SOURCE: “Mimesis, Utopia, and Reconciliation: A Redemptive Critique of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory,” in The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism, Poststructuralism, Columbia University Press, pp. 62-79.

In 1980, Leo Lowenthal formulated a set of prescient insights about the future of Critical Theory in an interview entitled “The Utopian Motif is Suspended.”¹ By “utopian motif,” Lowenthal was referring to the eschatological hopes for a better life in the here and now that inspired not only the enterprise of Critical Theory, but an entire generation of Central European Jewish thinkers who, like himself, came of age around the time of World War I and drew on utopian aspects of the Jewish tradition as a source of messianic inspiration.² Among this generation, a decisive influence on the “inner circle” of Critical Theorists was exercised by the thought of Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin.³

Prima facie, the claim epitomized in the title of the Lowenthal interview cannot help but seem a startling admission. For if we try to imagine the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse stripped of this dimension of utopian longing, it seems divested of its most fundamental impulses. Moreover, Lowenthal's contention seems a striking concession in the direction of Jürgen Habermas, who has made a point of trying to integrate Critical Theory with contemporary developments in social science and philosophy of language at the expense of its speculative-utopian tendencies. “Maybe [Habermas] is right,” Lowenthal observes. “Perhaps [the speculative-utopian moment] is ballast. When I speak of such things, I feel a bit old and obsolete. After all, one cannot just live from utopian hopes based in never-never land, whose realization seems scarcely in the realm of the possible. Maybe this is a cause of the sadness I spoke of at the outset. But perhaps the theoretical realism I sense in Habermas is the only means of salvaging the motifs present in Critical Theory and thereby of protecting them from a complete disintegration into an empty, melancholy pessimism.”⁴

Of course, Lowenthal's comments must in no way be construed as an abandonment of the critical intellectual legacy he helped found. Instead, in keeping with the nobler aspects of the dialectical tradition, they represent a constructive modification of what seem to be, from the vantage point of the current historical hour, extraneous preoccupations. As Lowenthal explains, Critical Theory's own revolutionary ardor was decisively cooled in the aftermath of the twin catastrophes of Nazism and Stalinism. For him, however, the loss of concrete utopian prospects in fact signifies the need for a redoubling of original critical energies. “It would be criminal to bury ideology critique now,” Lowenthal remarks. “What has not been lost is, of course, the critical approach: the process of analysis, retaining the good and rejecting the bad, the need to accuse, the indictment of all that exists, … but without explicit hopes. What has occurred is not a retreat into skepticism or cynicism but sadness. The utopian motif has been suspended.”

Lowenthal's sober appraisal of the utopian side of Critical Theory represents a valuable point of departure for examining Adorno's Aesthetic Theory. For it is in Aesthetic Theory that we find Adorno at his most utopian. In the later Adorno, philosophy is assigned the “negative” role of ruthlessly criticizing itself in order, against all odds, to undo its manifold past failings. This is the message of Negative Dialectics, a work which, in eminently quixotic fashion, fights against the domination of the concept through the use of concepts. Only as aesthetics does philosophy for the first time truly come into its own. It thus relinquishes its traditional position of privilege as prima philosophia and instead becomes a handmaiden to the arts as their faithful interpreter. Its new mission is to give voice to the speechless particularity of aesthetic objectivations, which, as “art,” are nonconceptual, and thus devoid of the capacity for theoretical expression. It is precisely at this intersection of art and philosophy, that the utopian dimension of Adorno's work manifests itself. For this intersection is also the locus of aesthetic theory.

The stakes in this debate over the continued relevance of the utopian dimension of Critical Theory are high: an answer to this question will go far toward determining one's receptivity to the “linguistic turn” in Critical Theory spurred by the work of Habermas. To be sure, Habermas' oeuvre is far from devoid of utopian potential: the theory of communicative competence sets forth an ideal speech situation in which generalized and unconstrained participation in decisionmaking becomes the counterfactual normative touchstone. Yet, unlike his predecessors, Habermas is someone who is fully at home with the ethical presuppositions of the modern world. He is for the most part interested in bringing these preconditions to consummation; or, as he once phrased it, the project of the modern age must be brought to completion. It is in this spirit that he has felicitously characterized the political implications of his theories as a “radical reformism.” Absent from his perspective is the “romantic anti-capitalist” impulse that pervaded the worldview of the first generation of Frankfurt theorists. It was precisely this impulse that impelled their program of a “ruthless critique of everything existing” (Marx), which took the form of an unmitigated existential antipathy toward capitalist modernity as a whole. In eminently dialectical fashion, it was precisely this existential antipathy that spurred the profound utopian longings of Adorno, Horkheimer, Lowenthal, Marcuse, etc.

While Habermas has not hesitated to criticize vigorously the various “social pathologies” engendered by late capitalism, the sentiment of anticapitalist, “existential antipathy” is fundamentally foreign to his way of thinking. Correspondingly, he has often attacked the romantic anticapitalist utopianism of Critical Theory as one of its weakest aspects. The Critical Theorists' rejection of the notion of “immanent critique” is seen as essentially Nietzschean: they accept Nietzsche's Zeitdiagnose of bourgeois modernity by concurring with him that its cultural ideals are wholly bankrupt; and this conclusion forces them, like Nietzsche, to abandon the concept of immanent critique for that of “total critique.” In both cases, the equation of modernity with a prosaic logic of “rationalization” (“instrumental reason”), where the unexalted mentality of the Weberian “Fachmensch” reigns triumphant, leads to a search for aestheticist alternatives. For Habermas, conversely, the ideals of bourgeois modernity (embodied in the differentiated spheres of science, morality, and art) remain serviceable as a basis for the immanent criticism of its various “social pathologies.” The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment have abandoned too much by succumbing to Nietzsche's heady, totalizing critique of the bourgeois world—for example, the potentials for communicative reason embodied in modern bourgeois law and morality.

We may summarize Habermas' objections by saying that as a result of a totalistic and undialectical understanding of the significance of modernity, Horkheimer and Adorno remained incapable of comprehending future sources of social change: from a “totally administered world” no good can conceivably emerge. And in consequence of this diagnostic incapacity, emancipatory prognoses of necessity took on an unrealistic, utopian hue. Unable to locate progressive emancipatory tendencies in the concrete historical present, the Critical Theorists were constrained to identify ersatz repositories of negation deriving from the aesthetic sphere. But in the last analysis, art was unable to bear the heavy burden accorded it in their framework. Instead, one is left with the conceptual aporia of a “totally administered world” side by side with historically unrealizable utopian projections. Both Lowenthal's observations and Habermas' critique, therefore, cast serious doubt on the utopian aspirations of Adorno's aesthetics.

One cannot help but be struck by the indebtedness of Adorno's aesthetic theory to insights first expressed by Max Weber in the famous “Zwischenbetrachtung” to his great work on the Sociology of World Religions.⁵ Certainly, Adorno the musicologist learned much from Weber's essay on the Rational and Social Foundations of Music. The fundamental concept of that work—the “rationalization” of musical techniques in the modern West—plays a major role in Adorno's analysis of aesthetic modernity tout court. As Adorno emphasizes repeatedly, the imperatives of aesthetic modernity dictate that only those works of art which rely on the most advanced techniques historically available become worthy of serious consideration. In this context, he approvingly quotes Rimbaud's dictum, “Il faut être absolument moderne.”

But it is Weber the theorist of the “Aesthetic Sphere” in modern life who establishes the parameters for Adorno's theory of aesthetic modernism. Following Kant's discussion of art in the third Critique as “purposiveness without purpose,” Weber points out that in traditional or premodern art, art's inner logic remained stultified, insofar as form was always subordinated to content: the independent development of artistic technique was perennially subservient to the ends of salvation. In fact, these two aspects, form and content, stood in grave conflict, since aesthetic means inherently threatened to outstrip the demands of the religious message per se. (The annals of art history are replete with such tensions. For the sake of illustration, I mention three: Augustine's concern about the enticement to pleasure for pleasure's sake in musical liturgy; Tarkovsky's conflicted icon painter in Andrei Rublov; and the threat posed to the worldview of the Church by the “new realism” of Renaissance painting.)

All this changes, according to Weber, with the differentiation of the spheres of science, morality, and art that follows from the thoroughgoing rationalization of life in the modern age. For the first time, art (and the same claims can also be made for the spheres of morality and science) need no longer legitimate itself in terms of a logically prior, all-encompassing worldview. Instead, it is free to develop its own intrinsic formal potentialities to an unprecedented extent. The result, for Weber, is the creation of the “Aesthetic Sphere” in the modern sense, a historically unique network of artists and persons of taste, whose interactions are mediated by a new series of public institutions: theaters, galleries, feuilletons, critics, public libraries, museums, and so forth. Weber encapsulates this development—with characteristic pith and discernment—as follows: “[Under] the development of intellectualism and the rationalization of life … art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values, which exist in their own right. Art takes over the function of this-worldly salvation, no matter how this may be interpreted. It provides salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially form the pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism.”⁶

I think there could be no better lead-in to the basic intentions of Adorno's aesthetic theory than the remarks of Weber just cited; above all, his characterization of aesthetic modernism as a type of inner-worldly salvation. To be sure, Adorno, following the lead of Walter Benjamin, is primarily concerned with de-auraticized (or postauratic) art; that is, with forms of modernism that have relinquished the immediacy of the Stendhalian promesse de bonheur, the “beautiful illusion” that happiness might be attainable in the here and now. Nevertheless, Weber attributes a special redemptory function to art in the modern world, which, for men and women of culture, surpasses religion to become a unique locus of ultimate meaning and value in life.

Art performs an analogous redemptory function in Adorno's aesthetics. For him, too, art represents a form of salvation vis-à-vis the pressures of “theoretical and practical rationalism” that predominate in daily life. Moreover, in Adorno's aesthetics, art becomes a vehicle of salvation in an even stronger sense. It takes on a compelling utopian function as a prefiguration of reconciled life. If Adorno stands Hegel on his head by claiming that “the whole is the untrue,” it is art alone that offers the prospect of reversing this condition, of redirecting a lacerated social totality along the path of reconciliation (Versöhnung).

It is important to recognize that Aesthetic Theory, Adorno's magnum opus, fulfills an important systematic function in his oeuvre as a whole, addressing a concern originally posed jointly with Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.⁷ There, social evolution is comprehended, in a manner reminiscent of both Nietzsche and Freud, in terms of the progressive mastery of unsublimated impulse. The latter must be perpetually subordinated to the “organizational imperatives” of civilization. Individuation thus means domination: increasing control of human drives on the part of the superego, the internalized agent of social authority. Ultimately, this dual process of self-renunciation and the extirpation of “otherness”—of those spheres of life that remain nonidentical with the subject qua res cogitans—leads to the horror of Auschwitz: the Jew, with his pre-Christian rites and physiognomy, represents the ultimate incarnation of otherness at the heart of European modernity. So pervasive is this dilemma that conceptualization itself—the very process of making the nonidentical intellectually comprehensible to the subject—is fully implicated in this world-historical march of unreason. As Horkheimer and Adorno observe, “The universality of ideas, as developed by discursive logic, domination in the conceptual sphere, is raised up on the actual basis of domination. The dissolution of the old magical heritage, of the old diffuse ideas, by conceptual unity, expresses the hierarchical constitution of life by those who are free. The individuality that learned order and subordination in the subjection of the world, soon wholly equated truth with the regulative thought without whose fixed distinctions truth cannot exist.” And further: “Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator behaves toward men. He knows them insofar as he can manipulate them.”⁸Dialectic of Enlightenment may thus be read as a type of cautionary tale concerning the fate of civilization once it has succumbed to the identitarian spell of formal logic.

In the context at hand, it is not so much the accuracy of the Zeitdiagnose set forth by Horkheimer and Adorno that concerns us, as the fact that an analogous preoccupation with “domination in the conceptual sphere” pervades Adorno's epistemological musings some years later in Negative Dialectics. To be sure, the historico-philosophical framework of the latter work is very much of a piece with Dialectic of Enlightenment. As Adorno remarks at one point: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”⁹ But of greater relevance for our purposes is the fact that the theme of the “domination of the concept” occupies pride of place in the work, which may thus be understood as an elaborate meditation on a specific epistemological problem that had been inherited from the philosophy of history of the 1940s. For Adorno, “the original sin of all philosophy is that it tries to grasp the non-conceptual through conceptual means.” It is the tacit alliance between society and ratiocination, which manifests itself in their mutual hostility to the nonidentical, that Adorno seeks to undo via negative dialectics—which, paradoxically, “strives by way of the concept, to transcend the concept.”¹⁰ Adorno has drunk deeply from Nietzschean waters: his critique of conceptualization derives from the latter's characterization of philosophy as a manifestation of the “will to power.”

Adorno offers a succinct rendering of his philosophical program—an intransigent defense of nonidentity—in the following statement: “To change [the] direction of conceptualization, to give it a turn toward the non-identical, is the linchpin of negative dialectics. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection. Reflection on its own meaning is the way out of the concept's seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning. … Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from growing rampant and becoming an absolute unto itself.”¹¹

A prior account of Adorno's stance on the philosophy of history and theory of knowledge is crucial for an informed appreciation of the stakes of his Aesthetic Theory, which is the direct philosophical heir of these earlier works. More importantly, in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explicitly attempts to posit “solutions” to the dilemmas of abstract conceptualization—“domination in the conceptual sphere”—targeted in his previous work. And these solutions are integrally related to the redemptory or utopian function he assigns to works of art as ciphers of reconciled life.

Adorno fully accepts the Hegelian turn in aesthetics whereby art is deemed a serious vehicle of knowledge and truth. Thus, for Adorno, like Hegel, art remains an embodiment of Spirit; however, in opposition to Hegel, art is no longer deemed a subaltern manifestation of the latter insofar as it represents the Idea merely in the realm of sensuous appearance. Instead, he in effect reverses the terms on his idealist predecessor. The truth claims of the aesthetic sphere are potentially superior to those of philosophical truth precisely because of their greater affinities with the realm of sensuous appearance.

Philosophical truth is by definition disembodied. Whereas for Hegel, this high degree of “spiritualization” accounted for its distinct superiority vis-à-vis, for example, the pictorial representation of the absolute in religious lore, for Adorno, the reverse is true: the sensuous nature of works of art means that they display a greater affinity with objectivity as such. In his eyes, therefore, philosophical thought, which seeks to represent the nature of things by use of abstract concepts, operates at a more distant remove from the reality it seeks to grasp.

The greater concretion of works of art, their inherent affinities with the realm of “sensuous externality,” is not, however, an unequivocal gain. Instead, the increase in material concretion simultaneously signifies a diminution in intelligibility. For unlike philosophy, the language of art is sensuous. Its mode of articulation relies on images, sounds, and colors rather than the clarity of discursive argument. Consequently, as vehicles of truth, works of art are inherently enigmatic, rätselhaft. And it is precisely this enigmatic quality that beseeches, implores, and requires the philosophical interpretation of art. This dynamic alone mandates the necessity of aesthetic theory.

Similarly, it is only in light of the epistemological problematic inherited from Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics that one of Adorno's more controversial theoretical strategies in Aesthetic Theory becomes comprehensible: a rehabilitation of the category of natural beauty. Here, too, a comparison with Hegelian aesthetics is instructive. For Hegel, natural beauty was indisputably inferior to the humanmade variety, insofar as nature is inherently de-spiritualized. At best, it represents spirit in the mode of “otherness.” There is no mistaking the fact that Aesthetic Theory is in the main a theory of aesthetic modernism. But this fact only makes the elaborate justification of natural beauty contained therein all the more surprising. To be sure, if various artistic movements throughout history have emphasized “naturalism” as a paramount criterion of aesthetic value, such a mind-set is completely foreign to the sensibility of modernism, for which all residues of naturalist sentiment must be ruthlessly expulsed (otherwise one ceases to be “absolument moderne”). Adorno's concerted efforts to rehabilitate this category from the legacy of pre-Hegelian aesthetics can only be understood in light of the ulterior epistemological agenda of his aesthetics.

Thus, just as Adorno criticizes the pan-logism of Hegelian metaphysics for its perpetual willingness to sacrifice the nonidentical to the imperatives of systematic unity, he similarly attempts to overturn Hegel's dismissal of natural beauty as part and parcel of a process of “spiritualization” (Vergeistigung) that must be combated. “Spiritualization” bespeaks an imperious anthropocentrism, in which all that is alien to and other than the subject must be rendered equivalent to the latter at the expense of its own intrinsic contents. Consequently, in the framework of Adorno's nonidentitarian theory of knowledge—a theory that takes issue with the main epistemological desideratum of German idealism: the identity of subject and object—the category of natural beauty is endowed with immense metaphorical significance: it represents the irreducible Other, a pristine condition beyond the reach of subjective self-assertion that is for this reason to be cherished and emulated. Adorno expresses this view forcefully when he opines, “The beautiful in nature is the residue of non-identity in things in an age in which they are spellbound by universal identity.” As a “residue of non-identity,” natural beauty is at the same time a utopian cipher of “reconciliation”: utopia would be a state of “reconciliation,” i.e., a condition in which the nonidentical could freely articulate itself, rather than function—as is the case at present—solely under the aegis of the concept. “The beautiful in nature,” observes Adorno, “is different from both the notion of a ruling principle and the denial of any principle whatsoever. It is like a state of reconciliation.”¹²

It is the conceptual triad nonidentity-reconciliation-utopia that assumes central significance in Aesthetic Theory; though for Adorno, unlike Hegel, in the Aufhebung of reconciliation, nonidentity is not effaced but first truly comes into its own. For Hegel, it is the very existence of nonidentity that accounts for an antagonistic (or unreconciled) state; and this condition must be overcome via the moment of synthesis. Conversely, for Adorno, it is the suppression of nonidentity by its other, the concept, that is the root of all injustice in the theoretical sphere; thus, reconciliation signifies the elimination of the identitarian urge, rather than, as with Hegel, its consummation.

But on the whole, the utopian potential of natural beauty is of minor moment in Aesthetic Theory in comparison to that of works of art—and especially modern works. Works of art are utopian constructs of necessity, according to Adorno. Social life exists in an unredeemed, “fallen” state. Its elements are subject to the rule of heteronomous and alien principles such as the law of universal equivalence characteristic of a commodity economy. Amid the omnipresent degradation of the phenomenal world, works of art possess a unique saving power: they incorporate these phenomena within the context of a freely articulated, noncoercive totality, thereby redeeming them from their deficient everyday state. According to Adorno, in a capitalist society dominated by considerations of utility, phenomena are allowed to subsist only in an inferior state of universal Being-for-Other, which militates against the prospects of authentic Being-for-Self. In a flash, works of art dramatically reverse this state of affairs: “Whereas in the real world all particulars are fungible, art protests against fungibility by holding up images of what reality might be like if it were emancipated from the patterns of identification that are imposed on it.”¹³ Works of art for the first time allow the Being-in-Itself of things to emerge by virtue of the redeeming capacities of aesthetic form: “The utopia anticipated by artistic form is the idea that things at long last ought to come into their own. Another way of putting this is to call for the abolition of the spell of selfhood hitherto promoted by the subject.”¹⁴

For Adorno, art is intrinsically utopian by virtue of the nonutilitarian principle of construction that is peculiar to it. Art emancipates by virtue of its formal principle, which is that of “free articulation” rather than “instrumental reason.” And this emancipatory aesthetic practice is actually enhanced in the case of modern works of art, in which the principle of montage becomes predominant, such that the individual parts attain independence, and are thereby no longer mechanically subjugated to the whole. Art redeems the material elements of everyday life by absorbing them within the liberating contours of an aesthetic constellation. This inherently emancipatory effect of aesthetic form contrasts starkly with the coercive nature of contemporary social organization. According to Adorno, at the present stage of historical development, aesthetic form signifies a unique refuge in which things are temporarily freed of the constraints of Being-for-Other and their Being-for-Self is allowed to flourish. In this way alone can one break the “spell” of the subject as well as the principle of social organization that follows therefrom—instrumental reason.

In the discussion of the utopian function of art in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno comes close to violating the Judeo-Marxian Bilderverbot (the taboo against graven images), insofar as utopia is well-nigh concretely depicted. He explicitly recommends aesthetic form as a positive alternative to the reigning principle of social organization. His aestheticist solution to the dominant pressures of “theoretical and practical rationalism” is wholly consistent with Weber's discussion of the aesthetic sphere. In this respect, Adorno's approach is at one with a tradition beginning with romanticism and continuing through l'art pour l'art, whereby the nonutilitarian logic of the aesthetic realm is viewed as the only alternative to an increasingly rationalized and prosaic bourgeois social order. In accord with both the romantics as well as the proponents of art for art's sake, Adorno seeks to redeem the vaunted promesse de bonheur that art counterposes to an antagonistic social totality. Art comes to represent a world of happiness and fulfillment that is denied in the workaday world of bourgeois material life. It embodies claims to sensuousness and affective solidarity that are repulsed in a social world in which formal rationality is the dominant principle. For Adorno, “Art is a refuge of mimetic behavior” and thus signifies a “response to the evils and irrationality of a rational bureaucratic world. … The memory trace of mimesis unearthed by works of art … anticipates a condition of reconciliation between the individual and the collectivity.” As such, art becomes a form of “remembrance,” joining “the present to the past.” As Adorno phrases it, “Remembrance alone is able to give flesh and blood to the notion of utopia, without betraying it to empirical life.” That Adorno interprets works of art as concrete utopian projections in more than a metaphorical sense is indicated by his contention that one must “reverse the copy theory of realist aesthetics: in a sublimated sense, reality ought to imitate works of art, rather than the other way around.”¹⁵

That Adorno makes a concerted effort to emphasize the relation between mimesis, reconciliation, and utopia in the passages just cited is far from accidental. For the utopian program of Aesthetic Theory—and the link between “mimesis” and “remembrance” which is its linchpin—bears a profound resemblance to the one adumbrated jointly with Horkheimer some twenty-five years earlier in Dialectic of Enlightenment. There, too, ruthless domination over external nature becomes the central theoretical problematic. What has been lost in the species' inexorable drive toward rational self-assertion is the capacity to view nature mimetically or fraternally. The solution to this dilemma hinges upon the capacity for remembrance of nature in the subject: “By virtue of the remembrance of nature in the subject, in whose fulfillment the unacknowledged truth of all culture lies hidden, enlightenment is universally opposed to domination.”¹⁶ The subject must remember that it, too, is part of nature; and that consequently all violence perpetrated against the latter will in the last analysis redound implacably against subjectivity itself. The program of enlightenment is thus fulfilled only in a distorted and one-sided sense when it is equated simply with the advance of the rational concept. Equally important is the “natural” or “sensuous” substratum of subjectivity—the subject as a medium of desires, drives, and somatic impulses—which comes into its own only via a conscious act of remembrance: an act that recaptures the “natural” dimension of subjectivity which remains ever-present, though dormant, in our mimetic faculty.¹⁷

The mimesis-reconciliation-utopia triad plays a key role in Adorno's response to the epistemological problem of the “domination of the concept.” For in his eyes, works of art possess the singular advantage of greater immediacy over against the abstract mediations of the conceptual sphere. It is this enhanced immediacy that accounts for their greater affinities with the sensuous dimension of objectivity as such, unlike pure concepts, which exist at a studied remove from the objective world they seek to grasp intellectually.

Art, therefore, may be said to possess a certain epistemological superiority vis-à-vis philosophical truth. Philosophical cognition is suspect insofar as it is inherently implicated in the dialectic of enlightenment: since concepts know phenomena only insofar as they can manipulate them, they are a priori part and parcel of the historical unfolding of domination. As Adorno remarks: “The derivation of thought from logic ratifies in the lecture room the reification of man in the factory and office.”¹⁸

Since theoretical reason is untrustworthy, the aestheticist solution Adorno posits in response is far from surprising. It is of a piece with the standard critique of a rationalized, bourgeois cosmos by the elevated Kulturmensch. It is precisely because of this inordinate distrust of formal rationality that the wager on the aesthetic dimension in Critical Theory is so pronounced: art alone, it would seem, can undo the damage wrought by a logic of unrestrained subjective rationality gone awry.

Adorno emphasizes the superior representational capacities of the aesthetic faculty, as opposed to philosophy, when the depiction of truth is at issue. In art the mimetic faculty, long repressed, is emancipated: one no longer need suppress the desire to be like the Other. The realm of aesthetic illusion or Schein thus frees the subject from his or her otherwise natural compulsion to objectify the Other for purposes of enhanced control. “Works of art represent self-sameness that has been freed of the compulsion to identify,” remarks Adorno.¹⁹ Only works of art are exempt from the Kantian proscription against depicting the “intelligible realm”—a ban that must be upheld in the case of theoretical reason. They alone possess the capacity to express the ineffable, to represent the unrepresentable, by virtue of the magical, transformative capacities of aesthetic Schein. Works of art represent a secular redemption of myth: they alone are capable of depicting a superior, transcendent world order in which—unlike the world at present—good, evil, and beauty are assigned their rightful niches. Yet, unlike traditional myth, aesthetic cosmologies no longer stand in the service of alien powers, but in that of a potentially redeemed humanity. At the same time works of art, in contrast to philosophy, never attempt to serve up the absolute as something immediately accessible. Instead, it always appears enigmatically, via the embellishment and indirection of aesthetic form. As Adorno himself expresses this point: “Works of art speak like fairies in tales: if you want the absolute, you shall have it, but only in disguise.” They are enigmatic “images of Being-in-itself.”²⁰ Art restores the element of wonder or thaumazein to the everyday phenomenal world; a power, according to Aristotle, once possessed by philosophy, but which the latter has surrendered in recent times in favor of protocol statements and analytical truths. Art is the utopian reenchantment of radically disenchanted social totality. It serves as irrefutable proof of the fact that the existing universe of facts is not all there is. It is a constant reminder of a state of not-yet-Being (Bloch) that eludes our concrete grasp at the moment, but which for that reason remains nonetheless “real.” As Adorno remarks, “Aesthetic experience is the experience of something which spirit per se does not provide, either in the world or in itself. It is the possible, as promised by its impossibility. Art is the promise of happiness, a promise that is constantly being broken.”²¹

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Can the utopian potential of Adorno's aesthetics be redeemed? This is only another way of responding to the Lowenthal query with which we began: to what extent has the utopian motif in Critical Theory been suspended? The case of Adorno's aesthetics is paradigmatic, since the utopian wager of Critical Theory was so often couched in aesthetic terms.

In order to be redeemed, Adorno's aesthetics must be refunctioned. To be sure, few theorists have probed the fundamental parameters of aesthetic experience in the modern world more deeply than Adorno. Yet it seems that the true import of Adorno's aesthetic utopianism remains limited by certain fundamental shortcomings of his metatheoretical framework. Adorno's aesthetics are therefore in need of a redemptive critique so that they may be freed from the prejudicial constraints of his own theoretical presuppositions.

The conceptual deficiencies alluded to emanate primarily from two quarters: Adorno's theory of knowledge and his philosophy of history. Both components of his theoretical framework were originally articulated in Dialectic of Enlightenment.²² It is these two aspects of the Adornian worldview that prevent his aesthetic doctrines from receiving the fully exoteric redemption they merit.

We turn first to his theory of knowledge, having already indicated that Aesthetic Theory is very much concerned with resolving certain epistemological problems inherited from German Idealism.

In this respect, it is in no way accidental that one of the book's central categories is the eminently Hegelian concept of the “truth-content” or Wahrheitsgehalt of art. It was unquestionably an advance on the part of Hegel over the aesthetic doctrines of the eighteenth century to have valorized the cognitive dimension of aesthetic objectivations, to have viewed them as legitimate incarnations of the “Idea” or truth. And in this regard, Adorno's aesthetics are eminently Hegelian, even if he values the sensuous side of works of art to an incomparably greater extent.

Nevertheless, once works of art are viewed primarily as “epistemological vehicles” (and in this fundamental respect there is really very little difference between Hegel and Adorno), another crucial component of aesthetic experience tends to fall out of account: the pragmatic dimension, on which the essence of aesthetic experience depends. Because Adorno tries to conceive of works of art primarily as vehicles of philosophical truth, in his approach the entire pragmatic side of works of art—their role in shaping, informing, and transforming the lives of historically existing individuals—falls by the wayside.

That Adorno succumbs to this error in judgment is due to an eminently Hegelian preconception: a belief in an “emphatic concept of truth,” whereby truth is viewed as something transcendent and noncontingent, which escapes the fallibility of the human condition. Adorno's thought—despite the conceptual pyrotechnics of negative dialectics—still very much moves within the horizon of traditional metaphysical theories of truth. One might go so far as to say that his entire philosophical program is motivated by a nostalgia for the lost prelapsarian unity of subject and object, concept and thing. It is this nostalgia that accounts for the prominence of mimesis in his thinking—the importance of a fraternal, nonobjectivating relationship to the external world—as well as the category of reconciliation, the explicit hope for a future condition beyond the subject-object split.

As a result of this tendentious preoccupation with works of art as vehicles of truth, the richness of aesthetic experience—i.e., art's status as a pragmatic phenomenon capable of altering the existential parameters of human life—is significantly downplayed. Interpreting art becomes primarily an esoteric philosophical exercise in deciphering the work's “enigmatic character” (Rätselcharakter); with the result that Walter Benjamin's question concerning the exoteric value of aesthetic experience—the capacity of art to produce “profane illuminations”—is lost sight of.

This deficiency of Adorno's framework is, moreover, systematic rather than accidental in nature. Since his debate with Benjamin in the 1930s over the status of mechanically reproduced works of art, Adorno—who was very likely correct in terms of the particulars of the debate itself—remained undialectically wedded to the concept of an esotericized, autonomous art as an absolute model of aesthetic value. In the debate with Benjamin, he pointed out, in the cases of both film and surrealism, that the act of bursting the vessels of aesthetic autonomy does not automatically produce an emancipatory effect. Instead, one runs the risk of a false sublation of autonomous art, whereby a crucial refuge of negativity and critique would be prematurely integrated with facticity as such. Adorno's cautionary remarks concerning the dangers of a premature integration of art in life-praxis remain valuable to this day. The problem, however, is that his own stance in this debate became rigidified, and thus possible countervailing tendencies in the postwar period were ruled out a priori. The “culture industry” thesis from Dialectic of Enlightenment ossified into a monolithic, self-fulfilling prophecy—a mere mirror image of that undifferentiated continuum of the always-the-same that Adorno himself had projected onto social life under advanced capitalism.

In the present context, we can only fleetingly touch on the second systematic deficiency of Adorno's approach: a philosophy of history that was formulated during one of the darkest hours of recent memory: the era of Nazism, Stalinism, and the ensuing Cold War period, when international politics was reduced to the avoidance of successive, imminent catastrophes. However, his theory of a “totale Verblendungszusammenhang”—a context of total delusion—formulated during these years cannot withstand transposition to very different historical conditions without undergoing extensive modification. Consequently, Adorno's historico-philosophical thinking became similarly ossified, reinforcing his unreceptiveness to oppositional cultural forms with genuinely exoteric, generalizable potential.

The utopian moment of Critical Theory is redeemable; but one must specify very carefully what type of utopia one intends to redeem. What is not meant by utopia in the present context is the variety of utopianism criticized by Marx throughout his writings of the 1840s: a utopian future which is in essence a secularized version of eschatological religious longing. This strong version of utopianism resurfaces in the secular messianism of Bloch, Benjamin, the early Lukács, and Marcuse. In Adorno's work, it appears in the guise of a “negative theology”: utopia would be the obverse of the present state of things.²³ This strong version of utopianism, whose telos is a state of reconciliation—of humanity with nature, existence and essence, thought and being—beyond the split between subject and object, is the type that Lowenthal has rightly consigned to an outmoded theoretical paradigm.

The weak version of utopianism that is recuperable from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory pertains to his advocacy of “aesthetic alienation”: art presents the familiar and everyday to us in a new and unexpected light, such that we are impelled to modify our habitual modes of thought and perception. Authentic works of art are the archfoes of all intellectual complacency and positivist affirmation. Adorno is essentially correct in his claim that works of art exist in a state of constant polemical tension vis-à-vis the given universe of facts. Genuine works of art are intrinsically utopian insofar as they both highlight the indigent state of reality at present and seek to illuminate a path toward what has never-yet-been. The profane illuminations of aesthetic experience seek to unseat the predominant tendencies toward “theoretical and practical rationalism”; and as such they give expression to an affective dimension of life that is routinely tabooed by bourgeois subjectivity and its unceasing will toward rational self-preservation: they are powerful repositories of a mimetic, noninstrumental relation to nature, of human fraternity, of nonutilitarian playfulness.

Habermas has expressed a similar insight: aesthetic experiences “are possible only to the extent that the categories of the patterned expectations of organized daily experience collapse, that the routines of daily action and conventions of ordinary life are destroyed, and the normality of foreseeable and unaccountable certainties are suspended.” By being “incorporated into the context of individual life-histories” art “belongs to everyday communicative practice. It then … reaches into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations and transforms the totality in which these moments are related to each another. In this respect, modern art harbors a utopia that becomes a reality to the degree that the mimetic powers sublimated in the work of art find resonance in the mimetic relations of a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity of everyday life.”²⁴

A precondition for redeeming Adorno's theory of aesthetic modernity would be its transposition to an exoteric context: aesthetic illumination is not just the province of critics, aesthetes, artists, and experts, but a general phenomenon of daily life that concretely alters the life-histories of individuals. The “truth-content” of art is in principle accessible to a plurality of recipients.

There are, moreover, several structural features of contemporary aesthetic experience that suggest that Adorno's argument for the esoteric redemption of artistic truth-content is being undercut from below. For example, in an essay on “The Decline of the Modern Age,” Peter Bürger points to the obsolescence of modernist high art in favor of a new series of hybrid genres and forms that are loosely identified as “postmodern.”²⁵ Bürger correctly questions the descriptive cogency of the latter term, observing that many so-called postmodern art forms (e.g., neo-dada, neo-expressionism, etc.) are in fact continuous with the modern. The important point is that the conception of modernism on which Adorno's aesthetic theory was predicated—the idea of a select canon of hermetic, self-referential, autonomous works—has burst asunder. Any attempt to preserve the contemporary relevance of his theories must of necessity incorporate this manifestly new “state of the arts” into the total picture.

The changed configuration of contemporary aesthetic experience, the dissolution of traditional genre distinctions that has been described by Bürger and others, suggests the prospect of redeeming Adorno's aesthetics on a truly generalizable scale. And although this new aesthetic constellation is fraught with contradictions and tensions whose ultimate outcome remains difficult to foresee, it seems to indicate a potentially new sphere of operation for an aesthetics of negativity such as Adorno's. For the contemporary fusion of genres and levels of aesthetic experience suggests the real possibility that the profane illuminations Adorno sought to cull from esoteric art may now be exoterically available—in a way Adorno himself may have been incapable of anticipating. The apparent dissolution of the traditional European “aesthetics of autonomy” seems to indicate that the types of critical aesthetic experiences Adorno confined to hermetic works have now taken root in the life-world of late capitalism in general. That the aesthetic sensibility of modernism seems to have been democratized—and this is certainly one prominent aspect of the various strands of cultural experience commonly referred to as “postmodern”—is a phenomenon to be welcomed. For it means that an aesthetics of rupture, discontinuity, de-familiarization, and disenchantment—in sum, the “ideology-critical” function Adorno attributes to authentic works of art—has shifted to the plane of everyday artistic endeavor. An entire series of “popular” genres and cultural forms that as a rule fell beneath the threshold of Adorno's theoretical purview—popular music, cinema, even television in certain respects—have over the course of the last two decades displayed a new pluralism and inventiveness. To subsume them immediately under the “culture industry” thesis as originally formulated in the 1940s would be rash. It is, moreover, hardly surprising that this assault on the tenets of high modernism originated in the U.S., where (European) cultural elitism has always been at odds with a fundamentally democratic cultural self-understanding.

Nevertheless, the tendencies we have just described are far from unambiguous. The two most salient features of the much vaunted postmodern turn in the arts are 1) random historical borrowing of artistic styles; and 2) a collapse of the distinction between high and low culture, art and entertainment. The first trend poses the specter of a historicist loss of historical consciousness; if “all ages are equally close to God” (Ranke), then the course of history itself is trivialized, and all epochs are simultaneously equally meaningful and equally meaningless. And an absolute effacement of the distinction between high and low culture would be a far from untroubling development: for it harbors the prospect of a false sublation of art in the domain of life praxis, whereby art would to all intents and purposes become fused with the phenomenal sphere of daily life. The last-named tendency represents a real danger for the various artistic currents commonly referred to as postmodern. And thus, from the bursting of the vessels of aesthetic autonomy, an emancipatory effect does not necessarily follow. Here, the main risk is a slackening of the critical tension between art and life that proved the linchpin of modernist aesthetics. Consequently, the danger arises that once the boundaries between art and life become blurred, the critical potentials of art decay, and art itself is transformed into a vehicle of affirmation: i.e., the uncritical mirror-image of the “happy consciousness” of late capitalism. Adorno's “aesthetics of determinate negation” provide an important safeguard against this eventuality.

Notes

1. Leo Lowenthal, “The Utopian Motif is Suspended” (interview conducted with Martin Lüdke), New German Critique 38 (Spring-Summer 1986): 105-111. It has also appeared in Lowenthal's autobiography, An Unmastered Past, edited by Martin Jay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 237-246.

2. For the best account of this generation and its various programs, see Michael Löwy, Rédemption et Utopie (Paris: PUF, 1988).

3. In a private conversation, Lowenthal identified Bloch's Geist der Utopie and Lukács' Theorie des Romans as the two works that most influenced his own early development.

4. Lowenthal, “The Utopian Motif,” p. 111.

5. Translated in English as “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber, pp. 323-359.

6. Ibid., p. 342.

7. It may seem paradoxical to attribute “systematic intentions” to the author of Negative Dialectics. However, it should be kept in mind that despite his pronounced aversion to l'esprit de system, l'esprit systematique was not a concept entirely alien to his way of thinking: from Rolf Tiedemann's “Nachwort” to Aesthetic Theory, we learn that Adorno intended to compose a major treatise on moral philosophy upon completion of the latter work. Had this intention not been cut short by his death in 1969, Adorno's three major works would have corresponded to the subject matter of Kant's three Critiques.

8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 14, 9.

9. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 321.

10. Ibid., p. 15.

11. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 122, 124.

13. Ibid., pp. 122-123.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., pp. 190, 192; emphasis added.

16. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 40.

17. Cf. Walter Benjamin, “The Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections, edited by Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), pp. 333-336.

18. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 30.

19. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 183.

20. Ibid., pp. 183, 184.

21. Ibid., p. 196.

22. Although the true intellectual historical origins of his outlook on philosophy and history go back to two profoundly Benjaminian essays from the early 1930s. See “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” and “Die Idee der Naturgeschichte,” both in Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 325-344, 345-365.

23. On the relation between Adorno and negative theology, see F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974).

24. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, edited by Richard J. Bernstein (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985), pp. 200-202.

25. Peter Bürger, “The Decline of the Modern Age,” Telos 62 (Winter 1984-1985): 117-130.