Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

Although the critical theory of Theodor Adorno has experienced a revival since the 1990s, what has been revived is not so much Adorno’s Marxism as his aesthetics.¹ In keeping with the late twentieth-century movement defending aesthetic critique and rejecting sociohistorical and political analyses, critics take the critical negativity of his aesthetics to oppose the poststructuralist methods of Michel Foucault and others as well as the “identity politics” of feminists, gays, African Americans, and multiculturalists.² To an extent, the critics are right: in Adorno’s view, instrumental reason imposes a repressive political domination on social institutions and grants subversive force to speculative theory or high art, not to the women’s or the black liberation movement. Foucault, by contrast, rejects such aesthetic critique and describes the positive import and historical development or “genealogy” of governmental technologies, which supports, critics say, feminist or multicultural movements (see McNay and Sawicki). The trouble is, however, that Adorno’s aesthetics and Foucault’s genealogies parallel the onto-theology of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, what Adorno terms instrumental reason and Heidegger terms “equipmental” thinking in order to describe the customs, prejudices, or “being” dominating social life.