Adorno -- in aesthetic theory -- refers to Benjamin's idea of the *unutterable*... the secret that cant be expressed. The illusions of the mediated system of capital are based on domination...so to escape such dominated thinking, false consciousness, means the artist must look for new strategies. Some are born of historical and material conditions (Bach and the fugue...conventions and genre) and others are about what adorno called "radical particularization"...by opposition to the universal (of course it then becomes universal...but not through its own intention).
I dont think his utopian ideas of art were about ideology of any sort...marcuse said we cant know what an un-repressed existence would look like...and Adorno more or less said the same. Art is not communication per se. Its more dialectical. The idea of instrumental reason comes into this...Adorno saw the conterfeit in culture as growing all the time...and such illusions became more and more difficult to transcend.

John,
According to this the summary of an Art and Aesthetics After Adorno, symposium hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature at University of California, Berkeley, April 2001 Zoe Hepden says that Andrew Bowie from the University of London tackled the problem of what to do with Adorno in a paper entitled ‘Adorno, Pragmatism and Aesthetic Relativism’, in which he claimed that a good deal of Adorno’s position on truth is indefensible.

Lurking in Adorno’s philosophy, argued Bowie, is the assumption that the modern subject’s tendency to use means-end rationality has resulted in our loss of access to meaningful reality. Bowie argued that in order to sustain this claim, Adorno presents a notion of the ‘totally untrue’ nature of the modern social world, the truth of which only modern art can reveal. But the idea of a ‘totally untrue’ society is philosophically paradoxical (how can we know the social world is false if its false nature is all-pervasive?). Because Adorno links the truth of art to a kind of redemptive hidden truth with which our aim is to be reconciled (even if this reconciliation is impossible), he reduces his claims about the truth of art to a negative theology, i.e. a theology that avoids saying anything about the nature of God. This is inconsistent with his critical philosophical project.

In the earlier conversation I wrote that you are more than welcome to do some guest posts on Adorno on philosophical conversations (as does John C Halasz) or become an author, if you so desire.

first, thanks gary. I'd love to at some point. Can i take a second to mention I write for Placebo Art...part of Cyrano's JOurnal....though its been hacked and wont be back up until next week. Ok....
so, I will let you know when i have a moment to think coherently about this....or anything, but Im flattered and most thankful.

As for Adorno and the TOTAL untruth of society...i think this is whats wrong here. He doesnt really say that. He says the society of domination ...advanced captial...has created mechanisms (the culture industry is the obvious example) that tend toward a a sort of brainwashing. That culture industry was written in 1944 is cause for pause. A very precient book.

Adorno doesnt say for example that nature is untrue. He says the man or woman of late capitalism has a deeply mediated experience of it. He constantly, repeatedly, stresses the way false consciousness masquarades as something of authenticity. That false opposition or false art is marketed as real opposition and real art...and that often those creating these things are believers....such is the depth of the problem. Im being very simplistic here to be sure...(and we would need a rather long discussion about what *real* art is)...but I think he never actually said there was TOTAL untruth....which would indeed create logical cul de sacs. Adorno did find, as is mentioned above, that instrumental reason, the logic of technology and the fetishizing of progress, all have become means to a process of domination. He saw art...and culture....as a corrective and an awakening...and yes, he got rather mystical about it (after attacking Heidegger for the same thing). ALright....well, I must think on this and read what you have linked to and again, thanks.

Adorno's writings/thinkings are very complex, but he does write with some considerable concision and clarity. So it's somewhat amazing, if not surprising, how these academics overlook clearly articulated points and mis-attribute "positions" to Adorno.

The "theological" is obviously there in Adorno's thinking, but it's obtuse to ignore its twin roots in Marx and Benjamin. Marx did not have a crititque of religion, but rather a critique of the critique of religion, in which "ideology" becomes the displaced parody of religion, even as its splittings or bifurcations of social phenomena are structurally "necessary". Benjamin, in turn, was criticizing historicism by radically reading history against its grain. The redemptive prospect, discernable inspite of all, consists in recognizing the distorted investment of human aspirations and relations in the world of "things", whereby history becomes frozen into "nature" and nature becomes entrapped in alienatated human "will". It's in the "afterlife" of "things",- (which roughly Gadamer would conceptually normalize as "effective history"),- that the past becomes released into the possible present, disrupting the continuity of "progress" as the accumulation of the ever-same. Adorno's "theology" of the prospect of "redemption" amounts to an underlining exacerbation of the contingency of present reproductive affairs by means of a retrieval of its suppressed potentials, indicating a merely possible shifting of ground.

Adorno explicitly states that he writes in "solidarity" with the ontological proof, at the moment of its downfall. The question, of course, is: which version of the ontological proof? Assuming it is the "original" medieval conception of the participation of contingent beings in a connected order of creation, then that amounts to an alternate version of Heidegger's critique of "logocentric" metaphysics, with the difference that Heidegger attributes the "false", repressive unification of things to a dispensation of Being manifested in modern technology itself, whereas Adorno attributes such an impulse toward repressive unification to modern capitalist processes of rationalization. It's not so much a matter of the falsehood of social totality without exception, as that the totalizing tendency of modern industrial capitalism is "false", i.e. falsifying of "things", persons, and their separate potentials. The claim that "the whole is false" parodies Hegel more than it insists on paradox.

I've taken the line that Adorno's insistence that the "moment" for the "realization" of praxis was missed, is quasi-permanantly blocked off, and that any such effort could only contribute to what it would seek to remove, is at least partly rooted in his acceptance of the Kantian/modern conflation of theoretical and practical reason, and that a separating out of a ethico-political conception of practical reason from modern theoretical/instrumental forms of rationality, however hopeless its prospect, is what needs to be re-addressed by thinking.

But, irregardless of that, Adorno's preoccupation with art and aesthetic experience is clearly meant as a place-holder for a transformed praxis. The notion that he would collapse philosophical thinking/reflection into aesthetics is explicitly belied by his insistence on not doing so. (That would be to confuse him with the likes of Foucault, with his "happy positivism", who does conflate philosophical theory with aesthetic experience for purposes and reasons of his own). In fact, for Adorno, works of art, as appearances, "Schein", are precisely false and per se ideological, which is why philosophical interpretation qua reflection/conceptualization is needed to "release" their "truth-content".

On the other hand, art/aesthetic experience form for Adorno an alternate mode of "cognition", in contrast to the classificatory cognitive-instrumental mode of thinking that predominates and erases the traces of its "origin", (what Heidegger would style the metaphysical/technological mode of thinking), which forms a kind of "proving ground" for his (meta)critique of epistemology.

But aside from any role for art as a placeholder of an emancipated condition, equally contingent and "theological", and as an indicator of any shifting of ground, what's most noteworthy about Adorno's aesthetic reflections is that they emphasize an "aesthetics of production", concentrating upon materials and techniques involved in "advanced" works of art, correlative to the "advanced" development of the "forces of production".

That reverts back, of course, to Marx and, before him, Schiller. Art becomes, in effect, a kind of counter-fetishism to the fetishism of commodity production, an imitative abreaction of submission to the world of administrated doom.

very cogent several paragraphs john.

"...the universality of art always bore a class character and was to this extent particular -- artowrks were no longer radically elaborated, any more so than the early automobile succeeded at freeing itself from the model of the buggy..."

he also says art becomes human the moment it stops being a (Kantian) servant to mankind....and such humanity is anti ideological. Negative dialectics again....but not negative.

Adorno says the secret (per Benjamin) of art is always enigmatic. He goes on at some length about the self consciousness of spirit...and sublime as arts moment of self consciousness, and the sublime in art spiritualized art. How Freud works into this is interesting...as adorno says, the sensually unpleasant has an affinity for with spirit.

John's comments at the end of his third paragraph are excellent, and what I was trying to say, but much less coherently in my earlier post. Adorno was never so crude as to say the "whole is false". But that the mechanisms that shape a dominated consciousness create a falsity....create illusions of authenticity. Is this actually a totalizing tendency? It would seem also a fragmenting tendency...which Heidegger sort of thought (though Im hardly all that conversent with heidegger). That the logic of technology produced ever more rationalized modes of thought....and production....is what Adorno is going after when he talks of the false, or untrue.

And yes, he emphasized production...and historical particularity. In that particularity he found the dialectical contradictions....and said the history of art is the history of contradiction.

John S,
why would someone want to hack Placebo Art? Or are they hacking Cyrano's Journal?

yes I find Bowie's claim that

Adorno presents a notion of the ‘totally untrue’ nature of the modern social world, the truth of which only modern art can reveal. But the idea of a ‘totally untrue’ society is philosophically paradoxical (how can we know the social world is false if its false nature is all-pervasive?).

If I can speak simply in terms of Appendix 111 of Aesthetic Theory there is a contradication between artistic freedom and the unfreedom of society as a a whole. This contradiction leads to modern art almost destroying itself as the quest for the artistic freedom lead to the imprisonment of art in itself. Art then turned on itself--(Dada? hence we have a reworking of Hegel's thesis of the demise or end of art.

Yet we still need art ----to express our suffering in an unfree world. This expression of suffering makes art negative, and an aesthetic philosophy helps articulate the need for this kind of expression and to give conceptual weight to art's expression.

John C H

I've a simple understanding of the truth content of art. In an instrumentalized world, where nature is an object of technological control for profit, art remembers the nonidentical in nature-- as an ecology or wilderness; the truth content is the fullness of nature in its ecological being that is beyond instrumental rationality but mediated through it.

In terms of the social Adorno says in Ch.7 (p.173) of Aesthetic Theory that art remains loyal to the shudder by preserving its legacy.(eg.,Munch's Scream? ).

I realize it's far more complicated than that--as art is a necessary illusion and that we have a number of paradoxes, which I struggle to understand. I guess its something along the lines of art redeeming truth from artistic illusion, with artistic illusion understood in terms of antinomies..eg
--autonomy and social being as commodities
--image character and appararitional quality (I struggle on this--it's p. 421 Aesthetic Theory

gary....yeah, they hacked CJ...and placebo art was part of that. But its close to being back up. Thanks for asking.

A couple follow up comments.
In that article at Radical Philosophy, it seems there is a confusion about Adorno on autonomous art. Its written as if we lived (and Adorno wrote as if)we're in an historical vacuum. Adorno wrote at great length, both in Aesthetic Theory and in other places, about the mediation of history and the relations of production to art and individual artists. You simply cant pose a question about how Adorno restricted the truth content of artworks to the autonomous. its not that kind of catagory -- at least to adorno. But maybe Im confused...happens a lot.

and this sentence:"...intersubjective linguistic media through which agents communicate their aesthetic experience by means of syntheses of thought and feeling." Ive no idea really what that means. And its my humble opinion that adorno wouldnt either.

john steppling:

I'm not overly interested in, nor preoccupied with the "aesthetic" side of Adorno's thinking. But it's my vague notion that "Aestehtic Theory" is something of a swan-song, in that Adorno fully recognized that the development of Art, as a "progressive", connected and consequential historical series, is effectively at an end, that the era of "High Culture" is over, even as it was never fully worthy of its vaunted claims. And, as I remarked earlier, Adorno valorizes "autonomous" artworks precisely because he recognizes that they are not really "autonomous", that they at once bear the imprint of the historical world from which they "originate" and "express" resistance to its "inevitable" course, qua a "totally administered" society/completely instrumentalized thinking. Such artworks serve as a "repository" for meaning-potentials/interpretations of experience that are suppressed and split-off by the prevailing functionalization of "communication", for relations to the world and others that are denied by our very transactions with them. They maintain the possibility of an "otherwise than Being" to which otherwise all our possibilities of thinking and acting are subjected. (Though, as my term suggests, I think Levinas' account of the modal-relational dimension of meaning-constitution, qua an ethical relation to the other qua other, gets at the issue of irreducible particularity somewhat more trenchantly, and I tend to think of the "functionless function" of literature in terms of its capacity to "body forth" that dimension of meaningfulness that otherwise passes away in the "inevitable" rigidification of social relations). But the point is not to maintain the "institution" of art, but to "recuperate" and retain the possibility of criticism that the functionalized (re)production of culture denies to it/us.

So you're right: "intersubjective...media...of syntheses of thought and feeling" is fudge, yummy, fattening and unsatisfying. It entirely misses the point that art is not a medium for our transactions, but an "expression" of the natural-historical context of the world that does not get "transacted", of our "metabolic" relation to that world that our current nexus of transactions denies us/it.

John C,
you write:

...it's my vague notion that "Aesthetic Theory" is something of a swan-song, in that Adorno fully recognized that the development of Art, as a "progressive", connected and consequential historical series, is effectively at an end, that the era of "High Culture" is over, even as it was never fully worthy of its vaunted claims.

Is it aesthetics or modern art that is a swansong? Or both?

Art continues after modernism. Is not aesthetics a reflection on postmodern art?

Gary,

I suppose that goes to those pomo claims about Adorno's "nostalgia" and obsolescence, as well as to mirecognitions that he's an advocate of "art for art's sake" and views art as an end-in-itself. That just misses or dismisses the Marxist commitments that underlie Adorno's preoccupation with art and aethetic reflection. Again, art is valorized precisely in sofar as it registers, expresses and resists the persistent suffering brought about by the reifications of the "exchange society", and bodies forth that world otherwise, prefiguring a transformed relation between self and world, which would amount to a different mode of (self)understanding than that of compulsive identity thinking.

His basic concern is not with the preservation of the institution of Art, nor does he deny that artworks and aesthetic reflections might continue to be produced in new configurations and different situations in the coming world. But his concern is with resistance to life as it is and with the capacity of art to conserve critical meaning potentials for a transformed practice of life over against "meaning" as it is currently transacted.

My guess is that he would see much of pomo as an accomodation with life-as-it-is through a premature "realization" of art, breaking down the objectively persisting barriers between art and life in society, and integrating itself with the very disintegrative forces that constitute a commodified/instrumentalized culture, fragmentary and merely decorative, losing hold of the critical potential to express any difference between meaning and "meaning".

john hc;
wanted to agree that I think Adorno would most certainly find something reactionary or regressive in the pomo inclination or tendency toward...as you put it...accomodation with the administered society.
he did however support the fragmentary to some degree....as a corrective to over-valuing the *wholeness* demand of bourgeoisie cultural product.

He asked that artworks, in their resistance, speak of that which -- as he put it-- otherwise pass unnoticed. Very Benjamin in that respect./