An Artwork as a Critique: Adorno against Lukács

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초록

The purpose of my essay is to set forth a comparative approach to Adorno and Lukács to discuss the function of an artwork in the capitalist society. The perspective of mimesis crucially leads Adorno to the way in which he considers Enlightenment as a paradoxical process of civilization itself, a process precipitating intellectual regression. For Adorno, the Enlightenment project increasingly destroys the sensuous mimetic faculty, while fortifying reification and instrumental reason; however, Adorno finds the remnants of the preserved sensuous mimesis in art; art is a mutated mimesis through the modern rationalization process, by which rationality is combined with the sensuous mimetic faculty. In this respect, Adorno argues that art is a refuge for mimetic comportment. Here, Adorno chooses a different path from Benjamin, who conceptualizes the autonomy of artworks as a magical aura. It is interesting that Adorno specifically points out the paradoxical character of art by which the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated. When considering that modern subjectivity is closely related to the Cartesian cogito, what Adorno implies in his analysis is that art is a rational device to disavow magical practices – the mimesis of art is possible by its rational feature. More importantly still, the paradoxical mimetic faculty of art leads to irrationality by means of its rationality, in the sense that all rationality aims at necessarily achieving something irrational. Therefore, it is not surprising that art is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an over-administered world.

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