Art’s “double character” and its critical potential against total society in Adorno

Abstract

The paper analyzes the reciprocal mediation of art and society, to show how Adorno interprets the aesthetic as the last possibility of spontaneous and critical human expression within the reified world of advanced capitalism as dehumanizing “total society”. Art, for Adorno, fits paradigmatically into the dialectic between participation to and divergence from the social totality, as it is marked by a “double character”. On the one hand, art takes place in the material and empirical society, while, on the other, by virtue of its ineliminable reference to the “nonidentical”, it maintains a marginal range of autonomy. Art can thus become immanent critique and, when not politicized and traced back to ideology, one of the last possible forms of opposition and resistance to the (social) existent.