As a man positioned within an intricate web of partnerships and ‘warring camps’ within twentieth-century philosophical discourse, Theodor W. Adorno left behind him an impressively versatile body of work. His sharp criticism on political and social circumstances in the first half of the twentieth-century was largely influenced by the incongruous historical events of the period, namely the rise and fall of fascism, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the tumultuous times preceding and following the Second World War, the rise of totalitarian regimes in Old Europe, the Holocaust, and the seeming inevitability of the Cold War. On the other hand, there is the Theodor Adorno of the Aesthetic Theory, a work that marks an important departure for the philosopher’s seeming ‘ontological negativism’.
Written in the last few years of his life, after Adorno had said his final good-byes to the United States, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory sets out (bravely) to examine an area of relevant bearing for the philosopher, one that he had until then approached in a rather diffused manner. The work is centered on the idea that art is autonomous, i.e., art seen as a product of the immanent division existing between intellectual and physical labor. Adorno examines this characteristic of ‘high art’ by looking at artworks from the bourgeois era that wield a visible ‘freedom’ from social rule/influence. For example, he considers the art of the German Romantic Period (one that he was particularly taken by) as a pertinent example of art that had not been ‘composed’ so as to perform a ‘public function’, hence it managed to preserve its aesthetic essence by opposing the heteronomy of political ‘influenza’.
Even though Adorno himself was profoundly affected by revolutionary Marxism (a shared trait with other intellectuals reared in the decades of the Great Depression and Hitler’s totalitarian rule over Germany), in the sections of the Aesthetic Theory focusing on the relationship between art and society, he sets out to reject the idea of ‘politically committed art’ as postulated by two other leading western European intellectuals at the time (Bertold Brecht and Jean-Paul Sartre), since he dismissed their acquiescence of art’s political platform. It is Adorno’s belief that
art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not communication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced without being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art’s immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared. Nothing social in art is immediately social, not even when this is its aim. […]
what is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless in that they are things. (226-227)
In that respect, true art allows room for the exploration of social conflicts, since it does not claim to have removed itself entirely from the purview of society. Nonetheless, according to Adorno, true art, i.e., ‘autonomous art’, disavows the occasion(s) to be profusely ‘edited’ so that it satisfies a social norm/standard, such as the depiction of social life as a well-balanced and evocative entirety.
Adorno then proceeds to employ the metaphor of Leibniz’s monad (i.e., monads are essentially perceived as entities, individual and internally dynamic unities, windowless in their capacity not to affect one another and simultaneously acting as individual reflective surfaces to the universe’s wholeness), translating it to the realm of art, so as to establish each work of art as one such monad. Concurrently, Adorno positions each work of ‘autonomous art’ as a monadic symbol awaiting its interpretation, drawing attention to socially volatile spaces without conforming itself to the singularity of a ‘resounding message’ (as he views the case with ‘politically committed art’).
In other words, ‘true art’ can question social dynamics by inviting/initiating practices that are found in opposition to socially approved practices (Adorno points to the work of Arnold Schoenberg), or by ‘exposing’ the out-of-the-ordinary elements/segments within everyday affairs (Adorno zooms on the work of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, respectively). Adorno sees this Kafkaesque and Beckettian approach as a highly effective form of literary ‘subversion’ (meaning, a stylistic ruse of content via form), one that very much like Leibniz’s monads demonstrates the aporious nature of contemporary social life. This aporious quality of contemporary lifestyle, in turn, is hidden away from our false consciousness, since it (our false consciousness) allows the make-up of the social situation to permeate our existence by equating it with something that has been ‘naturally given’ as a fundamentally realistic element to/of social structure. That is to say, both Kafka and Beckett (and here I would like to add on to the list Arthur Miller and his artistic ‘subversions’) confront this (false) consciousness by situating in a literary work of art the knowledge of social ambiguities/inconsistencies/negations/oppositions that serve to challenge, perhaps indirectly, our linear understanding of social practices. In Adorno’s view, this constitutes the only feasible way for ‘autonomous art’ to engage itself in the ‘battles’ of aesthetic opposition.
Adorno also makes a clear distinction between his notion of what ‘autonomous art’ is and the ‘l’art pour l’art’ aesthetics, in that, the latter (while asserting a self-imposed stance from a vile reality) are unable to question the reality they propose to dismiss and stand aside from, thus resorting to mere periods of ineffectual let-up. This assumption brings Adorno’s exploration of art’s autonomy and its relationship to social forces full circle, as he once again asserts the relevance of treating art as the end-product of the existing divide between intellectual and physical labor. While arguing in favor of ‘autonomous art’s’ superiority, one that is closely tied to ‘autonomous art’s’ critical endeavors, he does not fail to ascertain that it is precisely due to art’s coming-about-as-the-resulting-effect-of-labor-division that it effectuates society’s potential for political, cultural, artistic change.
Along those lines, I propose a reading of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible as an ‘autonomous art-work’, a history play, which offers the audience (present and past) an alternative way to be constructively critical of social normativity and its tightening grip on otherwise ‘liberated’ politics of art’s cultural legitimacy. Although Adorno’s somewhat lassiez-faire view of art (that is strong enough to transcend the pettiness of map lines and time slots) tends to blur the historical specificity of the time we live in, thus striking out as a rather insufficient methodological tool to relate the reality of multiple political, social and historical forces engaged in the process called ‘contemporary American theatre’, when addressing Miller’s The Crucible as one poignant example of a dramatic ‘monad’, Adorno’s aesthetics prove quite invaluable.
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