Frankfurt School critical theory is almost as central to the history of modern aesthetics as aesthetics is to Frankfurt School critical theory: one cannot be thought without the other. On the one hand this means that Frankfurt School aestheticians are amongst the most important modern and contemporary aesthetic theorists. Hardly any modern thinker can compete with the influence and importance of the aesthetic theories of especially Adorno and Benjamin – not only in the academic discussion of aesthetics and art theory but also concerning their impact on players in the contemporary art field, including artists, curators, and critics.1 This situation is more peculiar than it might seem: while many intellectual fashions have temporarily informed and inspired the artistic or curatorial practices of their time, very few major aesthetic philosophies actually have consequence in the daily business of art and manage to nest there beyond the specific moment and to develop sustainable ‘art field credibility’.
On the other hand, this means that within Frankfurt School critical theory aesthetics has played a major role from the very beginning as a central element of the conception of social research in both analysis and style: the performative understanding of theory was crucial for the first generation of critical theory. In this understanding the question of Darstellung was of central importance as theory not only needed to be adequately thought and presented but also placed and performed.2 Summarizing much of what had been thought and written by then, Adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, the most developed aesthetic work of the Frankfurt School, suggested this unity of theory with its mode of presentation with its very title.
On a programmatic level, aesthetic research was included in the conception of social research (Sozialforschung) from the very beginning. Next to its specific interest in (psychoanalytically informed) social psychology –represented by the trailblazing Studies in Authority and Family – Horkheimer’s initial program for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and the idea of an interdisciplinary materialism granted prominent space for the critical analysis of art and culture. From issue one the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung contained the works of literary scholars (like Leo Löwenthal) and musicologists (like Adorno), who presented the sociological (or, materialist) analyses of works of art as a crucial element of the general project of Sozialforschung. Advanced by Marcuse’s seminal texts on happiness and Horkheimer’s essay on mass culture, critical discussions of recent cultural history, of the developments of technological media and visual arts (Walter Benjamin’s contributions), of Greek poetry (the contribution of Bowra) and radio music (with Křenek’s text) demonstrated the scope of the Zeitschrift’s discussion. Many of these approaches have either become classical or can be seen as preparatory studies for works that have later become canonical texts of aesthetic theory.
In more than one respect, the Zeitschrift is at the center of the constitution of Frankfurt School critical theory as a specific type of discourse.3 It organized and institutionalized the central discussions of the main protagonists and gave it the most coherent programmatic. It should therefore be the starting place for the reconstruction of the aesthetic paradigm of the Frankfurt School. Particularly in the field of aesthetic and cultural analysis, it helped formulate a materialist methodology that eventually became one of the main paradigms of twentieth century cultural materialism.
This general interest in the broader horizon of culture or, in classical Marxist terms, superstructural phenomena was of course not just a significant aspect of the constitution of the Frankfurt school; it also characterizes the more general development of Western Marxism (Anderson, 1976; Schmidt, 1980: 9f.), with its emphasis on cultural struggles and the historical conditions of subjectivity rather than the persistent hope in economic determinism and historical teleology. To reflect this shift in Marxist reasoning, Western Marxism has paradigmatically been described as ‘dialectic of defeat’ (Jacoby, 1981), a theoretical paradigm that had to confront the sphere of culture and ‘collective consciousness’ to understand the political challenges after the failure of the revolutionary moment of 1918/1919.
In other words, the analysis of ideology and the structure of subjectivity was identified as the new specific task of Western Marxism in reactionary times that left no space for hope concerning the general course of history, along with the need to explore the subjective conditions of political struggle more deeply.4 Culture, art, and aesthetics were irreducible elements of this ideology-critical analysis. Given the specific understanding of ideology within the discussions of the Frankfurt School (about which more will be said), it is obvious that such analysis of aesthetics as a fundamental element of ideology was always both in solidarity with and critical of aesthetics, that it treated aesthetics as an element of possible social transformation and of bourgeois self-legitimation.5
The analysis of cultural, or more specifically, of artistic developments that characterized the approach of the Frankfurt school was inspired by Georg Lukács, the major author of Western Marxism (Merleau Ponty, 1973: 31–58), and particularly by his historico-philosophical analysis of literature. Although Lukács has neither been a member of the inner circle of the Frankfurt Institute, nor even an author of the Zeitschrift, his importance for the Institute’s discussions can hardly be overstated. It is therefore worthwhile to spend some time on his thought. Lukács’s 1916 essay Theory of the Novel is a particular historical milestone in the history of leftist cultural criticism; it came, in the words of Fredric Jameson, ‘like a thunderclap in the dialectical awakening of a whole generation of central European intellectuals (very much including Benjamin and Adorno)’ (Jameson, 2015: 4). Lukács’s starting point was, of course, the Hegelian claim that art reflects the general state of culture in the historical moment and finds its truth precisely in its historicity. From here, Lukács took the Hegelian conception of the historicity of art a step further and applied it to modern (and early modern) literature. Against this background Lukács developed a conception of aesthetic form that would inherit the promise of the classical paradigm of art (as Hegel termed the art of the Greek period, when the aesthetic ideal was realized) and that of the ancient Greek epos specifically, in its potential to express the ‘extensive totality’ and the ‘immanence of meaning’. Modern times were, Lukács argued, characterized by a radical rift between the objective world and the individual, a world of ‘transcendental homelessness’.
In this light, Lukács emphasizes that ‘the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality’ (Lukács, 1971a: 56). Novels specifically, so Lukács argues, still implicitly worked with the promise of an integrated totality of meaning, with the promise of a world that remains inherently meaningful to the individuals, just as the Greek world would have been according to the German idealist prejudice. They would, however, only maintain this promise formally. While their narratives reflected the reality of a world torn apart, an alienated world, the world of aesthetic form would keep an inherently utopian promise. Art reconstructs the unity of a fragmented world, which is, following the Marxian conception of fetishism, socially necessary semblance. Through form (for Lukács specifically the totality of the narrative), art resists the dominant historical tendency and defends the possibility of the horizon of utopia. Lukács’s specific historico-philosophical interpretation of the novel did not only (and in the end, not even so much) inspire further interpretations of major literary narratives. The controversies over the concept of totality characterize much of the further development of the Frankfurt School (see Jay, 1984).
In Lukács’s decisively Marxist History and Class Consciousness (1923), one finds similar, if rare, explicit remarks on the potential of art and literature to mediate the apparently isolated and abstract realities of the individuals in great literary form. In continuity with the earlier arguments, History and Class Consciousness presents the ‘principle of art’ as a principle, ‘whereby man having been destroyed, fragmented and divided between different partial systems is made whole again in thought’ (Lukács, 1971b: 139).
The Lukács of 1923 addresses aesthetic concerns far less expressly. Nonetheless, his analysis of commodity fetishism is of equal paradigmatic importance for the aesthetic reflections of Benjamin, Marcuse, and Adorno. Reformulating, in explicitly Marxist terms, Georg Simmel’s idea that in modern society money has to be seen as a psychological, and ‘even as an aesthetic fact’ (Simmel, 2004: 55), Lukács formulated the framework for Marxist cultural critique for generations to come. His holistic perspective on the unity of modern capitalist societies is summed up in the claim that there is ‘no problem that does not ultimately lead back to that question [of the commodity form, JFH] and there is no solution that could not be found in the solution to the riddle to the commodity structure’ (Lukács, 1971b: 83). In opposition to the overarching logics of reification – the naturalization of social forms due to their atomistic appearance – art is presented as an exercise in mediation, as an attempt to come to terms with social connectivity and historical continuity.
Against the background of such a holistic analysis of the social process, the political relevance of art gained particular relevance. Lukács’s idea was that the historico-political significance of a work was to be found in its formal organization, that, in other words, the political analysis of art could accept the relative autonomy of art without reducing it to historical content. Such an understanding that the formal organization of an artwork could possibly contain a political signature that would – in Lukács’s case, by means of aesthetic semblance – reach beyond the contradictions of the historical moment, marked a trailblazing moment for the further development of Western Marxist aesthetics in general, and Frankfurt School aesthetics in particular. This meant that aesthetics would not only be deeply characterized by the general course of history (and thus be part of an extended field of politics) but that it would also have its own specific political logic, one that gestured beyond the dominant developments on the forefront of progress. Aesthetics could therefore appear as a realm of anticipation and unevenness (Vorschein und Ungleichzeitigkeit in Ernst Bloch’s [1974] terms) and a source of non-identity that disclosed hidden emancipatory promises and potentials even and particularly in times of political hopelessness.
Such a reading of political aesthetics was in tension with classical Marxism. The emphasis on the relative autonomy of aesthetic form and the potential of bourgeois art to anticipate a utopian horizon could not easily be reconciled with strict understandings of base-superstructure determinism or with the ideological conditions of working class politics. Indeed, Lukács’s early (1916) version of such a politics of form was written at a time when he had not yet made the philosophical step towards Marxism and it was a position he later criticized as a merely ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ (Lukács, 1971b: x). In his later writings on realism he argued for a strictly Marxian version of aesthetics, which also leveled some of the unevenness between (relatively autonomous) form and (historical) content that was so central to his Theory of the Novel.
Unlike in Lukács’s own intellectual development (on which Adorno commented very polemically, see his ‘Reconciliation under Duress’ [Adorno, 1977]), the tensions between dominant historical tendency and its aesthetic surplus remained influential for the aesthetic models of the Frankfurt School, especially in the articulation of the anti-capitalist potential of the aesthetic. At a deeper level, such disagreement was of a historico-philosophical nature, which had much to do with Lukács’s understanding of Hegelian Marxism and the anti-teleological version of history in the theoretical approaches of the Frankfurt School. While Lukács – both aesthetically and politically – hoped to be able to leave his own ‘despair’ of the 1916 text (Lukács, 1971b: xi) behind, the Frankfurt scholars could never follow his optimism in progress, historical tendency, and a general course of history. In a number of ways, however, the theoretical grounds for formulating such positions were no less Marxist than Lukács’s own.
Although never a member of the Frankfurt Institute’s inner circle, some of Benjamin’s most important aesthetic texts emerge in direct proximity to the Zeitschrift; they were either published in it (like the Kunstwerk-essay), were prepared as essays to be published there (like the Arcades Project, with its exposé being discussed in the correspondence with Adorno), or were in conversation with the texts published in the Zeitschrift. His discussions with Adorno can be said to be amongst the most important places and manifestations of the development of Benjamin’s later aesthetic thought. The aesthetic texts of the 1930s, of his ‘Marxist period’ (see Miller, 2014: 35), can therefore be seen as playing a direct part in the intellectual formation of Frankfurt School aesthetics.
In light of the most polemical critiques of aesthetic ideologies (Jameson, 1981: 64; Bennett, 1990: 146), Walter Benjamin’s historicizing approach to the aesthetic question also seems to be most explicitly historical materialist. Benjamin’s highly differentiated aesthetics circles less around a normative conception of aesthetic form or semblance and more around the historicization of forms of aesthetic experience themselves. Inspired by – and in some ways anticipating – the discourse of the historical avant-gardes, aesthetically idealist categories like aesthetic semblance or organic totality no longer speak for themselves. Even in his own writing style the modernist idea of montage and fragmentation mark a paradigmatic shift in aesthetic reasoning.
At first sight, Benjamin’s aesthetics is characterized by many different approaches to a great number of aesthetic practices, diverse forms of experience, and various techniques of representation. His evaluation of historically specific shapes and shades of the aesthetic often remains ambiguous. It remains difficult to identify any one systematic (or normative) aesthetic position that one could identify as Benjamin’s own – a situation that has allowed for a multiplicity of interpretations of his aesthetic thought. The three initial observations (the deeply historical nature of his analyses, the fragmented character of his own aesthetic writings, and the situative, historically specific evaluation of the use of aesthetic practices) prove useful, however, to identify the nature of Benjamin’s aesthetic thought. Benjamin’s archeological approach to the history of experience, his paradigmatic conception of allegory (which contains much of his understanding of modernism), and his strategic interpretation of aesthetic intervention appear to be the most fundamental of his aesthetic approaches that also keep reappearing throughout his texts. This historico-political dimension of Benjamin’s aesthetics strongly inherits the Hegelian understanding of the historicity of aesthetic truth – albeit in materialist terms. Mimetic faculty, storytelling, auratic experience, and phantasmagoria are, in this sense, not necessarily features of the nature of the aesthetic as such (a question of minor importance for a deeply historical thinker like Benjamin), but rather symptoms and signatures of their respective historical context.
As the above suggests, Benjamin’s aesthetics is conceptualized in terms of a fundamentally historical understanding of aisthesis (perception, experience). The concrete shape of life of a historical situation (the Hegelian Idee) becomes concrete in the structure of experience, as much ideologically as materially and practically constituted and thus historically specific. What Adorno, in his famous letter to Benjamin from September 1936, critically described as an ‘anthropological materialism’, for which the ‘human body represents the measure of all concreteness’ (Adorno and Benjamin, 2004: 146), is an adequate description, certainly if one considers Benjamin’s understanding of the extended body of a social collective, which he found in material culture (cities, architecture, but also in machinery and technical media).
In this sense Benjamin’s own version of historical materialism is in line with the considerations that the young Marx had sketched in his Paris Manuscripts, in which he considered the ‘forming of the five senses’ as the ‘labour of the entire history of the world down to the present’ (Marx, 1975: 302). Marx, too, saw the aesthetic as a historical construction site for subjectivities organized through material practices and expressed in the structure of the perceptive apparatus. Communist subjectivity, so Marx argued, would also have to deal with the aesthetic formation [Bildung] of a new collective sensuality (forming a ‘human sense’, liberating ‘the human nature of the senses’). As we will see later, similar considerations will guide Benjamin in formulating his own communist media aesthetics. In addition to this debt to Marx, Benjamin owed the understanding of the materialized history of perception to the Vienna School of Art History, to Riegl and Wickhoff specifically, ‘who were’, as Benjamin writes, ‘the first to think of using such art to draw conclusions about the organization of perception at the time the art was produced’ (Benjamin, 2008: 23).
To understand such an account of anthropological materialism, however, one must not forget that the historical constitution of perception and the organization of the faculties of experience also involve the production of ideology, the possibility of the supra-sensuous, and the structural necessity of superstition, which Marx, in Capital, identified in the structure of commodity fetishism. In commodity fetishism, Benjamin identifies two major approaches that will guide his analyses of the conditions of experience under high capitalism (as in the Arcades Project and the texts on Baudelaire): allegorical form and phantasmagoria.
Influenced by Lukács’s seminal analysis of reification, Benjamin develops his own terminology. As Marx argued in his fetishism chapter, and as Lukács lucidly presented to his contemporaries, commodities, as objects of exchange, necessarily appeared as bearers of a second, social reality (all the social relations that were inscribed into value), realities that were given a thing-like (reified, verdinglichte) reality by the commodity itself. Inspired by the conceptualization of the commodity form, Benjamin’s interpretation of allegory, initially presented in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, is further developed in the essay on Baudelaire (‘On some Motifs in Baudelaire’) in the Zeitschrift in the 1939/1940 issue. According to Benjamin’s conception, allegory identifies the condition of experience under capitalism, rather than the ontological condition of language as such. In classical understanding, allegories (as terminologically opposed to symbolic representation) were arbitrary forms of representation in which the relationship between signifier and signified was not intrinsic or organic but interchangeable. As Benjamin writes: ‘Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else’ (Benjamin, 1998: 175). The literature of Baudelaire is seen as a cultural reflection of the general development of experience under conditions of expanding commodification.
Such an historical account of aesthetic experience and representation is not merely a call for historical relativism. It rather allows Benjamin to unveil forgotten and unrealized potentials of human subjectivity. With strong suggestions of isomorphism, Benjamin’s history of human experience focuses on the both ontogenetic and phylogenetic changes of the human capacities of perception and representation, sometimes referring to human prehistory, sometimes mobilizing childhood memories. Aesthetic analyses, analyses of historically specific aesthetic constellations, are thus nothing less than historical studies in the historical constitution of subjectivity.
Benjamin’s account of the history of the species [Urgeschichte] and the early development of the individual (childhood) partly converge in accentuating the uneven layers of the historical process and in outlining an unresolved history of the present. Benjamin’s archaeological perspective on buried layers of experience that previous generations –or children – might have had access to, is as much melancholic as it is hopeful. If, in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, he argues for a redemption of the past (Benjamin, 2007: 254), such redemption also aims for the uncovering of lost and buried human capacities, of the subjective potential of the forgotten victims of the past with whom – ex post – to reconcile. Redeeming the past, however, would not only imply the actualization of buried capacities of experiencing and representing other layers of realities: it would also mean awakening from the dreams of the past to realize them.
In this light, it is highly characteristic that Benjamin’s unfinished opus magnum, The Arcades Project, focuses on the material history of a system of myths (dreams, hopes, projections) that characterizes the foundational period of modern capitalism.
The central concept for grasping the historical nature of experience in a society within which dream-like realities become effective, is the concept of phantasmagoria. In a phantasmagoria (as the magic lantern, developed in seventeenth century, was sometimes called), a projected image appeared as almost real; quite similar to modern projectors, it gave a transparent image concrete visibility through the use of light beams. For Benjamin, such phantasmagoric reality, as well as the reality of dreams, not only anticipated the development of modern technological imagery (as in cinematography): the aesthetic significance of the bourgeois phantasmagoria for Benjamin consisted in its surplus or anticipation of a utopian future, of unrealized dreams. Importantly, this text also chooses a specific form of aesthetic representation [Darstellung] by working with fragments, quotes, a complex system of intertextual links, and a great number of images that are discussed or alluded to (and included in the posthumously published print versions).
If commodity fetishism, in Benjamin’s interpretation (Tiedemann, 1982: 26 ff.), was characterized by the reified presence of a second, social layer of reality that was implicitly communicated by commodities, the various ways in which social semblance and ghostly realities brought themselves to the fore in visual culture were central to Benjamin’s analyses. Phantasmagoric imagery can, in this light, be interpreted as the ‘sensuous manifestation of the idea’ in modern times, in which ideas were produced by the logics of commodity production, dream-like expressions of a society’s collective unconscious (Cohen, 1993).
The dreams of the high bourgeois past of nineteenth century, of its architecture, streetscapes, imagery and poetry, were to be disclosed, unfolded (as did the surrealists by their appropriations of urban Paris), and realized. Benjamin’s conception of phantasmagoria, the reconstruction of the collective dreams that manifested themselves in material culture, was not just an analysis of a contingent moment of historical experience, but also a form of redemptive critique, an attempt to realize the secret dreams of high capitalism.
The first condition, however, for realizing a dream, as Benjamin suggests in his considerations on surrealism, was to wake up. It is specifically this motif that structures his identification with modernist aesthetics from surrealism to film and contemporary photography, especially in the most influential of all of Benjamin’s texts, his Kunstwerk-essay (The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility), first published in the Zeitschrift in 1936. Mobilizing art against the technological slumber, against the fact that technological progress largely remains unprocessed and expresses the most violent potentials both on an economic and on a psychological level, Benjamin positions aesthetic forces as adapting to the technological conditions of modern culture. The aesthetic (or, more strongly put, strategic) importance of shock is to be seen in this light. Shock experience, the confronting experience of speed and proximity, pierces the veil of aesthetic autonomy. It dissolves the aura, the ‘air of sacredness around the image’ (Miller, 2014: 42), and turns it into an object of everyday practice. At the same time, it helps to process the daily experience of urban and industrial modernity (Simmel, 1950).
In the essay (and in the key texts that surround it)6 Benjamin combined a modernist paradigm of art with proletarian aesthetics and anti-fascist strategy. The Artwork-essay does not only historico-philosophically interpret, document, and reconstruct the situation of art and experience, but also takes an explicitly strategic stance. His identification with soberly modernist engineer aesthetics and avant-garde techniques of montage attempts to break the mythical spell that characterized the tradition of autonomous art. However, his text is also a very subtle discussion of contemporary film theory (Arnheim, Kracauer, Balász, etc.), which Benjamin had studied attentively.7 Here, too, as much as in the analysis of the modern phantasmagoria, modern optical media (film, photography) were discussed as condensations of a general perceptive paradigm of the historical moment. In this way, Benjamin’s aesthetic theory is always also a theory of modern media technology.
In the apocalyptic moment, the advent of European fascism (especially in Italy, Germany, and Spain) – the background against which Benjamin is writing – film and photography identify a moment of rupture, shock, and confrontation with the experiential horizon of the urban proletariat (speed and spatial density: an intensified sensorium). In this way, the potentials of modern optical media identify Benjamin’s aesthetic-political preferences and his hope in the potential of contemporary media technology.
Media technology, however, are also a placeholder for the technical productive forces in general. In this way, Benjamin’s argument prepares for communist revolution on the level of aesthetic experience: modernist art is expected to do nothing less than to contribute to the capacity of taking control of the technical means of production. If it is to be appropriated politically and juridically (by the proletariat seizing the means of production), technology also needs to be mastered symbolically. Thus, modernist art turns into a training ground for the revolution to come. It confronts the destructive logics of unceasing (imperialist) expansion embodied in unprocessed technological development. And whilst aestheticizing the violent logics of technological development and economic expansion is the cultural logic of fascism, communism’s answer is the politicization of modern technologically mediated experience, i.e. the symbolic appropriation of the technological means of production.8
If Benjamin’s historical political approach to human perception and experience is the first line of thought characterizing the Frankfurt School’s approach to the aesthetics of politics or the politics of form, the second line of thought is the immanent critique of the bourgeois legacy. A general ideology critical approach to the bourgeois legacy of aesthetic thinking is paradigmatically formulated in Herbert Marcuse’s text ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, ‘a landmark essay in Marcuse’s oeuvre’ (Miller, 2014: 119) originally published in the Zeitschrift in 1937. Although Marcuse strongly argues for the normative potential of the German classic tradition (Goethe, Schiller), for the indirectly social promise of the organic work of art (containing the image of a reconciled society) his text contains an argument that will later become central for the discussion of the historical avant-gardes (Bürger, 1984, see also the final section).
Marcuse’s emphasis, already evident in his aesthetic texts published in the Zeitschrift (‘On Hedonism’, 1938, being the second), is on the possibility of a materially concrete form of collective and objective happiness. In more or less direct ways, his discussion of aesthetics focuses on this issue from day one.
Regardless of the importance of these two texts, Marcuse’s theoretical contributions to the Zeitschrift (1932–41) were not primarily about aesthetics. His texts famously deal with the decline of liberalism, the conservative ontology of his time and the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s dialectics. His text on the affirmative character of culture might nonetheless be the most influential of Marcuse’s texts for the further development of Frankfurt School critical theory. It also anticipates Marcuse’s deepened interest not only in art and aesthetics, but also in the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic, which his later writings strongly emphasize, discussing aesthetics as a radical source for social transformation that reaches beyond the immanence of integrated consumer capitalism. Although Marcuse’s evaluation of the value of aesthetic semblance and sublimation slightly changes with changing historical circumstances, in all of these texts Marcuse discusses the potential of art and aesthetics to transgress the autonomous realm of aesthetic semblance and to transform real life forms in the perspective of the critique of alienation and of objective happiness.
In the specific context of the essay ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’ Marcuse discusses the reduction of culture (the good, the true, and the beautiful) to a merely compensational ideology. The classical tradition’s conceptualizations of aesthetic form and beauty are interpreted as a virtual harmonization of social antagonisms. Because of their inner, formal organization, artworks contain the promise of a non-alienated world. By virtue of its own semblance character, however, the work indirectly keeps its own utopian promise at arm’s length.
Referring back to ancient understandings of culture (2009: 67), which were separated from the necessity of labor ‘by an abyss’, culture appears as a sphere of fulfilled individual happiness and enjoyment for the few. This legacy, so Marcuse argues, continues in bourgeois culture. Furthermore, the claim to the universal relevance of culture is fully developed in the aesthetics of the bourgeois age. Universalization, however, is achieved by paying the price of social concreteness. Culture withdraws into the realm of abstract freedom, freedom detached from the equal access to culture and its inherent promise to happiness: ‘To the need of the isolated individual it responds with general humanity, to bodily misery with the beauty of the soul, to external bondage with internal freedom, to brutal egoism with the duty of the realm of virtue’ (2009: 72). Again, aesthetics moves into the realm of semblance.
The bourgeois conception of aesthetic semblance at the same time enacts a form of ideological repression as ‘the real gratification of individuals cannot be contained by an idealist dynamic which either continually postpones gratification or transmutes it into striving for the unattained’ (2009: 74). It is such aesthetics, such an affirmative conception of culture, that easily falls prey to the anti-liberal tendencies of authoritarian society, against which the text is written. Not unlike Benjamin’s efforts to formulate a politics of perception that would be capable of countering the fascist threat, Marcuse’s essay contains his own anti-fascist politics of aesthetics. Contemporary authoritarianism is identified in the essay as the attempt to establish stabilized forms of collectivity (‘race, folk, blood and soil’, 2009: 93) and to replace ‘idealist inwardness’ with ‘heroic outwardness’ (ibid.). By doing so, post-bourgeois culture casts off the ‘progressive elements contained in the earlier stages of culture’ (ibid.). While classical bourgeois idealism reduces culture to a realm of semblance, individual pleasure, and consolation, and thus remains affirmative in light of a possible transformation of society, authoritarian culture replaces this realm of semblance with explicit and unambiguous significations of collectivity. Marcuse interprets the historical counterparts of bourgeois humanist culture and post-bourgeois totalitarianism as two sides of the same coin, each neutralizing, in their own way, the radical and transcending potential of collective happiness. Beauty, he writes, ‘contains a dangerous violence that threatens the given form of existence’ (2009: 85).
In light of the political strategies of the day, the political substance of Marcuse’s aesthetic politics, to navigate between bourgeois humanism and authoritarian anti-humanism, maintains some historical relevance. What makes Marcuse’s seminal article particularly paradigmatic, however – and not only for the development of his own thought but also for a central line of argument in the whole development of Frankfurt school aesthetics – is his critical strategy. Bourgeois culture’s inherent promise of beauty and happiness, and authoritarianism’s false negation of its idealism, are not regarded as ‘mere ideology’ but rather as a symptom of historical alienation and as reflections of non-alienated conditions of social life. Ideology is thus not confronted and rejected head-on but rather recognized as a bearer of ‘objective content’ (2009: 73), which can help to diagnose the social constellation it is part of and provide sources for normative critique. Marcuse’s critique of the affirmative character of culture is, in this sense, a model case for the immanent critique of aesthetics, aiming at the sublation [Aufhebung] of aesthetics’ inherent promise without destroying it. Clearly, the critique of the affirmative character of culture in both of its neutralized forms (bourgeois humanist and authoritarian) also aims to restore the potential of art and culture for social transformation: the critical character of art.
According to Marcuse, the inherent promise of the classical aesthetic tradition finds its proper place only in the emancipatory perspective of materialist philosophy: ‘materialist philosophy takes seriously the concern for happiness and fights for its realization in history’ (ibid.). It is Marcuse’s emphasis on the material conditions for happiness and the challenge of making these conditions sustainable and universal that will also inform Marcuse’s later writings on aesthetics. Since Marcuse located this potential at the center of the historical discourse on aesthetics, he was convinced throughout his life that ‘every authentic work of art would be revolutionary’ (1977: xi) – at least by virtue of its authentic inheritance of the promise to objective happiness and by maintaining the beautiful ‘image of liberation’ (1977: 6).
It is in his later writings that the critique of society employs a more explicitly psychoanalytical terminology. The rhetorical shift from sublation [Aufhebung] to sublimation and the more explicit discussion of psychoanalytical terminology does, however, also imply a shift in the aesthetic and the political perspective. In Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse mobilizes his interest in the utopian potentials of classical Weimar aesthetics against a different enemy: the material conditions of happiness are now being discussed against the background of technologically perfected late capitalist consumerism. Art is now meant to mobilize a critical potential, as Marcuse will call it in One-Dimensional Man, against ‘repressive desublimation’ (Marcuse, 2007: 75), the apparent satisfaction of needs under conditions of broadened commodification.
Much could be said about the ways in which Marcuse rephrases Lukács’s original critique of reification in terms of a critique of modern technology and one-dimensional (means–end) rationality (Feenberg, 2014). One-dimensional society is fundamentally a reified society that reduces conscious activity to the fulfilment of particularistic ends, ends that are mutually antagonistic and oppositional. The lack of theoretical comprehension, of reified consciousness, affects the human psyche. Marcuse’s employment of psychoanalysis continues on this path. It is explicitly intended to ‘break the reification in which human relations are petrified’ (Marcuse, 1966: 254). Not only, however, does psychoanalysis embed psychological traits in context and narrative, it also helps Marcuse to articulate the material grounds of happiness in new terms.
In the discussion of the possibility of sustainable collective happiness, it is Schiller’s conception of aesthetic education that helps solve the problem of the Freudian tensions of Civilization and its Discontent. The aesthetic configuration of social life allows for solving tensions between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between instrumental rationality and sensuous pleasure. Just as Schiller suggested a playful mediation between rationality and the senses to overcome the threat of rigorist terror (of the barbarians) on the one hand and uncultured rudeness (of the savages) on the other, Marcuse, too, aims to mediate the repression and the direct, uncultured articulation of libidinous energies. In this way, aesthetic education is discussed in close analogy with sublimation and with Eros, both distinguished from sheer and blunt sexuality, with Marcuse clearly taking a stand for the liberation of sensuousness. Freedom, he writes, ‘would have to be sought in the liberation of sensuousness rather than reason, and in the limitation of the “higher” faculties in favor of the “lower”’ (Marcuse, 1966: 190). Even in his late work Marcuse defends such aestheticization as the ‘truth content’ of classical, affirmative, idealist culture.9
The radical and activist tone of Marcuse’s aesthetics remains throughout his work, and can nowhere be found as pure and simple as in his last book publication: The Aesthetic Dimension of 1977, in which Marcuse presents the ‘encounter with the fictitious world’ as ‘counter-societal experience’ (1977: 44). Through semblance and aesthetic sublimation an alternative reality keeps re-introducing itself to one-dimensional society. The realization of the inherent promise of aesthetics, Marcuse continued to emphasize in 1977, was in the hands of ‘political struggle’ (1977: 58). But the sources for ‘great refusal’ (Marcuse, 2007: 261) were fundamentally aesthetic, particularly when more classical (proletarian) sources of political revolt were nowhere to be seen (cf. Kellner, 1984: 280). Marcuse’s radical politics was a politics of form as well.
A third point of entry to the tradition of the Frankfurt School and its most developed aesthetic theory is the work of Theodor W. Adorno, which discusses and, in some ways, integrates central arguments of Benjamin and Marcuse. Adorno’s aesthetics culminates in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s theory is prepared, however, in the early essays which Adorno publishes in the Zeitschrift. Here, as in his later writings, key motifs of Adorno’s aesthetic writings are the historical separation of advanced from popular art forms and the dialectics of autonomy, oftentimes discussed in terms of aesthetic fetishism. Also, the critique of culture industry, further developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, have been substantively prepared by the texts published in the Zeitschrift (especially the studies ‘On Popular Music’). A major part of Adorno’s analyses (above all his 1937 text ‘On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening’, in which Adorno critically responds to Benjamin’s positive assessment of the destruction of aura, aesthetic autonomy, and traditional art) focus on these two issues, which will structure his work all the way through to his aesthetic theory. They are in some ways derived from the analysis of the commodity form, which, in Adorno’s understanding, determines the ontology of the modern work of art (Martin, 2007: 15f.).
The aesthetic relevance of the commodity is, however, ambiguous. As Adorno emphasizes very strongly throughout his work, the development of music as a free art form (as with any other art form) has been historically contingent on the development of its market character. Having developed autonomy by becoming independent from church and court, however, opened the gates for new forms of heteronomy and new social tensions to be mediated by the (musical) work of art.
It is this discussion that enters Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in terms of the double character of the artwork (alluding to the double character of the commodity in Marx’s Capital) as being ‘autonomous’ and ‘fait social’. Already in the 1932 text for the Zeitschrift, ‘On the Social Situation of Music’, Adorno argues emphatically: ‘The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value is that determined by the market’ (2002: 391); he continues, ‘The same force of reification which constituted music as art has today taken music from man and left him with only an illusion [Schein] thereof’ (392). Following Lukács’s holistic suggestion that social totality, inherently structured by the logics of the commodity, has fully been realized in modern capitalism, Adorno discusses the question of music in light of the ambiguities of the commodity form and formulates the problem of aesthetic autonomy explicitly in these terms. But the affinities and tensions between artwork and commodity reach further than this. Adorno regards the artwork as the place of mediation between (abstract) form and materiality, rational composition and mimetic particularity (echoing the tension between exchange value and use value). Given this parallel with the double character of the commodity, it is no coincidence that two of the key dialectical terms of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, mimesis and ratio, articulate the struggle between the systematic rationality of aesthetic construction (following laws of form and general principles) on the one hand and the attentiveness for the specificity of the material on the other. Here, too, Adorno’s conceptualization of the modern artwork echoes the inner tensions of the commodity form. As a result of this process of mediation, the artwork is also potentially a place of resistance against direct utility and thus interrupts the continuity of the commodity process by maintaining its inner legitimacy. Especially as a place of encounter between rationality and materiality (or, classically, ‘understanding’ and ‘imagination’, ‘sensual drive’ and ‘formal drive’ etc.), Adorno argues in line with the classical aesthetic tradition: the artwork remains as the place of beauty and semblance, as an autonomous object.
But Adorno’s dialectics does not stop here: even this potential resistance against (commodified) utilization is itself articulated in terms of fetishization. Adorno writes: ‘Artworks that do not insist fetishistically on their coherence, as if they were the absolute that they are unable to be, are worthless from the start; but the survival of art becomes precarious as soon as it becomes conscious of its fetishism’ (1997: 228). Following the general argument of the historical emergence of autonomous art through the development of the (art) market, Adorno suggests that it is precisely the ignorance of the social conditions of art production that allows for a radically aesthetic perspective.
As usual, Adorno’s argument is antinomical in character as it introduces two contradicting propositions: on the one hand, the necessary illusion of aesthetic autonomy is built upon the ignorance of the specific social conditions of the artwork. On the other hand, such fetishistic illusion remains necessary especially to insist that aesthetic contents and potentials can reach beyond the immanence of reified society. Or, in the terms of the 1938 essay: ‘The more inexorably the principle of exchange value destroys use values for human beings, the more deeply does exchange value disguise itself as the object of enjoyment’ (1991: 39). Under conditions of instrumental reason and enforced utility, the reduction of the aesthetic object to its fetish character, the artwork as an ‘absolute commodity’ (1997: 21)10 remains as a placeholder for the objects ‘no longer distorted by exchange’ (1997: 227). Adorno presents, in other words, fetishism in conflict with itself.
Such diagnosis is, to some extent, congruent with the dynamics that Marcuse also introduces in his 1937 article ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’. Separated from direct social utility, reduced to the realm of semblance, art’s inherent promise of happiness is at all times threatened with becoming fetishistic, ideological, or, in Marcuse’s terms, merely affirmative. But Adorno is, already in the 1930s, far less optimistic concerning the potential for sublating art into social practice than Marcuse, and less willing to subscribe to the autonomy-critical program of the historical avant-gardes than Benjamin.
Amongst the most threatening developments of contemporary authoritarian societies and socially integrated capitalism, Adorno identifies certain versions of popular culture that reduce cultural production to stultifying versions of easy consumption. Biographically, this threat is becoming particularly concrete in Californian exile. Living in close proximity to Hollywood, Adorno is confronted with the emergence of a type of cultural production that strategically produces forms of (deceptively) easy enjoyment. Adorno’s conception of popular music and, to a large extent, the concept of the culture industry are attempts to identify such conditions of marketable cultural production.
Easy and popular enjoyment, cultural goods produced for the market, falsely suggest an accessibility of happiness and pleasure in a world that structurally undermines its very possibility; a world within which the social antagonism makes a life beyond scarcity and the compulsion to work for the major part of the population impossible. Such cultural goods are reduced to their affirmative character and thus betray the aesthetic idea of real happiness. Adorno thus identifies a fundamental rupture in the history of aesthetic enjoyment: ‘After The Magic Flute’, Adorno famously argues regarding the history of music, ‘it was never again possible to force serious and light music together’ (1991: 32).
In Adorno’s aesthetic program – and his aesthetic models are never just reconstructions of the logics of aesthetic production and experience but also always strategic interventions in contemporary cultural production – advanced art needs to include the ambiguity of enjoyment and happiness. The aesthetic promesse du bonheur presents itself in its negativity, by way of its impossibility. He formulates: ‘Art records negatively just that possibility of happiness which the only partially positive anticipation of happiness ruinously confronts today. All “light” and pleasant art has become illusory and mendacious’ (1991: 33). Adorno’s aesthetic justification of dissonance and post-tonal composition, or later, the central aesthetic importance of the color black (1997: 39), is strongly inspired by this argument.
To protect the capacity of autonomous art to indicate the potential of happiness, art has to abstain from the illusion of easy enjoyment. For this it has to pay the price of becoming esoteric. The separation of autonomous culture and popular culture is regarded as historically irreversible. It does, however, condition both extremes of the spectrum: just as much as the promise of culture as a collectively lived form of social practice is withheld from autonomous culture, so the promise of transgressive and unrestricted happiness remains unavailable to the products of culture industry.
This historical rift between the two extremes of culture (autonomous culture and culture industry) ultimately contains Adorno’s verdict on the avant-gardes. Although Adorno defends the idea of aesthetic autonomy and insists on the historical legitimacy of aesthetic semblance, his dialectics also presents overly simple interpretations of a modernist aesthetics of autonomy. Modern art, by the force of its own concept, also contains the struggle against its own illusoriness or semblance character; in this sense, too, Adorno conceives it as antinomical by essence. What Adorno coins as the failure of culture (and specifically philosophy) (1973: 3) in not having become practically relevant in reorganizing social life, is, metaphorically speaking, inscribed into the conscience of modern art. Or, as he writes in Aesthetic Theory, ‘The dialectic of modern art is largely that it wants to shake off its illusoriness like an animal trying to shake off its antlers’ (1977: 102). Art’s attempt to become effectively real, without reducing itself to culture industry and without sacrificing its potential to insist upon the unrealized potential of happiness, is doomed to fail. Autonomous art remains, in the end, in conflict with itself, no less antinomical than activist forms of avant-gardism or even the products of culture industry.
It is important to be aware of the fact that Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is, in its very structure, an attempt to critically react to what he characterizes as ‘identity philosophy’ by maintaining the ‘primacy of the object’ (1977: 109, 145, 169, 259, 322f.; cf. Sonderegger, 2011: 414). His theory attempts to become aesthetic itself. It attempts to stay ostentatiously close to empirical, historical, and, most of all, aesthetic material. Furthermore, Adorno’s writing style mobilizes figures of aesthetic presentation in order to intensify the plausibility of his arguments. Finally, it is also aesthetic theory in actu rather than a fulfilled system of aesthetics.
This attempt to emphasize the material and materiality of theory is yet another, partly performative and stylistic, attempt to resist the predominant logic of the commodity form. If the commodity form installs a universal logic of quantification that makes qualitatively different things quantitatively commensurable (in terms of exchange value), Adorno understands aesthetics (both theory and practice) as a place of resistance against commensurability. By the very structure of theory, aesthetics becomes yet another place for mobilizing the qualitative against premature systematization.
In response to the Lukácsian ambition of formulating an aesthetic theory that could confront progressive reification, three main aspects of the Frankfurt School’s conceptualization and critique of aesthetics remain: a historico-political theory of aesthesis, which allows for specific strategic interventions in the realm of aesthetic discourse (Benjamin); the immanent critique of the classical aesthetic paradigm with its inherent idea of aesthetic sublimation and political sublation (Marcuse); and the dialectical discussion of aesthetic semblance in light of a critique of commodity fetishism (Adorno). All three approaches formulate a politics of form in a situation in which the general course of history – a history of ever-growing commodification – was no longer trusted and in which emancipatory politics are needed to mobilize deviant potentials of social practice. Four main aesthetic-political strategies of such kind come to the fore: the redemption of forgotten layers of the past (1), the immanent critique of the bourgeois legacy (2), the representation of those social forces, who might still be capable of preventing the worst (3), and the unfolding of the inner contradictions of the commodity form (4).
The reach and impact of these aesthetic models is hard to measure. Particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world, much work has been done towards the reception of Frankfurt School aesthetics by Susan Buck-Morss, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Andreas Huyssen, and Peter Osborne. Under contemporary conditions, no serious scholar of continental aesthetics could afford not to process its major claims in one way or another, even though its manifest and explicit politic layer has often had to be downplayed, ignored, or rejected. At the same time, the official development of second generation Frankfurt School critical theory, mainly determined by the institutional political impact of Jürgen Habermas, marginalized aesthetic perspectives in the trajectory of social research. Much of what Frankfurt School aesthetics had epitomized then continued in other theoretical traditions, predominantly poststructuralism.
If not at the institutional center of critical theory in the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and the Goethe University, the key systematic impulses of the original aesthetic programs nevertheless found their way into the theoretical efforts of second generation critical theorists who formulated their own aesthetic politics.
A key impulse of the first major book collaboration between Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993) was a direct critique of the lack of cultural theory and aesthetic experience in Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. In opposition to the bourgeois public sphere was the proletarian public sphere as a Produktionsöffentlichkeit, a public sphere of production. What is interesting in light of the ongoing interest of Negt and Kluge in the historical formation of human experience, are a number of impulses, strongly reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s original aesthetic project. Already, Public Sphere and Experience includes the experiential horizon of social production in daily political culture – much like Benjamin attempted with his passionate plea for modern media technology. Their second collaborative book project, History and Obstinacy (Negt and Kluge, 2014), also includes extensive discussions of the young Marx’s accounts of the history of sense perception and the aesthetic formation of a human sense. Finally, the fragmentary form, a surrealist montage of texts and images ranging from cosmic history to the history of working class struggles, from planetary and human Urgeschichte to childhood, echoes Benjamin’s writings, which similarly suggest an isomorphic relation between these various layers. In more systematic terms, the concept of ‘self-regulation’ (Negt and Kluge, 2014: 106–13; see Martin, 2015) suggests comparable logics of subtle physical and quasi-physical forces (within history as much as the individual), the acceptance of which would allow for various perspectives of emancipation (Negt and Kluge, 1981: 55).
In their own self-understanding, the theoretical contribution of Negt and Kluge to the tradition of the Frankfurt School could predominantly be understood in terms of political theory. One must not forget that Alexander Kluge is amongst the most prolific, influential, and multifaceted filmmakers and authors (and TV-producers) of recent German history, whose work can also be seen as a continuation of Frankfurt School aesthetics (if not cultural politics) in praxi.
Marcuse’s aesthetic theory might appear as the least influential paradigm of early Frankfurt School aesthetics. Indeed, both the radical posture of an aesthetically motivated ‘great refusal’ and the strong affinities to Weimar classicism have seen better days. It is the argument of Herbert Marcuse’s early essay on affirmative culture, however, that is echoed and further developed in Peter Bürger’s path-breaking contribution to the conceptualization of the avant-garde (Bürger, 1984), the influence of which can hardly be overestimated.11 Bürger’s book is indeed an attempt to mediate Walter Benjamin’s radical critique of bourgeois autonomous aesthetics and Adorno’s affirmative reading of the idea of autonomy in light of the advent of culture industry. Bürger’s conceptualization of the historical avant-garde reads like a paraphrasing of Marcuse’s critique of affirmative culture. Bürger presents the main impulse of the historical avant-gardes as a critique of the bourgeois separation of art and life. Avant-gardist artistic politics thus means, for Bürger, to sublate the inherent promise of autonomous art in real life praxis. What is striking in Bürger’s account of the historical avant-gardes is not only the structure of his argument, which is strongly reminiscent of Marcuse – formulating an immanent critique of the semblance of beauty from the perspective of a radically changed life practice – but also the evaluation of the neo-avant-gardes as repeating Marcuse’s own position. Regarding the neo-avant-gardes as de-sublimated practices under changed social conditions (as art forms that have institutionally been integrated), Bürger, like Marcuse, explicitly rejects these developments as instances of social integration.
It is important to note that this particular argument provoked the most (and the most influential) criticism of Bürger’s account.12 It is interesting to note that Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensional society inspired the work of a conceptual artist like Dan Graham and thus became the source of neo-avant-gardist art itself.13
After the successful Abwicklung clearing of academic Marxism in German universities, the continued success of Adorno’s aesthetic writings is not without irony. Few Adorno scholars accept the categorical role of the commodity form for understanding the ontology of the modern artwork, and few would insist on modern art’s capacity to break the spell of a commodified society. The dialectic of aesthetic semblance, however, remains central for contemporary academic debates. Without reflecting the historical ontology of the work of art – its contingency on socio-economic and institutional conditions –Adorno’s aesthetic theory appears like an ontological theory of aesthetic experience, aesthetic representation, or aesthetic semblance. Disconnecting Adorno further from Benjamin’s efforts to historicize aesthetic experience, aesthetics is presented as a philosophical discipline in its own right, rather than a theory of art under the historical conditions of late capitalism; it is presented as a theory of form rather than a politics of form.
Among the second and third generation Frankfurt scholars, Albrecht Wellmer has formulated the clearest version of aesthetic dialectics in his 1984 text, ‘Truth, Semblance and Reconciliation’. In line with Habermas’s project of a communicative turn of critical theory, Wellmer reformulated Adorno’s insistence on the utopian implication of aesthetic semblance as an image of successful communication. Wherever aesthetic semblance alludes to a form of successful signification – and Adorno’s negative anticipation of fulfilled happiness is one example – it also implicitly anticipates a form of successful intersubjectivity. Such aesthetic semblance remains dialectical in one respect: wherever the materiality of aesthetic signification is aesthetically emphasized, its realization in intersubjectively shared systems of communication is undermined. Aesthetic experience is thus dialectically bound to intersubjectivity, into which it also introduces a sting of negativity. Wellmer left it to his own successors to develop such a theory of aesthetic experience in dialogue with Derrida’s deconstruction,14 thus completing the separation of aesthetics from social philosophy.15
This gesture of depoliticization, now happening to the critique of aesthetic ideology, characterizes much of the development from first generation critical theory to second (and onwards). Somewhere between the contradictory logics of academic theory on the one hand, and artistic practice on the other, much of this original critical impulse has persisted. It can thus still be received, processed, and realized by future aesthetic-political activists, for whom critical theory (unlike traditional theory) was originally written.
1. In the art sociological research collected in Das Kunstfeld the authors prove the massive popularity of Benjamin (being by far the most popular theorist of all) but also Adorno, ranked at 8 (Münder and Wuggenig, 2012: 303) more popular than even Deleuze, Butler, or Rancière. See also Hartle (2015) and the exhibition and catalogue of the Frankfurt Kunstverein, fully dedicated to Adorno, in Müller and Schafhausen (2003). For the artistic impact see also Miller (2014: 4).
2. See for instance García Düttmann (2007); about Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s idea of developing critical theory as conceptual gesture see Schmid-Noerr (1997: 51–88).
3. For the importance of the Zeitschrift see Schmidt (1980); for the role of Leo Löwenthal as its central coordinator see Schneider (2014: XIV ff., 8 ff.).
4. The following threefold structure is partly inspired by the book of Tyrus Miller (2014). To some extent I follow his structure and emphasis of the contemporary legacy of the Frankfurt School’s aesthetics. Unlike my text, his book is a contribution to intellectual history and abstains from further-reaching systematic or (theoretico-)political claims.
5. Strongly inspired by the Frankfurt tradition, although (of course) not without ironical distance, this twofold approach to the aesthetic ideology is developed by Terry Eagleton (1990).
6. The central essays to think of are ‘The Little History of Photography’, ‘Eduard Fuchs, the Collector and the Historian’, the review ‘Theories of German Fascism’, and ‘The Author as Producer’.
7. In his archive one can see Benjamin’s excerpts to these texts.
8. This argument against war is formulated in parallel with Rosa Luxemburg’s argument in The Accumulation of Capital, as Ansgar Hillach has pointed out (1979: 102).
9. There are interesting shifts in Marcuse’s evaluation of popular and counter-culture between the 60s and 70s. Particularly in the 70s, Marcuse returns to the idea of aesthetic sublimation and rejects the popular and counter-cultural versions of de-sublimation. See Kellner (1984: 352).
10. About this concept see Stewart Martin’s excellent text (2007). Martin very pointedly discusses the antinomies of the commodity form as the very core of Adorno’s ontology of the modern artwork.
11. A large part of the discussion of the Neo-Avant-Garde in October, arguably the most influential journal of contemporary art criticism of the last 40 years, is an attempt to come to terms with Bürger’s criticism. See specifically the introductory formulations to Buchloh’s compilation (mind the title!) Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry (Buchloh, 2000: xxiv ff.).
12. See Buchloh (1984); Foster (1996); Bürger (2010).
13. See Alberro (1994: 8); Miller (2014: 118).
14. The nuances of the difference between Wellmer and Menke are discussed in a footnote of Wellmer (1993: 199).
15. As for my own attempt to formulate a politics of form in the aftermath of Adorno without relying on the critical analysis of the commodity form, see Hartle (2006).
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