Adorno

As a rough generalization, the Frankfurt School (the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, including Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and others) hold that capitalist society is torn by such social, economic, and political injustice (a goodness issue) that the arts are distorted. (See the brutally brief sketch of Marxism in the Introduction to Philosophy area of this website.)

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” (1937)

II. A reproduction is not equivalent to the original work of art.

“The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity” (526.2); “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (527.1). Call what is eliminated in mechanical reproduction the “aura.” Mechanical, process reproduction can enlarge or slow down or make things appear outside their original context, including from the domain of tradition (527). Film’s positive social significance is bound up with its “destructive liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (527).

III. Perception is historical, and our perception is changing. A thing’s aura is bound up with distance, and what the masses today demand is a reduction of distance (528). "If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on a horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch."

IV. Mechanical reproduction liberates art from religious ritual. The traditional religious function of art continues to resonate even in the modern (from the [e.g., 15^th century Italian] Renaissance) secular cult of beauty, which finally reacted against religion by making a religion of art (l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake). Reproduction for the masses, defacing the value of the original, causes art to “begin to be based on another practice—politics” (529.2).

V. There is a spectrum of values that function in art, from its value in the religious cult [worshiping group, not the popular sense of the term] to its “exhibition value”—taken to the level of an absolute, e.g., in the use of photography and film (529).

VI. The cult value of art retires into the human face—photographs pursue. The beauty of a melancholy face cannot be treated in the way of mass culture. And photographs attract a contemplative regard. But captions enter the scene beneath the photographs, giving directives to viewers.

IX. Actors learn to perform for the camera, not an audience in a theater; they shoot scenes in fragmented ways, rather than performing them with the rhythm of the work of art.

X. Actors, anxiously, become mass commodities who make no revolutionary challenge to social conditions. Everyone becomes an expert (critic), and every one has access to the role of, e.g., writer. A capitalistic “film industry is trying hard to spur the interest of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacles . . . .”

XI. The film camera is invasive; only in the product does one see the scene free of the equipment involved in shooting the scene.

XII. Historically, a painting has been viewed by individuals or by a few a time, each responding to the work individually (perhaps responding in a reactionary way to a Picasso painting). A movie is seen by the masses, who influence each other’s reception [interpretation and evaluation], perhaps responding to a Chaplin film in a progressive way—involving a “direct intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert” (i.e., as though the audience are all qualified to be expert critics).

XIII. Film makes possible new analysis of human behavior, highlighting details that would be lost in the theater. Film has new resources for drawing attention to a “Freudian slip.” This illustrates “the mutual penetration of art and science.” Our normal way of paying little attention to a host of minor daily activities can be overturned in film which can direct our attention to aspects of common activities that are normally overlooked.

Epilogue. The masses are increasingly becoming the proletariat (the immiserated, industrial working class, oppressed by those who dominate the system of property). All Fascism does for the masses is to give them the opportunity to express themselves. Fascism introduces aesthetics into politics, and war is the result. War fascinates with its “beauty.” War mobilizes resources away from social needs. This is the extreme of art for art’s sake. The self-alienation of humankind “has reached such a state that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order” (537-38).

http://pages.emerson.edu/Courses/spring00/in123/workofart/benjamin.htm

[How true was this when it was written in the early 20^th century? How true now? Compare with Plato's critique of art devoted merely to making an immediate impression on the lower side of an audience.]

Should art be expected to take up the task of radical protest? “Because of . . . Adorno's own complex emphasis on (modern) art's autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/adorno/

Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938)

Main theme: the flight into conformism in the face of catastrophe.

Light (popular) and serious (artistic) music clash in content, value, mass appeal and commercial function (531-532.1).

Classical music today is dominated by a small number of favorite pieces, which become trite, and whose ideas are not taken seriously (532.2).

The instrument (e.g., a tenor with a voluminous and high voice or a Stradivarius violin) becomes a fetish [an object of primitive worship], as though good music cannot be made with average instruments (533.1).

In the upside-down world of capitalism today, as Marx said, market values (the price—“exchange value”)—and the advertising function eclipse the actual enjoyment of music (the “use-value” of the music) (533.2-534). There is psychological regression to an infantile state among listeners to popular music, abandoning a thoughtful response, listening with distraction in a way that is more like driving a car or football; childish, forcibly retarded; fleeing “the possibility of a different and oppositional music” (read carefully p. 543).

The popular music is advertised in a way that is forceful; the cult of name brands and “in” products takes over. The identification of the listener with the fetish-music “give hit songs power over their victims.”

Those who try to rise above this scene lapse into pseudoactivity and fall into sophisticated versions of the same traps. “Their ecstasy is without content”; the ecstasy is compulsive, “like the ecstasies savages go into in beating the war drums.” “Dance and music copy stages of sexual excitement only to make fun of them.” Those dancing to the music “behave as if they were electrified by syncopation”; stock expressions of stock emotions prevail. Or there is the ham radio listener, apparently quite different, but in fact equally pitiful. Or the jazz amateur: “his agreement with everything dominant goes so far that he no longer produces any resistance”; he has “the passive capacity for adaptation to models from which to avoid straying” (544-46).

Hope: a time may come when clever fellows “may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things . . . . Even discipline can take over the expression of free solidarity if freedom becomes its content. (546.2). Mahler suspends bourgeois concepts of creation. The music of Schönberg and Webern “gives form to that anxiety, that terror, that insight into the catastrophic situation which others merely evade by regressing” (547.1).

Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (1978)

This essay of Marcuse, while sustaining many key Marxist ideas, is also a critique of dogmatic Marxist aesthetics. For an artist to belong to, or to represent the interests of, the economically lower class, is neither necessary nor sufficient for aesthetic quality (555.1). After analyzing the social content of a work, “the questions as to whether the particular work is good, beautiful, and true are still unanswered” (554.1).

For Marcuse, “art . . . expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis [action], are nevertheless essential components of revolution.” [Karl Marx (1818-1883] had called for revolution to overthrow governments that represent the capitalist order in which the bourgeoisie, the “haves,” the capitalist class, oppresses the proletariat, the “have nots,” the industrial working class, in an increasingly polarized system—rich getting richer, poor getting poorer.]

The older Marxist doctrine that culture [part of the superstructure] merely reflects the material, economic base unfortunately devalued the individual consciousness and subconscious [Marcuse draws on Freud as well as on Marx] and thus devalued inwardness, emotions, and imagination—the soil where the drive toward revolution must grow.

By joining the content of our lives to the form of a poem, painting, or piece of music, the artist “sublimates” the emotions involved. But art that is critical of the status quo “desublimates” perceivers’ energies, enabling a more powerful subversion, delegitimization, of existing institutions and conventional practices. Forbidden and repressed aspects of reality emerge in art’s images of liberation. “The poetry of Marlarmé . . . conjures up modes of perception, imagination, gestures—a feast of sensuousness which shatters everyday experience and anticipates a different reality principle” (555.2.) Art transcends the conditions of its age to give, in its fictions, a transhistorical truth, a universal appeal: we can still experience a Greek tragedy or medieval epic as great.

Art is not only negative. It is affirmative in its commitment to Eros (a more Freudian concept than a Platonic one), Life Instincts, which, in art, endure through the centuries no matter what befalls.

The autonomy of art was forced upon art through the separation of mental and material labor, as a result of the prevailing relations of domination. Dissociation from the process of production became a refuge and a vantage point from which to denounce the reality established through domination.” (554.4) “Artistic activity, and to a great extent also its reception, become the privilege of an ‘elite’ removed from the material process of production” (555.0).

“The works of Poe, Baudelaire, Proust, and Valéry . . . express a ‘consciousness of crisis’: a pleasure in decay, in destruction, in the beauty of evil; a celebration of the asocial, of the anomic—the secret rebellion of the bourgeois against his own class. . . . In terms of political praxis, this literature remains elitist and decadent. It does nothing in the struggle for liberation—except to open the tabooed zones of nature and society in which even death and the devil are enlisted as allies in the refusal to abide by the law and order of repression. . . . Art cannot abolish the social division of labor which makes for its esoteric character, but neither can art ‘popularize’ itself without weakening its emancipatory impact” (555.last-556-0).

Autonomy of art: Harold Osborne describes the view as involving:

the concentration of attention on the work of art as a thing in its own right, an artifact with standards and functions of its own, and not an instrument made to further purposes which could equally be promoted otherwise than by art objects. . . . A work of art, it is now held, is in concept an artifact made for the purpose of being appreciated in the special mode of aesthetic contemplation; and although particular works of art may be intended to do other things and may in fact serve other purposes as well as this, the excellence of any work of art as art is assessed in terms of its suitability for such contemplation. This is what is meant by claiming that art is autonomous: it is not assessed by external standards applicable elsewhere, but by standards of its own. (Aesthetics and Art Theory: An Historical Introduction (New York: Dutton, 1970), pp. 262-263.)

Species beings= “men and women capable of living in that community of freedom which is the potential of the species”

Eros=love, “libido”

Thanatos=death, Freud’s postulated instinct toward death (destructive toward others or self)

Ideology=the ideas that capitalist society uses to justify itself

Bourgeoisie=the capitalist class

Proletariat=industrial working class, for Marx, the advancing class, with the potential of revolution