Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature) (ISBN 0816618003)

Fundamentally The Intellectual Equivalent of White Flight:
I do not understand Adorno's fame or appeal. The consequences--witting or unwitting--of many of his ideas are frighteningly inhuman. This is to speak only of the ideas I found scrutable. But really, the parts I didn't understand could have been a map to the unattended cook's entrance of Heaven; but it would not mitigate that which concerned me most about what I DID understand. No offense to the Schoenberg estate, and no offense to those who enjoy experimentations with tonality, but to my sensibility the elevation of Arnold Schoenberg to aesthetic eminence just seems representative of the lengths to which many will go to avoid thinking about black traditions in art, literature and music. Adorno's music writings insist that only classical music might liberate us from the pull of ideology and/or 'mere' existence. It offends me that a man who will not even try to appreciate Coltrane's A LOVE SUPREME--and moreover a man who would immediately equate said album to one of the means by which we maintain and spread cultural sickness--insists that he has navigated some sort of means for salvation to which we all should turn. Not being grossly essentialist, I would expand the concept of 'black' within this context to mean "people who do not insist on the idea that resentment and worldweariness are ontic categories and/or define these traits as, to use K. Burke's term, 'necessary equipment for living'." This means that each of us can escape Adorno's grasp. Let's consider: Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed by an accident backstage during a concert venue. He could not move below the neck. For the rest of his years he persevered, making one more album. Adorno, on the other hand, escaped the Final Solution, then returned to Germany for the rest of his life. For most of the time, he enjoyed not a little comfort. And yet somehow Adorno was melancholy, almost comically so. Mayfield made music Adorno couldn't understand. Was the humanity of Mayfield's perseverence something Adorno couldn't understand as well? If black world traditions of music, art, speech etc. were just as advertised--traditions--shouldn't many of us develop a useful understanding of those traditions? (Or could we at least recognize the courage of Fela Kuti and Adorno's failure to match up?) The task does not even seem particularly difficult, yet the rewards are great. Yes, many times more people will 'understand' pieces within these traditions than people would 'understand' a piece by Schoenberg. But the summitt of the former, I am certain, towers over the summitt of the latter. It would behoove us to address the reasons that Adorno's work is scoured day and night, with the intent purpose of locating 'genius.' And it behooves us as well to investigate into why the semantic vagaries of a term like "tha bomb" renders the same scavenger hunters for Adorno totally lost. It is noted about Adorno's book that paragraphing and cohesion and coherence are abandoned, forgotten or arranged idiosyncratically so as to instigate some kind of paradigmatic challenge, apparently. But minimal immersion within a vernacular culture would provide any student with the means of vernacular comprehension and comfort, if not vernacular mastery. Adorno's supporters strain for any act or utterance from Adorno to have profound meaning. A short survey of vernacular urban culture, for example, would provide a wealth of possibility for finding profound meaning. No strain, but a fair, competent consideration of many aspects of vernacular urban culture will reveal clearly the wealth of possibilities within that culture. Why insist on the insistence of genius? Why accept, especially, a flat denial of art's social value or social nature, in a way that always places Adorno's aesthetic theory in a position of strength compared to more 'grounded' ones? Doesn't this automatic suspicion help to hide the excesses of the idea of ideological contamination and underpinnings? Finally, consider two victims of the Nazis: Bruno Schulz and J. Huizenga. Schulz' comic outrageousness still inspires; Huizenga made the perceptive argument that man is by nature 'one who plays,' and that that was the best way to understand ourselves and to liberate ourselves. The Nazis killed these two. But is not, in a fundamental way, Adorno, who, in his declaration that, "There is no poetry after Auschwitz," reduces those two to ash and dust? To proscribe such essential ways to see the world with love, hope, and the possibility of one's agency, in the name of theory or aesthetics, is to me something that cannot be defended. Adorno did not fall then. Neither did he risk falling: he had escaped to LA. Yet he felt it imperative to strip certain sensibilities from our psyche, sensibilities that might get us over such attempts to destroy humanity as the Final Solution. Has Adorno stooped to a level of 'inhumanity'? In some real way, his concepts of ideology and classical music in effect see his brethren who enjoyed Klezmer music as getting what should be expected: victims of ideology are victimized to the last.

*The* aesthtic theory of modernism:
Adorno keeps your mind at thinking, not consuming thoughts. Even when you disagree with his brilliant idiosyncrasies they provoce you to think about modern art, philosophy and society.

so what:
If he doesn't like Curtis Mayfield. Should he?

The definite book of modernist aesthetics:
Adorno is not famous for his writing style. His prose is dense, and sometimes impenetrable for the English reader. Yet, I think Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is one of the greatest books of XX century philosophy along with Heidegger's "Being and Time", and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I think there are three levels of reflection in this book. The first is that AT is a sociology of art. Adorno traces the social and economic conditions of how modern art becomes to being. Industrialization and modernization have a great impact on aesthetics because perception and reality are fundamentally altered. Adorno makes the case that the destruction of nature by industry makes art to find its reality elsewhere and, hence, it becomes abstract. Art does not want to imitate nature anymore since nature is already destroyed. It escapes to the realm of idea(l)s in order to critique the current state of being. The critical nature of modern art makes for the second level of Adorno's reading which is the aesthetic. Aesthetics in modernism becomes an instrument of social critique. Before, in the time of Kant and the idealists, aesthetic was the study of beauty and artistic genius. Now, according to Adorno, it becomes the study of social disintegration in which the artist is just the "unfortunate" medium to express it. Yet, Adorno is not a complete pessimist. (Although his arrogance and snobbery concerning "lower" popular art is of the worst kind. His favorite artists are the European ultra-elite: Mahler, Kafka, Schonberg). He sees in aesthetic reflection a tool for utopian transformation. This is the third level of reading AT -the philosophical or utopian. Modern art, because it critiques this world for the sake of a better one, is also philosophy. Since philosophy was the discipline that established how the real and ideal are separated, modern art also shows this gap, and treats beauty as a poor substitute for happiness. Beauty, once idealized by the elite, becomes a sign of the powerlessness of art to transform the world. This impotence, still, is a sign of art's utopian power. This kind of paradoxical reasoning is typical of Adorno, and it is loaded with theological significance. Art promises something that cannot be delivered, but who delivers then?

A pyramidal corpus of smart ideas!:
"The darkening of the world makes rational the irrational in art: it's an irrationality radically obscured". "The art doesn't imitate neither the nature nor to a concrete natural beauty, but the natural beauty by itself." "The efforts of the art by saving, in the remaining, all the transient, flowing and temporal, defending it from the stuffing though art is familiarized with it, bear a tension between the objectifying technique and the mimetic essence of the works." "Aesthetical theory" is a huge compendium of smart ideas, a whole corpus of clever and revealing concepts about the role of the art. His architectural intelligence and supreme erudition literally is an engaging tour de force, an impressive gallery of sharp reflections that will motivate you, dear reader. Since I acquired it, this book has become one of my cult texts, whose relevant importance remains beyond any other superlative you want to label it.