{"id":1776,"date":"2025-03-07T09:09:16","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T14:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1776"},"modified":"2025-03-07T09:09:16","modified_gmt":"2025-03-07T14:09:16","slug":"adorno-on-beauty-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/adorno-on-beauty-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Adorno on beauty, Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/span>Adorno continues:<\/p>\n

However, putting the concept of beauty on the Index \u2014 as many psychologies have done with the concept of the soul and many sociologies with that of society \u2014 would amount to resignation on the part of aesthetics. <\/b><\/p>\n

The claim that most needs explaining is the bit between the dashes: Psychology, which is nominally the study of the <\/i>psyche or soul<\/i>, long ago dispensed with the category of the soul<\/i>. That observation probably isn\u2019t all that surprising. It might, in fact, just be a familiar point about secularization. Christians used to think that people had souls, but the psychologists have doubtless convinced you by now that all you really have is a \u201cmind\u201d or a \u201cself.\u201d Give the neurologists a chance and they\u2019ll probably talk you out of having a mind. It\u2019s Adorno\u2019s second example that could make a person wonder: Sociologists often try to get by without a concept of society. <\/i>Adorno, I hasten to point out, is right about this: Michael Mann begins his great trilogy on The Sources of Social Power <\/i>by remarking that he would, if he could \u201cabolish the concept of \u2018society\u2019 altogether,\u201d though he promptly grants that this \u201cmay seem an odd position for a sociologist to adopt.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s not that odd, though. No-one knows better than a sociologist not to treat a society like a thing\u2014not to say that society does x<\/i> and society does y<\/i>. It is Mann\u2019s recommendation, therefore, that we treat any society as a congeries of \u201cmultiple overlapping and intersecting power networks\u201d\u2014networks whose respective borders are unlikely to line up, meaning that the network of economic power will tend to share some but not all of its territory with, say, the network of administrative power. In nearly all cases, the economy and the administration (and the culture and the military) will have different maps. They won\u2019t coalesce into a single, discrete \u201csociety.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are other ways of giving up on the concept of society, of course, but Mann\u2019s version is at least perspicuous. What we\u2019ll want to see now is that Adorno\u2019s observation holds quite generally\u2014that disciplines routinely<\/i> turn against their foundational concepts and name-bestowing objects of study.\u00a0 <\/span>The scholars of religion are quick to tell you that the term \u201creligion\u201d isn\u2019t good for much\u2014that no-one has ever come up with a definition of religion that covers all the instances one intuitively wishes to group under that name; or worse, that this particular term\u2014re-ligio, <\/i>a \u201cre-reading\u201d or a \u201cbinding fast\u201d\u2014is heavy with Western-for-which-read-Christian assumptions, in a manner that inevitably misdescribes all other religions, subtly rearranging them in order to make them more like Christianity or at least more intelligible to Christians. The historian of Japanese Buddhism finds late-Tokugawa officials, having just guaranteed New England merchants \u201cfreedom of religion,\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>turning to each other and asking: What did we just grant them? Freedom of <\/i>what now? <\/i>Or again: Scholars of literature are the ones who have had to worry that the distinctions we draw between \u201cliterary\u201d and \u201cnon-literary\u201d writing are finally quite arbitrary. The avid but amateur reader knows that some books have fully earned their status as literature; the literature professor is less sure. The professors have also had to face the fact that the very term \u201cliterature\u201d acquired its current meaning rather late\u2014across the late eighteenth century, if the lexicographers are right\u2014which means that whatever Shakespeare thought he was doing, he couldn\u2019t have been writing \u201cliterature.\u201d It is at this point that we will have to worry whether we aren\u2019t making a recondite mistake whenever we read as literature a text that was written before there was \u201cliterature.\u201d That\u2019s a claim that can itself be made in impeccably literary terms: The word literature <\/i>is itself a feat of verbal creation, a category created where formerly there was none. There are no works of literature per se, only works that we describe as literature and that we could equally well describe otherwise.<\/p>\n

If you sit with these positions for a minute, you will be in a better position to appreciate how unexpected this sentence of Adorno\u2019s is. For such self-consciousness about one\u2019s central concepts\u2014a reflexive turn heightened unto skepticism\u2014is just the sort of thing that critical theorists are always asking for. A scholar of Buddhism who rejects the category of \u201creligion\u201d is a \u201ccritical historian of religion.\u201d The literature professor who told his colleagues circa 1987 that \u201cthere was no such thing as literature\u201d had gone over to \u201ctheory.\u201d What we can now say is that Adorno is urging us not to do this<\/i>\u2014he is asking us to avoid the critical turn\u2014at least for now and at least as regards aesthetics. He is suggesting that we not place beauty<\/i> between scare quotes and so delaying the project of a critical aesthetics. More surprising still, he seems to associate the critical attitude with the apparatus of Catholic censorship\u2014that\u2019s the Index that appears early in the sentence: the pope\u2019s Index Librorum Prohibitorum<\/i>, the Index of Forbidden Books, which was still in effect when Adorno started work on Aesthetic Theory<\/i>. Sometimes, one suspects, intense self-consciousness about concepts mutates into the rote policing of language. And Adorno isn\u2019t having it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Adorno continues: However, putting the concept of beauty on the Index \u2014 as many psychologies have done with the concept of the soul and many sociologies with that of society \u2014 would amount to resignation on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1776"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1778,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1776\/revisions\/1778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}