Schiller’s utopian synthesis of naive and sentimental art remained mere costume drama

Evidence

A dialectical, or “immanent,” critique of art, Adorno argued, “takes seriously the principle that it is not ideology in itself which is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality.” 35 One way in which art might offer a “true” foretaste of the future society was in its harmonious reconciliation of form and content, function and expression, subjective and objective elements. … “A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.” ” In other words, until social contradictions were reconciled in reality, the utopian harmony of art must always maintain an element of protest. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 549 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

In this context the various techniques or categories of the work of art take on their ultimate meaning only when their analysis is pursued as far as the ontological level itself, where they become transparent as modes of Utopian realization: “Art is at one and the same time a laboratory and a carnival of possibilities brought to fulfillment.” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 290 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

The peculiarity of a Utopian libidinal investment of this kind can be underscored by shifting from the landed manifestation of this desire to its actantial personification in the figure of Mademoiselle Cormon her­ self, the old maid of the title. What is significant here is that, as with the house itself, no reconstruction of this character in a properly ironic perspective is possible. M,ademoiselle Cormo:p. is comic, grotesque, and desirable all at once (or in succession) : her big feet, the “beauty” of her “force and abundance, ” her “embonpoint, ” her massive hips, “which made her seem cast in a single mould,” her triple chin, with its “folds” rather than “wrinkles”-none of these features is inconsistent with the Utopian desire that takes her person as its focus. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3734 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Schiller treated aesthetic theory as the necessary path to political freedom; Art expresses utopian harmony negatively by embodying contradictions unresolved — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 549; Art is trapped between utopian longing and the charge of false comfort — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 66 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Art expresses utopian harmony negatively by embodying contradictions unresolved #contradicts (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 549
• Artistic categories for Bloch become modes of Utopian realization at the ontological level #contradicts (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 290
• Art is trapped between utopian longing and the charge of false comfort #complicates (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 66
• Utopian desire can invest a comic grotesque body without ironic distance #qualifies (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3734
• Modernist art redeems reification’s fragments as Utopian compensation #complicates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 5942
• Modernism’s utopian function was securing authentic experience against mass culture #expands (0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 193