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InC
Commitment and history – On Adorno 3/3
by: robertoc
Friday 28th November - 4pm
RHB - room 356
In ‘Commitment’ [1962] , Adorno explores the dichotomy between autonomous and committed artworks in the context of Sartre’s What is Literature and Bertolt Brecht’s works. Adorno considers this differentiation as “a reminder of how precarious the position of art is today. Each of the two alternatives negates itself with the other. […] Between these two poles the tension in which art has lived in every age till now is dissolved”.
According to Adorno, commitment can be ‘an aesthetic force of production’: art as ‘negative knowledge of the actual world’ presents its truth content only to the extent that it articulates objective contradictions, through uncompromising processes, between form and social content (Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Beckett’s Endgame).
Starting from these assumptions, I will consider how this antithesis, on the one hand, configures an opposition that hardly can be sublimated into a new aesthetic category and, on the other hand, defies the conditions of possibility through which mediation or forms of reconciliation could eventually be accomplished in the context of modern history.
Suggested reading:
-Adorno, T. W., Commitment, in Ernst Bloc [et al.], Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 2007 or it can be downloaded from here: http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/commitment/commitment.pdf
Adorno, T. W., Aesthetic Theory, London and New York: Continuum, 2002, the section ‘Society’, Commitment, pp. 246-249.
Further Reading
Adorno, T. W., Reconciliation under Duress, in Ernst Bloc [et al.], Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 2007.
Posted on: Tuesday November 18 2008 ______________________________________
________________________________
Commitment and history – On Adorno 3/3
by: robertoc
Friday 28th November - 4pm
RHB - room 356
In ‘Commitment’ [1962] , Adorno explores the dichotomy between autonomous and committed artworks in the context of Sartre’s What is Literature and Bertolt Brecht’s works. Adorno considers this differentiation as “a reminder of how precarious the position of art is today. Each of the two alternatives negates itself with the other. […] Between these two poles the tension in which art has lived in every age till now is dissolved”.
According to Adorno, commitment can be ‘an aesthetic force of production’: art as ‘negative knowledge of the actual world’ presents its truth content only to the extent that it articulates objective contradictions, through uncompromising processes, between form and social content (Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Beckett’s Endgame).
Starting from these assumptions, I will consider how this antithesis, on the one hand, configures an opposition that hardly can be sublimated into a new aesthetic category and, on the other hand, defies the conditions of possibility through which mediation or forms of reconciliation could eventually be accomplished in the context of modern history.
Suggested reading:
-Adorno, T. W., Commitment, in Ernst Bloc [et al.], Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 2007 or it can be downloaded from here: http://grace.evergreen.edu/~arunc/texts/frankfurt/commitment/commitment.pdf
Adorno, T. W., Aesthetic Theory, London and New York: Continuum, 2002, the section ‘Society’, Commitment, pp. 246-249.
Further Reading
Adorno, T. W., Reconciliation under Duress, in Ernst Bloc [et al.], Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 2007.
Posted on: Tuesday November 18 2008 ______________________________________
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