Currently a passenger in a car listening to Leonard Cohen’s The Future and thinking about his “kindness untainted by sentimentality” on this record. Romantic poetry from the 18th century is probably too ironic, but particular pop music artists from the last 60 years (Cohen, Mitchell, Dylan, Prince, Yorke) are just ironic enough.
As a German Studies dude, I have to join in the praise here. Great work taking notoriously difficult arguments and making them lively, relevant, and accessible. What you say here contrasts interestingly with Adorno's Aesthetic Theory take on Romantic irony, which goes kind of to different political and aesthetic places.
If I remember, Adorno argues that Romantic irony was crucial in a few regards: by moving the artwork away from its direct sensory impact, it freed the artwork from the obligation of having to be beautiful, and so opened the door for "the ugly" as an element that art could work with and include (i.e. for Baudelaire). It also opened the door for the various "isms" of modernism, which, despite their kind of crappy and doctrinaire output, nonetheless grasp correctly the historical embeddedness and contingency of the artwork, i.e., the fact that not all art is possible at all times.
But the main thing is that Romantic irony correctly grasps the non-identity of the artwork, which Adorno says Hegel surprisingly misses (since his aesthetics tend to limit artworks just to their content, rather than their form or technique) just the basic fact that say, a painting of a bowl of fruit both is and is not a bowl of fruit. Non-identity is the key to the artwork's political possibilities, such as they are: the way it parodies the rationality of society, and, more importantly, the way artworks rearrange what they represent according to their own totally self-directed internal logic, which gives us a glimpse of a social whole whose elements come together freely, instead of by force.
Anyway, good shit! Feel like I'm stalking these message boards now... but this really is good and engaging and thought provoking stuff!
Currently a passenger in a car listening to Leonard Cohen’s The Future and thinking about his “kindness untainted by sentimentality” on this record. Romantic poetry from the 18th century is probably too ironic, but particular pop music artists from the last 60 years (Cohen, Mitchell, Dylan, Prince, Yorke) are just ironic enough.
As a German Studies dude, I have to join in the praise here. Great work taking notoriously difficult arguments and making them lively, relevant, and accessible. What you say here contrasts interestingly with Adorno's Aesthetic Theory take on Romantic irony, which goes kind of to different political and aesthetic places.
If I remember, Adorno argues that Romantic irony was crucial in a few regards: by moving the artwork away from its direct sensory impact, it freed the artwork from the obligation of having to be beautiful, and so opened the door for "the ugly" as an element that art could work with and include (i.e. for Baudelaire). It also opened the door for the various "isms" of modernism, which, despite their kind of crappy and doctrinaire output, nonetheless grasp correctly the historical embeddedness and contingency of the artwork, i.e., the fact that not all art is possible at all times.
But the main thing is that Romantic irony correctly grasps the non-identity of the artwork, which Adorno says Hegel surprisingly misses (since his aesthetics tend to limit artworks just to their content, rather than their form or technique) just the basic fact that say, a painting of a bowl of fruit both is and is not a bowl of fruit. Non-identity is the key to the artwork's political possibilities, such as they are: the way it parodies the rationality of society, and, more importantly, the way artworks rearrange what they represent according to their own totally self-directed internal logic, which gives us a glimpse of a social whole whose elements come together freely, instead of by force.
Anyway, good shit! Feel like I'm stalking these message boards now... but this really is good and engaging and thought provoking stuff!
Thanks so much for this discussion--you've given us so much to think about.
Brilliant discussion. Really enjoying this series.