Aesthetics Lecture 21 by Adorno

Let us try to take up our threads, meanwhile somewhat tangled, where we left them hanging weeks ago. I closed with an attempt to ground aesthetics in the so-called aesthetic experience or the consciousness of the aesthetic observer, and the final motif I introduced was that, in general, defining this so-called aesthetic experience, or defining what one experiences through works of art, is something entirely skewed and inadequate because it overlooks the decisive fact that there is really no such thing as determinate, unambiguous reactions, much less unambiguous intellectual judgments, as the conclusion of a work of art.

This type of unambiguity, to which we are accustomed from knowledge in the form of judgments – something is or is not the case- is quite simply absent from the sphere of the work of art. Perhaps you recall that I pointed you to the phenomena of Edouard Manet  in order to make this a little clearer, and I tried –admittedly only in the   form of propositions, for naturally I cannot develop this adequately in such a theoretically orientated lecture – to show you that, in this work [The Absinthe Drinker, in particular] a critical, a socio-critical aspect, and also an aspect one could describe as the experience of destructiveness or evil, is interwoven in  most peculiar way with a delight at the charms associated with this, and that, even in the form it assumes in Manet, the work of art – as Hegel puts it- does not offer a ‘slogan’. One could almost arrive at the heretical notion that the work attempts, in this way, to heal some of what is inflicted on things by the discursive logic that proceeds in concepts and judgments. This means that the world is indeed as complex as the world feeling evoked by a significant work of art.

While typical judgments that are for or against something –that say something is so or not so, and go no further than criticism or a position- in a sense destroy the whole interwovenness of truth and untruth, the interwovenness of what is alive, the work of art, by not arbitrarily separating these aspects and proceedings towards decisions but, rather, by presenting them in their intertwined state, could be said to restore the truth, which we lose precisely through the form of the mere judgment.


 But I think you would be underestimating the epistemic character of works of art or artistic experience if you thought that what I have called – using a phrase whose questionable nature I have already conceded to you, and whose questionable nature I would like to underline again in the strongest terms, and which only gives a small intimation about a very complex issue-if you were to think what I called a ‘world feeling’ conveyed by a work were really something entirely vague and undefined. For the world feeling which we gain in artistic experience contains, precisely in that multifacetedness which I attempted to elaborate for you in a somewhat determinate fashion, all sorts of extremely concrete aspects.


You would be entirely mistaken if, for example, as people tend to do in vulgar existential interpretations of Kafka – yes there is such a thing as vulgar existentialism!- you thought, if I too may express myself in vulgar terms, that this depicted the general lousiness of the world, as it were, and that these works, even Kafka’s, were ultimately  only about the general uncertainty surrounding the heroes of these novels and this general non liquet [‘it is not clear’] and non sequitur (‘it does not follow’) which the plots of these works of art repeatedly encounter. Rather, these works contain an infinite number of entirely determinate aspects – be it the sphere of law firms or the sphere of sadism, which also plays so infinitely large a part in Kafka’s oeuvre, or be it a very specific connection to the question of guilt and the guilt context of myth. All of these aspects are evident in Kafka’s works in the most unambiguous and emphatic form, and you will only understand it at all if you also note the unambiguity with which these motifs appear in his writing. But you must not treat it as a conclusion . . . and say ‘Such-and such reveals itself here’; or as some also say, ‘This or that corresponds to Kafka’s world picture or ‘worldview’; for you, perhaps, the disgusting and repulsive nature of terms  such as ‘worldview’ or ‘world picture’ already denounces the thing which such atrocious words usually stand for. And the synthesis of these aspects that Kafka brings about is indeed not one which tells us ‘That is so’; it does not result in a conclusion, a slogan, a judgment, but rather it is  the judgmentless and, if you will, the ambiguous intertwining of these aspects that really permits the work of art to incorporate that very wealth of the existent which is otherwise cut off by the logic of the judgment. . .

[To fill one’s mouth as fully as possible with these thoughts one could say that ‘the vital principle beauty is distance or dissonance: the elusive, not quite graspable, ephemeral impossibility of being pinned down’ -Lecture Four where Adorno also says:]

 “One could say that every dissonance is a small remembrance of the suffering which the control over nature, and ultimately a society of domination as such, inflicts over nature, and only in the form of this suffering, only in the form of yearning – and dissonance is always substantially yearning and suffering- only thus can suppressed  nature find its voice at all. And dissonance therefore contains not only this aspect of an expression of negativity, of this suffering, but always at the same time the happiness of giving nature its voice, finding something not yet taken, drawing something into the work that –if I could use the word again- has not yet been domesticated, something akin to fresh snow, which thus reminds us of something other than the self-same machinery of bourgeois society in which we are all trapped. .  . So, in other words: in this process whereby humans remove themselves from the threat of forceful nature, they always did nature an injustice too. And art, by clinging in a certain sense to the mimetic process, to this archaic, older phenomena rather than a rational one – and, in this, I would almost say that all art is childlike, infantile, because it truly still has the notion that it can take full control of reality through the image, not by intervening in reality with thought and action –by clinging to this aspect, art always tries at the same time to do justice to that element of suppressed nature. This strikes me as the more comprehensive historico-philosophical explanation for the circumstance of the return of nature in art. That is why nature remains in art, that is why art means the restoration of nature in a certain sense, because it is part of the prehistory of art itself – the idea of art itself, if you will- that that which would otherwise perish because of rationale, law, order, logic, classificatory thought, because of all these categories, finds its voice and receives its due after all.”