The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno
256
The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno
256eBook
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Overview
- How does art involve distinctive modes of experience?
- What is the political significance of modern art?
- What does aesthetic experience teach us about the limitations of conceptual thought?
- How is aesthetic experience implicated in the very medium of thought, language?
Ultimately the book presents a systematic argument for the foundational significance of the aesthetic in the development of the early critical theory movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783482948 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 08/27/2015 |
| Series: | Founding Critical Theory |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 521 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Contributors:
Natalia Baeza, Post-doctoral Researcher in Philosophy, University of Florence; Georg Bertram, Professor of Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin; Rick Elmore, Visiting Assistant Professor, Appalachian State University; Tom Huhn, Professor of Philosophy, New York School of Visual Arts; Eduardo Mendieta, Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York at Stony Brook; Marcia Morgan, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies, Muhlenberg College; Alison Ross, Australian Research Council Future Fellow in Philosophy, Monash University; Andrea Sakoparnig, PhD candidate, Freie Universität Berlin; Surti Singh, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, American University Cairo; Stéphane Symons, Assistant Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Joseph Weiss, Lecturer, DePaul University
Read an Excerpt
The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory
New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno
By Nathan Ross
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Nathan Ross and ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-294-8
CHAPTER 1
Benjamin and Adorno on Art as Critical Practice
Georg W. Bertram
To what extent is art critical? How can we understand the critical character of art under the aspect of its sensuousness? A debate took place between Adorno and Benjamin about these questions, the result of which has become familiar to us as follows: Adorno gave a powerful critique of Benjamin's position and thereby contributed to bringing about the fact that this position played and to this day continues to play a rather marginal role in systematically determining the concept of art. Adorno has made many philosophers — among others, Jürgen Habermas and those whom he influenced such as Albrecht Wellmer and his students — think that Benjamin's conception of art is too affirmative. On this view, Benjamin fails to appropriately articulate the critical aspect of art because he does not conceive the form of art in terms of the resistance of this form. By contrast, Adorno's position of negative aesthetics claims precisely to do justice to and appropriately understand the critical potential of art.
It is my view, however, that Adorno is not completely right about this point and that his position has thoroughly problematic consequences for the philosophy of art. It has set many more recent positions, especially in so-called continental philosophy of art, in the direction of a negative understanding of art. Such an understanding is based, however, on a one-sided conception of critique. As I will argue in what follows, it is precisely this one-sided conception of critique that Benjamin's position challenges. It is thus my view that Adorno's interpretation of what is actually in dispute between his and Benjamin's positions is mistaken. It is my aim, then, to frame this dispute appropriately. An appropriate conception of this dispute is helpful in my view for arriving at an understanding of art as critical practice. It is important for this purpose to emphasize that Benjamin works with an understanding of art as critical practice that differs in some significant ways from Adorno's. It is precisely this different understanding of critique on Benjamin's part that can be made systematically fruitful for the concept of art.
The question of how art can be understood as critical practice is connected with that of how one understands the sensuous aspect of art. To what extent do the sensuous aspects of art provide a critical impetus to the latter? Does art in its sensuousness bring about a disturbance of other practices? Does art in this way provide a basis for a form of critique that it initiates? Or is it rather the case that this form of critique can be conceptualized independently of the sensuous aspects of art? These are also questions that figure in the debate between Benjamin and Adorno.
In what follows, I will take up this debate by first examining Adorno's critique of Benjamin. I will then turn to Benjamin's essay on the artwork in the age of its technical reproducibility and lay out the extent to which Adorno inadequately conceives Benjamin's concern in its central points. This will then, in the subsequent section, put me in position to analyze the divergent understandings of critique that guide Adorno and Benjamin as the issue that is actually in dispute between them. In a concluding section, I will sketch a Benjaminian perspective on art as critical practice that emerges by returning to Hegel's aesthetics as the common basis on which Adorno's and Benjamin's views diverge.
ADORNO'S CRITIQUE OF BENJAMIN
Adorno shares with Benjamin the project of formulating a materialistic aesthetics. He aims to ascribe a potential to art as a resource for criticizing society. Art should be conceived as a critique of existing relations of domination. For Adorno, this means that art should breach the cycle of subjectivity that dominates members of a community and is dominated by the same members of a community. We are thus confronted with an essentially dialectical task according to Adorno: to make intelligible the extent to which existing relations of domination turn against their own goal of realizing freedom. On this view, the practice of freedom turns against itself into a mythology to which subjects succumb and which causes their oppression. Adorno considers this account of the dialectic of liberating practice as a concern that fundamentally connects him with Benjamin.
Nevertheless, he sees Benjamin's philosophy of art as retrograde in light of this concern. From his perspective, Benjamin abandons a dialectical conception of art in favor of the goal of effecting the politicization of art. His objection that Benjamin goes wrong by failing to conceive art in a sufficiently dialectical fashion is directed above all against the concept of aura. According to Adorno, Benjamin understands aura as an "illusion [of] autonomy" that art emanates in the course of being set out within ritualistic contexts. Since the Renaissance, artworks have been created as objects that realize such an illusion of autonomy. This illusion comes about when artworks in practice are brought into a position of uniqueness. Artworks are treated as objects that stand out from the historical flux and historical contexts in which they are situated. This "auratic" way for artworks to stand out is reflected in the distantiated stance that their recipients maintain in relation to them. Recipients in this distantiated stance are individual subjects who stand on their own in their experience of art. They are extricated from their societal contexts.
Benjamin did not elaborate this concept of aura directly in relation to art. He illustrates it solely by way of considering the aura of natural objects. He defines the aura of the latter as "the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be." Our encounters with "auratic" art bring about such a distance. Now, with the onset of technically reproducible arts (or so Benjamin tries to shows), this aspect of distance and uniqueness is overcome. Art is produced now in such a way that it directly involves its recipients. This "post-auratic" art is thus an art that does away with the illusion of autonomy, thereby revealing the way in which art is embedded in society. Such an art breaches the subjectivity of auratic art and renders art into a medium through which the masses are mobilized.
From Adorno's perspective, this is a brief way of summarizing Benjamin's line of thought in the latter's essay on the nature of the artwork. For Adorno, Benjamin's analysis is insufficiently dialectical because it does not make the dialectic of illusion of autonomy intelligible. In his representative letter to Benjamin from March 18, 1936, Adorno formulates his objection to it (among other things) as follows:
Though your essay is dialectical, it falls below this in the case of the autonomous work of art itself; for it neglects a fundamental experience which daily becomes increasingly evident to me in my musical works, that precisely the uttermost consistency in the pursuit of the technical laws of autonomous art actually transforms this art itself and, instead of turning it into a fetish or taboo, brings it that much closer to a state of freedom, to something that can be consciously produced and made.
From Adorno's perspective, what Benjamin fails to grasp can be summarized as follows: The extent to which art produces the illusion of autonomy does not only bring its recipients into a distantiated stance. Rather, it brings its recipients at the same time into a stance that is affected by how an object asserts itself over against a subject. Artworks are objects that confront subjects with unique forms. For this reason, they do not allow themselves to be classified by subjects. Subjects can only confront artworks by letting themselves be guided by them. A certain liberation from domination occurs precisely when this happens. The subject is liberated from the structures that the subject established for the sake of his or her domination of nature and of him- or herself. The artwork that is thoroughly formed in a technical sense, which realizes an illusion of autonomy, by means of this thoroughly technical formation, stands opposed to the recipients as something that cannot be simply grasped in established structures. Adorno's analysis means, then, to show how the dominating technology in art attains a new aspect: On the basis of this technology, recipients are dominated by an artwork in a way that they cannot control. In this case, domination does not turn against itself.
Adorno insists, therefore, that the illusion of autonomy is not connected with a reversal of domination against itself. Rather, that which dominates, namely, the subject, is cut loose from the structures that dominate and are dominated by him or her. The subject thereby undergoes an experience that points a way to freedom: to a state in which the subject makes something out of him- or herself, but not in a way such that what gets made shapes the subject in accordance with the subjective structures. The "primacy of the object" that realizes itself in the aesthetic illusion of autonomy thus breaches the mythologizing of practices that dominate: The object asserts itself over against the subject and the structures that the latter has established. Its primacy consists in the fact that it is able to assert itself in this way.
Adorno's objection to Benjamin is that his concept of aura fails to have this dialectic of aesthetic autonomy in view. This failure is connected with a second one in Adorno's view. The latter has to do with the determination of various modern tendencies in art, through which aura comes to an end from Benjamin's point of view. Adorno fundamentally agrees with Benjamin in this diagnosis. The production of art at the threshold of the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century arrives at a juncture where the illusion of autonomy increasingly diminishes. Here, Adorno is in basic agreement with Benjamin. But this agreement ends with regard to their respective explanations of this transition. For Adorno, the techniques of reproduction in the arts are not the essential cause of this process. Instead, this process goes back in his view to a dialectic of aesthetic autonomy itself. Adorno conceives this dialectic of aesthetic autonomy as follows: With the increasing development of art, society — and to this extent the autonomy of art is also an illusion for Adorno — makes the techniques established in art consistently available for itself. This drives art towards the unending development of the techniques realized in artworks. Art thus follows a "law of movement" (Bewegungsgesetz) that leads for Adorno to a necessary point of culmination where the technological development of art is spurred on to such an extent that the illusion of autonomy can no longer be produced. Art becomes at this point a paradoxical operation in order to salvage this illusion: It renounces its own autonomy. Adorno understands the emblematic works of aesthetic modernity and postmodernity precisely as the results of a "rebellion against semblance." This rebellion, which one can also characterize with Benjamin in terms of the loss of the aura of art (as its "de-auratization" [Entauratisierung]), results from the development of aesthetic autonomy itself. Adorno speaks here of a "deaestheticization [Entkunstung] of art." For Adorno, in this state of "deaetheticization," art can no longer be conceived as entering a new stage. It is rather a question here of how the illusion of autonomy is essential for art's development as a practice. According to Adorno, Benjamin fails to have just this aspect of art in view in his juxtaposition of auratic and post-auratic art. For this reason, Benjamin fails not only to conceptualize aura in a sufficiently dialectical way; he also fails to do so regarding the nexus between auratic and post-auratic art.
BENJAMIN'S CONCEPTION OF ART
It is decisive in my view to raise the question of whether Adorno adequately grasps the critical direction of Benjamin's position in his critique. Toward this end, it is first important to clarify once again, independently of Adorno's perspective, what Benjamin is concerned with in general. What does Benjamin aim at with his novel justification of aesthetics for the sake of a politicizing of art? What is the significance of his concept of aura in this context?
Benjamin introduces the concept of aura in a context in which he comes to speak about questions of perception. The above-cited passage where he discusses the determination of the aura of natural objects begins as follows: "During long periods of history, the mode of human sensuous perception changes with the whole of human existence." It is thus necessary, so argues Benjamin, to conceive sensuous perception as historically determined. This is the central point of departure for Benjamin's reflections. What does this point of departure imply for the concept of aura? It implies that with this concept Benjamin works out a determinate, historically established mode of perception. It concerns a mode of perception that Benjamin characterizes in terms of the concepts of distance and uniqueness. When objects acquire aura, sensuous perception becomes shaped in such a way that perceivers stand in a distantiated relation to the objects of their perception. Within the framework of an auratic practice, subjects are set at a distance from what they perceive. The auratic objects are thus perceived uniquely in this sense, since they filter through a determinate historical development and stand at a determinate moment in complex contexts of tradition (in Benjamin's term: in "the whole of human existence" [menschliche Kollektiva]). Individual subjects are powerless in relation to such historical developments and contexts of tradition. Auratic objects are in this sense objects that have a primacy in relation to subjects who perceive them. This primacy, however, cannot be understood for Benjamin apart from the perceptual practices that society has shaped. This primacy does not result from the particular constitution of the objects themselves. For this reason Benjamin speaks of how "the unique value of the 'authentic' work of art" has "its basis in ritual [Fundierung im Ritual], the location of its original use value." He also speaks of how art is "based on ritual Fundierungaufs Ritual]." The concept of being "based on ritual" expresses and indicates a determinate alignment of practices. I designate such a determinate alignment of practices as an assemblage (Dispositiv). I resort here to the familiar concept of assemblage that Foucault elaborates because Benjamin's reflections exhibit aspects that fit well with this concept. According to Benjamin, the structures of perception that are established in communal practices ("being based on ritual") determine the particular perceptual practices of subjects. This is characteristic of a certain constellation of communal practices: The practices of particular subjects are constrained by forms that are realized by many subjects and to which these subjects are bound. "Being based on ritual" thus results in the sensuous perception of all individuals being directed and shaped in a certain way.
Now, it is this context that makes the "decay of aura" comprehensible. Benjamin argues that a transformation takes place in the assemblage of sensuous perception with the onset of technically reproducible arts. One can articulate this transformation in Benjamin's sense by speaking of a new assemblage of sensuous perception. What is characteristic for this new assemblage are modes of perception in which there is no distance between objects and those who view them. It is in this sense that a viewer penetrates the objects under observation. Benjamin understands the perception involved in this new assemblage to that of a surgeon: "The surgeon greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's body, and increases it only a little bit by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs." According to Benjamin, technically reproducible arts make such a mode of perception feasible. The undistantiated perception that arises in this way enables viewers to undertake "optical tests" of the objects in question. Photographs and films isolate different moments from movements; they open up viewpoints from positions from which no viewpoints are possible in everyday perception. Objects are optically tested in this sense. These tests take for granted that viewers are not confronted with a uniqueness that overwhelms them. The post-auratic or non-auratic perceptual situation is thus in this way bound up with the possibility of viewing objects in arbitrarily close ways.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory by Nathan Ross. Copyright © 2015 Nathan Ross and Contributors. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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