This essay examines the connection between art, ideology, and pathologies of reason. And this in itself requires justification – why think that there is a connection between such radically disparate domains? For critical theory, of course, these domains are not simply connected, but deeply interrelated in such a way that they mutually determine one another. Indeed, for one significant strand of critical theory the artwork is a means of criticizing ideology, and for revealing deep-seated misdevelopments and pathologies in our form of reason and society. Much ink has been spilled on the specific claims which have been advanced regarding these interconnections and artwork-based critiques, with special reference to the work of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and, above all, Theodor Adorno. But, in this chapter, I am less concerned with these writers’ specific claims than with the idea that is their precondition – that art can be critical at all. Why has critical theory, at least in its first generation, been so enamoured with this idea? Is it cogent? And is it still applicable today? I will focus on the work of Theodor Adorno, whose work on aesthetics far surpasses that of his contemporaries in depth, complexity, and ambition. Many of the issues we will find in his work will be of importance to other writers of his time who made use of similar interpretive strategies, but I cannot here pursue these parallels in detail.
Critical theory stands in the lineage of post-Kantian critical philosophy.1 While we cannot here trace this historical relationship too deeply, a thumbnail sketch is of use in getting to grips with the reasons for Adorno’s confidence that art is – in quite literal terms –a source of knowledge and social criticism. To grasp this point, we need to look again at the puzzle raised above – on what grounds are art, social criticism, ideology, and forms of rationality seen as connected? Why should the latter be able to show up in, and be criticized by, the former?
The philosophical arguments which legitimate seeing these apparently separate conceptual domains as interconnected are complex, and largely stem from a number of features in the critical project more generally. It is far beyond the remit of this chapter to lay out this history in full, but an incomplete narrative can be given.2 For one strand of post-Kantianism, increasing emphasis was given to the determining role of inter-subjective relationships in constituting self-consciousness. Much could be said here about the critical role of Fichte in introducing institutional and inter-subjective content into the transcendental preconditions of experience, but in the context of Adorno’s account of art, it is Hegel that provides the most important explanatory link. For Hegel, the categories of one’s thought were an expression of an underlying, trans-subjective process, which socio-historically determined the limits and nature of what was thinkable. While reason drew its features – and internal contradictions – from this process, it was not identical to it. And hence, this process – together with its contradictions, its problems, and its potentials – could have a determining influence on other areas of human life besides reason and philosophy itself. In other words, the problems which beleaguered reason were not only present in reason itself; they were reflections of features of the deeper process that structured reason itself. And these features of that deeper process could show up in the other areas of human life which drew on and gave expression to this process. Art was a paradigm case of one of these ‘other areas’ of human life; and it was art which was seen as, at varying historical points, mirroring, exceeding, or falling behind reason’s capability to work through the contradictions of the process which underwrote them both.
For Hegel, then, art and reason both feed into and are fed into by a mutually underlying process. As this process – Geist – is a historical, developmental process, the relationship between problems of reason and features of art alters across time. What the artist is capable of doing is firmly constrained by when the artist is working; and the same constraint operating on the artist is at work elsewhere, in determining the possibilities of reason, ethical life, and so on. Hegel’s is a content-centred aesthetics. Geist determines and shows up – to differing levels of explicitness –in the content and form of both art and reason. Accordingly, the various media of Geist (art, religion, and philosophy, for example) share the same content, and at different stages in the development of Geist they are capable of exceeding each other in their realization of that content. For Hegel, the content of art is thus intrinsically linked to and reflective of extra-aesthetic developments, and deficiencies. And so, the idea that art might interact with problems of genuine importance to philosophy and reason makes immediate sense; both art and reason are immersed in and determined by the same process, and so beset by and able to intervene in the same problems contained within that process.
With Hegel’s extension of the critical project, a hermeneutic connection is made between what are, prima facie, entirely distinct domains; artistic form, socio-historical content, and rational problematics. And this opened the possibility to see art as a form of knowledge. So, Hegel provides a simple and neat set of structures which can allow for art and social pathologies to be inter-penetrative. There is a subtending process which underlies them both, and which shows up in and determines them. For Hegel, this subtending process is developing – continually improving humanity’s comprehension of its own freedom, and progressively clarifying and pacifying the relationship between mind and world. And this process is ultimately more developed in reason than art; for Hegel, art in modernity came to forfeit the developmental edge of Geist, and began to lag behind philosophy and religion.3 Geist is a story of – among other things – increasingly adequate and explicit cognitive relationships between subjects and the objective world; accordingly, while art for a time comes to prominence as the most sophisticated statement and resolution of the goals and problems of Geist, it is finally superseded by religion and philosophy, as these goals and problems reach a level of discursive complexity no longer capturable by art, but must be taken up and carried further by reason, which has the conceptual complexity required to carry them further.4
Adorno drew on both Hegel and philosophies preoccupied with the notion of a ‘totality’5 more broadly, and gave them a simple inversion. Suppose art and reason are indeed mutually underpinned by a process, but that – contra Hegel – this process is agonic; it does not develop, but degenerates; it does not progressively disclose the world, but rather progressively occludes it. Adorno replaces the metaphysical construct of Geist with the post-metaphysical idea of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment’,6 a deepening crisis in the instrumentalization of reason, and its exclusion of non-abstract facts and experiences. For Adorno, as for Hegel, reason has developed and intensified this background process more than art. But as Adorno’s background process is one of degeneration, Adorno does not see reason as superseding art; reason has rather passed further along the stages of a harmful pathology. It falls to art to serve as a preserver of what is being lost. Art exhibits, but does not merely submit to, the deficiencies and pathologies by which Adorno understands reason to have been increasingly defeated.
Just as Adorno inverts the process/totality optimism found in the sources on which he draws, so too does he invert the idea that concepts and objects fall into a progressively more adequate relationship. Rather, for Adorno, reason increasingly abstracts away from, and hence fails to capture, the objects with which it deals. This tendency – sometimes referred to by the catch-all term ‘identity thinking’7 – has ostensibly reached such a pitch that all concepts ineluctably falsify their objects. This sorry state of affairs only compounds the crucial and unique role of art, to which falls the only opportunity to express problems in this underlying process/totality without having this expression falsified by the faulty tools of language and concepts. Art for Adorno comes to occupy an entirely central position; art can express entirely without falsification the ostensible problems with the world, and its form of reason. Art is less distorted by the contradictions of the social totality than reason; art lags behind reason and thereby preserves contact with the world in a way which reason increasingly does not.
In sum, for Adorno the relationship between art and reason is as follows. Both art and reason are informed by, and connected to, an underlying collection of processes (namely, the social totality). These processes are pathological – they are pathological in the sense of being mis-calibrated, tending towards the frustration, rather than realization, of human potential. The pathological nature of these processes finds realization in, among others, social pathologies (the generation of a social whole which tends towards the harm and even elimination of its constituitive members), and in epistemic pathologies (the progressive closing off of proper epistemic access to the world). Adorno’s account of the enabling conditions and origin of this pathology are intricate and complex – it ultimately stems and draws its nature from a move towards instrumentalization and abstraction which finds it origins at the very beginning of human culture.8 Reason intensifies and succumbs to this pathology; art, by contrast, does not (fully) succumb, and so can critically reflect and make visible the often concealed faultiness of reason and rationality. It falls to art – like philosophy – to express rather than discursively state the falsity of reason. To state the falsity of reason would be to make use of concepts and conceptual structures – as well as pre-set forms of judgement, inference, and justification – which Adorno claims irrevocably and ineluctably render false all claims and judgements which make use of them. The falsity of reason cannot be stated, then, as such a statement would have to be made via the very concepts and rational processes which have been made pathologically incapable of stating the truth.9 To express the falsity of reason, by contrast, is for a philosophical text or artwork to embody or show the failure of concepts in a way which is not fully capturable in discursive terms. (This curious idea of non-discursive expression is a difficult one to fix; however, we will enter into it in some more detail further below.)
Adorno’s account of the relationship between art and knowledge is superlatively complex, depending on an intricate critical picture of various interlocking structures of various types (social, cognitive, conceptual, somatic) and balancing a number of modes of description which are not obviously compatible (including the genealogical, historical, polemical, and musicological). In this respect, Adorno very likely represents the termination of one current in critical philosophy, expanding out the conditions of the possibility of features of human life to the very limits of cogency, embracing and claiming reciprocal causal interrelation between a dizzying array of phenomena and structures. This is responsible for much of the enjoyment and interest which can be found in reading Adorno, as it throws up no end of interesting technical problems in considering the cogency, or possibility, of its underlying structure. I have, however, explored these technical problems in Adorno’s account in this way elsewhere.10 What I would like to do here instead is to consider what Adorno’s analysis of art is for. Quite beyond technical issues in critical philosophy, we might consider whether Adorno’s account of art is true now; whether it provides a means of comprehending art’s current place in the world and –if not – whether it can be modified to do so.
The primary function of an aesthetic theory – even and especially where it claims aesthetics is intertwined with political and philosophical problems – is to elucidate actual art. Accordingly, we are obliged to examine how things stand with contemporary art, reason, and society. Let us examine whether Adorno’s aesthetic theory remains relevant, and remains capable of finding and elucidating an informative connection between art and reason; and whether the structural preconditions for Adorno’s claims about the criticality of art still obtain.
As Espen Hammer notes in his recent work on Adorno’s modernism, Adorno largely had a blind spot for contemporary developments in the visual arts which had already showed signs of the kind of fragmentation which some would term post-modernism.11 This ‘fragmentation’ consists in the multiplication and untethering of approaches to artistic construction from pre-set or canonical compositional rules. Adorno, unbeknownst to himself, flags up this blind spot in Aesthetic Theory. He writes of Picasso, and his stamping of newspaper fragments into his work:
[Philosophy’s] labour of Sisyphus is that it must reflect the untruth and guilt that it takes on itself, thereby correcting it when possible. It cannot paste its ontic substratum into the text; by speaking of it, philosophy already makes it into what it wants to free itself from. Modern art has registered dissatisfaction with this ever since Picasso disrupted his pictures with scraps of newspaper, an act from which all montage derives. The social element is aesthetically done justice in that it is not imitated, which would effectively make it fit for art, but is, rather, injected into art by an act of sabotage.12
We see here Adorno’s implicit autonomism; the importing of heteronomous material into the artwork can never be imitative, but always abrupt, ‘injected … by an act of sabotage’. Indeed, Adorno takes it that the autonomy of the artwork strictly prohibits that an artwork explicitly imitates the world external to it. In this way Adorno dispatches any attempt to directly work the heteronomous, and criticism of the heteronomous, into the artwork. It is Adorno’s claim that accomplished, successful art is constructed purely along formal lines, a ‘windowless monad’13 which foregoes any simple reflection of the world outside it. Rather, the artwork’s criticality stems from a kind of formal compositional force found in the aesthetic materials themselves, whose demands alone the artist must follow.14
But this is of course beside the point. If art is a movable concept, about which the only thing that is self-evident is that ‘nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore’,15 then we must read its constitution off the face of the artworld as we now find it. And what we find is that the formalistic experimentation which the newspaper was pasted into has waned. For Adorno, the direct pasting of the newspaper was only an opportunity to prove and test the power of the formally closed artwork to radically rework material from the external world, to strip it of its extra-aesthetic meaning and give it a role in the formally closed artwork, where it took on a radically new meaning. However, now we find that this act of ‘pasting’ – of allowing the world outside the artwork to show up directly, unchanged in the artwork – has become utterly central to modern art, and much of modern art cannot be understood without it. We now find that closed, autonomous artworks are no longer possible, and the direct importing of material from the extra-aesthetic world has taken on a new function. These ‘pasted’ or imitated parts of the external world retain their meaning from the extra-aesthetic world, and as a result the artwork is unclosed, does not conceal and complicate its meaning through formal innovation, but rather offers it to us directly.
To wit, artworks are now unclosed; if they were once windowless monads, their hermetic seal has now been punctured. To take two simple examples, we have Mark Wallinger’s Tate entry State Britain 2007, which perfectly replicated Brian Haw’s Parliament Square placards from his protest against the Iraq War; or Ai Weiwei’s S.A.C.R.E.D., consisting of six hyperrealist dioramas narrating the artist’s arrest and imprisonment by the Chinese Government in 2011. Wallinger’s State Britain 2007 directly interpolates, without significant mediation, an act of political protest, and places it on display. In doing so, it bears its socially critical content substantially on its face, without the need for oblique, formal artistic means of producing social criticism. Wallinger and Ai Weiwei’s artworks are irreducibly political, in no way capturable by attending primarily to their formal qualities, and held, at least by some, as artworks of considerable accomplishment. The relationship between the artwork and the world external to it is entirely open; the artwork does not only follow the demands of its own material but reaches quite directly into the world. And the converse is also true; the art appreciator is not rebuffed by the kind of non-representative formal complexity often characteristic of modernism, but explicitly invited in by the artwork’s use of unambiguously meaningful materials. Adorno’s emphasis on the artwork’s hermetically closed autonomy leaves him with no obvious means of responding to these kinds of art. As Hammer puts it,
One final problem with Adorno’s account of material is that it seems to contain few or perhaps no resources for thinking about art that wilfully ignores whatever demands may seem to be arising from the material. Examples of such art might be minimalism in music; video and installation art; land-art … and indeed much of the often dematerialized, site-specific, or non-medium-specific art that rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s … [and] continues to dominate the contemporary art world.16
The question now is, given the expansion of art’s engagement with heteronomous content, what does this mean for art? Now that it is ungoverned by a canon, and under no compulsion to adhere to formally complex conventions of convention, it can directly import critical heteronomous content. An artwork is under no compulsion to re-work or formally manipulate the external world – indeed, it can import parts of the external world directly as ready-mades or through collage, including parts of the external world which have discursive, directly political and socially critical content. This being so, is it in a better situation – with regards to its criticality, its connection to social content, or its quality, all of which were intertwined, for Adorno – or worse? After all, critical theory is selective –it is only ‘authentic art’ for Adorno which has the ability to engage and break the pathologies of reason external to it. Perhaps these kinds of art are no longer available. Perhaps we should not deny that there is art, but should deny there is any art worth having. This latter thought is not foreign to Adorno, whose theory often touches on a possible end of the possibility of autonomous, meaningful art.17 But, again, this is couched in terms of a formalism, and a modernism, which we are now even less obliged to accept as necessary compositional demands than at the time of Adorno’s writing. Let us consider the state of contemporary art a little more, which is now no longer explicable in terms of modernist and formalist theories of composition and reception, and see what might remain of the criticality of the artwork.
We might note at the outset that art, by virtue of the puncturing of its hermetic seal, has in many ways lost its canon. The field of compositional possibilities is entirely open; while previous artworks might serve as reference points or inspirations, they cannot serve as determining demands on the artworks that come after them. With the loss of a canon – of causal, formal consequences of the interrelation between the past and future seen as a continuous history, no matter how imaginary –comes a delocation of aesthetic meaning. Wagner’s use of the unresolved dissonant ‘Tristan Chord’ is, objectively and necessarily, a building on, reference to, and extension of Beethoven’s ‘resolved’ use of these dissonant resources in his Opus 31. These works stand within a continuous narrative; namely one of the ongoing formal expansion and development of compositional resources. By contrast, the reference of post-modern artworks to their forebears is not necessary; it is rather contingently selected by the artist, for contingent reasons which are provided to us in the exhibition catalogue. Here we see the loss of compositional weight of the canon; an artist is now free to interrogate it, and does so without objective compulsion, or indeed any need.18
We can in fact see in art itself, the symptoms of a great stress and strain which this hollowing out of a common system of meanings has created. Much of the consequence of this is the denuded search for common, universal structures of meaning. The plastic arts exhibit this tendency most readily, and perhaps have suffered the loss of a canonical anchoring most keenly. We might consider here the work of Anthony Gormley, which implicitly and relentlessly fastens onto the ineradicable horizon of common meaning which representations of the body will always carry with them. It is a matter of taste as to whether this is humane or manipulative, but the hermeneutic gambit here is clear. As a horizon of common significations of meaning and a compositional past is weakened, a clear response is to scuttle backwards into unassailable complexes of ahistorical meaning. We also find this tendency in land-art (we might consider Andy Goldsworthy’s use of natural materials and forms; Richard Long’s creation of ‘line’ artworks through walking; Robert Smithson’s creation of large-scale earthworks), which likewise seems to present itself as moving towards a putative basic layer of meaning. We find similar universalizing moves, through appeals to ostensibly basic forms of meaning, in other kinds of plastic composition. The work of Anish Kapoor, for example, evinces a kind of sensuous formalism, which yields entirely to what Adorno would have termed the ‘culinary’ appreciation of art (culinary appreciation being an exclusively hedonic and sensuous mode of art appreciation directed towards drawing pleasure from the surface level properties of an artwork).19 More broadly, the marked increase in the use of larger scale in plastic artworks is used as a blunt and immediate means of impressing a meaning and content on its viewer, simply by dint of its physical presence. Whatever the virtues of these works themselves, there is here a visible, and increasingly desperate, trajectory of flight away from a problem; namely, the evacuation of a hospitable, objective, and communal sphere of meaning.
This is by no means the only, or even predominant, response to this problem. The other main response moves in the opposite direction; rather than fleeing the ‘emptied middle’, it seeks to fill it. Here we find the peculiarly modern case of the artist with an expansive, and almost entirely private, personal iconography. Dali represented one of the earliest and most lurid examples of this modern tendency, in which artworks were filled with signifiers only comprehensible in tandem with the artist’s own declaration of their meaning (see Dali’s frequent use of ants, which symbolized decay, due to Dali’s private childhood encounter with decomposing animals being consumed by insects; compare this with Manet’s use of the frog in Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, which derives its meaning from the public slang term for prostitute, ‘grenouille’).
The evacuation of the canon, then, amounts to an evacuation of a common compositional core. It also enervates any kind of compositional necessity, in the context of which an artist’s autonomy, or originality, can be understood. This is a problem for, as well as a feature of, modern art. As Arthur Danto, writing about a different kind of end of art, from a different set of commitments, wrote:
As Marx might say, you can be an abstractionist in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon, a minimal minimalist in the evening. Or you can cut out paper dolls or do what you damned please. The age of pluralism is upon us. It does not matter any longer what you do, which is what pluralism means. When one direction is as good as another direction, there is no concept of direction any longer to apply.20
But what is the significance of this for critical theory? Art, for Adorno, reflected society by virtue of being compelled, via constraints on its compositional processes, in such a way that an oblique imprint of that society was left on it. If art is no longer externally compelled and constrained at all by compositional genres, social and artistic conventions, formal demands, or the canon, it would seem that the artwork begins to bear an arbitrary or frictionless relationship to its external world. And this would entail that socio-critical content could not be communicated to the artwork – or at least, not in the same way as before.
For Adorno, artworks were characteristically puzzle-like in nature.21 The artwork formally manipulated contents which had significance beyond their mere formal properties. When Beethoven introduced a rogue element to his String Quartet in F Major sonata, irreducible to the pre-set demands of the sonata form, this was for Adorno no mere compositional quirk, but rather signified a criticism and revelation of a core feature of society in general, and reason in particular:
In the totality of its form, Beethoven’s music represents the social process. In doing so it shows how each individual moment – in other words, each individual process of production within society – is made comprehensible only in terms of its function within the reproduction of society as a whole […] Beethoven’s music is Hegelian philosophy: but at the same time it is truer than that philosophy. […] Logical identity as immanent to form – as an entity at the same time fabricated and aesthetic – is both constituted and criticized by Beethoven. […] At this point a precise analysis of the D major passage from the slow movement of the great String Quartet in F Major [op. 59,1: third movement, bars 70ff] must be given. […] when the recapitulation fails to appear it is made clear that formal unity is insufficient [.]22
Analyses like these make sense – are possible – if and only if there is a unified continuity between forms of artistic composition (which Adorno believes, lending this common progress within a common problematic the term ‘aesthetic technology’23), and a unified social whole which relates to that unified continuity (which Adorno also notoriously believes to be the case, terming it a ‘social totality’).24 The former condition has been broken off. There is not a centralized body of concerns and practices titled ‘art’ (or even less ambitiously ‘painting’, ‘poetry’, etc) which a social totality can determine and show up in. Rather we have a vast collection of forms of artistic practice at the peripheries, with an emptied hermeneutic middle which could have united them.
The artwork generated meaning, for Adorno, through its autonomy. Indeed, autonomy was for Adorno an absolutely crucial feature of the artwork; by virtue of being autonomous, it acquired a standpoint from which to resist and criticize the encroaching heteronomy of the society external to it. However, aesthetic autonomy is an intrinsically corrosive, relational feature. As Horowitz puts it,
[I]f autonomy in art is the work’s refusal to let anything outside itself determine its form, then the autonomous work is just the appearance of that refusal […] But this of course entails that the work is bound irredeemably to what does not determine it; it is constrained to show what does not constrain it. […] [I]t must must visibly negate something and can only appear as the negation of that thing.25
To be critical, then, the artwork rejects; and the ongoing possibility of this rejection is conditioned by what it rejects. When Wagner introduced dissonance into his compositional scheme, he was not only following on from Beethoven’s continued opening up of compositional resources in his late period, he was also rebuffing and resisting the ‘culinary’ appreciation of Beethoven which increasingly dulled its edge. Dissonance was challenging. But, even in Adorno’s time, social heteronomy was finding ways of instumentalizing heteronomy, and making it marketable, as for example in the popular jazz of his time:
To be sure, dissonances occur in jazz practice, and even techniques of intentional ‘mis-playing’ [Falschspielens] have developed. But an appearance of harmlessness accompanies all these customs; every extravagant sonority must be so produced that the listener can recognize it as a substitute for a ‘normal’ one. While he rejoices in the mistreatment the dissonance gives to the consonance whose place it takes, the virtual consonance simultaneously guarantees that one remains within the circle.26
This trajectory, of the normalization of dissonance, has at our time become more than completed. Popular music bristles with dissonance, to the extent that it is difficult to discern without effort. (One need only consider the use of tritone intervals as a mechanism for generating tension or emotional excitement, found in as diverse musical examples as West Side Story’s ‘Maria’, the theme-tune of The Simpsons, and film scores.) The preservation of art’s autonomy, then, is a process of art emptying itself out, continually shrinking away from the heteronomous world (of commercial art, popular music, etc). And this is of course a finite business, as Adorno perceived.27 The artwork has only so many compositional strategies and resources to throw overboard; it cannot empty itself infinitely, but must sooner or later find itself with nothing further to sacrifice. A deeper way of understanding the narrative above about canonicity, then, is in terms of autonomy. When the world external to artwork has completely absorbed and instrumentalized all of the compositional strategies left to the artwork, how can it preserve its autonomy? What remains?
The answer is: ‘nothing’. The critical autonomy which Adorno privileged has been obviated. Every last gasp of compositional radicality has been re-used and exhausted. Art, through staying true to both its autonomy and its canon, has destroyed both. It has continually shrunk away from heteronomy until its own compositional rules became unsatisfiable. Adorno noted that art threatened to ‘fall silent’ – and if art had continued to insist on its autonomy, this would have come to pass. Instead, autonomy itself, and the conservation of the canon that was sustained by this autonomy, was jettisoned.
The progressive chain of increasingly autonomized artworks has been broken off, and the artwork must now seek its meaning elsewhere. The kinds of hermeneutics of suspicion which Adorno, Benjamin, and Bloch wielded so effectively are now obviated. For art to have common pathologies with society, both art and society must be minimally unified entities which can relate to and determine each other in the appropriate way. But with the uncoupling of meaning from some determinate anchor, it is no longer clear how this would be possible. With this emptied middle, artworks can be constructed in any way whatsoever, draw on any content whatsoever, and relate to society in any way whatsoever.
This is most fatal when we consider the central role, in Adorno’s account and those like his, of art’s expression of a critical stance in relation to social and rational problematics. When there is no centre of gravity in artistic composition – no necessary canon, compositional schema, or limits on what is acceptable as a compositional choice – the artist’s choice cannot be understood as a refusal, criticism, or expression of the limits of pre-set formal units or demands. It was just these pre-set formal units or demands which Adorno identified with pathologies of reason and society, as mirroring the occlusive and dogmatic nature of concepts and social structures;28 and it was in refusing and manipulating these that most often art could be true, by expressing the falsity of these demands, and the social problems they stand for. The conflict between autonomy and the externally imposed is utterly central to the idea of art working through or improving on that self-same conflict in reason (reason’s struggle in reaching its own autonomy and throwing off the constraints of dogmatism and ideology). When art is emptied of its compositional constraint, such a conflict cannot be generated; and expression of the same problems facing reason cannot be achieved, either. There is no longer a set of compulsions which can be rejected, so as to display and achieve autonomy. So not only has art degenerated into fragments, which can no longer maintain the kind of causal contact necessary for Adorno’s account, but art has also lost the formal preconditions needed for the kind of critical expressivity which Adorno and those like him need to find in art. This leaves us with the question of whether critical theory’s old strategy of seeing the artwork as true and critical is now – if it ever was – workable. For the reasons I have recounted above, I do not believe it is.
The question remains of how an artwork might be able to interact with, to critique, ideology, forms of thought, and other social pathologies. In one sense, the answer is apparent – an artwork is now free to be whatever it wants. Adorno once wrote:
Although judgments may occur in it, the work itself does not make judgments … If the discursive element takes primacy, the relation of the artwork to what is external to it becomes all too unmediated and the work accommodates itself even at those points where, as in Brecht, it takes pride in standing in opposition to reality.29
But if the autonomy of art is no longer historically possible, this is no longer binding. An artwork may simply constitute a philosophical or political text or gesture, and be exhibited; it may advance explicit political, philosophical, or social judgements. And indeed, this has happened, as we have discussed above.
We of course find this response dissatisfying, precisely because such an artwork is without significant effect. Precisely by virtue of being exhibited, it appears bloodless and divorced from its stated function of effecting a change in the world surrounding the artwork itself. The contemporary prevalence of the art installation can perhaps be understood as a reaction against this, an attempt to preserve not only the content, but the force of the artistic critique in the external world. As the artwork’s strategies are continually co-opted and vitiated by the world external to it, the temptation to intervene directly in the world and dictate the conditions of its own effect and interpretation are clear. The installation not only represents, but brings about a critique of or visible change in, the world itself; the installation is a palpable intervention, no matter how limited, into the world which surrounds the artwork. As laudable as this attempt is, it is in no small measure undermined by the institutionalization of art (installations are most often installed, after all, in galleries), and above all by the comparative inability of the artwork to intercede in and overpower the society external to it, to counter-act that society’s ability to absorb and re-interpret it.
Despite the evacuation of the hermeneutic centre, the threat to art remains the same as it was for Adorno – it must find a novel means of presenting criticism while evading absorption by that which it criticizes. For Adorno, this criticism was possible through autonomous formal experimentation, taking place against a unified backdrop of an objective canon. Autonomous formal experimentation was, as Adorno himself perceived, a limited and short-term response to the problem. The artwork continually evacuated itself of whatever content society succeeded in absorbing and placing to use; and it has now emptied itself entirely (as Adorno himself anticipated30). It remains now to be seen whether some critical art might be possible which foregoes the now impossible and ineffective closed, formal autonomous approach.
For Adorno the artwork expresses no judgement, but it affords to the art appreciator a formal complex which engages and criticizes the form of judgement. In other words, the artwork is for Adorno judgementally germane. Combined with Adorno’s commitment to autonomy as a precondition for these judgementally germane productions, the thought emerges that for Adorno, ideology is characteristically a form of maladapted judgement; as are, more obviously, the pathologies of reason and society he criticizes. Art’s autonomy is a resistance to a judgementally malformed world; and, hence, creates a properly ordered whole which invites properly ordered judgements. This judgemental propriety of the artwork was predicated on a resistive autonomy which is no longer available. However, Adorno also has a conception of the artwork’s criticality, somewhat more muted, which provides a means of seeing the critical function of the artwork in a quite different light. This is his notion of non-representational expression more generally.
Expression, for Adorno, is a means by which the artwork can grasp and display the nature of the society external to it. Crucially, however, this expression is non-representational. Adorno most often understood this expression as the expression of normative complaints, or somatic suffering.
[E]xpression is scarcely to be conceived except as the expression of suffering – joy has proven inimical to expression, perhaps because it has yet to exist, and bliss would be beyond expression – expression is the element immanent to art through which, as one of its constituents, art defends itself against the immanence that it develops by its law of form […] Art is expressive when what is objective, subjectively mediated, speaks, whether this be sadness, energy, or longing. Expression is the suffering countenance of artworks.31
In these respects, the expressivity of the artwork was critical by virtue of that which it was expressing. Namely, given states of suffering which – or so Adorno believed – contained an intrinsic normative demand which was effective without the need for any further normative justification.32 Here, then, the subject of expression was capable of having critical power in relation to forms of judgement. As somatic states of suffering have – so Adorno claims – intrinsic normative weight, their expression amounts to an irresistible rebuff to any judgement that the world – and the form of reason which underwrites the world – is adequately realized and free from pathology. Suffering informs us that how things are, should not be so; and thereby has an ineliminable critical power in relation to structures of judgement.
Quite apart from Adorno’s dubious claims about the intrinsic normative power of states of suffering – and the artwork’s ability to express them – Adorno is here operating with a needlessly denuded conception of expressivity. Expression need not only be a literal expression of some given pathic state; we can also conceive of expression as giving oblique expression to experiential states, as expressing alternative relations in which phenomena might stand.33 What might find expression is some experiential ordering, some structured presentation of objects of experience which find themselves ordered and arranged in a means which breaks with our conventional means of grasping and using them.
For Adorno, ideologies, or indeed rational and social pathologies, were most often understood as kinds of occlusion, or covering.34 And, indeed, it was the job of art, like philosophy, to bring about a revealing of that which was concealed; an ‘identification of the non-identical’.35 While this uncovering could only be accomplished by a highly complex set of paratactical critiques (in the case of philosophy), or formalist experimentation (in the case of art), it is nonetheless the case that we find here a vertical model of critique. We have the criticized form of reason, which culpably abstracts away from the lower-level and more genuine state of affairs of the world. Here, it is the job of the artwork to forcibly acquaint the former with the latter; to drag abstract concepts back down to the terrain of the real, where they will founder on those ‘non-identical’ features which they rose above, and are incapable of accommodating. This ‘vertical’ model, then, is characteristically about interceding in judgements, and attempting to repair the explanatory connection between forms of judgement and the objects they have lost contact with. The expression of suffering was one means of forcibly dragging abstraction down to the level of the particulars which it – in Adorno’s view –was causing harm to.
By means of exploiting Adorno’s notion of expression, however, we could instead make use of a horizontal model. On a horizontal model, we do not seek to judgementally connect concepts with some exterior set of excluded facts about the world – in other words, we do not seek to bring concepts into contact with ‘non-identical’ states of affairs which those concepts had culpably failed to capture. Instead, we confine ourselves to the realm of semblance and appearances themselves, and give expression to alternative ways in which those appearances could be organized and ordered. But what do we mean by this? As a first pass, we can say simply that we mean that the artworks can recast the relational properties which obtain experientially between phenomena. They can invert or modify relations of prominence, of compossibility, of entailment, and of significance. They can force the insignificant to appear entirely significant, to break relations of entailment between phenomena which appeared to us necessary, and set up relations of entailment where in our present social reality none exist. This makes palpable to the art appreciator the existence of other alternatives. Art demonstrates that our intuitively experienced world, with its relationships of apparent necessity, compossibility, and entailment, is in fact genuinely and constantly revisable.
This amounts to a criticality of the artwork only where we reveal possibilities where none were meant to exist. In other words, when the officially necessary is shown to be, in fact, contingent. The creation of the false appearance of necessity is entirely key to Adorno’s understanding of the operation of both ideology and identity thinking. In either case, we are misled into seeing the field of possibilities as standing in a single way, and as standing in this way necessarily. If an artwork can demonstrate alternative possibilities of ordering, this in itself would serve as a rebuff to these kinds of implicit ideologies to which we are subject.
The important question now is: how would this be socially critical? It is obviously true that artworks can place phenomena in different relational positions, and present alternative norms, patternings, and orderings in relation to those artistic phenomena. But how is this intended to intercede in ideologies, social pathologies, or pathologies of reason? To make sense of this, we will need to recast ideology, and pathologies of reason also, as no longer (merely) consisting in a vertical relationship which requires judgemental adjustment, but as also having a horizontal complement which art could expressively intervene in and demonstrate as contingent. In other words, we need to see ideologies and failures of reason as judgemental errors which are not exclusively combatable through vertical critique, which seeks to forcibly bring together the abstract form of judgement, and the real facts it has culpably excluded.
To make sense of this, we need only claim that cognitive practices and misdevelopments, as well as manifesting judgemental failures, also make claims derivative on those judgemental errors, which amount to a claim of complete accuracy, or necessity, about the relational layout of the experiencable world. In other words, structures of judgement also entail structures of appearance and semblance. Ideologies and epistemic pathologies operate with an implicit assurance of the complete adequacy between concepts and the world. Just this, of course, is what Adorno liked to call ‘identity thinking’ – the belief in a rigid and irrevocable match-up between conceptual structures and the world itself. But identity thinking – committed to the existence of a perfect fit between concept and object –entails that the relational properties which obtain between those concepts should likewise show up in relations of semblance between those objects subject to those concepts. And by adverting to and manipulating those relations of semblance – in showing them to be non-necessary and open to change – we can therefore show that the concepts which back them are likewise contingent, and fail to perfectly fit the world they are applied to.
We can express – give non-judgemental semblance to – a variety of pictures of the world, of its relational layout, which appear cogent and workable. And this serves not as proof that there is some non-identical ‘beyond’ or ‘concealed’ by concepts, but rather only that the world as we implicitly experience it, and conform to it, is revisable. Hence, ideology (understood as a misleading picture of necessary conditions) and malformed systems of thought remain vulnerable to criticism through the artwork, by virtue of their derivative semblances being able to be disconfirmed through the artwork’s ability to tease out and express alternative relational layouts of appearance.
Examples of this kind of horizontal criticism can be found most easily in literature, where we are confronted with people behaving in ways we take to be puzzling; where relationships of apparently necessary entailment between action and response are broken, or distorted into causal lines we find unexpected and difficult to comprehend. We might consider here Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which the main character reliably and continually fails to exhibit the responses that seem demanded from the actions of others; the work of Beckett and Kafka (valued by Adorno, of course, for different reasons), in which inter-personal relationships lose their natural flow and become the continual imposition of interpretive puzzles (Kafka’s The Castle is an especially clear example of this). We might consider similar examples, where human figures are shown in apparently absurd or non-naturalistic patterns of action, response, and significance in other media (in film, for example, we could consider Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Andrei Rublev; Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God). Here we find quite easily traceable pictures of alternative forms of human relationship, reaction, and structure. But the same is also true in media which take up no explicit attempt to depict human figures or themes. In Kandinsky’s intentional distortion of our reception of perspective in Bustling Aquarelle, or Schoenberg’s relentless engagement and frustration of our melodic and rhythmic expectations in his Five Piano Pieces (Op. 23), we find the ordering of our experience and sensory modalities intentionally disarmed and confronted with alternative lines of explanation, causation, and combination. We find here a display of possibility; and, as has been said, the display of possibility suffices as critique when one’s opponent (ideology; instrumental rationality) arrogates complete necessity to itself.
In closing, it should be admitted that this is a comparatively more meagre power we allot to the artwork than that which Adorno sought to give to it. We now find that artworks amount to expressive thumbnails of some possible relational contours, which serve only to loosen the apparently necessary relations of significance, entailment, and prominence, which are found in our everyday lives. This criticism essentially amounts to a kind of affordance of alternative viewpoints; a way of acquainting us with radically distinct means of ordering the experienced world. This presentation of relational possibility – the possibility of seeing things as structured differently – cannot hope to undo judgmental maladaptations, nor ‘identify the non-identical’. What remains is an ability to counter poorly calibrated forms of judgement at a lower level, the level of derivative semblance, where alternative outcomes and structurings can be gestured towards and played out.
For us, then, the artwork’s criticality is an altogether attenuated thing, compared with that which Adorno hoped to attach to it. We find ourselves forced to give it a denuded and weakened function, capable at best of gesturing towards – but never defeating – false ideologies and forms of judgement. This more denuded function is, however –to repeat myself once more – historically produced, generated by the completion of a process of autonomization which Adorno himself, in pointing it out, realized was already hurtling towards its end point.
1. See Clarke and Hulatt, ‘Critical Theory as a Legacy of Post-Kantianism’.
2. For an enlightening history of this narrative of development, see Maharaj, The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency.
3. ‘[I]t is certainly the case that art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it […] the conditions of our present time are not favourable to art […] art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past’ (Hegel, Aesthetics: 11–12).
4. Hegel, Aesthetics: 11–12.
5. For a conspectus of these, see Jay, 1992.
6. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
7. Adorno, Negative Dialectics: 149.
8. This is given direct, if at times vague, treatment in Adorno and Horkheimer’s jointly authored Dialectic of Enlightenment.
9. Adorno, Negative Dialectics: 8–9.
10. See my Adorno’s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth.
11. Hammer, Adorno’s Modernism: 2.
12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 334–5.
13. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 6.
14. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 72.
15. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 1.
16. Hammer, Adorno’s Modernism: 191.
17. See my ‘Hegel, Danto, Adorno, and the End and After of Art’.
18. We might ask here what is responsible for this dis-integration of the canon, the loss of formal compositional restraint, and the concomitant breakdown of the modernist form, or at least the breakdown of the connection between modernism and the canon that preceded it. This development has been produced by the reciprocal conflict and struggle between artistic autonomy and the heteronomizing processes of the society external to it. This will be covered below, in the section ‘The Emptied Middle’.
19. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 121.
20. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art: 114–15.
21. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 160.
22. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music: 13–14.
23. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 76–7.
24. Adorno, Negative Dialectics: 47.
25. Horowitz, ‘Art History and Autonomy’: 274.
26. Adorno, Essays on Music: 306.
27. ‘What can only appear negatively mocks a resolution that it recognizes as false and which therefore debases the idea of the beautiful. Beauty’s aversion to the overly smooth, the pat mathematical solution, which has compromised art with the lie throughout its history, becomes an aversion to any resultant, without which art can be conceived no more than it can be without the tensions out of which it emerges. The prospect of the rejection of art for the sake of art is foreseeable. It is intimated by those artworks that fall silent or disappear’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 69).
28. As Max Paddison puts it, ‘At the level of the aesthetic, sublimated/repressed social antagonisms and internalized socio-cultural norms (including the process of rationalization itself) are displaced into the arena of the artistic material. The stage on which the conflict now plays itself out is the structure of the work of art, in the tension between mimesis and rationality, expression and construction, as the immanent dialectic of the material’ (Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music: 147, emphasis mine).
29. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 129.
30. ‘When according to history’s verdict the unity of process and result no longer succeeds; when, above all, the individual elements refuse to mold themselves to the ever latently preconceived totality, the gaping divergence tears meaning apart […] If artworks are alive in history by virtue of their own processual character, they are also able to perish in it […] Ultimately their development is the same as their process of collapse’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 235).
31. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 145–6.
32. ‘All pain and negativity, the moving forces of dialectical thinking, assume the variously conveyed, sometimes unrecognizable form of physical things … The physical moment tells our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. “Woe speaks: ‘Go’”’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics: 202–3).
33. We can see an analogy here with Clewis’ account of the non-representational expression of the Kantian sublime, ‘A Case for Kantian Artistic Sublimity’: 169–70.
34. ‘[Ideology is] the surreptitious acquisition by indirect things of a directness vested with the authority of absolute, unimpeachable, subjectively evident being-in-itself’ (Negative Dialectics: 82). ‘The unity of that which general concepts cover differs fundamentally from the conceptually defined particular. The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named […] the particular [is indissoluable] in the cover concept’ (Negative Dialectics: 173).
35. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 29.
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