I'd wanted to get at something john steppling said, about how "totalizing" tendencies are really fragmenting tendencies, (though, I might add, that his emphasis on "mechanisms" conditioning consciousness/experience misses a bit the socially objective processes of rationalization that condition those conditioning mechanisms, which is perhaps an artefact of the way Adorno's own thinking is, inspite of its "intentions", nonetheless bound up in the conceptual apparatus of the traditional "philosophy of consciousness"). That is, of course, precisely the sort of "contradiction" that Adorno excels at identifying.

But I think it should be put in the context of post-epistemological philosophical thinking: there's that question of what philosophical thinking/activity should be "doing", once the basic, metaphysically rooted project of an epistemological "certification" of knowledge, as the correspondance of "final" truth with "ultimate" reality goes by the wayside. Knowledge is no longer the fulfillment of the plenitude of Being, nor the supreme justification of existence, nor the sure determinant and guide to action.

Knowledge is rather "deflated" and situated among social and natural processes and activities. But there was an additional notion attached to the project of philosophical epistemology, which was the idea that the "progress" of knowledge attached and amounted to a new "progressive" ethics, instead of there being the same old ethics attached to different truth-conditions. I think the "shock" of the rescinding of such epistemological expectations motivates Adorno's recourse to art/aesthetic experience as the "proving ground" of a post-epistemological philosophical thinking.

(A similar, parallel problem is to be found with Wittgenstein's critical dissolution of epistemology, where, though three quarters of his references to "philosophy" are pejorative, the other quarter imply some contituation of philosophical thinking/activity which he never manages to explicitate and spell out).

What I want to get at is the way that Adorno reacts to the "end" of epistemology as a collapse of the notion of "Reason" itself, as "Reason" becoming multiply divided against itself, no longer "whole", renouncing and denouncing its very tendency to "totalization". Art then becomes a polarized extreme of the break-up/division of reason against itself, which peculiarly holds on to the impossible ideal of "wholeness", even as it expresses its contradictory reality/impossibility.

Thus "wholeness" can be expressed only through the fragmentary, in and as the experience of fragmentation, even as that very expression amounts to an alternative "vision" of wholeness, as pluralistic and de-totalized. Art, as the acategorical uniqueness that protests against and rejects the totalizing ways of cognitive-instrumental categorical thinking and the objective processes which give rise to it and which it "expresses", becomes the "medium" of critical and counter-normative thinking. It becomes the repository that "expresses" the very deformations that categorical thinking is subject to.

That is, of course, a large cognitive burden to be imposed on art. But, still more, just as Marx saw that, while the rise of capitalism had dissolved the repressive narrowness of traditional social morality, it had rendered social morality effectively impossible, except as cant and private sentiment, such that it could only become possible once again as a fundamental transformation of the structural imperatives determining social organization, art, for Adorno, has become the refuge for the wrong life that can not be rightly lived, the hibernation abode of any conceivable social morality/ethical life. It becomes the means of retrieving not only cognitive aims, but ethical conditions from epistemological disappointment.

But the problem is not just that the Marxian project of social emancipation has become infected by the cognitive-instrumental categorical means, by which it sought to realize itself, but that those very categorical means and the social processes which generate and "reflect" them, have themselves become reflexive, such that they automatically reproduce and reflect the "conditions" that generate them.

For example, not only has labor-capacity become a commodity and human uses been commodified as "subjective utility", but unemployment has become "natural", as NAIRU, and commodity prices are subject to "hedonic adjustments", and not only does the "mind" seek out those aspects of things that can render them somehow calculable, but "mind" itself is reduced to a mechanical/computational process. The formation of categories becomes itself subject to the processes that give rise to cognitive-instrumental "reason". The "problems" of epistemology are at once abandonned and compounded.

The Habermasian "solution" to what Adorno sees as the collapsed, multiply divided and contradictory condition of "reason", its fragmentation, is to emphasize in neo-neo-Kantian/Weberian fashion the modern differentiation of "spheres" of validity and to attempt a discursive resolution. But aside from its lack of any "concrete" historical prospect, any existential situatedness, any institutional embodiment, and any intrication with the very processes and conditions that would give rise to categorical thought, it fails to respond and "answer" to the natural history of the entwinement of categorical thinking and social morality that Adorno excavates by means of the history of art.

The article was awkwardly written, at times, it seemed to me, barely in English. But its author did get the fundamental point right: "mimesis" for Adorno is a mode of behaviour, of a responsive, receptive sort, and not primarily a matter of representation.

That's the key point because not only is mimesis the point of transmission of the external world and its objective social and natural processes to "subjectivity" and the pre-subjective objectivity of the embodied "subject", but, as an involutary spontaneity, it connects up with what is virtually the foundational concept of Kantian, and hence German Idealism, namely, spontaneity, conceived as the originary "freedom" of the subject/mind/spirit, by which it transcendentally constitutes the world.

In other words, Adorno deploys "mimesis", as at once the exteriority of and the antipode to the rationalized "subject" with its knowledge of self and world derived from and shaped by its intrication in objective processes of rationalization, "strategically" to deconstruct the at once inflated, conflated and inverted conception of knowledge and "free will", human agency, and their interrelation, bound up in the illusory performance of transcendental constitution on the part of idealist metaphysics/reigning ideology.

Under such idealist metaphysics, knowledge of the world, theoretical cognition, is subtended by the moral-practical will, "freedom", and becomes a drive to the rational mastery of the world, while the "end" of freedom becomes the will to knowledge, entirely determined by the objective "necessity"of such knowledge, and hence subjected to the given order of the world that it illusorily "constitutes", effectively converting into its opposite.

It is because mimesis is at once spontaneous, involuntary, and pre-subjective, yet, at the same time curiously aligned with both the founding conception/intention of German idealism and with objective processes of rationalization by which the world is "constituted", that it picks apart the distorted conception and formation of both knowledge and agency.

So then wouldn't "Aesthetic Theory" be a kind of occluded and absented conception of practical reason, an anti-and-post-epistemolgical ethics aimed at retrieving knowledge, agency and the objective world from the domineering will to knowledge?

I just came across this site and want to thank Gary for citing my article on Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthtic Theory which was published a while ago in a book, Briel, Holger and Andreas Kramer, eds., In Practice: Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. Bern: Lang, 2000, pp. 145-159.
The entire article can be accessed at this website: http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html

I thank john c. halasz for his comments on my article, but find his rather undignified remark that "the article was awkwardly written, at times, it seemed to me, barely in English" not only unnecessary but also puzzling. Why would Gary cite those paragraphs if they were essentially unreadable?

Amresh,
I found I had to your article closely, and when I did so I found it very helpful; so helpful that I had intended to do another post on it. I was very much taken by this paragraph, which follows on from the previous ones that I quoted in the post:

The critical potential of art maintains itself qua mimesis in the midst of the irrationality of the world and is still relevant, despite the loss of the subject, to the priority of the object. Art survives first of all by adapting to the rational behavior of the mimetic impulse, and secondly by remaining distinct from the all-embracing identity of rationality. To put it slightly differently, the mimetic impulse in art survives due to its correlative, adaptive behavior. Art takes refuge in mimesis in order to escape from the irrationality of the death-like intensity of the reified world; this leads to Adorno's musings on the "posthumous" character of art in Aesthetic Theory.

It has made me go back and re-read the sections on mimesis in Aesthetic Theory.

John C.
In Aesthetic Theory (p.65) Adorno talks in terms of the dialectic between mimesis and construction in which one realizes itself in the other and not in some space between them. He talks in terms of mimesis as expression, the mimetic impulse, and construction emerging out in an unplanned way out of the mimetic impulse.

I had tacitly understood mimesis in terms of expression as representation---which is why I 've struggled to understand what Adorno was referring to. I agree with you that a lot hangs on 'art's mimestic impluse' for Adorno and that mimesis is a critical and deep category. Rightly so because Adorno grants art the role of expressing human suffering of a damaged life in a modernity marked by unfreedom.

Amresh Sinha:

I gave your article the once-through without stopping to linger much. (Also, as frequently occurs on the internet there's that matter of small print: I probably need new glasses). I found some of the syntax a bit hard to construe. That's not a personal matter, as I frequently think, when reading not just academic articles, but sometimes whole books, that it needs a copy editor, to force it into better clarity. And I realize it's difficult often to articulate complex ideas in an clear syntactical order. I'm just a stray internet commenter anyway, and am as guilty as anyone, since my comments frequently end up syntactically tortuous, as I pick those calcified proteins out of my brains,- (and Gary, at any rate, almost always re-paragraphs my comments). It was just a throw-away comment to Gary, anyway, and I did think that you had picked up on some things importantly right.

Gary:

Just to pinpoint it a bit further, it seems to me that Adorno is positioning himself/mimesis precisely at the point where Kant determines the finitude of the "rational subject", namely, its dependency on sensuous receptivity. That goes to what Adorno termed in the university lectures that were published, which is the last thing I directly read of him, the "Kantian block". (Of course, that's not existential finitude, but "materialistically" construed it can hook up with it.) By taking his stand at once within and beyond the point of the punctual "subject", which imposes its totality upon itself, Adorno seeks out his version of an Archimedian point.

He does not really believe in an integral reason, which is why he is always developing contradictory oppositions between its "moments", in a complex juggling act, whether with little particulars or big conceptual balls bearing the names of major thinkers. (A side glance to Gadamer, who renders the notion of "wholeness" virtual and even in league with the "honor" of "bad infinity" might be helpful here). But, at the same time, the multiple bifurcations of "reason" into its "moments, its fragmentation, threaten it with a repressive truncation by which instrumentalism takes hold.

And that's the point where mimesis as the "other" of reason takes hold: not as a representation of a restoration of the integral "wholeness" of reason, nor as an entirely other order, but as the marking/retrieval of what is split-off by the repressive antagonisms of its "moments". (That's where I think Habermas' communicative "paradigm-shift" gets it at once right and wrong). Expression in the artwork is neither a matter of subjective intention, nor representation, but belongs to its separate "objectivity", as the registration of a social condition/world. (Again, the parallel with Gadamer, for whom it is the work itself that calls forth the need for the hermeneutic interpretation of its contents in relation to the historical finitude of its interpreter, would be helpful).

It's in that respect that art, as the non-instrumental means for the expression of suffering, at once "free" and compulsive, in an unfree world, needs to be understood: namely, as the antipode to what Adorno sees as the constitutive principle of the "bourgeois subject", its coldness.

JohnC
you may be right about post-modernism. But the continental texts---foreign bodies- in the Anglo-Saxon culture in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s - were very helpful in developing the reception of continental philosophy and film theory in Australia, which, in turn, enabled the formation of an alternative, critical, counter intellectual culture in Australia.

A large part of that formation was avant garde film and aesthetics--through drawn from Delueze not Adorno--and it open up a different space to that of philosophy and science.

Secondly, there tis something happening between white and black Australia, and that it has to do with music, art and film. It is more than an ‘increasingly appreciative public informed by an attentive media’ as it lessens the pressure for Aboriginal people to become incorporated or assimilated into the global worldview.

Gary,

To John C: Thanks for your clarification, and no hard feelings!

Speaking of Australian academia, I'd like to bring attention to Colloquy, an online peer reviewed journal from Monash University, which is now languishing in the bureaucratic labyrinth of Monash University's offical website.

Monash University's administration has decided to appropriate the sovereignty of Colloquy as an independent online journal and has subsequently subjugated it to languish in the eternal damnation of obscurity. The previous url for the journal doesn't automatically take you to the new website. I am hereby posting the url for the journal and also the url of my article, "Forgetting to Remember: From Benjamin to Blanchot," for your critical attention (if you have time and inclination).

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/publications/colloquy/archives/issue010/sinha.pdf

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/publications/colloquy/archives/index.html

Cheers!
Amresh Sinha

Amresh,
Thanks for the reminder. I had come across Colloquy and had a brief look at the back issues, saw your article, scanned it, then forgot about it. I also forgot to remember.

I will have a look today.