|
Title: Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature)
Purchase
Item
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
List Price: $27.50
Our Price: $19.95
|
|
| Customer Reviews: |
| Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature) by University of Minnesota Press This is the core book of modern aesthetics. (SPANISH) | a) Desde el punto de vista puramente artístico, la estética de Adorno es una estética sociológica. Adorno hace de inmediato la diferencia entre una filosofía del arte y una estética filosófica de tipo dialéctico. Adorno diferencia entre una filosofía o ciencia del arte y la estética filosófica porque en la primera, al igual que en Hegel, se da solamente una consideración externa del arte. La estética filosófica, por su lado, considera al arte como objeto social, es decir, en el plexo de relaciones con la sociedad. Por eso, la estética de Adorno se considera a menudo como una sociología del arte. Sin embargo, el arte tiene una doble relación con la sociedad. Por un lado, el arte es un plexo de problemas propios de la sociedad; por otro, en su proceder innovador apunta más allá de dicho conjunto de problemas. El arte moderno es cerrado porque no imita lo exterior, no posee ventanas, pero su oficio interno viene determinado por la transformación del mundo social: "La totalidad de fuerzas reflejadas en la obra de arte, aparentemente solo subjetiva, es presencia potencial de lo colectivo según la medida de fuerzas productivas de que se disponga." (TE, 64). La mimesis en este primer plano artístico viene determinada por la exigencia de imitar lo no existente, y en poner en evidencia la catástrofe social, al hacerse el arte igual (mimesis) a ella.
b) Desde una posición teológica, la teoría de Adorno es una estética negativa. Históricamente la estética ha tenido una relación cercana con la teología filosófica. Desde una estética afirmativa o idealista, el arte se entiende como símbolo de una idea estética, reflejo o participación de ésta. Por otro lado, desde la estética negativa el arte se entiende como imitación de lo decadente, donde se constituye en un fragmento del símbolo, en una cifra ilegible de una realidad remotísima. La representación no tiene ninguna conexión con lo ideal, no se confunde con la realidad ontológica. En su fijación con la catástrofe y el simulacro, el arte niega cualquier realidad trascendente. Pero precisamente, por su carácter de maldad y simulacro (por ejemplo, en el Barroco) se esconde la esperanza de que la verdadera realidad es buena: "Es en la mirada vuelta hacia el horror donde el arte moderno tiene su belleza que extrae de la esperanza." La teología se expresa en dos cuestiones fundamentales: en el concepto de utopía como de "lo que no es" (Nicht-seiendes), de lo otro y en el concepto de la esperanza extrema que se hace visible precisamente en renunciar al optimismo que significaría afirmación.
El carácter teológico de esta "Teoria Estetica" se constituye desde dos nociones: 1) de la mimesis de lo catastrófico propio del ámbito sociológico se convierte en una mimesis de lo posible precisamente por la constitución monadológica del arte de crear mundos cerrados, 2) mediante el concepto de memoria, donde el arte trata de imitar una naturaleza redimida de la dominación técnica. El arte mediante la mimesis se constituiría en una memoria de la naturaleza para-sí.
c) Desde el punto de vista filosófico, la estética de Adorno es una estética dialéctica que tiene como fin una realidad reconciliada desde los términos de la razón y no desde los términos de la teología. En este sentido, la teoría estética tiene como programa construir un tipo de racionalidad que supere definitivamente el concepto de racionalidad instrumental. Se trata de una racionalidad mimética que en vez de identificar bajo un mismo principio, es identificarse racionalmente con lo otro. La Teoría Estética es la crítica de la racionalidad instrumental desde el punto de vista constructivista de la racionalidad mimética que se hace presente en el arte moderno auténtico. | | Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature) by University of Minnesota Press so what | | If he doesn't like Curtis Mayfield. Should he? | | Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature) by University of Minnesota Press Fundamentally The Intellectual Equivalent of White Flight | I do not understand Adorno's fame or appeal. The consequences--witting or unwitting--of many of his ideas are frighteningly inhuman. This is to speak only of the ideas I found scrutable. But really, the parts I didn't understand could have been a map to the unattended cook's entrance of Heaven; but it would not mitigate that which concerned me most about what I DID understand.
No offense to the Schoenberg estate, and no offense to those who enjoy experimentations with tonality, but to my sensibility the elevation of Arnold Schoenberg to aesthetic eminence just seems representative of the lengths to which many will go to avoid thinking about black traditions in art, literature and music. Adorno's music writings insist that only classical music might liberate us from the pull of ideology and/or 'mere' existence. It offends me that a man who will not even try to appreciate Coltrane's A LOVE SUPREME--and moreover a man who would immediately equate said album to one of the means by which we maintain and spread cultural sickness--insists that he has navigated some sort of means for salvation to which we all should turn.
Not being grossly essentialist, I would expand the concept of 'black' within this context to mean "people who do not insist on the idea that resentment and worldweariness are ontic categories and/or define these traits as, to use K. Burke's term, 'necessary equipment for living'." This means that each of us can escape Adorno's grasp. Let's consider: Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed by an accident backstage during a concert venue. He could not move below the neck. For the rest of his years he persevered, making one more album. Adorno, on the other hand, escaped the Final Solution, then returned to Germany for the rest of his life. For most of the time, he enjoyed not a little comfort. And yet somehow Adorno was melancholy, almost comically so. Mayfield made music Adorno couldn't understand. Was the humanity of Mayfield's perseverence something Adorno couldn't understand as well?
If black world traditions of music, art, speech etc. were just as advertised--traditions--shouldn't many of us develop a useful understanding of those traditions? (Or could we at least recognize the courage of Fela Kuti and Adorno's failure to match up?) The task does not even seem particularly difficult, yet the rewards are great. Yes, many times more people will 'understand' pieces within these traditions than people would 'understand' a piece by Schoenberg. But the summitt of the former, I am certain, towers over the summitt of the latter.
It would behoove us to address the reasons that Adorno's work is scoured day and night, with the intent purpose of locating 'genius.' And it behooves us as well to investigate into why the semantic vagaries of a term like "tha bomb" renders the same scavenger hunters for Adorno totally lost. It is noted about Adorno's book that paragraphing and cohesion and coherence are abandoned, forgotten or arranged idiosyncratically so as to instigate some kind of paradigmatic challenge, apparently. But minimal immersion within a vernacular culture would provide any student with the means of vernacular comprehension and comfort, if not vernacular mastery. Adorno's supporters strain for any act or utterance from Adorno to have profound meaning. A short survey of vernacular urban culture, for example, would provide a wealth of possibility for finding profound meaning. No strain, but a fair, competent consideration of many aspects of vernacular urban culture will reveal clearly the wealth of possibilities within that culture. Why insist on the insistence of genius? Why accept, especially, a flat denial of art's social value or social nature, in a way that always places Adorno's aesthetic theory in a position of strength compared to more 'grounded' ones? Doesn't this automatic suspicion help to hide the excesses of the idea of ideological contamination and underpinnings?
Finally, consider two victims of the Nazis: Bruno Schulz and J. Huizenga. Schulz' comic outrageousness still inspires; Huizenga made the perceptive argument that man is by nature 'one who plays,' and that that was the best way to understand ourselves and to liberate ourselves. The Nazis killed these two. But is not, in a fundamental way, Adorno, who, in his declaration that, "There is no poetry after Auschwitz," reduces those two to ash and dust? To proscribe such essential ways to see the world with love, hope, and the possibility of one's agency, in the name of theory or aesthetics, is to me something that cannot be defended. Adorno did not fall then. Neither did he risk falling: he had escaped to LA. Yet he felt it imperative to strip certain sensibilities from our psyche, sensibilities that might get us over such attempts to destroy humanity as the Final Solution. Has Adorno stooped to a level of 'inhumanity'? In some real way, his concepts of ideology and classical music in effect see his brethren who enjoyed Klezmer music as getting what should be expected: victims of ideology are victimized to the last. | | Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature) by University of Minnesota Press *The* aesthtic theory of modernism | | Adorno keeps your mind at thinking, not consuming thoughts. Even when you disagree with his brilliant idiosyncrasies they provoce you to think about modern art, philosophy and society. | | Aesthetic Theory (Theory & History of Literature) by University of Minnesota Press in English we've never experienced Adorno's thought till now | | Theodor Adorno's "Aesthetic Theory" is in one respect about the end of art;it was written partially in response to his friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin's views on the ends of art and the pontentialities, the encrusted meanings waiting to me unleashed in mass produced art. Benjamin had thought there was an emancipatory moment in art in now the age of mechanical production. Since Adorno had outlived Benjamin until 1969, Adorno's task was to furnish us with the conception of art now as a pennyless child gazing into the candystore, an art in exile, an art where the disintegration of cultural pillars have long eroded away. Schoenberg's varigated orchestral scores was the ultimate rebellion in a private world, the subject at last trying to find truth and resemblance within the aesthetic crumbs leftover from the 19th century. Adorno's " Aesthetic Theory" is not only a treatise, a counterflow, a tone-poem of fragments, symphonic forms exploded into motives and cells of thought, it is a bridge between all arts,although the relativily new form of film is neglected. Adorno had thought this fragmentary style of writing as satisfying with the collapse of system-building within philosophic thought.The aesthetic strategy of Adorno's thought then is one which interfaces, interrelates, crosses itself in its various readings of art. And the reader expects this complexity to be apparent. Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation is indeed something which encourages this reading of Adorno. He allows us to enter Adorno's thought in its full complexity. So, graphically he allows the undivision of paragraphs to remain as Adorno had originally composed in draft form. Adorno's thought continually overflows,continually creates layers, multilayers of references. Hullot-Kentor's term "paratactical form" is the localized struture of Adorno's thought and if form at all survives it is within this density of Adorno's thought and not any external structure. The first English translation by C. Lenhardt(1984)! maintains these divisions within the body of text and is still indespensible despite all the American jargon.Adorno's thought on first encounter needs all the divisions one can find,but once learned you can move beyond it into Hullot-Kentor's. The introduction to Hullot-Kentor provides a good history of Adorno's work with aesthetics a subject he came to late within these treatise-like dimensions. Adorno has been the focus of numerous studies, Frederic Jameson,Martin Jay, Albrecht Wellmer,Peter Berger, as well as art critics Donald Kuspit. Lambert Zuidervaart has a book-length critique of "Aesthetic Theory". All have used Adorno's thought to advance a particular cause mostly justified.Jameson's diatribes with the post-structural cadre for one, Wellmer in making a bridge to the communicative theories of Adorno's former assistant Jurgan Habermas. Who has been left out of this theoretical landscape? has been the practicing artist, and understandibly so for those I've mentioned are not burdened with the daily committment to creation of the artistic object and the set of philosophic problematics that entails. As a practicing composer myself I came to Adorno long ago, his "Philosophy of Modern Music" was a seminal text, a breath of fresh air from the self-serving pitch-set-theory ideas of academia. In fact Adorno's legacy is only now entering the mainstream of thought in musicology, with profound contributions into the creativity,and historical dimensions in opera,social sub-themes in the 19th century or new music. "Aesthetic Theory" is a fundamental resource for the composer, the poet, the performing artist,especially within the collapse of genre distinctions in today's art. Within the complexity of Adorno's thought we find the crossing of genres. Although he had structured his thought for quite different reasons for the search in locating truth and meaning and non-meaning wherever it may reside.In "Aesthetic Theory"although you may only find the grand auteurs,Kafka,! Mahler,Wedekind,Proust,certainly Beckett(where Adorno had found a pinnicle of his idea of the disintegration of value) we today can find parallels for creativity in the collapse of genre distinctions today. Certainly the positive side of postmodernity has been the proclivity toward research. A composer for instance may learn the complexity of Central American culture as pre-compositional studies for a set of piano preludes, a wonderful enrichment of the genre. If nothing else Adorno's thought compells one toward research and the meaning in art from a conceptual global perspective. For that's the definition of truth that Adorno adheres to. Truth must reside for everyone, truth is not an elitist endeavor. The truth content in a Beethoven symphony for instance is in its relative accessible directness of musical gesture. You, anyone understands his musical motives immediately. It was this clearness of meaning which produced a conceptual impasse within for instance Mahler who could not resolve the dilemma of the symphonic form apart from accreting its length. Today then a composer in his/her search for instance can no longer ignore the complex use of text, and the challenge that represents, or a playwright in the subtle use of lighting. Every creative artist must explore his/her creativity beyond the four-corners of the page, and I'd like to offer this perspective as one part of Adorno's legacy. |
No item elements found in rss feed.
|
