The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Revisited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, and: The Differentiation of Modernism: Postwar German Media Arts by Larson Powell (review)

The continued significance of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, developed in critical response to high modernist art and the classical avant-gardes, arises neither through the purely historicist reconstruction of its categories alone, nor from its presumed contemporaneity with present culture. Rather, as Hohendahl’s illuminating volume shows, Adorno’s actuality emerges through a critical reconsideration of the fundamental questions he asks about art. It is not only the content of his theory but, more importantly, the very structure of his propositions that, by virtue of its difference from later aesthetic paradigms and philosophical questions, challenges us to interrogate and rethink these current discourses’ underlying assumptions, concepts, and ideologies. Aware that any artistic material tends to defy the philosophical categorizations imposed upon it, Adorno’s aesthetics, as Hohendahl stresses, reveals itself as a supremely self-critical theory that always already partially undermines its own ground of assumptions, concepts, and conclusions, thereby radically questioning the very “condition of possibility of aesthetic theory” (11). In this sense, Adorno defines the aesthetic domain as something that always already points beyond itself, to ideology, politics, and even theology.

Hohendahl excels in subtly retracing the ever-shifting, sometimes contradictory, and often elusive thought processes of Adorno’s work as a type of intellectual performativity that defies philosophical systematics as well as hermeneutic closure and definitive theoretical abstraction. Not incidentally, Hohendahl’s own discourse congenially matches Adorno’s without merely replicating it. Recurrent phrases like “in other words” and “put differently” accentuate his intention not to impose any kind of hermeneutical closure on his subject’s discourse but to allow its almost rhizomatic networks of conceptual density to unfold.

Hohendahl resituates Adorno’s theory in the context of the renewed interest in the “immediacy of the aesthetic experience,” posed, for instance, by Elaine Scarry and Peter de Bolla, even though their definitions of aesthetic autonomy (as an “objective realm of the beautiful” or as an affective experience, respectively) are problematized by Adorno’s own exploration of this notion’s manifold ramifications (5). Other types of appropriations are shown to be similarly problematic. Albrecht Wellmer reformulated Adorno’s aesthetics along the lines of Jürgen Habermas’s later social theory and the hope for utopian reconciliation, while Christoph Menke’s project of aligning Adorno with Derrida’s deconstruction had to strip his theory of its social critique; in both cases, crucial parts of the original theory “had to be eliminated as no longer viable” (16). Through these resonances with, and differences from, contemporary philosophies, central concerns of Adorno emerge in new light but only, as Hohendahl rightly insists, through a close reexamination of the “structure of Adorno’s thought itself and its potential engagement with today’s discussion” (18).

Among other issues, Hohendahl reviews the philosopher’s engagement with Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, whose “rigorous formalism” Adorno appreciates even while preferring the speculative thought of figures like Hegel (20). In the context of aesthetic violence, Hohendahl, mindful of the centrality of music in Adorno’s thinking, distinguishes two types of the concept of the ugly in his theory: a positive one, associated with Arnold Schoenberg’s liberation of dissonance and the undermining of tonality, and a negative one, promoted by Igor Stravinsky’s regressive celebration of the primitive, even though Adorno himself was surprisingly interested in “primitive, non-European art” (23), which corrects the common view of his thought as a Eurocentric theory of modernism. Turning to Adorno’s essays on literary criticism, which do not always match his own aesthetic theory (24), Hohendahl reads Adorno’s work on Proust, Kafka, and Balzac as an attempt to address the problem of realist representation without adhering to the “heavy...