Review: Reanimating Critical Thinking

Art is imitation only to the extent to which it is objective expression, far removed from psychology. There may have been a time long ago when this expressive quality of the objective world generally was perceived by the human sensory apparatus. It no longer is. Expression nowadays lives on only in art. Through expression art can keep at a distance the moment of being-for-other which is always threatening to engulf it. Art is thus able to speak in itself. This is the realization through mimesis. Art’s expression is the antithesis of ‘expressing something.’ Mimesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance.” - Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

“Rationality is immanent to art, and this rationality is in many ways similar to the rationality of the outside world, but it is also, at the same time, different from the rationality of the conceptual order. No artistic work can exist in complete isolation from the “rationality governing the world outside,” yet it may not reproduce or imitate the strictures of the governing logic that condemns it for having irrational features. What appears as irrational expression in art in the “eyes” of the conceptual ordering is actually the expression of the “forgotten experiences” that themselves cannot be understood by “rationalizing them.”” - Amresh Sinha.

Amresh Sinha at http://www.wbenjamin.org/mimesis.html#fn1#fn1 begins to elucidate the critical distinction between the rational and irrational which has the capacity to rebuke the trend towards “spirituality” as a commodity fetish and to open up a “new” rationalism in the order of Spinoza’s mind body connection revealing the limitations of dualistic thinking which has been appropriated by the trend of nouveau humanists / spiritualist / capitalists to romanticize spirit while negating the relationship of real and imagined lives. He goes on to say, “ The artworks reach the highest stage of their vulnerability at the moment when they seek to transcend the limit set by their own principle of negativity, a boundary that expresses the negation that “each and every work…seems to say: non confundar” … “That the strength of artworks lies in the fact that they can transcend the limit also makes them, at that point, the most vulnerable to their own deception and fictitiousness. For the artwork’s truth content lies not in communicating something other than itself; rather it is a mediation, a “participation,” in history. The great works of art do not transcend the boundary of their own illusion, because their illusion represents their truth, an illusion of truth, i.e., their falsity. Aesthetic truth transcends illusion, but the artworks themselves are illusory.”–Jonathan Genkin