The effect of reality and the politics of fiction. Notes on the aesthetic model of politics in Th. Adorno

Abstract

The art-political relationship was one of the central theoretical points of the Frankfurt school, most recognized in some of its members as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Theodor Adorno's aesthetic stance, however, has been recognized for rejecting such a direct relationship between social praxis and artistic praxis. This argument, based on the interpretation of the autonomous nature of art as opposed to the political potential of technical reproducibility for its massification, left Adorno's aesthetic reflections on the development of contemporary art history, criticism and philosophy behind. This is the point I want to make here. I intend to show how the critical model of artistic praxis as political praxis is postulated in the adornian aesthetic, so much so that in the Aesthetic Theory of Adorno an aesthetic of the political can be found, an idea under which a great part of the current discourses on contemporary art are constructed.