Mimesis in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on literature and arts are spread over of his works, but his systematic and comprehensive theorization of art (including literature) was to wait until Aesthetic Theory, which Adorno did not live to complete. However, as editors of original German edition, Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman, quote Adorno (from a letter he wrote several days before his death), the final version 'still needed a desperate effort' but ... 'basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of substance of book'; (1) it is not inappropriate to rely on Aesthetic Theory as repository of Adorno's thought on subject of art and literature. Supplementing its reading with relevant chapters from Adorno's other works -Dialectic of Enlightenment (which he coauthored with Max Horkheimer), Prisms, and Notes to Literature)-this essay concentrates on concept of mimesis in Adorno's theory of arts and literature in order to examine various meanings Adorno assigns to that concept as well as constellations in which this concept articulates with other concepts. Since Adorno's aesthetic theory forms a coherent part of his overall philosophical enterprise, strategy used here is to discuss briefly some key concepts constitutive of Adorno's critique of and of Capitalist society, and then zero in on concept of mimesis. Adorno was a leading member of Frankfurt School-an institute that championed critical theory, which attempted to grasp contemporary society and culture as a totality, espoused unity of theory and praxis, and critiqued instrumental rationality. (2) Key to Adorno's thinking, as to Frankfurt School's, were Marx's concept of commodity fetishism and Georg Lukacs's concept of reification. Commodity fetishism names enigma in Capitalist society, where value of commodity as product of labor appears as value of commodity itself just as relation between human beings essential to production and exchange of commodities appears as relation between commodities themselves. In other words, commodities become fetishes because they seem to acquire a life of their own. (3) Lukacs's theory of reification extends Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, via Max Weber's theory of rationalization, to argue that not only economic sphere (in Marxist base-superstructure model, socio-economic base comprising of forces and relations of production) but social institutions such as law, administration, and journalism and academic disciplines such as economics, jurisprudence, and philosophy also become permeated by commodity form or logic of exchange. Indeed, according to Lukacs, commodity fetishism governs not only objects in world but equally subjects, who are reduced to exchangeable commodities, like mere things obeying inexorable laws of marketplace. (4) Adorno's favorite word for total reification of society under Capitalism is administered world, which appears repeatedly in Aesthetic Theory as it does in his other works. In Cultural Criticism and Society, Adorno thus describes totalizing and totalitarian effect of reification: This regimentation, result of progressive societalization of all human relations, did not simply confront mind from without; it immigrated into its immanent consistency.... The network of is drawn ever tighter, modeled after act of exchange. It leaves individual consciousness less and less room for evasion, performs it more and more thoroughly, cuts it off a priori as it were from possibility of differencing from itself as all difference degenerates into a nuance in monotony of supply. (5) The Cartesian division between thinking self and extended reality, therefore, no longer holds (if it ever did); subject does not confront object from a position transcendent to it but is rather enmeshed in the network of whole that leaves no room for authentic difference and autonomy. …