Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

As perhaps suits its intentionally ambiguous title, Aesthetic Theory is more rhetorically rebarbative than any other of Adorno’s works. Adorno consistently argued against providing definitions of his terms, hoping to maintain a labile set of philosophical concepts. Rather than being set by some stipulative definition, they were intended to take their structure and form from the demands generated by the phenomena they were applied to in each instance. Aesthetic Theory is by far the most successful realization of this principle. Adorno assembles a number of key terms and continually applies and reapplies them throughout the text. The most central of these terms—“expression,” “semblance,” “mimesis,” “construction”—demands sustained exegetical work to winnow out the full variety of uses to which they are put. Much valuable work has been done on this score, and I cannot hope to contribute to it here. In this chapter I hope to work at a lower level—as I did on Adorno’s dialectical philosophy—in order to interrogate those structures that must be in place in order to make Adorno’s conceptually labile method possible. I am going to confine my attention to Adorno’s notion of aesthetic truth content, and the often suggestive linkages he makes between this notion and the nonidentical. I cannot hope to give a full account of Adorno’s aesthetics, then, but I will try to explicate a central feature of that aesthetic, namely, Adorno’s reliance on the notion that art can be true.

While Adorno’s claims about the fundamental features of art were nearly always carefully qualified, or couched in refusals of the very idea of the existence of such fundamentals, he was nonetheless entirely strident when it came to the question of art’s relation to truth. For example: “Art is nevertheless the truth of society insofar as in its most authentic products the irrationality of the rational world order is expressed.”¹ Most obviously striking about this sentence is Adorno’s blunt statement that art is true. But, in a characteristically compressed fashion, Adorno also makes here a number of claims that serve to deepen and problematize the claim that art is in some sense true. The first of these concerns Adorno’s use of the term “expressed”; art is identified with an expression of the “irrationality of the world order.” This seems the more troubling when we bear in mind that the highest, most authentic form of art for Adorno is identified by its formal rigor and technical innovation, rather than any explicit attempt to fold in political or social themes. Indeed, the controversy that Adorno generated between himself, Lukács, and Brecht revolved around his vituperative rejection of the latter two’s attempt to subjugate the formal demands of art to the political. ² As the scorn that Adorno pours on in “Commitment”³ makes plain, he has in mind as the “most authentic products” of art those that refuse to intentionally open themselves up to social content, refuse to intentionally provide critiques of that which is external to art itself. It is at least partially due to this view that he terms the authentic artwork a “windowless monad,” a Leibnizian metaphor I shall return to below. Contemporary authentic artworks are for Adorno formally modernist. As ever, music furnishes Adorno with his clearest examples, and he singles out for praise Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, and the late Beethoven as examples of authentic art. These works are distinguished by their intense formal experimentation and—with the exception of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw—their eschewing any overt political content.

Accordingly, when Adorno says that artworks “express” the state of the “world order” we are not here dealing with a kind of direct expression. Virtually all of the artworks that meet Adorno’s standard of “authenticity” refuse to express anything concrete about the world at all, much less the “world order.” This is all the more so in the case of the musical examples Adorno has frequent recourse to, which are difficult to understand as expressing (in the presently relevant sense) anything at all. Artworks, for Adorno, are importantly and centrally formally constructed objects, which respond to formal problematics (as we will see). This being so, if Adorno wants to see the artwork as expressive, he stands in need of an account whereby these formal properties take on expanded hermeneutic scope in the artwork and in some fashion provide a critique of the society external to them.

Adorno understands the artwork to be critical and (following from this) in some sense cognitive. Just as the artwork’s ability to instantiate the “irrationality of the social order” is difficult to grasp due to the artwork’s refusal to incorporate social content, it is similarly difficult to understand how the artwork is capable of possessing an epistemological viewpoint at all, let alone one that is capable of judging the social order to be irrational. Adorno understands the creation of art to be conducted entirely through the artist’s fidelity to the formal demands of his aesthetic material: “The real source of the risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoorwill of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces—the spirit of the artist and his procedures—will be equal to that objectivity.”⁴ Given that the construction of the artwork is an entirely formal procedure, which has no reference to the intentions of the artist⁵ beyond the notation and resolution of formal problems, it is entirely unclear how this procedure of formal construction can result in rational criticism of the social order. We have the assertion that the artwork is in contact with realms of phenomena (the social order, standards of rationality) and has capacities (to make rational criticisms) based on that contact, yet Adorno’s account of the constitution and creation of the artwork would appear to entirely close off the possibility of such contact and hence the exercise of such capacities. Adorno’s claim that the artwork is true is intrinsically problematic on these grounds, and much of this chapter will be dedicated to attempting to unravel this problem.

This difficulty is compounded when one considers that the artwork for Adorno is not merely an expression of problems in the social order but is also, like dialectical philosophy, capable of providing rationally complex critiques of the structures of understanding itself: “Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it; art is not something prerational or irrational, which would peremptorily condemn it as untruth in the face of the entanglement of all human activity in the social totality. Rational and irrational theories of art are therefore equally faulty.”⁶

So for Adorno, the purely formal process of artistic creation—and the created artwork that results—not only is able to exhibit and criticize social content, but is also capable of interceding in complex, high-level problems internal to rationality itself. As Adorno puts it, “Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it.” This phrase brings to mind Adorno’s characterization of dialectical philosophy as the unlocking of the “non-conceptual by means of the concept, and the self-criticism of concepts,”⁷ and opens the suspicion that art and philosophy will share a great number of conceptual structures. This suspicion is only intensified by Adorno’s repeated claim that the truth content of the artwork is in some fashion related to the non-identical: “Truth content presents itself in art as a multiplicity, not as the concept that abstractly subordinates artworks. The bond of the truth content of art to its works and the multiplicity of what surpasses identification accord.”⁸ The artwork is not merely cognitively rich, and possessed of a critique of the rationality of the world order; this rational critique is also claimed in some fashion to accord with the nonidentical (“that which surpasses identification”). Adorno firms up this notion and strengthens the claim: “The new wants non-identity, yet intention reduces it to identity; modern art constantly works at the Münchausen trick of carrying out the identification of the non-identical.”⁹

The truth content of the artwork does not merely accord with the nonidentical, then; it is the very work of authentic art to instantiate and to identify the nonidentical. This tight relation between art and the nonidentical presents a further difficulty similar in structure to those already elaborated above. To “identify” is to subsume something under a concept or type; artworks however seem importantly noncognitive and incapable of providing “identification” in this way. Moreover, as Adorno notes, conceptual “identity” is an ineluctable feature of continuous experience. ¹⁰ As a consequence of this, we saw that Adorno’s philosophy had to follow a complex dialectical procedure in order to undo identity thinking, through manipulating the latent conceptual problematics in the socially universal conceptual array. It is as yet unclear how artworks, which are constructed through following entirely formal, nonconceptual aesthetic problematics, would be capable of circumventing the delusive influence of concepts in a similar way. Nonetheless, Adorno’s use of the phrase “the identification of the non-identical” clearly implies that artworks, like philosophical texts, are capable of dialectically manipulating concepts so as to induce an experience of the nonidentical. This can be seen in the closeness of Adorno’s articulation of the role of art concerning the true to his articulation of the role of philosophy in Negative Dialectics: “To change [the] direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward non-identity, is the hinge of negative dialectics.”¹¹

Here, as in the case of art, we have the assertion that dialectical philosophy attempts to grasp the nonidentical via the process of identification. We have seen that Adorno posits art as not only a mode of knowledge, but, as in dialectical philosophy, a mode of knowledge of the nonidentical. Second, we have seen that the problematic of this knowledge of the nonidentical in the aesthetic context is, just as in the philosophical context, governed by the antagonism between conceptual identification and the nonidentical object of comprehension. In both philosophy and art, Adorno alleges that the solution to this antagonism lies in the “identification of the non-identical.” It is apparent that art is confronted with a problematic closely parallel to the problematic that confronts dialectical philosophy. This provides a basis upon which to begin arguing that the truth of philosophy and art can be seen as commensurate. In order to begin building on this basis, I should first like to demonstrate that, as in the case of philosophy, the truth of art is wholly negative and critical. This is best established by reexamining the problematic of delusive mediation, in the context of art.

Here, Adorno not only explicitly endorses the negativity of art (“art… criticizes rationality”) but also, importantly, locates this negativity in the same epistemological context as the negativity of philosophy. As we saw in the previous chapter, philosophy is caught in a dilemma. It cannot employ the “discursive,” merely rational standards of justification and inference presented by conventional conceptuality. Those standards introduce obstacles to the genuine comprehension of the object, and hence falsify assertions made by means of them. However, an irrational escape from this problematic is equally impossible, as it precludes any meaningful relationship between the subject and object whatsoever. Only concepts and the rationality made possible by those concepts allow for an epistemic relation between the subject and object to be created. As a consequence, philosophy became dialectical: neither merely rational nor irrational, but rather a rational critique of rationality itself. Adorno now locates art in an identical situation. Art, like philosophy, is caught between two equally unsustainable epistemological modes. On the one hand, art is pulled toward regression to “literal magic.” Adorno is here drawing on the account of magic adumbrated with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which we developed in chapter 1. Magic stands for an early stage of the development of rationality, at which the distinction between the concept and object is not yet fully fleshed out, and comprehension of the environment is sought through the mimetic project of making oneself like the nature one is trying to control. Art is “pulled” in this direction just because the propensity of concepts to obscure objects generates the temptation to arbitrarily attempt to unite concepts and things, as magic sought to do. In this way, art would exit the problematic of modern rationality, but thereby increase its own irrationality and—in seeking to unite the concept and the particular—forfeit the capability of communicating the truth.

The other direction in which art is “pulled” is “thinglike rationality.” In attempting to disclose the nonidentical, art needs to make use of the rational standards of communication and justification embedded in concepts. Art’s inability to escape these standards generates the temptation to simply “surrender” to conventional conceptual discourse and to attempt to positively express the true. However, this would also defeat the goal of the exercise, as such a surrender would surrender the object to the distorting and delusive influence of the concept. Philosophy solves this dilemma by creating a metacritique of the rational standards embedded in conventional conceptuality. Art likewise navigates this dilemma by becoming a rational critique of rationality.

This similarity in the negativity of art and philosophy could merely, of course, be skin deep. There is nothing to say that the negativity of philosophy and art relates to the same, identical problematic. Adorno, however, asserts that they do relate to the same problematic: “Art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it.”¹³ Art’s requirement of philosophy, whose role it is to “interpret” and “say” that which art cannot say, entails that art and philosophy must share a common content that is, as it were, expressible across the two kinds of practice (the philosophical and the aesthetic). Given that philosophy’s content is necessarily truth-apt, the content embedded in art, which philosophy itself is capable of receiving, would seem itself to be truth-apt (or, at least, to be such that expression in truth-apt terms does not seriously distort it). Both art and philosophy, then, are forms of knowledge; moreover, they each provide differing ways of knowing the same thing: “Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept.”¹⁴ Not only are philosophy and art identically situated in terms of the web of mediation that constitutes them; they also “converge in their truth content.” The only unqualified truth content of philosophy was the nonidentical; and accordingly, Adorno identifies the ultimate aim of art as the “identification of the non-identical.”¹⁵ There seems to be little doubt that Adorno sees his theory of aesthetic and philosophical truth as substantially unified.

Given this gloss on Adorno’s aesthetics, one might have the impression that Adorno has simply reduced art to a clumsily articulated form of philosophy. My claim that art and philosophy have a “unified” theory of truth raises the danger that Adorno is making art and philosophy homogenous. To clear up this possible misconstrual of Adorno, and of my reading of him, I would like to develop the differentiations that he folds into his unified theory of truth, and explore how art and philosophy are capable of sharing an identical truth content, while having entirely domain-specific, autonomous methods of instantiating that truth content. The central point around which these differentiations converge is that of the circumvention of delusive mediation. Both philosophy and art are identically positioned in terms of having both their construction (by the philosopher/artist) and reception (by the reader/art appreciator) problematized by the delusive mediation of concepts. Both art and philosophy are obliged to engage these delusive mediation relations in order to manipulate concepts into revealing their own insufficiency. Both art and philosophy, however, are obliged to engage in this conceptual manipulation in radically different ways.

Adorno also construes art as a critique of the delusive nature of conceptuality and the conceptual mediation of experience. However, art cannot be understood as achieving this end goal (and its further production of an experience of the nonidentical) in a functionally identical fashion. The two constitutive features of philosophy—its conceptual self-reflexivity and its orientation toward knowledge—on which its mechanics depend are entirely absent from art. Art is, Adorno claims, constitutively incapable of employing nonaesthetic material; it is, moreover, entirely unconcerned with claims to knowledge or epistemological norms. Art constructs itself solely in accord with its domain-specific aesthetic norms. Adorno understands art as above all autonomous, and entirely rebarbative to any attempt to import heteronomous, nonaesthetic problematics into itself. Art refuses, constitutively, any attempt to know, judge, or cognize: “The affinity of [aesthetic] construction with cognitive processes, or perhaps rather with their interpretation by the theory of knowledge, is no less evident than is their difference, which is that art does not make judgements and when it does, it shatters its own concept.”¹⁶

Adorno yet again opens an apparent contradiction. It is essential to the success and “authenticity” of an artwork that it, in some undisclosed fashion, discloses a critique of that which is heteronomous to the artwork. It provides no less than a criticism of the rational structure of society. At the same time as it is critically intervening in the organization of the heteronomous, it is also radically autonomous, refraining not only from making judgments on that which is external to the artwork, but also from any contact with the heteronomous whatsoever. The artwork, in importing its content, reduces the heteronomous to the artwork’s own categories: “Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstructing them according to the work’s own law. Only through such transformation… does art give empirical reality its due.”¹⁷

The heteronomous cannot enter into the constitution of the artwork, then, and even if it could, the artwork is constitutively incapable of judgmentally engaging such heteronomous content. It can scarcely be anything other than a mystery, then, how such a radically autonomous artwork could amount to a critique of its sociohistorical context. Adorno is fully aware of this difficulty, and it is this difficulty that undoubtedly stands behind his repeated reference to the artwork as a “windowless monad.” While this glancing reference to Leibniz’s monadology has some interpretive value—as I will go on to show below—it cannot serve to close this difficulty, only rather to highlight it.

The key difficulty—intimated by the phrase “windowless monad”—revolves around the interaction between heteronomy and autonomy. How can that which is entirely autonomous (artworks that “hermetically seal themselves off” as Adorno puts it)¹⁸ criticize the heteronomous? Moreover, how can that which refuses to enact deliberative judgment produce criticism? Resolving this issue requires a detour through Adorno’s conception of aesthetic autonomy.

Given Adorno’s commitment to terminological lability, I cannot provide an exhaustive definition of what Adorno understands by the term “autonomy.” For the moment, one can understand the autonomy of the artwork to consist in the artwork’s constituting itself solely by means of aesthetic processes and its applying these aesthetic processes solely to what Adorno calls “aesthetic material.”¹⁹ It is not important at this moment to elucidate the precise meaning of “aesthetic materials” and “aesthetic processes.” Let’s gloss aesthetic materials to be the subject of the processes of artistic creation. The artwork rejects any heteronomous content drawn from the world external to the artwork as an aesthetic material. All imported aesthetic contents are, on Adorno’s view, converted into purely autonomous, purely aesthetic material (I will expand on this shortly). We can gloss aesthetic processes as purely autonomous processes of artistic creation that are in no way determined by extra-aesthetic practices. The artwork confines itself entirely to materials, norms, and practices internal to its own domain, with no intentional dealings with that which is external to the particular artwork itself. Adorno emphasizes this:

We are told that the artwork’s self-mimesis prevents it from being akin to a “symbol.” This is because the symbol and the symbolized characteristically share formal characteristics (consider the relationship between the holy trinity and the fleurs-de-lis). The form of an artwork, by contrast, is constructed entirely according to the formal demands of the artwork itself, and has no intentional congruency with that which is external to the artwork. Adorno thematizes this autonomous exclusivity of the artwork, variously terming the artwork “hermetic” or “blind.”²¹ This serves to throw into relief the impossibility of collapsing the boundary between the categories of art and philosophy. Art, for itself, has no relevance to philosophical problems, and no capacity for mimetically mirroring philosophical method.

This introduces our first problem. The very severity of this divorce between the nature of philosophy and the nature of the artwork threatens to stall Adorno’s project of positing the artwork as a form of rational access to the nonidentical. While he intends the artwork to be a form of knowledge, which breaks the falsifying compulsion of the concept in order to reach the nonidentical,²² it would seem that his uncompromising insistence on the artwork’s being autonomously constituted serves merely to rule this out. Art’s autonomy entails that it excludes, as content, the epistemological processes that falsify it. As it cannot address them (having excluded them), then, it would appear impossible that it could successfully critique them and escape being falsified by them. If the artwork takes place in experience, and is thus falsified by the mediators of experience, and moreover is constitutively incapable of directly addressing and critiquing these mediators, the artwork would seem to be incapable of avoiding being falsified itself.

Adorno’s laudable refusal to homogenize art and philosophy seems to have undermined any possibility of seeing art as rational knowledge of the true and, by extension, my claim that artistic and philosophical truth is commensurable. However, Adorno flatly denies that the artwork’s hermetic status precludes its being true. Rather, he claims that art—just by virtue of concentrating solely on its aesthetic properties—is able to effect the kind of critique and demolition of its falsifying mediators that is necessary: “That artworks as windowless monads “represent” what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it.”²³ Adorno’s move here is bold. While the artwork is entirely self-mimetic, and hence eschews any attempt to model or criticize the world external to it, Adorno nonetheless confidently asserts that the artwork “resembles [the world] without imitating it.” Taking this assertion at face value, Adorno is claiming that the artwork, though causally and normatively cut off from heteronomy, is capable—through its autonomy—of reflecting that heteronomy. It is Adorno’s use of the Leibnizian phrase “windowless monad” which confirms that we should take Adorno’s claim at face value. Adorno’s reference to Leibniz is calculated and—characteristically of Adorno at the most strained and problematic points of his philosophy—achieves much by implication and allusion that demands to be made explicit.

Leibniz understands the universe to comprise ontological units known as “monads,” each of which reflects every other without causal interaction. ²⁴ This acausal reflection is brought about by the individual monad developing its own inner principle. Due to the established harmony that underpins Leibniz’s metaphysics, the execution of a monad’s inner principle excludes all interaction with other monads, and yet thereby achieves harmonious reflection of those other monads. It is this acausal, noninteractive reflection that Adorno is claiming stands as the grounds of the artwork’s capacity to remain autonomously exclusive of, and yet critically reflective of, its heteronomous context. Without directly dealing with that which is external to the aesthetic (in fact, precluding the extra-aesthetic by virtue of its autonomy), the artwork nonetheless, Adorno claims, “resembles… without imitating” the state of the extra-aesthetic. This is the analogy Adorno intends to draw in using the phrase “windowless monad”; without interaction, the artwork nonetheless expresses the reality of that which is external to it:

One functional upshot of the artwork’s autonomy, then, will be the capacity to instantiate in some fashion a critique of the heteronomy that obtains outside of it. While Adorno’s use of Leibnizian metaphor is circumspect, it nonetheless leaves importantly open the question of how this synchronicity (between the operation of autonomy and the state of the heteronomous) is guaranteed. To return to Leibniz, the capacity of the monad to reflect its fellow monads without interaction is explained by the intercession of God, who presets the internal principles of each monad such that they, in the course of executing those principles, acausally reflect one another. Adorno’s account stands in need of a similar intercession, which is capable of synchronizing the windowless autonomy of the artwork with the heteronomous.

I believe Adorno is capable of providing this interceding principle, and of providing a full explanation of the synchronicity that obtains between the autonomy of the artwork and the heteronomous. Before doing so, I want to first briefly outline a second feature of the autonomy of the artwork that stands in need of explanation. Adorno believes that the successful construction of an autonomous artwork results not only in critique of the world external to the artwork, but also in what he calls a “shudder”:

In the first extract,²⁸ Adorno asserts that this shudder which results from a successfully executed artwork recapitulates an experience which began the history of mankind, against which the history of mankind was opposed. This cannot but bring to mind the account in Dialectic of Enlightenment of the genesis of conceptuality (outlined in chapter 1). It was the original experience of nonconceptual terror that gave rise to conceptuality (and, correlatively, human history); and it is this nonconceptual experience to which Adorno understands conventional conceptual discourse to be opposed. This original experience, as we saw in chapter 1, was the nonidentical, the experience of an object that refuses conceptual subsumption and threateningly presents a phenomenon that the consciousness is incapable of subsuming and controlling.

Adorno claims that the artwork recapitulates an experience of the failure of conceptual subsumption, that is, the nonidentical. Moreover, just as in the case of philosophy, Adorno links this comprehension of the nonidentical with a form of experience. Adorno linked the comprehension of the nonidentical through philosophy with a “momentary” conceptual breakout; Adorno’s theory of art links it with an experienced “shudder.” Once more, then, despite the vast differences between philosophy and art, Adorno is claiming that there is a unified end point for each, namely, a true experience of the nonidentical.

This assertion is not without problems. Adorno is claiming that, despite the artwork’s complete hermeticity and autonomy, the artwork’s hermetic process of constitution nonetheless results in a negating of the delusive mediation with which aesthetic experience is imbricated, and as a consequence serves as an instantiation of the nonidentical. This amounts to our second problem—how can we take this autonomously aesthetic process to result in a critical break with delusive conceptual mediation, resulting in access to the nonidentical?

Both of the problems I have raised (of art’s autonomous reflection of the heteronomous, of art’s autonomy terminating in an experience of the nonidentical) revolve around the relation of autonomy and heteronomy. Presently, there seems little alternative to understanding autonomy and heteronomy in art as diametrically opposed. There is an explanatory gap in understanding the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy. If there is some account available that is able to put the hermetic constitution of the artwork in touch with that which is aesthetically heteronomous (epistemology, philosophical and social problematics, and the like), by virtue of the operation of autonomy alone, then Adorno’s account will become plausible, and the explanatory gap will be closed.

Mediation will serve to smooth over this problem. So long as we understand autonomy and heteronomy as autarchic, opposed spheres in art, then the problematic explanatory gap concerning their interrelation will never be able to be closed. Adorno however argues quite forcefully that heteronomy in fact constitutes the autonomy of the artwork: “Art and artworks are perishable, not simply because by their heteronomy they are dependent, but because right into the smallest detail of their autonomy… they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it.”²⁹ Adorno is not here giving a reductive account—the autonomy of art is not simply an epiphenomenon of heteronomy. The artwork retains genuine autonomous control over its content and structure. Adorno will make the argument that the execution by art of its autonomous decisions will, due to the influence of mediation, be predetermined so as to reflect and critique the heteronomous without interaction with the heteronomous. In this sense, mediation will serve as the functional analogue for Leibniz’s God.

The autonomy of the artwork, on Adorno’s account, can be broken down into two main constituents. Adorno conceives the autonomous artwork to comprise an autonomous aesthetic process of formation that in turn concerns itself with wholly autonomous aesthetic materials. I will elaborate Adorno’s solution to the explanatory gap between heteronomy and autonomy by dealing with each of these in turn.

On Adorno’s understanding, the processes at work in constructing an artwork are entirely autonomous. The artist’s role is substantially passive,³⁰ and their intentions have little to no determining influence on the substantial content of the artwork. ³¹ Of course an artist likely engages in aesthetic praxis in order to satisfy some intention (if only to satisfy an urge to create, or, less flatteringly, to acquire prestige). Adorno does not believe or demand that artists are selfless and intentionless. But he understands the mechanics of artistic production to be such that any intentions the artist has are functionally precluded from having any influence on the resulting artwork. ³²

The artwork is produced without the imposition of predetermined aesthetic ideas or structures. Rather, the artwork is “organized from below.”³³ Adorno claims that the aesthetic materials which are employed by the artwork have intrinsic formal demands. ³⁴ It is the role of the artist to follow and reconcile these formal demands: “The real source of risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoorwill of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces—the spirit of the artist and his procedures—will be equal to that objectivity.”³⁵ Artistic production is a form of sensitivity to purely immanent formal demands. These formal demands can be presented within certain wider formal contexts—as, for example, a composer in the premodernist period might be constrained by certain preset demands of the sonata form. Nonetheless, the artist’s only intercession is in the resolution of these formal demands, and aesthetic materials confront the artist as a complex of formal problematics.

Adorno often likens this process of artistic formation to the construction of a riddle or Vexierbild. ³⁶ The Vexierbild, or “picture puzzle,” is an illustration that plays on the formal characteristics of its visual components in order to introduce a visually complex image, which can be visually interpreted into a number of different images, often satirical in intent. Examples of these abound—they were a reasonably popular fixture in the German newspapers of Adorno’s time—but the most familiar to us are perhaps Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit or Salvador Dali’s The Great Paranoiac.

Adorno’s analogy with riddles and Vexierbilder is informative. A riddle or Vexierbild cannot be constructed according to a predetermined structure or form; rather, the content of each can only be produced through the manipulation of the formal properties of its materials and the structural specificity of its medium (for example, tricks of perspective in the Vexierbild, linguistic ambiguity in the riddle). The finished product is the outcome of a dialectic between the formal properties of all of the constituents, and could not have been imposed onto those constituents without navigating this dialectic. Taking the Vexierbild as an example—the concealed image cannot be imposed onto the apparent image, but rather must be composed from the formal properties of the constituents of the apparent image. Failing to do so will cause the concealed image to no longer be concealed, and the constitutive ambiguity of the Vexierbild will be lost.

The nature and formal content of the materials of the riddle and Vexierbild have a strong determining role in establishing the constitution of the completed artifact and what it turns out to “mean.” It is this that Adorno is gesturing toward in using his analogy. This, then, is how we should understand the process of aesthetic creation—it does not concern itself with propounding an ideology, or with attempting to instantiate an “aesthetic idea,” but is instead a formal process of investigating aesthetic materials and then resolving the various aesthetic and formal properties of these aesthetic materials such that an aesthetic whole results. ³⁷

This clarifies why Adorno terms the artwork “hermetic.” The artwork’s constitutive principle is nothing other than the treatment of aesthetic materials without reference to anything but their formal properties. As such, the artwork is entirely autonomous considered from the perspective of its constitutive processes. And this leaves us with the problem of comprehending how such a radically autonomous procedure could entail critique of that which is external to the artwork.

Adorno frequently asserts in Aesthetic Theory that this hermetic process of artistic creation is constituted by heteronomy. This constitution of the autonomous by heteronomy is often referred to by Adorno as the “guilt” of the artwork: “The monadological character of artworks would not have formed without the guilt of the monstrous monodalogical character of society, but only by its means do artworks achieve that objectivity that transcends solipsism.”³⁸ Adorno’s use of term “monad” is somewhat confusing here—it does not seem that Adorno means to signify the acausal reflective properties of Leibniz’s monads. Rather, here the “monadological character” shared by the artwork and society would appear to refer to the self-contained nature of Leibniz’s monads. Leibniz’s monads have no parts, and each is a complete unity (that is, it is not internally differentiated, but bears its properties uniformly throughout itself). ³⁹ Calling society “monstrously monadological” maps onto Adorno’s critique of society as a “total society, which encompasses all relationships and impulses.”⁴⁰ Society’s monadological character is just its suppression of internal differentiation in favor of total unity, reducing all of its constituents to its own internal standard. The artwork, likewise, has a monodalogical character by virtue of manipulating and harmonizing the alterity of its constituents until they form a unified whole. The aesthetic materials that constitute an artwork each have competing individual formal demands, which are only harmonized into a unity through the oppressive imposition of form created by the artist’s decisions at such points of tension. ⁴¹

The “guilt” that Adorno refers to here is not incurred by the mere fact of having a monadological character, but rather in the functional dependence that this monadological character of the artwork has on society itself. The artwork in some fashion uses the “means” of the social whole in order to constitute its critique of that society. The way in which Adorno wants to see the autonomy of the artwork as intertwined with the heteronomy of society is best understood sociologically. Adorno often notes the practical requirements for cultural work (freedom from immediate want, unusually large amounts of leisure time), and claims not unreasonably that cultural work thereby is only possible through a negotiation, and hence compromise, with the existing structures of capitalist society. Since Adorno views the extant social structure as “hell,”⁴² any such compromise incurs a “guilt” for the artwork and artist. ⁴³

This first form of “guilt,” that of the artwork’s imbrication in a falsely constituted social whole, is relatively simple. Adorno claims that, although the artwork constitutes itself as autonomous, this “autonomous” activity is predicated on a heteronomous state of affairs. This heteronomous state of affairs is nothing other than the unequal social distribution of funds that makes possible the artist’s hermetic, blind activity. To sharpen the issue, the “hermetic” nature of the artwork entails that the artist must construct the artwork without reference to immediate interest, ideology, or instrumental goal. This, however, is only possible if the artist’s situation is such that he or she is able to withdraw him- or herself from these concerns; and this possibility itself is determined either directly by the social structure (in the case of state funding) or indirectly (in the case of patronage or personal wealth, either of which are only possible in a society that unevenly distributes its funds).

There is an inescapable air of the mundane about this line of thought. And it certainly does not aid us at all in trying to understand how autonomously executed artworks can mirror and critique their heteronomous context. All the same, there is something to be said for it. Namely, that this shows Adorno trying to demonstrate that even at the most basic aesthetic level (the existence of the artist and the artist’s engaging in the activity of creating art) autonomy presupposes heteronomy and requires it in order to exist. Adorno’s understanding is that the nature of autonomous aesthetic production (the hermetic working of aesthetic material) is itself only possible if certain heteronomous conditions obtain (the artist’s social standing, level of funds, and so on). Even if successful, however, this account is far too thin to explain how the artwork possesses the ability to criticize that which is outside of it. Adorno goes on to deepen this account of the artwork’s “guilt,” turning away from its more practical aspects to the deeper interrelation between the hermetic artwork and its social context: “Art becomes entangled in the guilt context of the living, not only because its distance allows the guilt context to prevail but even more importantly because it makes incisions in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it.”⁴⁴

While the guilt of the artwork’s “distance” from the “guilt context” of society is undeniably a gesture toward the first kind of guilt I outlined above, the “even more important” form of guilt Adorno picks out here is quite different. This “guilt” is identified with an epistemological trait that the artwork shares in common with its “guilt context.” The artwork’s expressivity, achieved through the manipulation of its aesthetic materials, is a “mutilation” of those aesthetic materials. The “living”—the world as it appears in the artwork—is culpably mutilated by the artwork, and this mutilation derives from the artwork’s lifting the living into “language.” This falsification of the living—which is importantly similar to the falsification caused by the social “guilt context”—comes about through the introduction of language. Just like philosophy, art makes use of language (linguistic art) and conceptual structures (linguistic and nonlinguistic art) that are embedded in “identity thinking” and thereby false. In the very attempt to make something manifest, the artwork obscures the phenomena through subjecting it to concepts.

Adorno understands the autonomous artwork as taking part in identity thinking (and, correlatively, as being determined in the structure of its operation by heteronomy) by virtue of the artwork’s “domination”⁴⁵ of its aesthetic materials. The artwork is intrinsically a form of domination because it is an offshoot of the heteronomous process of identity thinking, from which it inherits this dominating character. As such, Adorno wants to see the autonomous sphere of artistic production as structurally dependent on, and constituted by, a heteronomous process that occurs external to it, and that gave rise to it.

This dependence of art on identity thinking—if that is what Adorno is gesturing toward here—is difficult to comprehend outside of those forms of art that, like literature, have a clear connection to concepts. How do sculpture and music, for instance, take part in identity thinking? This difficulty is especially pressing given that Adorno has already claimed that artistic composition purely follows formal demands. It is difficult to see how the conceptual problems represented by identity thinking are germane, in the case of the formal problems thrown up by music, for instance. Concepts, under “identity thinking,” “dominate” their objects by mangling their phenomenal and cognitive character until any extraconceptual residue is concealed and treated as nonexistent. Artworks are constitutively incapable of employing concepts,⁴⁶ and Adorno accordingly requires an account of how artworks can be meaningfully seen as dominating in the same way.

It is tempting to read the artwork’s domination as the artwork’s attempt to force its aesthetic materials into an established aesthetic form that rides roughshod over the formal demands of the materials themselves. On this reading, then, domination would arise whenever the formal properties of the aesthetic materials were ignored in order to subordinate them to some imposed formal project. (We might imagine, for instance, a set of poetic ideas being forced into a preset rhyme scheme, rather than being given the kind of full expression that free verse might afford them.) However, this reading is untenable, just because Adorno also identifies this domination of the artwork as being present in ideal, “authentic” artworks too. ⁴⁷ Adorno identifies the authenticity of an artwork with its refusal to impose preestablished forms, and so the domination referred to cannot be of this type. ⁴⁸

The “domination” of the artwork is its subjugation of its component materials to the overarching unity of that artwork. In order to exist as an artwork, the artwork cannot be a mere aggregate of its components, but must formally bend those components into a unified whole. In order to exist as a singular and unified artwork, an artwork must prevent its aesthetic materials from being apprehended in their full specificity as wholes, and must instead subjugate these materials as parts: “What art in the broadest sense works with, it oppresses: This is the ritual of the domination of nature that lives on in play.”⁴⁹ The sacrifice of the immanent demands of each of the aesthetic materials to the demands of unification of those materials in a whole unavoidably transforms, mutilates, and reduces the aesthetic materials employed. If the artwork is to cogently reject the world external to it and appear as a hermetically sealed, autonomous whole, it must make manifest and apparent its status as not merely an object native to the heteronomous world, but rather something that is at work in refusing to conform to the structure of the heteronomous. And this is, on the one hand, bound up with the demands of aesthetic unity; as we have seen, in order to exist as a singular aesthetic object, and not a mere collection of discrete material, the artwork must mold, combine, and harmonize its various parts. This is ineluctable, I think, on almost any understanding of artworks as compositional objects; on Adorno’s view, it is also reflective of the artwork’s being entwined with a broader epistemic trend toward “identity,” control, and abstraction. The artwork, then, to exist as an artwork, must change its materials, must “dominate” them and subjugate them to an overarching project of unification. This, in part, grants the artwork its autonomy; a sculpture, for instance, appears as a distinct source of value by virtue of not merely collecting various pieces of marble together (which might exhibit heteronomous kinds of value, suitability as building material, say), but through forcibly unifying and molding them into an object that visibly rejects these heteronomous forms of value in favor of autonomously exhibiting aesthetic structure and value.

It is just the artwork’s autonomy—its ability to unify itself and differentiate itself from nonaesthetic objects—that Adorno takes to be centrally responsible for the artwork’s imbrication with and criticism of the heteronomy external to it. Horowitz gives a very useful account that clarifies why this is:

The autonomy of the artwork reveals itself through the negation of the heteronomous. Art is constitutively appearance; for autonomy to be discerned in an artwork—and hence for it to be relevant to the artwork’s aesthetic value—this autonomy must also display itself. However, as autonomy is in an important sense a lack, an absence of subjection to external determination, this autonomy can only manifest itself through the exhibition of this freedom. As Horowitz notes, this exhibition must be accomplished through the negation of the heteronomous. Moreover, this negation must also be made apparent. The autonomy of art, then, is dependent on a visible negation of extra-aesthetic, heteronomous material. By analyzing the conditions for the autonomy of art, and discerning its dependence on the visible negation of heteronomy, Horowitz elucidates the internal relation between the visible autonomy of the artwork and criticism of the heteronomous, which is external to the artwork. Adorno expands on this: “The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination…. Aesthetic rationality wants to make good on the damage done by nature-dominating rationality.”⁵¹

The artwork, then, is unavoidably implicated in, and constituted by, the heteronomous dialectic external to it. In order to manifest its own autonomy, and constitute itself as a unity, the artwork must formally manipulate its constituent parts. This formal manipulation, in Adorno’s view, is nothing but domination: “Undoubtedly, the historical [aesthetic] materials and their domination—technique—advance; discoveries such as those of perspective in painting and polyphony in music are the most obvious examples.”⁵² The artwork constitutively recapitulates the characteristic error and “guilt” of identity thinking, which does violence to the topic of its thought in order to attain the pragmatic goal of that thought. Just as the consciousness is pressed into knowledge of the world by self-preservation, but thereby generates concepts that preclude full knowledge of the world, so too is the artwork pressed into being a formal unity in order to display its autonomy and differentiation from the world, but thereby recapitulates the internal structure of the world it attempts to differentiate itself from, in making use of the dominating manipulation of its aesthetic materials.

Working with Horowitz, one can see that the autonomy of the artwork is functionally dependent on its heteronomous context, and is forced to engage it in order to constitute its own autonomy. While this serves as a forceful theoretical account of the constitution of autonomy by heteronomy, Adorno also provides a sociohistorical account of the emergence of art out of identity thinking, which is also intended to provide an account of the similarity in structure between art and identity thinking.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno provided an account of the characteristic structures of both rational thought and human society that derived its justification both from conceptual analysis and from historical speculation. History is seen at least in part by Adorno as a working through of a particular conceptual problematic—namely, identity thinking—and the various disintegrations and forms of life that this governing problematic generates. Adorno quite clearly understands art itself to feature in this historico-conceptual narrative, and to derive its dominating character from its status as an epiphenomenal production of identity thinking: “Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of the artworks produces the shudder by externalizing it in objects. Thus art participates in the actual movement of history in accord with the law of enlightenment.”⁵³ Adorno understands autonomous art to be functionally dependent upon the “movement of history” represented by the “law of enlightenment.” The constitution of the artwork—its dominating of its aesthetic materials—is not merely the result of the autonomous function of the artwork, but rather a sociohistorically specific offshoot of heteronomous conditions (that is, the prevalence of identity thinking). Accordingly, art is not merely critical of identity thinking; it is a form of identity thinking itself. Art is immanently constituted by identity thinking and derives its structure and function from it.

As art is itself a species of identity thinking, it constitutively comports itself in the same manner as other forms of identity thinking (artworks “dominating” their material,⁵⁴ just as concepts dominate their objects). As such, there is a preestablished harmony between the way in which aesthetic processes and conceptual processes operate. Both conduct themselves according to the constitutive tendencies of “enlightenment” thinking. As such, we have the first example of the artwork’s autonomy (following the immanent demands of its own constitutive processes) being reflective of (without causal interaction with) the extra-aesthetic. Art’s fundamental structures and modes of comportment are constituted by the heteronomous processes external to them. However, these heteronomous processes do not intercede into the internal workings of art itself. It is in the autonomous execution of its internal principle (which was determined by heteronomy) that the artwork mirrors, without interaction with, the structure of the heteronomous.

In sum, aesthetic processes, while behaving wholly autonomously, are nonetheless only possible should given heteronomous conditions obtain. Moreover, these autonomous aesthetic processes are predetermined to be congruous with nonaesthetic cognitive processes, such as those that obtain in philosophy and conceptual thought. Our examination of the relationship between aesthetic processes and identity thinking begins to make apparent the continuity between the hermetic status of the artwork and the obtaining socioepistemological whole.

While for Leibniz God preset the internal principles of the monads, such that their autonomous exclusion would nonetheless entail reflection of their fellow monads, it is mediation that for Adorno synchronizes the internal structure of the artwork and the heteronomous world external to it. The mediating processes that give rise to “identity thinking” also determine and constitute art, which itself recapitulates the characteristic structures and domination of identity thinking even as it attempts to distinguish itself against it. This determination of the autonomous by the heteronomous serves to begin making clear how the hermetic, “blind” working of the artwork, and the resultant autonomous aesthetic truth, can amount to a philosophically critical, negative instantiation of the nonidentical. While these aesthetic processes do not intentionally form a critique of the obtaining epistemology of identity thinking, and do not in fact concern themselves with that epistemology, we can see that in fact the aesthetic process is constituted and determined by that epistemic whole. As such, the artwork’s aesthetic processes recapitulate the nature of the processes of the epistemological whole. Both the epistemological and aesthetic processes are identical in terms of their constitutive treatment of the material they work—they are both species of identity thinking.

The autonomy of aesthetic materials splits into two distinct parts: the autonomy of selection and autonomy of function. The autonomy of selection for aesthetic materials consists in the artwork’s progressively gaining control over the selection of materials it chooses to employ. This autonomy develops over time, a development often referred to by Adorno as “spiritualization”: “Spiritualization… the continuous expansion of the mimetic taboo on art…. The sensuously pleasing has come under… attack. On the one hand, through the artwork’s spiritualization the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly become the appearance of the inward.”⁵⁵ As Horowitz outlined, the display of autonomy requires a visible rejection of the heteronomous. Accordingly, as art’s autonomy has intensified across time the “mimetic taboo” has intensified also. The artwork progressively rejects any resemblance between itself and the heteronomous order external to it, and hence it takes on the “appearance of the inward”; artworks increasingly seek to be sui generis fields of experience, and hence reject those “sensuously pleasing” aesthetic materials that would incorporate artworks into the heteronomous order of objects employed for mere pleasure. This intensifying self-determination comes along with an increase in the control that the artwork has over those aesthetic materials it chooses to incorporate. This increased autonomy of selection expresses itself first as the throwing off of preset formal kinds. Adorno traces this process in the premodernist period in, for example, Beethoven’s astringent relationship to the strictures of sonata form (explored further in the next chapter), and in the modernist period in the rejection of formal constraints altogether. This autonomous freedom of selection is also accompanied by an expansion of the content that can be autonomously selected by the artwork.

As the artwork increasingly becomes “inward” and refuses any semblance of continuity with the heteronomous, what were previously formal features of artworks become reincorporated as content. This process reaches its apotheosis in modernism, in which previously binding features of genres and compositional norms become reinternalized as content that can be manipulated, parodied, and recontextualized. The autonomy of selection, then, consists in the artwork’s progressive capacity to freely determine its makeup, both formally and in terms of the content available to it. As this autonomy intensifies, so too does the artwork’s rejection of any content that has not been manipulated so as to forfeit any heteronomous aspect it might have.

Artworks are progressively “spiritualized” in that every aspect of their constitution increasingly comes under control by the artwork, and the very content of the artwork itself increasingly refuses any semblance of continuity with the world external to the artwork, instead insisting on being directly determined by the autonomous decisions of the artwork. This very process of spiritualization—of intensification of the autonomy of art—is constituted by the heteronomous intensification of rationalization that is occurring outside of art: “Thus, as Hegel was the first to perceive, the spirit of artworks is integrated into an overarching process of spiritualization: that of the progress of consciousness.”⁵⁶ Just as Hegel folds the developments and innovations of art into an overarching narrative of the progress of Geist, which determines and makes possible those developments in art, so too does Adorno view the developing character of art as intimately bound up with the “progress of consciousness.” For Adorno, of course, whose view of progress was notoriously grim,⁵⁷ this “progress of consciousness” is not driven by a benign Zeitgeist, but rather the ongoing intensification of identity thinking. Just as the dialectic of enlightenment served as the heteronomous basis for the development of the autonomy of aesthetic processes, the autonomous spiritualization of artworks is embedded in, constituted by, and made possible by a heteronomous process.

The intolerance of the artwork for anything not already reduced to the artwork’s own categories and ratified by the artwork’s own decisions is expressed in its restless rejection of predetermined forms and of heteronomous aesthetic materials. This intolerance mirrors the intensification of the intolerance displayed by identity thinking toward those phenomena (and forms of life, derivatively) that cannot be readily conceptually subsumed and rationally ratified. Adorno posits this parallelism not as mere coincidence, but rather as deriving from art’s status as a production of identity thinking itself (as I explored in the previous section). The autonomy of aesthetic material selection bears the same “guilt” as the aesthetic processes, and similarly reinforces the deep tie between the autonomous aesthetic processes and the contingent epistemological whole that makes them possible. As such, the artwork’s spiritualization is also itself an oblique reflection of the epistemological whole, serving as a reflection and embodiment of the socioepistemic problematic external to it.

This examination of aesthetic processes, and the artwork’s autonomy of selection of aesthetic materials, lays the foundation for an account that can close the explanatory gap between the autonomy of art and that autonomy’s critique of the heteronomous. The artwork’s autonomous processes of self-construction are constituted by the heteronomous social totality; as such, the execution of these processes entails a parallel between the artwork’s domination of its materials and conceptual discourse’s domination of its objects. Similarly, the artwork’s internal constitution recapitulates the insularity of our thought; just as the artwork increasingly rejects all materials and forms not reducible to its own control, so too does conceptual thought increasingly reject as false all phenomena that cannot be conceptually subsumed in full.

The artwork is, for Adorno, created by a formal process, in which the aesthetic processes are guided by the selected aesthetic materials. For Adorno, the way in which these aesthetic materials figure and have weight in the creative process is not explicable in terms of their sensuous or emotive properties. ⁵⁸ They are not used because of a contingent liking for their sensuous properties (that is, timbre, hue, or assonance). Nor, on the other hand, are aesthetic materials simply forced into conformity with some project or desire external to them. (Authentic artworks are not didactic or “opinionated” artworks.) Rather, aesthetic materials present a set of demands to the artist. Aesthetic materials fall into a kind of aesthetic logic, imposing their own formal demands, and having their own set of aesthetico-logical possibilities (that is, that which they can and cannot be combined with and so on). An example of the aesthetico-logical property of an aesthetic material x would be its employment entailing the impossibility of the employment of y, or, more plausibly, its employment opening up a large set of possibilities and simultaneously closing off some other set. An informative analogy might be harmonic relations in music. If one is committed to avoiding dissonance, the employment of a given note immediately excludes a large set of notes from being employed after it, as it stands in a relation of dissonance with these notes. This is an aesthetico-logical relation. However, harmonic relationships are largely “natural” and ahistorical—aesthetico-logical properties for Adorno are neither natural nor ahistorical properties, as we will see. As aesthetic materials are possessed of their own aesthetic logic, it is the artist’s role to follow and reconcile these formal demands: “Opinion generally produces opinionated artworks that are, in a certain sense, rationalistic. Rather, the lyric poet’s desinvolture, his dispensation from the strictures of logic—which enter his sphere only as shadows—grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works.”⁵⁹

The first “logic” referred to in this extract refers not to aesthetico-logic, but rather to formal logic. It is the “immanent lawfulness” of the work that represents what I call aesthetico-logical properties. “Opinionated” artworks are not successful precisely because they lack the passivity or desinvolture that allows the artist to follow the “immanent lawfulness” of the aesthetic material. It is the “consistency of… [the artwork’s] elaboration”⁶⁰ of these aesthetic materials and their demands, and nothing else, that entails the truth of the artwork: “Aesthetic form is the objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent. It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth.”⁶¹

To further this picture, Adorno claims (as we have seen) that aesthetic materials do not present themselves to the aesthetic processes as nonaesthetic or heteronomous content to be subordinated to the formal demands of aesthetic processes. ⁶² Rather, aesthetic materials are always already sets of aesthetico-logical demands, which it is the artist’s role to formally reconcile and reconfigure, in order to construct a true artwork. It is difficult to comprehend what these purely aesthetico-logical properties of aesthetic materials could amount to for Adorno. Once introduced into the nexus of the artwork under construction, the aesthetic materials appear to be translated out of their sensuous and affective properties, and to become instead purely formal, in this aesthetico-logical sense. ⁶³ It is just the aesthetic material’s possession of a kind of property of aesthetic logic, completely divorced from the material’s apparent properties outside of the logic of aesthetic formation, that constitutes its autonomy. The aesthetic materials are blind and ensure the blindness of the aesthetic processes, in that they present themselves to the aesthetic processes without any reference to or relevance to anything outside of the aesthetic nexus. Rather, they are present solely as complexes of aesthetico-logical properties that must be dominated by the aesthetic processes, such that they can be forced into a collectively constituting a unified artwork. ⁶⁴

This is the autonomy of function of aesthetic materials—their function in the process of aesthetic construction is explicable purely in terms of aesthetic logic, with no reference to or immediate determination by extra-aesthetic processes or criteria.

While Adorno’s account has thus far successfully provided an account that explains how the artwork’s constitutive structures can be understood as in parallel with—and hence illustrative of—the socioepistemic problematic external to the artwork, this has not sufficed to legitimate Adorno’s claim that the artwork is critical of those structures. This is precisely because, as Adorno often emphasizes, the artwork is semblance. In order to provide a semblance of such a critique, the artwork’s material would have to present content that could be understood as relating to and criticizing the artwork’s heteronomous context. The autonomy that Adorno allots to aesthetic material is sufficiently radical as to make this appear impossible. Aesthetic materials appear—to the processes of aesthetic construction—as nothing but autonomous logical problematics, with no social content.

This introduces one of the central problems of this chapter, and indeed of Adorno’s aesthetics in general. Only if the aesthetico-logical properties can be shown to, in some fashion, mirror the socioepistemic problematics external to the artwork and only if the completed artwork can be understood to make these aesthetico-logical properties disclose these socioepistemic contents through the artwork’s semblance will Adorno’s claim that artworks can be a form of socioepistemic critique be cogent. ⁶⁵ This looks like a steep task; the artwork’s complete autonomy, its hermetic exclusion of the extra-aesthetic, and its incapability to directly express critique—as it is obliged to make use of mere semblance—seem to combine to make the idea of a true, socially critical artwork impossible.

Part of what is needed is to put the autonomy of the artwork into contact with the heteronomy of that external to the artwork. We achieved this for the autonomy of the processes of aesthetic formation by understanding their autonomy as being an offshoot from (and contingent on) extra-aesthetic, heteronomous epistemological processes. This relation allowed us to explain how autonomy came to reflect the heteronomy external to it. What is now required is a method of seeing the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic materials as determined by the extra-aesthetic totality. Adorno repeatedly gestures toward an account of this sort:

In identifying this problem, Dahlhaus is treating the same problem that has been exercising us in the present chapter, namely, the problem of relating the autonomous formation and analysis of the autonomous artwork to that which is extra-aesthetic. As Paddison notes in the paper in which Dahlhaus’s challenge is cited, this problem can only be closed by consideration of the dialectical nature of aesthetic material:

Adorno argues that while aesthetics must immerse itself in the particularity of individual works through analysis… it is nevertheless a different kind of activity to analysis…. [The] aim of such an analysis is to establish the technical consistency (Stimmigkeit) of a work…. [Access to the truth content of the artwork requires not only analysis, but second reflection] in terms of the relations between the work and its social and historical context—a context which also constitutes, if I understand Adorno correctly, the work’s structure, as socially and historically mediated content (Gehalt)…. It is the “correspondence” between the inner structural relations of the work and the outer social relations within which it functions which is the focus of Adorno’s interpretative method, and which is, of course, the bone of contention [for writers like Dahlhaus]. ⁷⁰

In his monograph Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Paddison enters into this problem at length, giving an extended treatment of Adorno’s theory of mediation and its operation in the aesthetic context. Paddison notes that the structural properties and contradictions of aesthetic materials are themselves the products of social antagonisms:

Paddison is alleging that the aesthetic function of aesthetic materials is constituted by the extra-aesthetic, that the autonomy of function is in fact determined by heteronomy. This reflection that obtains between the aesthetic materials and the extra-aesthetic is, Paddison alleges, constituted by “mimesis.”⁷² “Mimesis,” in the context of Adorno’s broader philosophical writings, denotes the propensity of thought to try to intentionally assimilate itself to the world outside of it in order to comprehend it. ⁷³ It is clear that we cannot interpret aesthetic mimesis along these lines, just because of the hermeticity of the artwork already outlined. ⁷⁴ It is also clear that Paddison himself does not understand the operation of aesthetic mimesis in this way. He asserts that, for example, “Social antagonisms exist within the art work only in ‘cipher’ form, as deviations from the handed-down formal norms, as genres, formal types and schemata.”⁷⁵ Paddison is arguing that the artwork’s mimesis does not take place at the level of the artwork’s content, but is rather a formal occurrence taking place at the level of the artwork’s structure. ⁷⁶ As such, it would appear that the “mimesis” that Paddison refers to is equivalent to what I have referred to as “oblique reflection.” Put into the idiom employed in this chapter, Paddison holds that the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic materials reflect extra-aesthetic contradictions. As such, the “mimesis” of the artwork is an oblique reflection, obtaining between the autonomously blind and the heteronomous. Adorno himself endorses this reading of mimesis: “The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as ‘rational.’”⁷⁷

Mimesis is not constituted by an intentional attempt by artists to make themselves, or their artworks, like the world. Rather, mimesis describes an unintentional “affinity” between an entity and “its unposited other.” Art’s mimesis entails nothing other than its oblique reflection of its other; the artwork, without positing or intending any reference to the extra-aesthetic, nonetheless reflects it. But how do we understand this oblique reflection? Paddison puts us on the right track by pointing toward the operation of mediation: “It means that the second reflection of sociological critique and philosophical interpretation, which Adorno argues is both separate from and, at the same time, dependent upon the first reflection of immanent analysis, has its model within the process of mediation which constitutes the technical structure of the work itself.”⁷⁸ Paddison is undoubtedly correct on this score. Mediation is the only remaining available method of understanding the autonomous aesthetic function of aesthetic materials as heteronomously constituted. One of the unique properties of mediation is that it influences that which is mediated without showing up in that which is mediated. As such, it provides a method of seeing the autonomy of aesthetic materials as determined, without thereby compromising the autonomous nature of their operation in the artwork. Mediation allows us to see them as determined, without this extra-aesthetic determination showing up in the course of the employment of the aesthetic processes and hence compromising the hermeticity of the artwork. If we are able to reapply our analysis of the mediation of experience to aesthetic materials, I believe we will be able to put the autonomy of aesthetic function in touch with the heteronomy external to it.

The combination of reification and self-preservation, in enforcing the tendency of identity thinking to take its concepts of things to exhaust those things, is clearly at issue in the aesthetic. This has already emerged in our examination of the heteronomy of the aesthetic processes. While reification and self-preservation are germane to aesthetic processes, however, they do not appear to be relevant when considering aesthetic materials. Reification and self-preservation serve to determine the character and employment of epistemological structures. They do not determine the nature of the material that is manipulated by those structures. Aesthetic materials, analogously, are the subject of the aesthetic processes, and so are fully beneath the purview of reification and self-preservation. These forms of mediation are unable to effect an oblique reflection between aesthetic materials and the extra-aesthetic.

It is thin determination, then, that makes possible the oblique reflection between aesthetic materials and the extra-aesthetic. We have already seen in chapters 2 and 3 that thin determination entails that the apparent properties of any subject of experience are in fact determined by the social totality. Moreover, because of reification this thin determination is not transparent to immediate experience. As such, the presented properties of objects in experience are in fact mediated productions of thin determination.

As thin determination is a property of all experience simpliciter, it is in fact a short step to comprehending how it could be that the autonomy of the function of aesthetic materials is obliquely reflective of the social totality. As thin determination is the social constitution of all experience, this must of course extend to the experience of the artist, in constructing the artwork and aesthetic materials. Aesthetic materials (and their perceived formal properties and problematics) are present to artists and their creative processes as objects of experience. This being the case, the autonomous aesthetico-logical properties that the aesthetic materials present are thinly determined, and hence reflect the source of that determination (the social totality). As such, the formal problematic of aesthetic materials and the resultant form of the completed artwork are obliquely reflective of the extra-aesthetic. The aesthetic contradictions, tensions, and incompatibilities that the aesthetic materials present to the aesthetic processes in the course of the autonomic process of constructing the artwork are in fact determined by and reflective of the totality, which mediates and makes possible these aesthetic materials and processes. Adorno himself confirms this:

The formal problematics presented by the aesthetic materials when they are taken up into the processes of aesthetic formation are therefore mimetic reflections of the problematics that obtain in the social totality, which determines them through thin determination. Just as the phenomena of experience bear conceptual analogues of the socioepistemic totality that determine them through thin determination, and thereby give rise to latent contradictions in the concepts that are applied to them, so too do aesthetic materials present to aesthetic processes formal problematics that recapitulate the problematics extant in the socioepistemic totality. The core difference, of course, is that the phenomena that give rise to the conceptual problematics of philosophy disclose these problematics in an explicitly epistemological register. The problematic of aesthetic materials, by contrast, will be obliquely reflective of the structural problematics in the socioepistemic totality. We still stand in need of an account of how these obliquely reflective formal problematics can be induced to yield up the semblance of a critique of these problematics, and how this semblance of critique can in turn yield an experience of the true (that is, the nonidentical). I will now turn to this problem.

Aesthetic processes are determined by identity thinking and “dominate” their aesthetic materials in accordance with identity thinking. In this respect, this is identical to the epistemological faculties and processes operative in philosophical thought, which are also constitutively in accord with the form of identity thinking. Moreover, aesthetic materials are determined by the same social totality that is operative in the mediation of the epistemological materials (concepts, objects, and so on) that philosophy makes use of because of the incidence of the same process of thin determination in both aesthetic and nonaesthetic contexts. The parallel between philosophy and art is clearly quite strong at this point.

However, what is distinctive about philosophy, as we saw in chapter 3 and 4, is that it employs the delusive epistemological processes available to it in such a way as to break with those processes. It does so by forming a dialectical texture in the philosophical text, which enacts the failure of all candidate concepts. This textual demonstration is then inwardly performed by the agent, which causes the concepts that mediate their experience to fail, thereby acquainting the agent with the nonidentical. It is this specific philosophical dialectical method that results in the knowledge of the nonidentical, and thereby the knowledge that there are existents which are not capturable by one’s present conceptual array. While the artwork may share the same nature of its processes with philosophy, and its materials may be identically mediated, this does not entail that the truth of the artwork should be the same as the philosophical standard of truth. For this to be so, it would have to recapitulate the philosophical method summarized above, in order to similarly achieve a critique of the delusive mediators of experience and entail the agent’s acquaintance with the nonidentical.

I will suggest in what follows that this is in fact the case. There is textual evidence in Aesthetic Theory that Adorno understands the artwork to recapitulate the philosophical text’s approach to truth. This can best be shown by breaking down the philosophical method into three core areas—the destructively phenomenological employment of false epistemological materials in order to create a break with those materials, the employment of the dialectical constellation in order to effect this break, and the performative role of the agent as ultimately responsible for this break’s taking place—and finding analogues for them in the artwork.

The unique feature of Adorno’s theory of truth is its circumventing the falsifying mediators of experience by virtue of engaging these false mediators, and creating a break in them through this engagement. Adorno phrases this, in the philosophical context, as the attempt to instantiate truth by virtue of breaking with concepts “in [their] own measure.”⁸⁰ In Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy this feature, of creating an immanent break, is also present: “It is by way of concepts, however, that art sets free its mimetic, nonconceptual layer…. Art militates against the concept as much as it does against domination, but for this opposition it, like philosophy, requires concepts.”⁸¹ Adorno claims that art has a “nonconceptual” layer, and “militates against the concept.” This serves to closely tie together art and philosophy in their role as not only providing a critique of conventional conceptual thought, but also providing a grasp on the nonconceptual (nonidentical) through this critique. Second and more importantly, Adorno states that the artwork constitutively sets free the artwork’s “nonconceptual layer” not by attempting to work outside of concepts, but in fact by way of concepts. Adorno confirms that art, like philosophy, “requires concepts,” and yet these concepts must be employed such that they give rise to access to the nonconceptual: “The truth of artworks depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity what is not identical with the concept, what is according to that concept accidental.”⁸² As was shown above,⁸³ Adorno has asserted that art “requires concepts.” Bearing this in mind, in the extract just cited⁸⁴ Adorno is saying that the artwork effects a break in these concepts by virtue of forcing the concepts employed in the artwork in the course of their own employment to, by virtue of their own “immanent necessity,” incorporate content that the concept took itself to exclude. This was, of course, how philosophy goes about creating a breakout from conceptual thought. Concepts take themselves to have a seamless identity with their objects. If concepts can be pushed into summoning other concepts in the course of their application to a given object, this generates Adorno’s desired “constellations,” while also destroying the idea of the concepts ability to flawlessly subsume the object. The artwork, like the philosophical text, also seeks to force the concept to work against itself in the same way.

The way in which the artwork effects this break in conceptuality might be identical in form to the philosophical employment of constellations; the artwork might force the concept to call up other concepts and content in order to mitigate the concept’s own insufficiency. If this is indeed the case, and the artwork effects a break in conceptuality in the same way as the philosophical text, this would take us further in trying to establish the uniformity of Adorno’s theories of philosophical and aesthetic truth. There is in fact exegetical evidence that Adorno takes the artwork to constitute itself in the same way, by making use of dialectical constellations. Adorno makes it clear that the truth content of the artwork, its epistemological and sociohistorical critique, is constituted not through the addition of any new content, but rather through the dialectical employment of preexisting content. This dialectical employment constitutes the artwork’s truth content and “break” with the falsifying mediators of experience:

Here, then, we have Adorno’s claim that the artwork’s instantiation of “utopia” and the “other” (both of which function as shorthands for the nonidentical) is achieved through the “[reconfiguration of] the other out of the unvarying.” The “aesthetic creativity” that brings about this appearance of the nonidentical through the artwork is identified with nothing other than the constellation of the artwork’s “elements.” As in philosophy, then, there is the clear thought that the instantiation of the nonidentical is achieved via the dialectical employment of constellations. Adorno reiterates this thought: “In artworks the name is, however, strictly negative. Artworks say what is more than the existing, and they do this exclusively by making a constellation of how it is, ‘Comment c’est.’”⁸⁶

Here, Adorno uses the “name” as shorthand for the identification of the nonidentical, this idiosyncratic connotation being inherited, via Benjamin, from Gershom Scholem’s work on the Kabbalah. ⁸⁷ Again, as in philosophy, art says more than what is the case, but does so negatively. As we saw above, art (as constitutively experiential) is subject to the delusive mediators of experience. Art is subject to the same problematic as philosophy; the positive statement of the true is impossible, as it would be falsified by the mediators of experience. As such, as Adorno says, the “name” of the artwork is “strictly negative.” This negative grasp of the truth is achieved through what Adorno calls a “constellation of how it is.” This reinforces the similarity of the situation of art and philosophy—both are necessarily negative, and both transcend this negativity through the employment of dialectical constellations. Finally, Adorno gives a direct statement of the artwork’s mimicking of philosophy’s dialectical employment of concepts:

That universal elements are irrevocably part of art at the same time that art opposes them, is to be understood in terms of art’s likeness to language. For language is hostile to the particular and nevertheless seeks its rescue. Language mediates the particular through universality and in the constellation of the universal, but it does justice to its own universals only when they are not used rigidly in accord with the semblance of their autonomy but are rather concentrated to the extreme on what is specifically to be expressed. ⁸⁸

Adorno draws a direct parallel between art and language, the constitutive medium of philosophy. Language, Adorno asserts, is problematized by its innate “[hostility] to the particular” (this hostility deriving from the conceptual mediation of experience) and yet “nevertheless seeks its rescue” through “universality and the constellation of the universal.” This suffices as a summary of the philosophical method that we examined in chapters 3 and 4, and posited as the constitutive element in the philosophical text that allows for an instantiation of the nonidentical. Adorno then asserts that art’s own relationship to concepts (“universal elements”) is likewise to be construed in this manner. As such, art, like philosophy, is problematized by the falsifying role of universals and also resolves this problematic through the dialectical employment of constellations. However, of course, art, unlike philosophy, does not construct these constellations explicitly with reference to concepts, but instead conducts itself autonomously, through working the formal properties of its aesthetic materials.

So, we have seen that for Adorno the artwork is constructed by dialectical procedures that, like philosophy, result in what Adorno terms “constellations.” These constellations are constructed (in the artwork) by interrogating and attempting to reconcile the aesthetico-logical properties of aesthetic materials. The key consequence to be drawn from this is that the artwork bears the same textural performativity as the philosophical text. Just as in the case of the philosophical text, the artwork employs problematic concepts and, in the course of their employment, causes the concept to display its insufficiency. As in the context of philosophy, the displayed insufficiency of the concept thereby calls up other concepts and causes a dialectical constellation.

First, we must note that both the artwork and the philosophical text present, in their respective media, the same dialectical complex of concepts. Which is to say, that which is present in each is determined by the same conceptual totality, with the same obtaining conceptual aporias. ⁸⁹ This is so just due to the influence of a single process, thin determination, on both philosophical and aesthetic materials. The aesthetic materials, and their aesthetico-logical properties, are obliquely determined by both concepts and the social totality. As such, the artwork’s dialectical working of those aesthetico-logical properties serves as an oblique mirror of the philosophical dialectical method. The hermetic procedure of following the aesthetico-logical demands of aesthetic materials amounts to a conceptual constellation, just because these aesthetico-logical properties are nothing other than the oblique reflection of the conceptual mediation that governs them. As such, the dialectical working and development of these aesthetico-logical properties will result in the artwork presenting, in the completed artwork, a formal whole that will engage the agent’s concepts and induce them to fail. The contradictions latent in concepts are translated into aesthetic logic—the working of the aesthetic processes on this aesthetic logic results in a completed artwork.

As has been said, the aesthetico-logical properties of the aesthetic contents are not merely passively received, but are in fact worked on by the artist. This working takes these aesthetico-logical demands and tendencies and extrapolates and develops them. As a consequence, these aesthetico-logical tendencies often result in the aesthetic equivalent of philosophical contradiction. Authentic artworks encounter aporias and irresolvable formal problematics, just as authentic philosophy terminates in the display of contradictions, aporias, and the like. It is in the frank display of these aesthetic aporias, contradictions, and internal inconsistencies that artworks increasingly became incapable of successfully forming flawless wholes. Accordingly, Adorno lays great weight on dissonance and ugliness in his account of authentic art. These irruptions of disharmony are not, on Adorno’s account, attributable to a contingent dislike of tonality or seamlessness on the part of the artist. They are rather the unconcealed limits of the artwork’s attempt to seamlessly dominate and unify its materials. And, thanks to thin determination’s communicating sociohistorical content to the aesthetico-logical nature of aesthetic materials, this ugliness and dissonance are reflective also of genuine contradictions and problems in the unity of the socioepistemic whole external to the artwork.

To conclude this section, then, the artwork’s dialectical treatment of its aesthetic materials, because these materials are constituted by conceptual and sociohistorical mediation, amounts to the same as the philosophical text’s dialectical treatment of its explicitly conceptual material. By “the same” I mean that, in either case, the finished product (the artwork or philosophical text) bears in itself a dialectical construct that engages the concepts of the agent’s conceptual array and induces them to fail. The philosophical text does so explicitly; the artwork does so obliquely, by virtue of the thin determination of the aesthetic materials and the conceptual mediation of experience. This amounts to their textual performativity—their bearing a texture that is conceptually germane. The artwork, like the philosophical text, bears on its face a destructively phenomenological treatment of concepts. Adorno makes this textual performativity explicit: “The truth content of artworks, as the negation of their existence, is mediated by them though they do not in any way communicate it. That by which truth content is more than what is posited by artworks is their methexis in history and the determinate critique that they exercise through their form.”⁹⁰

Adorno identifies the critique in the artwork with the artwork’s form. It is through its formal properties that the artwork exercises its critique. Once one recognizes that formal problematics are translations of conceptual problematics, this becomes cogent. What remains to be seen is how the artwork’s capability to visibly instantiate conceptual critiques, through the dual hermeneutic status of its materials as both formal and socioepistemically germane, will amount to the creation of a “truth content… more than what is posited by artworks.” This truth content that emerges in the artwork but exceeds the artwork’s constitution is the nonidentical. The artwork is textually performative in the same fashion as the philosophical text, organizing its materials such that concepts are engaged and induced to fail. What is now required is an account of how this semblance of conceptual critique can result in knowledge of the nonidentical.

What is most important in the above is that the artwork’s “enigmaticalness”—its failure to disclose a determinate, subsumable content—is only overcome by an active participation in the artwork. This participation is termed by Adorno a reenactment of the work “under the discipline it imposes.” Adorno posits this role of the agent as necessary in order to avoid falling under the “empty gaze” of the artwork (that is, to not become like those Adorno terms the “art-alien,”⁹² who are incapable of a genuine relationship to and interpretation of the artwork). Just as in the case of philosophy, art is held to have a content that is not reducible merely to its apparent phenomena, but in fact also requires the agent’s own engagement. This strongly suggests that art, like philosophy, is held by Adorno to require a performative engagement from the agent in order to fully disclose its content. Adorno explicitly draws this comparison:

What is most striking about this, of course, is that Adorno is here asserting that “art and philosophy converge.” However, what is most important is Adorno’s assertion that the “truth of the spirit” (the intellectual component of the artwork) is “located beyond the aesthetic configuration” (that is, it is not merely equivalent to the presented properties of the artwork). He simultaneously asserts that in “the act” of critique the truth is revealed—and this act is constituted by “reading the spirit of artworks out of their configurations and confronting the elements with each other.” The artwork, then, holds a truth of spirit that is “beyond the aesthetic configuration”—that is, not equivalent to the immediate properties of the artwork. But this truth is only revealed through the addition of an activity in the consciousness—the “reading of the spirit of artworks out of their configurations.”

Adorno denies that this truth could be extracted from the artwork. While Adorno holds the truth to be “beyond the aesthetic configuration,” it nonetheless can only be comprehended through this configuration. In the act of critique enacted by the agent, the truth is “read out” of the aesthetic configuration, and bound up with it. This sounds identical in nature to the problematic encountered in chapters 3 and 4, namely, that the philosophical content was located beyond the conceptual content of the philosophical text, and yet was nonetheless posited as only being accessed by the agent’s interaction with that philosophical text.

As in the case of philosophy, then, the truth content of the artwork is incompatible with the nature of the medium in question (as the truth content is nonidentical and the medium is in accord with identity thinking), and yet nonetheless must be “read out” of that medium, by virtue of the agent’s own performative engagement. As such, Adorno is claiming that the artwork sets up a truth that is not identical to the artwork’s actual constitution. In the philosophical context, this opposition of the truth to the discursive makeup of the philosophical text was solved by the performative engagement of the agent. From the evidence already adduced, and Adorno’s statement that the aesthetic problematic “converges” with the philosophical, we may take this as legitimation for reading art as demanding the same kind of performative engagement of the agent as philosophy. Adorno states this directly:

Adorno is tracing a relationship between analysis and the artwork itself that is identical to the problematic of the relationship between the “philosophical demonstration” and “discursively true” that Adorno discovered, which was discussed in chapter 3. The artwork in aesthetic experience constitutes itself through the “involuntariness” of “pure immediacy.” However, this “involuntary,” immediate experience is necessarily accompanied by “volition, concentrating consciousness.” “Aesthetic experience” is constituted by a dialectic between an immediate truth of the work and the conceptually mediated element (analysis enacted by a “concentrating consciousness”) that makes this immediate truth viable. As Adorno puts it, analysis “enriches the element of involuntariness.” A complicated dialectical relation is being drawn between the immediate truth of aesthetic experience and the intellectually mediated grounds of that experience.

Adorno also subtly transitions from consideration of the constitution of optimal aesthetic experience to the related issue of the optimal relationship between aesthetic analysis and aesthetic experience. Adorno asserts that the “pure immediacy” of aesthetic experience must be accompanied by, and translated into, “analysis,” which “reconstitutes” this experience “through its antithesis.” As such, Adorno is introducing a dialectical opposition between an immediate, nondiscursive truth content of the artwork and “its antithesis”—that is, a conceptually mediated, complex analysis by which this immediate truth content demands to be reconstituted. This analysis, Adorno claims, “redescribes the course that the artwork objectively describes within itself.” As such, then, the truth of the artwork is the “antithesis” of the language of analysis (that is, conceptual discourse), but nonetheless must be retranslated into this language of analysis. Compare this to Adorno’s analysis of the relationship between philosophical demonstration and discursive knowledge:

Adorno claims that philosophy is caught between the immediacy of “philosophical demonstration” and the “mathematical model.” The former is nondiscursive but, because of the “stringency” of thought, “requires” a retranslation into the rational discourse of the mathematical model. As in the aesthetic case, then, the immediate content, the access to the nonidentical, entails and requires a discursive, rational instantiation. Just as art has the opposition between “immediacy” and “analysis,” philosophy has the opposition between “philosophical demonstration” and “discursive thinking.”

Adorno is drawing a strikingly direct correspondence between the aesthetic and philosophical modes of comprehension. In both cases the medium of expression (the philosophical text, the artwork) is by itself insufficient. The conventional mode of understanding the medium (conventional philosophical discourse, aesthetic analysis) is also found to be insufficient. True comprehension is achieved in an immediate experience of truth, which is derived from the agent’s internalized performance of that which is contained in the medium of expression. This immediate experience is opposed to the conventional, discursive mode of comprehension, but nonetheless entails and requires it. As Adorno puts it in the aesthetic context, the “pure immediacy” of the artwork must be reexpressed “through its antithesis,” namely, conceptual analysis. As such, the “spontaneous completion” of the artwork’s “objective processes” that takes place in the observer’s experience is necessary for “adequate knowledge of the aesthetic.” However, this “pure immediacy,” Adorno asserts, is insufficient, and must be accompanied by discursive analysis. Adorno, then, is reinstating here the dichotomy that was characteristic of philosophical truth, namely, that there is a complex relationship between a discursive expression of the truth—which accords with preestablished conditions of validity—and a form of experiential, immediate truth that is opposed to the former but must be retranslated into it.

The solution to this problem, in the case of philosophy, was the addition of the performative engagement of the agent. This performative engagement of the agent vitalized, as it were, the concrete truth of the philosophical text through performatively internalizing it. This performative internalization established a breakdown in the mediators of experience, and hence an experiential acquaintance with the nonidentical. It is my claim that Adorno also extends this solution to the aesthetic problematic. Art and philosophy are united in their solution to their shared problematic. In each case, the discursive standard of understanding (philosophical discursive thinking, standards of aesthetic analysis) is insufficient and falsifying by virtue of its employment of conceptual discourse, and in each case the proposed answer is the agent’s own immediate cognitive performance of the philosophical text or artwork. Adorno makes this clear in the aesthetic context: “Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic is the spontaneous completion of the objective processes that, by virtue of the tensions of this completion, transpire within it.”⁹⁶

This serves as a very concise assertion by Adorno that the correct comprehension of the aesthetic entails a performative element. In the philosophical case, the role of performativity was to liberate the philosophical content, by means of the concept, from conceptuality itself. Intriguingly, Adorno here asserts the same, obliquely, for art. Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic requires the agent to performatively engage with the constitutive processes within the artwork and to complete them. In other words, Adorno notes that the processes transpiring in the artwork are presently incomplete—it falls to the agent to add their performative element and complete the artwork, and thereby attain adequate knowledge of the artwork. Performativity for the aesthetic, as for philosophy, is a condition on the true completion of the artwork as a mode of knowledge: “Understanding specific artworks… requires an objective experiential reenactment from within in the same sense in which the interpretation of a musical work means its faithful performance.”⁹⁷ As in philosophy, then, performativity is required to solve the dilemma of the rational/nonrational modes of knowledge in art, and to finally attain the nonidentical.

Adorno correctly maintains that the artwork cannot be consistently seen as either conceptual or judgmental. Our examination of the artwork’s autonomy served to demonstrate why this is; the artwork constitutes itself wholly with reference to aesthetic properties and in no way attempts to capture, describe, or conceptually subsume anything extra-aesthetic. However, and this returns to the artwork’s status as dialectical critique, the artwork nonetheless “accommodate[s] discursive thought” while “disappoint[ing]” its “criteria.” While the artwork may be formed aconceptually, it nonetheless (once completed) presents a conceptually germane unity that engages and is “analogous” to the “logic of experience.”¹⁰⁰ The artwork accommodates and engages, then, the conceptual faculties of the agent as they performatively engage with the artwork, while simultaneously frustrating these concepts.