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Adorno: art & mimesis « Previous
February 12, 2007

I've always found the category of 'mimesis 'in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory elusive. It was very very elusive in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. I appreciate that it is a counter rationality to the hegemony of instrumental rationality, but I have always found his aesthetic rationality difficult to pin down, due to the complexities around the paradoxes and contradictions. So I was pleased to come across Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory by Amresh Sinha.

He says that art takes refuge in mimesis in order to escape from the irrationality of the death-like intensity of the reified world:


Mimesis, in Adorno, mediates between two elements: life and death. In such a dialectical context, if we assume that art's survival in the midst of its potential annihilation by the bureaucratic irrationality of the world depends on the fact that it must partake in the process of rationality, which itself is the reason for its irrationality, then its relation to death is what is manifested as its relation to life. Despite the historical fact that art emerged gradually from the fetters of magical principles, it cannot simply go back to its natural origin, when faced with the rational composition of the irrational, reified, bourgeois world. It is already a part of it. Art's emergence from the shackles of the magic world testifies to its rational principle. But it does not fully indicate the separation of subject from the object. For Adorno, the "varying positions" of art signifies two distinct features. In the first place, the work of art is endowed with the principle of rationality, which indicates its separation from the dominance of the magico-mythical realm; secondly, art also stands in opposition to the rationality, the real domination. In both instances the actual process of art is "inextricably intertwined with rationality" (AT, 80).

I presume art standing in opposition to the rationality, the real domination, refers to instrumental rationality and not rationality per se, since art is a form of rationality--an aesthetic rationality.


Sinha says that:


The dialectic of mimesis and rationality reveals the compatible but irreconcilable tendency of one to the other. Art's mimetic character is revealed in its disenchantment from and secularization of magic from the archaic period. It thus conveys the rational side of art, as well as its refusal to allow the domination of rationality to turn it into a technological perfect being. In art the resistance is felt in both directions as nothing but the mute suffering of its expression. For neither does its mimetic rationality permit it to regress to the magical realm, in order to separate itself from that type of cognition which aims at a singular conceptual grasp of the world, nor the knowledge of the "magical essence" let it slide towards the destruction of its self-identity.

So modern art swings in the wind between its alienation from magic and ritual and from instrumental rationality.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 07:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The article was awkwardly written, at times, it seemed to me, barely in English. But its author did get the fundamental point right: "mimesis" for Adorno is a mode of behaviour, of a responsive, receptive sort, and not primarily a matter of representation. That's the key point because not only is mimesis the point of transmission of the external world and its objective social and natural processes to "subjectivity" and the pre-subjective objectivity of the embodied "subject", but, as an involutary spontaneity, it connects up with what is virtually the foundational concept of Kantian, and hence German Idealism, namely, spontaneity, conceived as the originary "freedom" of the subject/mind/spirit, by which it transcendentally constitutes the world. In other words, Adorno deploys "mimesis", as at once the exteriority of and the antipode to the rationalized "subject" with its knowledge of self and world derived from and shaped by its intrication in objective processes of rationalization, "strategically" to deconstruct the at once inflated, conflated and inverted conception of knowledge and "free will", human agency, and their interrelation, bound up in the illusory performance of transcendental constitution on the part of idealist metaphysics/reigning ideology. Under such idealist metaphysics, knowledge of the world, theoretical cognition, is subtended by the moral-practical will, "freedom", and becomes a drive to the rational mastery of the world, while the "end" of freedom becomes the will to knowledge, entirely determined by the objective "necessity"of such knowledge, and hence subjected to the given order of the world that it illusorily "constitutes", effectively converting into its opposite. It is because mimesis is at once spontaneous, involuntary, and pre-subjective, yet, at the same time curiously aligned with both the founding conception/intention of German idealism and with objective processes of rationalization by which the world is "constituted", that it picks apart the distorted conception and formation of both knowledge and agency. So then wouldn't "Aesthetic Theory" be a kind of occluded and absented conception of practical reason, an anti-and-post-epistemolgical ethics aimed at retrieving knowledge, agency and the objective world from the domineering will to knowledge?

Posted by: john c. halasz | February 14, 2007 10:22 PM