Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art

252 Pages·2020·2.222 MB·English

by  Mario Farina

Adorno’s Aesthetics
as a Literary Theory
of Art
mario farina
Adorno’s Aesthetics as a Literary Theory of Art
Mario Farina
Adorno’s Aesthetics
as a Literary Theory
of Art
Mario Farina
Department of Letters and Philosophy
University of Florence
Firenze, Italy
ISBN 978-3-030-45280-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45281-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45281-0
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Preface
Generally deemed inadequate to account for the postmodern issues of
the second half of the twentieth century, Adorno’s philosophical contri-
butions, as Fredric Jameson acknowledged thirty years ago, have been
met by two main groups of objections (Jameson 1996, p. 229). As to the
first, with Jürgen Habermas at the head, Adorno’s philosophy is seen as
being burdened by the Marxian orthodox idea of class struggle, and
thereby as unable to understand contemporary society.1 The second
strand of criticism, instead, looks more closely at Adorno’s aesthetics as at
a typically modernist, and therefore non-postmodernist, explanation of
art. This second set of objections can be traced back to Jean-Françoise
Lyotard, and how he sees Adorno’s emancipatory idea of history as by-
product of the modern hope in the integrity of subjectivity (Lyotard
1974, pp. 127–137). Along the same line can also be placed Peter Bürger’s
approach and his idea of postmodernism as a peculiar and negative defi-
nition of what is simply a phase of modernity itself. In this regard, Bürger
sees in Adorno’s aesthetics an obstinate reluctance in dealing with the fact
that the contemporary condition of art includes both progression and
1 As Habermas writes, Adorno and Horkheimer “held fast to the basic assumptions of the theory of
value as the core of their tacit orthodoxy, and in this way they blinded themselves to the realities of
a developed capitalism based on the pacification of class conflict through welfare-state measures”
(Habermas 1987, p. 334).
v
vi Preface
regression as part of the same progressive and developmental movement
(Bürger 1983, pp. 177–197). These paradigmatic and interconnected
positions—Adorno as a too obstinate Marxist or as too modernist to have
a clear understanding of late- or postmodernity—have defined the theo-
retical ground for large part of the criticism targeting Adorno’s under-
standing of philosophy of art, such as the wide skepticism with which
even non-specialists judge his interpretation of Jazz music, as exemplified
by Eric J. Hobsbawm’s words: “Adorno wrote some of the most stupid
pages ever written about jazz” (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300).
Connected to the question of modernism is also the second mortal sin
of Adorno’s aesthetics, namely its ban on aesthetic pleasure and enjoy-
ment. As Espen Hammer shows, in fact, while vindicating the role of
classical beauty, a new conservative cultural trend in authors such as
Roger Scruton and Alexander Nehamas vehemently attacks one of the
pillars of Adorno’s comprehension of art and also what supposedly quali-
fies it as a modernist aesthetic theory (Hammer 2015, pp. 247–249).
Also because of its “modernist” connotation, the postmodern strand of
Adorno’s detractors understands his rejection of aesthetic pleasure as the
result of his miscomprehension and culturally elitist disgust for popular
mass culture,2 as exemplified by the “perverse rant against popular music”
that Jerrold Levinson (2015, p. 44) finds in his musicology.
There is no doubt, in fact, that Adorno’s philosophy of art is permeated
by tensions originating in how the subject relates to the enjoyment of the
artistic object. “Aesthetic enjoyment”—writes Adorno in a personal note of
1955—“in the superficial sense of the enjoyment of the artistic object as if
it were a piece of sensuous world, in general does not exist and any aesthet-
ics that starts with that is dull. I have never enjoyed an artwork” (TWAA:
20688). This tension, as the scholarly literature has pointed out, also defines
the historical turning point in the development of art, that Adorno calls
“de-artification” of art, and that Richard Wolin describes as the “final dis-
solution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have until this century
been inseparable from the concepts of art itself” (Wolin 2004, p. 11).
2 As Erica Weitzman (2008, p. 185) suggests, “Adorno has been vigorously and exhaustively criti-
cized, by people from every point on the political spectrum, for being a pseudo-revolutionary kill
joy, a narrow-minded elitist, a closet conservative, the fetishizer of his own (historically particular)
miserabilism!”.
Preface vii
According to this framework then, the difficulties Adorno objectively
faces in the understanding of the most advanced tendencies of art in his
time—Adorno is indeed infamous for rarely mentioning the most rele-
vant post-avant-gardist phenomena—can be explained in terms of some
sort of aesthetic conservatism and elitism that prevents his otherwise bril-
liant analysis of artistic products from applying to the art of the second
half of the twentieth century. At variance with mainstream interpreta-
tions, what I intend to argue in this book is not only that the develop-
ment of Adorno’s philosophy of art is inspired by a more complex
constellation of elements than the sum of modernism and Marxist dog-
mas, but also that Adorno’s contributions suit particularly well the most
advanced products of postmodernism. Adorno’s work in aesthetics can be
ultimately seen as an attempt to react to the essential tensions exposed by
contemporary art and which originate from a theoretical principle that I
identify as “the dissolution of the aesthetic element”. In accordance with
large part of the aesthetic debate of the second half of the past century,
Adorno acknowledges an epochal turn in the qualification of art. This
turn consists in the cancellation of the difference between art and every-
day objects, or rather in the trend fostering the annulment of any aesthetic
distinction among them. What should be remarked in this regard is the
contrast between Adorno’s fear for the transformation of art into a com-
mon good and, for example, the satisfaction with which Arthur Danto
welcomes this tendency. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno writes that “cut loose
from its immanent claim to objectivity, art would be nothing but a more
or less organized system of stimuli-conditioning reflexes […]. The result
would be the negation of the difference between artworks and merely
sensual qualities; it would be an empirical entity, nothing more than—in
American argot—a battery of tests, and the adequate means for giving an
account of art would be program analysis or surveys of average group
reactions to artworks or genres” (ÄT: 394 [264]). In passages like this,
Adorno focuses on the same set of problems standing behind the institu-
tional theory of art and Danto’s idea of the end of art, eventually leading
to the theory of the aesthetic indiscernibility of art and non-art. Although
dealing with the same set of historical and philosophical questions,
remarkable differences can be nevertheless detected in their respective
reactions.
viii Preface
What I suggest in this book is in particular to read Adorno’s reaction
to what he perceives as the dissolution of the aesthetic element of art as
laying the ground for the elaboration of a literary theory of art. I will
argue, in fact, that the process of dissolution of the aesthetic is closely
linked to what one can understand as the thing-like nature of the work of
art. In Adorno’s definition of the aesthetic, in fact, the work—as thing, as
objectual element—directly participates to the economic process in
which things become the mediator of the social relationship between
people, in other words it enters the logic of the capital.3 On the contrary,
literature—as an artistic form—is not constituted by things, but by
meaning-relationships that allude to things and to the way in which they
relate to one another. My proposal—it should be made preliminarily
clear—does not entail in any way the convergence of all the arts into lit-
erature, nor the effective dissolution of visual art in general. On the con-
trary, what I intend to show is the fact that in the effective historical
development of art, literature can be seen as the one artistic form which
is able to act as aesthetic guarantee of the existence of something like art
in general. And this is so precisely because its aesthetic material, namely
language, cannot be completely absorbed in the economic process of pro-
duction. In this regard, supportive elements to the theoretical core of my
position can be found, for example, in Eva Geulen’s acknowledgment of
Adorno’s philosophy of art as a philosophy of language. She indeed
observes that “the tension between universality and particularity is great-
est in language, precisely because of the resistance mounted by its discur-
sivity or semanticity. Artworks are said to be like language when they
develop and sustain the tension that characterizes the literary artefact: to
say the particular in a form that is generic” (Geulen 2006a, p. 58; see also
Geulen 2006b, p. 92).
My overall goal is therefore to show that Adorno’s aesthetic, far from
being an old iron, a historical find to be placed in the museum of theo-
ries, actually provides a set of philosophical tools that can be fruitfully
applied within the context of the contemporary theory of art, as
3 According to Marx’s famous quotation, in fact, “capital is not a thing, but a social relation between
persons which is mediated through things” (Marx 1990, p. 932).
Preface ix
exemplified also by other recent contributions to the critical debate.4
These tools are notably those of the aesthetics as a philosophy of litera-
ture. The last chapter of this book, in fact, is an attempt to pursue an
interpretation of American postmodern novels within the conceptual
framework of Adorno’s aesthetics as a philosophy of literature. Although
I have no intention of jumping into the debate about postmodernism in
general, about its being a part of modernity or an autonomous historical
category, I believe that Adorno’s aesthetic elements are particularly suited
to clarify the otherwise evasive literary nature of American postmodern
novels. While pursuing this aim, I take American postmodern novels as
an extant category in the contemporary literary debate and I refrain pro-
grammatically from assessing its consistency. My merely instrumental use
of the category is meant to allow me to investigate whether the literary
products it designates have something in common and possibly what it is.
I have divided the book into five chapters. In the first, I will present the
very first determination of the aesthetic in Adorno’s thought and thus
introduce what I read as his construction of the aesthetics. In the second,
I will focus on Adorno’s philosophy of music, and I will detect in it the
principle of the dissolution of the aesthetic. In the third chapter, I will
present the process of the literary reconstruction of the aesthetic, while
turning to Adorno’s late aesthetic production, in particular to his Aesthetic
Theory and the collection, Notes to Literature. In the fourth, I will point to
what I see as the basic theoretical lines of Adorno’s philosophy of litera-
ture, namely a complete set of theoretical tools that can be applied to the
most advanced results of literary production. Finally, in the fifth and last
chapter, I will investigate and account for the formal issues of American
postmodern novels in what I see as its morphological development from
Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, through Wallace’s Infinite Jest, to DeLillo’s
Underworld.
Firenze, Italy Mario Farina
4 I refer to the book of Josh Robinson (2018), published under the title of Adorno’s Poetics of Form,
where he shows the connection of Adorno’s literary aesthetic with the contemporary debate about
historicism and formalism, and to which I will refer again in the following.
x Preface
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