T.W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970): Combining strands from Kant, Hegel, and Marx, this text repeatedly engages in dialectics of form and content to conclude that modern art is philosophically significant. Due to its autonomous nature, modern art provides a space for aesthetic production that incorporates disparate aspects of human experience, challenges existing social conditions, and concomitantly presents utopian notions of freedom.

Adorno writes for an audience concerned with intersections between philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, the death of religion, and the crisis of meaning in modern society. He assumes his audience is familiar with “modern” art produced in the West since 1910, theories of Western philosophy, and the body of work originating more or less with Sigmund Freud.

Deeply concerned that Eurocentric discussions regarding the meaning of human existence are headed in the wrong direction, Adorno disagrees to some extent with ideas advanced by Marx and Benjamin that art should serve primarily as a political tool. Referencing Hegel, Adorno notes that art is never static and is always becoming; it changes over time and through different cultural constructions. The dialectic of art resembles Marx's social/labor dialectic as they both have the same teleology (7), but art is an autonomous entity, as a "momentary standing still," and as a fractured social artifact (9, 10).

Adorno wrestles here with nihilism. He wants to call attention to modern art, primarily visual work and drama, and its inherent ability to authentically engage with a crisis of meaning. He challenges the utility of psychoanalytic theory because he feels that alienation and the desire to bring about a better world are more than a purely subjective language of the unconscious. He also finds Kant's work to be too limiting because it focuses on a concept of disinterestedness, which ignores the central importance of satisfaction and pleasure with respect to aesthetic experience. Modern art can speak directly to domination or repression, and the fact that social conditions deny happiness, but it can simultaneously promise that happiness does indeed lie elsewhere (17). Adorno is calling attention to this phenomenon as a way to redeem the site of art as a space for meaning or signification, to move intellectual thinking away from the view that art only serves as a space of pure negation.


Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1977) : Building upon Adorno’s work, Marcuse affirms that art is revolutionary, but he argues that art’s ability to be autonomous allows art to function as an ideology, rather than as just a political, class-reconfiguring kind of tool. Art can resist social oppression, but then also transcend this same repression (or sublimate it) to re-present new sensibilities of pleasure and freedom.

Marcuse assumes his audience has an intimate familiarity with Adorno’s work and Marxist theory. His analysis works primarily through literature and drama to explore the specific qualities of art that transcend socio-historical contexts of production and still allow this medium to present or enact universal principles. He agrees that art can change political consciousness, but he wants to demonstrate that art can also change more fundamental, more “inward” aspects of human consciousness and he reminds his audience that both kinds of transformation are important steps toward achieving true liberation. Essentially, Marcuse wants Marxism to address basic human needs for beauty (fulfillment, tranquility, freedom) and sensation (including the erotic and pleasure).

I was drawn to Marcuse’s invocation of Proust, the way that Marcuse highlighted art’s motivating ability to preserve a remembrance of things past—its ability to memorialize moments of gratification and happiness or pleasure, as well as moments of human failure. Can this really happen if art (in infinite forms) is not in general circulation? Can this happen if art is only available as a discourse for the privileged, or a privileged leisure class?

I also have questions regarding the specific examples of art each author seems to be valuing. If I am reading Adorno correctly, not all forms of modern art fit within his analysis, and Marcuse does not seem to like Warhol too much. I am trying to identify specific examples of art that can function in form and content as the kind of universal envisioned by Adorno and Marcuse. At the same time, classifications and taxonomies are dangerously limiting and it seems that both authors were very careful to avoid this trap. Thoughts?

Thar She Blows:
The Bayside Middle School Sixth Grade Band Performance

As I entered the stark white gym last Thursday night, I encountered a familiar cacophony: the loud buzz of friendly chatter, the muted whine of over-tired babies, younger siblings squabbling noisily over seats or toys, and the erratic clank of metal chairs as they hit each other or were scraped against the newly waxed gym floor. A few minutes before 7pm, these sounds diminished as the Sixth Grade Band entered the gym in more or less single-file fashion, and ascended the rickety portable stage. During this drawn-out opening, many parents repositioned themselves to get better phone or video shots, and this reshuffling caused some further commotion, but the noisy swell died down as Mrs. White came out from behind a (dusty) purple curtain and waved to the audience.

When the Band Director, also known to the assembled parents as Carol White, assumed the stage, forty-seven members of her Sixth Grade Band fidgeted nervously in their seats. As they lifted their instruments (almost) in unison to begin their concert, looks of unease and uncertainty were shared among a number of the band members. These glances could have been attributed, in part, to the anxiety of performing live and perhaps even the mandatory dress code. Many of the young gentlemen seemed to be chafing almost unconsciously against the obligatory “shirt-and-tie” attire, while many young women pulled at the hems of their skirts, as if to reassure themselves that critical parts of their bodies were indeed, appropriately covered. However, as I noted this fidgeting, I remembered an earlier conversation with my own little timpani player. Apparently Mrs. White had been yelling quite frequently this week. It seems that her most acerbic comments had been aimed at the boys in the trumpet section who had failed to cease their "endless chatter" and needed to pay more attention to matters at hand. Perhaps this lack of musicality remained a lingering concern for the largely female woodwind section as they raised their instruments to start their first number, “Thar She Blows,” which was referenced in my fuzzy, xeroxed concert program as an “Old English Sailing Tune, Composer Unknown.”

Listening to the tune (a term employed carefully throughout this text), I began to think about the middle school concert as a social ritual that necessarily bonded the Bayside community together, but also functioned a cipher. The quality of music these families came to hear mattered much less than the affirmation of culture that this performance and its “dressed-up” players represented. The music seemed to be a secondary consideration, if not completely unimportant, to many members of the audience. Being seen, being in attendance, being part of a community that enjoyed watching a band, all of these considerations seemed to be far more important than any specific aesthetic aspect of this concert experience. Certainly, on an individual level, many parents would be happy to report that they encouraged musical training and that they supported their son or daughter’s need or desire to develop “an ear for music,” but during this more universal moment, as long as Mrs. White kept directing, and the children kept producing something, the audience seemed to be pleased.

As the band moved on to their “Disney Medley,” I think began to think about concepts of beauty, taste, and creative labor. I wondered whether this kind of middle school musicianship is a hybrid form of play and work, some frightening amalgamation of free play and repressive authority. It seemed to me that the trumpet players were leering at each other and racing through their sections, off tempo and happy to be so. The percussion section was counting out loud, trying desperately to stay together, and Mrs. White’s arms were pumping furiously in an effort to catch everyone’s gaze. A few audience members were laughing, but many were simply smiling (not grimacing) and in several rows, a number of people--mostly grandparents--were leaning forward to listen more attentively.

After ending with a strain of music slightly reminiscent of the theme song from “Beauty and the Beast,” several members of the Sixth Grade Band Woodwind Section walked up to the microphone to introduce the Band’s final two numbers (“Theme from Halo 3” and Adapted Selections from “Phantom of the Opera”). As they spoke, I realized that there were some very complicated structures at issue here as well. To engage her students’ interests in the music which they may, or may not strive to play, Mrs. White needed to pander to consumer trends and well-accepted consumptive practices. Few parents seemed to be too concerned about this uncomfortable intersection between the economic and the artistic.

Certainly most Bayside families, if asked, might have considered this concert ritual to be an affirmation of free will and democratic tradition. At the individual level, each family fundamentally believed that their child possessed the potential to become some kind of musician. Each family fundamentally believed that their child contained within them some kind of artistic aptitude that could be brought forth and developed. This ability would not be a question of inheritance, entitlement, or capacity, but more a question of access. Attending a school which provided this kind of opportunity could be seen by many in the audience as affirmation of the right kind of social development a free society should foster for its citizens. And certainly, disturbing questions related to access and equal opportunity would not be raised this evening. Nor would there be any references to pluralism or multiculturalism. During the seven years that I have been attending Bayside Middle School Concerts, I cannot remember hearing even one selection that might be considered a departure from the Western Canon.

I was jolted from these thoughts as the concert concluded, and a sweating Mrs. White thanked the audience for “supporting” the Sixth Grade Band. She clutched the yellow carnations wrapped in green plastic that had been presented to her by the PTO President, and walked off stage. Before I left the building, I could see her solid frame pushing the kettle drum back to the Band Room. And then I began to wonder; perhaps in Carol White's dreams, she is conducting, rather than directing, and the audience can not only see, but hear, if only for a brief and fleeting moment.

Josef Chytry, “The Aesthetic State” (1989): This text examines the aesthetic dimensions of Marx’s theories developed in connection with his vision of a post-capitalist society. Chytry explores Marx’s reworking of Hegel (and Schiller) to arrive at a definition of the aesthetic as a concept of creative labor that has the capacity to unify distinct aspects of human experience: man and nature/reason and spirit/mind and body/individual and community.

Working beyond a perception that particular dimensions of Marx’s work may have limited applicability today, Chytry maintains that the enduring power of Marx lies within his imaginative reworking of the aesthetic. Creative labor, as an aesthetic experience, becomes the foundational aspect of a post-capitalist society. According to Marx as read through Chytry, creative labor operates as a form of “free-life expression,” provides enjoyment, and evidences uniqueness or individuality. It moves from the particular to the universal as its authentic modes of production necessarily cultivate all five human senses, unify individuals with communities, and provide a critical space for personal or social freedom.

Chytry hopes to persuade contemporary scholars to reexamine Marx’s work and identify ways that Marx’s thoughts on the aesthetic might help to shape current debates regarding what it may mean to achieve personal fulfillment and social harmony in an alienated, transnational, globalized world. I think Chytry’s project reads Marx to fully humanize or “concretize” the aesthetic, moving this concept away from it strong connections to mind or spirit, and re-defining the aesthetic as a very particular, and a very universal kind of bodily experience.

I would like to explore aspects of Chytry’s discussion that address techne, technique, and art—how these three terms inform, work against, or complicate Marx’s notions of the aesthetic and creative labor.

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Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production” (1936):
Benjamin is writing to an audience that is growing increasingly concerned about the rise of repressive, totalitarian political regimes, particularly Nazism and Facism. He notes that through photography and film, art can become unmoored from its temporal origin (with its entire cultural heritage, including ritual) and begin to serve as a political instrument in order to reach larger and larger audiences (the masses).

Benjamin discusses the ambiguous nature of these new technologies, for he notes that, unlike lithography or the printing press, these new forms of reproduction cause an absence of original presence which means that the unique “aura” experienced when one encounters any particular object of art is lost. Nonetheless, there is so much at stake at this point in human history that the ability to reach/influence the masses is a critical project; communism must respond by politicizing art, by using the aesthetic as a political weapon to establish new political, social, and economic structures. Film is particularly useful because it is transportable, mutable, addresses individual concerns, and remains universally engaging.