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Aesthetic Theory (changes)

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Adorno according to Eysteinnson

• Because modernist art wants to reflect the negative of society, it can’t use transparent expressive means (realism)
• Because form is historically specific, the author doesn’t have to try to be socially or politically relevant, but only needs to focus on form
  • “Art criticizes society by just being there” because it goes against the “total-exchange society” because it isn’t for anything except itself
• Artistic language = anti-significatory language
  • You must be outside of the typical communication loops to position yourself outside of society
  • Form unconsciously carries within itself history, so the socially unconscious artist can still be a carrier of it
    • Social content “is content that articulates itself in formal structures”
• Doesn’t have “duplicate the facade of reality” but instead “makes an uncompromising reprint of reality while at the same time avoiding being contaminated by it”
  • The artist’s portrait of society doesn’t match ideology’s picture of itself, but instead is a “negative reflection”
  • Doesn’t want to look rational or objective (that reproduces society’s flaws and ideology)
  • A truly “objective” look on society will therefore be “radically subjective”
• Art shows rationality its own fundamental irrationality (all closed systems make no sense, Adorno says)
• Modernist art “negated not only traditional literature, but tradition itself” (Eysteinnson’s words, 137)
• Dissonance of modernist art risks “solidifying into indifferent material, creating a form of immediacy without cultural memory” (139)
• Unintelligibility of modernist art creates a “historical judgment on intelligibility which has degenerated it into misunderstanding” (qtd in Eysteinnson 203, not from AE)
  • Advantage of remembering the context of modernist formal aesthetics: not just against “normal” communicative language, but against a specific cultural milieu that demands it
• Bitter Critique of Realism
  • “Realism in art has become an ideology”
    • Realistic artworks “feign a nonexistent reconciliation of reality with the subject”
    • Realism merely “acts according to prevalent institutions,” limited by those institutions, not free
  • Modernism does not try to create this fake world
    • Joyce’s interruption of time in Ulysses reflects the real dissolution of time in the modern world
• On collage and fragmentation
  • The realist holistic narrative gives way to the fragmented modernist work that doesn’t give you the feeling of an organic whole
    • “The semblance of art being reconciled with a heterogeneous reality because it portrays it is to disintegrate as the work admits actual fragments of empirical reality.”
• Some Adornian arguments quoted by Burger, as discussed by Ey:
• “The avant-garde is the only possible authentic expression of the contemporary state of the world.”
• “The negation of synthesis becomes a compositional principle”