The Transcendental Economy of Aesthetic Autonomy

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The Transcendental Economy of Aesthetic Autonomy

Richard Stopford

Preface

I have approached the complex issue of aesthetic autonomy through the lens of Adorno’s analysis of Kant. Specifically, my focus rests upon scattered remarks he makes about Kantian subjectivity in the idiom of economics. The recasting of key elements in Kant’s thinking in economic terms seems intended to reveal aspects of the theory which may otherwise remain obscured. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that these remarks convey some of what Adorno sees as ‘truth-content’ of Kant’s work. That is, they help us to see how Kant’s philosophy reflects important features of the socio-historical environment within which Kant was working.

In this piece, these remarks are drawn together and developed to provide the basis for a more systematic, ‘economic’ treatment of this aspect of Kant’s view. The analysis is divided into three parts. I consider what Adorno means by the truth-content of Kant’s philosophy. From that I turn to the economic account proper which is then divided into two further sections. First, I consider the ‘transcendental economy’ of Kantian subjectivity and its autonomy; I then use this analysis to situate the ‘transcendental economics’ of this subject’s aesthetic experience and its autonomy.

Adorno’s view appears to be as follows. Kant has reified a particular socio-historical configuration of bourgeois subjectivity in the form of a transcendentally necessary account of human subjectivity as such. Here, reifi-cation suggests a sort of fixity which denies the vitality and particularity of the entity in question. Second, despite failing to account for the dynamic and fluid nature of human subjectivity, this particular reification is a function of the developing bourgeois world and a capitalist division of labour.

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198 Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy

These points inflect the view of aesthetic experience and autonomy. Kant’s aesthetics brings clear advances to the discipline, yet, for Adorno, his theory of aesthetic experience is wedded to heteronomous commitments concerning the transcendental conception of subjectivity as such. These commitments inhibit the critical aspects of aesthetic experience and are unable to provide an appropriate basis for engaging with autonomous artworks which are, according to him, dialec-tical in character.

My account is the basis for a speculative interpretation of a small number of remarks by Adorno. It is provocative and reflects controversial aspects of his thinking. Nevertheless, it presents a unique and arresting picture of one of the most influential theories in aesthetics. In particular, the account suggests that the very attempt to wrest ourselves from mundane concerns in our appreciation of art is itself an expression of just those influences.

Introduction

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno provides an extensive critique of Kantian aesthetics.1 He focuses on the four moments of the analytic of the beautiful – in particular on the first and second moments; he also considers Kant’s theory of the sublime, particularly the dynamic sublime; and also, Kant’s account of natural beauty.2 In this analysis, he couches a number of remarks within the rhetoric of economics. This analysis rarely pertains to actual economic phenomena; rather, it is used to refer to other, non-economic phenomena relevant to aesthetic analysis such as the structure of the subject and of aesthetic experience. Hence the use of economic language is a device for recasting and reconsidering aesthetic phenomena from a fresh and revealing angle.

These economic comments continue a line of thinking present in his analysis of Kant’s theory of subjectivity in the Critique of Pure Reason3 and suggests critical links across different areas of Kant’s philosophy. Adorno’s comments fit within a tradition of materialist critique which is concerned to resituate theories in the socio-historical conditions from which they have emerged – as opposed to more abstract philosophies which deliberately consider theories and phenomena apart from any socio-historical conditions. He uses this critical model to suggest problematic social commitments concealed beneath the surface of rarified cognitive and aesthetic philosophy.

Unfortunately, his comments are scattered and do not form a systematic treatment. In this chapter a more systematic treatment will be developed,

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The Transcendental Economy of Aesthetic Autonomy 199

working towards an economic analysis of aesthetic phenomena and demon-strating key links to his critique of cognition in the first Critique. It becomes apparent that these economic comments revolve around the structure and consequences of transcendental argument and are relevant primarily to the idea of freedom, or autonomy, in aesthetic experience. Hence this account is referred to here as the ‘transcendental economy of aesthetic autonomy’. The aims of this chapter are threefold. First, to help understand an important component of Adorno’s aesthetics of autonomy from an original perspective. Second, to provide a point of critical departure for analysing Kant’s aesthetics to reveal aspects of Kant’s thinking which are perhaps overlooked in contemporary Kantian scholarship. Finally, a meta-philosophical concern of Adorno’s is considered. While a philosophy may be wrong about its analysis of a particular phenomenon – and Adorno, as we will see, heavily criticizes Kant’s view of the subject, its autonomy and the form of aesthetic experience it engenders – Adorno claims that it may nonetheless be a valid expression of a socio-historical way of thinking. Therefore, a theory may falsify the object of analysis but do so in a way which reveals something true about the world. In that sense, a philosophy may still tell us something true even if we do not hold the theory as such to be true.4

Kant’s transcendentalism and truth-content

In this section we will set up Adorno’s general critical orientation to Kant’s philosophy, to transcendental thinking and to the ‘truth-content’ of this thinking. We see that such concerns focus attention on Kant’s theory of autonomy. Adorno’s key point is that Kant’s theory of the subject, of its autonomy and of its aesthetic experiences may not achieve the transcendental necessity Kant aims for. However, Kant’s ambition, the method, the theoretical goals and the content of the theory itself all tell us something true about the socio-historical moment in which they were produced. This is because, for Adorno, Kant’s philosophy is mediated by the socio-historical context of its production – Enlightenment, and particularly bourgeois, beliefs, aims and method suffuse and motivate the work. Against this meta-philosophical background, the focus and importance of the transcendental economics of aesthetic autonomy may be properly elucidated.

Adorno criticizes the ostensible purity of Kant’s separation of transcendental entities from their material basis.5 A prime example is the Kantian generation of the transcendental self, emancipated from its material conditions:

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The delusion that the transcendental subject is the Archimedean fixed point from which the world can be lifted out of its hinges – this delusion, purely in itself, is indeed hard to overcome altogether by subjective analysis. For contained in this delusion, and not to be extracted from the forms of cognitive mediation, is the truth that society comes before the individual consciousness and before all its experience. (ND: 181)6

It is not always clear what Adorno is referring to when talking about the ‘transcendental subject’; here it will be considered as a reified self consisting in modally necessary features of subjectivity, arrived at through transcendental argument.7 This transcendental subject is contrasted, by Adorno, with the empirical subject which he seems to understand as that about human subjec-tivity which appears to the subject spatio-temporally.8 With those distinctions in mind, we see him resist the Kantian view that any features of subjectivity can be transcendentally abstracted from their material conditions and taken as necessary, universal features of any human subjectivity regardless of changes in the material conditions of empirical subjectivity.

Yet, Adorno acknowledges that the relationship between the empirical self and transcendental aspects of human subjectivity poses a real, yet inelimi-nable, problem for philosophy.9 Hence it is not surprising that Kant should find this relationship problematic and attempt a resolution. Nevertheless, Adorno considers Kant’s treatment of this problem a true expression, as it were, of bourgeois, Enlightenment philosophy; and at least to this extent we can consider Kant’s philosophy to have truth-content.

Adorno believes that Kantian subjectivity and autonomy is an expression of a particular modality of subjectivity and autonomy commensurable with the emergence of the bourgeois subject during the Enlightenment. He denies universal, ahistorical validity to this subject, but, as I have suggested, he thinks there is some truth to the idea in other respects:10

As the extreme borderline case of ideology, the transcendental subject comes close to truth. The transcendental generality is no mere narcissist self-exaltation of the I, not the hubris of an autonomy of the I. Its reality lies in the domination that prevails and perpetuates itself by means of the principle of equivalence. The process of abstraction – which philosophy transfigures, and which it ascribes to the knowing subject alone – is taking place in the factual barter society. (ND: 178)

Notice that the kind of truth conveyed through the transcendental subject is couched in economic terms and according to economic phenomena. What

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is true about this subjectivity is that it both reflects, internally, a principle of equivalence which emerges as an important feature of capitalist socio-political relations, and is the sort of subject required for those relations to operate effectively.

Whether or not Adorno is correct to argue this is moot for this chapter. The intention here is to develop Adorno’s analysis; and we see that he applies the same sort of thinking to the notion of autonomy. Again, for Adorno, Kant’s view of autonomy is commensurable with the developing socio-political and economic arrangements found in burgeoning capitalism:

That there must be freedom is the supreme iniuria committed by the lawmaking autonomous subject. The substance of its own freedom – of the identity which has annexed all nonidentity – is as one with the ‘must,’ with the law, with absolute dominion. This is the spark that kindles the pathos of Kant. He construes even freedom as a special case of causality. To him, it is the ‘constant laws’ that matter. His timid bourgeois detestation of anarchy matches his proud bourgeois antipathy against tutelage. Here, too, society intrudes all the way into his most formal reflections. Formality in itself is a bourgeois trait: on the one hand, it frees the individual from the confining definitions of what has come to be just so, not otherwise, while on the other hand it has nothing to set against things as they are, nothing to base itself upon except dominion, which has been raised to the rank of a pure principle. (ND: 250–1)

There are many controversial claims in this passage; to justify them would take us beyond my purposes here. What is important is that for Adorno there is an intersection between Kant’s transcendental view of freedom and subjectivity, and the socio-historical structures from which such views have emerged. Insofar as they emerge and reflect a particular historical situation, they have ‘truth-content’ even if, for Adorno, they at the same time falsify, in some way, the phenomena they are attempting to explain. Despite Kant’s attempt to philosophize to general, formal principles with the minimal metaphysical and empirical assumptions, Adorno holds that his philosophy is nevertheless socio-historically mediated. That is, even in his most formal moments – when elucidating a priori the necessary conditions of experience, which are seemingly removed and insulated from the contingencies of the empirical world – the empirical world still inflects, motivates and suffuses the philosophy. The attempt to transcendentally separate subjectivity and freedom from their bases in empirical reality is itself indicative of bourgeois consciousness. Our economic analysis will help us to see how this is the case.

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It is well known that the architectonic structure of Kant’s view of transcen-dental subjectivity is key to his philosophical project; that there is a view of autonomy which is also derived transcendentally and which has import and application across Kant’s philosophy.11 The specific application of transcendental thinking to various aspects of subjective agency – cognition and aesthetic experience, for example – reveals important aspects of transcendental autonomy and provides a point of departure for determining the ‘truth-content’ of Kant’s philosophy. Furthermore, given the architectonic structure, we are able to move across applications of transcendental reasoning, from the cognitive to the aesthetic, in a way in which analysis of one reveals important aspects of the other. This being the case, we will now turn to such an analysis, beginning with cognition and moving then to aesthetics, examining both through the lens of Adorno’s economic rhetoric.

Sketch of the transcendental economy of Kantian subjectivity and cognition

It is clear that Adorno sees Kant as having great insight into human subjec-tivity but holds that Kant falters when he reifies the structures of the subject and its relationship to the world. It is in the moments of reification where Kant ultimately comes to favour a particular form of subjectivity, which Adorno sees as a bourgeois form of subjectivity.12 That is, a form which is amenable to bourgeois socio-historical relations and which results in suppression of the mediatedness of the transcendental and empirical realms.

In Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he says the following:

The distinction between thinking and receptivity, sense impressions, is precisely that we do something, we activate ourselves. Because analysis shifts the entire weight of the dynamic, the dynamic character of reality, onto the side of the subject, our world becomes increasingly the product of labour; we might say it becomes congealed labour. And the livelier the subject becomes, the deader the world becomes. (KCPR: 115)

This is a dense and revealing passage. The first claim is reasonably clear. He is referring to the important Kantian notion that cognition requires both the receptivity of sensibility and the spontaneity of the understanding; we need not dwell on this well-known claim here. What is important is the interpretive spin provided by Adorno in the following claim. He suggests that Kantian perception

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and cognition is a form of production, a labour, and that the product is reality. The subject, in its cognitive agency, is a producer par excellence.

How to interpret this second claim is the key to this analysis. The first possible interpretation, which should be dismissed, is that Adorno is attributing to Kant some form of strong ontological idealism; that is, some form of the view that we ‘produce a reality’ in the sense that reality is nothing other the product of our mind. This would be to ascribe to Kant a view that he clearly did not hold. Fortunately this is not Adorno’s claim.13

Rather, we should interpret this idea charitably, as a hermeneutic point about the role of cognition. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes it clear that his emphasis is on the relative importance given to the subject and the object in a cognitive act within a theory of knowledge. His argument is that in Kant’s transcendental philosophy the subject is reified through the universal features of transcendental subjectivity and, given the fact that this subject determines the limits of objectively valid empirical reality,14 the limits of subjective cognition become the limits of objective reality (ND: 91). Not only does Adorno worry that this falsifies the irreducible particularity of the objects of empirical experience, it also fails to account for the dynamic interaction between the subject and object through which both are constitutively transformed. This is a very complex notion. However, the key idea is that objects are not simply as they appear to us, and that we cannot consider epistemology as satisfactory if it merely seeks to secure knowledge of appearances. The socio-historical mediation of objects means that empirical entities are constituted and changing in ways not captured in their appearance. Such a view suggests a theory of knowledge that cannot be accomodated within a transcendental epistemology.

What is important for our purposes here is the notion that the reification of the subject in the form of transcendental subjectivity results in the division of subjectivity into the concrete empirical subject and an abstract self.15

Life becomes polarized, wholly abstract and wholly concrete, although it would be only in the tension between them. The two poles are equally reified, and what is left of the spontaneous subject, the pure apperception, ceases to be a subject; in the hypostatized logicity of a Kantian cogito, detached from any living I, it is covered by the all-controlling rigidity. (ND: 91)

In turn, this division is put to specific philosophical work: to produce a stable fundament and territory within which the subject may control and determine both herself and the empirical world which appears to her. This division is directly relevant to understanding Adorno’s contention that Kantian cognition

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results in a ‘congealed labour’. Given other random remarks which we will be discussing in due course, we are entitled to take Adorno’s thought somewhat literally: cognition is a form of labour. How then could we translate this Marxian influence into the Kantian architectonic of the subject? Taking such a notion seriously it would appear that we derive a division of labour between the empirical self and transcendental selves mentioned above. The transcendental self provides and guarantees the means of production which the empirical self operates to produce a cognitive product from which we can accrue some form of profit. Given Kant’s account of the cognizing subject in the first critique, this profit may be best understood in three parts: first, the objective validity of reality as it appears to us; second, the assurance that cognitive distinctions we make of the world really carve the empirical world at the joints and hence produce entities properly amenable to acquisition and control; third, the acquisition of space and time as something owned, transcendentally speaking, by the subject.

Such a view is confirmed by the following passage:

The essence of the transcendental subject ever since the Critique of Pure Reason has been functionality, the pure activity that occurs in the achievements of individual subjects and surpasses them at the same time. It is a projection of freely suspended labor on the pure subject as its origin. In further restricting the subject’s functionality by calling it empty and void without a fitting material, Kant undauntedly noted that social labor is a labor on something; his more consistent idealistic successors did not hesitate to eliminate this. Yet the gener-ality of the transcendental subject is that of the functional context of society, of a whole that coalesces from individual spontaneities and qualities, delimits them in turn by the levelling barter principle, and virtually deletes them as helplessly dependent on the whole. The universal domination of mankind by the exchange value – a domination which a priori keeps the subjects from being subjects and degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object – makes an untruth of the general principle that claims to establish the subject’s predominance. The surplus of the transcendental subject is the deficit of the utterly reduced empirical subject. (ND: 178)

It was noted earlier that Adorno’s view of mediation and truth-content suggests that Kantian subjectivity, while aiming at a universal subjectivity, is an expression of a notion of subjectivity appropriate to a particular socio-historical moment and therefore is indexed to that moment – albeit a particular moment which believes universal subjectivity to be a possible and desirable entity. Adorno’s recasting of Kantian subjectivity in the above quotation in the mode of particular (i.e. non-universal) forms of economic structures which are then

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transcendentally determined as universals emphasizes the historical mediation of Kantian philosophy. The mediated claim Adorno is interested in making is that this labour theory of subjectivity parallels the labour structure developing within burgeoning capitalism with the bourgeois entrepreneur sublimated within the very structure of subjectivity.

He notes in the above passage that Kant, in the form of the noumenal basis for empirical reality, sets a transcendental limit to the scope and territory of human control of the objective world – this is to be lauded as a real bulwark against the total hegemony of the subject. Nevertheless, Adorno clearly worries that within the objectively valid domain of human control, reality is dominated by the abstract, transcendental subject. A key feature of that subjective dominance is the reduction of the objects of empirical experience to that which is captured in their conceptual representations. The individual, empirical subject is similarly reduced in this division of labour to a worker, designated for operating the transcendental machinery of cognition, the products of which – objec-tively valid, empirical judgements – are typically alienated as mass-produced commodities available for internal and social exchange. The structure of the Kantian subject is as an efficient machine designed to extract maximum surplus value from its prescribed property – the phenomenal world. It is the transcen-dental subject which guarantees the basis from which objective reality may be validly and efficiently processed in cognition; the empirical subject, effectively the worker in this division of labour, is thoroughly undermined within this model of cognition – just as the particularity of the object being cognized is undermined.

We should also note that Adorno calls this cognitive labour ‘congealed’. How should we understand this metaphor and what is its import for the idea? To congeal is to move from a liquid or fluid state into a hardened state. There seem to be two ideas that Adorno has in mind here: one is that when cognizing a particular phenomenon to form a determinative judgement, we reify the phenomenon in order to produce a fixed, objectively valid, determinate cognition; second, if reality were to remain fluid, Kant’s transcendental reasoning would not be able to fix universal features of the human mind. We require the world to be ‘fixed’, in this reified sense, in order to be able to draw fixed conclu-sions about the conditions for that reality and about ourselves. What Kant is then prepared to sacrifice is both a fluid notion of empirical reality and a fluidity in our cognitive relation to that reality in favour of a hardened, reified reality. Such a view enables us to draw transcendental conclusions about the structure of subjectivity which are equally reified. The fact that Adorno explicitly refers to

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Kantian subjectivity as bourgeois – both as a piece of bourgeois philosophy and also a universal exemplar of the idealized bourgeois entrepreneur16 – indicates the socio-historical truth-content of Kantian philosophy.

Objectively valid judgements are formed through the necessary appli-cation of cognitive technology to guarantee a mechanistic process of reality production. These judgements form a real-world capital which may be used to generate further objectively valid ‘pieces’ of knowledge about the world; they are also the basis upon which we are entitled to control the world insofar as the way we think about the world just is the way the empirical world is. The product of our cognitive labour not only determines reality; it would also appear to produce knowledge with clear opportunity for capital growth.

Yet the value which may be derived from these processes relies on their complete systematic determination. Nowhere is this processual fixity more evident than in the case of the imagination. In Kant’s model of cognition, which we are here recasting in economic terms, the processes of the imagi-nation are themselves dominated by the ends of the productive process. Imaginative freedom is anathema to profitable production on the basis of its inappropriateness for producing determinate results: the quantitative ineffi-ciency of unrestricted processings and also the potential qualitative diversity of our imaginings are unruly cognitions, ripe for generating productive ineffi-ciency.17 To safeguard against such productive lapses, the imagination in Kantian cognition is placed under strict process guidelines: the imagination packages atomistic appearances, according to the prescribed rules for efficient production, ready for conceptual processing.18 The Kantian model of cognition has, built into its streamlined transcendental structure, the minimal necessary processes and technology required to produce objectively valid knowledge.

A defining characteristic of determinative cognition is the intense interest the subject takes in the object. In Kantian terms, this interest takes a number of forms. Foreshadowing his aesthetic analysis, the interest may be understood by the conceptual determination of a sensible representation as such-and-such a kind of thing, i.e. we take an interest in what sort of thing the object is, an interest made explicit by conceptualization itself. Economically inflected, the interest also takes the form of interest qua profit. Knowing what sort of thing an object is and being entitled to think of that object as such a kind of thing enables the cognizer to bring the object into the complex web of empirical judgements. Once conceptually assimilated in this way the object may then be mined as an epistemic resource, which transforms the singular object, in all its obstinate, inefficient particularity, into a generalized form about which many generalized

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judgements may be made. Hence we take an interest in what the object is and our interests are served by generalizing over the particular through conceptual assimilation. This is the proper means for the efficient mining of profit from any one particular judgement. The object must be unambiguously determined as ready for its assimilation into the exchange character of conceptual analysis within which the surplus value of the cognition may be realized. As Adorno says, the primary aim of identity thinking is to produce a model of cognition within which the empirical object may be identified with its conceptual determination. This reaches its apotheosis in the Kantian transcendental model whereby the general concept operates as the thing-in-itself.19 As much as Adorno criticizes Kant for this form of ‘identity-thinking’ – briefly, promoting the general concept of the particular as sufficient for the representation of the particular – he does laud Kant for placing some form of limit on this sufficiency. We will return to this below when considering aesthetic experience.

The preceding analysis helps structure a more unified account from a few scattered remarks about the nature of Kantian cognition as if it were an economy. We can now use this analysis to reconsider aspects of Adorno’s critique of aesthetic autonomy and its relation to the architectonic of Kantian subjectivity in general.

A transcendental economy of aesthetic autonomy

Just as we found that the resituating of the Kantian account of cognition in economic terms revealed interesting ways to consider the truth-content of Kant’s theory of the subject, the same is true when recasting aesthetic experience in economic terms. Adorno argues that while Kant discovered key insights for a genuinely modern aesthetics, his theory is unable to properly account for the objective autonomy of artworks. Critical light may be cast on these ideas through the outlining of aesthetic autonomy within economic terms.

We are told in the the ‘analytic of the beautiful’ that the formal character of the objects of experience are purposive, and that form is normally assimi-lated within the processes of conceptual determination in objectively valid judgements.20 In the case of aesthetic experience, that purpose is treated ‘purposelessly’:21 the imagination does not determine the manifold presen-tation according the concept of the object but ‘plays’ with the form of the object.22 That is, the imagination is freed from its objective role in the labour process of cognition and is, effectively, granted leisure time. The free play of the

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imagination and the understanding affords the subject an alternative mode of experience whereby it is able to take pleasure just in the productive processing possibilities of its own cognitive technology. As the mind plays with the form of representation, the subject of an aesthetic experience of the beautiful allows its faculties free reign to multiply the representational content of any particular experience.

Crucially, the subject experiences a pleasure from the play of its faculties. It is not obvious, however, why this should be the case. Kant’s thought seems to be that there is a pleasure which we can take in the ‘over-sufficiency’ of our cognitive resources for processing appearances. There is also a pleasure which we can take in the multiple productions of that technology in the experience of the beautiful.23 In short, aesthetic experience, while disinterested, is a moment of self-enjoyment hooked on to the external world only as a foil for our own further self-regard. It is only indirectly that the object can be pleasurable as a source of such appearances and it is not pleasurable in virtue of what it is in itself.

Adorno notes the complex dialectic of interest in Kantian aesthetic experience which is suppressed beneath the transcendental account of disinterestedness. There is a twofold satisfaction in aesthetic experience: the self-satisfaction taken in the unlimited potential of human subjectivity and the taboo pleasure taken in the object which facilitates this experience.

For the more art is dominated throughout by subjectivity and must show itself to be irreconcilable with everything pre-established, the more that subjective reason – the formal principle itself – becomes the canon of aesthetics. This formal principle, obedient to subjective lawfulness regardless of what is other to it, and unshaken by its other, continues to give pleasure: In it subjectivity, unconscious of itself, enjoys the feeling of power. (AT: 62–3)

Hence it is through the aesthetic mode of experience that the limitations placed on determinative judgement are loosened such that the subject is able to enjoy the infinite capabilities and opportunities afforded to it by its own technological resources. For the bourgeois subject, aesthetic experience is literally the reward at the end of the day for a hard day’s cognitive labour and for which no more capital investment in technology is required. While the entrepreneur sets his or her resources to work for the generation of capital gain, they are precluded from taking a satisfaction in their own cognitive resources and the activity of those resources. Clearly bourgeois aesthetic experience takes on a very different tenor when recast within this economic rhetoric.

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It is quite clear why the artwork, the foil for the potentially infinite play of the mind, should be such a prized possession for the bourgeois subject. It is the ideal commodity – a source of unlimited profit, in the form of unmediated personal pleasure. Furthermore, this pleasure, while stimulated by the external object and its form, is nevertheless properly situated entirely within the subject and is a product of the lawful structure of cognition in general – the object of aesthetic experience is necessary only indirectly. Aesthetic experience carries with it the semblance of freedom, the total emancipation of the subject from empirical scarcity which is founded upon the transcendental resources of the human subject.

However, it is built into the structure of aesthetic experience that the subject must defer interest in its own self-satisfaction, and in the object of its satisfaction, unless it is to risk submerging aesthetic experience back into the real-world pressures of the real-world interests from which Kant has so diligently extricated it – precisely so that immediate pleasure can be maximized. The price, as it were, of aesthetic experience of the beautiful is that the subject must relinquish its desire to quantify and qualify, that is, rationalize, its profit in that moment.

This tension between interest and disinterest, which emerges out of the structure of aesthetic experience and from the bourgeois goals of aesthetic theory, is a key concern for Adorno. He consistently lauds the disinterest-edness of Kantian aesthetic experience as undeniably the first crucial step in an advanced theory of art. Indeed, it provides a block to precisely the sort of reduction of art to a mere means for enjoyment (AT: 349). Disinterestedness also directs the pleasure taken in artworks away from a purely sensuous pleasure which signals the shift towards a model of aesthetic appreciation appropriate to autonomous artworks.

Adorno also sees in disinterestedness the first step away from certain forms of ‘profit’ in the experience of artworks:

The viewer enters into a contract with the artwork so that it will speak. Those who brag of having ‘got’ something from an artwork transfer in philistine fashion the relation of possession to what is strictly foreign to it; they extend the comportment of unbroken self-preservation, subordinating beauty to that interest that beauty, according to Kant’s ever valid insight, transcends. (AT: 345–6)24

Kant’s advancement of aesthetics beyond taste is a key step in the development of a truly Enlightened theory appropriate to the development of autonomous

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art. Yet we should note: not seeking to ‘get something out of ’ aesthetic experience during an aesthetic experience does not entail that we never look to get something out of it. Indeed, Adorno argues that Kant defers, rather than abolishes profit from aesthetic experience, in order to amplify the profit accrued. With this qualification in mind, Kant nevertheless holds that the pleasure felt in aesthetic experience of the beautiful is not a sensuous pleasure.

While Adorno wishes to retain such insights, there are two ways in which he wishes to subject these notions to immanent critique – to release the dialec-tical processes which become reified in Kant’s thinking. First, the freedom of the subject in aesthetic experience and production is an attenuated ‘freedom under law’.25 In other words, the flights of fancy of the artist must be brought under determinate technique and purpose in order that an object be created, let alone a beautiful object. Yet, for Adorno, the heteronomy of this law, under which art is created and experienced, results in a theory which fails to properly understand that autonomous artworks create and obey their own laws of form; it misses the fact that artworks need to be engaged with according to their own laws of form.26 In short, the theory of aesthetic freedom is too subjective in Kant’s philosophy and lacks the limits it should find in the objective self-governance of the autonomous artwork.

The limits of subjective freedom and the objective freedom of the artwork are of crucial importance to Adorno’s own account of the autonomy of artworks. He considers their objective form as a sedimentation of socio-historical material;27 he argues that the artwork contains truth-content as a result of the coordination of this material;28 and in light of this objective truth-content, the artwork comes to be a fulcrum for a praxis of resistance to the givenness of a particular moment of socio-historical reality.29 These are bold claims, but they are not our focus here in Adorno’s critique of Kant’s account of aesthetic experience. Yet they are essential to note for a fully developed Adornian account of aesthetic autonomy and for understanding the importance of the dialectical critique that Adorno mounts against Kant.

Second, in line with the overly subjective character of freedom under law, disinterestedness is shorn of all its dialectical entanglement with interest. Adorno argues that the separation of disinterest and interest is neither possible nor desirable in a theory of aesthetic experience. The freedom of the subject which this theoretical separation aims towards indicates a broader Enlightenment goal which is a key thematic issue in Adorno’s work with Horkheimer. Kant makes aesthetic experience as much a freedom from the body as a form of freedom for the subject as such – indeed, there is a logical grouping of the subject, as such,

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with the transcendental self. Both are then set apart from the bodily, empirical self.

For Adorno then, Kant’s account of aesthetic experience is in line with the general Enlightenment project for the domination of external, and internal, nature. His theory of the freedom of aesthetic experience brings to mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of Odysseus as the prototypical bourgeois subject strapped to the mast such that he can hear the Sirens’ song without succumbing to it.30 Through the mediation of the self under its own rational law, the subject is able to maximize profits from its own body, its artefacts and from nature itself. This is only possible, however, through the diremption of the self followed by the suppression of the empirical self in favour of the transcendental subject. Adorno puts this idea in visceral terms:

For Kant, aesthetics becomes paradoxically a castrated hedonism, desire without desire. An equal injustice is done both to artistic experience, in which liking is by no means the whole of it but plays a subordinate role, and to sensual interest, the suppressed and unsatisfied needs that resonate in their aesthetic negation and make artworks more than empty patterns. (AT: 14)

The experience of art becomes exemplary of the bourgeois maxim that controlling our desires will pay dividends.

Considerations of interest, while admitted, are not given any proper theoretical room by Kant. The reason for such exclusion is that Kant’s very aim is to separate interest from aesthetic experience and to keep it excluded. His transcendental arguments enable him to make the separation and then assert that separation as necessary. Once separated, he has the distance required to reassert the hegemony of subjective freedom and control over its own restricted domain of interest within which it may help itself to the rewards of aesthetic experience. Indeed, it becomes an unmediated idealization of the profit that the bourgeois subject would wish to accrue from finite material goods. Adorno resists this separation and idealization through his dialectical account of disinterest. While disinterest acts as a valid and necessary limit on subjective domination over the object in the aesthetic experience, distinterestedness cannot be reified and used as a buffer to demark a zone of experience within which the subject has total control and can, in due course, claim interest.

Adorno conducts his immanent critique of Kantian transcendentalism by reinvigorating the dialectical forces which Kant has reified through transcen-dental argument. Adorno argues that the transcendental construction of the faculties of experience in the first critique as insulated from change falsifies

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the dialectical, mediated nature of subjectivity. A properly dialectical account of the self entails, for Adorno, that the interest the subject takes in the objects of aesthetic experience cannot be transcendentally separated from the subject’s disinterest. The most obvious expression of such interest is a materially economic one: desire, excluded from the moment of aesthetic experience, is expressed and reinvested in the form of possession of those very objects which it purports to be disinterested in.

The bourgeois investment in the timeless work of art – a source of increasing capital based on the plenipotentiary of aesthetic experience which the artwork represents – is a falsification of the reality of autonomous artworks. The bourgeois owners of artworks believe themselves to be in possession of artworks just because they have the rights to the material entity in question. This fixed relation to the object, determined through material possession, is only possible if the object, qua art, and subjects are fixed and reified (e.g. as they are in Kant’s aesthetics). This fixity means that the moment of financial investment will be sufficient to secure ownership as long as the object is possessed. However, if heteronomous socio-historical political, economic and cultural forces play a constitutive role in determining an object as an artwork, then what counts as a real artwork will change accordingly; such changes entail that ownership is no guarantee that what is in one’s possession is still an artwork in the way it was at the moment of purchase. As socio-historical changes take place, so might the existence conditions of artworks.31

Kant could not account for this notion, nor even conceive of its possibility, because aesthetic experience is tied to appearance and the transcendental operations of the subject, neither of which change in the relevant sense. For its part, the artwork cannot help but become little more than a cipher for the stimulation of experience and is denied the resources to resist subjective aesthetic experience. The idea then that the artwork could resist aesthetic experience and even cease to be an artwork while its material form remains is anathema to Kantian aesthetics. Indeed, this idea threatens to undo the reified construction of Kantian aesthetics of the beautiful and of fine art. As a fantasy of its own freedom and domination over the subjective realm and all that falls within that realm, the bourgeois subject believes its own experience transcends the empirical conditions of scarcity and social change. In addition, the idea that the object, the artwork, could slip away from the subject despite the latter’s right to the object as a piece of property, is unthinkable to Kant. Adorno’s position suggests the opposite: that the transcendental separation of the aesthetic from the empirical world is a function of bourgeois philosophy and its truth is

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indexed to this function. This transcendental separation is not true in and of itself.

Conclusions

In this chapter a sketch of Kantian aesthetic experience has been presented through the lens of a materialist critique. This account was developed on the basis of a number of scattered ‘economic’ remarks made by Adorno and by using other aspects of his philosophy to recast Adorno’s critique in an economic idiom. We find that the economic remarks are closely related to revealing the ‘truth-content’ of Kant’s philosophy. That Kant’s philosophy tells us something true about the world even while it putatively fails in its philosophical ambitions is an insight that Adorno holds throughout his work on Kant. In this way, Kant’s account of subject has a truth-content which may be explored using the resources developed above.

What we have found in the analysis of the autonomy of aesthetic experience in Kantian aesthetics is a model of production, consumption and value which fits alongside the model provided for objectively valid empirical cognition. Furthermore, it suggests the complex psychical investment that the bourgeois subject has in artworks. Aesthetic experience becomes a quite unique and potent mode of experience for any subjects able to free themselves from the contingencies of their material desires in a particular moment. It transpires that the interest suppressed in the first moment of the analytic of the beautiful returns as a means for a deeper rationalization of pleasure and interest.

In this chapter I have not attempted to justify Adorno’s critique of Kant, although the hermeneutic analysis offered here could provide reasons for such a justification. Furthermore, given the complexity of both Kant and Adorno’s thinking, such an account is undoubtedly incomplete and would require further development. However, inasmuch as the Kantian view of aesthetic experience persists, implicitly and explicitly in our aesthetic theories, the above analysis should raise some concerns for the pursuit of a non-dialectical account of aesthetic autonomy of that kind. It also suggests the complex importance of socio-historical phenomena for a theory of aesthetic autonomy.

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Notes

1 Sincere thanks to Owen Hulatt for his insightful editorial suggestions. They were greatly appreciated and have made a valuable contribution to this chapter.

2 Cf. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ch. 4, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997 (henceforth AT). London: Continuum.

3 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth CPR), translated by Werner Pluhar, 1996 (Indiana: Hackett Publishing); Kant’s Critique of Judgement (henceforth CJ), translated by Werner Pluhar, 1996 (Indiana: Hackett Publishing).

4 Cf. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Rodney Livingston (henceforth KCPR), (Cambridge, Polity Press), pp. 32 and 137.

5 This indicates a general concern about the scope and justification of transcendental argument. See also: ‘But philosophy was in error when it supposed that it could simply cut the umbilical cord, thus separating the abstractions from the things from which they were being abstracted’ (KCPR: 153). Inasmuch as transcendental arguments aim at producing fixed conditions which may then be considered apart from that which they supply conditions for, Adorno is sceptical of transcendental argument. This is a vexed issue in Kantian scholarship. Stroud (1968, pp. 255–6) and Cassam (1987, pp. 377–8) attack the warrant of transcendental argument. Pereboom (1990, p. 41) argues for a deflationary view of transcendental arguing as not a priori rationalist but genetic and epistemically humble.

6 See also KCPR: 203.7 Ibid., 13–14.8 Ibid., 122.9 Ibid., 18, 148.10 John McCumber (2006: 283) argues that our faculties do in fact have histories for

Kant: ‘Unearthing the Wonder: A “Post-Kantian” Paradigm in Kant’s Critique of Judgment’ in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, (ed.) R. Kukla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

11 To follow this architectonic structure of subjective autonomy consider Kant’s treatment of the difference between noumena and phenomena, CPR: B307–11; the application of transcendental idealism to the Antinomy of Causation, CPR: B567–9; the moral autonomy of human subjectivity, 42 and 63 (Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor, 1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); the mediated freedom of the subject in aesthetic experience, CJ: 306–7.

12 See ND: 189–91, 370, 374–5. On the background of the concept of reification, see Lukács (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 83–110; Jay, (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas

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(Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 109–11. Reification may also refer to ‘natural’ entities.

13 CPR: B274–83.14 See CPR: B44 of the Transcendental Aesthetic.15 The reification of apperception is a deeply divisive issue in Kantian scholarship.

Stephen Priest (1987) ‘Subjectivity and Objectivity in Kant and Hegel’, in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, ed. Stephen Priest (Oxford: Oxford University Press); and Ameriks (2000) Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 281–3. Both argue against Hegel’s putative reification of apperception which may have influenced Adorno here.

16 See KCPR: 6.17 See Fiona Hughes (2007) for a more moderate analysis of the same idea, §4.III.i.

Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).18 See CPR: A115–117.19 ND: 148.20 CJ: §11: 221.21 CJ: §15: 228.22 CJ: §9: 217.23 See Douglas Burnham (2004) Kant’s Philosophies of Judgement (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press), p. 174.24 See also AT: 392.25 See e.g. CJ: §50.26 See Lambert Zuidevaart’s excellent commentary on Adorno’s aesthetics and his

theory of the the objective autonomy of artworks qua form: 2.1 and 5.1 ( 1991); and Paddison (1993, p. 98).

27 AT: 6.28 AT: 338.29 AT: 14.30 DoE: 25–7.31 Implicit here is the Hegelian idea that ‘art’ may cease to exist. Hegel’s Aesthetics:

Lectures on Fine Art. vol. 1., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 91–105. Adorno’s understanding of this notion is of course more materialist and less idealist: the conditions for art are not indexed to Geist in the Hegelian sense but in fragmented socio-historical conditions.

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References

Adorno, T. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, ch. 4, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (henceforth AT), London: Continuum.

—(2001) Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Rodney Livingston (henceforth KCPR), Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ameriks, K. (2000) Kant and the Fate of Autonomy, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 281–3.

Burnham, D. (2004) Kant’s Philosophies of Judgement, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 174.

Cassam, Q. (1987) ‘Transcendental Arguments, Transcendental Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 149.

Hegel, G. W. F. (1998) Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, translated T. M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91–105.

Hughes, F. (2007) Kant’s Aesthetic Epistemology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kant, I. (1996) Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Werner Pluhar (henceforth CPR), Indiana: Hackett Publishing.

—(1987) Critique of Judgement, translated by Werner Pluhar (1996) (henceforth, CJ). Indiana: Hackett Publishing.

—(1991) Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Mary Gregor (1991), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, translated by R. Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 83–110.

McCumber, J. (2006) ‘Unearthing the Wonder: A “Post-Kantian” Paradigm in Kant’s Critique of Judgment,’ in Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy, (ed.) R. Kukla, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paddison, M. (1993) Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 98.

Pereboom, D. (1990) ‘Kant on Justification in Transcendental Philosophy’, Synthese, vol. 85, No. 1.

Priest, S. (1987) ‘Subjectivity and Objectivity in Kant and Hegel’, in Hegel’s Critique of Kant, (ed.) Stephen Priest, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stroud, B. (1968) ‘Transcendental Arguments’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 65, No. 9. Cassam: 377 – 8 (1987) ‘Transcendental Arguments, Transcendental Synthesis and Transcendental Idealism’.

Zuidevaart, L. (1991) Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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The Transcendental Economy of Aesthetic Autonomy

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