Aesthetic Theory

Theodor W. Adorno

Translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor

Aesthetic Theory

By: Theodor W. Adorno

Translated and edited by: Robert Hullot-Kentor

Translator’s Introduction

• Artworks are after all unique, not least in that, when they are experienced, they are experienced from within.
• It is possible to vanish into a novel of a painting and be half-surprised, looking away for a moment, that the world was ever there at all.
• “We don’t understand music, it understands us.”
• When the editorial board at the Psychoanalytic Society of San Francisco finished with his essay “Psychoanalysis Revised,” Adorno found that “the entire text was disfigured beyond recognition, the basic intention could not be discerned.” As Adorno recounted, the head editor explained that the standards to which the essay had been adjusted, which made it look like every other essay in the journal, were those of the profession: “I would only be standing in my own way” – Adorno was told – “if I passed up its advantages. I passed them up nevertheless.” Adorno moved back to Europe.
• Paragraph indentations were distributed arbitrarily throughout.
• This device provided a steady external grip on the book while causing it to collapse internally.
• And whereas the paratactical text demands that every sentence undertake to be the topic sentence and that the book be composed of long, complex phrases, each of which seems under the obligation to present the book as a whole.
• The slightest slackening of intensity threatens to dissolve the text into a miscellany.
• And the more extensive the paratactical work actually is – and Aesthetic Theory is almost unparalleled in this – the greater the potential for its unraveling at each and every point.
• Every reader will note the work’s recurrence to abrupt, staccato, sometimes delphically-abbreviated expression that heightens the push-pull of the text.
• Adorno’s many other techniques of condensation and heightening have been used to maintain the density of this translation.
• For however difficult his writing may be, it is never vague or simply evocative.
• The original has plenty of problems of its own that it imposes on the translation.
• The text produced a need for repetition that is its innermost antagonist.
• The virtual presence of the whole of the text at any one point is impeded by the form in which it is maintained.
• And consider the intense philological pressures in a country whose Protestantism invented the discipline and where there are, for instance, left-wing and right-wing editions of Holderlin.
• No reader will imagine the linguistic mayhem out of which this translation is built.
• What he wrote was completely unpalatable to the former-Nazi faculty, still in its prime, that controlled Frankfurt University after the war.
• Barely two decades after his return, leftist students who had idolized him and embraced his works rioted in his seminars because he refused to lead them to the barricades.
• Aesthetic Theory wants to be what is German that is not German, and if it finds real resonance here, it will be with what is American that is not American, none of which could be put on a list of national character traits.
• The right word is always there, it just can’t be used.
• Line by line, the wrong word is always, unbearably, coming to the rescue.
• For the many sentences that were each finally accepted as not really but sort of what it means, I can only say, it can only be said, that it was not for lack of trying.

Art, Society, Aesthetics

o Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity.

o Posed from on high, the question whether something such as film is or is no longer art leads nowhere.

o Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not.

o Admixed with art’s own concept is the ferment of its own abolition.

o There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted; no imagination without something imagined. This holds true particularly in the case of art’s immanent purposiveness.

o Art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution.

o Artworks are alive in that they speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make them.

o The communication of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted.

o Every artwork is an instant; every successful work is a cessation, a suspended moment of the process, in which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye. If artworks are answers to their own questions, they themselves thereby truly become questions.

o The unity of both, of reportage and linguistic perfectionism, accounts for the book’s unfaded actuality.

o For no single select category, not even the aesthetically central concept of the law of form, names the essence of art and suffices to judge its products.

o Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron fillings.

o Art’s unconscious self-consciousness derives from its participation in the cast of the illusion of its purely spiritual being.

o Art is the social antithesis of society not directly deducible from it.

o Among artists of the highest rank, such as Beethoven or Rembrandt, the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality.

o “The liking that we combine with the representation of the existence of an object.”

o For, once shorn of what Kant calls interest, satisfaction becomes so indeterminate that it no longer serves to define beauty.

o There is no art that does not contain in itself as an element, negated, what it repulses.

o The dignity of artworks depends on the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested.

o For Kant, aesthetics becomes paradoxically a castrated hedonism, desire without desire.

o The moment, however, the artwork comports itself by retaining the negativity of reality and taking a position toward it, the concept of disinterestedness is also modified.

o For him who has a genuine relation to art, in which he himself vanishes, art is not an object.

o Incontestably, no one would devote himself to art without – as the bourgeois put it – getting something out of it.

o Yet precisely because they were sacred, the art objects were not objects of enjoyment.

o The spiritualization of art incited the rancor of the excluded and spawned consumer art as a genre, which conversely antipathy toward consumer art compelled artists to ever more reckless spiritualization.

o Whoever disappears into the artwork thereby gains dispensation from the impoverishment of a life that is always too little.

o Only in memory and longing, not as a copy or as an immediate effect, is pleasure absorbed by art.

o In many of Mozart’s compositions the delicacy of expression evokes the sweetness of the human voice.

o The taboo on the sensual ultimately encroaches on the opposite of pleasure because, even as the remotest echo, pleasure is sensed in its specific negation.

o The happiness gained from artworks is that of having suddenly escaped, not a morsel of that from which art escaped.

o What the work demands from its beholder is knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped.

Situation

• Chopin’s rare tonalities, did indeed radiate the force of the untrodden.
• By serving the customers, they themselves are betrayed.
• This hold true as well for artworks. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters.
• If thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something in back of the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides.
• The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn.
• By avoiding contamination from what simply is, art expresses it all the more inexorably.
• Immersion in the historical dimension should reveal what previously remained unsolved; in no way can a relation between the present and the past be established.
• The modern is abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconcilable with magic, it is unable to bespeak what has yet to be and yet must seek it, protesting against the ignominy of the ever-same.
• The abstractly new can stagnate and fall back into the ever-same.
• The paradox that something made exists for its own sake; precisely this paradox is the vital nerve of new art.
• The latently traditionalistic belief that it would automatically become clear whether the results were a match for what had already been established and could thus legitimate themselves.
• The belief is chimerical that through them art will divest itself of its subjectivity and become the illusionless thing in itself which to date art has only feigned.
• Further, the concept of the avant-garde, reserved for many decades for whatever movement declared itself the most advanced, now has some of the comic quality of aged youth.
• It is worth noting that the uneasiness with isms seldom includes their historical equivalent, the schools.
• In sharp contrast to traditional art, new art accents the once hidden element of being something made, something produced.
• The more successful the integration, the more it becomes an empty spinning of gears; teleologically it tends toward infantile tinkering.
• Their truth was that it would be better not to have art than to have a false one.
• In Beckett it is pushed to the point of the manifest annihilation of reality.
• At ground zero, however, where Beckett’s plays unfold like forces in infinitesimal physics, a second world of images springs forth, both sad and rich, the concentrate of historical experiences that otherwise, in their immediacy, fail to articulate the essential: the evisceration of subject and reality.
• There is no art without individuation.
• The relation to the new is modeled on a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord, however, was always there; the possible combinations are limited and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard. The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself.
• If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end.
• This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia – that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise – converges with the possibility of total catastrophe.
• The shaft that art directs at society is itself social; it is counterpressure to the force exerted by the body social.
• Modern works in this sense must show themselves to be the equal of high industrialism, not simply make it a topic.
• By an inherent tendency, important artworks annihilate everything of their own time that does not achieve their standard.
• Modern art is questionable not when it goes too far – as the cliché runs – but when it does not go far enough, which is the point at which works falter out of a lack of internal consistency.
• Aesthetic rationality demands that all artistic means reach the utmost determinancy in themselves and according to their own function so as to be able to perform what traditional means can no longer fulfill.
• Each and every important work of art leaves traces behind in its material and technique, and following them defines the modern as what needs to be done, which is contrary to having a nose for what is in the air.
• The truth content of artworks is fused with their critical content. That is why works are also critics of one another.
• Each artwork is the mortal enemy of the other.
• Idiosyncrasies of artists are sedimented in the canon of prohibitions, but they in turn become objectively binding so that in art the particular is literally the universal.
• Art threatens to become allergic to itself; the quintessence of the determinate negation that art exercises is its own negation.
• Aesthetic norms, however great their historical importance may be, lag behind the concrete life of artworks; yet all the same these norms participate in the latters’ magnetic field.
• The artist’s imagination scarcely ever completely encompassed what it brought forth.
• As play, art seeks to absolve itself of the guilt of its semblance.
• Valid art today is polarized into, on the one hand, an unassuaged and inconsolable expressivity that rejects every last trace of conciliation and becomes autonomous construction; and, on the other, the expressionlessness of construction that expresses the dawning powerlessness of expression.
• Construction is not the corrective of expression, nor does it serve as its guarantor by fulfilling the need for objectivation; rather, construction must conform to the mimetic impulses without planning, as it were.
• Similarly, construction cannot, as a form empty of human content, wait to be filled with expression. Rather, construction gains expression through coldness. Picasso’s cubist works and their later transformations are, by virtue of asceticism against expression, far more expressive than those works that were inspired by cubism but feared to lose expression and became supplicant.
• Aura is not only – as Benjamin claimed – the here and now of the artwork, it is whatever goes beyond its factual givenness, its content; one cannot abolish it and still want art.

On The Categories Of The Ugly, The Beautiful, and Technique

o Nietzsche’s dictum that all good things were once dreadful things, like Schelling’s insight into the terror of the beginning, may well have had their origins in the experience of art.

o In back of the word spleen is the obsession with what resists being formed, with the transformation of what is hostile to art into art’s own agent, which thus extends art’s concept beyond that of the ideal.

o Great artworks, as destructive works, have also retained the power to destroy in the authority of their success.

o Beauty establishes a sphere of untouchability; works become beautiful by the force of their opposition to what simply exists.

o There is no denying that even in the principle of construction, in the dissolution of materials and their subordination to an imposed unity, once again something smooth, harmonistic, a quality of pure logicality, is conjured up that seeks to establish itself as ideology.

o Construction is the synthesis of the diverse at the expense of the qualitative elements that it masters, and at the expense of the subject, which intends to extinguish itself as it carries out this synthesis. The affinity of construction with cognitive processes, or perhaps rather with their interpretation by the theory of knowledge, is no less evident than is their difference, which is that art does not make judgments and when it does, it shatters its own concept. What distinguishes construction from composition in the encompassing sense of pictorial composition, is the ruthless subordination not only of everything that originated from outside the artwork, but also of all partial elements immanent to the work. To this extent construction is the extension of subjective domination, which conceals itself all the more profoundly the further it is driven. Construction tears the elements of reality out of their primary context and transforms them to the point where they are once again capable of forming a unity, one that is no less imposed on them internally than was the heteronomous unity to which they were subjected externally. By means of construction, art desperately wants to escape from its nominalistic situation, to extricate itself by its own power from a sense of accidentalness and attain what is overarchingly binding or, if one will, universal.

o Art that is simply a thing is an oxymoron. Yet the development of this oxymoron is nevertheless the inner direction of contemporary art. Art is motivated by a conflict: Its enchantment, a vestige of its magical phase, is constantly repudiated as unmediated sensual immediacy by the progressive disenchantment of the world, yet without it ever being possible finally to obliterate this magical element.

Natural Beauty

• Nature to the experience of a mediated and objectified world, the artwork to nature as the mediated plenipotentiary of immediacy.
• Authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves completely a second nature, have consistently felt the urge, as if in need of a breath of fresh air, to step outside of themselves.
• So long as progress, deformed by utilitarianism, does violence to the surface of the earth, it will be impossible – in spite of all proof to the contrary – completely to counter the perception that what antedates the trend is in its backwardness better and more humane.
• Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature’s promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back into itself.
• What nature strives for in vain, artworks fulfill: They open their eyes.
• The more that art is thoroughly organized as an object by the subject and divested of the subject’s intentions, the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significative language.
• Only the pedant presumes to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly in nature, but without such distinction the concept of natural beauty would be empty.
• Every individual object of nature that is experienced as beautiful presents itself as if it were the only beautiful thing on earth: this is passed on to every artwork.
• What is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there.
• Natural beauty is perceived both as authoritatively binding and as something incomprehensible that questioningly awaits its solution.
• Under its optic, art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty.
• Natural beauty is suspended history, a moment of becoming at a standstill. Artworks that resonate with this moment of suspension are those that are justly said to have a feeling for nature.
• It is for this reason that art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it.
• For in art the evanescent is objectified and summoned to duration.
• The weakness of thought in the face of natural beauty, a weakness of the subject, together with the objective intensity of natural beauty demand that the enigmatic character of natural beauty be reflected in art and thereby be determined by the concept.
• Through its language, the poem imitates what is unutterable in the language of nature.
• The pain in the face of beauty, nowhere more visceral than in the experience of nature, is as much the longing for what beauty promises but never unveils as it is suffering at the inadequacy of the appearance, which fails beauty while wanting to make itself like it. This pain reappears in relation to artworks. Involuntarily and unconsciously, the observer enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak.
• However words may glance off nature and betray its language to one that is qualitatively different from its own, still no critique of natural teleology can dismiss those cloudless days of southern lands that seem to be waiting to be noticed.
• Natural beauty is close to the truth but veils itself at the moment of greatest proximity. This too, art learned from natural beauty.
• What is true in this is that natural beauty, the unexpected promise of something that is highest, cannot remain locked in itself but is rescued only through that consciousness that is set in opposition to it.
• The more strictly artworks abstain from rank natural growth and the replication of nature, the more the successful ones approach nature.
• The necessity of art cannot be propounded more scientifico but rather only insofar as a work, by the power of its internal unity, gives evidence of being thus-and-only-thus, as if it absolutely must exist and cannot possibly be thought away.
• Artworks say that something exists in itself, without predicating anything about it.
• With human means art wants to realize the language of what is not human.
• The more perfect the artwork, the more it forsakes intentions.

Art Beauty

o Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is. To wrest this more from that more’s contingency, to gain control of its semblance, to determine it as semblance as well as to negate it as unreal: This is the idea of art.

o Artworks become artworks in the production of this more; they produce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they once again become separated from transcendence. The actual arena of transcendence in artworks is the nexus of their elements.

o Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual.

o Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect.

o Artworks remain enlightened because they would like to make commensurable to human beings the remembered shudder, which was incommensurable in the magical primordial world.

o Artworks surpass the world of things by what is thing-like in them, their artificial objectivation.

o In each genuine artwork something appears that does not exist.

o In art something momentary transcends; objectivation makes the artwork into an instant.

o Artworks are only able to become other than thing by becoming a thing, though not through their localization in space and time but only by an immanent process of reification that makes them self-same, self-identical. Otherwise one could not speak of their spirit, that is, of what is utterly unthinglike.

o In society as a whole, it is art that should introduce chaos into order rather than the reverse.

Semblance and Expression

• Because meaning, whenever it is manifest in an artwork, remains bound up with semblance, all art is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely its successful unification suggests meaning, and the sadness is heightened by the feeling of “Oh, were it only so.”
• By canceling those elements of semblance that adhere to them, artworks actually strengthen the semblance that emanates from their existence.
• Art is expressive when what is objective, subjectively mediated, speaks, whether this be sadness, energy, or longing.
• Artworks are smart or foolish according to their procedures, not according to the thoughts their author has about them.
• Yet art is scarcely imaginable without the element of inwardness.
• Authentic art knows the expression of the expressionless, a kind of weeping without tears.

Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics

o There is no answer that would convince someone who would ask such questions as “Why imitate something?” or “Why tell a story as if it were true when obviously the facts are otherwise and it just distorts reality?” Artworks fall helplessly mute before the question “What’s it for?” and before the reproach that they are actually pointless.

o One understands something of art, not that one understands art.

o Those manifestly incomprehensible works that emphasize their enigmaticalness are potentially the most comprehensible.

o No concept that enters an artwork remains what it is.

o Art judges exclusively by abstaining from judgment; this is the defense of naturalism.

o All artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content.

o Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales: “If you want the absolute, you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it.”

o Art is what remains after the loss of what was supposed to exercise a magical, and later a cultic, function. Art’s why-and-wherefore – its archaic rationality, to put it paradoxically – was forfeited and transformed into an element of its being-in-itself. Art thus became an enigma; if it no longer exists for the purpose that it infused with meaning, then what is it?

o Great artworks are unable to lie. Even when their content is semblance, insofar as this content is necessary semblance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify; only failed works are untrue.

o The appearing, whereby the artwork far surpasses the mere subject, is the eruption of the subject’s collective essence.

o Of all the paradoxes of art, no doubt the innermost one is that only through making, through the production of particular works specifically and completely formed in themselves, and never through any immediate vision, does art achieve what is not made, the truth.

o Artworks would be powerless if they were no more than longing, though there is no valid artwork without longing.

o By retracing this figure, they are not only more than what simply exists but participate in objective truth to the extent that what is in need summons its fulfillment and change. Not for-itself, with regard to consciousness, but in-itself, what is wants the other; the artwork is the language of this wanting, and the artwork’s content is as substantial as this wanting.

o Ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance, which alone concretizes utopia without betraying it to experience.

o Artworks say what is more than the existing, and they do this exclusively by making a constellation of how it is, “Comment c’est.”

o An artwork is, as Beckett wrote, a desecration of silence.

o No artwork cedes to another.

Coherence and Meaning

• That in artworks everything only appears as if it must be as it is and could not be otherwise.
• There is no mistaking time as such in music, yet it is so remote from empirical time that, when listening is concentrated, temporal events external to the musical continuum remain external to it and indeed scarcely touch it: if a musician interrupts a passage to repeat it or to pick it up at an earlier point, musical time remains indifferent, unaffected: in a certain fashion it stands still and only proceeds when the course of the music is continued.
• The relation of the parts to the whole, an essential aspect of form, is constituted by way of detours. Artworks lose themselves in order to find themselves.
• As Kraus wrote, “A gutter well painted is of greater value than a badly painted palace.”
• For the process of artistic production is precisely that of according importance to something.
• Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say, with the content of the work.