Art and Aesthetics After Adorno: Prospectus
by Anthony J. Cascardi
©
Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory (1970) offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques
of the discipline of aesthetics ever written.
In it we find a deeply critical engagement with the history and
philosophy of aesthetics, and with the mainstream traditions of European art through
the middle of the 20th Century, is coupled with the vision of a new,
thoroughly historicist model of aesthetic theory. The central question posed by this volume is
wether and how developments in art and in aesthetic theory since Adorno wrote
call for modifications of the views he presented there. Indeed, it could be said that the horizon of
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory was set by high modernism. Much has happened since then, and Adorno’s
powerful critique calls for reconsideration in this light. This volume of essays gathers the work of
leading philosophers, critics, and theorists, around this central set of
issues. Rather than share a set of views
for or against Adorno, they hold in common a deep respect for the power of
Adorno’s views and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory.
Questions about the fate of
aesthetics are hardly new. Indeed,
Adorno’s “Draft Introduction” to the Aesthetic Theory he cited a passage
from the work of Moritz Geiger (1880-1937) that speaks to the ongoing identity-crisis
of aesthetic theory. Aesthetics, he
says, 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.” While the history of aesthetics may be
somewhat less random than this description suggests, aesthetics has nonetheless
labored under ongoing uncertainties about itself. Hegel expresses the concern that art may not
be a suitable subject for “systematic and scientific treatment” at all. Before Hegel, in Kant, there are worries
about whether aesthetic reflective judgment marks out a “field.” And, before Kant, aesthetic theory voices
uncertainties about whether or not matters of taste require something other
than epistemology in order to be settled.
In the course of its attempts to grasp central questions about “beauty”
and “art,” aesthetic theory has often found itself in a centrifugal relation to
its subject-matter, attempting to transforming itself into epistemology,
psychology, sociology, moral philosophy, and politics. Indeed, almost all the models on which modern
aesthetic theory has been based have been drawn largely from extra-aesthetic
domains. Beginning in the 18th
century, aesthetic theory attempted to imagine itself now as a version of the
theory of knowledge, now as a branch of philosophy concerned with questions of
judgment, now as a vehicle for morality, now as a stand-in for political
science. Since that time it has looked
to sociology, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, semiotics, ontology,
pragmatics, systems theory, the theory of communication, cultural studies, and
ideology-critique, for guidance. What
can explain this seemingly endless series of displacements, evasions, shifts of
identity, and changes of heart? And in
light of the extraordinary theoretical disarray surrounding them, what hope
might there be for a theoretical account of terms such as “beauty” or “art”?
Following Adorno’s lead, the plan of this volume is to
move along two axes, one directed toward questions of history, the other
directed toward more conceptual matters.
The history in question involves the development of aesthetic theory in
relation to the suppression of [the desire for] what can best be called the
“concrete concept” during the period in which one form of reason, the
rationalized form, came to be instutionalized as normative. To speak of the “concrete concept” is
register art’s way of demonstrating the insufficiency of purely conceptual ways
of knowing the world, along with the concenquences that abstract knowing
entails. It is at the same time a way of
staking claims for the values that it makes (and adds) to the world. To account for these facts we need to engage
not only Adorno’s negative-dialectical materialism but also Hegel, whose
convictions about the role of art in providing a “sensuous manifestation of the
idea,” in spite of the fact that Hegel’s own claim was coupled with the belief
that art could be surpassed by a form of “concrete thinking” somehow more
satisfactory than it, i.e. pure thinking.
Art, he wrote, “is not...the highest way of apprehending the spiritually
concrete. The higher way, in contrast to
representation by means of the sensuously concrete, is thinking, which in a
relative sense is indeed abstract, but it must be concrete, not one-sided, if
it is to be true and rational.” For
Adorno, by contrast, the possibilities of art are set by the untranscendable
horizon of history.
In spite of a renewal of
interest in aesthetic theory in the last several decades, developments since
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory have not managed to shrink the gap between the
theory of aesthetics and art’s resistance to systematic treatment at the level
of ideas. They have neither been able to
accept the bifurcation of sense and concept nor to reconcile their
differences. But neither have
contemporary developments managed to render those problems irrelevant.
On the contrary, art has
itself become incorporated within the widening gap between the relatively
non-theoretical partisans of history, politics, and “cultural studies” on the one
hand and those who favor “analytical” (read: conceptual) approaches to art on
the other. Each of these factions claims
to have some privileged access to the truth-content of art, but the net result
has been a dialogue des sourds.
Indeed, the mutual incomprehensibility of these approaches can be of
staggering proportions. In attempting to
ascertain the ontological status of a fictional work, for example, the
assumption is that a work of art can be grasped by means of conventional,
philosophical truth-categories such as being/not-being, original/copy, or that
the truth-content of any given work of art can be expressed discursively in
ways that are consistent with the principles of propositional logic. Such categories not only exclude the
historical and material specificities that make the work of art in question the
way it is; they are deemed to transcend them.
And yet the examples seem more compelling than whatever an analysis of
them might yield. In the face of them
philosophy can seem embarrassed. (What
would ontology have to contribute to an analysis of Francis Bacon’s “Innocent
X,” which carries a force that goes well beyond the paradox generated by the
muteness of the outcry it depicts?) By
the same token, an aesthetic theory that situates art wholly within the
framework of social labor, as Adorno does, or within networks of social and
political power, as neo-Marxists and Foucalutians wish, has relatively little
to say about the peculiar ontology of art, its refusal, for instance, to abide
by the bifurcation of “being” and “not being.”
Most conventional conventional forms of historicism ignore whatever that
refusal might contribute to, or subtract from, the dynamics of power. The point is not to credit one or the other
of these perspectives as more adequate or true than another but rather to
recognize that art may act as a foil for all such exclusionary approaches. Whereas the vocation of aesthetic theory
would seem to be to help us recognize in art the very things that such
exclusions seem to let slip away, aesthetics has typically presented us with
views that either divide “sense” from “concept,” “history” from “truth,”
“experience” from “idea.,” or that attempt magically to reconcile these
terms.
The questions of art’s
resistance to aesthetic theory and of the mis-recognition of art by the theory
designed to comprehend it are central to this volume. How and why did this happen? At what cost did it occur? Addressing these questions requires an
account of the formation of aesthetic theory as we have come to know it as well
as insights into shifts in the nature of art and the cultural spheres adjacent
to it.
In identifying itself now
with questions of taste of a more normative and “empirical” kind, now with
“reflective” judgments of that originate in subjective feelings of pleasure and
paint, now with the aims of moral philosophy, now with politics, now with
empirical approaches to “experience,” now with the theory of material
production, now with the dynamics of desire, now with the social organization
of experience, etc., aesthetic theory has consistently been pointing to the
very domains of praxis from which art has been set apart. Such separations may have been necessary in
order for art to identify and validate itself as an integral and autonomous
sphere of activity during a time when other such spheres were also
consolidating themselves in independent ways.
But because these separations were not complete, i.e. because art still
retained recognizable traces of its relationship with what we may more broadly
call the “praxis of life,” the mis-recognition of art by aesthetic theory can
itself provide critical insights into the ways in which those extra-aesthetic
domains were subjected to the conditions that rendered art unfamiliar.
The questions Adorno was
raising became especially sharp in the broad stretch of time that has come to
be known as “modernity”--i.e., during the period when something like the
“theory of art” began to fashion itself as coequal to discourses concerned with
truth and morality and when the practice of “art” itself began to emerge as a
domain of artefactual production no longer intelligible within the praxis of
life. But it is no longer clear that art
occupies an autonomous domain at all.
In the course of the “Draft
Introduction,” Adorno passes under critical review a vast array of
theoretically informed approaches to art:
work-immanent studies, phenomenological aesthetics, a form of nominalism
that he associates with Benedetto Croce, empiricist aesthetics, and hermeneutics,
along with Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” and Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art. Given Adorno’s critical assessment of this
entire, heterogeneous tradition, his work might well be taken as constructing a
space for the appearance of art by systematically excluding every conceivable
approach to it: “art” would be defined
in methodological terms as the structural remainder, as the thing that theory
consistently fails to explain. But this
is hardly the project that Aesthetic Theory sets for itself. Quite the contrary. Each of Adorno’s negations is designed to
disclose some element of aesthetic truth and each can in turn be incorporated
into a dialectical understanding of the relationship between aesthetic theory
and art. Moreover, Aesthetic Theory
aims to hold the “objective status” of art firmly in place rather than to
locate it as a function of the affects or the judgments of the subject. (Adorno’s critique of the association of art
with subjective inwardness is evident from his early work on Kierkegaard.) In his insistence upon art as an
object-domain Adorno follows hegel’s response to Kant, who identified the task
of aesthetics as universalizing the subjective judgment-power work required for
the mediation of the sensuous and super-sensuous worlds. And yet Adorno can hardly refuse Kant’s idea
that aesthetics must address itself to what the division of experience into the
separate domain of cognition (sense) and morality (the supersensuous) fails to
grasp. Adorno’s aesthetics is Kantian in
its commitment to the principle of art’s incongruity with the realm of the
cognitively true and the morally good, but it is un-Kantian in that it refuses
to make art a function of subjectively grounded claims. For Adorno, aesthetic theory is directed
neither toward questions of taste and judgment nor towards questions of
experience rooted in the subjective apprehension of forms. Rather, it offers a window onto a domain of
works that are non-identical with both the concepts we bring to them and to the
materials of which they are comprised.
Artworks are things, and their “thingly” qualities ought to be
respected; but artworks are not mere things.
Insofar as they are woven into the fabric of social and historical
relations, Adorno regards artworks as the “social antithesis of society.”
To be sure, one can replace a
aesthetic theory qua theory of art with descriptions of aesthetic
experience, as certain branches of phenomenology have sought to do. (The work of Elaine Scarry moves in this
direction.) Insofar as phenomenology
takes its bearings by lived experience, it might appear to be uniquely suited
to the development of a philosophical aesthetics. The reasons are hardly obscure. Like art itself, phenomenology deals with the
realm of embodied experience as complex, integrated, and irreducible. Its procedures defy any approach to the world
that would begin from the “top down” or from the “bottom up.” Phenomenology attempts to register the fact
that any engagement with the world must commence “in the middle.” It is equally discontent with the reduction
of experience to its “conditions of possibility” and with the mere
description of the content of experience.
In Adorno’s view, however,
the phenomenology of art runs aground because it strives to be just as presuppositionless
as the concept, free from all privileged anteriorities. It aims, after all, at the “things
themselves.” He objects that
phenomenology finds itself limited when confronted with artworks because it is
driven by a search for essences of a kind that art will never yield (the most
blatant of these being the “essence of art”):
“It wants to say what art is. The
essence it discerns is, for phenomenology, art’s origin and at the same time
the criterion of art’s truth and falsehood.”
Adorno also objects that art inevitably presents us with some “content”
to which phenomenology is unable to respond.
If we take “content” to mean some legible subject, decipherable theme,
or recognizable figure in the work, then the criticism seems at best partially valid,
especially in the wake of abstract art, whose aims and interests lie
elsewhere. But “content” as Adorno means
it not just topic or theme; it is a name for everything that is communicative
in art. Moreover, phenomenology would
hardly deny that art asks to be engaged on levels that are incompatible with
the wish for pure essentiality. The
“essence” of art is hardly art itself.
Art is “essential” only in that it remembers and preserves a form of
concreteness that has been lost from the abstract concept and its
particular instantiations in the world.
That concreteness is “essential” in art to the degree that it is the
abstract concept’s lost other half. In
contrast to phenomenology, Adorno’s dialectical model is one in which the
abstract and the concrete continuously mediate one another in art: “Highly mediated in itself, art stands in
need of thinking mediation; this alone, and not the phenomenologist’s
purportedly originary intuition, leads to art’s concrete concept.”