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Reflections on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (un)do i n g Cr i t i ca l ph i l o s o p h y : elements coalesce in the task of critical theory: rE f l ec t i o n s o n Ad o r n o ’s to imagine the world differently by subjecting Ae s t h e t i c th e o r y it to critical negation. As I argue in this essay, Aesthetic Theory advances an understanding of art Larry McGrath against the backdrop of a world in which this University of California, Berkeley task becomes increasingly difficult to fulfill. Aesthetic Theory thus integrates the principles of critical theory with an account of art in its contemporary context. What is art? How does An Introduction to Adorno’s Thought and art affect us in the modern era? And, most Elucidation of Terminology significantly, how should philosophy engage art? These questions guide Aesthetic Theory in its Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was the effort to revive the power of philosophy and art foremost theorist of the Frankfurt School. in an era that blunts the critical potential of Originally established as an institute of social both. research, the Frankfurt School evolved as an informal grouping of German philosophers 1. Decline of metaphysics (“a post- and social critics, including Max Horkheimer, metaphysical world”): refers to an Walter Benjamin, and later Herbert Marcuse ontology of becoming, which this paper and Jurgen Habermas. The Frankfurt School credits to Friedrich Nietzsche’s assault on advanced a critical theory of society, which metaphysical certainty. This view holds deepened theoretical understanding of late that there exists no abstract (Platonic) capitalism, the rise of European fascism, and realm of stability beyond the physical the state of late modernity. This proceeded world; instead, the world is composed of by synthesizing elements of Marxism, struggle among competing forces. Thus, Psychoanalysis, and the German critical physics best describes our world, as one tradition (inaugurated by Kant). The core in constant motion, reducible only to the of this position was arguably best captured in activity of which it is composed. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Horkheimer’s Traditional and Critical Theory. 2. Instrumental rationality: can be For Adorno, critical theory grounded understood as a mode of thought that itself as a historically self-reflexive sociological converts the inherent value of some- critique. As a mode of philosophical- thing into its use-value. Money, for sociological inquiry, critical theory takes aim example, is purely instrumental; its at the ideological, scientific, and economic only value is its ability to purchase other conditions of post-industrial capitalism. These items, as no bill is worth anything beside conditions reflect the development of refined the instrumental use to which it is put. instruments of social control that prolong and For Adorno, instrumentalization is intensify mass unfreedom and absorb avenues the dominant mode of thought in late of resistance, such as those originally articulated modernity. by Marx. My interpretation of Adorno’s thought 3. Violence of the concept: refers to the thus foregrounds its Marxist elements. These consumption of all objects under the 64 conceptual control of the subject. This style of philosophical construction that is an epistemological counterpart to adapts itself to the philosophic conditions instrumental rationality, which imposes of a post-metaphysical world and resists the concept of identity1 on things to instrumentalization by the demands of render them know-able. We come instrumental reason. This will unfold as I trace to know society and nature through the development of the central theses of Aesthetic identity-thinking when all that is real Theory, analyzing the style of the text, which must harmonize with our own conceptual opposes the traditional logical and narrative system. form of philosophical texts. 4. Negative dialectics: attempts to limit the dominance of identity-thinking by I. Historically philosophy has built theories reflecting on the limits of our concepts: of aesthetics upon an ambivalent relationship to think what is un-thought. The task between their constituents, philosophy and is to negate the identity of what appears art. On the one hand, art, in its production immediate to us, and therefore think of and reception, is often understood to be what falls outside identity. For Adorno, inherently subjective. The subject’s aesthetic negative dialectics is the central task and experience of its engagement with an artwork driving thrust of critical theory. seems to be confined to the particularity of that experience. On the other hand, philosophy The beginning moments of Aesthetic aims to conceptualize what is universal in Theory offer the author’s reflections on that experience. Adorno recognizes “the the contemporary status of art; “nothing fundamental difficulty, indeed impossibility, concerning art is self-evident anymore, not of gaining general access to art by means of a its inner life, nor its relation to the world, system of philosophic categories.” At the same not even its right to exist.”2 My project takes time “aesthetic statements have traditionally Adorno’s reflections as its point of departure. presupposed theories of knowledge.”3 I will begin by identifying the socio-historical Thus, aesthetics must negotiate these twin conditions that efface art’s self-evidence: a dimensions, the philosophic demand to post-metaphysical world circumscribed by articulate universal categories and the instrumental rationality. It is in response to particularity of the work of art. This duality these two conditions that Adorno crafts his motivates a dialectical aesthetic that mediates negatively dialectical aesthetics. The question between the philosophical concept and the I am interested in asking is how philosophy work’s resistance to conceptual consumption. responds to these same conditions. In order Adorno’s dialectic mediation between these to answer this question I probe the style oppositional dimensions owes its groundwork of the philosophical text Aesthetic Theory. My to the seminal aesthetics of Kant and Hegel. analysis will uncover a negatively dialectical Kant’s contribution to the aesthetic tradition is his transcendental critique of aesthetic judgment. In the Critique of Judgment judgment is 1 Identity is that which renders an entity definable and a timeless faculty of knowledge; it functions as recognizable. This is an axiom of logic, according to which the identity relation holds only between a thing and itself: x = x. 2 Aesthetic 1 3 Aesthetic 332. 65 “the ability to think the particular as contained face of the violence done to it by the concept: under the universal.”4 Aesthetic judgment, “Aesthetics is not obliged, as under the spell in particular, grounds itself in the a priori of its object, to exorcise concepts. Rather, its faculty of taste, confirmed by “the fact that responsibility is to free concepts from their whenever we judge any beauty at all we seek exteriority to the particular object and to bring the standard for it a priori in ourselves, and them within the work.”7 that the aesthetic power of judgment itself This is a daunting project that Adorno legislates concerning the judgment as to takes up. The trick is to deploy philosophy whether something is beautiful or not.”5 Thus, successfully against its own medium : the the subject who deems a work of art beautiful concept. But before moving to whether Adorno does so on the basis of universal and necessary succeeds in his task, we should note the socio- conditions. Hegel’s’ philosophy of art responds historical circumstances that an aesthetics must to Kant’s transhistorical account of aesthetic also address. These are the historical conditions judgment. For Hegel, art has a history of philosophy now faces in a post-metaphysical its own. It’s understanding is not guided by world and the barbarity imposed on that world universal categories; instead, Spirit speaks by the logics of late capitalism. In the face of through individual works within their historical such conditions, aesthetics finds its task to era. In its opposition to the Kantian primacy of “free concepts from their exteriority” more the subject, whereby the concept subsumes the demanding. particular work of art, Hegel’s aesthetics reveals The decline of metaphysics marks the the works own cognitive comportment. rise of a world wherein the stable ground Drawing upon these contributions, upon which to found an aesthetics dissolves. Adorno crafts an aesthetics that builds upon Aesthetics can no longer ground itself in the the autonomous historicity of the work of art, lofty Kantian position of a transcendental yet recognizes that the subject who engages subject. This is because faculties of knowledge the work cannot dispose of its conceptual do not submit themselves to transhistorical apparatus. The work is a product of history, but investigation. Nor can Adorno work within the comprehension of its uniqueness depends upon logics of the “end of history,” in which Hegel’s its subjective mediation. Aesthetic Theory orients dialectic culminates. Theory must dispense this subjective mediation in new directions with the search for a stable starting point from attuned to the intrinsic temporality of the work. which investigation of the artwork proceeds. He writes of aesthetics, “as an investigative This has become the case following Nietzsche’s procedure subsumption never reveals aesthetic dismantlement of the truth of metaphysics in content, but if subsumption is rejected his revelation that “the ‘apparent’ world is the altogether, no content would be thinkable.”6 only true one: the ‘true’ world is merely added Hence, what is necessary is an aesthetics that by a lie.”8 Heidegger’s reflections on Nietzsche curbs the conceptual subsumption of the work. illustrate the world philosophy must now Dialectics, in its movement between the work address: and the concept, responds to this demand to preserve the particularity of the work in the [I] If the world were constantly changing and perishing, if it had its essence in the 4 Kant 18.
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