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John Roberts delivered this paper at apexart on March 8, 2000 |
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After
Adorno: Art, Autonomy, and Critique
by John Roberts
In conversation with two artist friends recently they both declared that Adorno
was a far more serious and productive guide to their practices than any other
philosopher or aesthetician. Given their work and histories as artists - one
had lived through the period of conceptual art and had been won over briefly
to its arguments, the other emerged out of its ruins - this was a surprise. Like
many artists in the late seventies and early eighties both had fallen under the
sway of Walter Benjamin, and were convinced, in their respective ways, that the
dissolution of the category of Art into the forms of modern technology and everyday
life was a good thing. Indeed both artists were proselytisers for photography
and its powers of social reference and communality. Discussions of art's autonomy
were not on their check list of priorities. In fact, if autonomy was discussed
or thought of at all it was denounced as a bourgeois category. Autonomy was what
Clement Greenberg and modernist painters believed in, and the bane of all materialist
art criticism. It was not what serious post-conceptualist artists, armed with
the 'critique of representation' and theories of the social production of art,
should be worrying about.
Today, however, the confidence of their admonitions has diminished considerably.
Where there was a commitment to the possibility of a non-specialist audience
for art, and a consideration of artÕs social role in their thinking, now
there is a turn to the space and time and immanent problems of the artwork itself.
The question of autonomy, accordingly, has resurfaced, only now in a setting
which is far more sympathetic to its claims.
Why is this so? It is of course highly dubious to credit the work of one author
with effecting this kind of change. Yet, since the publication of Aesthetic Theory
in English in 1984,1 Adorno's writing has had an extensive influence on the rethinking
of the question of autonomy in Anglophone art theory and philosophical aesthetics.
Indeed, the views of my two anonymous artists are not that unusual; Adorno's
work has undergone a widespread revival of interest, generating by the late 1990s
a minor academic industry in Europe and North America. This is because there
is an increasing recognition that both the critique and the defence of autonomy
have been undertheorized since the seventies; and this being so, Adorno's work
is well-placed to give a number of powerful reasons why.
The return to Adorno, needs to be seen, therefore, as part of a deeper response
to what is perceived as the wider crisis in art and theory in the wake of the
institutional demise of American modernism and the successful rise of postmodernism
prior to, and out of the ruins of, the collapse of European communism and the
current crisis of the left. In fact it is the struggle over the ideological legitimation
of postmodernism that has allowed Adorno to find a new critical readership today.
For amongst anti-postmodernists Adorno is being read not so much as an elitist
defender of high modernism - although of course some do read him in this way
- but primarily as the scourge of the false or premature democracy of postmodernism.
Despite postmodernism's purported attack on elitism its critique of autonomy
is judged as having produced little in the way of actual transformative social
institutions and collective cultural practice. Since the late seventies the dominant
form of postmodernism - critical postmodernism - has become linked with the cultural
aspirations of the new middle class, as it reinvents the basis of artistic professionalism
out of the struggles of feminism and anti-racism, post-colonial theory and queer
theory. The outcome is a convergence in art between the critique of the mass
media, social identity, representation and the institutions of art, and new forms
of bourgeois social and academic administration.
This influence of this liberal-left agenda within some of the major cultural
and academic institutions of our time is seen by many as a progressive historical
achievement. Modernism's dedifferentiated, socially abstract subject has been
decisively challenged by the cultural impact of subaltern and marginalized subjectivities,
irredeemably damaging the case against familiar conservative accusations of the
'lowering of standards'. But, if postmodernism is in a position of some strength
against the critics of multiculturalism and 'anti-aestheticism', it is extremely
vulnerable when its claims to cultural emancipation are examined in the light
of the narrow class composition of its social base. Just as postmodernism's critique
of the avant-garde presents insuperable problems once art's negation of tradition
is abandoned for the moral authority of social and political intervention.
Indeed, it is the dissolution of the normative basis of modern art's negation
of tradition that has generated the renewed interest in Adorno. For Adorno's
defence of autonomy is based on the fundamental premise that art's continued
critical potential rests on its resistance to the authority of tradition, whether
or not this tradition speaks in the name of social emancipation and enlightenment.
Without this process of renewal the transmission of value and meaning in art
becomes subject to the positivity of an external, self-legitimating authority
and the pieties of 'commitment'. In short, art defines itself through its received
codes and protocols, denying the demands of the present in the name of the securities
of the past.
Given this, Adorno's defence of autonomy is not to be confused with the transcendental
separation of art from its social base or traditional aesthetic conservativism.
Rather, autonomy is the name given to the process of formal and cognitive self-criticism
which art must undergo in order to constitute the conditions of its very possibility
and emergence. In a world which continually reduces the discursive and non-discursive
complexities of art to the reconciliations of entertainment, fashion and (recently)
social theory, this self-criticism is an ethical necessity.
The postmodern critique of autonomy, then, confuses the process of self-criticism
with simplistic modernist claims of formal development or advance in art. Accordingly,
it fails to scrutinise its own academic and idealist conditions of production
and reception, insisting that the technological dissolution of art into everyday
life claimed by much contemporary practice makes the intimacy between formal
values and ethics historically redundant. But this misunderstanding of autonomy
is not confined to Adorno's postmodern critics. A number of Adorno's defenders
are themselves guilty of traducing its dialectical content. The move 'back to'
to Adorno has also generated a proto-conservative reading of autonomy, in which
postmodernism is attacked without any proper critical consideration of the expanded
social base of the bourgeois institutions of art in the 1980s and 1990s and the
critical content of the art since conceptualism.
As such, fifteen years after the publication of Aesthetic Theory, Adorno new
readership stands at the centre of a number of competing critiques of postmodernism.
In the following I examine the claims of these positions in the ongoing debate
on postmodernism and art, as the basis for an assessment of the possibility of
Adorno's continuing relevance for philosophical aesthetics and art theory.
It is possible to divide contemporary Adornian studies into five main categories.
1) The dialogic critics of Adorno, as in the school of post-60s German Critical
Theory, specifically, JŸrgen Habermas and Albrecht Wellmer;2 2) Peter Bürger's
Brechtian critique of Adorno's aesthetic autonomy as a retreat from social praxis;3
3) the philosophical defenders of Adorno as a radical aesthete, as in the writing
of philosophers JM Bernstein, Andrew Bowie, and the recent translator of the
new edition of Aesthetic Theory, Robert Hullot-Kentor;4 4) the anti-Habermasian
interpretation of Adorno as the great theorist of 'totality' and 'reification',
as in Fredric Jameson;5 and 5) the defenders of Adorno as the dialectical theorist
of autonomy, as in the philosophical aesthetics of Lambert Zuidervaart and Peter
Osborne.6
Category (1) has affinities with the postmodern critique of Adorno and autonomy,
despite its antipathy to postmodernism as a cultural category and philosophical
phenomenon.
Both Habermas and Wellmer argue that Adorno's defence of autonomy is falsely
opposed to instrumental rationality, and therefore judge that the work of art
is overdetermined as a model of truth. By insisting on autonomy as the basis
of artistic value, Adorno opens up an irreconcilable gap between the artwork
and socially shared knowledge and social transformation. In sum, Adorno's aesthetic
theory for Habermas and Wellmer lacks any proper or reasonable dialogic content.
This is because AdornoÕs hieratic model of reification reduces the conversational
and communicative potential of the artwork to a bare minimum. In fact, Adorno
always opposes the 'expressive' truth of the artwork to its socially communicative
function. The upshot of this being that Adorno has no interest in how people
actually experience and use works of art, how their content is mediated in everyday
life. Art, insist Habermas and Wellmer, does not signify by virtue of its 'intrinsic'
expressiveness, but through the intersubjective agency of a given discursive
community of reception.
For Bürger, in category (2), this objection to Adorno's would-be indifference
to art's discursive functions, forms an explicit political defence of art as
social praxis. Whereas Habermas and Wellmer reclaim the notion of art's autonomy
under a quasi-Kantian transcendental reason, Bürger dispenses with the dialectics
of autonomy altogether. This is based on what Bürger sees as Adorno's wilful
historical misrepresentation of the role and function of the avant-garde. By
subsuming the post-autonomous artistic claims of the original revolutionary Soviet
and German avant-garde under the critical model of the modern neo-avant-garde,
Adorno fails to recognise the qualitatively distinctive moment of the original:
namely, that it broke with the high-cultural institutions of art. Adorno's model
of autonomy simply continues the death-throes of art's aesthetic and esoteric
specialization.
Wellmer's and Habermas's model has a certain amount of influence, particularly
within feminist cultural criticism, which sees Adorno's theory of autonomy as
modelled on the repression of bodily pleasures and women's everyday experience.
By insisting on modernism as the dissonant negation of sensual pleasure Adorno
inherits the iconophobic rationalization of art in post-Platonic philosophy.
The Kantian and Hegelian skepticism about sensible form becomes the fear of sensuality
as a loss of intellectual control, and as such an unconscious fear of bodily
pleasure. However, as Sabine Wilke and Heidi Schlipphacke, argue, this is not
because Adorno's modernism allows no place for sensuality and non-disaffirmative
pleasures (Adorno is keen on the somatic playfulness of the circus for instance),
but that bodily pleasures and sexual difference are left behind "on the
trajectory towards aesthetic autonomy".7 Wilke and Schlipphacke note that
this repression is there at the very beginning of Aesthetic Theory, when Adorno
defines autonomy in emphatic Hegelian terms as a parting of the ways from bodily
determination.With Romanticism "art emancipated itself from cuisine and
pornography, an emancipation that has become irrevocable".8
In contrast to categories (1) and (2), Bernstein and Bowie in category, (3),
defend Adorno's dialectic of enlightenment against what is judged to be the sanguine
and conciliatory critique of modernity in the dialogic model of art and the premature
dissolution of art into everyday life in Bürger.
In this respect this position sets out to redefine the redemptive content of
Adorno's claim for art's autonomy. In Adorno the defence of autonomy is construed
ontologically as first and foremost a defence of aesthetic semblance or illusion.
By this Adorno means that it is the artefactual character of the artwork that
secures its autonomy, because it is the artefectual character of art which establishes
the possibility of aesthetic rationality overcoming instrumental rationality.
As socialised, non-coercieve labour, or purposeless purposiveness in the language
of Kant, the artwork's fabricated uselessness is able to recall for the viewer
the human, non-instrumental purpose of production. Famously this notion of aesthetic
form as a redemption of alienated labour becomes a defence of what Adorno calls
the process of mimesis internal to the autonomous artwork: its capacity to sustain
a relationship of non-instrumental affinity between subject and object. Autonomous
artworks, in this sense, both preserve and present the possibility of other kinds
of experience. As Bernstein puts it:
" the question of aesthetic semblance is the question of the possibility
of possibility, of a conception of possible experience that transcends what is
now taken to be the parameters of possible experience".9
From this perspective, Bernstein, Bowie and other radical aesthetes draw two
significant conclusions from the notion of art as the enactment of a promise,
which set them off sharply from the dialogic critics of Adorno. The promise of
happiness is separate from the mere satisfaction of desire or bodily pleasure
- hence the criticisms of the kind made by Wilke and Schlipphacke are misplaced;
and that particular things can be unsubsummable under conceptual categories and
yet remain sources of meaning. As a consequence it is the transcendent promise
of the reconciliation between sensuality and spirituality in the autonomous artwork,
which grounds the truth-claims of art.
Category (4) is similarly preoccupied with the transcendent promise of the artwork.
But for Fredric Jameson what is of general concern is how this promise has come
into its own again in an historical period of continued stalled social and political
transformation. Whereas in the 1970s in the age of national liberation, high-levels
of class struggle, and radical cultural transformation, AdornoÕs promise
was seen as an "encumbrance" and "embarrassment",10 today
it keeps alive the untruth of capitalist rationality and freedom. This is because
the very historical possibility of the autonomous artwork is what exposes the
false totality of capitalist production. Through a deeper commitment to aesthetic
truth as the non-negotiable source of dereification and disalienation, Adorno
demonstrates that aesthetic theory is never merely aesthetic. What is of paramount
significance in Adorno for Jameson, therefore, is that all aesthetic questions
are taken to be fundamentally historical ones. But, as a consequence of this,
Jameson refrains from making actual judgements about modernist works themselves;
this is because it is not so much the specific content of Adorno's defence of
various kinds of modernist art that counts, but the implications of aesthetic
praxis as redemption as a whole. The outcome is a reticence and, even, guardedness
about what constitutes the content and boundaries of autonomous art today. Indeed,
there is a clear tendency in both the philosophical aesthetics of category (3),
and Jameson's position, to evacuate the problems and contradictions of contemporary
art practice for the promise of the promise itself. This is the result in Jameson,
as in Bernstein and Bowie, of an undialectical interpretation of the social content
of AdornoÕs concept of autonomy.
What distinguishes Adorno's theory of autonomy from the early Romantics, the
neo-conservative New Criticism of the1950s, and Greenbergian modernists, is that
art is seen simultaneously as socially determined and autonomous. Or rather,
the autonomy of the art object is something which is produced out of the social
relations which constitute the institution of art itself. It is not something
which is produced immanently out of the object and therefore transmittable as
a particular 'style' or 'look'. This means that autonomy is the practical and
theoretical outcome of the contradiction between the artwork's exchange value
and use-value. Because of the perpetual threat of the loss of the artwork's use-value,
art is continually propelled by its own conditions of alienation to find aesthetic
strategies which might resist or obviate this process of critical and aesthetic
dissolution - the history of the 'new' in modernism derives from the resistance
of art to its exchange value. But, at the same time, under capitalism art derives
its social identity and value from this process. Thus authentic modern art acquires
identity and value in a double movement of negation and self-negation: art achieves
visibility through positioning itself in relation to the prevailing norms, interests
and protocols of the market and intellectual academy. But once the work achieves
institutional and market visibility, the artist is forced to resist the work's
own subsumption under a new set of norms if he or she values the thing that defined
the workÕs initial moment of production: its critical difference or aesthetic
'otherness'. For once the value of the new work is institutionally established,
the work finds itself part of a new set of prevailing norms and protocols. The
exchange value of the artwork, therefore, operates as a kind of 'fiction': artists
seek to transform the normative values of the market and the critical academy
in their own image, but in the interests of escaping from these values and self-image.
That is, the 'fiction' of autonomy has to be dismantled by the artist if the
pursuit of autonomy is to be able to continue to prosecute art's failure to realise
its freedom from social dependency. Art's autonomy is necessarily dependent,
on the alienated conditions of its realization, because it is through artÕs
connection to the 'unresolved antagonisms' of reality that the social content
of autonomy is generated. Commodification, then, locks art into an impossible
logic: art can only renew itself through undermining or disrupting those qualities
that bring it into being. Yet if this logic is impossible, for Adorno it is necessary
and inescapable under current relations of production, because, paradoxically,
it is this logic which sustains the possibility of art's (and human) freedom.
In this sense the possibility of art's autonomy is socially driven.
This expansive notion of autonomy is something that is explored in detail in
the dialectical theory of autonomy in category (5), particularly in the work
of Lambert Zuidervaart and Peter Osborne.
What these writers insist on - which I concur with - is the need for a sharper
reintegration of the truth of autonomy into the cultural and social experience
of recent art and postmodernism. That is, they call for a development of autonomy
away from its grounding in modernist painting and sculpture into the area of
new media and their interconnections. For if the value of autonomy rests on its
commitment to finding new materials and forms of attention for the 'unresolved
antagonisms' of social experience, then this must of necessity be expanded into
an analysis of the problems which confront the art of the present, without recourse
to nostalgia or moralism. Without the establishment of the link between the expanded
means and materials of the art of the last thirty years and the problem of autonomy,
aesthetic value is forced back into a conservative reading of the modern. In
this way Adorno's dialectics must be brought to bear on Adorno's categories themselves,
as a recognition of the historicity of autonomy itself.
Importantly, this means transforming the relationship between high-art and popular
culture in Adorno's aesthetic theory. For it is the would-be fixture of this
binary opposition between 'high' and 'low' that identifies the current historical
limits of Adorno's defence of autonomy and that of his contemporary philosophical
defenders, who tend to see the art of the last thirty years as a falling away
from the sensual achievements of modernism.11 The failure to acknowledge the
expanded social content of autonomy on the part of these defenders is invariably
the result of their condescension, or outright hostility, towards mass culture
and popular culture. Yet the expanded content of the art of the last thirty years
is incomprehensible without a recognition of how the 'low' has challenged and
reconfigured the 'high'. But, breaking with this condescension towards the popular
is not an invitation to dissolve the 'high' into the 'low', as in the populist
tendencies of postmodernism. Rather, it allows the possibility of a dialectics
of 'high' and 'low': that is, it reestablishes the opposition between 'high'
and 'low' in the light of the contradictions inherent in both of its terms. And
this, of course, is something that Adorno himself was highly sensitive to, and
which first preoccupied him in the 1930s, even if his judgement on the 'low'
was essentially skeptical.
Adorno's antipathy to mass culture is notorious and much criticised. This is
based on his view that although high-art or autonomous art, and mass culture
or dependent art, are both commodities, dependent artworks are incapable of generating
sustainable critical reflection on the part of the spectator and reader. Rather,
mass culture offers compensatory forms of libidinal gratification, and as such,
functions overall as a form of social repression. The pleasures of mass culture
negate the promise of happiness of autonomous art. Yet when Adorno actually talks
about the 'high' and the 'low' in Aesthetic Theory the 'high' refers to the interrelations
between autonomy and dependency, of which autonomy is the dominant term. Similarly
Adorno is well aware that in mass culture there are moments of autonomy. As he
was to say in his letter to Benjamin on March 18, 1936, "If you defend the
kitsch film against the 'quality' film, no one can be more in agreement with
you than I am; but l'art pour l'art is just as much in need of a defence".12
As such it is important to stress that Adorno does not identify mass culture
with the culture industry; the culture industry is what capitalism does to mass
culture. But two things interconnect to make his judgements about modern mass
culture utterly marginal in his aesthetic theory: his totalizing view of the
reification of mass experience; and as such his overwhelming commitment to analyzing
mass culture from the standpoint of autonomous art. Thus, no popular art quite
meets the highest standards of the best autonomous art, and the best of autonomous
art is always compelled to preserve its boundaries against the encroachments
of aesthetic dependency.
In this respect, like categories (2), category (5) distances itself from autonomy
as a precondition of the evaluation of all art. As with BŸrger - and Habermas
and Wellmer - the dialectical theory of autonomy accepts that the truth of autonomy
is not the ultimate criterion of art's social significance. Indeed, this conclusion
is self-evident in a culture where traditional modernist forms of autonomy no
longer provide any moral or political challenge to the effects of reification.
Just as the pleasures of mass culture and popular culture do not have to negate
the promise of happiness, but can, as Osborne says, at certain moments, "heighten
the sense of frustration at the broken promise".13 As a consequence, it
is hard to accept, in Adorno's terms, that autonomous art is any more critically
effective than dependent art when certain products of mass culture can subvert
the conventions of the traditions they operate within and disclose, on occasions,
radical aspirations.
On this basis the debate on the dialectical content of autonomy is an attack
on Adorno's traditional concern for normative evaluation. Irrespective of their
'levels' of 'autonomy' or 'social dependency' all works of art demonstrate a
social function. However, unlike BŸrger and the postmodernists, to accept
the multiple and variegated functions and forms of reception of artworks does
not thereby mean accepting the abandonment of normativity altogether - the postmodernist
syndrome of defining art as popular culture and popular culture as art. Rather,
what is required is a more differentiated account of art's standards and criteria
of evaluation, what Zuidevaart calls a "complex normativity".14 This
complex normativity might include not only "technical excellence, formal
depth, aesthetic expressiveness" (attributes conventionally associated with
modernism) but also "social scope, potential effectiveness and historical
truth". "Rarely would a particular work meet all these norms, nor would
very many works display exceptional merit with respect to every norm that they
do meet".15 By this, Zuidevaart means that the supposedly elitist concern
with autonomy allows us to rethink the dynamics of popular pleasure and technological
development in art, at the same as the dynamics of popular pleasure and technological
development in art can allow us to rethink the limits and content of autonomy.
Indeed normativity is unavoidable once we accept that the critique of the category
of art remains inseparable from the continuing conditions of art's possibility.
Osborne adopts a similar position to this. But, in contrast to Zuidervaart, he
is far more forceful in arguing that the implications of this dialectic are there
latent in AdornoÕs work itself. As he says:
" Adorno's own analysis suggests another, far more productive approach [to
the question of autonomy]: namely, to lay bare the structure of the dialectic
of the dependent and the autonomous within dependent art, and to comprehend it
through its opposition to autonomous art, as a distinctive part of a larger cultural
whole."16
This insistence on the solution to the problem of autonomy lying in the transformation
of Adorno's categories themselves is held, rightly, by Osborne to be a political
decision. To defend autonomy in the spirit of Adorno as an historical and interrelational
concept is to resist those who would judge negation and the critique of tradition
in art to be dead and buried. In this respect the continuing importance of Adorno
lies in how his concept of autonomy incorporates the irreconcilability of art
to its own alienated conditions and fate into the conditions of its own possibility.
The idea, therefore, that art can resolve these conditions by claiming allegiance
to a given aesthetic tradition or by dissolving itself into everyday life, is
an avoidance of the realities of art's alienation, whether these forms of reconciliation
are offered in the name of cultural democracy or not. Hence the fundamental problem
with BŸrger's, Habermas's and Wellmer's models - and postmodernism as a
whole - is that in their various ways they fail to acknowledge the violence and
misrepresentation which underwrite art's mediation of cultural and social division.
As such in the case of Habermas, Wellmer and the postmodernists, they assume
far too easy an incorporation of the artwork into the principles of communicative
rationality, when human suffering and reification are always threatening to dissolve
this rationality into incoherence, bad faith and sentiment. Indeed the rejection
of all forms of aesthetic and social compensation in AdornoÕs theory of
autonomy is designed not in order to foreclose all possible communication, but
to render the truth of art as existentially and formally continuous with the
effects of alienation and reification. By defending a form of autonomy which
is constituted through the negation of tradition the irreconcilability of art
is coextensive with the irreconcilability of the subject's consciousness of being-in-the-world.
Adorno's legacy, then, needs to be defended against those who would abandon normativity
for shallow defences of the 'popular' and art's basis in communal discursivity,
and all the political substitutionalism that inevitably comes with such positions.
However, at the same time, it needs to be recognised that the theoretical resources
in Adorno for sustaining the social content of autonomy, are highly attenuated,
opening up room for misunderstanding and false departures, as in the writing
of the Adornian philosophical aesthetes. This is not least because Adorno's notional
recognition of the 'autonomous' in the 'dependent' and the 'dependent' in the
'autonomous' leaves the social character of his concept of autonomy highly ambiguous.
Viewed from this perspective, one of the problems with Adorno's writing for his
philosophical aesthetic defenders is how to position the claims of anti-art in
relation to the critique of tradition, particularly in the light of the most
important art of the last thirty years, which has systematically expanded the
forms and meanings of aesthetic experience through the strategies of anti-art.
The moment of anti-art for Adorno is determinate for the renewal of art's autonomy;
in order to distinguish itself from what has become aesthetic, art is forced
to expand into, or reclaim non-aesthetic, experiences, forms or practices, (popular
and discursive modes of attention, the ready made, the textual etc). But for
Adorno this is heavily qualified by his view that such moves always threaten
to dissolve the artwork back into the real and the everyday. This leads him to
attack the aesthetics of the ready-made and to devalue photography. The radical
aesthetes of category (3), tend to follow this line, settling for the formal
evaluations of Adorno's misjudged conclusions, rather than the dialectical implications
of his argument. Consequently, they maintain that Adorno's critical potential
today lies in his resistance to the dissolution of the artefectual and sensual
base of artistic practice. But if this critique is pursued in order to draw attention
to the false democracy of the 'popular' and anti-form etc - critical postmodernism
is uppermost in their minds - it also threatens to disengage autonomy from AdornoÕs
hermeneutical privileging of the 'new'out of anti-art.17 If the 'new' in art
is the constitution of art's autonomy through the determinate negation of tradition,
then the impulse of anti-art is integral to what has previously established itself
as autonomous, and therefore essential to the social content of autonomy. Without
this moment of negation autonomy in art degenerates into a confirmation of tradition
and the present, meaning that, anti-art is a transgression that autonomy must
undergo in order to reconstitute itself.18 Accordingly, one of the reasons that
there is a close identification between autonomy and the aesthetics of modernism
in work of the writers in category (3), is that philosophical aesthetics takes
the superseded and conventionalized forms of anti-art in modernism as its guide
to contemporary practice, losing the positional logic of anti-art in the pursuit
of art's autonomy. In this sense it is the positional logic of anti-art which
drives the social content of art's autonomy. In this way the ambiguity of Adorno's
legacy tends to be exacerbated by this kind of philosophical aesthetics, because
it treats the concept of autonomy as an abstract philosophical postulate, and
not as something determined by the prevailing conditions of art's autonomy.
Adorno's concept of autonomy, then, generates two interconnected problems for
its radical aesthete defenders: 1) in the interests of stabilising aesthetic
quality and high-culture's negation of mass culture it weakens the moment of
anti-art within art's pursuit of autonomy; and 2) in order to distinguish the
authenticity of autonomy in art it represses the transcendent moment of autonomy
immanent to all forms of culture. This leaves his defenders with very little
to use aesthetically when coming to understand the art of the recent past and
the massive expansion and diversification of popular cultures in the 1980s and
1990s. By identifying autonomy with tired modernist protocols and by defending
an implausible account of ideology and popular culture - popular culture as fundamentally
antithetical to the fulfilment of human needs - the radical aesthetes dissolve
autonomy into a defensive aestheticism.19 In this respect the dialectical critics
of autonomy are correct: the interrelations between autonomy and mass culture
are dead in the water unless retheorized as part of the critical expansion of
art's normativity. By expanding the content of normativity the opposition between
modernism/anti-reification mass culture/reification is revealed to be no longer
functional as a source of absolute value - if ever it was. But, if the dialectical
theorists of autonomy correctly relativize the issue of reification, there is,
similarly, little sense what this might actually mean in terms of the problems
of contemporary art and culture. Osborne's notion of the "critical potential
of mass culture",20 is frustratingly vague.
It is not of course the job of philosophy to answer such questions; philosophy
cannot predict or legislate the content of art's autonomy. However, what it can
and should do is clarify the conditions for a defence of the social content of
autonomy against its premature aestheticization or dissolution. Hence, the dismantling
of the opposition between a high modernist singular normativity and dependent
popular culture, means little unless questions of value, meaning and pleasure
are based on a theory of artistic subjectivity and spectatorship which adequately
represent contemporary transformations in art and culture.
The central problem with the philosophical aesthetes' defence of a version of
the traditional modernist subject and spectator is, as I have stressed, its lack
of cultural differentiation. What demands our attention, therefore, if we are
to establish a workable notion of autonomy is the need to connect the expanded
social and aesthetic conditions of art since the 1960s to a theory of negation
in art - or anti-art - that does not merely reproduce or reverse the antinomy
between 'high' and 'low'. By this I mean that if the concept of autonomy is no
longer able to sustain its negative logic through modernism's classical forms
of distantiation it requires an aesthetic subject/producer which derives its
critical agency from the relations between an expanded notion of social identity
and form in art and the exclusions and aporias of social and cultural division.
In other words, an adequate notion of autonomy is to be derived from the aesthetic
subject/producer's mediation of the interrelations of 'high' and 'low', and not
merely from their abstract conjunction.
Consequently, the concept of 'complex normativity' becomes clearer if we take
the contemporary incorporation of popular modes of attention into the expanded
social categories of art as a response to modernist 'expressiveness', as itself
divided. The significance of the 'relativization of reification' for a complex
normativity is not that it allows art to switch to the popular from the demands
of critical distance, but that art's critical functions are structured within
an understanding of the popular as both pleasurable and alienated. By stressing
that popular modes of attention and pleasures define a shared space in which
both 'high' and 'low' position themselves in late capitalist culture, the demands
of autonomy are situated as internal to the determinations of dependency. Popular
forms of attention are not so much the 'other' of authentic aesthetic life, but
the dominant space out of which aesthetic pleasures and values are formed and
struggled over.
From this perspective the experience of aesthetic subject/producer is opened
up to the pleasures of popular culture and mass culture without condescension,
which is a significantly different proposition from Adorno's occasional embrace
of popular pleasures as a kind of healthy antidote to middle-brow taste. In this
way embodied popular pleasures are enjoyed precisely because they refuse to give
unqualified assent to the supposed enlightened pleasures of high-culture. However,
this refusal of assent does not imply that the taking of such pleasures is a
negation of high-culture or that such pleasures are identifiable with an undiscriminating
cultural pluralism. On this basis of the aesthetic subject the taking of pleasures
from the popular is not to be confused with the postmodern notion of the popular
consumer. Rather, the aesthetic subject takes pleasure from the popular knowing
such pleasures to be alienated. This is an important epistemological difference,
for it reveals something significant that neither the Adornian philosophical
aesthetes nor postmodernists take much notice of about the conditions of modern
culture: that the pleasures taken from popular culture and high culture are mutually
unstable for would-be popular consumers and 'aesthetes' alike - even if this
instability is in the final analysis subject to the wider constraints of class
division, and therefore unstable in uneven ways. But the important ontological
point is that the taking of such pleasures is itself a process of internal division
and dissent, for, there is no such thing as the uncultured and unfeeling popular
consumer - everybody comes to popular culture and to a work of art with some
knowledge and powers of discrimination whatever their educational and cultural
accomplishments. And, similarly, this is precisely the point about the cultural
limitations inherent in the position of the aesthete, for the aesthete is no
less alienated than the popular cultural consumer - alienated by his or her own
fantasy of aesthetic control. So, just as popular modes of attention are themselves
internally differentiated under the demands of aesthetic discrimination, the
aestheteÕs would-be disinterested pleasures are the constant, repressive
reminder of the embodied and subaltern pleasures of the popular.
Thus, what the concept of complex normativity is able to establish is that both
works of autonomous art (high culture) and the products of popular culture share
a common space of reification and dereification. This allows us to theorize artistic
production and reception without recourse to a simplistic model of high culture
as the protection of a single normativity and low culture as the degradation
of normativity - of one (higher) form of autonomy subsuming another. Indeed the
idea of the aesthete as the defender of a normative autonomy and the popular
consumer as the undifferentiated consumer of mass culture is utterly regressive.
Consequently, the aesthetic subject/producer who acknowledges the dependency
in autonomy and moments of autonomy in dependency, might be said to be extending
the implications of Adorno's aesthetic theory, but crucially, from within a critical
space where cultural alienation is treated as complex and internal to both terms.
For the overwhelming problem with the Adornian philosophical aesthetes, is that
the conflicts of aesthetic experience are not viewed as the result of the actual
and symbolic violence internal to high culture and popular culture.
To link the question of aesthetics to symbolic violence is to make clear what
connects the debate on art and the popular to what remains of importance in Adorno's
writing on autonomy: the fact that the internal and external divisions of autonomy
and mass culture are only comprehensible within a continuum of actual or symbolic
violence. To analysis autonomy and dependency, in terms of the actual and symbolic
violence perpetrated against works of art by the culture industry and aestheticism,
and in terms of the symbolic violence internal to the social logic of art's autonomy,
is to see how modern art's internal history and external relations with mass
culture in the 20th century exist in a continuum of destruction and derogation.
What this discloses, importantly, is how symbolic and actual violence constitute
the ontological condition of art's production and reception under capitalism.
Thus to acknowledge the incorporation of the moment of anti-art into art in terms
of the irreconcilability of art's being-in-the-world is to foreground the philosophical
and cultural intimacy between negation (of identity) with violence. The logic
of art's autonomy is its internal disidentification in the face of art's external
derogation.
Theories of aesthetics, however, are largely concerned with dissolving art's
interpresence with symbolic and actual violence. As Paul de Man puts its it his
critique of aesthetic ideology: "the aesthetic is not a separate category
but a principle of articulation between various known categories, and modes of
cognition".21 But, an acceptance of this separation is what leads to the
culturally undifferentiated aesthete and to the abandonment of a complex normativity
and the exigencies of anti-art. The self-divided aesthetic subject, however,
challenges this loss of differentiation, insofar as it restores an active recognition
and critique of the structural violence internal and external to both the production
and reception of art and popular culture.22 The question of 'complex normativity'
as the relativization of reification, therefore, remains incoherent if it does
not make visible how the artist and spectator are now situated in a contested
space between the modes of attention of popular culture and their critique. It
is out of this space between the identification and disidentification of these
modes that the contemporary conditions of a 'complex normativity' are currently
being produced.23
The threat to art's autonomy is inherent to the social conditions of art's existence.
But it is the social conditions of artÕs production and reception which
bring the autonomy of the artwork (its challenge to the instrumentalities of
market and academy) into being. Autonomous art remains authentically autonomous
inasmuch as the conditions of its production recognise this and resist its instrumental
and extra-artistic logic. Adorno's expressive model in Aesthetic Theory, is I
have outlined, based on this. But Adorno is unable to develop this because the
social content of autonomy is prematurely separated from the negation of autonomy
within autonomy - the moment of anti-art. He is unable to see - or trust - anti-art
as the means by which autonomy is able to mediate art's futural condition and
the relations between art and knowledge. This might be described as the moment
of 'realism' in art's autonomy, the moment which grounds the dynamic movement
of autonomy's social content. Adorno's philosophical followers, however, dissolve
this movement, by resolving the issue of autonomy in terms of the defence of
a single normativity - against what they see as the loss of all normativity in
postmodernism. In this the philosophical defence of autonomy as the negation
of aesthetic tradition and protocol remains imperative in the face of the aggressive
rejection of normativity in postmodern cultural studies and the positivization
of negation in philosophical aesthetics. But the dialectical defence of autonomy
is no source of artistic value. It is only the practices and criticism of art
that is able to open up the the social content of autonomy. Philosophy's job
is to underwrite that possibility, not to substitute itself for that possibility.
© 1999 John Roberts
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John Roberts is Professor of Art & Aesthetics at the University of Wolverhampton, and is the author of a number of books including, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso 2007), The Necessity of Errors (Verso 2010) and Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press, 2014). His Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde is to be published by Verso in 2015. He lives in London. |
