Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today

Abstract

Theodor Adorno would shudder - then again, maybe not - to see what's become of his celebrated 1957 essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” Actually, the question of whether he'd be shaken by recent interpretations of the essay may be less interesting than the related matter of whether those analyses are anticipated by Adorno's own theory. That is, the readings at issue, despite or even because of their manifestly left-wing intentions, may stem from what Adorno would see as a grimly predictable, instrumentalist negation of his negative dialectic: a perverse cancellation-by-programmatic-affirmation of the philosophical aesthetics Adorno had developed precisely to trouble the neat dialectical syntheses and closures of fellow Marxian critics. The relevant interpretations of “On Lyric Poetry and Society” have arisen in mostly academic Anglo-American treatments of late eighteenth century through twentieth-century poetry (though applications sometimes reach back as far as Renaissance lyric); they have more or less assimilated Adorno’s essay to the influential theory or argument known, in recent literary criticism, as the “critique of aesthetic ideology,” which has at times seemed to make itself almost synonymous with Marxian or Marxian-inflected criticism in general. The critique of aesthetic ideology holds that high romantic poetics and Kantian aesthetics – building on eighteenth-century advances in bourgeois sociopolitical power – establish an essentialist or transcendental theory of cultural value. This is said to be an ideological theory whose function, enacted practically through literary/aesthetic experience and form, is to serve bourgeois hegemony by rerouting attention, interest, and energy from the sociopolitical to the artistic-cultural realm.