Aesthetic Theory (Volume 88) by Theodor W. Adorno

an understanding of the orientation gains us a critical perspective in the current condition of experience’. ‘ It is about how the subject has a capacity to orient themselves non-instrumentally towards objects and. Mimesis, then is a dimension of human behaviour whose origins precede the development of the aesthetic realm, whilst somehow surviving only as a vestige in an aesthetic form’. (O’Connor, 2013: 150) ‘ In the experience of aesthetic mimesis – imitative creativity – there is the ‘happiness of producing the world once over’ (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory: 339) that has almost entirely been eliminated by the reifying rationality of the social totality.

Reification is a complex idea for when you treat something immaterial – like happiness, fear, or evil – as a material thing’. For example, a red rose may be a reification of the concept of love. ‘Reification is the process of attributing concrete form to an abstract concept. It is a reference point for non-reified human behaviour. (O’Connor, 2013: 150)Īesthetic mimesis is not just the opposite of reification, but is a diagnostic concept. Art is mimetic not only in its content that is, in how what it says is in some way imitative of reality but also in the aesthetic activities of performance and experience: the full range of the aesthetic realm is mimetic’. In that work Adorno endeavours to articulate a distinctly critical-theoretical account of the mimetic basis of art. It is in Aesthetic Theory that mimesis becomes a central theoretical principle. In a non-reified realization of the subject-object relationship, this desire is pursued through the activities of conceptualisation and judgment and through the correction of the content of those activities when contradictions emerge. ‘ Mimesis … is not another name for the subject-object relationship. It is the pre-conceptual human desire to imitate and to seek affinity with an other, underpinning, what we saw in Adorno’s discussion of morality, ‘the sense of solidarity with what Brecht called “tormentable bodies”.

I am particularily taken with his approach to ‘mimesis’. Here are a few of the many notes that I have taken on O’Connor’s book and others. I have been reading Theodor Adorno of late, and in particular Brian O’Connor’s excellent introduction to his work.

Aesthetic Theory (Volume 88) by Theodor W. Adorno