Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

Adorno and Affect

“Affect” is taken up at various points in the Seminars, but rarely, and only negatively , in relation to Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. In contrast, the name most frequently associated with affect theory is that of Gilles Deleuze; in fact, Deleuzian affect theory is presented during the Seminars as the major contemporary alternative to Frankfurt School theory and its dour narrative according to which the sensual and the affective are increasingly subjected to instrumental rationality. Deleuzian affect theory is thus called on to support a host of responses to the art object supposedly excluded by Adorno’s account of modern art and its astringent asceticism (or avoidance of pleasure in viewing). Deleuze thus comes to replace Adorno as the source of vital approaches to today’s art (the aesthetic of sensation for sensation’s sake, or art as fun), while any contribution the German philosopher might have made to our understanding of the affective register in art is neglected, ridiculed, or tossed out. The most dramatic example of this attitude (that “affect” is not Adornian) occurs when Dakota Brown objects that the neo-Kantians are forgetting “pleasure ” (seminar 5): “I’d like to know why it seems to people like Jay [Bernstein] himself doesn’t want anyone to experience pleasure” [sic]. After a humorous pause (“Laughter”), Joana Cunha Leal adds, “The pleasure you describe in relation to art, Jay, seems very far from Adorno’s negativity.” But if we read the passage closely, we see that Jay Bernstein hasn’t been discussing pleasure per se; rather, he’s been discussing affect, and the account Adorno takes of it. What needs to be clarified, then, is Adorno’s account of affect and of its relation to art. Channeling Adorno, Jay Bernstein states in seminar 5 that for Adorno, art constitutes an attempt to preserve a form of rationality that differs in significant ways from “rationality” in the Weberian sense, the standardization and quantification of experience leading to the domination of the subject over its environment . The rationality of artworks, he says, is “about sensuous particulars as having a standing claim that we can address in their particularity, and not sacrifice them to the universal.” To address something in its sensual particularity, Bernstein continues, is to construe an “alternative rationality of the ordinary,” one that can serve as a “critical epistemology.” The aesthetic (which sees things in their “sensual particularity”) is “critical” because it refuses conceptual rationalization as a half-truth. At the same the aesthetic is an “epistemology” because it offers a way of knowing that does not subsume the object of knowledge (the “sensual particular”) under the concept. A few pages later, Bernstein returns to adorno and affect carrie noland Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 180 1. Bernstein brings Deleuze and Rancière together in the next paragraph: “I think the question of the aesthetic—and this is present in Rancière and in Deleuze—is about the kind of experience such works provide, and so I do not see there is much difference between works that are overtly political and those that are not, nor between those aesthetic theories that are explicitly political like Rancière’s and those that are more epistemological or phenomenological like Deleuze’s.” This “kind of experience” has to do with an apprehension of nontotalizable “sensuous particulars.” 2. Theodor W. Adorno, “Draft Introduction,” in Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert HullotKentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 245. 3. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 269. the same theme, adding an important clarification: the aesthetic aims to provide “thick” experience—not just “raw feelings”—but Erfahrung, or an orientation in the world. This orientation (Erfahrung) is “epistemological” insofar as it is directed by “feeling laced with cognition.” Again, Erfahrung is “critical” insofar as it is cognition that involves feeling, not “raw feeling” in itself. This distinction between a feeling that is a type of knowing and “raw feeling” will become an important one. Bernstein is repeating here a proposition he introduced earlier, namely that “[a]rtworks interrupt our merely instrumental engagement with objects, and further, demand a form of knowing that is also a feeling, a knowing by feeling” (seminar 1; emphasis added). At this point Eve Meltzer responds, introducing the notion of “affect” for the first time: “a lot of what [Jay] talk[s] about in terms of the puzzle, and the gap between the two critiques [knowledge and morality], and what might exist in [that gap]—sensuous particulars, love, appearances—all that could...