Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

When we read Adorno’s own writings on artworks—rather than his writings on aesthetic theory—we do not find Adorno simply putting his aesthetic theory to work. Adorno does not expend all of his time in tracing conceptual problematics in formal characteristics, nor does he exclusively occupy himself only with an attempt to show how and in what way artworks are true. Adorno’s approach is far more diverse in approach and tone than this, and he shows himself very willing to pursue both tangents and matters of important detail. In this respect, Adorno’s work on specific artworks appears to diverge from, or at least run in parallel to, the account of aesthetic truth (complete with its account of aesthetico-logical properties and so on) that we worked through in the previous chapter.

To understand why this is, in the first place we need to pay attention to Adorno’s own remarks in Aesthetic Theory on what aesthetic analysis (as opposed to aesthetic theory) is and is meant to achieve. As Adorno put it, the goal of analysis of an artwork is not to pretend to “discover” support for an overarching theory, but rather to “contemplatively immerse” oneself in the artwork’s specificity. ¹ This is not to say that aesthetic theory and aesthetic analysis can allowably contradict each other, but rather that they have different aims and different subject matter. Aesthetic theory is a study and critique of allowably general features of art, and forms its interpretations with a view to maximizing their universality. By contrast, aesthetic analysis begins with specific features of specific artworks, and does not allow the conclusions of aesthetic theory to determine how the analysis will run. ² In other words, in his analyses of artworks, Adorno is not in the business of shoring up his theoretical position; he is rather seeking to analyze and unfold the full specificity of the artwork as far as possible. It may be the case that specific artworks can tell us informative things about our general theory of art; and it may be that our general theory can be in part disconfirmed or amended by what we discover in particular pieces of art. But we cannot decide in advance if and how this will take place. ³ Aesthetic analysis and aesthetic theory, then, are divergent kinds of interpretation, which may or may not overlap.

However, at important points these different kinds of interpretation do overlap. In this chapter, I would like to examine two examples of the interpretation of specific artworks that shows how the general theory of aesthetic truth content I have reconstructed in Adorno’s work is capable of meaningfully and helpfully supporting and interweaving with Adorno’s interpretative engagement with artworks. Aesthetic theory ultimately holds worth only to the degree to which it can inform and undergird our appreciation of artworks and our comprehension of those unusual and beguiling features they exhibit. Just as Adorno takes artworks to be organized “from below,” and yet to also exhibit a critical responsivity to general developments in art theory, so too must Adorno’s account of the truth of art not only be found to be consistent in general terms, but also match up importantly with his work on particular works of art.

As Adorno points out, Beethoven was not plausibly influenced by Hegel’s philosophy. ⁶ The parallel between Hegel and Beethoven is created not by the intention of the composer but by the same social whole expressing itself through the two men:

The history of ideas, and thus the history of music, is an autarchic motivational context insofar as the social law, on the one hand, produces the formation of spheres screened off against each other, and on the other hand, as the law of totality, still comes to light in each sphere as the same law…. It is in fitting together under their own law, as becoming, negating, confirming themselves and the whole without looking outward, that [Beethoven’s] movements come to resemble the world whose forces move them; they do not do it by imitating that world. In this respect Beethoven’s attitude on social objectivity is more that of philosophy—the Kantian, in some points, and the Hegelian in the decisive ones. ⁷

This is all perfectly in keeping with the account I have argued for; the problematics we find in both aesthetic and philosophical material are constituted by the social totality: “Social law” produces the “spheres” of philosophy and music (among others) and expresses itself (“comes to light”) in each, despite their being “screened off against each other.” As Adorno’s frequent reliance on Leibnizian metaphor makes clear, the social totality generates genuinely autonomous spheres of human endeavor that, through their autonomy, come to harmonize with and recapitulate the structural problematics in these other spheres to which they are not connected. Philosophy and music are united, despite their separation, as the same mediation (“social law”) transpires in each. Adorno claims that it is Beethoven’s use and organization of movements that serve to crystallize socioepistemic problems and to critique them:

Here Adorno begins to trace a critique of the “self-reproduction of society as a self-identical entity” by frustrating the principle of “logical identity.”⁹ This critique of logical identity is found in the frustration of the relationship between the “retransition” and “recapitulation.” A sonata has a fixed, triadic form. The opening section—the “exposition”—states a set of themes and figures. These are developed in the middle section, the “development.” The development is brought to close by the “retransition,” which serves to effect the movement into the “recapitulation,” the closing triadic section, which restates the thematic content of the exposition. The specific interest of the “D major passage” that Adorno points to, then, is that it inserts into the interstices between the completion of the retransition and the beginning of the recapitulation a new theme that was not found in the exposition or derived from the development of those exposited themes in the middle section (as he puts it, it is not “reducible to the economy of motivic unity”).

This represents a break, however slight, with established sonata form. Beethoven’s insertion of an unanticipated, novel theme frustrates the immediate and established relationship between the development and recapitulation. The abstract structures of the sonata form are, in Adorno’s view, being broken—it is being shown that these abstractions are incapable of truly constraining and explaining the possible thematic development that could take place in a piece of this type. The introduced theme is, in a literal sense, not identical to the structures of the sonata. In Adorno’s view, this thematic development demonstrates the truth content of Beethoven’s composition, which is both akin to and “truer than”¹⁰ Hegel’s philosophy. As Adorno puts it: “The developmental tendency in those works of Beethoven which precede the late style itself is opposed to the principle of transition. The transition is felt to be banal, ‘inessential’; that is, the relation of disparate moments to a whole which holds them together is seen as no more than a prescribed convention, no longer tenable.”¹¹

Beethoven refuses to make unqualified use of the overarching structures of the sonata form—rather than lending his sonata a seamless unity, he violates the transition from development to recapitulation by introducing a novel theme. In Adorno’s view, this is simultaneously a refusal of the epistemic pretense of a seamless unity of concept and object. (As we saw in the last chapter, formal aesthetic structures and problems are sedimented socioepistemic content, in Adorno’s view.) Beethoven dissolves the apparently necessary formal relationships between abstractions (such as the transition between development and recapitulation) and the particulars that they apply to (the musical themes themselves). In doing so, Beethoven reveals them as not in fact necessary, but rather “prescribed convention” that is “no longer tenable.”¹²

This claim might seem a little strange—supposing we accept that what Beethoven has done is reveal the traditional sonata form as not in fact necessarily binding, but purely conventional. We might wonder (1) who ever doubted this in any event and (2) why such a “revelation” would make sonata form “untenable.” Musical composers are presented with a large range of musical forms—and presumably they have always been aware that they are free to pick up or put down these forms as they please. (One might abandon a sonata to write a canon instead.) In this sense, music forms have always been selected rather than imposed and, in this sense, conventional.

Adorno’s point, however, is that in the act of composition, certain formal structures present themselves to the compositional eye as rigidly necessary. As one begins to work with the aesthetic material, they appear to demand the use of rigid and ostensibly necessary structures. And—just as in the case of identity thinking in general, of which this is for Adorno an example—these apparently necessary abstractions obscure the genuine formal/structural demands of their contents. Beethoven’s break with sonata form renders it “untenable,” as it breaks the fiction of the absolute necessity of the use of that form—it becomes clear that the aesthetic materials outstrip the structures of the abstract sonata form. The sonata form is now untenable in the sense that it can never again present itself as a necessary formal constraint. Indeed—and here Beethoven’s anticipation in his late work of certain features of modernism can be seen—the sonata form now in fact becomes content rather than form. The artwork can choose to incorporate the sonata form, but now always on the understanding that such a form is contingent and revisable and only employed to the extent that the artwork consents to make use of it. Sonata form ceases to have a role as a necessary formal constraint and instead becomes contingently employed—a content that the artwork is free to pick up or put down as it pleases—to bend, deform, and revise. This is, for Adorno, also an instance of a critique of the general principle of identity thinking—of the identification of particulars with the abstractions applied to them. Adorno finds this kind of critique of identity thinking also in some other of Beethoven’s work—for example, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 29. ¹³

While Beethoven’s organization of his movements exhibits criticism of the application of abstract structures to particulars, Adorno also finds social criticism to be crystallized in Beethoven’s use of motives. Motivic composition conducts itself by means of short note patterns that are repeatedly subjected to variation and, less commonly, wholesale repetition. These motive patterns can be constituted by patterns in melody, rhythmic cadence, or harmonic relationships. In Beethoven’s employment of these motives, Adorno again finds Beethoven’s astringent relationship to logical identity and the totality:

Adorno’s point is that an inflexible use of motives—which assumed that the role and effect of these motives could be abstractly anticipated in advance—would result in the repetition rather than development of motives. (We might understand Adorno’s criticism of Wagner’s use of leitmotifs in this way ¹⁵—the leitmotif is given a fixed function and trotted out only with a view to satisfying this function.) By contrast, Beethoven suspends judgment about the compositional demands a motive might exhibit at each point—and accordingly, we find that motives are developed and varied continually, in response to the specific formal situation in which they are found. Beethoven forfeits, then, any preset overarching formal scheme, in favor of developing his aesthetic materials—his motives—in response to the particular situations they are found in. Just as in the case of sonata form, then, we see that Beethoven’s compositional form causes a deterioration in the apparent seamless identity of the aesthetic materials and pregiven forms. The structural similarity to Adorno’s account of ideal cognition—in which concepts are dialectically labile and maximally open to the particular features of their objects—is apparent. Just as Adorno traces the contradictions in the elements of the socioepistemic totality, Beethoven displays this totality in the formal qualities of his music: “All these implications of Beethoven result from musical analysis without any daring analogies, but to social knowledge they prove as true as the inferences about society itself. Society recurs in great music: transfigured, criticized and reconciled.”¹⁶ Formal problems are, thanks to thin determination, sedimented socioepistemic problems. This allows Adorno to claim that Beethoven’s response to the problems thrown up in the course of composition are at the same time indirect responses to the problems latent in the social totality. And so in Beethoven we find a preoccupation with the inability of the abstract—the compositional form—to properly subsume and govern, to respond to and develop, the particular aesthetic materials it applies to. This is an expression of the general “social law” of the diremption between abstract structures—in both epistemological and social structures—and the particulars to which they are applied. This allows Adorno to see Beethoven as truthfully capturing—to an extent greater than Hegel!—the genuine features of the social totality.

Even conceding all this, it is not clear why Adorno claims that above society is “reconciled” in great music. What we have seen implies that Beethoven’s work is relentlessly—if indirectly—critical of society. However, in Adorno’s view, this thoroughly critical work is undermined by Beethoven’s use of the reprise, which imports an ideological and “affirmative” moment into his work. The reprise, the return in composition to the opening themes of the piece, represents to Adorno “the force of crushing repression, of an authoritarian ‘That’s how it is.’… The self-exaggerating assurance that the return of the first is the meaning, the self-revelation of immanence as transcendence—this is the cryptogram for the senselessness of a merely self-reproducing reality that has been welded together into a system.”¹⁷ The reprise becomes ideological by means of its apparent privileging of some original content that stands over and above the dialectical elaboration of the aesthetic material. To Adorno, this represents a “formalistic residue.”¹⁸ It represents a failure by Beethoven to completely integrate the formal and content-led demands of his art. Beethoven forgoes total compositional spontaneity in favor of a final repetition of some foundational preset musical material in the reprise. This failure, however, is not contingent but sociohistorically enforced. The reprise is

the tribute Beethoven was forced to pay to the ideological character whose spell extends even to the most sublime music ever to aim at freedom under continued unfreedom…. A composer is always a zoon politikon as well, the more so the more emphatic his purely musical claim…. The fact that Beethoven’s music is structured like the society to which… we give the name of “rising bourgeoisie,” or at least like its self-consciousness and its conflicts, is premised on another fact: that the primary-musical form of his own views was inherently mediated by the spirit of his social class in the period around 1800. He was not the spokesman or advocate of this class… he was its inborn son. ¹⁹

Once again, then, the formal nature of Beethoven’s music is determined by the sociohistorical complex external to his “purely musical” activity. The appearance of the reprise in Beethoven’s work, then, is not simply a contingent choice made by Beethoven alone. It in fact represents the limit of Beethoven’s dialectical musical activity, this limit being imposed by the same sociohistorical determination that also lends the successful elements of Beethoven’s work its socially critical dimension and truth. Both the truthfulness of Beethoven’s work and the limit we find drawn to its truthfulness are produced by the same thing—the complete mediation of the artwork by the sociohistorical whole external to it.

This being done, however, I should like in closing to visit Adorno’s aesthetic work once again. Adorno’s work on Beethoven represents a particularly stark example of Adorno’s finding truth in an artwork. There is also the suspicion that Adorno’s aesthetics as a whole is predicated far more closely on the structure of musical experience and problematics than, say, the literary. Music—or at least the classical or art music with which Adorno deals—is constitutively formal, with only the libretto (if there is one) giving the chance for the presentation of meanings that are not generated solely by form. It is little surprise that highly developed modernist music—which constitutes itself solely through the investigation and navigation of formal problematics—might hew close to Adorno’s aesthetics, with its account of the interrelation of purely formal experimentation and aesthetic experience. But this should not imply that Adorno’s engagement with nonmusical art was lacking. Or, at least, not completely lacking. Adorno was at no great pains to engage with the specificity of the visual arts, although he did make some enlightening remarks on that subject. Nonetheless, an engagement with visual art of the quality and speculative daring of, say, Althusser’s work on Cremonini is altogether missing. It is literature, in any case, rather than painting or sculpture, that presents the most difficult case study for Adorno’s aesthetics. Both painting and sculpture are closer than music to our everyday structures and conventions of meaning—but nonetheless, they have clearly demarcated borders of formal control, within which our preestablished forms of meaning are converted into fresh forms. (One only needs to consider the case of the use of ready-mades here.) On top of this, the skein of preestablished meanings (visual, spatial) is free to be defied or exited by the artist in each of these disciplines, through the formal innovations and stresses that are introduced in the artwork. Henry Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 5 clearly draws its impetus, and a great deal of its effect, from familiarity with the horizon of possibilities disclosed by the human form; but it is in the careful violation and skewing of that horizon that the sculpture demonstrates its autonomous, formal content. Similarly, Kandinsky’s Bustling Aquarelle quite intentionally appeals to the familiar cluster of impressions associated with the viewing of planes from given perspectives; but the painting’s exhibition of the physically impossible synchronicity and contiguity of divergent perspectives breaks decisively from the familiar form of visual experience.

Literature, which per Adorno’s account of “authentic” art musters a complete lability of form, is in a far more straitened context, in which formal innovation is submerged in the skein of socially constructed meanings intrinsic to language and largely finds itself incapable of exiting from that skein. The artwork, we are told, engages concepts and leads them into failure; and yet novelistic language must do so while at the same time (through the meaning intrinsic to its materials) appealing to our concepts in a different, undialectical way. If a work of literature were to display its conceptual engagement on its face, as it were, it would be a work of philosophy, which employed philosophical terms. It must indirectly engage the concepts that mediate experience—and thereby acquire philosophical content—while nonetheless simultaneously employing the conceptual medium of language in the elaboration of its content. In conducting itself, the novel passes through a series of assertions, descriptions, and claims, all of which employ concepts; if the artwork is to have a philosophical content, this content must be elaborated indirectly. And it is not clear how we can understand this as occurring.

While Adorno drops a number of glancing references to Proust’s work in Aesthetic Theory and Negative Dialectics,²⁰ Adorno engaged in a sustained way with Proust in only two essays. ²¹ The first—“Valery Proust Museum”—turns on a dispute between Paul Valery and Marcel Proust on the ultimate worth of the museum; the second, “Short Commentaries on Proust,” is, as the title implies, a rather fragmentary treatment of isolated passages from across À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Adorno begins the latter with an insightful account of the relation between whole and part in Proust: “In Proust, however, the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in…. Proust’s great theme, the rescue of the transient, is fulfilled through its own transience, time. The duree the work investigates is concentrated in countless moments, often isolated from one another.”²²

Bracketing Adorno’s uncharacteristically reductive attempt to find a unifying theme for Proust’s work in the “the rescue of the transient,” we do find here a good rule of thumb. Proust’s work composes itself in the flow of its enthusiasms, in the crystallization and reliquefaction of experiences in language, from which the characteristic curlicues of the Proustian sentence derive. As Adorno rightly divines, Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu is a work whose energies are continually being expended in all directions, rather than in service of an overarching architectonic. This demands and legitimates Adorno’s treatment of Proust in his selecting, apparently at random, isolated passages from his work. What Adorno does with these passages is a different matter. For instance, Adorno informs us that:

The episode about Marcel’s disagreement with his revered uncle Adolf, the demimondaine who occasions the disaster through no fault of her own is not lost to the novel. As Odette Swann, she… manages to achieve the highest social honours…. Proust’s work captures one of the strangest experiences;… that the people who are decisive in our lives appear in them as though appointed and dispensed by an unknown author, as though we had awaited them in this place and no other. [It is in fact Uncle Adolphe. The “disagreement” concerns the narrator’s failure to salute his uncle in the street, after having told his parents he found his uncle entertaining a courtesan, leading the Uncle to erroneously believe the narrator’s family had forbidden him from acknowledging him, this belief in turn leading to Adolphe’s estrangement from the family.]²³

This passage, embedded as it is in a broader account of Swann’s entering the house of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, which is intentionally rendered by Proust as a bewildering cyclopean structure, is one of the most striking of all the six volumes that compose À la Recherche du Temps Perdu; it is one of the rare points at which a character is driven by the force of his emotional life to stand outside the society in which the majority of the novel takes place. (Indeed, the trajectory followed by the majority of the characters—insofar as they move at all in relation to the question of making an impression “in society”—is in entirely the converse direction, the narrator’s bathetic encounter with Legrandin in The Guermantes Way²⁵ being most emblematic of this.) The oddity of the customs of French high society is registered elsewhere—as in the beguiling experience of seeing a theatre box and its inhabitants as beautiful marine life forms, which Adorno also refers to himself²⁶—but is therein seen as invitingly unusual. It is only with Swann’s desperate attendance above, which Proust raises to such a pitch as to almost invite the impression that Swann is temporarily taking leave of his sanity, that we see a character who is forced into taking an objective perspective on the mores by which he has lived.

The effect of this bleeds into the tenor of the prose itself, and by implication the mental state of Swann himself, taking on a monstrous quality, in which the characteristics of his fellows are disintegrated, lose their uniqueness, and then are recombined into unfamiliar and allegorical figures. It is of course grist to the Adornian mill that this process is occasioned by the withdrawal of Swann’s self-interest. His love for Odette has created a set of projects (spying, winning the confidence of Odette’s friends) that has wholly supplanted his desire to appear “smart” in society. Accordingly, we see Proust inform us that the differentiation of these characters—according to their worth as “symbols of practical utility”—vanishes altogether, leaving only their constitution by the external markers of their social standing and wealth, namely, their clothes and accessories. It is this that occasions Proust’s excursus on monocles, the power and oddity of which bring to mind Benjamin’s work on Grandville, the French illustrator. One of Grandville’s illustrations in Un Autre Monde sees human beings replaced by their accessories, who are now dancing together, organized into a parody of the human form. ²⁷ Buck-Morss summarizes Benjamin’s use of Grandville well: “The earliest Passagen-Werk notes state that the work of Grandville is to be ‘compared with the phenomenology of Hegel.’… Grandville ‘brings well to expression what Marx calls the “theological capers” of commodities.’”²⁸ This link with Marx is suggestive. In Swann’s encounter, for a brief moment, his own milieu is presented to him as it truly is; the uniqueness of the men vanishes, preserved only in the mass-produced articles they drape on themselves: their monocles. In this moment, which comes close to what Adorno sees as most characteristic of Proust (the experience of everything being “completely different”²⁹ from our conventional view), we have a classic picture of reification and the effects of the commodity form.

The self-externalization and alienation that Swann suffers from here are the inversion familiar from analysis of the commodity form: the inversion of the relationship between people and things. Swann now sees his fellows as mechanistically following rote formulae of social success, while it is their inanimate accessories that have the only remaining element of life. The bewilderment of this new perspective is communicated by Proust in the formal construction of the sentences that bear it: the lengthy, loping sentences that Moncrieff preserves in his translation move in a steady descent from focusing on faces and names (Marquis de Bréauté, Monsieur de Palancy) to a confrontation with the collocations of individual articles to which these men are reduced. By the time we reach the grotesque of Monsieur de Palancy’s fish head, we find Swann attempting to reunify the bewildering discontinuity of his experience of these individuals, and finding himself unable to re-create them as they once were. This section is the more remarkable for the brusqueness with which it emerges from the common texture of the novel, and the marmoreal tone in which the location for this event is drenched. ³⁰

This moment in Recherche is unique in the life of the character who experiences it also, being the pinnacle of Swann’s alienation from both himself and his desire; shortly afterward, his marriage to Odette brings access to domestic happiness, of a sort, but more importantly the socialite fatuity that Swann finds himself unable to comprehend here. Proust, as ever, does not name the central facet of the impression he is hoping to bring into prose, but he, as it were, suffuses it formally into the construction of the sentences. We find washed through the sentences various adjectives that convey the underlying distaste Swann is going through: the general’s face bears a “shell-splinter” and is “common,” “monstrous,” and “not decent”; M. De Bréauté has a monocle that contains his gaze like “a specimen prepared on a slide for a microscope”; M. De Palancy is altogether repellent with his “mandibles” and “goggling eyes.”

Social eminence in Proust invariably, even when under criticism, ultimately confers a complimentary aura that, as the narrator mercilessly outlines at several points, suffuses the often disappointing features of its bearers. ³¹ Swann’s epiphany represents one of the rare travels in the converse direction in Proust: the complete unraveling of the effects of social mediation, and the perception of social practices and values from an exterior perspective. It is, characteristically for Proust, love that has unseated Swann’s system of values. Swann’s suffering continues, as he is forced to remain at a small concert that has been laid on. But it is at this concert that a musical figure by Vinteuil, the “little phrase” with which Swann had associated his love for Odette, is played:

He suffered greatly from being shut up among all these people whose stupidity and absurdities wounded him all the more clearly since, being ignorant of love, incapable, had they known of it, of taking any interest, or of doing more than smile at it as some kind of childish joke, or deplore it as an act of insanity, they made it appear to him in the aspect of a subjective state which existed for him alone, whose reality there was nothing external to confirm; he suffered overwhelmingly, to the point at which even the sound of the instruments made him want to cry, from having to prolong his exile in this place where Odette would never come, in which no one, nothing was aware of her existence, from which she was entirely absent. But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition tore him with such anguish that his hand rose impulsively to his heart…. And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening, to think: “It is the little phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata. I musn’t listen!,” all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him [returned]…. When it was the little phrase that spoke to him of the vanity of his sufferings, Swann found a wisdom in that very wisdom which, but a little while back, had seemed to him intolerable when he thought he could read it on the faces of indifferent strangers, who would regard his love as a digression that was without importance. ’Twas because the little phrase, unlike them, whatever opinion it might hold on the short duration of these states of the soul, saw in them something not, as everyone else saw, less serious than the events of everyday life, but, on the contrary, so far superior to everyday life as to be alone worthy of the trouble of expressing it. Those graces of an intimate sorrow, ’twas them that the phrase endeavoured to intimate, to create anew; and even their essence, for all that it consists in being incommunicable and in appearing trivial to everyone save him who has experience of them, the little phrase had captured, had rendered visible. ³²

No small amount of interest can be derived from Proust’s description of the “little phrase” above. We are elsewhere informed that the little phrase consists of only five notes. Despite the scant formal composition of this phrase, we are shown the immense significative power it bears and, moreover, the violent self-alienating effect it has on Swann, one of the sole characters in the novel to appreciate its power. ³³ It is due to the phrase that Swann does “not at first recognize… himself,”³⁴ such is its power to absorb Swann into it. Also suggestive, in light of Adorno’s account, is Proust’s juxtaposition of the expressive power of this music with the “essence” of its content, which is its “being incommunicable.” Vintueil’s sonata, with its little phrase, combines the ability to reflect extramusical content (in its sorrowfulness and air of resignation), truth, and the ability to intervene in the continuous experience and self-conception of those who attend carefully to it.

I am not trying here to find, in Proust, support for Adorno’s conception of art. Rather, what is significant about Proust’s development of Swann’s alienation from his environment, through the ability of art to alienate Swann from himself, is that we here find that Proust’s novel is engaging in a complex self-reflexive discourse about art, and the value of art, itself. Proust’s novel contains a myriad of artworks—music by Vintueil, novels by Bergotte, paintings by Elstir, and pseudepigraphical excerpts from fictive works by the real Goncourt Brothers—but it is most characteristically in writing on Vintueil that Proust intensifies the formally intricate self-reflection on the status of the artwork and the worth of aesthetic pleasure. If nothing else, this shows us that Adorno’s association of formal complexity and formal “risk”³⁵ with authentic art is at least intuitively plausible; and, moreover, the link of formal innovation with aesthetic value likewise models the peculiar pleasure that can be taken in Proust’s work. The almost entirely liquid formal composition of both the Proustian sentence and, within its titled sections, the Proustian novel as a whole shows us why Adorno places such a high value on Proust. It is in Proust that experiences of objects are taken as primary and allowed to dictate the composition of the novel.