,” aesthetics and aesthetic modernity do occupy an important position in his overall oeuvre.1 Much of Habermas’s work is charac- terized by an effort to restore the modern faith in reason first articulated by Enlightenment thinkers. It was, on Habermas’s terms, problematic that the cri- tique of reason launched by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, left them without a basis on which any reasoned critique of society could be pursued.2 For those theo- rists, Adorno especially, aesthetic experience held the promise of a reconciled relation between the sensual and the rational, posing as an “other” to the dom- inating force of instrumental reason in modern society and offering a way to I wish to thank Martin Ruehl, the Department of German at the University of Cambridge, Peter Gordon, John Flower, and the anonymous reviewers for their indispensable guidance and helpful suggestions. 1. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Rich- ard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 199. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 138–39. New German Critique 124, Vol. 42, No. 1, February
Adorno's Aesthetics Today

Adorno’s Aesthetics Today SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN Adorno in the Present In many respects, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory seems to belong to a past that is moving away from us at increasing speed. Adorno himself acknowledges this belatedness, for instance when in the draft introduction he says that already the very term philosophical aesthetics “has an antiquated quality”.1 In this parti- cular passage his suggestion is tied to what he sees as the nominalism of modern art, whose emergence he locates in Croce and Benjamin, but we may also think of Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism”, which would render the observation even more acute.2 But while aesthetics must acknowledge that it no longer can subsume its objects, it can just as little opt for mere particularity; there is an inescapable antinomy between empty universality and the con- tingency of particular judgements. And from the vantage point of the present, this seems only to have been exacerbated: no theory appears to be able to delimit a priori what counts as artistic practice, as a work, and as an aesthetic experience—an emptying out that, at the same time as Adorno’s reflections on art were drawing to a close, was registered both in the arts themselves and in many strands of philosophy, notably in institutional art theory, although with- out the historical depth and socio-political urgency that we find in Adorno. If we add to this his infamous resistance to popular art, his highly selective canon of works drawn from an equally selective idea of tradition, and the fact that as time went by he became increasingly remote from the avant-garde of his own present, his obsolescence seems to be confirmed.
Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 13 (2011) Issue 3 Article 4 Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought Oleg Gelikman Soka University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Gelikman, Oleg. "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1791> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
The Anti-Aesthetic ESSAYS on POSTMODERN CULTURE

The Anti-Aesthetic ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE Edited by Hal Foster BAY PRESS Port Townsend, Washington Copyright © 1983 by Bay Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition published in 1983 Fifth Printing 1987 Bay Press 914 Alaskan Way Seattle, WA 98104 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Anti-aesthetic. I. Modernism (Aesthetics) -Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Civilization, Modern-1950-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Foster, Hal. BH301.M54A57 1983 909.82 83-70650 ISBN 0-941920-02-X ISBN 0-941920-0 I-I (pbk.) Contributors JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris, is the author of The Mirror of Production (Telos, 1975) and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Telos, 1981). DOUGLAS CRIMP is a critic and Executive Editor of October. HAL FOSTER (Editor) is a critic and Senior Editor at Art in America. KENNETH FRAMPTON, Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, is the author of Modern Architecture (Oxford University Press, 1980) . .. JURGEN HABERMAS, present~y associated with the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, Germany, is the author of Knowledge and Human Interests (Beacon Press, 1971), Theory and Practice (Beacon Press, 1973), Legitima tion Crisis (Beacon Press, 1975) and Communication and the Evolution of Society (Beacon Press, 1979). FREDRIC JAMESON, Professor of Literature and History of Conscious ness, University of California at Santa Cruz, is the author of Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press, 1971), The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972), Fables of Aggression (University of California Press, 1979) and The Political Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1981).
Kant's Aesthetic Theory

CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS. International Journal of Philosophy N.o 12, December 2020, pp. 43-51 ISSN: 2386-7655 Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4304051 Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: key issues. An Introduction by the Guest Editor of the Special Issue JOÃO LEMOS*1 NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal Abstract This introduction presents an overview of the special issue of Con-Textos Kantianos devoted to Kant’s aesthetic theory. The articles in this issue have been organized into two sections: those written by keynote-authors, and those written in response to the general call for papers. Within each of these two sections, articles have been organized thematically, although the philosophical traditions that they engage with, as well as points of contact between articles, have also been considered. In the first section, keynote-authors address questions of aesthetic normativity; the role of aesthetics in the acquisition of empirical concepts; the emotional nature of aesthetics; subjectivity and disinterestedness; connections between aesthetics, anthropology, and politics; and aesthetic non-conceptualism. The second section begins with contributions dealing with matters of formalism and conceptualism in Kant’s aesthetics, as well as their relation and relevance to thinking about art, the arts, and contemporary art. It continues with papers that address key issues of Kant’s aesthetics, such as the free play and the role of imagination, as well as possible complementarities between the three Critiques. It closes with articles that focus on the reception of Kant’s aesthetic theory in the works of major philosophers of the 20th century, namely within critical theory and the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition.
Expression in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository Chapter 1 Introduction 1. General Considerations This thesis investigates Adorno’s notion of expression in Aesthetic Theory . It describes some of the features of his critique of the Western aesthetical-philosophical- historical tradition important for the comprehension of his Aesthetic Theory primarily involving theories about the relation between the individual and nature. Adorno suggests that the understanding of this relation amongst the Western aesthetical- philosophical-historical tradition, mostly coming from the ideas of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, contributed for a comprehension of aesthetics which emphasises either the individual or nature. In either case, Adorno perceives an unbalanced relation between individual and nature which, according to him, it is the root of suffering. For that reason, suffering is in Aesthetic Theory, the expression of the relation - or the unbalanced relation - between the individual and nature. Furthermore, he considers that all manners of conceiving expression, apart from expression as suffering, are contributing to the unbalanced relation between the individual and nature thus perpetuating suffering. His notion of expression as suffering has two different directions in his theory. On the one hand, it expresses the unbalanced relation between the individual and nature and on the other hand, it makes possible consciousness about this relationship motivating change minimising suffering. Therefore, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory reveals his understanding of suffering as both positive and negative experience in which expression is a form of knowledge acquisition qualitatively different from knowledge acquired through reason.
Aesthetic Autonomy and Praxis: Art and Language in Adorno and Habermas.1

1 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The International Journal of Philosophical Studies (2011) 19: 2, 155-175, on 14th June 2011 available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/ To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2011.539365. Aesthetic Autonomy and Praxis: art and language in Adorno and Habermas.1 Jennifer A. McMahon Abstract Aesthetic autonomy has been given a variety of interpretations, which in many cases involve a number of claims. Key among them are: (i) art eludes conventional conceptual frameworks and their inherent incompatibility with invention and creativity; and (ii) art can communicate aspects of experience too fine grained for discursive language. To accommodate such claims one can either adopt a convention based account or a natural kind account. A natural kind theory can explain the first but requires some special scaffolding in order to support the second, while a convention based account accommodates the second but is incompatible with the first. Theodor W. Adorno attempts to incorporate both claims within his aesthetic theory but arguably in his aesthetic theory each is cancelled out by the other. Art’s independence of entrenched conceptual frameworks needs to be made compatible with its communicative role. Jürgen Habermas, in contrast, provides a solution by way of his theory of language. I draw upon the art practice of the contemporary Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in order to demonstrate this. Keywords: Adorno, Habermas, Olafur Eliasson, Brandom, aesthetic autonomy, art, pragmatism, theory of language. 1 Introduction 2 The concept of aesthetic autonomy can be interpreted in at least two different ways.
Art and Aesthetics After Adorno

The Townsend Pa P e r s i n T h e h u m a n i T i e s No. 3 Art and Aesthetics After Adorno Jay M. Bernstein Claudia Brodsky Anthony J. Cascardi Thierry de Duve Aleš Erjavec Robert Kaufman Fred Rush Art and Aesthetics After Adorno The Townsend Pa P e r s i n T h e h u m a n i T i e s No. 3 Art and Aesthetics After Adorno J. M. Bernstein Claudia Brodsky Anthony J. Cascardi Thierry de Duve Aleš Erjavec Robert Kaufman Fred Rush Published by The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California | Berkeley Distributed by University of California Press Berkeley, Los Angeles, London | 2010 Copyright ©2010 The Regents of the University of California ISBN 978-0-9823294-2-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Art and aesthetics after Adorno / J. M. Bernstein...[et al]. p. cm. — (The Townsend papers in the humanities ; no. 3) ISBN 978-0-9823294-2-9 1. Aesthetics, Modern—20th century 2. Aesthetics, Modern—21st century 3. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903–1969. Ästhetische Theorie. I. Bernstein, J. M. BH201.A78 2010 111’.850904—dc22 2010018448 Inquiries concerning proposals for the Townsend Papers in the Humanities from Berkeley faculty and Townsend Center affiliates should be addressed to The Townsend Papers, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720- 2340, or by email to [email protected]. Design and typesetting: Kajun Graphics Manufactured in the United States of America Credits and acknowledgements for quoted material appear on page 180–81.
Aesthetic-Dimension- -Marcuse.Pdf

THE AESTHETII DlmEDSIOD TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF MARXIST AESTHETICS HERBERT MARC USE Beacon Press Boston Originally published in German under the title Die Permanenz der Kunst: Wider eine bestimmte Marxistische Aesthetik (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, copyright© 1977 by Herbert Marcuse) English version translated and revised by Herbert Marcuse and Erica Sherover, copyright© 1978 Beacon Press books are published under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 -9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Marcuse, Herbert, 1896-- The aesthetic dimension. Translation of Die Permanenz der Kunst. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883 - Aesthetics - Addresses, essays, lectures. 1. Title. B3305.M74M3513 1978 335.4'11 76--9001 ISBN 0-8070-1518-0 Eantents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix I 1 n 22 m 40 IV 54 v 62 Conclusion 71 Notes 75 Bibliography 81 Index 83 v AEknawledgments Erica Sherover has given the manuscript a critical reading from the first draft to the final version. She has discussed with me every paragraph, and insisted on improvements. This little book is dedi cated to her: my wife, friend, and collaborator. Intensive discussions with my friends Leo · Lowenthal and Reinhard Lettau have been a great help and a great pleasure. Leo Lowenthal has again proved his reputation as a fierce reader and critic; Reinhard Lettau has demonstrated that authentic literature-literature as resistance-is still possible today.