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Philosophy of Art, Art of Philosophy: Adorno’s Aesthetic Utopia

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Abstract

This chapter explores Adorno’s aesthetic theory. It looks at his claim that “writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” in its relationship to art’s fragile, double-edged autonomy, and examines his theory of mimesis—a non-conceptual affinity between subject and object that, expelled by identity thinking, has found refuge in art. Through a close reading of Adorno’s reflections on natural beauty, aura, the sublime, and on the not yet fully rationalized child, the chapter examines his intuition that the aesthetic is crucial in any attempt to integrate the nonidentical into reason. Finally, a study of Adorno’s writing style and an excursus on his critique of Heidegger show how Adorno demarcates his own dialectic of form and content from what he views as Heidegger’s self-serving manipulation of the preconceptual.

Art is not to be subsumed under the concept of reason or rationality—rather, it is that rationality itself, only in the form of its otherness, in the form of a certain resistance against it.

—Adorno, Lectures on Aesthetics

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an overview of the German response to Adorno’s dictum from poets and writers, see Petra Kiedaisch, Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995).

  2. 2.

    Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” in GS 10.1:20.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 10.1:29–30.

  4. 4.

    Ibid., 10.1:30.

  5. 5.

    Ibid.

  6. 6.

    Ibid., 10.1:34.

  7. 7.

    Adorno, “Jene Zwanziger Jahre”, in GS 10.2:506.

  8. 8.

    Ibid.

  9. 9.

    Ibid.

  10. 10.

    Otto F. Bollnow (1903–1991), a German philosopher and educational theorist whose collected works were recently republished, considered himself a critical disciple of Heidegger. From Adorno’s point of view, it is worth noting that Bollnow, who joined Rosenberg’s antisemitic Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur in 1933, signed the loyalty oath of university professors to Hitler and became member of the NSDAP in 1940, continued his academic career after the war undisturbed and received numerous awards and honors, including the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1983. See Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005), 62.

  11. 11.

    Adorno, “Engagement”, in GS 11:423–4.

  12. 12.

    This clash (compounded by commodification) is also the basis of Adorno’s critique of the popular protest music of the 1960s: “I believe, in fact, that attempts to bring political protest together with ‘popular music’—that is, with entertainment music—are for the following reason doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from commodity, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial…And I have to say that when somebody…sings maudlin music about Vietnam being unbearable, I find that really it is this song that is in fact unbearable—by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it.” Interview with Adorno, viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-njxKF8CkoU (accessed 07/11/2016).

  13. 13.

    For a look at the genesis of Adorno’s aesthetic theory and its relationship to Benjamin’s thought, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectic, 122–35.

  14. 14.

    In a letter to his friend René Leibowitz, Adorno wrote: “It requires no long explanation that the fact that, due to my biographical fate, and certainly also due to certain psychological mechanisms in my life, I have not remotely achieved as composer what I continue to believe that I could have achieved, is a trauma that has impacted my entire existence.” T.W. Adorno to René Leibowitz, 3.10.1963, in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VII (München: text + kritik, 2001), 61.

  15. 15.

    Ibid. See in particular Plato’s Ion, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 215–28.

  16. 16.

    Despite the fact that Habermas dismissed Adorno’s mimesis early on as insufficiently theorized (see Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), mimesis has been far from absent in Adorno scholarship. Josef Früchtl, Mimesis: Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), looks at the various occurrences of the term in Adorno’s work, without however lingering much on the meaning of their constellation. Karla Schultz, Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno’s Concept of Imitation (Bern: Peter Lang, 1990) traces the concept through Adorno’s aesthetic writings and explores its Freudian undercurrents. Britta Scholze (Kunst als Kritik. Adornos Weg aus der Dialektik. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2000) focuses mainly on the mimetic relationship between artwork and natural beauty (136–82).

  17. 17.

    Ruth Sonderegger, “Ästhetische Theorie” in: Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer, Stefan Müller-Doohm (eds.), Adorno Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011), 417.

  18. 18.

    See for example: “I have not tried to explain to you what Kant himself was thinking as he was thinking [was Kant sich bei seinem Denken gedacht hat], something which I consider perfectly irrelevant to a philosophy.” KRV 121/78; see also AES 216–7/135–6.

  19. 19.

    Shierry Weber Nicholsen points to the importance of children in Benjamin’s writing and the latter’s possible influence on Adorno in this matter. See Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work, 141–5.

  20. 20.

    In this respect, Jay Bernstein remarks “how ruthlessly dry and dead are the objects of perception with which philosophy has classically dealt: impressions and ideas, qualia and sense data, synthesizing perceptual manifolds (…) and so on. Even G. E. Moore’s ‘This hand I see before me’ is more ghost hand than living one.” Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 257.

  21. 21.

    Adorno, “Zur Musikpädagogik” in: Dissonanzen. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie. GS 14, 117.

  22. 22.

    Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, § 28, in Kant, Werke. Band 8, edited by Wilhelm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1957), 349.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Kant , Kritik der Urteilskraft, 349.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 349–50.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 350.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 349.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Ibid., 350.

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 353.

  31. 31.

    Hegel , Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Band 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), 190. For Hegel’s justification of this assessment, see ibid., 190–2.

  32. 32.

    Kant himself was arguably well aware that his transcendental subjectivity could not account for the full range of our experiences; his Critique of Judgment could be considered an attempt to respond to this shortcoming. Tom Huhn writes: “The Critique of Judgment might be read as an attempt to rectify the [occlusion of the pervasiveness of subjectivity in representation], to reveal what has been concealed, and to offer a more sweeping, though less cognitive basis for subjective unity.” Huhn, Imitation and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 115.

  33. 33.

    See Kant , Kritik der Urteilskraft, particularly §18–22, in Kant, Werke, Band 8, 319–24.

  34. 34.

    I owe the notion of an “excess of form” to Jay Bernstein’s Lectures on Kant’s Third Critique held at the New School for Social Research in New York, accessible at www.bernsteintapes.com. See notably the lectures of 10/31/07 and 11/14/07.

  35. 35.

    The enigmatic is an integer part of many of the elements examined in this study: natural beauty, aura, gaze, mimesis, the animal’s otherness, uncertainty, and of course the nonidentical in general. For further analyses of the enigmatic in Adorno’s philosophy, see Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics, 150–7; Alexander Garcia Düttman, So ist es. Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos ‘Minima Moralia’ (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2004), 55–63.

  36. 36.

    See Hegel , Werke, Bd. 15: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik III, 573.

  37. 37.

    Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 1.2 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 479.

  38. 38.

    AET 7:89/56. See Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 2 (1) (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998), 368–85.

  39. 39.

    Benjamin , “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7(1), 353.

  40. 40.

    Weber Nicholsen, “Aesthetic Theory’s Mimesis of Walter Benjamin” in Exact Imagination, Late Work (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 165.

  41. 41.

    See notably Soeren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (London: Penguin, 1992).

  42. 42.

    Hegel , Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Hegel, Werke in Zwanzig Bänden, Bd. 12, 261.

  43. 43.

    Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), 160.

  44. 44.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis] in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 19 (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1996), 58.

  45. 45.

    Christina Gerhardt, “The Ethics of Animals”, New German Critique 97 (2006): 160.

  46. 46.

    Adorno, Beethoven: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1993), 123.

  47. 47.

    Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen” in GS 11: 282.

  48. 48.

    In a note in 1961 where he deplores the state of the Geist in post-war Europe, he fustigates “the kind of art which mistakes the—literal—whetting [Zurüsten—the German word has a strong military connotation] of natural material (…) with aesthetic objectification.” Adorno, “Graeculus”, 21.

  49. 49.

    Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen”, 283.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 286.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., 285.

  52. 52.

    Adorno, “Über Tradition” in GS 10.1:314–5.

  53. 53.

    See Adorno’s analysis of alienation in art, AES 124–9/77–9.

  54. 54.

    Adorno, “Jene zwanziger Jahre” in GS 10.2, 506.

  55. 55.

    There is an obvious affinity between this account of aesthetic experience and Kant’s free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding as developed in his Critique of Judgment. For an insightful reading of Kant’s Third Critique through Adornian glasses, see Huhn, Imitation and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).

  56. 56.

    Jürgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer have written prominent and influential critiques of Adorno’s intertwine of art and philosophy. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne; Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1998, 130–57), Habermas argues that by blurring the boundaries between art and reason, Adorno ignores their vital separation and weakens both, thus undermining his own argumentation; the result, Habermas writes, is something that is neither philosophy nor art. Habermas’ critique appears to completely ignore the larger context of Adorno’s philosophical approach, ascribing to a methodical flaw a reality that, as Adorno repeatedly pointed out, lies “in der Sache”. Wellmer’s criticism (“Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation” in The Persistence of Modernity, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997, 1–35) is a variation of Habermas’ (see critical discussion by Zuidervaart in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 276–303). Bernstein discusses both in The Fate of Art, 245–8. For a more recent critique, see Rüdiger Bubner, “Concerning the Central Idea of Adorno’s Philosophy”, in Huhn and Zuidervaart (ed.), The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 147–75. For an overview of the criticism, see Scholze, Kunst als Kritik. Nicholsen, Jameson, Scholze (all op.cit), and Bernstein in The Fate of Art, offer a more sympathetic reading of Adorno’s conjunction of rationality and aesthetics.

  57. 57.

    A parallel reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and his Critique of Pure Reason points to numerous connections between judgments on beauty and cognitive understanding, without Kant explicitly consecrating the conjunction. Adorno would have called this an instance of Kant going beyond himself. For a wide-ranging exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and cognition in Kant, see the essay collection by Rebecca Kukla (ed.), Aesthetics and cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

  58. 58.

    Adorno, “Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm”, Interview with the Magazine “Der Spiegel”, May 5, 1969, in: Wolfgang Kraushaar, Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung, Bd. 2 (Hamburg: Zweitausendeins, 1998), 607.

  59. 59.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis], 58.

  60. 60.

    Ibid.

  61. 61.

    I don’t share Martin Jay’s assessment that “[Adorno’s] writing was deliberately designed to thwart an effortless reception by passive readers”. Rather (as Jay himself continues), he “refused to present his complicated and nuanced ideas in a simplified fashion” (Jay, Adorno, 11, italics added) because, in his own words, “the laxly said is badly thought” (ND 6:29/18), and “where linguistic intensity lessens, the moral responsibility to the object [Sache] also lessens” (Adorno, “Der Begriff der Philosophie” in Frankfurter Adorno Blätter II, München: text + kritik, 1993, 31).

  62. 62.

    Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, in GS 11:11. English translation: “The Essay as Form”, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, in New German Critique, No. 32 (1984), 153.

  63. 63.

    Ibid.

  64. 64.

    Ibid.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 14/156.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 15/156.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 17/158.

  68. 68.

    Ibid., 25/164.

  69. 69.

    Ibid., 17/157.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., 20/160.

  71. 71.

    Ibid., 21/160.

  72. 72.

    Ibid.

  73. 73.

    Ibid., 26/166.

  74. 74.

    In his use of constellations, Adorno is indebted to Walter Benjamin. Benjamin first mentions constellations in his 1925 “The Origin of the German Tragic Drama”, where he writes that “ideas relate to things as stars do to constellations” ( Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 1.1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991, 214) and speaks of “truth represent[ing] itself in the dance of represented ideas” (209). Adorno took up the idea as early as 1931, in his lecture on “The Actuality of Philosophy”, where he says that “philosophy must put its elements… into changing constellations” (GS 1:335).

  75. 75.

    Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 21/161.

  76. 76.

    On the self-destructive skepticism of enlightened rationality, see Bernstein, Adorno: Ethics and Disenchantment, 75–135.

  77. 77.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis], 57.

  78. 78.

    He frequently uses the term in his writings on music. “Far more important than [the leitmotive] however is the inner composition [Zusammensetzung] of the music, the Gewebe.” Adorno, “Zu Werken. Alban Berg, Wozzeck” in GS 13:432.

  79. 79.

    See AES 142–3/88.

  80. 80.

    Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 25/164. This underscores how problematic it is to pluck a sentence out of Adorno’s work and consider it self-sufficient, as it is too often done (the “dictum” on poetry after Auschwitz being but one famous example).

  81. 81.

    Quoted in AET, “Editor’s Afterword”, 541/364.

  82. 82.

    Adorno frequently uses the expression in his writings on music.. See e.g. GS 11:578; GS 12:61; GS 13:244, GS 13:393.

  83. 83.

    Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 21/161.

  84. 84.

    Plato, “Gorgias”, 453a, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 236.

  85. 85.

    Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno and the Persistence of the Dialectic, 161.

  86. 86.

    Adorno, “Der Essay als Form”, 13/155.

  87. 87.

    Ibid., 13–4/155.

  88. 88.

    Hermann Mörchen, a disciple of Heidegger’s, took it upon himself to write a 700-page study on the relationship of the latter’s philosophy to Adorno’s, and vice versa. The author tries to convince the reader that the two thinkers’ “refusal to communicate” is due to too much proximity rather than unbridgeable differences. While I will not deny that Adorno and Heidegger were moved partly by similar concerns (critique of scientism, of systems, question of historicity), the driving force behind their thought, or, to put it in Adornian terms, the point from which they philosophized, is very different in each of them. Mörchen’s book makes for a fascinating study of these differences “ums Ganze”, even if that was not the author’s intention. See Mörchen, Adorno und Heidegger. Untersuchung einer philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung (Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1981).

  89. 89.

    The jargon is according to Adorno a “product of the disintegration [Verfallsprodukt]” of an aura that the disenchantment of the world has made inaccessible to our experience. See JE 6: 419/10.

  90. 90.

    “In the name of contemporary authenticity, even a torturer could make all sorts of ontological claims, as long as he was a good torturer.” JE 6:497/125.

  91. 91.

    Adorno, Brief an Herrn S., 3.1.1963, published in: Musikalische Schriften, GS 19, 638.

  92. 92.

    “Betrayed is not only thought, but also religion, which once promised humanity eternal bliss, while authenticity quietly resigns itself to a ‘ultimately idyllic world’” JE 6:429/25.

  93. 93.

    Quoted in JE 6:447/51.

  94. 94.

    Quoted in JE 6:448/53.

  95. 95.

    Quoted in PT 1:153.

  96. 96.

    See Adorno’s lecture on the topic, PT 1:161–73.

  97. 97.

    As Adorno points out, Heidegger himself uses the term ‘half-poetic”, JE 6:448/53.

  98. 98.

    See Adorno, “Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit” in GS 10.2:567.

  99. 99.

    Martin Jay’s claim that this criticism “could perhaps be extended to [Adorno] as well” misrepresents in my opinion the relationship of form and content in Adorno’s work. See Jay, Adorno, 11–2. See also Note 62.

  100. 100.

    Adorno and Horkheimer, [Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis], 57.

  101. 101.

    Ibid., 59.

  102. 102.

    Ibid., 57.

  103. 103.

    Ibid.

  104. 104.

    In biology, the term homeostasis refers to the complex set of interacting metabolic reactions that ensure the equilibrium of the whole organism.

  105. 105.

    “Logizität” is Adorno’s term for art’s own internal logic. See e.g. AET 7:151/98; 181/119; 205–11/136–40.

  106. 106.

    Adorno, “Über Tradition” in GS 10.1:314–5.

  107. 107.

    Ibid.

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Silberbusch, O.C. (2018). Philosophy of Art, Art of Philosophy: Adorno’s Aesthetic Utopia. In: Adorno’s Philosophy of the Nonidentical. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95627-5_4

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