DOCSLIB.ORG

S AESTHETIC THEORY a Thesis Submitted to Middlesex Un

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
S AESTHETIC THEORY a Thesis Submitted to Middlesex Un View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Middlesex University Research Repository THE MEMORY AND EXPEC TATION OF AESTHETICS : A STUDY OF ADORNO‟S AESTHETIC THEORY A thesis submitted to Middlesex University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Alan McPherson BA., MA The School of Arts and Education Middlesex University October 2009 ABSTRACT Alan McPherson Title: The Memory and Expectation of Aesthetics: A Study of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory This study aims to clarify the underlying conceptual structure of Adorno‟s theoretical position with regard to both philosophy and art and to examine the expectation of philosophical aesthetics. I introduce Aesthetic Theory from a morphological point of view and claim that the form and structure of this unfinished text reveals a great deal about the book, as it exemplifies Adorno‟s theory of meaning. I claim that for Adorno dialectic is better thought of not in its Hegelian form but as a Kantian antinomy. This is because the dialectical oppositions he identifies cannot be resolved under the capitalist conditions of the administered world. I claim that philosophy understood as the construction of a form of totality, the constellation, provides the key to understanding Adorno‟s theory of meaning. This theory consists of three linked concepts: midpoint, constellation and parataxis. I further claim that for Adorno art and philosophy are structured in the same way. Adorno has in effect developed a conception of art that depends for its ultimate justification on the concept of rank as explicated by the completion of the work of art by philosophy. Art and theory are thus entwined in a mimetic relationship. I claim there is a temporal dichotomy at the centre of Adorno‟s conception of the work of art, that it is both transient and absolute. This antinomy is what makes the work of art a paradoxically absolute commodity precisely because Adorno‟s concept of the work of art is modelled on the commodity form. I claim that Adorno‟s conception of the artwork as an instant is clearly closely related, in a structural and conceptual sense, to his conception of how philosophy works. Truth for Adorno is always located in the present instant. My textual analysis leads me to claim that for Adorno a utopian element is involved in writing a negative dialectical text. Finally, I claim that a theory of the art form in all its different typologies is best suited to carry out detailed critique and theoretical reflection on contemporary art. Philosophical aesthetics can only supply an historical perspective. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I should like to thank The School of Arts of Middlesex University for the award of a bursary for part-time study for an MPhil/PhD in The Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. This award was made in the autumn of 2001 and taken up in the spring of 2002 on completion of my M.A. Without this financial support this project would not have been possible. Above all I should like to thank my Director of Studies, Professor Peter Osborne, for his wise supervision of this research project and for all his, encouragement, valuable advice and incisive critique. I should also like to thank my two second supervisors, Professor Alexander García Düttmann (to 2003) and Dr. Stewart Martin for their invaluable advice and critical commentaries on the project. C O N T E N T S PREFACE 1 CHAPTER ONE: REMEMBERING AESTHETICS 9 Section one: Aesthetics and Aesthetic Theory 9 Brief historical background to aesthetics 9 The reception of Aesthetic Theory 12 Introduction to Aesthetic Theory 14 Section two: Interdisciplinarity 23 Interdisciplinarity: art, aesthetics, philosophy 23 Art and culture 30 CHAPTER TWO: TOTALITIES 35 Section one: Capitalism as negative totality 37 Background to negative totality 37 Adorno‟s conception of capitalism and society 40 Adorno‟s rational-irrational dialectic of society 43 Antinomies and/or dialectics 45 The individual and society 47 Summary 50 Section two: Constellation 52 Midpoint 52 The constellation as formation 56 Parataxis 60 Section three: Monad 63 The background to Adorno‟s monads 63 Monads as spiritual beings 65 Monads as mirrors 67 Monads as dynamism 70 Summary 71 CHAPTER THREE: ADORNO‟S THEORY OF THE ARTWORK 74 Section one: The status of the artwork 74 Autonomous art and commodification 74 Success and coherence 77 Section two: Construction 85 Montage 85 Mimesis 90 Section three: Judgement 101 Interpretation, commentary and critique 101 Spirit and truth content 104 Art and philosophy 109 CHAPTER FOUR: TEMPORALITIES IN AESTHETIC THEORY 113 Section one: Historical time 117 Conceptual background to Adorno‟s idea of history 117 Adorno on history 123 Commodity, absolute, abstraction 125 Section two: The time of the artwork 128 Adorno‟s history of time in music: Bach to Mahler 130 Adorno‟s history of time in music: the twentieth century 135 Section three: The instant 143 Structured listening 143 The artwork comprehended in an instant 144 CHAPTER FIVE: EXPECTATIONS 148 Section one: Expectation 148 Brief history of expectation 148 Adorno and utopian expectation 151 The utopian moment of negative dialectics 154 Section two: Expectation in art – Heidegger and Adorno 156 The one-sided relationship 156 Great art 158 Truth in art 159 Epochal expectations 163 Section three: Antinomy and mimesis in the expectation of aesthetics 166 Expectation in Kant and Hegel 168 The „Draft Introduction‟ to Aesthetic Theory 169 The expectations of art and theory 172 BIBLIOGRAPHY 178 Notes to preface 195 Notes to chapter one 195 Notes to chapter two 198 Notes to chapter three 202 Notes to chapter four 206 Notes to chapter five 210 PREFAC E „In order to lay hold of the fleeting phenomenon, he [the philosopher] must first bind it in fetters of rule, tear its fair body to pieces by reducing it to concepts, and preserve its living spirit in a sorry skeleton of words‟.1 „…the philosopher is always implicated in the problems he poses,‟ 2 The second quotation above has a double significance for this study. First, Adorno always thought of himself as a musician. He was a skilled pianist but was also a composer. Early on in his life he was unsure whether he would become a composer or a philosopher. Second, for my own part as both a visual artist and student of philosophy I was attracted to Aesthetic Theory for two reasons. As a student of philosophy I have always been fascinated by texts that do not reveal their meaning on a first reading. As an artist I have always been engaged, as a reader, with aesthetics and art theory. I know from my own practice that there is an aspect to making art that is theoretical. This is because making is a form of thinking, just as writing is a form of thinking. The old saying that you only find out what you think by writing it down holds for painting too. In his essay Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel Adorno gives advice on reading Hegel. My methodology in what follows is to take Adorno‟s advice on how to understand Hegel and apply it to reading Adorno‟s Aesthetic Theory. The advice in question concerns the suggestion that reading for understanding, if done properly, if done immanently, will lead to a critique of what is to be understood. „Philosophy itself takes place within the permanent disjunction between the true and the false. Understanding takes place along with it and accordingly always becomes in effect, critique of what is to be understood when the process of understanding compels a different judgement than the one that is to be understood.‟3 Adorno has a second piece of advice about reading both Kant and Hegel that also applies to his own texts. It is generally accepted that almost any philosophical text if scrutinised minutely enough can be, in Heidegger‟s usage subjected to de-structuration. There is a danger, especially with Adorno, of taking quotations out of context and so giving them a false reading. Aesthetic Theory is eminently quotable and easily misconstrued. In his fourth lecture on Kant‟s Critique of Pure Reason Adorno stresses how important it is to keep in view the wider intentions of the writer of the text. It is necessary for thinking about Kant - and to a far greater degree about Hegel - that the process of thought should carry a double movement. On the one hand, it should immerse itself in the text, and keep as closely to it as possible; on the other hand, it should retain a degree of self-control, remove itself from immediate contact and look at the ideas from a certain distance. This is because very many of the difficulties in Kant and Hegel, but also in Fichte and Schelling, arise when you scrutinize the texts too closely and so fail to recognise their intentions, whereas these can be perceived much more clearly at a distance.4 The procedure for this investigation of Aesthetic Theory will be a close reading continually informed by a stepping back for a wider view. Aesthetic Theory is a book of and about philosophical aesthetics, and of and about art. The book has twin openings. The „Draft Introduction‟ asks whether aesthetics is still possible, whilst the opening section of the main text asks whether art is still possible. The two questions are connected because if there is no contemporary art then there will be no contemporary philosophical investigation of art, no aesthetics. It looks like a question about the end of art. However from Adorno‟s point of view it is equally a question about the end of philosophy.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 04Eloy Ok.Indd
    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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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).
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]
  • SOCIOLOGICAL POETICS and AESTHETIC THEORY by the Same Author
    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.
    [Show full text]
  • 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.
    [Show full text]