Aesthetics and Critical Theory

Critical theory, a prominent strand of Western Marxism, is associated with the Frankfurt School and has had a significant impact on aesthetics and art-critical contexts. Its main contributors include Walter Benjamin in his influential essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936), and Theodor W. Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory (1970).

Benjamin's essay suggests that the function of artwork has changed as the conditions of production under industrial capitalism have changed. He suggests that it has taken some time for changes at the superstructural (cultural) level to manifest the implications of the changes at the substructural (economic) level, which Marx analysed in the nineteenth century. The key factor in this change is the technique of mechanical reproduction. Benjamin classifies these techniques as forms of manual reproduction and asserts that with mechanical reproduction, something significantly new has developed.

The aura of a work, which is the unique presence of the original exuding a distinct time and place, is lost through mechanical reproduction. This aura gives a work its authenticity and makes it possible to distinguish between an authentic original and a forgery. With arts such as photography and film, it no longer makes sense to draw distinctions between reproductions from a photographic negative, as one reproduction from a photographic negative is no more or less authentic than another.

Benjamin also believes that this change has the effect of extracting the artwork from tradition. The uniqueness of a work means that it is imbedded in a fabric of tradition, and this traditional uniqueness is associated with the anthropological basis of artworks in ritual. Benjamin uses Marx's categories of use value and exchange value to suggest that ritual or cult value is the original use value of an artwork.

With the advent of mechanical reproduction, artworks are finally liberated from this cult value and take on an "exhibition value." Copies are put into mass circulation, exhibited far more widely than would be possible with an authentic original. This accords with a broader social and cultural phenomenon of 'the mass', a sense of the universal equivalence and exchangeability of all things in the social domain.

Benjamin asserts that human modes of perception are historically transformable, and the arts of mechanical reproduction are altering our perceptions of the world. Techniques in photography and film, such as close-up and slow motion, introduce new perceptions and knowledges as they capture things entirely unknown to the naked eye.

Benjamin suggests that as art loses its ritual or cult value, it takes on a political value, and the concepts it develops can be useful for a revolutionary communist politics of art.

Adorno's reflections on art and culture emerged from a disagreement with Benjamin over the democratizing potentials of radio and film. He agrees with Benjamin that contemporary developments in society and the arts challenge modern and romantic aesthetics but has a more pessimistic view of the mass media 'culture industry'. Adorno argues that popular culture is complicit with the contemporary social system of capitalist exploitation, which he analyses as a culmination of the logic of 'instrumental rationality' devolving from the Enlightenment. In this system, human beings are radically alienated from nature through the project of manipulation and control of the natural world, leading to a 'new barbarism' in which we are psychologically dominated by the very system which was supposed to set us free.

The culture industry acts as an ideological support of this system, keeping people blind to the real conditions of their existence. However, Adorno saw more positive potentials in 'genuine' art, particularly experimental modernism. Through extensive writings on musicology, literature, and the visual arts, Adorno contributed one of the most important bodies of work in continental aesthetics, culminating in his last book, Aesthetic Theory.

Aesthetic Theory deliberately employs strategies which resist any easy summation of the work into simply stated concepts and theses. Adorno developed a paratactic style of writing on the model of atonal music, in which sentences clash with each other to dissonant effect, rather than developing a clear line of argument. He deploys his own 'negative' dialectical style of thinking, in which pairs of contrasting concepts 'constellate' around topics of discussion without resolving into static propositions and conclusions.

Several key themes are evident in the context of the broader tradition of aesthetics in continental philosophy. First, Aesthetic Theory is a critical interrogation of the tradition of philosophical aesthetics itself, especially as exemplified by the works of Kant and Hegel. Adorno seeks to rethink such categories critically rather than simply abandoning the legacy of the aesthetic tradition.

Second, Adorno asserts the autonomy of the artwork, insisting that the aesthetic value of an artwork is independent of other values ascribed to it, such as epistemological or ethical value. This claim has often been misinterpreted to mean that artworks should be understood to be entirely unrelated to their social context or political value.

Finally, Adorno sees artworks as'monads', products of the social conditions in which they are created and mirror these social conditions within them. He argues that the most politically relevant artworks are those that best reflect the deeply conflicted conditions of contemporary culture, such as the atonal compositions of Arnold Schoenberg or the absurdist literature of Samuel Beckett.