Can there be an Adornian theory of beauty? It is not a category that one expects Adorno to have been drawn to. In one section of Aesthetic Theory, he calls for “a radically darkened art,” and that, of course, is just Adorno playing to type. That’s the Adorno who has inspired multiple American punk bands to release albums called Minima Moralia. A page or two later, still in Aesthetic Theory, he praises one version of modern poetry for having “defected to the enemy” — for having declared war, I guess, upon poetic things. Adorno would seem to prefer a verse that poisons nightingales and shoots skylarks from the air. Later in the same volume, he dedicates an entire essay to the ugly, and there we will find him praising “the penchant of modern art for the nauseating and physically revolting.” “The apologists for the status quo,” he says, get to ruin the world confident that the artists will beautify at least some of the resulting wreckage. In the midst of general ugliness, they will create pockets of “idle beauty.” So maybe that’s the Adornian theory of beauty right there—and maybe it’s theory you’d been expecting: Beauty is the happy face that kept artists put upon catastrophe.
The surprise, then, is to realize that this is not, in fact, Adorno’s final word on beauty. Yes, fine: Beauty is affirmation and apology and kitsch. But are we willing to consider the possibility that there is more to beauty that its readiness to acquiesce? Can negative dialectics find something worth affirming in beauty—and will that something itself be negative? Can you picture Adorno with a nosegay in his fist?
The way to start answering these questions is to read the essay on beauty that begins at the bottom of p. 50 in Aesthetic Theory. Here’s the first sentence:
If anything, it is beauty that originated in the ugly, and not the reverse.
And with that, new questions already interpose themselves—specific questions to replace the general ones with which we began. Why, after all, does Adorno start here? What does this sentence even mean? What is he after? The trick will be to figure out who (broadly) Adorno is disagreeing with — and to realize going into it that the answer is likely to involve metaphysics. Why might someone think that beautiful things are primary or original and ugly ones in some sense secondary? Here, then, is a chain of argumentation: A person might not unreasonably hold that all things possess form, each thing its form, and they might think, further, that form typically involves purpose or function. Iron has served many different purposes over the centuries, and each change of purpose has been accompanied by a change in form; iron can come to us variably as a lathe treadle or a hand-crank corn sheller or a smelting ladle. Cartilage, too, takes different forms: it is there, in not readily visualized fashion, in your knee (to protect the bone), but also there, juttingly, in your outer ear (where it captures and directs sound waves into the ear canal). It is this simple point about form—different forms for different purposes—that will do most of the hard work for the classical theory of beauty. We are, after all, in the habit of judging things to be well-formed. That particular phrasing may not come to you intuitively, but this species of judgment surely does. You are accustomed to assessing the fitness of the things. But then I don’t want to just give up on the phrasing, which adds a little something of its own. For if I call something “well-formed,” I might just be saying that it is good, that it was well designed for its purpose. (“In a well-formed watermeadow it is as necessary to keep it perfectly dry at one time as it is to place it under water at another.”) But equally, I might be saying that it is handsome, or shapely; I might even be casting about for a way to call a man beautiful. The word “well-formed,” then, is the term from ordinary language that without strain conjoins the beautiful and the good. My point is that if you continue on in this connection, you might eventually find yourself arguing that the human mind is set up to apprehend fit things as beautiful—or even that fit things simply are beautiful and that the experience of beauty is the delight we take in their fitness. That, then, would be your opportunity to claim that beauty is primary (which — you can glance now back up to the top of the paragraph — is the opposite of what Adorno is arguing): Everything, again, has a form; and a large majority of things are at least moderately well-formed, if only because things that are not well-formed tend not to stick around for very long: the ill-formed, the anomaly, the freak.
The task now is to flip that argument on its head. The view that takes ugliness to be primary will have to adopt a competing metaphysics. Here’s one way to get at the thing: In Virgil’s Aeneid, as in most other classical epics, the stakes of a great many episodes are properly cosmic. As readers, we’re not just following Aeneas—we’re not just concerned for the hero, not just reading to find out what happens to him next, not just hoping that it will fare well with him. We’re reading, rather, to find out what will happen to, well, everything — to the entire cosmos. We are awaiting the verdict on the nature of reality.
I think this is especially clear in the first book of the Aeneid—ie, early in the poem—when the Trojan ships are first scattered by a great storm. (That’s the tempest that blows Aeneas’ band of refugees to the shores of Dido’s Carthage.) You might remember: Juno has created this storm in order to vex the Trojans, and in order to do so, she has had to approach the divine wind-keeper and seduce him into turning loose the squalls over whom he has custody. As Virgil tells it, the winds are universally known to be dangerous and so kept in prison. Killer squalls, held in a dungeon:
But high in his stronghold Aeolus wields his scepter,
soothing their passions, tempering their fury,
Should he fail, surely they’d blow the world away,
Hurling the land and sea and deep sky through space.
Fearing this, the almighty Father banished the winds
to that black cavern, piled above them a mountain mass
and imposed on all a king empowered, by binding pact,
to rein them back on command or let them gallop free. (Fagles 1.69-76)
What I hope you’ll notice is how generalized the language becomes here—that’s the mark of the epic shifting over to rude ontology. It’s not just that the winds can damage Sardinia or the Florida coast. They can “blow the world away.” We might notice how the poem shifts for a single line into a sublime and elemental sci-fi image: The stuff of the planet whirling in a void. When reading an epic, you should stop whenever you run into sci-fi language like this, because that’s when the epic is turning metaphysical. And what we see here is the possibility of a world of contending and unruly forces; Dryden’s translation of the same pages speaks of “mixed confusion.” But let’s notice, too—because this is crucial—that this disorder is just a possibility, since the gods have undertaken a cosmological effort to keep the world ordered when it is not naturally and by necessity ordered. You might say, then, that there are rival ontologies in the Aeneid—a ontology of order vs. an ontology of disorder (or chaos or strife). The epic isn’t only concerned with the founding of Rome — it’s trying to figure out whether order or disorder is going to win in the cosmos—and of course it superimposes that battle of cosmic principles onto the Roman story. Maybe the more accurate way to put this would be to say that the poem posits a single, riven ontology: the universe is capable equally of order and disorder. Order might be in evidence, but the possibility of cataclysmic disorder can never be discounted. Order is available, but only through commitment and effort—including the efforts of regal gods whose powers are great but not entire.
What I’m trying to say is that the storm isn’t just an ordinary, old narrative obstacle. If anything, it functions a bit like the especially nasty pre-credit kill with which some horror movies begin. Virgil’s epic starts by flaunting its nightmare and apocalyptic antithesis, as the poet sets off to write against the chaos and mixed confusion that the reader glimpses in the storm. The Trojans, as a people, have been scattered. And Aeneas’ ships have now just been scattered—that’s a scattering within a scattering, a diaspora twice-dispersed. If you can grab hold of the epic’s ontological thread, you might be able to make sense of the Aeneid as a poem against the scattering and against the storm. Early on, Venus tells Aeneas that she has seen “scatt’ring” birds regather into a flock—“all united in a goodly team.”
Such, then, is what it might mean to claim that ugliness comes first and that beauty follows on: The fundamental condition of the cosmos is disorder, chaos, or strife. Order and form and purpose and beauty must accordingly be built (and guarded and, where necessary, repaired). That’s the position that Adorno wants us, at least, to consider—though his opening phrase, “if anything,” is enough to suggest that he doesn’t really credit this version any more than he does its opposite, it being a hallmark of dialectical philosophy that antitheses arrive in pairs, as polarized conceptual fields, and that one couldn’t possibly talk about either “ugliness” or “beauty” if the other weren’t already in view. Let’s agree, then, that the ugly and the beautiful are coeval, but having said that, let’s also consider the status of beauty in a world that is fundamentally geared towards ruin.