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Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and Artworks

In order to make aspects of this paper more accessible, I'd like to provide some general definitions or explanations of important terms I will use throughout the paper. These terms, particularly in Adorno's thinking, deserve a much fuller exploration. However, due to time constraints basic definitions will have to suffice. Maybe we could explore these ideas in more detail during the questions at the end.

Idealism: Adorno argued that idealism was the dominant mode of philosophy during the Enlightenment period. Although idealism has been constantly reformulated by different philosophers, even to the point where it is not obviously idealism, idealist philosophies argue that subjects and objects can be comprehensively known through conceptualisation. I appreciate that this is quite vague, however, I expect this to become more clear throughout this paper.

Dialectical Materialism: This is a cornerstone of Marxist thinking which argues that Hegel's dialectics should be understood as the fulfilment of the dynamic machinations of socio-economic forces within an historical context rather than being directed towards the synthetic fulfilment of 'Absolute Spirit'. Particularly, Marx believed that Dialectical materialism, i.e., a dialectics of man's material conditions, would provide the theoretical framework for the necessity of class revolution; the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat.

Negative Dialectics: This was Adorno's own methodology - an appropriation and reformulation of Hegel's dialectics. As with Marx's dialectical materialism, Adorno's analysis was directed towards man's socio-historical conditions, however he fundamentally altered the dynamic of dialectics by arguing that thesis and antithesis could never be reconciled by reason in the synthetic moment. As such Adorno's dialectics were negative, emphasising the non-identity and tensions between the thesis and the antithesis rather than an illusory reconciliation.


Adorno, in accord with his unique dialectical materialism perceived a very different role for aesthetics and for art itself. It is Adorno's radical rethinking of aesthetics which will form the basis of this talk. Instead of attempting to construct systems by which we could define what is 'true art', whereby we could determine whether or not art is morally 'good', or devise criteria by which artworks could be considered beautiful, Adorno argued that an artwork is a particular type of object which, through critical engagement - i.e., aesthetic philosophy -, would reveal the socio-historical contradictions of a given moment. In other words, Adorno argued that there are types of objects which simply fulfil a role in society, and that role constitutes the entirety of their meaning, and there are objects which in some way take a critical stance towards the society within which they are created. These objects do not merely reflect the aspirations of that socio-historical moment they call it into question. An artwork is this latter type of object. Adorno argued that:

"[Music] fulfils it social function more accurately when, within its own material and according to its own rules of form, it brings to articulation the social problems which it contains all the way to the inmost cells of its technique. In this sense, the job of music as art bears a specific analogy to that of social theory." (Adorno Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik" part 1, Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, 1, 1/2 (1932):105)


As an aesthetic statement concerning the nature and purpose of art this would appear quite alien to much aesthetic theory. To understand what exactly Adorno means by this statement one needs to refer back to his criticism of Idealist philosophy and also his alignment with the Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production. As I will show, this will come to underpin much of the theoretical motivation for his aesthetics.

Dialectical materialism redirects the critical gaze of reason back to an analysis of the material conditions of society and the manner in which society is organized to co-ordinate - and possibly perpetuate - those conditions. In this respect Adorno was arguably a traditional Marxist. Buck-Morris notes his agreement with Lucacs concerning the structural relationship between commodity fetishism and the dualism of idealism:

"He [Lukacs] argued that the fundamental problem of idealism, the dualistic separation of subject and object, had its prototype in the problem of commodities, in which products appeared as objects divorced from the workers who produced them. The concept of reification provided the key to both. Just as commodities in the realm of production took on reified form, became "fetishes" which appeared cut off from the social process of their production, so bourgeois theory's reified conception of the "object" as an immutable given obscured the sociohistorical process through which it had come to be. And just as the reified commodities took on an abstract exchange value, divorced from their social use value, so the reification of bourgeois logic was manifested in its abstract separation of form from content. Hence the limit to bourgeois thought was "objective; it is the class situation itself."

This is a criticism of idealism within the vein of dialectical materialism. In short, an object was not perceived is being any more than the categorical concept under which it was subordinated by the rational subject. Implicit within this conceptualization was the notion that reason can understand reality in its totality. In this move, the rational consciousness was not goaded by the object to understand any more of the object than that which was already present within the concept of that object. As such the object became effectively superfluous to the subject's comprehension. The negative ramifications of this process were two fold: on the one hand the rational subject becomes divorced from its material reality which has, in effect been reified into a conceptual framework and the object, aside from being divorced from the subject, is also divorced from itself. Its being an object becomes residual; its meaning and value are transformed into that which it is not but which also completely dominates it: a concept.

Completing then Lucas' argument, the fundamental instability of this rationality becomes manifest within Adorno's materialist dialectics in a typically Marxist fashion. Marx argues that within the capitalist mode of production, the division of labour is fundamentally alienating. Instead of each worker being involved in a matrix of work into which she invests her labour, but also receives the benefits of the labour of all the other workers through the dynamics of the commune, the division of labour within the capitalist mode of production occurs along the lines of class and economic hierarchy. Within this structure, the worker labours on an object which is then given over to the factory owner who is then able to reap the direct benefits of the commodity in terms of profit. The worker is paid for their time but does not receive any direct benefit from the production of their labour and furthermore, this time does not relate in materialist terms to the labour. It too is a conceptual reification of labour into an exchange value of its own. The product then ceases to carry any personal value for the worker, instead it is translated into an exchange value. The meaning of the object is reified into its economic viability exacted through its pecunial value - itself the pinnacle mode of object reification in capitalism. This value does not tolerate the particularity of the object merely its universal concept as interchangeable with other commodities within the market system.

The essential point here is to note that the object as product is powerless to resist its conceptual and economic subordination. Not only is the object as product reified as exchange commodity, its meaning is derived entirely heteronomously: it is not an 'in-itself', 'for-itself' but rather it is entirely 'for-another'. The problem as the above analysis also suggests is that the 'for-another' to which the object is directed is unclear. Although the capitalist mode of production revolves around the concept of material ownership the subject is simultaneously, as suggested, conceptually unmoored from the material reality which it is supposed to be dominating. The subject becomes, even as Hegel suggested, an empty container which contains all of nothing. The immediate and necessary capitulation of the object to a heteronymous being is precisely the object of Adorno's concern in his aesthetics.

Referring back to the quote above, music as exempla of an artwork, it fulfils its role in society when it, as an already social object, articulates the contradictions, tensions, ruptures and fissures hidden beneath the surface of its given socio-historical location. As I have suggested, the domination of the object within the capitalist system, not only strips the object of identity but also of the power by which it could resist its own domination. As objects are created by market forces to fulfil their role in the commodity market, they are created to have no residual objectivity - an evident, articulated particularity which immanently contradicts total domination through a universal concept - by which they could resist domination by market forces. It should be apparent therefore, the sort of object Adorno argues an artwork must be. It is an object which in some way resists socio-economic domination and simultaneously articulates the contradictions inherent within the rationality of this domination. We are now at the point where we can properly examine how and why an artwork will achieve this particular mode of objectification within the capitalist system.

Of principal importance to Adorno's theory of an artwork is the dialectical machinations of autonomy and heteronomy qua the art object. It will be noted from the above quote that Adorno speaks of art having a role in society which it fulfils. This is a very interesting quotation as it glosses a very important aspect of his aesthetics as presented in Aesthetic Theory. In keeping with negative dialectics, Adorno wished to critically reveal hidden contradictions in socio-historical moments through the application of antinomian rationality. In this instance it is the fact that an artwork effectively has a private life and a public life, both of which are dialectically related but also carry with them irresolvable tensions - which are nonidentical. This theoretical position is best expressed through the antinomy: the function of an artwork is to actively resist social function. It is perhaps most easy to see how an artwork would fail in this role. If an artwork capitulates to the function of commodity then it becomes an object of consumption, a 'for-the-subject' (read, it fulfills the requirements of subjective aesthetic experience through a moment of illusory gratification). The artwork which is to be perceived and consumed as 'art', cannot be an artwork for Adorno as it is simply being no more than what is required of it to fulfil its conceptual role as an artwork. In this sense it falls within one of the two categories of illusory art for Adorno: cuisine or pornography. The defining characteristics of these categories are their subordination to taste or titillation which, for Adorno, are themselves illusory, unstable constructions of subjective placation within capitalism.

Likewise if an artwork simply resists society through an absolute lack of functionality and becomes absolutely inaccessible to its socio-historical location, it retreats into itself and expresses no public life. The irony for such art is that, in its absolute retreat, it becomes subject to the same powers of commodity fetishism which appropriates art as objects existing only for social gratification. In its complete retraction from functionality it simply becomes ornament. One can understand Adorno's absolute adherence to dialectics on the grounds that any loss of such a tension literally destroys the integrity of both the subject and the object. Where 'authenticity' or 'quality' may have been a watchwords for aesthetic appraisal, I would argue that Adorno theorises in terms of 'integrity'; in so doing content is displaced by structure. And yet it is not the aim of art to resolve its own antinomy, it must remain an object that has a function in resisting function.

Although this makes more clear how the object exists on the social level it does not address the fundamental mode of its being and that is as an autonomous object. Indeed its autonomy, dialectically speaking defines its heteronymous role such that the heteronomy referred to above does not lapse into heteronomy per se. It is the autonomy of the artwork which burns through through the possibility of its having a social function and in so doing, this becomes its social function.

However, this is possibly becoming too abstract. It is perhaps easiest to understand Adorno's theory of an artwork by example. It is not possible to present a complete picture of Adorno's concept of autonomy in art in this paper, let alone his concept of an artwork in its entirety, however, it is essential to understand its basics if we are to understand his aesthetics and any sort of political praxis. I would characterize a 'traditional', popular understanding of art as that object which is technically and emotionally expressive. I appreciate that this sort of description has immediately stepped into a very subjective aesthetics but this is intentional. People generally tend to feel that they can instinctively know what is 'art', and yet the reasoning for this viewpoint tends to resolve itself to the essential platitude that good art is that which is generally conceived of as being good art. Not only is this markedly unhelpful when attempting any reasonable analytic aesthetics, Adorno argues that much of traditional aesthetics is unable to resist dissolution into psychologism, subjectivism or phenomenological realism. As such, despite the sophistication of aesthetics when wedded to technical understanding, if it is conducted without reference to socio-historical contingencies it becomes little more than an academic justification for what the so-called philistine already 'knows': "good art is good". Which is to say: it knows nothing.

This is strong stuff but I think it properly characterises the tenor and conviction of Adorno's aesthetics. Adorno wishes to eradicate this inconsistent aesthetics, not simply for the sake of aesthetics or art per se, but because it is obscuring and obfuscating the tremendous import of art. In a socio-historical moment of capitalist domination, for Adorno, the artwork becomes the last refuge of truth. And it is truth and meaning which defines Adorno's aesthetics. In a Copernican turn in expectations, it could be argued that Adorno perceives a creeping and pernicious relativism in idealism, exemplified through its aesthetics. In the application of aesthetics to socio-historical contingency, via the methods of negative dialectics, Adorno wishes to critically reveal the truth of socio-historical contradictions as comported within art. Adorno argues that this can only be achieved by critically engaging with non-identity within artworks as endemic of non-identity, contradictions and disruptions within society.

Returning therefore, to the nature of the artwork, how is it to achieve this delicate yet important role? Huhn isolates the crux of the autonomy of art in the following passage:

"The task of the artwork - or, perhaps we might now just as readily say, the task for mimesis - is to objectivate the momentary in such a way that it stands in contrast to reification. Yet the very technique of art, what might also be called its inseparability from form, is in tension with its mimetic essence. The trick for art - and since art is the refuge for mimesis, the task for mimesis - is to somehow objectivate without reification, to express without expressing something, and to think without being too well thought. In the register of motion, it would mean being held fast without becoming rigid, pausing without becoming rigid, pausing without withering.

In this section Huhn isolates three aspects of an artwork, all of which interplay to generate the autonomy referred to above. There is the notion of art as a mode of representation - representation in this case being a highly specialised understanding of mimesis -, the technique of art as related to the expression of art in form, and the dialectical tension between movement and rigidification. I will deal with each of these aspects in turn and then show how they enter into dialectical relations with each other and from this irresolvable antagonism, generate the very specific autonomy of an artwork. Once we have gained an understanding of the dynamics of autonomy as related to the heteronomy, or the fait social of art as presented above, we will be in a better position to consider the relationship between artistic and political praxis.

An appropriate way to present Adorno's own concept of an artwork is by briefly tracing its own history. Adorno refers to the Nietzschean idea in a number of his texts that 'truth is made'. And this is just as much the case for Adorno's own concept of aesthetic truth; it too has been made (through history). Adorno argues in both the Philosophy of Modern Music and in Aesthetic Theory, that true artwork must be 'of its time' and that that truth is wedded to the relationship of the artwork to its time. Adorno looks back to the birth of Enlightenment which he argues is the initial moment of emancipation for art from its cultic roots and religious patronage. It is during the Enlightenment that an artwork became a technical mode of individual expression. As such the domination (and mastery) of form under the expression of burgeoning individuality was an appropriate expression of the fissures occurring within the socio-historical birth of the Enlightenment. Adorno's analysis of Beethoven is particularly instructive. During his own socio-historical location, Beethoven's individuality was 'modern'. Reason was the new reality and autonomous, the expression of rational individuality was the expression of reason. Indeed through Beethoven's artistic genius, he was able to express a harmony of reason to nature by the subordination of nature to reason, in the form of the perfect expression of rational harmony through the control of form. For Adorno, Beethoven's sonatas were the apotheosis of Enlightenment music: perfect expressions of tonal control and invention expressed through a rational, progressive form which was in fact controlled by the extrapolation and ultimate resolution of that tonal progression. It is therefore important to understand that Beethoven wasn't a great artist and a genius simply because he wrote great music, where 'great music' is an immutable qualitative category. Beethoven wrote great music because that music comported the dialectics of his socio-historical moment. It is in this sense that Beethoven's music was autonomous, it perfectly expressed what it ought to express but where the 'ought' is derived from a dialectical relation to its historical moment not ahistorical normativity.

From this brief prcis of Adorno's analysis of Beethoven's art, one can immediately sense an important aspect of Adorno's aesthetics - 'art' changes. Again, returning to the basics of idealist methodology, where 'art' is an immutable, ahistorical category, art resists change. Artworks are judged for their ability to fulfil the ahistorical criteria of an idealist concept of 'artwork'. Adorno argues that the idealist concept lacks stability and a proper understanding of that which it represents. In order to be related to its object it must eradicate its non-identity with its object through reification. The artwork becomes concept, loses its particularity and, within a capitalist system becomes commodified within the dynamics of exchange value. To avoid this reification one must critically appraise art historically and appreciate that the relationship of an artwork to its concept - art - is also historical. In short this historical analysis is not to discern whether or not the art is 'Good' but to discern its truth. It is only in this sense that art can be 'good' for Adorno. Indeed, if an artwork is not true, then it is not an artwork regardless. This in turn effectively renders the idealist category of 'good art' redundant quite simply because, dialectically speaking, there is no such object as 'bad art'.

Furthermore, Adorno is unequivocal about the fate of the ahistoricizing of an artwork (I will from now only refer to an artwork if it comports truth in this Adornian fashion). Beethoven's artworks, at their time of conception, have realised the truth of their socio-historical locale. The danger then for Beethoven is if his artworks are then assumed to be 'good' in the idealist sense referred to above. Adorno argues, in the form of negative dialectics, that art's emancipation from its religious patronage which affords art its economic autonomy is also the moment when market forces would subject it to a new form of domination. Yet it is only within this new form of domination that it would fully realise its autonomy by resistance - hence consolidating its emancipation and autonomy. However, as artworks become historical by the passage of time, they cease to properly represent the contradictions of a given socio-historical system and as the system changes, it develops ways of subsuming what was once resistant. Therefore, as Beethoven loses his historical moment as a modern artist, he becomes conceptually ossified, subsumed by the capitalist system as a 'great artist'. Capitalism celebrates this ossification in the form of bourgeois nostalgia where all the modernity of Beethoven is transferred into the social currency of exchange value. Beethoven becomes little more than a fetishised product of bourgeois cultural capital, gutted and devoid of any meaning; an object of dinner-time conversation and background music.

This evisceration of artworks is expressed by Adorno in the essay "Saving Brahms From His Admirers". In the essay he confronts the idealist, anti-modern intention of replicating the original performance as the only way to properly confer the meaning of an artwork. For Adorno however, this is delusory insofar as it ignores the fact that the socio-historical environment for the artwork, the audience, must be of its time. Beethoven is only historically truthful when he sounds as he was: challenging, modern and, at times, dissonant and cacophonous. It is impossible to re-produce the historical meaning of Beethoven exactly because this meaning is lost to his socio-historical moment. It is the equivalent of exhuming a corpse and making it dance whilst people clap along in the assumption that this must be art. Galleries become hangings and the appreciation of art is reduced to automatic digestion. The morbidity of the image is not hyperbolic. For Adorno, artworks 'live' and their living directly equates to the activity of their implied resistance to reification played out through their autonomy. The only way that Beethoven can become truthful for a modern audience, if at all, is if he is played in a modern fashion not regressively.

It is in contradistinction to this account of Beethoven that we can complete a basic understanding of the autonomy of art. Adorno's conception of art is that it must always be modern, a phrase he adopts from Baudelaire. Beethoven's music, for Adorno, was a paradigm example of tonality - Adorno points out that that for Beethoven's audience, there would also be moments of dissonance; this dissonance is now lost through the usage whereby exception becomes the rule. However, as Enlightenment rationality proceded to reify its own processes, converting its practices into truths, in short believing as Hegel did that its rationality had converged with reality, the socio-historical condition underwent seismic changes. These changes were the embedding of new contradictions within the socio-economic fabric of bourgeois culture and capital production. This process of the embedding of contradictions beneath the illusory harmony of rational progress creates dangerous storing of energy. The implications of those energies, as far as Adorno is concerned, have been revealed to us through the horrors of 20th century history.

In short, artworks needed to transform themselves to not only maintain an autonomy within the structure of capitalism but also such that they can provide a mimetic refuge, as Huhn suggests, for the contradictions endemic within that society. The autonomy of an artwork is therefore grounded in its ability to be irreducible either to its social categorisation (in other words it must be discontinuous with the concept of art), but it must also not be reducible to its factum brutum. The ability of an artwork to achieve this end relies on its non-identity with society and the motifs with which society perpetuates itself in order to avoid its own internal contradictions. The modes of Enlightenment art - individual expression, lyricism, melody and harmony to name but a few - , which once tore at the fabric of their socio-historical situation, have now been conceptually appropriated. These modes of autonomous resistance become 'art' which is then applied reflexively to artworks in order to literally exhaust them of their autonomy. Then once art becomes the rule for the production of artworks, all is lost and the artworks become commodities even whilst parading under their concept as 'high art'. It is therefore the role of modern art to again disrupt this idealism and reaffirm the dialectical materialism of art.

It is for this reason that Adorno consistently lauds the work of the serialist avant-garde composers, and in particular Schoenberg. Indeed, returning to the initial quote for this section from Adorno, this is when art becomes 'an analogy for social theory'. And it is also therefore no surprise that Adorno compared himself to Schoenberg as Hegel was to Beethoven. It is in contradistinction to the Enlightenment mode of autonomy which grew unstable, that the modes of modern music will find their autonomy. Atonality, an absence of subjective expression, coldness and rational execution are all the hallmarks of the autonomy of modern music. This autonomy reaches its zenith in the works of the serialists and most importantly in the works of Schoenberg whose genius was to make the twelve-technique of serialism transparent.

I wish to explain a little more about Huhn's reference to expression through mimesis and its relation to autonomy. Adorno argued that through the Enlightenment, again taking music as an example, the expressions of enlightenment artworks became constitutive of the concept of Enlightenment art. The resolution of this constitution is to say that Enlightenment art - and its modes of expression - is art. In other words to be a piece of high musical art then one must display the same sorts as artistic invention as Beethoven. The fact that this was a reasonable solution to aesthetic comportment found its justification in Enlightenment rationality. For reasons already discussed, this became problematic, therefore, a new form of art work must engage with this conceptualisation through a resistance to it. Adorno argued in the Philosophy of Modern Music that the domination of melody and subjective expression in music had become reified which in turn lead to these modes of musical expression being confused with music itself. Serialism achieved a rational mode of aesthetic production without recourse to the appropriated modes of Enlightenment musicality. The anti-subjectivity of serialism, achieved through the complete adherence to logical form, demonstrated that the content of music as expression - represented through the use of techniques such as tonality, the diatonic scale, the harmonic triad etc. - were in fact contingent not constitutive modes of musical expression. Serialism at its height, achieved perfect formal expression without the composer imposing the arbitrary motifs of their individual expression in order to generate the content/meaning of the music. Indeed serialism derived its meaning, which I have suggested is for Adorno its truth, from its formal expression. Serialism is a direct negation of a dominating yet unstable subjectivity.

It is important to note that Adorno did not feel that the loss of the subjectivity was a loss to the music; one has not in this equation, 'lost the artistry'. Instead the truth of the artwork transforms the role of the artist to that of a craftsman. In the same movement therefore, artistic expression is radically altered: from poesis, as art making, to praxis as art doing. Furthermore, for Adorno, this transformation of the artist is in fact what saves him as it allows the artist to still do art no matter how marginalised that art must be. Within a capitalist mode of production which dominates objects, that there remains any possibility of art whatsoever is arguably a triumph of a human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds.

In the manner therefore of perfect restraint, Schoenberg refuses to express himself simply because expressive content, the calling-card of Enlightenment, has been appropriated. Indeed it is the very thing to be resisted. Interestingly for Adorno, this marks an important point of divergence between Adorno and his Communist friends. His distancing from Brecht was due to his contention that art cannot even be polemic even if it is for so-called 'good' (leftist) political reasons. The very didacticism, the determinate expressive resistance to capitalism, is exactly the 'handle' required by capitalism to reify polemic art. Adorno's admiration for Schoenberg, whom he argued had produced truly dialectical materialist art, is that in his resistance to his own expression, he properly resists the requirements of capitalism.

Furthermore, the subtlety of this argument is nuanced further by the antinomial mode of Schoenberg's art. In presenting an 'expression that lacks expression' he simultaneously calls into question the supposed idealist conception that expression is continuous with art. It also applies the further, implied challenge, that individual expression possible. The artwork is this questions immediate answer: no! Capitalism has dominated and reified the individual subject so how could the particularity of individual expression be possible? In fact, one could push the argument even further by suggesting individual expression has become unreasonable insofar as it operates under an illusory appreciation of its times. It is astonishing that all this should be so subtly expressed in the formal exposition of a serialist artwork. However it is the technical expression of form when placed in contradistinction to the concept of 'art', audience expectations and socio-economic pressures that the artwork is able to present both autonomy and critique.

Finally I wish to say something concerning the relationship of the artwork to the audience as this offers an important facet of an artwork's autonomy as presented by Huhn above. It is through the interaction of the audience to an artwork that it is able to 'hold 'fast' without becoming 'rigid'. I would argue that this issue can be explained through interest and disinterest. A piece of commodity art, no matter how 'good' it maybe, is implicitly interested in the audience. Whether it is the desire of the artist for praise or the comportment of audience expectations in subject matter of an artwork, the artwork takes an interest in the audience. The modern artwork, be it Schoenberg's or even Beethoven's during his lifetime, acknowledges the audience yet it is simultaneously disinterested in them. Its being is 'for-itself'. Yet it presents that 'for-itselfness' as a dialectical expression of its own being. It is possible from this analysis to understand the shock of the new in (modern) art, as the realisation of the audience that they - as universal subjects - are unrepresented in a piece of art; it is the shock for the audience of witnessing objective autonomy. The aesthetic discomfort of modern art is a mimetic expression of our own social horror: capitalism is dehumanising to the extent that autonomy itself is cold and lonely.

Bernstein highlights the aesthetic moment I have referred to above: that the engagement of an audience with a piece of (modern) art is characterised by disruption. The audience is shocked and uncomfortable. I have alluded to aspects of the aesthetic experience and what that may mean. Bernstein emphasizes the cognitive dimension of the aesthetic experience:

To perform each of these reversals is to reinflate, to expand and thicken, the intuitive moment of conceptuality. In accordance with the logic of independence and dependence, this involves showing how the presumptive independent moment of the concept, call it the logical moment, is dependent on its material moment, which would entail showing how the material moment possess some independence from the logical moment, for an item cannot be dependent on a second item unless the second possess some independence of its own. (Bernstein in cam in to ad)

He argues that the critical analysis of aesthetic philosophy, made possible by the analytic formality and autonomy of the artwork itself, enables a richer cognitive and conceptual moment in the analysis of the artwork. In other words, the immediate domination of the artwork by the subject in an idealized aesthetics, enables the subject to assume the validity and cognitive content of a concept without properly engaging with that concept. Ironically therefore, not only does the subject in idealist aesthetics, lose a dialectical relation to the object in favour of a conceptual relation with the object, the subject is also too readily assimilated to the concept itself. The concept is transparent to itself, and therefore to the subject, through the tautological relationship of the concept to its object. The concept and the object reference each other without the subject being able to 'ground' their cognitive understanding of either. Through the artwork maintaining autonomy, the subject is hindered in their ability to subsume the object to its concept and is therefore simultaneously forced into a dialectical relationship with the object (artwork). Literally the subjective consciousness is forced to ask of itself, when confronted by autonomy in the form of an artwork, "what is this?"

By extension, the modern artwork therefore interrupts a subject's unmediated experience of their own subjectivity by interrupting their experience of the object (the artwork). Whereas previously their unchallenged conceptualisation of an object enables their own cognitive faculties to be transparent in the process of their subjectivity, the modern artwork obstructs this happy conceptual assimilation. The object then becomes distinct from the subjective consciousness and without an object the consciousness recoils upon itself through which the subject, as agent, is dialectically revealed to the subject. The subject is no longer transparent in its own subjectivity. This may appear to reflect some cognitive process of phenomenological revelation: the authentic moment. However, Adorno's project is consistently dialectical and consistently negative. As Bernstein suggests:

Negative dialectics, austerely thought, is nothing other than the reflective version of the expreience of contradiction; it is that experience raised to the level of the concept. What makes this dialectic negative is that it nowhere claims or even attempts to state the truth of an indigent item; rather it is riveted to the moment in which the object appears as "more" that what its covering concept has claimed it is.

Nothing is 'revealed' in the aesthetic experience. The subject must stay locked in the dialectical relation with the object with which it must continue to critically engage. This is the role of aesthetic philosophy, it critically encounters the aesthetic experience; its subject is neither rejected by the experience of modern artworks nor believes that this encounter is the end in itself - a moment of consciousness which itself becomes reified. Instead it must stoically and methodically continue to critically explore the contradictions of society as mimetically comported within the artwork.

In this section, I have outlined the basis of Adorno's aesthetics and how he conceives of an artwork, aesthetic experience, the relationship of negative dialectics to art and how this theory may translate into an artistic praxis. In the following section I will suggest the import of this analysis to the reception of Adorno's political project if indeed he had one. It is essential to note that aesthetics is structurally the pivotal moment in critically assessing issues of contradiction, discontinuity and non-identity in a socio-historical situation. This will be important when one considers the possibility of political praxis within Adorno's theoretical legacy.