Aesthetic Truth as the Mimesis of False Consciousness in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

Adorno makes the notion of truth content into the central term of his Aesthetic Theory. He understands the truth content of artworks not as a message that could be translated into propositional form but as experience that derives from their objective form of presentation. The artwork’s truth is to be glanced in the effect that it has on consciousness. This leads to an emphasis on the crucial role of false consciousness in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Artworks embody, mime, and determinately negate false consciousness. Adorno defines false consciousness in a series of works such as Mimima Moralia and Critical Models as a set of attitudes and modes of experience that emerge out of late capitalism and lead to the potential of fascism such as the separation of pleasure and work, political sadism, and the removal of thinking from products of sensible intuition. In his theory of the artwork, he demonstrates the ways in which aesthetic forms work against such patterns of false consciousness.