Theodor Adorno Overview

born: 1903
died: 1969
Among the foremost members of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno launched a tirade
against the modern world. With an arsenal of unsupported assertions strung together without
obvious connecting elements, Adorno set out to critique what he called the "phantasmagoria" of
commodity consumption. A commodity, according to Adorno, is a deception: it conceals its
mode of production behind an attractive veneer, becomes "reified" as an object without a history.
Consequently, Adorno deemed it his philosophical task to get beneath these surfaces'”to discover
material processes that would betray the seductive world of objects. The task, though
philosophical in nature, was essentially a crusade for freedom; Adorno wanted to liberate the
intellect from the model of commodity consumption. Freedom would be possible only insofar as
humanity could align its consciousness with material processes: forces that could not be simply
identified and consumed, but had to be reckoned with in the mode of what they were not.
According to Adorno, this was achievable by means of "negative dialectics," or thought through
negations and displacements, as opposed to identifications and affirmations. Adorno repeatedly
turned to avant-garde art for support. The mental effort required to enjoy avant-garde art
disrupted the mindless consumption that Adorno thought dominated society. It reached beneath
the surface, remained closer to the level of material forces, and elicited its audience to do the
same. By explicitly refusing to be recognized by means of everyday aesthetic forms, avant-garde
art achieved a thorough-going negativity capable of overturning commercial society. Born in
Germany in 1903, Adorno studied in Frankfurt, Vienna, and New York. In addition to receiving
his doctorate for philosophical studies in 1924, he also engaged sociology, psychology, and
music. He was deeply influenced by the music of Schonberg (Adorno even wrote a series of
articles about him), and moved to Vienna in 1925 to study composition with Alban Berg. Adorno
consciously developed an interdisciplinary flexibility, as evidenced by the wide sweep of
subjects that fell under his critical gaze.

(www.artandculture.com/users/48(22-02-2011))
 Theodore Adorno on Modernism
Kate Liu

For Adorno, modern art is negative on different levels.

First of all, it critiques the administered and antagonistic society it is in, at the same time it
"makes an uncompromising reprint" of the society (Aesthetic Theory 28).
The work of art is also negative of its predecessors. Modern art, specifically, negates its
own affirmative tradition, exposing the latter's illusion of harmony and totality.
Placed in the dialectical history of art, modern art also negates itself. Post-war modernism
with its lack of tension negates of high modernism's negation and break the latter's taboo
(Aesthetic Theory 53).

What Adorno is most concerned with is, however, the negativity of high modernism, which
"expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and
uncompromised, in its innermost structure." Modern art de-aestheticizes itself by presenting
neither harmony nor formal unity but dissonance and fragmentation.

Modern art, however, does not simply "embody the contradictions" correlative to the tensions
in society; it integrates and synthesizes them through form. This integration, however, is
"non-repressive," allowing the "non-integratable" to subsist. Adorno, for me, is vague in
describing art as a dialectical process that transcends antagonisms but not abolishes them
(aufheben). One possible reason for this vagueness is that in describing the dynamics of art,
as well as "aufheben" as its outcome (272), Adorno intentionally leaves out the audience--an
indispensible dimension in the play of art.

Notes:
The whole, as a positive entity, cannot be antithetically extracted from an estranged and
splintered reality by means of the will and power of the individual; if it is not to degenerate
into deception and ideology, it must assume the form of negation. The chef d'oeuvre
remained unfinished and Schoenberg's admission of failure, his recognition that it was "a
fragment, like everything else," says perhaps more for him than any success. (Prism 164)

"A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective
contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively
by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure."
"Art, and so-called classical art no less than its more anarchical expressions, always was, and
is, a force of protest of the humane against the pressure of domineering institutions, religious
and otherwise, no less than it reflects their objective substance." (Jay)
the process of de-aestheticization in modern avant-garde art, the consciously executed
destruction of aura
This did not mean the end of traditional art through the extrinsic intervention of machine
technology or the masses, but rather the immanent techinical development in which auratic
qualities are eroded from within. In the face of a Brechtian politicized art or the affirmative
"culture industry," this process kept alive the primary function of art as a negation of a
completely instrumentalized world: only "where art observes its immanence does it convince
practical reason of its absurdity." (Lunn)
Endgame--Beckett uses form to evoke the emptiness of modern culture. ...The absurd
discontinuities of the discourse, the pared-down characterisation, and plotlessness, all
contribute to the aesthetic effect of distancing the reality to which the play alludes, and
thereby giving us a 'negative' knowledge of modern existence.
Adorno argues that art cannot simply reflect the social system, but acts within that reality as
an irritant which produces an indirect sort of knowledge: "Art is the negative knowldge of the
actual world." This can be achieved ...by writing 'difficult' experimental texts and not directly
polemical or critical works. (Selden)
"The return of the repressed" can only occur through a "shattering of the social contract with
reality" (Laing 64) Schoenberg emerges from Adorno's analysis as a composer whose work
reflects the social totality, but negatively, through negating it.