“Blind Representation”: On the Epic Naiveté of the Cinema

Abstract

This essay argues that Theodor Adorno’s reflections on the novel form respond to a problem that is focused in his commentaries on the cinema: how to develop forms of aesthetic rationality at a historical moment in which medium-specific aesthetic reflection may be obsolete. Adorno’s commentaries on novelistic and filmic language register this historical situation of art. At the same time, this line of thought serves a crucial underlying interest of Adorno’s aesthetic theory – to maintain art’s thought of uneven development, its vanishing distinction from the technological forms of its social context.