Ross Wilson
That part of Adorno's work which we might wish to label his "aesthetics" is not hard to identify. At the time of his death, Adorno was close to completing his Aesthetic Theory, which represents the culmination of his lifelong engagement with the various arts — especially music and literature — and their philosophy. The development of Adorno’s aesthetics can easily be traced from his early account in Philosophy of New Music of the rival tendencies in twentieth-century music represented by the composers Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinsky, through his engagement with a wide variety of literary texts in Notes to Literature, to the posthumously edited and published Aesthetic Theory itself.
However, closer inspection of these works — and perhaps of Aesthetic Theory in particular — quickly complicates such a neat survey of what might be called Adorno’s aesthetics. There are a number of significant reasons for this complication. First, the category of aesthetics is itself at issue in Adorno's thought. In his important commentary, Lambert Zuidervaart has described Aesthetic Theory as a "meta-aesthetics", which is to say that Adorno is concerned, among other things, to question the very possibility of philosophical aesthetics.1 Adorno's considerations of the meaning of aesthetics do not simply aim at a clearer, sharper definition of this term. Instead, one of the main appeals of Aesthetic Theory is that it seeks to question whether aesthetics can — or ought to — stand alone as a subdiscipline of philosophy. Philosophical reflection on the nature and status of art, for Adorno, is metaphysical, logical and moral, as well as "aesthetic" in the usual sense of that term.
Secondly, Adorno claims that aesthetics cannot stand apart from consideration of both the social and historical situation and the development of art, usually viewed as the preserve of art history. This claim that aesthetics should be attentive to historical and social considerations in its discussion of art is not just the demand that aesthetics back up its general theses with particular examples. Rather, artworks in their historical and social specificity already demand philosophical reflection. Aesthetics must be concerned, not so much with articulating general principles and definitions which are then to be applied from above, as it were, to any given artwork, but much more with the philosophical significance already implicit in actual, particular artworks.
Thirdly, Adorno claims that the subject matter of aesthetics is no longer obvious. This difficulty is not cleared up with the commonsensical reminder — as if philosophers interested in aesthetics were simply forgetful — that aesthetics should be concerned with art: the concept of art itself has become unstable. The music of Arnold Schönberg, the stories of Franz Kafka, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, the paintings of Pablo Picasso — to cite only the most prominent examples — have disturbed established conventions of composition, form, decorum and meaning to such an extent that it is no longer possible to settle decisively on the defining features of art as such. The crisis in the concept of art, wrought by developments in artistic practice, is strikingly expressed in the first line of Aesthetic Theory: "It is selfevident that nothing concerning art is self-evident any more."2
These fairly brisk opening considerations already suggest that Adorno’s work is as much concerned with questioning the status of the discipline of aesthetics as with simply contributing to it. Adorno wants radically to work through — not simply to abandon or destroy — the fundamental questions of the philosophical interpretation of art: what is aesthetics? And, what is art? In mapping his ways of formulating these questions and, indeed, of beginning to answer them, this chapter falls into three sections. The first gives a brief account of Adorno's relation to the two most influential figures in modern European aesthetics before him: Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel. The second shows how Adorno's distinctive negotiation of the opposition between Kant's subjective and Hegel's objective aesthetics shapes his account of aesthetic response; it then considers Adorno's insistence on the need for art to be interpreted philosophically. The third section deals with Adorno's criticism of flawed types of philosophical interpretation of art and his criticism of politically committed art, before setting out his view of the relation between art and society.
Adorno's work draws on a very broad range of writing in philosophical aesthetics, art history, and cultural and literary criticism. His aesthetics is especially concerned with a number of significant questions inherited from Kant's aesthetics and from Hegel's response to Kant. Central to any discussion of Adorno's aesthetics, therefore, is some account of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), and of Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts, first delivered in 1823, and published posthumously in 1835.
The central focus of Kant's aesthetics is aesthetic judgement, or, more particularly, the judgement of taste. According to Kant, aesthetic judgement is autonomous. This means that aesthetic judgement is distinct from other types of judgement such as cognitive judgement, which aims at knowledge, or moral judgement, which aims to tell us what we ought (and ought not) to do. The autonomy of aesthetic judgement has the consequence that I cannot decide upon criteria for whether I will find, say, a poem pleasing before I actually read it.
Imagine that I have been taught that a poem must tick certain boxes in order to be a good poem, that, for instance, it must use particular kinds of words and not others, that it must have rhythmically regular lines, and that it must have some sort of rhymescheme. Kant insists that if I approve of a poem that does not conform to these principles, then the pre-established principles that I have been taught — and not my judgement — are to be sacrificed. Likewise, if I dislike a play but am informed that, in fact, it conforms perfectly with rules for what and how a play ought to be, I should, Kant claims, be unmoved.3 My taste is the only court of appeal for whether I approve of an object aesthetically. This is what Kant means by the autonomy of aesthetic judgement; it is neither possible to establish the features of an aesthetically pleasing object prior to submitting it to judgement nor, concomitantly, is it possible to make aesthetic judgements conform to predetermined standards.
Kant's insistence on the autonomy of aesthetic judgement means that aesthetic judgement must not be confused with cognitive or moral judgements. On the contrary, it must be radically distinguished from them. To return to my example, were I to reply to a question about whether I have found a poem beautiful by saying that I deplored it because of what I took to be its immoral message, I would have allowed a moral judgement to infringe on the autonomy of purely aesthetic judgement. When I am asked to judge the poem aesthetically, I have misunderstood the question if I respond that I dislike it because I take it to be wicked or, indeed, uninformative.
Such an account might seem to reduce aesthetic judgement to mere opinion: I know what I like, and you know what you like, and that’s that. However, much of the first part of the Critique of the Power of Judgment is dedicated to the attempt to show that, although aesthetic judgements must in a certain sense be subjective, they can nevertheless legitimately claim the assent of everyone. This is what Kant means when he describes aesthetic judgement as making a claim to subjective universality.4 While the word "beautiful" does not refer to a definable property of the poem, the judgement "this poem is beautiful" is meant to be accepted by all subjects. Thus I know what I like — and I demand that you agree with me.
Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is a densely argued book to which this kind of summary can only begin to do justice. For our purposes, it is chiefly necessary to bear in mind Kant's insistence on the autonomy of aesthetic judgement and on the separation of aesthetic judgement from cognitive and moral judgements. In his important thesis on "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism", Adorno's friend Walter Benjamin argued that the generation of German thinkers after Kant, and especially the philosopher and critic Friedrich Schlegel, "secured, from the side of the object or structure, that very autonomy in the domain of art that Kant, in the third Critique [Critique of the Power of Judgment] had lent to the power of judgment".5 In other words, Schlegel extended Kant's insistence on aesthetic autonomy from aesthetic judgement to art itself. Indeed, central to Adorno’s own aesthetics is the autonomy of art — and not just of judgement.
We might be able to grasp how judgement is to be autonomous —it refuses to be dictated by predefined rules — but how is an artwork autonomous? On the wall of my living room, I have a print of Cimabue's Maestà, the original of which is kept in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence. While Cimabue might now be considered an "artist" and his altarpieces "art", this was not always the case. Or, at the very least, "art" sometimes served purposes such as, in this instance, religious devotion. As an altarpiece ceases to perform this function, or ceases to be valued primarily for its facilitation of worship, it becomes "art" in the sense that we might now understand it. Thus, what we might now identify as an artwork may not always have been such. An artwork is autonomous when it obeys no criteria other than artistic ones; that is, when it serves no function other than to be art.
Benjamin claims that the German Romantics inaugurated a turn from Kant’s focus on subjective aesthetic judgement to art objects. This refocusing is also central to Hegel's criticism of Kant's aesthetics. Although Kant argues that the subjectivity of aesthetic judgement does not mean that it relinquishes its claim to be binding, Hegel still sees Kant’s aesthetics as culpably subjective. Kant's quite explicit admission that aesthetic judgement cannot offer knowledge of the objects that it judges is a major flaw, according to Hegel. Hegel argues that "the depths of the thing [the artwork] remained a sealed book to taste, since these depths require not only sensing and abstract reflections, but the entirety of reason and the solidity of spirit, while taste was directed only to the external surface".6
Although Hegel certainly does not wish to revert to a position back behind Kant — that is, to the reimposition of fixed rules for the creation and judgement of artworks — he does think that Kant pays too high a price for his insistence on the autonomy of art. Kant thinks that aesthetic judgements can legitimately claim to be binding on other human subjects, but not because these judgements pertain to the truth or untruth about objects. By contrast, aesthetics for Hegel must be precisely concerned "to determine what the beautiful is as such".7
Whereas Kant’s aesthetics is subjective in the sense that it focuses on aesthetic judgement, and Hegel’s aesthetics is objective in the sense that it wishes to explore the truth of the aesthetic object, Adorno wishes to move beyond this stark opposition. It is important here briefly to recall Adorno's broader philosophical project. In Negative Dialectics, he seeks to remedy the consequences of Kant's focus on the subject by a renewed turn to the object. However, he does not simply respond to Kant's elevation of the subject with his own counter-elevation of the object. Rather, what is required is a reconfiguration of the relationship between subject and object in which it is precisely by way of the subject that the merely subjective is broken through and the object is reached (ND: xix–xxi).8 This reconfiguration is all the more necessary in aesthetics, Adorno claims. It is central to his understanding of "dialectical aesthetics":
As contrary poles, subjective and objective aesthetics are equally exposed to the critique of a dialectical aesthetics: the former because it is either abstractly transcendental or arbitrary in its dependence on individual taste; the latter because it overlooks the objective mediatedness of art by the subject.
(AT: 166)
The kind of aesthetics conceived by Adorno seeks to avoid simply adopting the positions offered by either Kant or Hegel. Instead, Adorno's aesthetics rests on an account of the mutual implication of subject and object. This is the case even where he scorns the type of subjective relation to art that would log aesthetic experience in an account book with everything else:
For him who has a genuine relation to art, in which he himself vanishes, art is not an object; deprivation of art would be unbearable for him, yet he does not consider individual works sources of pleasure. Incontestably, no one would devote himself to art without — as the bourgeois put it — getting something out of it; yet this is not true in the sense that a balance sheet could be drawn up: "heard the Ninth symphony tonight, enjoyed myself so and so much" even though such feeble-mindedness has by now established itself as common sense.
(AT: 13)
It is perhaps hard to keep track of exactly what is being said here because the categories of both subject and object are mutually qualified to such a profound degree. The attitude to works of art — such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony — that Adorno attacks is one that he associates elsewhere in his authorship with the consumer's response to the products of the "culture industry". Products churned out on a large scale and distributed by industrialized methods are merely consumed by a mass audience, rather than adequately engaged with even when they in fact merit such engagement (DE, C: xvi; J: xviii–xix). The imaginary balance sheet that Adorno mocks in the above passage is drawn up by the mere consumer of an inert object.
Adorno contends that an adequate response to artworks involves a much more intricate involvement of subject and object. It is true that such a response relies on the devotion of the subject to works of art in the hope that something will be derived from them. But this kind of intense subjective devotion — the pathos of which contrasts sharply with the bathos of the bourgeois experience of Beethoven in the above description — leads, not to the aggrandizement of the subject over art, but rather to his or her disappearance in it. It might reasonably be thought that this disappearance of the subject means that the dominant aesthetic category has now become the object. But "art is not an object". It is important to emphasize that for Adorno the pair subject—object is operative only as a pair. If the subject is radically altered, so too is the object.
Adorno's aesthetics, then, inherits and attempts to overcome the opposition of Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics. For Adorno as for Hegel, Kant unduly restricts aesthetics to the investigation of subjective response. However, Adorno still insists that aesthetic response is fundamental to consideration of aesthetic objectivity. This must be a certain kind of response, involving more than mere pleasure.
Indeed, in terms explicitly derived from Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno denounces the separation of feeling from thinking:
feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment.
(AT: 331)
Feeling separated from thought is whimsical; thought separated from feeling turns in on itself and refuses to be stirred by what is external to it. Crucially, understanding artworks is an essential part of any response to them: "Critique is not externally added into aesthetic experience but, rather, is immanent to it" (ibid.: 347). For Adorno, this means both that understanding is not a higher, later stage of reaction and, significantly, that the initial, immediate response to artworks is already important for serious contemplation of them.
This insistence on the centrality of critique to aesthetic response is mirrored by Adorno's emphasis on the necessity of philosophical interpretation to artworks themselves. Just as critique is not additional to response, so interpretation is not exactly added to artworks that are otherwise indifferent to it. As Adorno puts it, "Art awaits its own explanation" (AT: 353). Adorno is again indebted to Benjamin's work on the concept of criticism in German Romantic philosophy. Benjamin had shown that, for writers such as Novalis and Schlegel, criticism was the consummation — that is, the completion — of the work of art. This is not so much to say that art is missing something that criticism adds, but rather that criticism brings out the philosophical significance that is already latent — and mute — in art. Benjamin attempts to bring out the specific character of the knowledge of artworks that transpires in criticism by describing it as a kind of self-knowledge of the artwork.9
It is becoming clear that Adorno's idea of the philosophical interpretation of artworks does not simply imply that art should be knocked into philosophical shape. The philosophical interpretation of art is the complement to a requirement already evident in artworks themselves. Moreover, Adorno goes so far as to say that "Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks" (AT: 121). Without relaxing his emphasis on the need for the closest scrutiny of the philosophical significance of art, Adorno wants to guard against the kind of criticism that would simply read philosophical or, as we shall see, political propositions and theses out of works of art. Connected to this is Adorno's refusal to see what he calls a work's ""truth-conten"" merely in the stated ideas and theses it contains, or in the position that it might be thought to advance. For example, the interest of a work such as John Milto'’s Paradise Lost is not exhausted once it has been decided whether it advances a clearly republican position or whether it successfully manages to articulate a coherent theodicy.
None of this, however, is to relinquish the claim of poetry, for instance, to philosophical significance. Rather, it is to say that the philosophical significance of poetry lies as much in its diction, syntax and versification as in the statements that can be extracted from it, or the positions with which it can be identified. Adorno is suspicious of the kind of philosophical interpretation that finds in artworks only whatever it has already put into them:
today philosophical interpretations of literary works . .. fail to penetrate the construction of the works to be interpreted and instead prefer to work them up as the arena for philosophical theses: Applied philosophy, a priori fatal, reads out of works that it has invested with an air of concretion nothing but its own theses.
(AT: 352)
In contrast, Adorno denies the choice between a brand of mere aesthetic consumption and vague, tendentious philosophizing.
While acknowledging that art can never simply be converted into philosophy without loss, Adorno argues that the refusal to relinquish philosophical interpretation is especially necessary when confronted with some of the radical developments in the arts during the twentieth century. Anyone who has been frustrated in their initial attempts to read James Joyce's Finnegan’s Wake, for instance, or to listen attentively to Schönberg's Pierrot Lunaire will probably admit that modernist works more frequently seem to rebuff interpretation than to encourage it. Adorno states that "in the contemporary situation, it is [artworks'] incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended" (AT: 118).
Perhaps Adorno's most explicit statements on the way that modernist works disturb the assumption that art is straightforwardly interpretable are to be found in "Presuppositions" in which he reflects on a reading — if "reading" is really the right word — of FA: M’AHNIESGWOW by the experimental poet Hans G. Helms.10 In his discussion of the ways in which interpretive understanding (Verstehen) is problematized in encounters with this kind of work, Adorno returns to some of the questions regarding the relation of subject to object in aesthetics that I discussed above. First of all, he questions whether interpretive understanding should begin with a consideration of the effect on the subject of a work such as FA: M’AHNIESGWOW. It is far from clear that the subject is able straightforwardly and accurately to grasp "the interior of the work" (NLII: 96). The model of a stable subject faced by an inert object is inadequate.
Criticism of this kind of model extends, not just to the view that artworks should simply be enjoyed, but also to the idea that they should be rationally unpacked by understanding. Philosophical interpretation, especially in this case, cannot mean the "rational grasping of something in some sense intended".
If [interpretive understanding] is meant to indicate something adequate, something appropriate for the matter at hand, then today it needs to be imagined more as a kind of following along afterward [Nachfahren]; as the co-execution [Mitvollzug] of the tensions sedimented in the work of art, the processes that have congealed and become objectified in it. One does not understand a work of art when one translates it into concepts — if one simply does that, one misunderstands the work from the outset — but rather when one is immersed in its immanent movement; I should almost say, when it is recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it.
(NLII: 96–7)
To return to an earlier point, Adorno's attempt to overcome the solidified opposition between subject and object does not mean that the subject must simply be sacrificed on the altar of the work. Rather, rational understanding conducted by, and on the terms of, the subject should give way to its performance along with and according to the innermost characteristics of the artwork. Moreover, the requirement for this distinctive philosophical response is not extraneous to the immediate sensible intuition of works of art, but part of it (ibid.: 97).
We have seen so far that Adorno is wary of directly reading theses out of artworks or identifying them with certain positions. Specifically, he is suspicious of attempts to ally artworks with particular political stances. It might be said, therefore, that his concern with art is aesthetic, rather than directly political. (It is worth noting again that Adorno's questioning of aesthetics does not entail that aesthetics should be abolished and replaced by something else; that is, the questioning of aesthetics may equally involve a certain ambivalent defence of it.) Adorno's refusal to apply philosophy directly to artworks and his advocacy of radical modernist art need to be considered in connection with his criticism of the kind of art that explicitly espouses particular political commitments. Although Adorno is interested in the relation of art to society, that relation does not inhere, for him, in the explicit political commitments or social criticism that artworks might be taken to advance.
Adorno was wary of the artistic and theoretical attempts by JeanPaul Sartre and, on a much higher level, by Bertolt Brecht to turn art towards explicitly political ends. For Brecht, "[t]he aesthetic point of view is ill-suited to the plays being written at present" because he thinks that the purpose of contemporary theatre is to stage instances of social conflict and provide political instruction.11 However, Adorno objects that such a view insufficiently recognizes the disruption to traditional aesthetic categories by the catastrophic events of modern history; it also fails to see the socially critical tendency already implicit in artworks. The rational, humanistic assumptions behind aesthetic meaning have been damaged to such an extent that it is no longer possible for artworks successfully to communicate meaning directly.
Furthermore, Adorno sees art's socially critical potential — that is, its opposition to the prevailing way of the world — as located, not in its message, but in the very fact of its being art. The response to a world in which freedom is in retreat is not to impose political purposes — however laudable they may be — on art: "No artist is able on his own to transcend the contradiction between unchained art and enchained society: All that he is able to do, and perhaps on the verge of despair, is contradict the enchained society through unchained art."12
Just as the artist's refusal to submit to pressures on the unhindered exercise of artistic freedom is potentially more politically powerful than the direct expression of social criticism or political propaganda in art, so the artwork's standing apart from the run of mere things suggests that a differently configured world might be possible. "Art is the social antithesis of society", Adorno comments near the beginning of Aesthetic Theory; it is "not immediately deducible from it" (AT: 8, tr. mod.). However, care should be taken with this statement. On the one hand, Adorno is clearly expressing the view that art as such is antithetical to society as it is currently constituted. On the other hand, art is "the social antithesis of society": art is opposed to what it is, at least to some extent. The paradox that art faces is twofold: first, it can arise only from and in the world as it currently is and, secondly, it must be real and exist along with everything else in society if it is to suggest that an alternative is really possible. "Indeed, artworks are only able to become other than thing by becoming a thing" (ibid.: 86).
The paradoxical nature of autonomous art in contemporary society — that is, of art that obeys no law other than its own — goes still further. Zuidervaart has insightfully commented that while autonomous art may suggest opposition to an unfree society, it may also falsely suggest that some consummate freedom from society is in fact possible.13 It is for this reason — that in some respects art wants to keep society at arm's length and thus deny its implication in it — that "Brecht distrusts aesthetic individuation as an ideology" (NLII: 82). In fact, this is central to Adorno's difference from Brecht. For Adorno, Brecht's dismissal of aesthetics throws the autonomous baby out with the ideological bathwater. Art is both ideological and emancipatory.
In order fully to understand Adorno's argument here it is necessary to get some sense of what is meant by ideology. Ideology might be generally defined as false consciousness; it deceitfully portrays as universal law whatever serves the particular interests of a particular section of society. Beginning from this definition of ideology, Adorno also qualifies it in a number of extremely significant ways, not all of which can be explored here.14 While ideology is certainly untrue for Adorno, it is so in a particular way: "it is not ideology in itself which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality" (P: 32). Adorno is arguing that, while it is untrue to say that this really existing society is free, harmonious and just, the wish implicit in these statements that society be such is true. He remarks in Negative Dialectics that "the truth moment of ideology" is "the pledge that there should be no contradiction, no antagonism". That is, in declaring that there is no antagonism in society, ideology is false; but such declarations also harbour the wish that society indeed be free from antagonism. It is in this way that "the pragmatist, nature-controlling element [in ideology] already joins with a utopian element" (ND: 149–50).
Ideology is, therefore, not simply untrue. By making this point, Adorno wants to sharpen the otherwise very blunt instrument of the concept of ideology. He is also critical of accounts of ideology that, from the definition of ideology as false consciousness, conclude that all consciousness is false. For Adorno, this conclusion does not follow (AT: 252). He articulates a clear and extremely significant rebuttal of this kind of view in "On Lyric Poetry and Society" (originally broadcast as a talk on German radio):
Special vigilance is required when it comes to the concept of ideology, which these days is belabored to the point of intolerability. For ideology is untruth, false consciousness, deceit. It manifests itself in the failure of works of art, in their inherent falseness, and it is countered by criticism. To repeat mechanically, however, that great works of art, whose essence consists in giving form to the crucial contradictions in real existence, and only in that sense in a tendency to reconcile them, are ideology, not only does an injustice to their truth content but also misrepresents the concept of ideology. That concept does not maintain that all spirit serves only for some human beings to falsely present some particular values as general ones; rather, it is intended to unmask spirit that is specifically false and at the same time to grasp it in its necessity. The greatness of works of art, however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success moves beyond false consciousness, whether intentionally or not.15
(NLI: 39)
Two points in particular need to be drawn from this important passage. Adorno insists that the concept of ideology is not meant to be a general category applied blindly, in this instance, to art. Rather, what is required is specific attention to actual artistic phenomena. We should note that this makes Adorno a rather odd kind of literary or aesthetic theorist in that, even when he invokes an apparently theoretical category such as ideology, he insists on close scrutiny of actual artworks, not the application of pre-established categories to them.16
Adorno's refusal to accept a monolithic view of art as ideological is connected to his refusal to accept a monolithic view of ideology. We have seen that Adorno does not view ideology as simply untrue. Likewise, he states here that spirit — including art and the aesthetic in particular — is not to be dismissed wholesale as ideological from a position outside or before any consideration of a particular artwork. Indeed, if ideology and truth cannot decisively be disentangled, this seems particularly to be the case in art (AT: 234). The ideological supposition that culture is separate from the brutal enthronement of mere means as ends in contemporary society is also true in so far as it "implies, at least as an unconscious element, the promise of a condition in which freedom were realized" (P: 23). Artworks may inherently fail — note that Adorno does not refer to the failure of bad works of art in the passage from "On Lyric Poetry and Society" — in so far as they are ideological, but their very claim to freedom is also part of their wish for freedom, that is, part of their truth.
This investigation of the ways in which art's ideology points to both its truth and untruth clearly shows that Adorno's aesthetic theory is more a sustained investigation into the possibility and nature of a philosophical approach to art than an easily assimilated contribution to the established discipline of aesthetics. However, Adorno does not think that aesthetics should just be abandoned. Moreover, his interest in it is not motivated merely by intellectual—historical curiosity. Rather, one of the most striking and, for many, uncomfortable features of Adorno's work is that central questions in aesthetics also represent the most significant ways of thinking about the relation of subject to object, and about the hope for a world free of the antagonisms by which this one is riven.
1. Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (1991), 8.
2. See also Adorno's consideration of the relation between the different arts and art as such in "Art and the Arts", Can One Live after Auschwitz? (2003), 368–87.
3. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (2000), 162–6.
4. Ibid., 99.
5. Walter Benjamin, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism", Selected Writings, vol. 1 (1996), 155.
6. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (1975), 34.
7. Ibid., 18.
8. See also ND: 40: "The Privilege of Experience". I explore aspects of Adorno's reception of Kant's supposed subjectivism in "Dialectical Aesthetics and the Kantian Rettung: On Adorno's Aesthetic Theory", New German Critique, forthcoming.
9. Benjamin, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism", 143, 151 and 153.
10. For a brief but serviceable account of Helms's career, see Stefan Fricke's entry, "Helms, Hans G(ünter)" in Grove Music Online.
11. Bertolt Brecht, "Shouldn't We Abolish Aesthetics?", Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (1964), 21. (Readers should note, and perhaps question, the subtitle of Brecht's writings on theatre.) For Sartre, see What is Literature? (1993).
12. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music (2006), 82.
13. Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1991), 32.
14. Simon Jarvis has offered a subtle reading of Adorno's view of ideology. See in particular Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), 65–7, and with regard to art, 116–19. Readers of German might also consult "Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre" ("Contribution to the Theory of Ideology") Gesammelte Schriften 8 (1972), 457–77. An English version of this essay appears in Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Aspects of Sociology (1972).
15. For an instructive reading of this essay — and its (mis)appropriation in subsequent accounts of ideology and literature — see Robert Kaufman, "Adorno's Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity”, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2004), 354–75.
16. Jarvis, Adorno, 137–8.