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.