[FRA:] Adorno's aesthetics: the ugly

[Ralph Dumain]

Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory"
Peter Uwe Hohendahl
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 60 (Spring, 2005), pp. 170-196.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489213 

I decided to look into this subject in the process of reading and reviewing Ben Watson's new book ADORNO FOR REVOLUTIONARIES, whose focus is music. He makes claims for a variety of musical expressions, including punk, which I absolutely loathe. I want to see if his attempt to justify this via Adorno makes any sense.

I will just interject some key interesting points from the article. 

The author claims that Adorno's scattered comments on the ugly in AESTHETIC THEORY were never fully integrated into a coherent thesis, and that Adorno scholars have not paid adequate attention to this topic.

Skipping ahead:

"The two strands mentioned above, however, do not exhaust the significance of the ugly in Adorno's thought. In fact, they do not get to the root of Adorno's interest in the ugly. The third, and I believe most important, aspect is the link to the primitive and archaic. It is this nexus that raises the most fundamental and far-reaching questions,
questions about the origins of art, its relation to myth and religion, and its changing function in human history."

There is an interesting digression on the appropriation of African art by the European avant-garde (cubism) and different ways of looking at it in terms of aesthetics, religious basis, etc. While Adorno doesn't make the contrast that this author does viz. African art, citing a critic named Einstein, the question is whether the use of pre-modern cultural resources serves regression or progress.

Case in point: Schoenberg can be contrasted with Stravinsky. Adorno sees the primitivism in Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" as tending to fascism. (Here I agree.)

"Adorno is aware that Stravinsky's critique of
modem culture owes its impulse to the very liberalism it undermines, but this subversion, he argues, ultimately affirms fascist violence.

"The aesthetic celebration of the mythic sacrifice in Stravinsky's music consciously violates the traditional aesthetic code in two ways. On the one hand, it openly shows the barbaric act; on the other, it breaks away from a romantic musical sensibility and embraces the primitive, also in musical terms. Yet this confluence of theatrical content and music does not achieve what Adorno demands, that is,musical progress. Rather, Stravinsky produces a compromised avant-garde in which the subversion of established culture encourages the rise of social and political barbarism. This means that Adorno rejects
a form of the ugly that is incompatible with his concept of artistic progress. While The Philosophy of Modern Music acknowledges the legitimacy of the ugly in Schoenberg's music, in the case of Stravinsky the verdict is negative because the ugly is linked to a form of regressive primitivism."

The return of the archaic is tied to the failure of Enlightenment, of progress, and is linked to the rise of fascism, the common element brought to the fore being the notion of sacrifice. Here DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT is invoked. 

Adorno is dissatisfied with others' takes on the archaic origins of art, and he has trouble resolving this question himself. Notions deployed here are expression and mimesis. 

"In one of the fragments of the Paralipomena Adorno attempts to define the relationship between aesthetic and pre-aesthetic moments in the artwork. He suggests that ancient art (vergangene Kunst) is not coincidental with its cultic function, but it cannot be described as the opposite; "Rather, art tore itself free from cult objects by a leap in which the cultic element was both transformed and preserved, and this structure is reproduced on an expanding scale at every level of its history" (Aesthetic Theory, 286).22 Put differently, the history of art preserves the cultic element in all its phases, including European modernism. It is not accidental that a closely related fragment examines the nature of the cultic or mimetic moment. Looking at modem art, in particular at the works of Picasso, Adorno notes the "marks of the
frightening" (Aesthetic Theory, 287) ("Male des Schreckhaften" [Gesammelte Schriften, 7:4261), i.e. the shock produced in the viewer by the deformation of the represented object. Unlike Einstein, Adorno does not interpret the deformation in Cubism as an exclusively formal
problem. Rather, he insists on the presence of older elements, a historically legitimate return of the horror in cultic figures. This means that, in Adorno's late thought, the ugly is not a purely formal question; rather, it is closely linked to the larger issue of the origin of art
and the significance of the cultic element."

Adorno maintains that the ugly has a legitimate position in modern art but is wary of aestheticization and naturalism. He is also not an advocate of classicism.

(TO BE CONTINUED)