blind intuitions: modernism's critique of idealism

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Blind Intuitions: Modernism'sCritique of IdealismJ.M. Bernsteinaa New School for Social ResearchPublished online: 12 Jan 2015.

To cite this article: J.M. Bernstein (2014) Blind Intuitions: Modernism's Critiqueof Idealism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 22:6, 1069-1094, DOI:10.1080/09608788.2014.993304

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ARTICLE

BLIND INTUITIONS: MODERNISMS CRITIQUE OFIDEALISM

J.M. Bernstein

Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing andrational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique,singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interestsand needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions oftranscendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect,historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the worldfor an objective understanding of the world. And further, thisinterested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radicalway than just obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needsand purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, arebroadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effectiveconcern for the well-being and worth of others; by becominggeneralized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes ofencountering things and persons that support their differences andindependence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practicesare the deepest cause of the ills of our time. As heightened forms ofrational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason,transcendental interests suppress the interests of others. Adornoargues that modernist artistic practices perform a critique of the set ofassumptions governing idealism by demonstrating how there is asuppressed rational form of human comportment directed towards themaking and comprehension of unique sensuous particulars. Art,according to Adornos Aesthetic Theory, is a broken off andisolated fragment of human knowing; in its hibernates the rationalforms of acting and knowing that have been suppressed in thecoming to be of Enlightened modernity.

KEYWORDS: modernism; idealism; intuition; concept; disinterestedness

INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY BECOMES AESTHETICS

There is a fairly standard debate about whether epistemology or the philos-ophy of language or moral philosophy (in the thesis of the primacy of prac-tical reason) or metaphysics or even, now, philosophy of mind should be thecontrolling domain for philosophical inquiry. Although proposed and then

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abandoned by Schiller and Nietzsche, the idea that aesthetics should havethat role is never heard among Anglo-American philosophers. T. W.Adorno is perhaps unique among twentieth-century philosophers in claimingthat aesthetics should be the critical core of modern philosophy. While Icannot vindicate Adornos primacy of aesthetics thesis here, I can block inthe structure of his claim and chart some of the path he travels in hisdefence of it.Perhaps the most direct way of considering Adornos primacy of aes-

thetics thesis is as a reworking of Kants aesthetic theory. The initially sur-prising gesture of Kants aesthetics is his requirement that aesthetic reflectivejudgements be disinterested, and that such disinterestedness is already atwork in thinking of aesthetic judgements as reflective as opposed to determi-native. Determinative judgements subsume individuals or events underempirical concepts in accordance with the categories of the understanding,while aesthetic reflective judgements begin with the individual thing priorto (independent of) conceptualization and inquire into its intrinsic intellig-ibility, its unity of parts with whole (the purposiveness of its parts for thatwhole) without a concept (without an extrinsic purpose). Kants Copernicanturn in aesthetics operates in the first instance in a direction opposing whathappens in knowing and acting; rather than beginning with a determiningconcept the categories or the moral law in aesthetics we begin with thething: we are called upon to make sense of the thing merely as it appearsto us and not in accordance with the demands of the transcendental interestsspecified by the categories or the moral law (or the lower level empirical andmoral concepts they regulate). Those transcendental interests provide orig-inal horizons of intelligibility through which items light up as either know-able or as in relation to desire and worth. In aesthetics we must bedisinterested in those very orienting interests, those ways of the world light-ing up for us. The kind of disinterest necessary for aesthetic reflective judge-ment is thus against those determining interests that specify what knowingand acting are (as well as against sensual and erotic interests that are specificto each of us as particular individuals).In a gesture he learned from Nietzsche, Adorno takes Kant at his word: the

interests of knowing and moral action are just that, deep and abiding interestswe have developed in the course of civilization for the sake of species sur-vival: we needed to comprehend empirical objects in terms of theirlawlike, and ideally manipulable, causal powers; and we need to regardothers as fellow participants in a collective enterprise where rules of faircooperation allow each to freely pursue their own ends. The principles ofknowing allow items to appear with respect to their causal likenesses anddifferences with (all) other items (that is what a unified science would rep-resent); and the principles of morals regard all others as autonomous partici-pants in the same, enduring practical world in which we participate. Withoutadopting those principles, we could not have survived as a species; that is thereal source of their presumptive necessity. In Adornos way of expressing the

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thought, transcendental interests are the cognitive expressions of the (subjec-tive) drive to self-preservation raised to a level in which they come to appearas exclusive and necessary, as, simply, what objectivity and truth are.That appearance of necessity is called into question in the demand for dis-

interestedness in aesthetic reflective judging. In aesthetic reflective judge-ment, judgement is not instrumentalized by the faculties of understandingand reason, but allowed to operate autonomously and thus disinterestedly.And when it so operates, its reflections are the attempt to draw the potentialfor cognitive significance from the thing itself as it appears to our powers ofsensing and knowing, as if there could be a significance of the thing or in thething that was not a shadow of the demands of the categories or the moral law where Kant knows there must be such a sense of things if concept for-mation, concept learning, concept application, and concept extension tonew cases are to be possible. In naturalizing the presumptive necessity ofthe categories and moral law, we explain how this relief from necessity ispossible: the necessity was real, but limited because once survival interestsare satisfied (or in principle satisfiable), then alternative ways of encounter-ing objects and others is possible, some less interested, less instrumentalway.Just this is Adornos hypothesis: something of what we think of knowing

and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singu-lar presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs;and hence we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contin-gent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective under-standing of the world. And further, this interested understanding of theworld is deforming in a more radical way than just obscuring what is therefor the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways ofknowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival,without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becom-ing generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encoun-tering things and persons that support their differences and independence,their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest causeof the ills of our time. As heightened forms of rational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason, transcendental interests suppress the inter-ests of others.What is directly evident in this account, if somewhat perplexing, is how

the transcendental subjective-interested structure of knowing and actingaligns with the claim of conceptuality and generality, while the objective-disinterested structure of aesthetic reflective judgement aligns with singularpresentations; this is the opposite of what we normally believe. It is equallythe perplexity of the claim of the aesthetic, namely, its binding of objectivityto what is regarded as outside ordinary conceptual discourse. In the nextsection, I track Adornos genealogical account of how this reversal occurred,and hence why the aesthetic became the refuge for a suppressed objectivity.In the third section, I show how Adorno views this state of affairs as about

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morality even more than about knowing. In the fourth section, I show whyAdorno substitutes the claim of modernist art practices for Kantian aestheticreflective judging; and in the fifth section and following, I begin working outhow aesthetics redeems that suppressed claim to objectivity and rationality,that is, why aesthetics has a claim to be the orienting domain of philosophicalinquiry.

CONCEPT AND INTUITION

Near the beginning of Dialectical of Enlightenment, Adorno offers a minorgenealogy of the separation between concept and intuition that is structuralfor the entirety of his later thinking. He argues that with

the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor whichscience had helped to establish was extended to language. For science theword is first of all sign; it is then distributed among the various arts assound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by theaddition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language mustresign itself to being calculation and, to know nature must renounce theclaim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to be a likeness and, tobe entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it. With advancingenlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid themere imitation of what already is.1

Adorno, writing here with Max Horkheimer, goes on to state that it was thisdistinction between sign and image that was given philosophical articulationin the Kantian dualism of concept and intuition. Roughly, they claim that thedivision of labour between science and art first generated a linguistic divisionof labour between sign and image in which science, whose authority stemsfrom it being all sign from being non-sensible, general/universal, subsum-ing, and explanatory and not image (sensible and mimetic), becomes intime the rational ordering and manipulation of signs (and eventually thepure sign language of mathematics), while the moment of the imagecomes to be exiled (banished) in its distribution among the different arts:sound images (as such) are preserved in music, the perceptual image (assuch) hibernates in painting and sculpture, and word proper is inherited bypoetry (in the widest sense of that designation). What is so preserved inthe arts, however, implicitly, is the rational-cognitive significance of theimage, its authority, that has been effectively disenfranchised and delegiti-mized by the sign becoming hegemonic (constitutive) for knowing andrationality. It is because the image function has been delegitimized, thatthe arts carry the burden of the significance of the image function only

1Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1213.

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quixotically or aporetically: however materially insistent, the claim to someform of independent rational authority by the arts has, from Platos and Aris-totles first wrestling with the issue, appeared incapable of being satisfied.The arts always seem more important, more significant, more knowingand urgent than aesthetic theory has ever managed to vindicate. If Adornois right, both sides of that equation are right: the arts are urgent, and theirexisting claim to direct rational significance incapable of justification. (Toconcede the obvious: because art is the bearer of a fundamental connectionto or way of relating to the world that has been suppressed and delegitimated,then aesthetics becomes important because it is the reflective comprehensionof that now disenfranchised portion of knowing. The primacy of aesthetics isderived from the primacy of knowing under conditions in which a significantportion of human knowing has been separated from its other core feature,exiled, dispersed, and emptied.)As the translation of the sign/image duality into concept and intuition

makes plain, what is sundered is the appropriate relation between universaland sensuous particularity: universals without sensuous particulars areempty, sensuous particulars without the controlling orientation of universalsare blind just the world all over again, an ideological doubling, a compli-ant reproduction.2 No matter how formed, when rationally cut off from theauthority of reigning universals, the art image carries within itself someversion of the blindness, some version of being a mere mirroring or rep-etition of what is (Platos original complaint about the arts) that justifiesthe sense that the cognitive-rational role of the arts is incapable of justifica-tion. What the image function has become is nearly as misbegotten as its fier-cest critics, sceptics and philistines, claim.Horkheimer and Adorno concede that the separation of sign and image is

inescapable, that there is a legitimacy to the division of labour betweenscience and art, and hence that the idea of a total knowledge of theworld is an illusion (there is not and cannot be one unified and totalaccount of how the world is). Nonetheless, they also argue that if the separ-ation is hypostatized over again, then each of the isolated principles tendstoward the destruction of truth.3 What Horkheimer and Adorno mean bythe dialectic of enlightenment is precisely the long historical path wherebythis hypostatization incrementally occurs, and truth is thus destroyed by sub-jective species- interests coming to parade as necessary, objective, and com-plete. Thus, the path through which sign and concept become hegemonic forour self-understanding of what knowledge and truth are, and hence whatreason must be, drives out to the point of becoming a vanishing moment(Hegels phrase) the sensuous particular as recorded in the image function.And further, that it is philosophical idealism, as forwarded by Kant andHegel, that most radically and systematically performs this hypostatization

2Ibid., 13.3Ibid.


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of the separation, giving it its quintessential rational form and unassailableauthority.4 Hence, in some fundamental way for Adorno, the philosophiesof Kant and Hegel are perspicuous accounts of the authority of the deformed,because hypostatized, sign/concept, and hence of the massively deformedrationality of the modern world that is pervasively governed by thatconcept of the concept. These are enormous claims, and it will not be mytask to defend them here.5

My interest, again, is in matters directly downstream from this originatingthesis about concept and intuition, namely, how this thesis informs Adornosconception of aesthetics. Let me begin this by broadening the sign/conceptversus image/intuition duality one step further. Adorno terms the regimeof the hypostatized sign/concept constellation identity thinking. What hemeans by identity thinking and his precise critique of it is proximate toNagels conception of the view from nowhere (and the worry that itdrives out first-personal, subjective experience, and the whole domain ofwhat things are like from the inside); and with Bernard Williamss con-ception of Descartess project as seeking to provide an absolute conceptionof the world, that is, some conception of the world as what is there anywaysuch that multiple perspectives could converge on it.6 That those ideals ofobjectivity have the character they do for us now, Adorno argues, is a con-sequence of identity thinking; it derives from a conception of rationality inwhich the abstract-formal-general concept becomes the sole bearer of cogni-tive significance. Once this is accepted, then what depends on any individ-uals experience for its authority, either as a subjective matter of what it islike (Nagel), or as a matter of perspective (Williams) must be surmountedand overcome.From this vantage point, Adornos general critique of identity thinking is

familiar enough: there is no significant stretch of human knowing that cannotbe subsumed under the laws of natural science or its social scientific exten-sions; nor any significant stretch of human practice that can be rationallymeaningful in itself apart from exemplifying some general practice. Identitythinking reduces sensuous particulars to universals in the sense that themeaning and significance of any sensuous particular item is exhausted inbeing an instance of some universal, concept, law, social function orsocial type. Nothing is meaningful in itself, all any item can mean comesfrom the universal it falls under or exemplifies. Here then is the familiar con-trast between the nomothetic sciences and the ideographic arts: science con-cerns the meaning of things insofar as they are exemplars of universal law,

4Adorno thinks of all modern philosophies, however, rationalistically or naturalisticallyinclined, as just hypertrophied and self-deceived versions of the great idealist systems which is pretty much what the idealists themselves thought.5For an effort to provide these claims with prima facie plausibility, see Bernstein, Adorno:Disenchantment and Ethics, Chapters 2 and 4.6Nagel, View from Nowhere and Williams, Descartes Project of Pure Inquiry.

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while art provides for an encounter with an object that is presumptivelyunique and meaningful in itself. The difficulty with this thought is, ofcourse, that to date, no rational sense can be made of the idea of objectsbeing unique or meaningful in themselves. For Adorno that difficulty is his-torically true: it is what has happened to unique sensuous particulars as aconsequence of the coming to be of the hegemony of identity thinkingover both knowledge and social practices. Which further entails that art prac-tices too are not intrinsically or immediately rational.Rather, the arts historically carried and sustained the de-authorized auth-

ority of the image function at one remove because officially what the artswere about was never art itself but religion, or politics, or social hierarchyor human affective experience. Only as art becomes modern, autonomousfrom other domains and social practices, does the old problem of the auth-ority of the image function return; or rather, Adorno argues, as the artsbecome aware of their autonomy, they become increasingly aware thattheir previous sense of authority was borrowed (from the gods and kingsand empires they celebrated), and that their image function on its own wasin need of purification (embracing autonomy) and justification, with thehope that, somehow, the effort of purification would yield justification.The modern arts become reflective about being just art, and hence abouttheir status as belonging to the image function in its separation from concep-tual reason. Not too surprisingly, modern aesthetics arises at the precisemoment when the question of art suddenly devolves back into the problemof the authority of the image function. Kant was the first to survey the par-ameters of the problem; Schiller was the first to see it as a problem, as acontest in which the claim of sensuous particularity (the sense drive) hadbeen disenfranchised by categorical knowing (the form drive).7

Adornos thought in this regard could not be simpler and more direct: theimage function as relayed through the history of art into modern autonomousart cannot be directly rationally vindicated because that version of the imagefunction really is only a remnant, a part of a larger whole, a fragment ofknowing or reason that has been loosened from the setting in which its claim-ing originated. But that, after all, is a genealogical claim about a past wholeof knowing that even Adorno concedes cannot be recaptured or even recon-structed anew. Hence the genealogical claim, however useful, is insufficienton its own. What the genealogy urges is the thought that the arts have been,however tacitly and implicitly, carrying and sustaining the suppressed cog-nitive and rationality potential of the image function. Modernist arts, Adornoargues, are the effort of, minimally, making thematic and, optimally, seekingto vindicate the suppressed rationality potential of the image function. Butvindication is something that artworks cannot do themselves precisely

7Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. The opening seven letterslay out the diagnosis of modernity, while the immediately following letters provide an outlineof Schillers drive theory.


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because they are bound to the rationally eviscerated image function; the taskof vindication is thus inherited by aesthetics. Thus the primary object ofaesthetic reflection becomes demonstrating that the arts, while notrational-cognitive in themselves (about this the sceptical tradition has beenright), because they are bearers of the image function, contain a suppressedcognitive and rationality potential; we care about the modernist arts in theway we do because they bear upon another form of human encountering,and hence another way in which things and persons can be experienced;or even, they return the experience of things and persons to the centre ofwhat encountering them necessarily involves.Adornos further thought is that the image function cannot be compre-

hended outside the aesthetic effort of excavating that claim from the arts;we cannot just turn our attention to the sensory modalities themselves, toseeing and listening and speaking, to gather up the image function portionof cognition since our understanding of these forms of sensory engage-ment has already been deracinated by the reigning protocols of theconcept. In this his procedure is self-consciously Hegelian in spirit: inthe same way in which we cannot fully comprehend the nature ofknowing apart from the historically evolved exemplars of knowing,namely, the natural sciences, so we cannot investigate the image functionoutside the historical practices that bind themselves to sustaining andworking through it, the arts. Hence, what the genealogical account ismeant to license is a reading of aesthetics as, shall we say, a philosophicalunderlabourer to the modernist arts in their task of registering and preser-ving the claim of the now fractured and alienated image function; with thefurther proviso that the analytic work of aesthetics should, finally, vindi-cate the theoretical substance of the genealogical thesis. Only the actualpractice of aesthetics can demonstrate that the circularity here is virtuousrather than vicious.Aesthetics, as it is conceived by Adorno, thus concerns an alienated

portion of knowing. But because this knowing is alienated, what is atissue in aesthetics are matters of both morals and epistemology. I shallcome to the morals claims directly. Aesthetics for Adorno, as the conceptualexposition of the logic of artistic modernism, is thus not primarily about artat all, but concerns the features of the practice of artistic modernism that canbe shown to be attempting to bear the burden of the epistemic-rational claimof the now deracinated image function. Correctly understood, modernist artpractices are the effort to bear the burden of the image functions claim toknowing, to be a portion of what knowing is and what truth is, in a settingin which the image itself (the work of art itself) is not and cannot be aform of knowing or deliver empirical truths about the world. Becausewhat is suppressed by deformed rationality and knowing, by the rationalityof the hypostatized sign or concept, is the claim of sensuous particularity,then, again, the stakes are as much moral as cognitive-rational, as I shallshow below.

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SUFFERING AND TRUTH

As critics of Adorno have been quick to point out, if he truly believes that thepath of enlightenment is the destruction of truth, then his own philosophicalefforts must be self-defeating: he has sawn off the limb upon which he isstanding. How is philosophy, as the discourse of truth, to proceed if theregime of the concept it employs (identity thinking) has destroyed thetruth? A provisional answer to this worry has three aspects. First, asalready noted, Adorno does not deny truth to the positive sciences; whathe denies is that the positive sciences possess a hegemonic control overknowing, and hence over truth. History is already a bald counterexampleto the exclusivity claim, and hence to the exclusive privileging of nomotheticknowing as opposed to ideographic. One might summarize Adornos projectas the attempt to demonstrate how there can be knowledge that is not furthertranslatable into science, and how such knowing bears on practical engage-ments with others. Hence, second, what thus has been destroyed by identitythinking is not truth as such, but moral truth, which here means not generaltruths about what is right and what wrong, but truths about the weal and woeof human beings with respect to the worth of human lives; some notion oftruth whereby the individual him- or herself is counted as being of unique,non-exchangeable value as a matter of experiential encounter; and, in conse-quence, how such encountering partially determines what is to be done withrespect to them.8 Third, once this is acknowledged, then it brings into viewwhat might be otherwise perplexing, namely, Adornos insistent contentionthat what philosophy (as the discourse about the meaning of the concept) andart (as the practice sustaining the rationality potential of the image function)share is that, in the final instance, they must be answerable to senselesshuman suffering.In the Introduction to Negative Dialectics Adorno bluntly states: The

need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering isobjectivity that weighs upon the subject: its most subjective experience, itsexpression, is objectively conveyed (ND, 1718).9 Let me unpack thesecond sentence first. By suffering is objectivity that weighs on thesubject, I take Adorno to mean that suffering is the subjective register ofan objectively intolerable state of affairs. But suffering itself is a norma-tive-cognitive experience of what should not be the case for the subject,and hence, by inference, what should not exist objectively since it broughtabout that suffering. Suffering is thus an experience in which what is fully

8Adorno does not think that Kantian moral thought can salvage the worth of individual livesthrough the transformation of individual maxims into universal laws; that is dragging the verydomain of particular encounter into the domain of generalizability and so identity thinking.Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Chapter 3 is an effort to support Adornosthesis that Kantian moral reason is, despite itself, a form of instrumental reason.9I will use ND to refer to Adorno, Negative Dialectics and AT to refer to Adorno, AestheticTheory.


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subjective and fully objective are fused: as a reason to change ones state, asrequired by any functional account of the meaning of pain, the experientialawfulness of a state of suffering already belongs to the space of reasons.I take the plain sense of Adornos first sentence to be that philosophy, as

responsible for registering the relation between subjective experience andobjective fact, must become answerable to the exigency presented by sense-less suffering if it is not to lose its claim to rationality. Suffering, as whatshould not be, is in this respect foundational for moral reflection; the inflec-tion of our historical present lies in the vast amounts of wealth and practicalknowledge that prima facie seems capable of putting an end to senseless suf-fering. Senseless suffering is the historical profile of human suffering underconditions of plenty: the gap between the suffering and the capacity to put anend to it speaks to a failure. One might argue that the failure could be merelypractical, not a failure of reason or rationality but of motivation or organiz-ation; Adorno thinks that thesis empty: if we are not moved to do what isprima facie morally necessary, or we cannot organize ourselves to do whatshould be done, then something is amiss in moral reasoning and reflection.Later, he says The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical

world belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suf-fering (ND, 203). Plainly, the suffering is a condition of truth claim theview that a criterion for philosophical truth is that it be answerable to theexistence of senseless suffering is the premise supporting the dismissalof traditional philosophy whose practice, identity thinking, Adorno arguesis that cause of suffering that has been produced by reason itself. Identitythinking is the dominant cause of senseless suffering in industrially and tech-nologically developed countries. The whole vast arrangement of the modernworld operates in perfect indifference to the most salient moral fact about it:massive and wholly unnecessary human suffering and death. Identity think-ing would attempt to talk us out of this suffering as, roughly, the way of theworld, as inevitable; there is no alternative to present practices. The senselesssuffering caused by rationalized reason is thus the suffering that could (beginto) be addressed by the transformation of what we now think reason, ration-ality, and human knowing are. Lending a voice to suffering becomes the con-dition of all truth when the suffering is unnecessary and the primary cause ofits perpetuation and covering over is a regime of reason itself. This concerngives Adornos epistemological inquiries a practical orientation.This same privileging of opposition to senseless suffering as a criterion of

validity scores the argumentation of Adornos Aesthetic Theory. Indeed, thebook ends on just this thought:

but it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than thatit forget the suffering that is [arts] expression and in which form has its sub-stance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom counterfeits aspositivity.

(AT, 260; italics mine)

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While there are a series of questions about past and future art here, none-theless the relation between art and suffering is intimate: senseless, rationallycaused suffering is arts expression, what it finally expresses and why it is,for now, an essentially expressive medium. This thesis only makes senseagainst the background of the genealogical hypothesis: the regime of identitythinking causes senseless suffering because of its indifference to sensuousparticularity. The rational marker of that indifference is the now decimatedrationality potential of the image function as the bearer of the burden ofthe claim of sensuous particularity as such. Hence arts forever evisceratedclaim to objectivity as being the bearer of the rationality potential of theimage function must be taken as, at one remove, an expression of senselesssuffering. If art is the bearer of that burden, then a fortiori, objectivity in art,what makes artworks valid as artworks is determined by successfully con-veying that expression. Said more directly, if sign and concept necessarilytranscend the claims of sensuous particularity, the world as experienced(Nagels thought) from here (Williams thought), then a fortiori it extin-guishes the expression of that experience. The image function in its ideo-graphic determination necessarily has an expressive dimension. Thescience of pain concerns no individuals pain but the mechanisms of pain;each pain, however, as something felt, makes its way into the worldthrough its expression.Adorno cashes out this thesis with his surprising claim that the demand

for the expression of suffering is the substance determining arts form.Form must have two aspects. Adorno is assuming that form is that invirtue of which an organization of materials is aesthetic, a matter ofart, and not, say, epistemic or practical. Substantively, form is an art-works procedures for attaining unity with itself, its organizing principle,and thereby that which is experienced as the principle of gravitationthrough which the elements of a work are bound together. If we thenunderstand by what Adorno calls bindingly eloquent [stimmig Beredten]form that in virtue of which a work is authentic or valid or true, then theexpression of suffering is here too a condition of truth. What bindingeloquence is, how it operates, and how we judge it are, at least here,utterly opaque. It is that opacity that will need to be removed ifAdornos claim about the rationality potential of the image function is tobe vindicated.Despite the structural convergence, suffering inhabits philosophy and art

differently. Early in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explains: Sufferingremains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it concep-tually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcelyexpress it through its own means of experience without itself becomingirrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential(ND, 18). Philosophy is not self-sufficient since it cannot express, that is,cannot give experiential meaning to the very thing on which it pivots,while arts expressivity is discursively mute it cannot articulate what its


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expressions mean. This adumbrates the diremption constituting the fragmen-tation of rational subjectivity, and, in consequence, the spiritual division oflabour between art (as the bearer of the image function and intuition) andphilosophy (as the critical reflection on the meaning of the identitarian,rationalized concept).Adorno is insisting that unless philosophy and art have senseless suffering

as their humane content they will become so morally complicit in its perpetu-ation that it would be better that they disappear. But the reason for this moralcomplicity belongs to the practices of philosophy and modern art them-selves: philosophys reason and arts form are somehow bound to this suffer-ing such that in turning away from it they are or would be mutilatingthemselves. Hence the thesis that suffering should be taken as the conditionof all truth is a claim about philosophy coming to self-consciousness aboutits own history, social placement and commitments; and that suffering is themeaning of modern arts expressivity concerns not a specific content, but,too, the placement of modern art in society why this art takes on theforms it does.

THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION AS A LOGIC OFRESISTANCE

What does it mean to say that philosophy, and art, in particular, must beanswerable to senseless suffering? Arts task of preserving the imagefunction begins to take shape as Adorno attempts to answer this question.Famously, Negative Dialectics opens with a situating of philosophy:Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete [in the light of Marxseleventh thesis on Feuerbach, say10], lives on because the moment torealize it was missed (ND, 3). What this now can be taken to mean isthat in place of the revolution that failed to occur what is required isreflective resistance. Resistance is the politics of the state of emergencyin the absence of revolution; it is a minor politics in the absence of sig-nificant politics; it is the praxial refusal of despair.11 This was alwaysAdornos thought about the meaning of modern art: Art is a matternot of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely throughartistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistolto the heads of human beings.12 Adorno elaborates this claim inAesthetic Theory:

10Marx, Concerning Feuerbach, 423.11I am relying on the opening sentences of thesis VIII of Walter Benjamins, Theses on thePhilosophy of History: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emer-gency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conceptionof history that is in keeping with this insight. In Illuminations, 259. For a dialectical encyclo-paedia of the meaning of resistance, see Caygill, On Resistance.12Commitment, op. cit., 244 (italics mine).

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Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and itoccupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself assomething unique to itself, rather than complying with existing socialnorms and qualifying as socially useful, it criticizes society by merely exist-ingArt keeps itself alive through its force of resistance; unless it reifiesitself, it becomes a commodity.


Let me begin to unpack this claim. Adorno binds his aesthetics to the art ofhigh modernism out of standard Hegelian scruple: aesthetics cannot beginwith a formal definition because [t]he concept of art is located in a histori-cally changing constellation of elements (AT, 2). Hence, Adornos pro-cedure in Aesthetic Theory is to engage in an elaborate dialogue with thehistory of the philosophy of art and aesthetics, in its conceptualization ofwhat art is and how it matters, in the light of the unfolding logic of high mod-ernism. That is, the concepts central for the understanding of art must beregimented and honed to the most advanced artistic practices of our time,which from the last third of nineteenth century through to the last third ofthe twentieth century was modernism.We are already well placed to begin unearthing the fundamental gestures

of modernism because, if Adorno is right about sign and image, concept andintuition, then we know that: (a) modernist artworks in being for the sake ofpreserving the image function must reveal their sensuous medium as a con-dition of possibility of aesthetic meaningfulness; and (b) but if mediums arethe condition of meaning, then to bring the claim of a medium to self-con-sciousness is to be concerned with form rather than representationalcontent (a thought already anticipated by traditional art suppressing the sig-nificance of the medium beneath its high contents). Eli Friedlander, inunpacking Clement Greenbergs Kantian modernism, states the thoughtthis way:

The turn of art into its own medium, which is also the prohibition of art to beas it were the servant of independently communicable contents, defines thetendency of art toward form. We can also call this the tendency of arttoward the abstract. Yet, the idea of abstraction would be badly understoodif it is thought of merely as lack of any recognizable representation fromour everyday surroundings. Abstraction, the presentation of form, is rather,the revelation of the conditions of possibility of artistic practice.13

Modernism begins with a bracketing of representational content as thesource of the meaning and authority of works: the requirements of the prac-tice itself, the how of a Van Gogh sunflower or Cezanne apple is whatdemands acknowledgement: The plastic arts speak through the How ofapperception (AT 168). The How of apperception is the moment of

13Friendlander, Expressions of Judgment, 101.


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form itself; this recession into form, into the demands of the practice itself,takes over in modernism and becomes the source of arts dynamicdevelopments.That modernism at its height could be, ironically, so vital was only poss-

ible because it obeyed a stringent logic; that there could be a real logic to itspractice, and not just a series of internally consistent conventions, dependson it being the case that the mere practice of art is already infused with arational demand: Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without with-drawing from it (AT, 55); the rationality of art is the rationality potentialof the image function, while the rationality criticized is that of identity think-ing. Aesthetic Theory is the discursive excavation of modernisms logic. Atthe centre of that logic is what has come to be called arts negative autonomy,the thought that arts asociality, its expulsion and exclusion from the mech-anisms of societal reproduction (AT, 225, 252), its being without any posi-tive social purpose or function, forced it, if it were to survive at all, tobecome the determinate negation of a determinate society, to make itselfunavailable for readable social purposes, unusable. Art was forced back inon itself, onto the stringency of its own elements, media, and practices.This entails that all modernist works must negate the conceits supportingtheir traditional forms; in the case of painting, the metaphysical conceitwas, centrally, representational form, with linear perspective conqueringall that came before it. Representation established the connection betweenthe work and the world, giving art its aboutness and meaning.Although the metaphysical conceits supporting traditional art were doubt-

less complex, nonetheless Adorno takes one to be primary, namely, that prin-ciple that Hegel argued was the great insight of Kants philosophy theworld-making authority of subjectivity: I think must be able to accompanyall my representations otherwise something would be represented in mewhich could not be thought at all (B 132). Hegel made this the principleof his own Logic: The Concept, when it has developed into a concrete exist-ence that is itself free, is nothing other than the I or pure self-consciousness But the I is, first, this pure self-related unity.14 The driving idea here isbeautiful, powerful, nearly inevitable, and deadly: nothing can be meaning-fully in my mind unless I can put it into functional conversation with every-thing else in mind; hence, the fundamental structures of mind that Kant callscategories and Hegel the Concept are functions of mental unity; so theunity of the self and the unity of the concept are the same unity. But sincethis work of unifying is the condition for anything being recognizable bya human mind, then this unity of the subject is responsible for the unity ofthe world. The world comes to appear as a world only if it can appear asin accord with the functions providing for the unity and freedom (fromnature) of subjectivity. The principle of idealism states that we can have aworld at all, and can represent the world to ourselves only through

14Hegel, Science of Logic, 583.

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conceptual unification, where establishing such conceptual unification sim-ultaneously yields the unity of the self with itself: the world necessarilyappears as my world all else would be phantasmagoria, hallucination,chaos. This is the logic of the concept in Kant and Hegel; and it is alsothe principle Adorno labels identity thinking.In order to critique idealism, the effort must be to demonstrate that the

order and unity of an object is not (necessarily) dependent on the unifyingactivity of the subject. If one could demonstrate this, then it would showthat there was a rationality potential in given sensuous particulars not redu-cible to the rationality of the idealist concept. This specifies what Adornotakes to be the implicit logic governing modernism: it is the practice ofundoing the unity objects as dictated by the unity of the self in order toreveal the possibility of another possibility of order and unification. Modern-ism accomplishes as an art practice what aesthetic reflective judgementaccomplished for the judgemental encounter with natural beauties. Thislogic patently has a negative aspect the work of undoing rational unityand given interests and an affirmative aspect, the revelation of a non-subject derived possibility of order and unification, and calling into beingdisinterested pleasure.In his essay on Samuel Becketts Endgame, the negation of the principle of

idealism is stated explicitly: Nonidentity [of object with concept] is both thehistorical disintegration of the unity of the subject and the emergence ofsomething that is not itself subject.15 Each modernist artwork operates aversion of this negation, seeking a unity of the artwork that does notdepend on the unity of the self, on the world appearing to a unified self asa unified object in accordance with determinate mind-dependent categories;hence such works seek forms that enable the material elements of thoseworks to escape the dictates of conceptual determination, however fleetinglyand partially.But this is patently insufficient on its own; it is solely a negative canon

(AT, 34). Identity thinking is a false rationality because it involves a sys-tematic perversion and deformation of conceptuality: the complete self-determination of the self in the concept, what Kant and Hegel consider asfreedom, denies its dependency, both causally and semantically, on whatit unifies.16 One pervasive gesture in modernist painting demonstrating

15Trying to Understand Endgame, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, 252.

16Calling identity thinking a deformation or perversion of the concept is less than fully accu-rate, since clearly this formation of the concept allows for the massive achievements ofmodern science and technology; they are not to be decried. So a better way of statingAdornos thesis is to say that he is objecting to the hegemony of identity thinking over ourunderstanding of concept, knowledge, and rationality; and we have overwhelming reasonsto think that hegemony is irrational and unearned because that formation of the conceptcannot take account of the dependency of concepts on their objects causally and semantically.Hence, another regime of the concept, another concept of the concept, and hence of knowingand rationality must be possible.


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how misbegotten is the principle of conceptual self-determination is the ten-dency towards monochromes and colour field paintings (and all theirprogeny and relations); these directly and emphatically explode thatconceit, as if the meaning of a colour could ever have been bestowed bythe mind, because, say, it was nothing other than its difference from sur-rounding colours. An Yves Klein blue, or a Barnett Newman zip paintingin their monochrome character and use of colour fields demonstrate anexperiential order and meaning that cannot be solely the product of concep-tual synthesis. The recurrence of the drift towards the monochrome inmodern painting is for the sake of repudiating the authority of subjectivity:these are appearances of meaning or proto-meaning or the emergence ofmeaning that cannot be conceived as owing their claim to meaning solelyto the powers of mind-giving order.Working from the opposite direction, the paintings of Matisse and Pollock

and Cy Twombly appear to let order emerge from chaos rather than imposingit, rather than contorting their materials into an order. Even the diverse usesof geometry, repetition, and mechanism in modernist art are for the sake oftwisting free of transcendental subjectivity, of letting something appearwhose meaning cannot conceivably be owed to me (my rules, principles,intentions), and hence exposing me to what I can but acknowledge but notown, something explicit in the almost ritual quiet of Agnes Martinsseeming wholly geometrical works.

MIMESIS AND INTUITION

Why should we feel aesthetically compelled by works that lack explicithumane meaning, that resist it? Why not condemn modern art as technicalbravado without significant meaning? This kind of art has been so con-demned often enough. Adornos answer concerns, still, the structure andnature of the concept. If conceptual meaning causally and semanticallydepends on objects in the world, then there must be an aspect or feature ofconcepts themselves, or some aspect or feature of conceptualization thatacknowledges and manifests that dependency. Kant calls the matter of con-cepts, intuitions, as if intuitions were components of concepts themselvesrather than a separate and separable ingredient in cognition. Intuitions arethe worldly individuals that concepts work on, unify, order, and turn intomeaning. Intuitions are also the deliverances of the senses, they are thegivens upon which concepts work, and without concepts, Kant famouslyavers, they are blind meaningless images attacking the human sensorium.Intuitions, in their role of being the rationalized form of the image function,is where we began. How can this historical determination of intuitions bereversed?In order to make the cognitive and rational dependence of the concept on

its object visible we require something other than passive sensory reception

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as our way of registering the moment of our exposure to the world (since it isalready that in Kant). There must be an action of receptivity, a mode ofacting or a comportment that in its doing involves acknowledging, register-ing, and recording what appears to it as it appears, a doing that is a mirroring.Adorno terms this form of doing mimesis; mimesis, we might say, is the actof intuiting, the act of responding to sensuous particularity in a sensuouslyparticular manner. And in the same way in which intuition is the act of intui-tion and what is intuited, so Adorno considers mimesis to refer to both thecomportment of following the significative demands of objects (hence aversion of what Kant regards as aesthetic reflective judgement), and its resul-tant, the objectification of the object in the subject, what becomes themimetic moment of works themselves, their material content (AT, 285).For Adorno, mimetic activity is taken to be one, primary source of theimage function.In art, then, the unity of concept and intuition is rewritten by Adorno as the

polarity between construction and mimesis, where the goal of constructivesynthesis the active-ordering-forming pole of art making is the releaseof the mimetic moment. The dialectic of construction and mimesis involvesnot a balancing of the moments, but enabling each pole to realize itself in orthrough the other, to have construction a response to the mimetic moment,and mimesis become the emergence of constructive form (AT, 44). Forexample, Sol LeWitt uses a purified constructive practice involving formaland usually iterative procedures for producing the work (which can thenbe carried out by anyone) Wall Drawing 16 has the rule: Bands of lines12 inches (30 cm) wide, in three directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonalright) intersecting that yield an hypnotic material object whose power orbeauty patently transcends the narrow procedural rules producing theimage. Oppositely, Helen Frankenthalers paint soaked and stained can-vasses Mountains and Sea (1952) is exemplary somehow emerge asformal wholes. Plainly, Frankenthalers method of soaking and stainingraw canvas, which gives her oils the feel of delicate, flowing watercolourson a mammoth scale, is not itself a mimesis of anything. Rather, and thisis Adornos thought generally about modernism, her practice objectivates[finds a replicable procedure for capturing] the mimetic impulse, holding itfast at the same time that it disposes of its immediacy and negates it (AT,285). Modernist art is not a mimetic practice; rather, art means to displayand so recuperate the mimetic impulse, not copying reality but elaboratingtechniques and methods that can release subjective control over the material(staining or soaking for Frankenthaler; dripping and splashing for Pollock;etc.) that allows moments of material signification, materials found significa-tive in themselves, to emerge; and when they so emerge, then they can onlybe judged reflectively and not determinatively. Adorno states the aestheticideal here as one of a nonviolent integration of what diverges (AT, 190);it is nonviolent because the order emerges from the materials rather thanbeing conceptually imposed upon them. And, again, because what is at


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stake here is overcoming the controlling determinations of the logic ofconcept, a logic owed to subjectivity, then Adorno also specifies these pro-cedures as finding a practice of self-relinquishment (ND, 13). Self-relin-quishment here is not a meditative practice of forgetting the selfaltogether, but rather a procedure of staining, dripping, pouring whereby the subject locates a practice or procedure that can effectivelyisolate or make independent its capacity for sensory encounter, thus a prac-tice whereby a following of materials, a sense of the materials taking formas if from themselves, becomes possible. The emergence of these significa-tive materials is marked, as we shall see in more detail directly, by the dis-possession of the judging subject who can reflectively respond to but notconceptually order what is experienced the appearance of meaningwithout conceptual meaning.

BLIND AND BINDING

I have argued that Kantian intuitions are the philosophical fate of the imagefunction the image function cancelled and preserved, one might say, by aconstitutive conceptual synthesis that is world-making in its ambition.17

Because he is always thinking about identity thinkings concept of theconcept and its erasure of the authority of intuitions, Adornos aesthetictheory makes recurrent use of the notions of emptiness and blindness,which always have lying behind them the self-indicting statement of theprinciple of identity from Kant: concepts without intuitions are empty, andintuitions without concepts are blind18 the principle in virtue of whichthe given is without sense on its own and derives whatever meaning it canhave from the work of conceptual synthesis; hence intuitions can onlyappear and have cognitive significance after they have been conceptuallysynthesized.19 For Adorno, Kants principle is the blinding of intuitions bya hypostatized conceptuality (transcendentalizing the categorical structureis the process of philosophical hypostatization20), depriving intuitions ofwhatever integral sense they may have through judgemental synthesis.

17For a contemporary defence of this way of erasing and preserving intuitions, and hence for adefence of the position Adorno is centrally critiquing, see Brandom, Some PragmatistThemes in Hegels Idealism, 16489.18That is not literally what Kant says, which is Gedanken ohne inhalt sind leer, Anschauun-gen ohne Begriffe sind blind, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 75. The first phrase literally statesthat thoughts without content are empty; but since the paragraphs in question are all aboutthe relation between concepts and intuitions, then drawing a strict parallel between the firstand second clauses is more than justified; it is what Kant is saying.19There is of course a debate about the role intuitions in Kant; I summarize that debate, andexplain why he is committed to the blindness thesis in Bernstein, Against VoluptuousBodies, Introduction.20Of course, in so doing, Kant is doing no more than what science had already accomplished;Kants epistemology legitimates the scientific worldview.

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Blindness is what has been done to the image function, and hence to nature inits material sensuous particularity by identity thinking. Art, as a repudiatedfragment of knowing, cannot by itself restore to the image function or sensu-ously particular nature what has been done to it, but it can rewrite whatKantian blindness is, namely, the insistence of the given as it imposesitself on our sensory apparatus. Art wants blind intuitions to appear intheir blinded insistence. Said differently, the effort of modernist artworksis to make fragments (or after-images or remnants) of the image functionappear as simultaneously necessary, unavoidable, insistent, and yetsomehow damaged, unable to provide what their very insistence promises:material meaning.Here is a cramped and cluttered passage in which Adorno is attempting to

say everything all at once, turning the concept/intuition structure once moreinto construction and mimetic capacity, but now adding the blindness pro-blematic. The expressiveness of objects is part of what is lost as theybecome conceptualized by idealist principles and positive science.Mimesis in artworks, Adorno claims, is of the expressive features ofobjects that the world no longer contains. In attempting to elaborate whatthis means, he comes up with following formulation:

The sense of form is the reflection, at once blind and binding, of the work initself on which that reflection must depend; it is an objectivity closed to itselfthat devolves upon the subjective mimetic capacity, which for its part gains itsforce through its antithesis, rational construction. The blindness of the sense ofform corresponds to the necessity in the object. The irrationality of the expres-sive element is for art the aim of all aesthetic rationality. Its task is to divestitself, in opposition to all imposed order, both of hopeless natural necessityand chaotic contingency.


If intuitional blindness were what Kant states, then blindness would be chaosand contingency without relief. Hence to produce what is blind and bindingis to show that the presumptively blind has an intelligibility and sensebeyond the terms of conceptual intelligibility and sense. Binding then isAdornos word for objective authority, what must rationally compel us. Sothe argument is that authentic works of art are rationally compelling but ina manner that refuses determining judgement with its conceptual demands.This is why response to the authentic works devolves upon the subjectivemimetic capacity, that is, our capacity to sensuously track, survey, experi-ence, follow along with an objects sensuous appearing without conceptuallydominating it. Again, it is probably easiest to consider this the kind of part/whole synthesis accomplished by Kantian reflective judging. To bring partsand whole into alignment without a concept is to find an order that is notimposed by concept or nature, hence an order whose bindingness satisfiesall one could want from an object by way of a fittingness of part and


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whole without there being anything further one can say about its validity(criticism does not authorize but provides the conditions and intelligibilitybehind claims to validity). Ones experience of that unity (which isalways, we shall see, a fragmented or broken unity) is the experience of bind-ingness; but because accomplished without conceptual determination, thennonetheless blind. (I shall return to the business about expression directly.)Modernist painting is odd because, as abstract, it seems to almost with-

draw from the precincts of culture altogether. I have been suggesting thatthe image function had as its original direct object sensuously appearingnature, and that in losing the authority of the image function we have lostthe authority of material nature in its role of being the habitat for humanliving. So modernist artworks as blinded intuitions, as moments of sensuousparticularity appearing for its own sake, is more like nature than like culture;perhaps it is that stratum of nature in culture that conceptual culture mustacknowledge if it is to acknowledge its dependence and non-self-sufficiency.Something like this thought is present in this passage from Adorno:

Only what had escaped nature as fate would help nature to its restitution. Themore that art is thoroughly organized [constructed] as an object by the subjectand divested of the subjects intentions [= conceptual synthesis], the morearticulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigi-dified significative language; this would perhaps be the same language that isinscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name,The Book of Nature.

(AT, 67)

I cannot think of a more accurate way of expressing the kind of access andwithdrawal one experiences in perceiving a Picasso or Matisse or Pollock orFrankenthaler than that of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significativelanguage: things meaning without conceptually meaning. Another way ofexpressing the same thought would be to say that modernist artworks seekto appear as natural rather than cultural, and that some sense of their auth-ority is derived from this appearing as nature-like, as if a spontaneousself-ordering. Two thoughts hence merge here: as intentionless images,images whose significance does not explicitly depend on whatever intentionlay behind the placement of their elements, modernist artworks appear toescape the authority of constituting consciousness. Oppositely, becausetheir sense is nonconceptual, then it appears more a cipher than a useablelanguage. But to say that is equally to say that such works lack somethingin way of their meaningfulness, and thus appear more as a promise of mean-ingfulness, or even, perhaps, as possessing a suppressed rationality potential.It is of course just this that Adorno is arguing is the true meaning of moder-nist art, its truth: art is the rationality potential of the now suppressed andde-authorized image function. When that claim appears nakedly, as it doesin modernist art, it appears quixotically, as meaning without conceptual

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meaning, or as hidden meaning, or as a promise of meaning. But all thoseways of talking about modernist art fall into place once it is recognizedthat art is bearing the burden of the historically exiled image function.Adornos theory explains how modernist artworks function, and why infunctioning in that way they should have the exorbitant but puzzling culturalsignificance that they do.

A SUBLIME LOGIC: ON THE EXPRESSION OF SUFFERING

In the previous section, I have attempted to explicate the claim that moder-nist artworks are responses to the blinding of intuitions by identity thinking,making them a return of the repressed: the insistence of the moment of intui-tion without the covering of misbegotten conceptuality. And that, in order tomake good on this claim, Adorno had to demonstrate how what is blind canbe nonetheless binding, binding without being conceptually binding. And,further, that one image of this bindingness is of a nature-like language ofmeaning, the artwork appearing as if a purposive natural thing without anyexternal, determining purpose. Both these ways of talking about artworksplainly parallel the way in which Kant and Burke talk about the experienceof sublime nature, where the missing extra is that the experience of sublimenature is one of an intense experience of both pain and pleasure, of threaten-ing nature seen from a safe distance that allows one to experience its powerwithout imminent fear.21 Sublime nature undoes one, safely.This directly speaks to an ineliminable burden in understanding modernist

art, namely, explaining its experiential depth, how it is that things lackingreadily communicative meaning can be felt experienced to be so mean-ingful, the excess of experiential intensity in works that prima facie appearimplausible candidates for delivering it? We could not be as affectively dev-astated and then so radically disappointed by art unless it bore an experientialcharge. How can we explain why the experience of hermetic works is socharged? Adorno contends that modernist practice produces works thatoperate in a manner analogous to the way in which Burke and Kantthought the experience of the natural sublime works, namely, through dis-possessing the spectator of the sources of meaning, unity, order that wouldallow them to assimilate the work to themselves. The experience of thesublime was always in the first instance the experience of an exit from theauthority of reason over nature, and hence a remembrance of the authorityof nature.The experience of being overwhelmed and undone migrated in the course

of the nineteenth century from the aesthetic experience of nature to art, amigration that is essential to Adornos understanding of modernist art.This is why, despite much of his argument sounding as if he were thinking

21Kant, Critique of Judgment, 2530 and Burke, Philosophical Enquiry.


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of modernist works as material instantiations of aesthetic reflective judging,nonetheless, what allows the logic to operate is that modernist works block,inhibit, and undo the conditions for conceptual reception, that works of thiskind have their significance in challenging our capacity for responsiveness ingeneral, and hence they install themselves in our midst through demandingto be recognized in their own terms and not ours. And all this is necessary,after all, if the issue is one of seeing how something singular and sensuouslyparticular can be meaningful in itself. Unless it actively blocked our powersof cognitive assimilation, such a claim could not even get started. Hence,underlying the two gestures examined in the previous section, there mustlie a third, some sort of logic of the sublime as intrinsic to the working ofany authentic modernist artwork.This thought brings us back to my initial formulations about modernism,

form, and the critique of representation. Let us call all the direct ways inwhich a work might confirm existing sources of meaning and so affirmthe unity of the subject communicative meaning. Communicativemeaning is extensionally equivalent to representational content. If represen-tation is determined by conceptual synthesis, then a critique of represen-tation must eschew communicative meaning. Adornos shorthand for theoperation of advanced works is that they refuse communicative meaning their being for another for the sake of immanent determination (AT,109). Advanced works turn away from the spectator in order to achievemeaningfulness in themselves, to be what they must be, being somehowtruly self-determined (the way a living thing is self-determined, not theway a person is self-determined). All modernist works, finally, must repudi-ate communicative meaning for the sake of absorptive significance. IfAdorno is right about modernist works being fragments of a disenfranchisedfeature of human knowing, then absorptive significance or meaningfulnessin itself is best construed not as a kind of obscure or opaque meaning (athought to which even modernist artists themselves have been drawn),but, again, as a defused potentiality for meaningfulness. So perhaps wemight say that modernist works sacrifice communicative meaning for thesake of revealing the possibility of another site and way of makingmeaning, another way of encountering and responding to things, anotherway of knowing.Adornos term for that moment in the modernist work conveying its depar-

ture from communicable meaning, its moment of sublime excess, is disso-nance. Dissonance, he claims, is the truth about harmony (AT, 110).Harmony in this setting is the operation of identity thinking in traditionalmusic, and by analogy, the operation of identity thinking in modern (butnot modernist) art generally. Dissonance is the truth of harmony becauseharmony, in its violent suppression of all that does not fit into its organizingprinciple, produces dissonance; dissonant sounds are those expelled by thedrive for harmony; they are what is left of sound after harmony has doneits work what Adorno calls the nonidentical. Dissonance expresses

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fidelity to the other of communicative reason; it sounds the others anguishof exclusion and denial.Dissonance, in repudiating communicative meaning, is equally arts rebel-

lion against its consignment to societal purposelessness. Dissonance, then, isrebellion against semblance, arts dissatisfaction with itselfArt, what-ever its material, has always desired dissonance, a desire suppressed bythe affirmative power of society with which aesthetic semblance has beenbound up (AT, 110; italics mine). Dissonance, disrupting or baldly negatingthe experience of art being a communicative encounter by making the workincommensurable with the demands of unifying subjectivity, replaces com-municative experience with another modality of experience, expression:

Dissonance is effectively expression Expression and semblance are funda-mentally antithetical. If expression is scarcely to be conceived except as theexpression of suffering expression is the element immanent to artthrough which art defends itself against the immanence that it developsby its law of form.


Expression and semblance are fundamentally antithetical because expressionbelongs to the disavowed image function. The stakes in this passage are thus:under what conditions can something belonging to the image function escapeboth the dictates of conceptual reason and the image functions emptyinginto mere repetitive mirroring, and so express the lost expressivity whichbelongs to the image function in the order of experience?Adornos answer unfolds this way: Arts law of form requires that art-

works be self-sufficient, unified wholes. But if artworks were real wholes,they would be empirical things in the world, not art, not fictions or sem-blances or illusions; being a semblance is substantive for works of artsince it is the marker of their separation from empirical reality. Identitythinking teaches us to identify what is real with achieved unity, that is,the establishing of unity is the establishing of existing in its own right. Itis this that makes artworks semblances they appear to be what theycannot be; the illusion of wholeness is exploded when, say, a character ina drama turns to address the audience; or when a strident tone erupts break-ing the flow of harmonically unified and rhythmically compelling music; orwhen the harsh impasto dissolves the tender leaf into green paint stuff; orwhen the novel narrator directly addresses the reader; or when the dancerlets her body succumb fully to gravitational pull, falling. These experiencesof dissonance are not of a piece; patently, dissonance functions differently inthe linguistic and non-linguistic arts. In painting, to experience dissonance isto experience the undoing of constitutive subjectivity through an experienceof material insistence that cannot be fully or finally absorbed into a formalorder. But to experience this moment, whether it arrives through overallness,as it does in Matisse, or fragmentation and distortion, as it does in Picasso, or


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through emphatic presentation of sheer materiality and the emergence ofform, as it does in Pollock is to experience of an intelligible order that sim-ultaneously makes a claim on the experiencing subject while refusing thedemand for assimilation and rational transparency. The expressivity of mod-ernist works is just the experience of them as works ordered other than by theprinciple of identity; they appear as nonidentical with constitutivesubjectivity.Adorno elaborates this thought by arguing that the shock aroused by

important works of art

is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into thework; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing;the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible The experience of art as that of its truth and untruth is the irruption ofobjectivity into subjective consciousness Shudder [as the name for oneversion of this shock] provides no particular satisfaction for the IRather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceivesits own limitedness and finitude.

(AT, 2445)

In this passage Adorno is tying together what a first glance might appear tobe two disparate experiences: the experience of the internal complexity of amodernist work, its mode of unity and disunity as objective, with the kind ofexperience associated with the disruptive overwhelmingness of the sublime.What was important about the experience of the sublime, especially inBurke, is that in confronting the might and infinity of nature those starryheavens humans are returned to their place in nature, so to their embodi-ment and finitude. As finite beings they are essentially non-self-sufficientbeings, dependent beings. No one really doubts finitude in this sense. Butthe principle of idealism, no matter how formally stated, does emphaticallydeny that human reason derives any of its force and character from nature.The principle of idealism is the repudiation of the thought that human mind-edness might be emphatically and constitutively dependent, and so continu-ous with humans as members of the natural world even in their rationalfunctioning. So the image function is not only a suppressed component ofknowing, but that component of knowing its matter! that bindsknowing to nature. This then explains why the claim of the image functionshould appear in works whose validity is like that of natural beauty ratherthan art beauty.It is a further lemma of autonomous reason that it cannot suffer being

directed by what is outside it; hence, the existence of senseless sufferingcannot in itself be an overriding reason for action. In being shaken by thesublime moment of artistic modernism we are equally recalled to our stand-ing as suffering mortals among suffering mortals, and hence that there isnothing higher or more demanding and more intrinsic to what might be

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demanded here and now than the acknowledgment of suffering, the acknowl-edgment that if we let reason set itself free from suffering nature, then itbecomes unclear how anything might matter. Idealist reason hopes toleave nature behind; artistic modernism is the reminder of how deludedand misbegotten that hope is.

Submitted 8 May 2014; revised 21 November; accepted 25 NovemberNew School for Social Research

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton.London: Routledge, 1973.

Adorno, Theodor W. Vol. 1 of Notes to Literature. Translated by ShierryWeber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Benjamin, W. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Collins/Fontana Books, 1973.

Bernstein, J. M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001.

Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and theMeaning of Painting. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,2006.

Brandom, Robert. Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism:Negotiation and Administration in Hegels Account of the Structureand Content of Conceptual Norms. European Journal of Philosophy7, no. 2 (1999): 16489.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublimeand Beautiful: And Other Pre-revolutionary Writings. London:Penguin Books, 1998.

Caygill, Howard. On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance. London:Bloomsbury, 2013.

Friendlander, Eli. Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kants Aesthetics.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London:George Allen & Unwin, 1969.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment:Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. RedwoodCity, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Kant, Immanuel. Vol. 1 of Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main:Suhrkamp, 1968.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar.Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987.

Marx, Karl. Concerning Feuerbach. In Early Writings, translated byRodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 4213. Harmondsworth:Penguin Books, 1975.


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Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1986.

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters.Translated and edited by E. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1967.

Williams, Bernard. Descartes Project of Pure Inquiry. London: Pelican,1978.

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AbstractINTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY BECOMES AESTHETICSCONCEPT AND INTUITIONSUFFERING AND TRUTHTHE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION AS A LOGIC OF RESISTANCEMIMESIS AND INTUITIONBLIND AND BINDINGA SUBLIME LOGIC: ON THE EXPRESSION OF SUFFERINGBIBLIOGRAPHY

blind intuitions: modernism's critique of idealism

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