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)

What is a Speech Act - Searle [1965]

Searle has introduced the notion of an 'indirect speech act', which in his account is meant to be, more particularly, an indirect 'illocutionary' act. Applying a conception of such illocutionary acts according to which they are (roughly) acts of saying something with the intention of communicating with an audience, he describes indirect speech acts as follows: "In indirect speech acts the speaker communicates to the hearer more than he actually says by way of relying on their mutually shared background information, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, together with the general powers of rationality and inference on the part of the hearer." An account of such act, it follows, will require such things as an analysis of mutually shared background information about the conversation, as well as of rationality and linguistic conventions.

In connection with indirect speech acts, Searle introduces the notions of 'primary' and 'secondary' illocutionary acts. The primary illocutionary act is the indirect one, which is not literally performed. The secondary illocutionary act is the direct one, performed in the literal utterance of the sentence (Searle 178). In the example:

(1) Speaker X: "We should leave for the show or else we’ll be late."

(2) Speaker Y: "I am not ready yet."

Here the primary illocutionary act is Y's rejection of X's suggestion, and the secondary illocutionary act is Y's statement that she is not ready to leave. By dividing the illocutionary act into two subparts, Searle is able to explain that we can understand two meanings from the same utterance all the while knowing which is the correct meaning to respond to.

With his doctrine of indirect speech acts Searle attempts to explain how it is possible that a speaker can say something and mean it, but additionally mean something else. This would be impossible, or at least it would be an improbable case, if in such a case the hearer had no chance of figuring out what the speaker means (over and above what she says and means). Searle's solution is that the hearer can figure out what the indirect speech act is meant to be, and he gives several hints as to how this might happen. For the previous example a condensed process might look like this:

Step 1: A proposal is made by X, and Y responded by means of an illocutionary act (2).

Step 2: X assumes that Y is cooperating in the conversation, being sincere, and that she has made a statement that is relevant.

Step 3: The literal meaning of (2) is not relevant to the conversation.

Step 4: Since X assumes that Y is cooperating; there must be another meaning to (2).

Step 5: Based on mutually shared background information, X knows that they cannot leave until Y is ready. Therefore, Y has rejected X's proposition.

Step 6: X knows that Y has said something in something other than the literal meaning, and the primary illocutionary act must have been the rejection of X's proposal.

Searle argues that a similar process can be applied to any indirect speech act as a model to find the primary illocutionary act (178). His proof for this argument is made by means of a series of supposed "observations" (ibid., 180-182).

[edit]Analysis using Searle's theory

In order to generalize this sketch of an indirect request, Searle proposes a program for the analysis of indirect speech act performances, whatever they are. He makes the following suggestion:

Step 1: Understand the facts of the conversation.

Step 2: Assume cooperation and relevance on behalf of the participants.

Step 3: Establish factual background information pertinent to the conversation.

Step 4: Make assumptions about the conversation based on steps 1–3.

Step 5: If steps 1–4 do not yield a consequential meaning, then infer that there are two illocutionary forces at work.

Step 6: Assume the hearer has the ability to perform the act the speaker suggests. The act that the speaker is asking be performed must be something that would make sense for one to ask. For example, the hearer might have the ability to pass the salt when asked to do so by a speaker who is at the same table, but not have the ability to pass the salt to a speaker who is asking the hearer to pass the salt during a telephone conversation.

Step 7: Make inferences from steps 1–6 regarding possible primary illocutions.

Step 8: Use background information to establish the primary illocution (Searle 184).

With this process, Searle concludes that he has found a method that will satisfactorily reconstruct what happens when an indirect speech act is performed.