The Redemption of Aesthetic Semblance
Adorno writes: "Central to aesthetics is the redemption of semblance; and the emphatic right of art, the legitimation of its truth, depends on this redemption." How is it redeemed?
The typical philistine will say it isn’t, that art is useless, and we ought instead to build smaller microprocessors.
A “clearheaded” philistine might reason in the following way: semblance usually corresponds to something pleasurable to look at. The body of a young athlete, for example, or a cherry blossom. We find these things pleasurable, for whatever reason, and the so the aesthetic semblance of these things might be pleasurable too, because we can look at them always, and because what is beautiful in them might even be enhanced or underscored by the artist. Also, mimicking these forms in artwork takes a great deal of skill, and this is how we measure both the quality of an artist and his work.
The “Great Books” sort of philistine might reason in a slightly different way: semblance is just one of the tools of human education. Art, and indeed all of man’s fictive endeavors, serve as a ground for demonstrating certain social and psychological truths. The visual arts are a window onto earlier times, and are basically an appendage of history; Greek tragedy teaches us about justice, Dickens teaches about poverty, etc. The quality of the artwork, therefore, is measured by the success of its didactic properties.
There are a lot of reasons to think poorly of these two reactions to aesthetic semblance, or any reaction which has at its base some functional imperative, which invariably fall short as accounts of art. In the first case, for example, we have a plethora of artistic subjects that are not in fact beautiful or pleasurable to look at, yet somehow constitute masterpieces; by the same token we have a great deal of artworks which have quite “pleasant” subjects but don’t affect us in any way. In the second case, if art is simply the instrument of learning, then it is a bad instrument, because there are obviously far more efficient ways of teaching people about specific subjects than through art. This leaves us with simply defining art as a bad form of education, which is basically what Plato thought, albeit for different reasons.
But the main reason I mention these two false accounts of aesthetic mimesis is because there is an element of truth in them. For example, it is true that becoming familiar with art is pleasurable, though often not in a usual way, and not in a way that’s easy for us to explain. It’s also true that art seems to teach us something, that it enlarges the scope of our understanding in some way, even though it’s difficult to explain why or how.
In The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse critiques traditional Marxist aesthetics for reasons similar to the ones I used above. The function of art is not to provide an aesthetic endorsement of socialism, illuminate the reality of class struggle, nor is it to be didactically critical of capitalism. Drawing upon Schiller, Marcuse makes the more radical claim that great art is an indictment against the present - essentially, against reality - whether it intends to be or not. It can do this by being Utopian, that is, by representing a shift in sensibility toward human possibility in the form of semblance, or it can do this through realism, by illuminating the human condition in a way that speaks for itself; it can also do this in ways that aren’t obvious at all - abstract expressionism can be interpreted as a gesture toward subjectivity, and a very critical gesture in the context of any kind of overarching realism.
Marcuse writes that “the truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.”
We might think here of Borges’ famous story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. It describes a situation in which fragments of an encyclopedia which documents a fictional world are discovered by accident. More fragments are found as knowledge about the fictional world (“Tlon”) spreads. The more the ideas of Tlon are disseminated, the more are found, such that by the end of the story Earth is being systematically replaced by Tlon. It’s worth noting that the parallel Borges intended to make here wasn’t to aesthetic liberation, but probably to the rise of fascism; the proliferation of Tlon is portrayed as an invasive and unstoppable madness that takes over the world.
This, in any case, is the redemption of aesthetic semblance. Art and philosophy both share a unique affinity in this. Horhkeimer, in his essay The Social Function of Philosophy, categorically distinguishes the project of philosophy from the natural sciences and suggests that philosophy itself, even when it does not explicitly intend to, is inherently critical in its (and therefore man’s) relationship to the world. By reconsidering man’s basic relationship to reality, and questioning what reality is, philosophy assumes a role which is necessarily and implicitly critical in every other way, and so the redemption of aesthetic semblance can be interpreted as running parallel to a redemption of metaphysics. Inversely, reactionary art -- art which is merely semblance, or merely didactic -- can be seen as being parallel to reactionary philosophy: philosophy which takes the categories of human experience as fixed and above critique, and which seeks to leave the world untouched.
The typical philistine will say it isn’t, that art is useless, and we ought instead to build smaller microprocessors.
A “clearheaded” philistine might reason in the following way: semblance usually corresponds to something pleasurable to look at. The body of a young athlete, for example, or a cherry blossom. We find these things pleasurable, for whatever reason, and the so the aesthetic semblance of these things might be pleasurable too, because we can look at them always, and because what is beautiful in them might even be enhanced or underscored by the artist. Also, mimicking these forms in artwork takes a great deal of skill, and this is how we measure both the quality of an artist and his work.
The “Great Books” sort of philistine might reason in a slightly different way: semblance is just one of the tools of human education. Art, and indeed all of man’s fictive endeavors, serve as a ground for demonstrating certain social and psychological truths. The visual arts are a window onto earlier times, and are basically an appendage of history; Greek tragedy teaches us about justice, Dickens teaches about poverty, etc. The quality of the artwork, therefore, is measured by the success of its didactic properties.
There are a lot of reasons to think poorly of these two reactions to aesthetic semblance, or any reaction which has at its base some functional imperative, which invariably fall short as accounts of art. In the first case, for example, we have a plethora of artistic subjects that are not in fact beautiful or pleasurable to look at, yet somehow constitute masterpieces; by the same token we have a great deal of artworks which have quite “pleasant” subjects but don’t affect us in any way. In the second case, if art is simply the instrument of learning, then it is a bad instrument, because there are obviously far more efficient ways of teaching people about specific subjects than through art. This leaves us with simply defining art as a bad form of education, which is basically what Plato thought, albeit for different reasons.
But the main reason I mention these two false accounts of aesthetic mimesis is because there is an element of truth in them. For example, it is true that becoming familiar with art is pleasurable, though often not in a usual way, and not in a way that’s easy for us to explain. It’s also true that art seems to teach us something, that it enlarges the scope of our understanding in some way, even though it’s difficult to explain why or how.
In The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse critiques traditional Marxist aesthetics for reasons similar to the ones I used above. The function of art is not to provide an aesthetic endorsement of socialism, illuminate the reality of class struggle, nor is it to be didactically critical of capitalism. Drawing upon Schiller, Marcuse makes the more radical claim that great art is an indictment against the present - essentially, against reality - whether it intends to be or not. It can do this by being Utopian, that is, by representing a shift in sensibility toward human possibility in the form of semblance, or it can do this through realism, by illuminating the human condition in a way that speaks for itself; it can also do this in ways that aren’t obvious at all - abstract expressionism can be interpreted as a gesture toward subjectivity, and a very critical gesture in the context of any kind of overarching realism.
Marcuse writes that “the truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e., of those who established it) to define what is real. In this rupture, which is the achievement of the aesthetic form, the fictitious world of art appears as true reality.”
We might think here of Borges’ famous story, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. It describes a situation in which fragments of an encyclopedia which documents a fictional world are discovered by accident. More fragments are found as knowledge about the fictional world (“Tlon”) spreads. The more the ideas of Tlon are disseminated, the more are found, such that by the end of the story Earth is being systematically replaced by Tlon. It’s worth noting that the parallel Borges intended to make here wasn’t to aesthetic liberation, but probably to the rise of fascism; the proliferation of Tlon is portrayed as an invasive and unstoppable madness that takes over the world.
This, in any case, is the redemption of aesthetic semblance. Art and philosophy both share a unique affinity in this. Horhkeimer, in his essay The Social Function of Philosophy, categorically distinguishes the project of philosophy from the natural sciences and suggests that philosophy itself, even when it does not explicitly intend to, is inherently critical in its (and therefore man’s) relationship to the world. By reconsidering man’s basic relationship to reality, and questioning what reality is, philosophy assumes a role which is necessarily and implicitly critical in every other way, and so the redemption of aesthetic semblance can be interpreted as running parallel to a redemption of metaphysics. Inversely, reactionary art -- art which is merely semblance, or merely didactic -- can be seen as being parallel to reactionary philosophy: philosophy which takes the categories of human experience as fixed and above critique, and which seeks to leave the world untouched.