Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic Theory

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Aesthetic Theory

Theodor W. Adorno

Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Editors

Newly translated, edited, and with a translator's

introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor

Continuum

The Tower Building

11 York Road,

London, SEI 7NX

www.continuumhooks.com

370 Lexington Avenue,

New York, NY,

10017-6503

© 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this pUblication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information

storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

Originally published as Asthetische Theorie, © 1970 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

This translation published 1997 by The Athlone Press Ltd

This edition published 2002 by Continuum

British Library Cataloguing-in-PubUcation Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

ISBN 0-8264-{i757-1

Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Bodrnin

Contents

Translator's Acknowledgments ix

Translator's Introduction xi

Art, Society, Aesthetics 1

Art's Self-Evidence Lost I-Against the Question of Origin 2-Truth Content and

the Life of Works 3-0n the Relation of Art and Society 4-Critique of the

Psychoanalytic Theory of Art 8-The Art Theories of Kant and Freud 9-"The

Pleasure of Art" 13-Aesthetic Hedonism and the Happiness of Knowledge 14

Situation 16

Disintegration of the Material 16-Deaestheticization of Art, Critique of the

Culture Industry 16-Language of Suffering 18-The New: Its Philosophy of

History 19-0n the Problem of Invariance; Experiment (I) 23-Defense of Isms

24-Isms as Secularized Schools 25-Feasibility and Accident; Modernity and

Quality 26-"Second Reflection " 26-The New and Duration 27-Dialectic of

Integration and the "Subjective Point" 29-The New, Utopia and Negativity 32-

Modem Art and Industrial Production 33-Aesthetic Rationality and Criticism

34-Canon of Prohibitions 35-Experiment (II), Seriousness and Irresponsibility

37-Black as an Ideal 39-Relation to Tradition 40-Subjectivity and Collective

4I-Solipsism, Mimetic Taboo, and Maturity 42-Metier 43-Expression and

Construction 44

v

vi 0 CONTENTS

On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique 45

On the Category of the Ugly 45-Ugliness: Its Social Aspect and Its Philosophy of

History 48-0n the Concept of the Beautiful 50-Mimesis and Rationality 53-

On the Concept of Construction 56-Technology 58-Dialectic of Function￾alism 60

Natural Beauty 61

Condemnation of Natural Beauty 6l-Natural Beauty as a "Stepping Out into the

Open" 63-0n Cultural Landscape 64-Natural Beauty and Art Beauty Are

Interlocked 65-The Experience of Nature Is Historically Deformed 68-

Aesthetic Apperception Is Analytical 69-Natural Beauty as Suspended History

70-Determinate Indeterminateness 7I-Nature as a Cipher of the Reconciled

73-Hegel's Critique of Natural Beauty: Its Metacritique 74-Transition from

Natural to Art Beauty 77

Art Beauty: Apparition, Spiritualization, Intuitability 78

"More " as Semblance 78-Aesthetic Transcendence and Disenchantment 79-

Enlightenment and Shudder 79-Art and the Art-Alien 8l-The Nonexistent 82-

Image Character 83-"Explosion" 84-Image Content Is Collective 85-Art as

Spiritual 86-Immanence of Works and the Heterogeneous 88-0n Hegel's

Aesthetics of Spirit 90-Dialectic of Spiritualization 9l-Spiritualization and the

Chaotic 93-Art's Intuitability Is Aporetic 94-Intuitability and Conceptuality 97

Semblance and Expression 100

Crisis of Semblance laO-Semblance, Meaning, and "tour deforce " lO5-Toward

the Redemption of Semblance lO7-Expression and Dissonance I lO-Subject￾Object Ill-Expression as Eloquence l12-Domination and Conceptual Knowl￾edge 113-Expression and Mimesis 114-Dialectic of Inwardness; Aporias of

Expression 115

Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics 1 18

Critique and Redemption of Myth 118-The Mimetic and the Ridiculous 118-

Cui bono l19-Enigmaticalness and Understanding 120- "Nothing shall be left

unchanged" I22-Enigma, Script, Interpretation 124-Interpretation as Imitation

125-"Block" 126-Fractured Transcendence 126-0n the Truth Content of

Artworks 127-Art and Philosophy; Collective Content of Art l3O-Truth as

Semblance of the Illusionless l3l-Mimesis of the Fatal and Reconciliation

I33-Methexis in Darkness 134

CONTENTS 0 vii

Coherence and Meaning 136

Logicality 136-Logic, Causality, Time 137-Purposefulness without Purpose

139-Form 14O-Form and Content 143-The Concept of Articulation (I) 146-

On the Concept of Material 147-The Concept of Subject Matter; Intention and

Content 149-1ntention and Meaning 151-The Crisis of Meaning 152-The

Concept of Harmony and the Ideology of Closure 157-Affirmation 159-Critique

of Classicism 160

Subject-Object 1 63

Subjective and Objective are Equivocal; On Aesthetic Feeling 163-Critique of

Kant's Concept of Objectivity 165-Precarious Balance 166-Linguistic Quality

and Collective Subject 166-Subject-Object Dialectic 16B-"Genius" 169-

Originality 172-Fantasy and Reflection 173-0bjectivity and Reification 174

Toward a Theory of the Artwork 1 75

Aesthetic Experience Is Processual175-Transience 17B-Artifact and Genesis

17B-The Artwork as Monad and Immanent Analysis 179-Art and Artworks

1B1-History Is Constitutive; "Intelligibility" 1B2-The Necessity of Objecti￾vation and Dissociation 1B3-Unity and Multiplicity 1B6-The Category of

Intensity 1B7-"Why a work can rightfully be said to be beautiful" 1BB­

"Depth" 1B9-The Concept of Articulation (II) 190-0n the Diff erentiation of

Progress 191-Development of Productive Forces 192-The Transformation of

Artworks 193-1nterpretation, Commentary, Critique 194-Truth Content Is

Historical; The Sublime in Nature and Art 194-The Sublime and Play 197

Universal and Particular 1 99

Nominalism and the Decline of Genres 199-0n Antiquity's Genre-Aesthetics

202-Philosophy of History of Conventions 203-0n the Concept of Style 205-

The Progress of Art 207-The History of Art Is Inhomogeneous 209-Progress and

Domination of the Material 210-"Technique" 212-Art in the Industrial Age

217-Nominalism and Open Form 219-Construction, Static and Dynamic 222

Society 225

Double Character of Art; fait social and Autonomy; On the Fetish Character

225-Reception and Production 22B-Choice of Thematic Material; Artistic

Subject; Relation to Science 229-Art as Comportment 232-Ideology and Truth

233-"Guilt" 234-0n the Reception of Advanced Art 235-Mediation of Art

and Society 236-Critique of Catharsis; Kitsch and the Vulgar 23B-Attitude to

Praxis; Effect, Lived Experience, "Shudder" 241-Commitment 246-Aestheti-

viii 0 CONTENTS

cism, Naturalism, Beckett 248-Against Administered Art 250-The Possibility of

Art Today 251-Autonomy and Heteronomy 252-Political Option 254-Progress

and Reaction 256-Art and the Poverty of Philosophy 258-Primacy of the

Object and Art 258-The Problem of Solipsism and False Reconciliation 259

Paraiipomena 262

Theories on the Origin of Art 325

Draft Introduction 332

The Obsolescence of Traditional Aesthetics 332-The Changing Function of

Naivete 335-lrreconcilability of Traditional Aesthetics and Contemporary Art

338-Truth-Content and the Fetish Character of Artworks 340-The Need for

Aesthetics 341-Aesthetics as the Refuge of Metaphysics 343-Aesthetic Experi￾ence as Objective Understanding 345-Work-Immanent Analysis and Aesthetic

Theory 348-0n the Dialectics of Aesthetic Experience 348-Universal and

Particular 350-Critique of the Phenomenological Research of Origin 351-

Relation to Hegel's Aesthetics 352-The Open Character of Aesthetics; Aesthetics

of Form and Aesthetics of Content (I) 353-Aesthetics of Form and Aesthetics

of Content (II); Norms and Slogans 355-Methodology, "Second Reflection, "

History 357

Editors' Afterword 361

Notes 367

Index 379

Translator's Acknowledgments

It is not recorded that Job was working on a translation, but I wouldn't doubt it.

Whatever could interfere in this project interfered: illness, earthquake, and unem￾ployment took turns with lesser scourges. The translation stretched years beyond

the year planned. That it did not finally get left on a doorstep or slid behind a

bookshelf lowe in part to friends, to Steve Babson, Jery Zaslove, Marty Jay, Bill

Donoghue, Milton Cantor, and most of all to my wife, Odile Hullot-Kentor. And

every reader of this book is indebted to Juliane Brand, who painstakingly checked

the translation against the original, word by word, suggested innumerable im￾provements, and, as its copy editor as well, helped bring the translation to an alto￾gether new level. Her expertise, generosity, and calm goodwill made her a won￾derful and indispensable ally. I also want to thank Shierry Nicholsen, Mike

Richardson, and Don Shumaker for their various contributions.

ix

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Translator's Introduction

Every translation must fit one world inside another, but not every work to be

translated has been shaped by emphatic opposition to the world into which it must

be fitted. This is, however, the case with Aesthetic Theory, which Theodor Adorno

was able to write only by leaving the United States, where he had lived for a

decade during the war years, became a citizen, and often thought he might need to

remain. Any review of the many American phrases that Adorno scornfully quotes

throughout Aesthetic Theory-the "tired businessman," the "pin-up," the "what

do I get out of it?" -will confirm that not least of all the book was written in re￾fusal of a country that it depicts as a completely commercial order. Even so un￾problematically scannable a phrase as "Only what is useless can stand in for the

stunted use value" draws on the transformation of distinctly European experi￾ences of aristocracy. In the United States, such an idea, if it gets as far as cogni￾tion, falls askance of the inheritances of a puritanical mind that has always sus￾pected that art does not properly work for a living and might encourage others to

do the same. And just opening to any page, without bothering to read a word, one

sees that the book is visibly antagonistic. No one from the land of edutainment

would compose these starkly unbeckoning sheer sides of type, uninterrupted by

chapter titles or typographic markers, that have severed and jettisoned every ap￾proach and patched over most every apparent handhold.

The book's stylistic peculiarities derive, as a whole, from what makes Aesthetic

Theory inimical to an American context: that it is oriented not to its readers but to

the thing-in-itself. This is not, as will be immediately suspected, motivated by

indifference to its readers. On the contrary. the book makes itself remote from its

xi

xii 0 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

consumption out of interest in, and by its power of, self-immersion. Aesthetic

Theory is an attempt to overcome the generally recognized failing of aesthetics￾its externality to its object-that Barnett Newman once did the world the favor of

putting in a nutshell when he famously quipped, speaking of himself as a painter,

that "aesthetics is for me like what ornithology must be like for the birds."! Art￾works are after all unique, not least in that, when they are experienced, they are

experienced from within. It is possible to vanish into a novel or a painting and be

half-surprised, looking away for a moment, that the world was ever there at all.

Anyone turning to aesthetics would expect that, to call itself aesthetics, it would

be allied with what is exceptional in the experience of its object. But what is dis￾covered instead is a discipline that throughout its history has worked at the con￾ceptual undergirding of standards of beauty, the sublime, taste, art's dignity, and

so on, while failing to achieve the standard of the experience of what it purports to

treat. The suspicion is irrepressible that either aesthetics is the work of the will￾fully deaf, blind, and insensate or that art is under a spell that prohibits its inner

comprehension, as if here one is permitted entry as nowhere else only on the con￾dition that one leave empty-handed and never be able to say what the difference is

between it and just having been distracted.

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory means to breach this externality of aesthetics to art.

It is hardly the first effort to do so. But when aesthetics has become dissatisfied

with itself and tried to escape its externality it has almost always taken the form of

pretending to be art in a pictorial, effusive voice, or it has offered to act as maitre d'

to a specialized domain of pleasure. Either effort, however, only camouflages the

presupposition that intellect must renounce knowing art from within. Aesthetic

Theory, by contrast, is oriented to an early aphorism that Adorno wrote about

music that was seminal to his thinking about art as a whole: "We don't understand

music, it understands us."2 The aesthetics required by this perception would be re￾mote to all art appreciation; its sight lines would run opposite those angled by the

intensifying need for art that makes people mill around art museums in constantly

greater numbers: it would be art's own understanding; the presentation of its truth

content.

Conjuring this genie out of the bottle would seem to require the sacrifice of

subjectivity to what is beyond itself . If the thing-in-itself is to speak, subjectivity's

own voice must only interfere. This thesis could perhaps look for confirmation in

Dialectic of Enlightment in which Adorno and Horkheimer show that fascism did

not simply coax cornered reason into delirium but was itself a potential implicit in

reason's own compulsion toward all-encompassing domination. Yet the authors

never sought to subvert subjectivity or to countermand enlightenment, the course

of SUbjectivity's development as reason. If enlightenment had come to a dead end

in fascism, its abrogation would make terror permanent. Rather, Adorno and

Horkheimer took the side of enlightenment and tried to discern the logic of its fail￾ure. What they showed was that it missed its aim of human emancipation from

TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xiii

natural necessity and the second nature of social constraint because the domina￾tion of nature unwittingly requires the sacrifice of subjectivity. The recognition

that in maxima potentia minima licentia is millennia old. But Dialectic of Enlight￾enment took this thought in a strictly modern direction: if the self is progressively

limited and deprived through the domination of its object, if humanity is subordi￾nated to necessity by the struggle against it, then the emancipation of the subject

depends on its capacity to emancipate its object, and this requires all possible sub￾jective spontaneity.

Adorno's thesis that subjectivity could only be transcended by way of subjec￾tivity, and not by its limitation, is one way of formulating his seminal insight: that

identity is the power of nonidentity. The philosophical means for giving shape to

what is more than subjectivity would be, paradoxically, those of conceptual cog￾nition that, since Kant's Copernican turn, specifically limited knowledge to the

world constituted by subjectivity this side of the thing-in-itself. As Adorno wrote

in the introduction to Negative Dialectics, he considered it the task of his thought

"to use the strength of the subject to break through the fraud of constitutive sub￾jectivity."3 The power of identity -manifest in Kant's transcendentalism as con￾cepts that constitutively define the likeness of the world with the subject-would

go beyond constitutive subjectivity if concepts could be developed in such a way

as to present what is more than conceptual in them. That concepts are more than

their definitional content is implicit in the idea of a dialectic of enlightenment: for

if enlightenment regresses to the natural necessity that it attempts to dominate,

then concepts, which ostensibly serve to identify the world with its knower, are

actually artifacts most deeply shaped by what enlightenment never mastered.

Identity must be more than identity in that it draws back into itself what it purports

to overcome. The concealed content of enlightenment, the content of concepts,

would be that nature that subjectivity sought to dominate in its own rise to power.

This defines Adorno's approach in Aesthetic Theory to the possibility of

breaching the externality of aesthetics to art: an aesthetics that wants to know art

from within-to present what art itself understands-would consist of what a

contemporary nominalist intelligence, always verging on irrationalism, dismisses

as the oppressive, overstuffed furnishings of an age credulous of absolutes: nat￾ural beauty, art beauty, truth, semblance, and so on, the fundamental concepts of

aesthetics.

Although these concepts emerged in the effort to master their material, they are

more than that. Freed from the compulsion of domination they would potentially

reveal their participation in what they sought to dominate and the impress of that

through which they developed. Aesthetic concepts would become the ,memory of

nature sedirnented in art, which for Adorno takes shape in Aesthetic Theory as the

unconscious, mimetically written history of human suffering against which en￾lightenment elsewhere seals itself off. Only this content could possibly bring rea￾son's struggle for domination to its senses and direct its power to what would ac-

xiv D TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

tually fulfill it. Thus Adorno organized Aesthetic Theory as a paratactical presen￾tation of aesthetic concepts that, by eschewing subordinating structures, breaks

them away from their systematic philosophical intention so that the self￾relinquishment that is implicit in identity could be critically explicated as what is

nonintentional in them: the primacy of the object.

Throughout his years in the United States, Adorno on many occasions met with

the rejection of his work by publishers who saw his writings simply as disorga￾nized. It was obvious to Adorno that what he was pursuing required his return to

Germany if only because in the 1950s publishing was still less commercially uni￾fied than in the United States and permitted writers greater control over their work

than here.4 One event did, however, finally prompt him to leave. When the editor￾ial board at the Psychoanalytic Society of San Francisco finished with his essay

"Psychoanalysis Revised," he found that "the entire text was disfigured beyond

recognition, the basic intention could not be discerned."5 As Adorno recounted,

the head editor explained that the standards to which the essay had been adjusted,

which made it look like every other essay in the journal, were those of the profes￾sion: "I would only be standing in my own way" -Adorno was told -"if I passed

up its advantages. I passed them up nevertheless."6 Adorno moved back to Europe.

Adorno's sense that staying here would have impossibly burdened his work

was confirmed long after the fact by the first English translation of Aesthetic

Theory in 1984.7 The publisher, partially against the will of the translator, dis￾carded the book's form as a superstitiously imposed impediment that would only

stymie the book's consumption.8 Diametrically opposed to the course the book

took in its various drafts in Adorno's own hands, a process that led in the final ver￾sion to the rejection of the division of the book into chapters, the 1984 translation

arrived on bookstore shelves divided into numbered chapters with main headings

and subheadings inserted in the text. Paragraph indentations were distributed arbi￾trarily throughout, completing the image of a monodirectional sequence of topic

sentences that could be followed stepwise from chapter 1 through chapter 12. This

subordinated the text's paratactical order to a semblance of progressive argumen￾tation that offered to present the book's content conveniently. This device pro￾vided a steady external grip on the book while causing it to collapse internally.

For in lieu of any argumentative structure in the text itself, because it contains no

homogeneous substance that can be followed from start to finish, the flaring clar￾ity of paragraph indentations only produced a contrast by which the simulated

paragraphs appeared murky in their refusal to parse into stages of thesis and evi￾dence. And whereas the paratactical text demands that every sentence undertake

to be the topic sentence and that the book be composed of long, complex phrases,

each of which seems under the obligation to present the book as a whole, the 1984

translation carved up sentences in the image of declarative vehicles of content.

The original paratactical text is concentrically arranged around a mute middle