Adorno’s aesthetic method skipped societal mediation by folding all social content into single artworks
Evidence
Adorno’s method did not include a model of the mediation of cultural characteristics in the social and economic process as a whole. Instead, he placed everything that could be said globally about society as he saw it within a discussion of various aspects of the work of art. The technical analyses were extremely brief, since other interpretations based on content analysis, reception history, biography and social psychology imposed themselves on Adorno until the whole palette of his categories and motifs was full. And just as the analyses, on the negative side, soon ended in reification, alienation, the commodity character and the reflexive individual, on the positive side they soon led to the concept of intellect renouncing authority. In his analysis of works of art, Adorno was ready and willing to grant the characters of fetish and commodity to all and sundry, in the certainty of being able to testify that some of themautonomous ones, of coursehad thoroughly dialecticized their reification. In this way, in spite of having diagnosed a social curse which was all-embracing, he could present them as having escaped the curse. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 882
Categorization
- DEFINE: Distinctly characterizes Adorno’s method: no separate mediation model, all society read through individual works that are granted and then dialecticized away their commodity character.
- XREF: Relates to the Frankfurt School’s critique of culture industry and the reification theme; worth comparing with Benjamin’s more sociological method. — connects to: Adorno’s Marxist musical theory avoided analyzing actual sociological ties between music and society. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 368; Adorno rejected the immediate mapping of art content onto economic social history — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 878; Adorno’s elitist critique condemned mass-culture victims without addressing them empirically — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1023