Autonomy, Negativity, and Illusory Transgression

Abstract

Insofar as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. -Adorno 1 The dysfunctional social function of art provides the hinge on which Theodor W. Adorno's account of autonomy turns. The account itself marks a theoretical passageway to both his critique of the culture industry and his qualified defense of modern art. As Deborah Cook demonstrates in The Culture Industry Revisited, Adorno's critique of the culture industry has three levels: an aesthetic thesis about the formulaic character of products of the culture industry, an economic thesis about the commodification of culture, and a psychological thesis about narcissistic tendencies in capitalist societies. The connection across these levels derives, in my view, from the strong links Adorno forges among three different concepts of autonomy: (1) the internal and self-critical independence of the authentic work of art; (2) the relative independence of (some of) high culture from the economic system; and (3) the autonomy of the self as a political and moral agent. He criticizes the culture industry for undermining all three types of autonomy, and he portrays authentic works of modern art as providing crucial resistance to pressures toward cultural commodification and social narcissism. In his qualified defense of modern art, as I indicate in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory,2 Adorno's account of autonomy goes roughly like this. Art has become independent from other institutions in capitalist society. Since this independence depends on political, economic, and other developments, however, the independence of art is relative to society as a whole. Art's autonomy is a matter of relative independence. Increasingly this relative independence has become tied to the production and reception of artworks whose "purposes" are internal to the works themselves. Such works, when they are authentic, are social monads whose internal processes express those of society as a whole. Being relatively independent, authentic works of modern art can enact a critique of society by engaging in self-criticism. They are like self-inflicted wounds on the body of society. They force people to face society's deeper illness-its divisions of labor, class conflict, and "exchange principle"-and they point toward remedies that art itself cannot prescribe. Adorno's account has come in for a number of criticisms. In Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Burger faults Adorno for ignoring how art itself, in its avant-garde movements, has attacked the principle of autonomy. Sabine Wilke charges Adorno with using his principle of autonomy in a gender-biased way to ignore or discredit the work of women artists.3 Noel Carroll claims that Adorno misunderstands mass art because his ideal of autonomous art tends "to misconstrue Kant's analysis of free beauty as a theory of art" (105). I myself have criticized Adorno for making autonomy a precondition for truth in art, with the effect that he discounts the truth potential of folk art, mass-mediated art, and any art prior to the solidification of fine art as a social institution in eighteenth-century Europe. Indeed, Adorno's emphasis on the autonomy of art marks a contemporary site of contention. Postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and feminist scholars criticize it as an anti-democratic vestige of Eurocentric philosophy, while post-structuralists and post-analytic philosophers dismiss it as an antiquated thesis of modernist aesthetics. In response, more sympathetic readers try to rescue Adorno's account by demonstrating its compatibility with the concerns of contemporary scholarship. Unfortunately, these rescue efforts often fail in two respects: they jettison insights in Adorno's writings that could counter theoretical deficiencies in contemporary scholarship, and they intensify practical conundrums in the arts that Adorno could not adequately address. …