The Frankfurt School and related critics (very very loosely, Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Jurgen Habermas) frustrate me by making very interesting but very broad assertions that they deign neither to support, qualify, or even really define. I am, admittedly, far from having read all of it, and if anyone finds any work that renders these ideas more systematic or rigorous, Let me know.
Meanwhile, the girth of Adorno's posthumous Aesthetic Theory helps. The writing shares the same strengths and weaknesses with his collaborations with Horkheimer, but the extent of the work allows one to contextualize it somewhat, to begin to approach an appreciation of the categories Adorno tosses around.
The following may give an idea of the problems:
"Ever since Attic classicism, the real barbarism of antiquity -- the slavery, genocide, and contempt for human life -- left few traces in art; just how chaste it kept itself, even in 'barbaric cultures,' does not redound to its credit" (161).
What a marvelous feat of misobservation! The entire history of art is constructed of counterexample; the closest thing to a nonviolent epic before Leaves of Grass is probably Paradise Lost. If one doesn't care for epics, let's turn to the mix of perversion and royalty that constitutes tragedy. We and the ancients just take the horror as somehow noble because the art itself is wonderful. But if the Iliad presents war as honorable, that may say something about the nature of ancient Greek and modern Western honor.
Here's another:
"Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning" (154).
This nifty aporia comes without the labor of any definition of meaning and how that one might "negate" it. In some contexts the anthropomorphosization of art makes little difference, but here in a discussion that purports to describe its operation, one should not indulge. The work does not will; the artist likely does. Is the art the artist or the artist-and-work or even the artist-and-work-and-consumer? Maybe, but that's the best I've got here. It seems likely that Adorno himself did not ask. Given these ambiguities, what does one make of negating meaning? Perhaps Adorno means something akin to Kristeva's analysis of chora, but if so, it's not obvious.
Or, on page 31, one finds various that "reality finds entry," there's an "annihiliation of reality," and that Beckett's plays unfold somehow "like forces in infinitesimal physics," by which Adorno may (or may not!) refer to Heisenberg's observations of indeterminate position-movement in certain of what get called "subatomic particles." If so, it's a cool reference except that it's utterly unhelpful. Does Adorno indicate that Beckett's plays function noncausally or that he finds himself unaware of their operation?
Some marvellous observations get tossed about in the same tone. Get this:
From the outset, aesthetic abstraction, which in Baudelaire was a still rudimentary and allegorical reaction to a world that had beocme abstract, was formeost a prohibition on graven images. This prohibition falls on what provincials ultimately hoped to salvage under the name 'message': appearance as meaningful; after the catastrophe of meaning, appearance becomes abstract. From Rimbaud to contemporary avant-garde art, the obstinacy of this prohibition is unflagging. It has changed no more than has the fundamental structure of society. The modern is abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconciliable 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:This is why Baudelaire's cryptograms equate the new with the unknown, with the hidden telos, as well as with what is monstrous by virtue of its incommensurability with the ever-same and thus with the gout du néant" (22).
Whew! To untangle just part of this, let's for the moment set aside the undefined "abstraction" and the nonsense of what consitutes a "world" that has become "abstract" -- if one can. If so, the alignment of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Doc Williams, Robert Lowell and so forth with Luther and the Puritans is a real coup, and may account for the some of the distinctions in the modernisms and avant-gardes in the nonprotestant world. That is, Pound's imagism and vorticism and hard language, and Williams' "no ideas without things" show a concern with concepts aligned with what Austin called "constative" language, a concern not reflected in Dada or Surrealism or Martinelli or Apollonaire or Zaum.
Or again,
The processual character of artworks is nothing other than their temporal nucleus. If duration becomes their intention in such a fashion that they expel what they deem ephemeral and by their own hand eternalize themselves in pure impregnanble forms or, worse, by the ominious claim to the universally human, they cut short their lives and assimilate themselves inot the concept that -- as the fixed circumference of shifting contents -- by its form pursues precisely that temporal stasis against which the drawn tension of the artwork defends itself (177).
Again, let's not examine "temporal nucleus" too closely, since we're apt to wonder what would constitute the temporal cytoplasm. And again the "intention" of the works themselves remains unclear, here doubly so because Adorno can't be bothered to articulate whether said work would endure in its creation and/or consumption as a single iteration, physical reproduction and distribution under a given title, or its continued influence as a progeniter of memes. But if we can stomach that, there's something here, just that the attempt to fix inspiration in a form stills the "processual character" intrinsic to artistic experience. And he goes on to discuss Stockhausen and "electronic art," which by Adorno's death in 1969 must have referred to broadcast media.
Altogether, I still find myself looking for a theoretical construction that adequately incorporates formal elements -- semiotics, narratology, formalism, structuralism or poststructuralism -- with socioeconomic and technological factors. So far I have found Derrida and Foucault more useful than the Frankfurt School. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E folks like Charles Bernstein, Lynn Hejinian and Ron Silliman have been at least as useful as anyone, really, though we're only talking about a handful of essays.
Oh well, off to the Auction of the Mind of Man . . . . It would seem we should at least try to know how.
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