Pleasing Shapes and Other Devilry: An Adornian Investigation of La Pocha Nostra Praxis

Abstract

Beauty, for Adorno, if it can exist at all, will not be created out of the (failed) idealism of society, rather it will be born of contradiction. In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno rejects idealist aesthetics because it offers false consolations to a society that is inherently corrupted. Yet despite the “uncertainty over what purpose it serves,” art “is condemned to provide the world […] with a consolation that […] strengthens the spell of that which the autonomy of art wants to free itself” (Aesthetic Theory, Adorno 2). Art is expected to do the one thing that it cannot and must not do, namely to offer consolation. Only autonomous beauty can succeed and it does so by not serving society at all: it succeeds as it fails to produce an illusion; this, he says, is the true goal of the beautiful. This paradox, however, does not suggest that the beautiful ought to be abandoned altogether “because the concept of the beautiful is not a mere intellectual error but is itself closely bound up with the dialectic of enlightenment” (Jarvis, Adorno 110). A cancellation of the concept of beauty would neglect Enlightenment’s failed universal values, and thus “it is only on the basis of redemption, rather than liquidation, of [beauty and art’s] illusion, that it becomes possible to imagine freedom from illusion” (116).