Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
• A critique that does not necessarily have reference to cognition (Rasmussen, 1994, p. 272).
• A critique of cognition, scientific, or instrumental ways of seeing the world.
• “…art represents, for Adorno, a way of overcoming the dilemma established by cognition.” Art as “potentiality” of “manifestation” for a “non-representational theory” (Rasmussen, 1994, p. 272).
• “The explosive power of art remains in its representing that which cannot be represented”
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”• With photography, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependency on ritual.”
• Now work of art is designed for reproducibility.
• Has emancipative potential, but not necessarily so.
• With reproducibility, the original loses its force and “authenticity” ceases to be a valid criterion for a work of art.
• Now, with reproducibility, art enters the realm of politics. [What can he mean by this? How is it associated with Adorno’s claim of “the explosive power of art”? The aura?]
• How is Fascism related to the “aesthetization” of politics.
o “Fuhrer cult” has a “violation of an apparatus…pressed into the production of ritual values.”
o Ritual is now returned to art that is mechanically reproducible. [What are the results of this?]
• Fascism=politics as aesthetic / the aesthetics of politics – will-to-power for the sake of power.
• Communism=art/aesthetics as politics / the politics of aesthetics.
McLuhan and the role of the artist, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man• “In the history of human culture, there is no example opf a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transoforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models or Noah’s arks for facing the change that is at hand….
“To prevent undo wreckage in society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the control tower of society…. [T]he artist is indispensable in the shaping and analysis and understanding of the life of forms, and structures created by electronic technology.
“The percussed victims of the new technology have invariably muttered clichés about the impracticality of artists and their fanciful preferences.... Equally age-old is the inability of the percussed victims, who cannot sidestep the new violence, to recognize their need of the artist.... The artist is the man in any field, scientific or humanistic, who grasps the implications of his actions and of new knowledge in his own time. He is the man of integral awareness.
“The artist can correct the sense of ratios before the blow of new technology has numbed conscious procedures.” (McLuhan, 1964, pp. 64-65)
• Also look into his theory of left-brained (visual man) and right-brained (aural man) in his posthumously published 1988 book, The Global Village. He had similar ideas in mind in Understanding Media in 1964: For McLuhan, artists had a non-Cartesian way of conceiving the world: “Everybody experiences more than he understands. Yet, it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour…” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 277). From here, McLuhan differentiates the artist from the “left-brained, linear, and logical thinking and visually-biased Cartesian way of reality” that is the condition of the literate mind, to the more full-sensorial, right-brained and acoustic all-at-onceness of the tribal mind.
Nietzsche• For Nietzsche, there was a psychological impact to art. Nietzsche, again and again throughout his writings, “stresses the close relationship between ‘art’ and ‘life’: art is, or at least ought to be, ‘the great stimulant of life, an intoxication with life, a will to life’” (Nietzsche, in Will to Power, quoted in Megill, 1985, p. 142).
• Art is
rausche, rapture.
Heidegger• Heidegger picks up his views on art and the force of the aesthetic from Nietzsche, especially in the first volume of his Nietzsche lectures and in his famous essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.”
• For Heidgger, as with Adorno and McLuhan, art is “a counterforce to technology” (Megill, 1985, p. 143) and technological/instrumental ways of thinking.
• Art reveals Being in a certain way that is much more authentic than other modes of revealing.
• Art speaks the unspeakable.
• Art is an originary way of saying and seeing. It founds something or brings something to light that otherwise remains hidden within the hustle-and-bustle of contemporary life.
• Art redeems life. [How so?]
• “Poetic language speaks in order to say nothing other than its own saying” (Megill, 1985, p. 167).
• Art is not purpose-ful. It is purpose-less. Art is not use-ful. It is use-less. Art is not utility, it is the exact opposite of it, but is, nevertheless, necessary for understanding life. [What could the opposite of utility be?]
• There is a mystery and enigma to art [could this be an aura?]. There is an unbridgeable gulf between saying and meaning. Everyday language and representation falls short always in bridging this gulf. Art, however, has the capacity to bridge this gulf in a much more powerful way than everyday words do. Heidegger called this capacity within art “the artwork working.”
Marcuse• Art has a “potentiality” to it. Potentiality possesses two things: it reveals “that which is” and “that which might be.” The latter term is about “becoming” and “movement.”
