Hammer - Adornos Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe

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Espen Hammer 2015

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First published 2015

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Hammer, Espen.

Adornos modernism : art, experience, and catastrophe / Espen Hammer.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-107-12159-1 (hbk)

1. Adorno, Theodor W., 19031969. 2. Modernism (Aesthetics) I. Title.

B 3199. A 34 H 36 2015

111.85092dc23 2015014246

ISBN 978-1-107-12159-1 hardback

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In the first two or three decades after World War ii , as intellectuals were struggling to come to terms with what had happened and assess the cultural and political situation in Europe, Theodor W. Adorno became a towering figure in German philosophy and aesthetics. Like his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, Adorno argued that the catastrophe of the Nazi years represented a historical caesura: from now on, it was thought, it was impossible to just continue, as though the collapse of civilization were a limited national aberration allowing some kind of eventual return to normalcy. There was a sense that everything had to be radically rethought philosophy, politics, codes of behavior, as well as art and culture in the widest sense. Adorno famously gave expression to this sentiment when, in 1951, he stated that writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. In the high modernism of artists like Schnberg and Beckett, he found models for how art could nevertheless respond to this predicament, and Adornos approach became emblematic of the period and came to dominate aesthetic reflection in Europe at least until the 1980s.

In the 1980s, well over a decade after his death, Adornos reputation as a cultural icon, a public voice of conscience of the kind that Jean-Paul Sartre had been in France, started to wane, and with the rise of postconceptual art and postmodern theory, his modernist commitments grounded in complicated dialogues with Kant and Hegel began to seem less relevant. During the same period, Jrgen Habermas made a big impact with his communication-theoretic reformulation of the foundations of Critical Theory. According to Habermas, while Adornos thinking had been of tremendous significance for the postwar generation, he had failed to take the required step beyond the so-called philosophy of consciousness and, especially in his aesthetics, had been flirting with mysticism. In the German Wellmers hypothesis was that many of Adornos intuitions could be preserved if formulated in different philosophical terms. However, exactly how much of Adornos aesthetics would be left if transposed to a Habermasian, communication-theoretic register was never made entirely clear.

Over the last three decades or so, an increasing number of interpretations have appeared in English that treat Adorno not simply as a cultural critic but also as providing an actual option for philosophy more broadly considered. Some of this work has been influenced by Habermass ideas. Other work, such as that of Fredric Jameson, has focused on Adornos Marxist commitments and tried to reclaim his legacy for the analysis of late capitalist culture. However, much of the most interesting reception has taken developments in Anglo-American analytic philosophy into account, interpreting Adorno in dialogue with figures such as Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell.

In the early phase of the Anglo-American reception, the anthropology and the critique of civilization dominated the interpretations. Then, during the years of debate with the Habermasian paradigm, Adornos views of rationality and representation became central. There have certainly been pioneering attempts at reconstructing the aesthetics as well. In the early 1990s, responding to recent debates in Continental aesthetics, Jay Bernstein and Lambert Zuidervaart each produced important work dealing with central and systematic aspects of Adornos aesthetic edifice.continued the modernist legacy, the high modernist attention to aesthetic quality and detail has had to compete with a large number of conceptual and postconceptual art-practices.

My aim here is not to discuss contemporary art. Like Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Adorno is one of the great classics of the European tradition of philosophical aesthetics. With that tradition as my primary context, I want to understand the philosophical implications of Adornos aesthetics. In particular, I seek to locate his discussion of art within the post-Kantian framework of understanding the nature and prospects of human freedom. However, I also explore the nature of aesthetic modernism its fundamental claims and commitments, its social and cultural conditions as it grew out of the post-Kantian tradition. Although the book largely proceeds historically, providing an interpretive reconstruction of Adornos aesthetics as it emerges in response especially to Kant and Hegel, it is not primarily intended as a historical contribution. Its overall aim is to demonstrate that this is a perfectly live option, combining, with an almost overwhelming degree of articulation and finesse, a critical account of modern social systems with a philosophically acute and uniquely sensitive approach to modernist art.