The Eschatological Dimension of Natural Beauty in Post-Hegelian Critical Theory

Enigma, Semblance, and Natural Beauty in Adorno's Epistemological Aesthetics Lorraine Markotic (bio) "The poverty of the participants in Endgame is the poverty of philosophy." —Theodor Adorno (1991b, 253) In this article, I argue that crucial to understanding Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1997) is the philosophy he outlines in Negative Dialectics (1973).1 Negative Dialectics is less an actual negative dialectics, in my view, than a call for such a philosophy—a call for which Aesthetic Theory may be seen as a response. Adorno's theory of art emphasizes the inherent role of subjectivity in the encounter with the enigmatic art object, and indicates the epistemological importance of semblance (Schein). Art promotes a model different from that of a knowing subject who apprehends objects through concepts. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory invokes the possibility of a non-dominative, or at least a less dominative, relationship between subject and object. Adorno pursues this through his original suggestion that art imitates natural beauty. Natural beauty inherently involves a subjective encounter but simultaneously insists upon the objective moment in such subjective experience. Similarly, art draws subject and object closer without allowing either to be conflated [End Page 293] into the other. Adorno suggests that just as natural beauty is the model for art, so aesthetics provides a model for philosophy. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory advances an epistemology—one that is a logical continuity to Negative Dialectics. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno rejects any positive dialectic and asserts that restlessness should characterize philosophy. Thought should not come to rest, but should instead continually negate itself. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno makes clear that works of art are far too enigmatic ever to let thought, or interpretation, come to rest. The semblance quality of art relentlessly impels thinking, and art's enigmatic quality prevents thought from settling. This is especially the case with modern art. Adorno's aesthetics suggests another way of knowing, one that engages in the negative dialectics that Negative Dialectics demands. The final Aesthetic Theory was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett; however, for the most part I think the salience of Beckett's work, not only for Adorno's aesthetics but also for his later philosophy in general, has been underestimated. Throughout this article, in addition to discussing Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, I shall address Adorno's essay "Trying to Understand Endgame." I consider this essay emblematic of Adorno's aesthetic theory and his philosophical project because in it Adorno both uses his aesthetic and philosophical theory to illuminate Endgame and sees Endgame as expressing his aesthetic and philosophical ideas.2 One In Negative Dialectics, Adorno criticizes Hegel for having betrayed dialectical thinking by permitting it to come to rest and allowing an—always premature—closure of system and world, concept and object. Adorno challenges the Hegelian notion of an affirmative dialectic, the idea of achieving something positive through the negation of a negation. This is not to say that idealist philosophy should resign, only that dialectics should as much as possible avoid congealing, should continuously negate itself and its conceptions. Against Hegel's "affirmative" or "positive" dialectic that culminates in absolute knowledge and the reconciliation of reason and society, Adorno maintains: "It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope" (1973, 406). Dialectics must be open-ended. It is neither method nor reality. Dialectics is not a system or even an approach to the world; neither is it any contradiction inherent in objects—for discrepancy is a relation perceived by subjects. Thought is propelled by a world that eludes conceptualization. Thought [End Page 294] should not come to rest, Adorno argues, for it would then betray all those things whose present form betrays their own potential. Throughout Negative Dialectics, Adorno attacks "identity theory" and depicts Hegel as the archetypal "identity theorist" who presents an apparent—but actually false and extorted—reconciliation between subject and object. The object is only encapsulated by the subject insofar as it is compressed into a prescribed concept. Adorno indicts the Hegelian concept for being coercive and accuses Hegel of claiming to extract from the object that which is...

Enigma, Semblance, and Natural Beauty in Adorno's Epistemological Aesthetics Lorraine Markotic (bio) "The poverty of the participants in Endgame is the poverty of philosophy." —Theodor Adorno (1991b, 253) In this article, I argue that crucial to understanding Adorno's Aesthetic Theory (1997) is the philosophy he outlines in Negative Dialectics (1973).1 Negative Dialectics is less an actual negative dialectics, in my view, than a call for such a philosophy—a call for which Aesthetic Theory may be seen as a response. Adorno's theory of art emphasizes the inherent role of subjectivity in the encounter with the enigmatic art object, and indicates the epistemological importance of semblance (Schein). Art promotes a model different from that of a knowing subject who apprehends objects through concepts. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory invokes the possibility of a non-dominative, or at least a less dominative, relationship between subject and object. Adorno pursues this through his original suggestion that art imitates natural beauty. Natural beauty inherently involves a subjective encounter but simultaneously insists upon the objective moment in such subjective experience. Similarly, art draws subject and object closer without allowing either to be conflated [End Page 293] into the other. Adorno suggests that just as natural beauty is the model for art, so aesthetics provides a model for philosophy. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory advances an epistemology—one that is a logical continuity to Negative Dialectics. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno rejects any positive dialectic and asserts that restlessness should characterize philosophy. Thought should not come to rest, but should instead continually negate itself. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno makes clear that works of art are far too enigmatic ever to let thought, or interpretation, come to rest. The semblance quality of art relentlessly impels thinking, and art's enigmatic quality prevents thought from settling. This is especially the case with modern art. Adorno's aesthetics suggests another way of knowing, one that engages in the negative dialectics that Negative Dialectics demands. The final Aesthetic Theory was to be dedicated to Samuel Beckett; however, for the most part I think the salience of Beckett's work, not only for Adorno's aesthetics but also for his later philosophy in general, has been underestimated. Throughout this article, in addition to discussing Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, I shall address Adorno's essay "Trying to Understand Endgame." I consider this essay emblematic of Adorno's aesthetic theory and his philosophical project because in it Adorno both uses his aesthetic and philosophical theory to illuminate Endgame and sees Endgame as expressing his aesthetic and philosophical ideas.2 One In Negative Dialectics, Adorno criticizes Hegel for having betrayed dialectical thinking by permitting it to come to rest and allowing an—always premature—closure of system and world, concept and object. Adorno challenges the Hegelian notion of an affirmative dialectic, the idea of achieving something positive through the negation of a negation. This is not to say that idealist philosophy should resign, only that dialectics should as much as possible avoid congealing, should continuously negate itself and its conceptions. Against Hegel's "affirmative" or "positive" dialectic that culminates in absolute knowledge and the reconciliation of reason and society, Adorno maintains: "It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total. This is its form of hope" (1973, 406). Dialectics must be open-ended. It is neither method nor reality. Dialectics is not a system or even an approach to the world; neither is it any contradiction inherent in objects—for discrepancy is a relation perceived by subjects. Thought is propelled by a world that eludes conceptualization. Thought [End Page 294] should not come to rest, Adorno argues, for it would then betray all those things whose present form betrays their own potential. Throughout Negative Dialectics, Adorno attacks "identity theory" and depicts Hegel as the archetypal "identity theorist" who presents an apparent—but actually false and extorted—reconciliation between subject and object. The object is only encapsulated by the subject insofar as it is compressed into a prescribed concept. Adorno indicts the Hegelian concept for being coercive and accuses Hegel of claiming to extract from the object that which is...

The main subject of this paper is the influence of Kierkegaard's philosophy on the concept of Adorno's dialectics. This article is focused on the analysis of Adorno's work published in 1966 titled Negative Dialec-tics. Adomo 's concept of dialectics, which is based on undefined experience, is broadly similar to the negative concept of existential philosophy of Kierkegaard. Although Adomo uses the Hegelian dialectics to expose the ways in which Kierkegaard’s thoughts fali into idealism. Finally, Adomo adopts Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegelian identity of thinking. Adomo, in Negative Dialectics refers to Kant, Hegel Heidegger, but seldom to Kierkegaard. A careful analysis shows that a number of themes and concepts of its predecessor have been assimilated to his philosophy.

Edward Schillebeeckx has consolidated the theoretical and practical dimensions of the Christian approach to human suffering in his theological method, specifically his theology of suffering for others. The various elements and sources of his method can be gleaned from his later writings, especially those published during the 1970s and 1980s. Schillebeeckx's theology is anchored in (1) the Thomist‐phenomenological approach of Flemish philosopher Dominic De Petter; (2) the historical‐experiential theology of Marie‐Dominique Chenu; and (3) the social theory of the Frankfurt School. De Petter's perspective on Aquinas integrated a Thomist epistemology with the phenomenological notion that concepts cannot ultimately capture the reality of human experience. From Chenu, Schillebeeckx acquired his commitment to both solid historical research and engagement with socio‐political problems facing church and world.The problem of suffering, which constitutes an essential dimension of Schillebeeckx's theological ethics with its dual emphasis on theory and praxis, raises the question of human responsibility in the face of unjust and needless suffering. His theoretical‐practical approach to the alleviation of human suffering evolved within the framework of social critical theory, specifically: (a) Schillebeeckx's theological integration of Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics into his own method of correlation, which promotes various forms of critical resistance to socio‐political injustice rather than a single program; and (b) the unification of theory and praxis, a priority of Jürgen Habermas's ‘new’ critical theory that Schillebeeckx endorses. Both principles of critical theory — negative dialectics and the union of theory and praxis — inform Schillebeeckx's eschatological orientation and his conception of liturgy as a form of social ethics.

Interview with Martin Jay

This book discusses how from their different backgrounds and on different levels, the German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist,Theodor W. Adorno, (1903-1969) and the Irish playwright, Brian Friel,(1929-2015) came to the conclusion that the modern crisis rendered art’s affirmative essence, like all positivistic fixations, obsolete. Only a new conception of dialectics, based on the reciprocity of opposites, rather than on antitheses, is capable of healing modern dichotomies. Independent of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Critical Theory, Friel is aware that with the processual character of life this requires of the artist in particular an attitude both critical and conciliatory and a persistent readiness to change. Reality is in need of possibility, its dialectic other. Uncertainty, in Friel’s Theatre of Hope and Despair is no longer a defect of our time, but a source of creation in art as well as in life.

The dominant view for the relation between Adorno and Nietzsche is that the latter’s influence on the former, in terms of style and content, is primarily to be found in Adorno’s book Minima Moralia. Contrary to the dominant view, this article takes seriously Adorno’s admission that ‘of all the so-called great philosophers I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt – more even than Hegel’ and investigates the extent of Nietzsche’s influence in the conception of negative dialectics. It is argued that there could be a significant as well as inconspicuous influence that runs through Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to the point where Nietzsche legitimately be proclaimed the originator of Adorno’s negative dialectics. For those who consider negative dialectics to be the paramount achievement of Adorno’s thought, this claim would be equivalent to the claim that Nietzsche’s most significant contribution in Adorno’s thought is to be found in Negative Dialectics rather than in Minima Moralia.

Reviewed by: The Frankfurt School in Exile Hinrich C. Seeba The Frankfurt School in Exile. By Thomas Wheatland. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. xxi + 415 pages. $39.95. From the theoretical critique of instrumental reason to living in counter-cultural utopias, from insistence on aesthetic autonomy to mass culture as a channel for democratization, from "negative dialectics" (as Adorno's most famous book is entitled) to rebellion against the commodification of culture, from bourgeois elitism, complete with contempt for falsches Bewusstsein of the less educated, to popular proletarianism—the Frankfurt School provided the mantra for a politically engaged generation that needed a theoretical framework for rebelling against their fathers, especially when, in the case of Germany, many of these fathers had been Nazi collaborators or worse. Anyone who is seriously interested in the originally Marxist criticism of mass culture and its manipulative aesthetics should read at least some of the self-contained chapters of Thomas Wheatland's The Frankfurt School in Exile. Readers will be fascinated to learn, for the first time in an in-depth analysis, about the affinities and controversies between the New York Intellectuals of the 1930s and the exiled Frankfurt School's Critical Theory, as it was discussed, often adopted, and eventually rejected, among others, by the editors of the journal Partisan Review and by the leading American Marxist of the time, Sidney Hook, who as a student of John Dewey had developed his own brand of Pragmatic Marxism. But this book is not so much a discussion of the philosophical legacy as it is a detailed contribution to the institutional history of how European philosophy was practiced under adverse circumstances, after the mostly Jewish members of the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung (founded in 1923 by Felix Weil, whose merchant family's wealth provided the annual operating costs of 120.000 marks) were forced into exile by the Nazis. The study concentrates on Columbia University as a host to the members of the Frankfurt School from 1934 until Max Horkheimer (on doctor's orders) and Theodor W. Adorno moved to California in 1941, and on the institutional conflicts surrounding the adoption of social theory in the American academe. The author, Thomas Wheatland, an assistant professor of German history at Assumption College in Massachusetts, emphasizes that he is not a critical theorist but merely a historian of Critical Theory. Even though he wants to stay clear of both philosophical and ideological controversies, he was able to give a nuanced, often captivating account even of slight theoretical and ideological differences in the interaction of German exiles and American intellectuals. He is clearly indebted to Martin Jay (Dialectical Imagination, 1973) and to Rolf Wiggershaus (Die Frankfurter Schule, 1986), but in contrast to both of them he concentrates on the often contentious interactions of the Horkheimer circle with mostly empiricist American scholars, especially at Columbia University. While the question of possible Communist infiltration was first [End Page 636] raised by Lewis Feuer in a provocative article of 1980, the clandestine Marxist leanings of the Institute (and their failure to publicly condemn Stalinist terror), to be sure, had been under scrutiny for some time. More interesting, at least to the author of the present study, than the ideological debate following Feuer's accusation is the fact that Columbia's Sociology department, represented by Robert Lynd, invited the Frankfurt School in 1934 because it needed the international and the interdisciplinary outlook the exiles from Frankfurt would provide, as the latter in turn needed an institutional home for their continued work, especially as the ongoing Studien über Autorität und Familie (collectively authored, and completed in 1936) coincided with Lynd's emerging research interest in the family. The story of the Frankfurt School in exile is full of ironies, as this book makes evident without delighting in the obvious failures. Horkheimer, who directed the successful studies in the proto-fascist nature of the authoritarian character, was personally most authoritarian in running a tight ship. He kept the members of the Institute under strict orders not to divulge their Marxist penchant or to engage in political action, yet they needed to collaborate with Marxist Pragmatists and to engage even in positivist...

The purely philosophical concerns of Theodor W. Adorno's negative dialectic would seem to be far removed from the concreteness of critical theory; Adorno's philosophy considers perhaps the most traditional subject of "pure" philosophy, the structure of experience, whereas critical theory examines specific aspects of society. But, as Brian O'Connor demonstrates in this highly original interpretation of Adorno's philosophy, the negative dialectic can be seen as the theoretical foundation of the reflexivity or critical rationality required by critical theory. Adorno, O'Connor argues, is committed to the "concretion" of philosophy: his thesis of nonidentity attempts to show that reality is not reducible to appearances. This lays the foundation for the applied "concrete" critique of appearances that is essential to the possibility of critical theory. To explicate the context in which Adorno's philosophy operates—the tradition of modern German philosophy, from Kant to Heidegger—O'Connor examines in detail the ideas of these philosophers as well as Adorno's self-defining differences with them. O'Connor discusses Georg Lucà cs and the influence of his "protocritical theory" on Adorno's thought; the elements of Kant's and Hegel's German idealism appropriated by Adorno for his theory of subject-object mediation; the priority of the object and the agency of the subject in Adorno's epistemology; and Adorno's important critiques of Kant and the phenomenology of Heidegger and Husserl, critiques that both illuminate Adorno's key concepts and reveal his construction of critical theory through an engagement with the problems of philosophy.

SPEP Co-director's Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise

Acknowledgements. Introduction. Part I: Critical Theory: The Frankfurt School:. 1. The formation of the Institute of Social Research. 2. Class, Class Conflict and the Development of Capitalism:. Critical theory and political economy. 3. The Culture Industry:. Critical theory and aesthetics. 4. The Changing Structure of the Family and the Individual:. Critical theory and psychoanalysis. 5. The Critique of Instrumental Reason:. Critical theory and philosophy of history. 6. Horkheimera s Formulation of Critical Theory:. Epistemology and method 1. 7. Adornoa s Conception of Negative Dialectics:. Epistemology and method 2. 8. Marcusea s Notions of Theory and Practice:. Epistemology and method 3. Part II: Critical Theory: Habermas:. 9. Introduction to Habermas. 10. Discourse, Science and Society. 11. Interests, Knowledge and Action. 12. The Reformulation of the Foundations of Critical Theory. Part III: The Importance and Limitations of Critical Theory:. 13. An Assessment of the Frankfurt School and Habermas. 14. The concept of critical theory.

Theodor Adorno argues that music contains an indelible collective undercurrent that can be revealed in its negative dialectic with Culture Industry music. This phenomenon of the communicative power of the ‘negative dialectic’ in popular music is the concern of this study. Charles Taylor observes that the rock concert embodies the expression of a continuing desire throughout secular modernity for a spiritual fulfillment that the reality or facticity of contemporary life cannot adequately deliver. In sympathy with Taylor’s interest in the rock concert as a fusion in common action/feeling that generates the powerful phenomenological sense that we are in contact with ‘something greater’, I draw on Adorno’s critical theory in order to offer an explanation of this continuing communicative power of music. It is possible to historicize Adorno’s controversial critique of popular music without rejecting his negative dialectical approach. In order to demonstrate the ‘actuality’ of Adorno’s negative dialectical approach, I use it to analyze – quite scandalously – heavy metal music.

This chapter examines what the author understands to be the core theological concept that gives substantive meaning to Adorno's Negative Dialectics and his philosophy of suffering; that is the notion of bilderverbot , or the theological ban of images. It claims that the essence of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and specifically the core of Adorno's philosophy is the sensitivity toward the suffering of the finite individual in the unjust and violent world of history. The chapter elucidates the political, economic, and social ramifications of the philosophical deployment and radicalization of the concept of bilderverbot in the Frankfurt School's vision (or non-vision) of utopia. By determinately negating the original Jewish conception of bilderverbot and therefore preserving and extending the concept beyond its original and sole theological meaning, Adorno and the Frankfurt School clarify the inherent double negativity of bilderverbot as well as the concept of utopia. Keywords: Adorno's philosophy; bilderverbot ; critical theory; Frankfurt School; Jewish conception; Negative Dialectics ; Utopia

Reviewed by: The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory by Amy Allen Sina Kramer Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, 304 pp. ISBN 9780231173247 Drawing on Adorno's aphoristic claim in Negative Dialectics that "Progress begins where it comes to an end," Amy Allen's The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory is a critique of the concept of progress in critical theory, for the sake of critical theory's decolonization. It is a clear, forceful and convincing argument that calls us to question what critical theory is, and perhaps more pressingly, for whom. While Allen aims both to decolonize critical theory and to criticalize post- and decolonial theory, she thoroughly succeeds at the first but only really invites the latter. While she relies on some postcolonial theorists and feminist and critical race philosophers (Spivak, Saïd, Chakrabarty, Alcoff), Allen's target and audience are members of the second, third, and fourth generations of critical theory and those inspired by their thought. She employs the method Adorno described as "critique and rescue": she gives an immanent critique of the concept of progress implicit but largely unacknowledged in the work of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. And she rescues a version of progress and a method of critical theorizing more friendly to decolonial aims (by means of the work of Adorno and Foucault). [End Page 357] Allen rescues a version of progress for the decolonization of critical theory by distinguishing between a backward-looking sense of progress as a historical "fact" from a forward-looking sense of progress as a moral-political imperative, a kind of anti-foundationalist, immanent regulative ideal. While the latter is a necessary expression of the demand for a better world at the heart of critical theory, the former is rooted in the desire to ground the normative claims of critical theory in empirical claims about the "fact" of our historical progress. Allen argues that this backward-looking notion of progress is grounded in a theory of modernity as a developmental, geographical, racial, and historical logic that positions non-European and non-Western peoples as lagging behind Europe and the West. She characterizes this backward-looking notion of progress as self-congratulatory, producing a neat political-epistemological circle that presumes the very thing it is meant to prove: the superiority of Europe, or the West. The middle three chapters of the book address the implicit accounts of progress at work in Habermas, Honneth, and Forst. As a theory that proceeds immanently, critical theory has to find grounds for making normative judgments without relying on the prop of some transcendental element. These theorists worry that this leaves critical theory open either to relativism (if societies develop their own internal normative criteria, then there is no place from which to adjudicate between them) or conventionalism (if normative criteria develop immanently to a particular society, then those criteria should be regarded as legitimate). Allen identifies Habermas's concept of universal pragmatics as his attempt to solve this problem. Allen argues that while Habermas does not work from an explicit philosophy of history, universal pragmatics nevertheless relies on a notion of social evolution that commits him to an implicit philosophy of history. She argues that Habermas's universal pragmatics is based on a conception of discursive competence that presumes the very thing it claims to argue for: the superiority of Western or European societies, or those that have historically developed the relevant capacities for justifying their claims and sorting between the different life-worlds to which these claims belong. While Honneth is also committed to the project of grounding critical theory's normative claims, he considers Habermas's approach insufficiently rooted in empirical practices or lived experience. Honneth grounds the legitimacy of norms in our subjective investment in them, arguing that our need for reciprocal recognition provides a mechanism for the revisability of norms and thus for progress. While Honneth avoids explicit claims about the superiority of Western or European societies and the reasoners within them, Allen argues that his commitment to a backward-looking account of progress ties...

Critical media theory can be traced back to the development of critical theory by thinkers associated with the so-called Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School was generally neo-Marxist and Hegelian, and established powerful critiques of positivist, mainstream forms of social science and philosophy. The Frankfurt School’s approach to theorizing the emergent 20th century “mass media” therefore founded a powerful critique of mainstream, positivist, “administrative” mass communication research that became dominant in the early decades of the discipline. Arguably the most direct theoretical descendants of Frankfurt School critical theory (via the latter’s critique of industrialized culture) are the forms of political economy of the media that emerged in their wake. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, competing Marxist analyses began to challenge what they took to be the economism, reductionism, and determinism of Frankfurt School and political economy approaches. The most important movement in these respects came out of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. The so-called Birmingham School developed forms of structural and cultural Marxism that drew heavily on the work of Althusser and Gramsci in particular. Additionally, the CCCS developed semiotic and ethnographic approaches to critical media studies that drew upon thinkers such as Barthes and Geertz, and thus gave rise to theories of media audiences that differed sharply from those of the Frankfurt School and political economists. During the late-1970s and throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the critical media theory of the Birmingham School engaged closely with feminist theory and politics, and with critical race theory; it also engaged in dialogues and debates with poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism and postcolonialism, and spread internationally under the stripped-down heading of “Cultural Studies.” Though not unrelated, critical media theory can be differentiated from film theory: many film theorists reject the characterization of cinema as a “communication medium,” and equally rejected (for many years, at least) the engagement with television that spurred the development of a great deal of critical media theory and that helped give rise to the field of television studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Critical media theory in general, and television studies in particular, have incorporated some forms of psychoanalysis to one degree or another, but neither has been anywhere near as absorbed by psychoanalytic approaches as film theory was for many years (arguably as primarily a consequence of the specificity of the cinematic apparatus). In more recent years, new media theory in particular has been central to the continuing development and concerns of critical media theory more generally.