mahr'svierteljahrsschriftfürästhetik
6 (2003), Nr.3/September
L'art philosophique
About
Adorno. Toward an assessment of Adorno's
philosophical aesthetics on the occasion of the celebration of the 100th return
of his birthday in September 2003. 20804
characters.
In German speaking countries the commemoration of
Adorno's 100th birthday yielded a variety of new books, symposia, exhibitions,
concerts, gatherings, reviews and newspaper articles. A first glance already
reveals that for these countries a good deal of collective identity depends of
the brillant and astonishing life, career and work of the person Adorno. Adorno
was celebrated in a way as if he were still alive and central a figure to the
Federal Republic of Germany 34 years after his death. To some degree this is
due to the powerful marketing of Adorno's later years' exclusive publisher
Suhrkamp Verlag, whose almost half century long CEO Siegfried Unseld who died a
year ago served and still serves as a continuing symbol for the apparently
unretrievable intellectual flourishing of post war Federal Republic of Germany.
I will try to do some steps in addressing the question
whether Adorno provides with a still vital and significant tradition in
philosophy and, more specifically, philosophical aesthetics.
Adorno studied with Hans Cornelius at
Concerning philosophy these circumstances meant that
he was open for all sorts of tendencies and would keep pace with traditional
and as well undogmatic philosophizing - Neokantianism, with portions of
Neohegelianism, more literary philosophy and criticism like Simmel's and the
Neomarxism of Lukács and Bloch, with portions of negative theology. On the long
term that perhaps necessarily had to result in a negative aesthetics of
Bilderverbot (Jimenez 1997) against the background of Existenzphilosophie and
Husserlian phenomenology – thereby refraining from the fundamental and founding
ambitions of logical positivism and Heidegger's phenomenology respectively. The
spectre of Marx hovering as a philosophical question mark above Western Europe
after Russian Revolution had taken place, the philosophical years after 1918
were challenged by the question of the conditions of the possibility of
philosophy's powers for real social and cultural change and renovation all the
more so after metaphysics had broke down - as stated already by Marx and other
young- or post-Hegelians – and the reforms of dawning 20th century could not
prevent from the catastrophy of the World War One. There is no doubt that
Frankfurt's liberalism made it impossible for Adorno to withdraw, even
temporarily, into one of the philosophical ivory towers had they been
philosophically so important and influential as the work of Husserl, Heidegger,
and Wittgenstein proved to be. This was particularly the case when Adorno
entered the circle of Horkheimer in 1927 who had been an assistant professor to
Cornelius, had become Privatdozent in 1925 with a book on Kant's Kritik der
Urteilskraft and advanced as Ordinarius for Sozialphilosophie as well as
director of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung in 1930. Also Adorno
began to contribute for Horkheimer's philosophically programmtic Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung from its start in 1932.
Concerning aesthetics at that time Adorno did not and
would even later only to a certain extent appropriate philosophical aesthetics
as it had been developed over the 19th and the beginning 20th centuries. This
can be seen from the fact that he neither discussed historical work of
aestheticians like Schasler and Croce nor took notice of the quarrel between
the psychological aestheticians and the Neokantians on the one side and the
fundamentalists on the other. Apart from Marxism in its more narrow sense
Simmel's turn to sociology in philosophy and aesthetics, the Simmel-related
transformation in Lukács's aesthetics and philosophy in the 1910s and in the
philosophy of music in Bloch's Spirit of Utopia of 1918, it rather was
Benjamin's theoretically advanced literary criticism besides Cassirer's
philosophy of culture and the Frankfurt Horkheimer-competitor Mannheim's
sociology of knowledge - as influential on Adorno as they all might have been
anyway – that set path for a sociological philosophy that dissolved or at least
rearranged traditional philosophical topics and disciplines like aesthetics.
That encouraged Adorno to continue to think apart from philosophically immanent
roads. With sociological philosophy I understand a philosophy that, like the
psychological philosophy of Brentano, Wundt and Freud, emerged from the need of
a transformation of philosophy into the Geistes- and Kulturwissenschaften under
the auspices of empirical methods and scientific progress with persisting in
philosophical penetration and comprehension of the observations scientifically
gained. This is characteristic for the founding fathers Durkheim and Weber and
reaches to the times of Lévi-Strauss, Bourdieu, Luhmann and Habermas.
More important for some time than the fate of
philosophy in twentieth century with regards to young Adorno' aesthetic thought
are his well known ambitions to become a composer. He, who must have had an
excellent education as pianist since his then well known recital pianist aunt
lived in young Adorno's household, encountered composition lectures already in
1919, but only seriously considered to become a composer for a short time after
having made his PhD in 1924 the time when he went to Vienna for studying with
Berg, the important member of Schönberg's Vienna School of New Music.
Theoretical aesthetic work could have only interested him from that time on,
from the time when he started to professionalize critical work he had begun in
the years when he studied philosophy and musicology. It is important to note
that at the time when he became collaborator and short time inofficial leader
of
The association of the two notions of critique - music
criticism and the post-Kantian critique, i. e. the critique of ideology –
should philosophically convincingly only later be performed with Adorno's
post-war Philosophie der neuen Musik. In this manifesto Adorno opposed to
Schönberg and Strawinski on the premises of the Dialektik der Aufklärung he had
written with Horkheimer in the last years of World War II. The Dialektik der
Aufklärung is based upon an interpretation of Hegel's concept of Aufklärung as
developed in the Phänomenologie des Geistes. There Aufklärung is concerned with
modern society being in a state of alienation to is to be sublated by
reflective education. Before Horkheimer and Adorno this idea had already
prompted Marx to reverse Aufklärung from the head to the feet in engaging with
working man's material work and economic effects in historical materialism
whereas Aufklärung considered as primarily mental development was theorized by
Hegel and before him by Cartesian rationalism and British empiricism
intellectual movements both being sceptical against heteronomous
religious belief and thereby preparing way for the philosophical currents in
prerevolutionary French Enlightenment that Hegel sought to complete. Horkheimer
and Adorno recognized the immediate social effects of Naturbeherrschung not
only by material work seen from Marx's labour class point of view but also in
bureaucratic administration, in science including social research and, most
importantly, in cultural industry and the mass media. Aware of the fact of the
holocaust from which they could manage to escape they succeeded in generalizing
the concept of Naturbeherrschung. Domination of nature IS enlightenment. But
its dialectics, its conflicts and developments, do not necessarily lead to
moral progress in humanity as Hegel was convinced of. Contrarily enlightenment
constantly is in danger to relapse into the very barbarity and stupidity it
always tries to overcome but showed to have been reproduced by enlightenment's
own rationality and technological means in the forms of war and bureaucracy.
Art already in the Dialektik der Aufklärung could be seen as a form of both resistance and potential, since mimesis as the
main sensitive faculty beyond the exigencies of self-preservation ascends to
cultivating humanity by reintroducing with art the archaic-biological and the
magical imitative remnants of the earlier stages of man over alienating bourgeois-technological
domination (Früchtl 1998).
Against this background one can understand better Adorno's
severe opposition of good Schönberg with bad Strawinsky as he drew it in his
Philosophie der neuen Musik. Music and art in general came to play the key role
to preserve an enlightenment that would remain capable of resisting
capitalism's darkening powers of cultural industry. Justified or not Adorno
related Strawinsky to aesthetic reaction or at least restauration because of
his archaism, neoclassicism and occupation with popular music in rhythms and
instrumentation whereas Schönberg could be seen as protector of musical
evolution in liberating music from the tonal system that had ruled for more
than three centuries. In Adorno's perspective Schönberg achieved staying in the
realm of the true quitting rules that jeopardize the expressive cry of the subject
in front of the possibility of its liquidation. Along a history of bourgeois
mind of technological and scientific domination of nature, the unchaining of
subject in consequence and its threatening dissolution instead of its sublation
in classless society, the history of music reveals the advantage of autonomous
creations salvaging the subject from its destruction. This can be artistically
achieved by taking into account the social and historical preconditions of
aesthetic semblance usually taken as natural and immediate. There is no
beautiful semblance as originary because aesthetic material - melodies, genres,
forms, acoustic environments, listening attitudes - is more or less
intentionally preformed. That confronts the composer with the necessity to reflect
upon the historical state of consciousness – a categoric imperative to be
absolutely modern, as Adorno put it with Rimbaud - in aesthetically and
exemplarily exposing the dynamic relationship of alienated material and
composing subject.
It is obvious that the arts in general thereby cannot
be subject to the dialectics of Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, not even to the
dialectics of Hegel's philosophy of history as conceived in the Phänomenologie
des Geistes. Art aspires to a dialectics of semblance, possible at any point of
historical time. That means again, in here following Christoph Menke's account
of Adorno's aesthetics as rooted in his Kierkegaard book of 1933, that the
aesthetic as situated in the dimension of images and fiction is a place for truth.
On the one hand the mere appearance of art is not absolute and neutral - hence
the possibility of criticism - , on the other the right of semblance is to be
uphold against all artful manipulation which even opens the possibility of a
turn against art itself. Art works intrinsically set in motion a dialectics by
means of a (modern!) art that breaks semblances in the form of fragments or
enigmas. But the dialectics of semblance can only be achieved when art works
are concerned with truth in different ways. It is not only obvious that this
framework allows to criticize art works and even entire art forms - jazz or pop
music for instance whose potential Adorno was not able to recognize
(Zuidervaart 1998) -beyond the usual forms of art criticism within a socially
aware critique of high art as mere ideological appearance. In so doing Adorno
could use an individual, non-identical particularity of aesthetic experience
that loses aesthetic autonomy - as it had been increasingly established in the
course of the twentieth century – and, as the Philosophie der neuen Musik has
it, confront the psychanalytical regression of R. Wagner's high art vis à vis
the classical imperative of unique form upon variety. Moreover such a
dialectics of semblance - dissolution of semblance in art, the turn of
semblance into truth - can be worked out theoretically if not systematically as
Adorno did in his posthumous Ästhetische Theorie of 1970. In this work various
opposite terms like Totalität/Moment, Konstruktion/Mimesis, Sinn/Buchstabe,
Geist/Material, and Prozeß/Objektivität help to reformulate a kind of dialectic
motion between the sembling unity of the art work and semblance as immediate
moment within this unity. Art advances toward evolving into a medium of truthn
- be it a truth-in-denial as set forward by its fragmentary, enigmatic,
abstract, incomplete forms. (Menke 1998)
Adorno's aesthetics itself suffices this theory of art
as an object to some extent. First of all, in endeavouring after a development
of aesthetic categories and doing art criticism at the same time, the
Ästhetische Theorie concedes the same rights to art and philosophy as working
on the same level (Jung 1995). The Aesthetic Theory being fragmentary itself
because of Adorno's untimely death raises the question if the author would have
been able or even willing to strip of the fragmentary character or skin of the
textual body as we know it (Schneider 1996). Only for this reason, by the way,
it is time for a critical edition of the book. The mimetic and paratactic order
of its parts (Zima 1995) even more suggests that Adorno secretly played with
the consideration of philosophy as an art in its own right and at the same time
not withdrawing from philosophy and its sociologically and aesthetically
critical businesses. The question whether the Aesthetic Theory offers a model
for theory as aesthetic has yet to be addressed. Adorno himself at least was
contradictory on this point, and to translate aesthetic truths into discursive
language makes it difficult to adhere to such an understanding (Eagleton 1990).
In general it is time to ask for the significance of
Adorno's philosophical aesthetics if one does not want to give way to becoming
addicted to the drug APP (Adorno's philosophical prose) some of us German
speaking people experienced more or less extensively. First of all, is it still
possible to participate in an Adornean energy drawn from a philosophy of
history that allowed for fighting for a Moderne as epoche, as special moment,
as guarantee of progress sticking with all ideals of modern times at once?
Certainly not. Can we still take for granted phenomena like dissonance as
symbols for our time (Schneider 1996) a time that builds halls for industrially
shaping car sounds and performing high art contemporary music? How can we stick
with Adorno in ascribing to art a vanguard function of protest and resistance
(Jung 1995, Hauskeller 1998) at a time when art has lost the avantgarde
condition? Can we preserve Adorno's critical intention in rereading and
reactuating his Ästhetische Theorie with for instance Lyotard's aesthetics of
the sublime (Welsch 1990)? Does Adorno's assertion of silent non-identical
natural beauty in contrast to artistic beauty - perhaps to be interpreted as
Derrida's alterity (Schneider 1996) - force us to dispense with a concept of
historical progress with modern art altogether?
We have lost the capacities of a (modern) philosophy
of history, thereby postmodern, post-metanarrative thought being a late confirmation
of this loss. But that does not necessarily force us to abandon the idea of a
progressing organisation of aesthetic material that enables artists to keep
distance to ideology and refuse the all embracing needs of the market
(Liessmann 1992). Besides, art may not be the only medium but only one of the
suitable media for a critique of ideology, being as dense as to be elucidated
and interpreted by philosophy (Wiesing 1992). Hence the business of a
philosophy of art including criticism in general and in particular. Again,
truth plays a central role in art although it never will be grasped
conceptually as already the young Hegelians knew who emphasized nature, chance,
dream and ambiguity (Zima 1995) and as might be compared with Kant's quasi
truth value of aesthetic judgments.
I cannot enter a discussion of the status of Adorno's
philosophy not to speak of his sociological work that was the underpinning of
his critique of ideology. I will only name some topics. It is obvious that the
dialectics of semblance - which can be compared with the concept of aura that
Benjamin shaped for the philosophy of art - means an invisible confrontation
with phenomenology, a philosophy that perhaps took and takes appearances or
phenomena all too quickly as the exclusive door for the move to what had used
to be things themselves as essences forgetting individually and personally
contingent epiphenomena that surround phenomena not simply as contingent
entitites but betray qualities that turn out to be essential in a quite
different way, qualities that the arts are prepared to present and turn out in
a more superior way. Here I feel compelled to speak out a methodological doubt.
As undoubted as Adorno's capabilities of minute observation and sensitive
experience had been it is not clear to me whether his theory and his kind of
theory laden observation was all too narrowly restricted to an enlightened
Hegelianism, a Hegelianism that was enhanced to be sure with an
astonishing array of 19th and 20th century philosophers, literates and motives.
As open, reversed (Marx) and based on empirical evidence Adorno's Philosophe of
objektiver Geist may have been - can we still take it for valid? That brings me
to another issue, the issue of the subject. Unextricably linked with bourgeois
individualism Adorno himself might be considered as probably the last subject.
Literate, artistically gifted and articulate an intellectual as he was Adorno
as an individual downright embodied the subject, a subject that was then
historically in danger as he knew too well. This fact or circumstance he
succeeded to analyze - to no surprise - in his work to a large extent,
especially in his philosophy of art. But if the subject has undergone its death
we can with Adorno merely redraw the traces of the sicknesses that lead to its
death and prevent us from its precipitate resurrection Adorno would possibly
withdrawn from himself.
Here of course I refer to times that set in during the
mid 1960ies in
Is Adorno's aesthetics as part of a philosophical and
“critical theory of society” - as was the title of the program of the
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Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford-UK/Cambridge-MA: Basil Blackwell
Früchtl, Josef (1998): Adorno and Mimesis, in:
Michael Kelly (Hg.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Bd. 1, New York-NY/Oxford-E:
Hauskeller, Michael (1998): Was ist Kunst? Positionen der Ästhetik von Platon bis Adanto, = bsr 1254, München: C. H. Beck
Jung, Werner (1995): Von der Mimesis zur Simulation. Eine Einführung in die Geschichte der Ästhetik, Hamburg: Junius
Liessmann, Konrad P. (1993): Philosophie der modernen Kunst. Eine Einführung, Wien: WUV Universitäts-Verlag
Menke, Christoph (1998): Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, in: Nida-Rümelin, Julian/Betzler, Monika (Hg.), Ästhetik und Kunstphilosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, = Kröners Taschenausgabe 375, Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 5-15
Schneider, Norbert (1996): Geschichte der Ästhetik von der Aufklärung bis zur Postmoderne. Eine paradigmatische Einführung, = UB 9457, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun.
Welsch, Wolfgang (1990): Adornos Ästhetik: eine implizite Ästhetik des Erhabenen, in: Ästhetisches Denken, = UB 8681, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam Jr., 114-156
Wiesing, Lambert (1992): Th. W. Adorno: Kunst als Ideologiekritik <Kommentar>, in: ders. (Hg.) (1992): Philosophische Ästhetik, = Aschendorffs philosophische Textreihe Kurs 7, Münster: Aschendorff, 232f.
Zima, Peter (1995): Literarische Ästhetik.
Methoden und Modelle der Literaturwissenschaft, = UTB 1590, 2. Aufl., Tübingen/Basel: Francke
Zuidervaart, Lambert (1998): Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, in: Michael Kelly
(Hg.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, Bd. 1, New York-NY/Oxford-E:
Peter Mahr © 2003
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