The primacy of the object: Adorno versus Cultural Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
Truth and Enigma: Adorno and the Politics of Art
New German Critique, 2018
This article reappraises the relevance of Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics in the aftermath of the postmodern debate. It proposes a shift of focus from the concept of “semblance character” to the concept of “enigmatic character” in order to grasp what Adorno means by the “truth content” of artworks. This theoretical move is meant to shed new light on how Adorno sees the relationship between art and politics. The inclusion of Adorno in the tradition of the beautiful and his portrayal as a forerunner of Jean-François Lyotard’s aesthetics of the sublime are flawed. In other words, artworks would be true not because of what they make apparent or acknowledge as unpresentable but because their enigmatic complexion unleashes a crisis of comprehension that challenges our understanding of the world. A “maybe” emblematizes the enigma, whose imaginative appropriation remains truer to emancipation than any utopia or dystopia could ever become.
An Artwork as a Critique: Adorno against Lukács
Comparative Literature, 2017
The purpose of my essay is to set forth a comparative approach to Adorno and Lukács to discuss the function of an artwork in the capitalist society. The perspective of mimesis crucially leads Adorno to the way in which he considers Enlightenment as a paradoxical process of civilization itself, a process precipitating intellectual regression. For Adorno, the Enlightenment project increasingly destroys the sensuous mimetic faculty, while fortifying reification and instrumental reason; however, Adorno finds the remnants of the preserved sensuous mimesis in art; art is a mutated mimesis through the modern rationalization process, by which rationality is combined with the sensuous mimetic faculty. In this respect, Adorno argues that art is a refuge for mimetic comportment. Here, Adorno chooses a different path from Benjamin, who conceptualizes the autonomy of artworks as a magical aura. It is interesting that Adorno specifically points out the paradoxical character of art by which the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated. When considering that modern subjectivity is closely related to the Cartesian cogito, what Adorno implies in his analysis is that art is a rational device to disavow magical practices the mimesis of art is possible by its rational feature. More importantly still, the paradoxical mimetic faculty of art leads to irrationality by means of its rationality, in the sense that all rationality aims at necessarily achieving something irrational.
Art and Resistance in Adorno: The avant-garde artwork as the foundation of the social critique
Adorno’s ideas on avant-garde art are found scattered in fragments throughout his opus, with the most rigorous study of it found in the unfinished ‘Aesthetic Theory’. Much like his other major ideas, they are not articulated as a clear and concise exposition in any single work. In this paper, I will attempt to formulate, and consequently scrutinize, his conception of art as critical of the social totality in a streamlined argumentative form. In §2, I will examine what, for Adorno, is to be resisted by art (namely enlightenment’s ‘instrumental reason’, manifested in late capitalism as commodification and the culture industry). In §3, I will examine why, and how avant-garde art exhibits resistance to the ‘reified consciousness’ – namely, its status as autonomous and mimetic. . In §4, I look specifically at Kafka’s work as exemplary of these attitudes. In §5, I explore worries concerning his understanding of avant-garde art. I conclude in §6.
Art and society in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
2021
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.
"Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History"
Evental Aesthetics: Aesthetic Intersections 2. Vol. 7, No. 2, 2018
That contemporary art is fundamentally irreducible to modernist art and aesthetics has become a commonplace of contemporary art theory and criticism. In marking this distinction, reference is often made to the obsolescence of once-dominant aesthetic categories and the need for breaking with aesthetic theories traditionally allied with artistic modernism. For many in the field of philosophical aesthetics, this means going beyond the work of Theodor W. Adorno and creating a conceptual discourse more appropriate to the current state of contemporary art. The present paper reconstructs the stakes of this legitimation crisis and sets Adorno’s writings on art and aesthetics in relation to some of the most significant debates in recent art criticism. In the process, it demonstrates that many of the most pressing problems in contemporary art are integral to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and that it is precisely at those points where his thought is today regarded as most problematic that it is often most instructive. Through a sustained examination of art’s essential relation to what Adorno calls “natural-history,” the problems of contemporary art and aesthetics are then situated within the wider context of art’s relationship to a history of domination.
Adorno and the Task of Criticism
Today, the words 'cultural criticism' hold a convoluted signification, containing layers of suspicious inquiry, each holding the next to an invariably groundless standard. It appears that there are two main tensions for this condition: one, the immanent status of the word -as in, it, as 'cultural' necessarily refers back to relations of the social and political. And two, 'criticism,' as distinctly referential to a negation which reveals hidden tensions through, specifically, a written text. It is the provocation of the 20 th century Frankfurt scholar Theodor Adorno that both of these details have been forgotten, or lost, due to the continual affects of the enlightenment lead culture industry. Similarly, the term 'cultural criticism' has prolonged inhibitions within modernity; primarily, within the Marxist theory of reification -which objectifies abstract relations as concrete in their commodity form. As an installment of enlightenment logic, reified social relations are universalized as easily as they are reproduced. Reified society appears similar to the role of cultural criticism: both intend to display, in material form, relations to which would be previously abstract. But, the logic of criticism is resoundingly one of inhibitory coercion; cultural criticism attempts to imitate the cultural conditions of social relations to subjects through methods of mediation. But mediation is never a neutral tool, necessarily insinuating the cultural attachments of a medium of cultural criticism. Importantly, it is undeniably an authoritarian gesture, which forces a conceptualization of the relations to which its reader exists. But exclusively in this motion, Adorno locates radical potential. Through a negative strategy, Adorno approaches cultural criticism with its very critique; this paper will trace the radical foundations and modern inhibitions of Adorno's theory of cultural criticism.
forthcoming in the Blackwell Companion to Adorno
This essay first contextualizes Adorno's essays in literary criticism in relation to his historico-philosophical account of modern rationalization and late capitalism, his dialectical theory of culture, and his return to postwar Germany. It then presents the neo-Marxist and formalist principles that inform his literary criticism, emphasizing the artwork's critical relationship to society on the one hand, and the theory of aesthetic experience undergone by the artwork's recipient on the other. These principles are exemplified in selective readings of Adorno's essays on Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Hölderlin. The essay concludes by polemically juxtaposing Adorno's practice of literary criticism with that of neo-Aristotelian "ethical criticism."
Adorno's Aesthetic Model of Social Critique
Blackwell Companion to Adorno, ed. Espen Hammer, Peter Gordon, Max Pensky
Aesthetics, in many ways, is at the center of Adorno's philosophical enterprise. Politics, and social critique, are in turn very much at the fore in his aesthetics. His art criticism is thereby bound up with social and political critique. That much is of course a truism about Adorno. In this essay, I shall suggest that Adorno's social criticism (in one of its main manifestations) is related to his art criticism in another interesting way as well. Specifically, their form is similar. The object of critical analysis, whether an artwork or other social phenomenon, is objectionable not simply because it promotes or fosters problematic things downstream-authoritarianism, anti-semitism, and the like-as cause to effect. Rather, it is objectionable because it contains, often in a way difficult immediately to detect, such objectionable ideologies covertly embedded in it. Critique will thus be a hermeneutic endeavor seeking to expose these ideologies. While this critical-interpretive model is of course more familiar in the aesthetic sphere, Adorno extends it to unmasking a wider range of social phenomena.