The Wanderer - Burney

Burney published her fourth novel, The Wanderer: Or, Female Difficulties, a few days prior to Charles Burney’s death. Described as “a story of love and misalliance set in the French Revolution”, it criticizes the English treatment of foreigners during the war years. It also pillories the hypocritical social curbs put on women in general—as the heroine tries one means after another to earn an honest penny—as well as the elaborate class criteria for social inclusion or exclusion. That strong social message sits uneasily within a strange structure that might be called a melodramatic proto-mystery novel with elements of the picaresque. The heroine is no scalliwag, in fact a bit too innocent for modern taste, but she is wilful and for obscure reasons will not reveal her name or origin. So as she darts about the South of England as a fugitive, she arouses suspicions that it is not always easy to agree with the author are unfair or unjustified. There are a dismaying number of coincidental meetings of characters. Burney made £1500 from the first run, but the work disappointed her followers and it did not go into a second English printing, although it met her immediate financial needs. Critics felt it lacked the insight of her earlier novels. It remains interesting today for the social opinions that it conveys and for some flashes of Burney's humour and discernment of character. It was reprinted with an introduction by the novelist Margaret Drabble in the "Mothers of the Novel" series.


The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties is Frances Burney’s last novel. Published in March 1814 by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, this historical novel with Gothic overtones set during the 1790s tells the story of a mysterious woman who attempts to support herself while hiding her identity. The novel focuses on the difficulties faced by women as they strive for economic and social independence.

Begun in the 1790s, the novel took Burney fourteen years to complete. She worked on it sporadically while she wrote plays and was an exile in France. Although the first edition sold out on the strength of Burney's reputation, the scathing reviews of the novel caused it to sell poorly. Reviewers disliked its portrayal of women and its criticism of English society.

Burney spent fourteen years writing The Wanderer—the longest amount of time she spent writing any of her works. She began the novel in the late 1790s, after finishing Camilla, but stopped, deciding to write plays, which were more profitable. In 1801, Burney's husband, General Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Piochard D'Arblay, returned to his home country of France and tried to acquire a commission in the French army that would not require him to fight the English. He was unsuccessful and could not then leave France without raising the suspicions of the government, so Burney joined him in April 1802. The Napoleonic Wars, which had halted briefly, resumed and Burney was forced to spend ten years as an exile in France. While there, she worked on a draft of The Wanderer; however, no manuscript of the novel exists, so it is impossible to track the exact progress of the novel. In 1812, Burney left France with her son on the Mary Anne, ostensibly to go to the United States; in actuality, she intended to return in England. The ship illegally docked in England and was captured, making Burney and a few other passengers nominally prisoners. Burney had not originally intended to work on the novel while in England, but during a long wait for her ship at Dunkirk, she had decided to continue working on it. Burney's husband sent her the manuscript there, to do which he had to promise the French government that "upon his Honour...the Work had nothing in it political, nor even National...possibly offensive to the Government". The customs officer, however, was enraged that the manuscript had been sent. According to Burney, he "began a rant of indignation & amazement, at a sight so unexpected & prohibited...He sputtered at the Mouth, & stamped with his feet". He accused Burney of being a traitor; Burney herself believed that without the help of an English merchant at the time, her manuscript would have been destroyed. However in her DedicationBurney gave a completely opposite account, no doubt to avoid any difficulties for her husband in France.Composition

Plot and themes

The protagonist, later identified as Juliet Granville, tries to become self-sufficient, but her story reveals the “difficulties” of a woman in her friendless situation. Women take advantage of her economically and men importune her. She is “a woman totally dispossessed by political events”. Miss Arbe, for example, takes control of Juliet's life and her money (although inexpertly); she also attempts to organize a ladies committee, becoming "a comic spectacle of political life". Specifically, Burney compares Miss Arbe to Robespierre: as Doody explains, "the arrangements of both become swallowed in egotism, are highly disorganized if impetuously directed, and are bound to end in failure". Throughout The Wanderer, Burney comments on the tyrannical hold that the rich have over the poor in England, showing how the wealthy will accept music lessons from Juliet but refuse to pay for them, placing her in a desperate situation. She also charts the downward spiral of Juliet from gentility to working woman; she begins as a musician and slips into the less-reputable positions of milliner and seamstress. In her cross-class analysis of the problems of women, Burney was probably influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798). However, according to Doody, "Burney is the first novelist seriously to express sympathy for the working women in their normal conditions of work—and to see how the system of employment, not merely individual bad employers, creates conditions of impossible monotony."The Wanderer opens with a group of people fleeing the Terror. Among them is the protagonist, who refuses to identify herself. No one can place her socially—even her nationality and race are in doubt. As Burney scholar Margaret Doody explains, "the heroine thus arrives [in England] as a nameless Everywoman: both black and white, both Eastern and Western, both high and low, both English and French." She asks for help from the group, but because she knows no one, she is refused.

Elinor Joddrel is the antagonist of the story. She controls her own destiny, largely because she is an umarried heiress, and articulates “feminist views on the economic and sexual oppression of women”. During the 1790s, novelists often portrayed feminist characters, sometimes as heroines, such as in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), but more frequently as “grotesque satires” as in Elizabeth Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800). In the character of Elinor, Justine Crump argues in her article on the novel for The Literary Encyclopedia, Burney represents feminist arguments, but she does not either explicitly criticize or endorse them. Doody, however, contends that Burney endorses Elinor's feminist arguments because no character contradicts them and Juliet appears to agree with them. When the two discuss women's issues, Juliet does not dispute Elinor's point of view, she adds more points to her argument.

Elinor falls hopelessly in love with Harleigh, the brother of her fiancé and a suitor of Juliet’s. Harleigh is uncertain whether he should propose to Juliet, as he knows nothing of her family and she earns money by giving young ladies music lesson and instruction on the harp. After Harleigh rejects her, Elinor “abandons decorum altogether”; she dresses up as a man and frightens Juliet with her threats of suicide. It is Harleigh who discovers Juliet’s true identity—she is the daughter of a “clandestine” marriage of the Earl of Granville. She was raised in France and forced to marry a revolutionary in order to save her guardian from the guillotine. Juliet fled the marriage, but her husband pursued her, believing that she would inherit the Granville fortune. The Granville family know of her predicament, but refuse to help her. Harleigh abandons Juliet after discovering that she is married. She is eventually rescued by a friend. In the end, Juliet’s husband is deported and executed as a spy; her guardian comes to England, thereby granting her respectability and her inheritance. Harleigh returns and proposes. Finally, “Elinor is brought to repudiate, if not her feminist principles, at least her suicidal intentions, and order is restored to the novel”. However, as Doody explains, "Burney gives us the 'happy ending' of course, but not until after she has made sure that we see it is just a formality, and by no means a solution." The reader cares little for Juliet's marriage to Harleigh and recognizes instead that she has become a commodity.

The love triangle between Harleigh, Elinor, and Juliet suggests that Elinor should be a villainess who disrupts the happy love of Harleigh and Juliet, however the characterizations of both Elinor and Harleigh challenge this assumption. Harleigh is a "very passive and fussy person", and as Doody argues, "he does not satisfy our ideas of the 'hero' of a love story—who ought to be handsome, dashing, strong, and courageous, if a trifle self-willed." His purpose in the novel is to mark out what is respectable and proper, claiming that Juliet should not perform her music in public nor should she profit monetarily from it. Juliet's defense of her performances to Harleigh mirror Burney's own defense of playwriting to her father, Charles Burney, who strongly disapproved. Harleigh is named after Henry Mackenzie's Harley in The Man of Feeling (1771) and reminiscent of him—a hero of "sentiment and delicacy".

Genre

The Wanderer is a historical novel, part of a new genre that was a response to the French Revolution. During the 1790s and early 19th century, novelists examined the past using fiction.Charlotte Turner Smith analyzed the revolution in Desmond (1792) and The Banished Man (1794) while Jane West's The Loyalists looked at the English Civil War. Sir Walter Scott'sWaverley (1814) was published the same year as The Wanderer. Although the novel is set during 1793-94, "the dire reign of the terrific Robespierre", Burney does not fill the text with references to specific historical events. Neither Louis XVI nor Marie Antoinette are mentioned in the novel, for example.

The Wanderer also draws on the conventions of Gothic fiction, specifically "mystery and concealment, spying and flight".Like Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791), the heroine of The Wanderer is unknown and in need of sympathy at the beginning of the story. Throughout the story, the heroine's name is consistently concealed and later only half-revealed.

Publication and reception

The Wanderer was translated into French by J.-B.-J. Breton de la Martinière and A.-J. Lemierre d'Argy and published in Paris in 1814; Burney described the translation as "abominable".A three-volume American edition was published in New York in 1814. No other editions were published until Pandora Press's 1988 reissue.The Wanderer was published in five volumes by Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown on 28 March 1814. Burney was one of the most popular novelists in Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, but she had not published a novel since 1796. The Wanderer was greatly anticipated and Longman printed a large first edition of 3,000 copies.^[8] All of these copies were sold to booksellers before the novel's actual release. Believing the novel would be a bestseller, they issued a second edition of 1,000 copies on 15 April 1814 and planned three additional ones. However, compared to Burney’s earlier novels, The Wanderer was not a success. Only 461 copies of the second edition were sold during 1814 and over the next ten years, only 74. The leftovers were pulped.

The Wanderer received unfavorable reviews, “with one or two quite damning”, which may have seriously affected its sales. Reviewers argued that Burney’s earlier novels had been better; The Wanderer was improbable and the language was “prolix and obscure”. They were also taken aback by its criticism of England at a time when the entire country was celebrating its victory over Napoleon. The negative reviews were published quickly (for the 19th century): two hostile reviews appeared in April 1814; a genuinely favorable review did not appear until April 1815. Critic William Hazlitt complained about the novel's focus on women: “The difficulties in which [Burney] involves her heroines are indeed, ‘Female Difficulties;’ – they are difficulties created out of nothing.” According to Hazlitt, women did not have problems that could be made into interesting fiction. The reviewer for the British Critic found the character of Elinor distasteful and guided readers to Hamilton's more conservative Memoirs of Modern Philosophers. Since the 1980s, The Wanderer, along with Burney’s other works, has become the focus of serious scholarship and is popular among students.

Biblical Worldview of Levinas' Substitution

http://brianjlund.blogspot.com/2006/11/levinas-on-substitutiontopic.html

Levinas: Substitution

http://faculty.evansville.edu/tb2/PDFs/UndergradPhil.pdf

Meaning and Sense (1964)

Levina's discourse on method; in a critical confrontation with Merleau-Ponty & Heidegger, Levinas shows how his style of thought differs from phenomenology, a philosophical method which he continues to practice as an obligatory passage to any thinking beyond phenomenology.
Phenomenology: an approach that concentrates on the study of consciousness and the objects of direct experience; a philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness.

Levinas: Meaning and Sense (1964)

1.  Meaning and receptivity.  There are two classic theories: (1) for Plato and Husserl perception involves an intuition of object-meanings; (2) for Heidegger the simpliect [object] requires being as its horizon--being, namely, which is gathered--with no privilege accorded to what others regard as the alleged sensory "basis" of metaphoric language.  ["Gathered" is Heidegger's word for the synthesis (Kant) that brings together what is in the background or margin (Husserl) of any object of consciousness].

2.  Meaning, totality, cultural gesture.  Meaning is an affair of invoking variously (it need not be through language--a gesture suffices) a cultural world or totality.  The body provides the sense of Being that is presupposed as the background on that basis of which intellectual recognition can occur.

3.  The antiplatonism of contemporary philosophy of meaning.  If meaning arises (only) through each cultural, Being-and-world-gathering act, there is no eternal perspective for us; there are no colonizing hierarchies of insight.  This multivocal condition is atheism.

4.  The "economic" meaning.  The attempt founders to reduce the cultural play of meanings to a basic meaning, a function of the values univocally determined by human need.  But human needs are always also culturally expressive.  (Note nationalism as need, too.)  And the drive for unified, fulfilled society presupposes (as in Plato's Republic) something that transcends need.

5.  The unique sense.  Pluralism is incoherent, since it can't help presupposing or needing a Source of sense.  But the (western) traditional Source of sense was the no longer credible and still economic religion of a supernatural God of miracles.  The analysis of sense must yield the notion of God that sense harbors.

6.  Sense and work.  Sense arises from orientation toward an Other--as seen in the noble work done in 1941, work done without getting anything in return, without triumph, without eternal life, work done on behalf of a future beyond my death.

7.  Sense and ethics.  There is desire beyond need, a relation to the Other--who is both (1) understood hermeneutically (in the customary ways of interpreting) and (2) functions to orient meaning.  The relation to the other is neither engulfed in the reflective pretentions of philosophy's self-consciousness nor solicited in a naive-spontaneous way by the need for "God."

8.  Beyond culture.  Plato mistakenly thought mind could rise above culture and grasp eternal truth, but retained the potential for tyranny.  Nevertheless, finding the abstract man in each man, he paved the way for a new moral Platonism, capable of judging cultures.

9.  The trace.  The face is a visitation (not an effect, not a sign--both of which are intramundane).  The other is the trace of Him, of illeity--absolutely past, absolutely transcendent, not the (Husserlian) correlate of any intention. . . beyond iconography [cf. Hegel's critique of representation as picture-thinking].  "The revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality."  Thence being has a sense (not a finality; there is no end.  True happiness attends desire which is not extinguished in happiness.

Levinas: Meaning & Sense

Levinas on Meaning and Sense

I.

In our last class, we discussed Meaning and Sense by Levinas.
We discussed why intellectualism will not always be
successful in finding exactly accurate definitions for meaning.
This is because the meaning source comes out of intuitition
and intentionality of a singular particular object. Interpreted
constitution of meaning has a smaller probability of having an
accurate recognition of causality even through logical
connections than the validating causal relationship, which is
the underlying constitution of meaning. We also discussed
how meaning is constituted culturally. The source of an
individual object is its place in the context that provides
access to its meaning. To me, this begins to deny that there is
an objectively present world. We also discussed the
“Economic Meaning.” I would also note from part 3 that the
expression of meaning through art and poetry occurs through
consciousnesss.

II.

In Meaning and Sense, Levinas’s thesis is that, “Height
ordains being” and also that the character of being has
meaning apart from just the sense of being. Levinas suggests2

Parker Emmerson

that meanings are distinguished in their context of sense and
that through a unique existence of being, we may being to
diverge from the Economic idea of God and see that, “sense is
impossible on the basis of the ego” (BPW 48). So far, the
scientific method has shown to be a descriptive way of
resolving paradoxes as it suggests that we can turn
quantitative value judgments into theses, which have a
qualitatively interpretable normative description of
experience. The absolute is how we find use from what is not,
like the hollow of a bowl, and there is still much to debate in
the resolution of paradox. Levinas says that the cultural
meaning revealed, derived from a historical perspective, is
jostled by the abstract being of the other, “The Other comes
to us not only out of the context but also without mediation”
(BPW 53).

III.

“The calling into question of oneself is in fact the welcome of
the absolutely other” (BPW 54). The absolute as the
cancelation of measurements in their fundament with relation
to each other presents a realm for differentiating the being
from the emptiness and the suggested relations, which have
functionality (Heidegger’s ready at hand). “Thus in the
relationship with a face, in the ethical relationship, there is
delineated the straightforwardness of an orientation, or

3

Parker Emmerson

sense” (BPW 55). Yet, even in the absence of substance, the
sense of emptiness is of the present at hand. Levinas
proposes that the revelation of the other occurs through the
epiphany of the face. “To be qua leaving a trace is to pass, to
depart, to absolve oneself… the trace would be the very
indelibility of being” (BPW 61-62). If most of the past is behind
us, and most of the future is before us, and the race is,“the
presence of that which properly speaking has never been
there, of what is always past,” then what is the phenomenon
of a thing in terms of traces? If there is a divine force of truth
within the creation’s mechanism of which God would form
miracles, it is reasonable to believe that our actions would be
both free due to the incompleteness of total systems and
consequential in the communication and understanding of the
metaphysical. Though, a solid grounding in phenomenology
must be substantiated, and the miraculous and the
transformative must come from the sense. It is the actions
that are the miracle, which inspires other miracles, and brings
about the epiphany of the other.

IV.

Can we read faces like maps of memories of life? And, how
would this apply to the subjective perceiver whose every
instant belongs to the world? Can we converse in the
abstraction?

Adorno: Aesthetic Theory (NOTES)

Empirical = experience; the world of fact/actuality

Adorno wants to argue against the view that art has nothing to do with experience and that naive reflectionism (art reflects life). art is connected to life and experience but not completely--its in a critical sense. One is self-conscious about the structure of the thing one is looking at. 

Reflectionism: 

Marx: Modern art is subjective, day-dreamy, decadent and foolishness--we ought to be creating productiveness. (Philistinian: anti-art, be productive...machinery) in a feudal society, art will produce the feudal means of production (military force) Art reflects life.

Lukacs: Art doesn't naively reflect the modes of production but class relations at a given time.

Adorno: Art is neither art for art sake or capitalist decadency or a reflection in either a naive or a medicated way of class relations of modes of production but reflects upon experiences in a critical way and is articulated in form as well as content. Adorno is a great defender of high modernist art (Picasso, Schoenberg) the dissident broken forms of modernist art of reflections of the power relations that are out there. The form of the work is a challenge is not simple conventional realism. The breaking of a momentum illusion functions as a type of critique...Picasso breaking up a woman in his art = ways that society constructs women. 

Stalin & art: It showed realism in that there is straightforward story but its socialist because the superficial realism proves that the party is right--used to support the party line. All artist were forced to become members of committees. any art alien to this was viewed as decadent--if the art wasn't propaganda for a political party or if the art was experimental then they got into trouble with Stalin. If the art showed class struggle then it was not art.

High culture induces ideological conformity.

Pop culture reinforces a naive empiricism where we are invited to conform but in a licensed way. Get a girls attention...light 2 cigarettes and give her one ... because that's what they do in the movies. We think in the way that we see in the movies. Hollywood art and socialist realist art  would be for Adorno the same kind of crap as a opposed to high art (Jame Joyce’s “Ulysses”, Shostakovich). Socialist realism is ultimately politically progressive even if its not saying it in the party line. It is Leninist, Stalinist system ('don't think, feel happy' culture): if you get off that track they'll put you in the gulag.

Khrushchev of Soviet Union: Went after modernist poets and other artists (of abstract art) because he saw it a decadent, corrupt and anti-Socialist. instead of killing like stalin, he just silenced them. Had a public debate with good russian poet.

Adorno wants to combine Kant and Freud's views: Kant's notion of disinterestedness in aesthetic experience and Freud's notion of desire being mediated in aesthetics.

Soviet material reality had become so non-productive that they had to bring the cold war to an end

Praxis/practice: material activity in the real world (heavy industry, supply chains, getting coffee for work) Marx: Everything is organized in a society by a means of production.

Art induces a good practice, because material praxis is governed by the value of production, making things, consuming things--art suggests a mode of praxis liberated from a material necessity. 

A wants to argue against a certain vulgarity in the Marxist tradition of art...argue against the totalitarian thrust of Marxist thought. His big argument is that we think through concepts and concepts efface differences. We think in terms that create an identity between things that are not identical. wants to use conceptual theoretical thought against itself. Use the language that had reinforced identity in a way that will allow non-identity to reveal itself (Non-identitarianism).

The aesthetic where the non-identical is born home to humans. if theoretical discourse totalizes and makes us all the same then art at its best works against that. the revolutionary thrust of marxism should imitate the practices of imitate modernist art. not that Picasso was a member of communist party that makes him progressive but what he does in painting that makes him progressive.

Have to see what art is observing in order to see the distinctiveness of what art is doing. art has an internal dissidence--due to the tension between form and content. the tension has meaning in relation to things of the outside. through the alienation of modern form (concerned with its own form), art then pushes us toward non-conceptual conceptions, which reveals the non-identical. art processes its materials through form and through manipulating form. (Ex: fragments put together in ways that call attention to the fragmentariness of the fragmented parts) See how the form reflects an aspect of life but not in a way that says here's the way the world is and here's how art mirrors the form. Art is about the world outside of art but only by turning attention to the artfulness of art.

Art uses the material from life, reorganizes it in such a way that it reflects upon the use of things in the real world. The form shows us various sorts of alienation that relfect material forms of alienation in the world but only by calling our attention to the form itself in its own naïve representativeness. Kant is right in that there is a disinterestedness in art. Freud is correct in that art is a sublimation of images by which we manage or express our desires. Adorno combines Kant and Freud: Modern music (Schoenberg) is not very pretty on your first hearing…there is not an interest it it…to enjoy it we cant be interested in it, but that sort of art and its very dissidence articulates our desire to overcome mechanization, alienation, and fragmentation. It speaks to desire while at the same time it is disinterested. Art is adversarial to corrupt and dehumanizing human orders but not in a direct, political (“I protest!”) way.

In papers: Correlate Adorno’s passage with Kristeva…He wants us to see that there are commonalities in these discourses but distinctiveness to each discourse.

Aesthetic Theory - Adorno

Aesthetic Theory

Relentlessly tracing concentric circles, Aesthetic Theory carries out a dialectical double reconstruction. It reconstructs the modern art movement from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. It simultaneously reconstructs philosophical aesthetics, especially that of Kant and Hegel, from the perspective of modern art. From both sides Adorno tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and philosophy discussed.Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement. So a summary of his philosophy of art sometimes needs to signal this by putting “modern” in parentheses. The book begins and ends with reflections on the social character of (modern) art. Two themes stand out in these reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this world. When addressing both questions, Adorno retains from Kant the notion that art proper (“fine art” or “beautiful art”—schöne Kunst—in Kant's vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual import (geistiger Gehalt) and Marx's emphasis on art's embeddedness in society as a whole. The result is a complex account of the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy. The artwork's necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to (modern) art's social character, namely, to be “the social antithesis of society”.
Adorno regards authentic works of (modern) art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong. These tensions enter the artwork through the artist's struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole. Adorno sees all of these tensions and conflicts as “contradictions” to be worked through and eventually to be resolved. Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent.
As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical conflicts. One gets frequent glimpses of this in Aesthetic Theory. For the most part, however, the book proceeds at the level of “third reflections”—reflections on categories employed in actual commentary and criticism, with a view to their suitability for what artworks express and to their societal implications. Typically he elaborates these categories as polarities or dialectical pairs.
One such polarity, and a central one in Adorno's theory of artworks as social monads, occurs between the categories of import (Gehalt) and function (Funktion). Adorno's account of these categories distinguishes his sociology of art from both hermeneutical and empirical approaches. A hermeneutical approach would emphasize the artwork's inherent meaning or its cultural significance and downplay the artwork's political or economic functions. An empirical approach would investigate causal connections between the artwork and various social factors without asking hermeneutical questions about its meaning or significance. Adorno, by contrast, argues that, both as categories and as phenomena, import and function need to be understood in terms of each other. On the one hand, an artwork's import and its functions in society can be diametrically opposed. On the other hand, one cannot give a proper account of an artwork's social functions if one does not raise import-related questions about their significance. So too, an artwork's import embodies the work's social functions and has potential relevance for various social contexts. In general, however, and in line with his critiques of positivism and instrumentalized reason, Adorno gives priority to import, understood as societally mediated and socially significant meaning. The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than straightforwardly political or economic functions. This is consistent with a hyperbolic version of the claim that (modern) art is society's social antithesis: “Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness”
The priority of import also informs Adorno's stance on art and politics, which derives from debates with Lukács, Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s (Lunn 1982; Zuidervaart 1991, 28–43). Because of the shift in capitalism's structure, and because of Adorno's own complex emphasis on (modern) art's autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicateAesthetic Theory, are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.
Arguably, the idea of “truth content” (Wahrheitsgehalt) is the pivotal center around which all the concentric circles of Adorno's aesthetics turn (Zuidervaart 1991; Wellmer 1991, 1–35 ; Jarvis 1998, 90–123). To gain access to this center, one must temporarily suspend standard theories about the nature of truth (whether as correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic success) and allow for artistic truth to be dialectical, disclosive, and nonpropositional. According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import (Gehalt) by virtue of an internal dialectic between content (Inhalt) and form (Form). This import invites critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs. The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions. Truth content is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: “Art has truth as the semblance of the illusionless”.

Aesthetic Theory - Adorno

Whilst Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensual, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.

Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. He wrote that "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism" Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same.

Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives – left and right – the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology

Aesthetic Theory - Adorno

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno is concerned not only with such standard aesthetic preoccupations as the function of beauty and sublimity in art, but with the relations between art and society. He feels that modern art's freedom from such restrictions as cult and imperial functions that had plagued previous eras of art has led to art's expanded critical capacity and increased formal autonomy. With this expanded autonomy comes art's increased responsibility for societal commentary. However, Adorno does not feel that overtly politicized content is art's greatest critical strength: rather, he champions a more abstracted type of "truth-content" (Warheitsgehalt). Unlike Kantian or idealist aesthetics, Adorno's aesthetics locates truth-content within the art object, rather than in the perception of the subject. Such content is, however, affected by art's self-consciousness at the hands of its necessary distance from society, which is perceptible in such instances as the dissonances inherent in modern art. Throughout, Adorno praises the drama of Samuel Beckett, to whom the book was dedicated.

Searle - What is a Speech Act? (Wiki)

he provides an analysis of the allegedly prototypical illocutionary act of promising, and offers sets of semantical rules intended to represent the linguistic meaning of devices indicating further (supposed) illocutionary act types (1969, 57-71).

Among the concepts presented in the book is the distinction between the 'illocutionary force' and the 'propositional content' of an utterance. Searle does not precisely define the former as such, but rather introduces several possible illocutionary forces by example. According to Searle, the sentences:

1. Sam smokes habitually.
2. Does Sam smoke habitually?
3. Sam, smoke habitually!
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually!

each indicate the same propositional content (Sam smoking habitually) but differ in the illocutionary force indicated (a statement, a question, a command, and an expression of desire, respectively) (1969, 22).

Searle, What is a Speech Act?

https://files.nyu.edu/mjr318/public/language08/Language%209%20-%20Searle.pdf

What is a Speech Act - Searle [1965]

·         Searle practices linguistic analysis in the spirit of Austin, “careful elucidation of some of the concepts of ordinary language.”  Language is of interest not just because of its usefulness for solving philosophical puzzles but in and of itself.

·         Like Austin, Searle believes that we cannot account for meaning in the absence of the context of a speech act.  In Searle, sentences (types) do not express a proposition.  Instead, tokens or sentences in a context, express propositions.

·         Using Austin’s framework, points out that there are many ways of describing or “carving up” the same speech act (physical act, act of reference, perlocutionary act, and illocutionary act). In looking at a single act there are many ways of describing it:  “The speaker will characteristically have moved his jaw and tongue and made noises.  He will have performed acts within the class which includes making statements, asking questions, issuing commands, giving reports, greeting and warning.  The members of this last class are what Austin called illocutionary acts and it is with this class that I shall be concerned in this paper.”  (377)

·         For Searle the basic unit of language is the speech act or illocutionary act, the production of a token in the context of a speech act (not the word, the sentence type, or the theory).

·         For a token to be an instance of communication, the audience must take it as being produced by a being with certain intentions (relevance of speaker intention, in contrast to Russell or Frege or logical positivism).

·         Introduces and defines the notion of a proposition as the common content of various expressions such as (380)

1. Will John leave the room?
2. John will leave the room.
3. John, leave the room.

·         Distinguishes between the notion of a proposition and that of an assertion:  “An assertion is an illocutionary act, but a proposition is not an act at all, although the act of expressing a proposition is part of performing certain illocutionary acts.”  (381)

·         Argues for the main thesis that to perform an illocutionary act is to primarily to do (rather than to say) and to engage in rule-governed behavior.  (378)

·         Responds to Austin’s call for a general theory of speech acts, producing a theory of speech acts in which speech acts are analyzed in terms of schemas.  For example, a speaker S makes a promise (acts out a certain illocutionary act) if and only if

(1)   he utters an expression E where E is a device for promising and

(2)   the felicity conditions for promising obtain.

·         To explain the notion of meaning, introduces the notion of semantical rules that govern the use of expressions and distinguishes two types: regulative and constitutive. “The hypothesis that lies behind the present paper is that the semantics of a language an be regarded as a series of systems of constitutive rules and that illocutionary acts are performed in accordance with these sets of constitutive rules.”  (380)

·         Intends to explicate the notion of an illocutionary act by (1) stating a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the performance of a particular kind of illocutionary act, and (2) extracting from it a set of semantical rules of the use of the expression (378).

·         Describes a (Gricean) theory of meaning that takes into account speaker intention.  (382) To say that a speaker meant something by X is to say that the speaker intended the utterance of X to produce some effect in the audience by means of the recognition of this intention.

·         Evaluates Grice’s definition as beneficial in that it points of the role of speaker intention but as deficient in that it ignores the role of convention. 

“It fails to distinguish the different kinds of effects – perlocutionary versus illocutionary – that one may intend to produce in one’s hearers, and it further fails to show the way in which these different kinds of effects are related to the notion of meaning.”  (383)

An American soldier addresses the Italian captors with “Kennst du as Land, wo die Zitronen bluhen?

Gricean effect: persuading them I am a German soldier (perlocutionary) through the recognition of my intention to do so.

But it doesn’t follow that what I mean is that I am a German soldier when I say “Do you know the land where the lemon trees bloom?”

“what we can mean is a function of what we are saying, it is also a matter of convention.”  (384)

·         Amends Grice’s definition to take into account the role of convention, as well as intention.  (384)

To say that a speaker meant something by X in the performance of a certain illocutionary act is to say that the speaker intended the utterance of X to produce some effect in the audience by means of the recognition of this intention and furthermore, if he is using the words literally, he intends this recognition to be achieved in virtue of the fact that the rules for using the expressions he utters associate the expressions with the production of that effect.  (384)

·         Gives an analysis of promising, providing its rules or set of necessary and sufficient conditions.

(1)   Normal input and output conditions obtain (same language, conscious, not under duress.

(2)   S expresses that p in the utterance of T.

(3)   In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S.

(4)   H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer his doing A to his not doing A.

(5)   It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events.

(6)   S intends to do A.  (Ammended: S intends that the utterance of T will make him responsible for intending to do A.)

(7)   S intends that the utterance of T will place him under an obligation to do A.

(8)   S intends that the utterance of T will produce in H a belief that conditions (6) and (7) obtain by means of the recognition of the intention to produce that belief, and he intends this recognition to be achieved by means of the recognition of the sentence as one conventionally used to produce such beliefs.

(9)   The semantic rules of the dialect spoken by S and H are such that T is correctly and sincerely uttered if and only if conditions (1) – (8) obtain.

·         Derives rules to govern the use of the function-indicating device “promise”

(1)   Rule 1: P is to be uttered only in the context of a sentence (or large stretch of discourse) the utterance of which predicates some future act A of the speaker S.

(2)   Rule 2: P is to be uttered only if the hearer H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would prefer S’s doing A to his not doing A. (a preparatory rule)

(3)   Rule 3: P is to be uttered only if it is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course of events.  (a preparatory rule)

(4)   Rule 4: P is to be uttered only if S intends to do A. (the sincerity rule)

(5)   Rule 5: The utterance of P counts as the undertaking of an obligation to do A. (the essential rule)