Abstract

A philosophical elaboration of Theodor Adorno's conception of aesthetic form. Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented through a reconstruction of the major concepts in his Aesthetic Theory and via the projects of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics. The dissertation argues that the nature of social and political institutions and ideologies is best revealed through an analysis of the critical social function embodied in aesthetic form. Artworks occupy such a ripe critical position--both in society and in aesthetic theory that confronts what is specifically social in form--because of the way in which artworks simultaneously instantiate and deny socially constructed reality. Modernist art represents a key moment in the history of aesthetic form because it presents the seeming impossibility of artworks asserting any meaning. ;A central task of the dissertation is to show how aesthetic form might resolve the problem of enlightenment, that is, whether and precisely how artworks might overcome the dilemma of reason being always complicit in power and domination. The concept of aesthetic appearance is examined in light of what Adorno terms the crisis of semblance in order to reveal how aesthetic form is the potential transcendence of instrumental rationality. ;The dissertation is situated within the German tradition of Kant and Hegel's aesthetic theories, in which notions of beauty and the sublime have an emphatic relationship to the constitution and form of subjectivity. The concept of the ugly is examined as a specifically modernist phenomenon that represents the aesthetic return of repressed nature. The primary concepts through which Adorno's aesthetic theory is presented include mimesis, exchange, sacrifice and identity. ;The final third of the dissertation consists of arguments against the contemporary philosophical theorists of postmodernism: Jurgen Habermas, Frederic Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Peter Burger and Albrecht Wellmer. It is argued that each of these writers fails to confront, or misreads, the core arguments and insights of Adorno's aesthetic theory.