Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists by Kul-Want Christopher

Author:Kul-Want, Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Aesthetics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-30T16:00:00+00:00

10

Society

* * *

Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was one of the leading Marxist intellectuals of the modern period. In 1931, together with Max Horkheimer, he founded the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, which came to be known as the Frankfurt School. In its heyday from its inception through to the 1960s, the philosophers of the Frankfurt School played an important role in interrogating the legacy of Enlightenment rationalism as transmitted through the ideologies of capitalism and totalitarianism.

Adorno developed a methodology of “negative dialectics,” the purpose of which was to negate notions of transcendence as perpetuated by ideology while maintaining, at least in principle, the idea of a future world of un-alienated freedom. The way in which Adorno considers art as a form of “negative dialectics” is outlined in the accompanying extract from the section entitled “Society” in his posthumously published book Aesthetic Theory (1970). The text develops Adorno’s idea of art’s significance as it emerges through the question of modern art’s relationship to “empirical reality,” by which is meant the capitalist realm of commodification, alienated labor, and ideology. In a typically dense style of writing (adopted so as to elide simple solutions and respect the subject of art), Adorno weaves together a series of contradictory ideas and tropes that, taken together, argue that what is at stake in modern art is not simply the representation of the experience of alienation but rather the issue of freedom from alienation.

As stated at the beginning of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno believed that it is only through a complex and nuanced approach to art associated with the tradition of aesthetics that philosophy can hope to approach the significance of both past art and modern art. However, as the accompanying text outlines, there are particular difficulties in theorizing about art, since for Adorno, like Kant, art is not an object of knowledge. Thus, Adorno argues that materialist philosophy cannot treat art in the same way as other forms of social production. Indeed, for Adorno, art reveals a poverty in philosophy, a limit to what can be achieved through knowledge alone. And furthermore, Adorno argues that art requires materialist philosophy to abandon many of its methods of analysis as these might apply to other commodified objects. According to Adorno, modern art (“which extends from the hybridization of the arts to the happenings”) has made this abundantly clear to philosophy by refusing to function mimetically or illustratively. While modern art, of which montage and Picasso’s cubist collages are the paradigmatic examples, draws upon the materials and products of contemporary society, it does this, not to represent anything as such, but rather to absorb these materials for less purposive and, in a sense, more violent, reasons.

Since art has a solipsistic character, it has to be treated as a unique entity. However, Adorno is quick to point out that this does not mean modern art is a reified form of production; rather, it is concerned with reification itself and its effects. These effects are of untold suffering. Hence, the reason

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