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February 3, 2004
Trevor,
your reference to Adorno's conception of an artwork as a windowless monad links back to the begining of modernity where folks like Alberti were talking about art and perspective in terms of transparent windows.
This was within a system of pictorial representation that rendered an illusionistic representation of reality within a balanced and harmonious order. This perspective system placed the eye of a man as the center of the world. It presupposed the work of art to be a transparent window which made a portion of the world visible to the viewer.
As I understand it---and I'm relying on memory here from doing a Donald Brooke course on aesthetics long ago--this system of pictorial representation meant a particular kind of perspectival vision. In this tradition perspective was akin to a reverse pyramid or cone, in which the apex was the eye. This visual convention----linear perspective---- centred everything in the eye of the individual beholder. So appearances flowed in from the things in the world to the apex eye, which was the vanishing point of infinity. The single eye of the spectator becomes the centre of the world.
The flow of appearances could only happen if there was a transparent and shatterproof window. Hence Alberti's window. The further assumption was that the picture would represent the visible world as if the artist were looking through a window.
Whilst here most cinematic representation is essentially the same as linear perspective. Marsha Adler says that as a way of viewing:
"Film perspective posits the camera's viewer's eye in a fixed position in space; the image is organized by and for the eye of the viewer placed in front of it. The image is posed, framed, and centered by the filmmaker to set the scene and to bind the spectator in place."
Even though I'm not sure what it means, I do understand that Adorno's conception of artworks as windowless monads challenges this perspectival visual tradition.
Here's a stab. First, the monad bit. If we return to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz we find that in his monads v being self-enclosed. More specifically, for Leibniz windowless means that monads do not interact with each other. They exist in a pre-established harmony with one another.
For Adorno windowless does mean something along the lines of self-enclosed:
"In relation to one another artworks are hermetically closed of and blind, yet able in their isolation to represent the outside world...My argument is that precisely because artworks are monads they lead to the universal by virtue of their principle of particualization."
That's enough for me. The main point I wanted to make with this post was that Alberti's transparent window is displaced by the windowless monad.
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