Art and theory were partners in Adorno’s thought serving mimesis and reason jointly

Evidence

There could be no question of Adorno having merely translated theory into an aesthetic form. If art was the refuge of the mimetic, `the theory’ was the guarantee of conceptual knowledge. The head of human emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariatas Marx asserted. He also said: the realization of philosophy and the transcendence of the proletariat are only possible through each other. Philosophy and art, too, could become superfluous only jointly, if at all, in a liberated society. For the rest, they were partners, standing back to back as symbols of a union of mimesis and reason, of an enlightened enlightenment, both in threatened positions, both concerned with shaking up rigidified forms of perception and behaviour, both aiming to sustain or reawaken a sense of wonder. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2743

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Adorno’s conception of the art-theory relationship and ‘enlightened enlightenment’ as a union of mimesis and reason.
• XREF: Connects to Marx’s ‘realization of philosophy’ thesis from the German Ideology and to Dialectic of Enlightenment’s mimesis-reason tension. — connects to: Adorno’s artists embody moments in the history of form as lived unities of contradiction — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 60; Adorno believed a knowledge of art made the turn to social theory necessary. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1257; Adorno saw immersion in art theory as forcing a turn toward social theory — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 324