Adorno

Aesthetic Theory was one of the four books I brought with me into Baghdad. Peter L. Wilson advised me to bring two long and difficult books because wars are both boring and scary so it is important to keep the mind sharp. Of course I over packed and brought four.
I began reading AE in 2000 and have yet to finish it. It's significant to note that it is not a finished book: Adorno died before organizing the final draft for publication. The book includes fragments of sections that might have been cut out, along with a draft introduction that would of most likely been cut down if Adorno had lived a bit longer. The translator's preface suggests you read the back of the book first.
Adorno's contention that art must move toward silence regarding the "darkness of the world" holds true not only for paintings but new media as well: the more connected art is to the mesh of social and political and cultural networks via uses of metaphors or contexts or raw materials the more weighted it is and the less mobile it can be toward reaching for a kind of clearing where new thoughts and new pleasures are possible. Beckett is, in Adorno's constellation, a big dark star that transforms by it's sheer form, the content (and context) in which the work exists in (namely Earth in the 20th century after WWII and the Holocaust).
The closest works I found in Baghdad University's English library to Adorno was Matthew Arnold. This makes me more mad than seeing homeless kids on the banks of the Tigris. It is the fucking 21st century: everyone should have the right to reasonable access to Theodor Adorno.

	Fragments from Aesthetic Theory
	THEODOR ADORNO All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function -- of which art is itself uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty -- are doomed. PG1 Its law of movement is its law of form. PG3 Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality which sanction art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work's own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. PG4 The communication of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication: precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted. PG5 The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. PG6 The freedom of artworks, in which their self-consciousness flows and without which these works would not exist, is the ruse of art's own reason. PG6 Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. PG6 It is structured by proportions between what exists, proportions that are themselves defined by what exists, its deficiency, distress, and contradictoriness as well as its potentialities; even in these proportions real contexts resonate. Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron filings. Not only art's elements, but their constellation as well, that which is specifically aesthetic and to which its spirit is usually chalked up, refer back to its others. The identity of the artwork with existing reality is also that of the works gravitational forces, which gathers around itself its member disjecta, traces of the existing. The artwork is related to the world by the principle that contrast it with the world, and that is the same principle by which spirit organized the world. The synthesis achieved by means of the artwork is not simply forced on its elements; rather, it recapitulates that in which these elements communicate with one another; thus the synthesis is itself a product of otherness. Indeed, synthesis has its foundation in the spirit-distant material dimension of works, in that in which synthesis is active. This unites the aesthetic element of form with noncoercion. By its difference from empirical reality the artwork necessarily constitutes itself in relation to what it is not, and to what makes it an artwork in the first place. PG7-8 Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. PG8 Kant was the first to achieve the insight, never since forgotten, that aesthetic comportment is free from immediate desire; he snatched art away from that avaricious philistinism that always wants to touch it and taste it. PG10 The conformist psychoanalytic endorsement of the prevailing view of the artwork as a well-meaning culture commodity corresponds to an aesthetic hedonism that banishes art's negativity to the instinctual conflicts of its genesis and suppresses any negativity in the finished work. PG12 The route to aesthetic autonomy proceeds by way of disinterestedness; the emancipation of art from cuisine or pornography is irrevocable. Yet art does not come to rest in disinterestedness. For disinterestedness immanently reproduces -- and transforms -- interest. In the false world all ( ) is false. For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art. PG12-13 Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by expressions like "a feast for the ears." Yet if the last traces of pleasure were extirpated, the question of what artworks are for would be an embarrassment. Actually, the more they are understood, the less they are enjoyed." PG13 Only in memory and longing, not as a copy or as an immediate effect, is pleasure absorbed by art. PG14 For a society in which art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it, art fragments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself. PG15 Happiness in artworks would be the feeling they instill of standing firm. PG15 Art responds to the loss of its self-evidence not simply by concrete transformation of its procedures and comportments but by trying to pull itself free from its own concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art. PG16 Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. PG18 The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn. In its pleasure of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photography of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie. PG19 Just as art cannot be, and never was, a language of pure feeling, not a language of the affirmation of the soul, neither is it for art to pursue the results of ordinary knowledge, as for instance in the form of social documentaries that are to function as down payments on empirical research yet to be done. PG 32 Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatively. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. PG 32 The literal is barbaric. PG61 The pain in the face of beauty, nowhere more visceral than in the experience of nature, is as much the longing for what beauty promises but never unveils as it is suffering at the inadequacy of the appearance, which fails beauty while wanting to make itself like it. This pain reappears in the relation to artworks. Involuntarily and unconsciously, the observer enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self-abandonment -- that moment of free exhalation in nature -- survives. Natural beauty shares the weakness of every promise with that promise's inextinguishability. However words may glance off nature and betray its language to one that is qualitatively different from its own, still no critique of natural teleology can dismiss those cloudless days of southern lands that seem to be waiting to be noticed. As they draw to a close with the same radiance and peacefulness with which they began, they emanate that everything is not lost, that things may yet turn out. PG73 Back
	Aesthetic Theory was one of the four books I brought with me into Baghdad. Peter L. Wilson advised me to bring two long and difficult books because wars are both boring and scary so it is important to keep the mind sharp. Of course I over packed and brought four. I began reading AE in 2000 and have yet to finish it. It's significant to note that it is not a finished book: Adorno died before organizing the final draft for publication. The book includes fragments of sections that might have been cut out, along with a draft introduction that would of most likely been cut down if Adorno had lived a bit longer. The translator's preface suggests you read the back of the book first. Adorno's contention that art must move toward silence regarding the "darkness of the world" holds true not only for paintings but new media as well: the more connected art is to the mesh of social and political and cultural networks via uses of metaphors or contexts or raw materials the more weighted it is and the less mobile it can be toward reaching for a kind of clearing where new thoughts and new pleasures are possible. Beckett is, in Adorno's constellation, a big dark star that transforms by it's sheer form, the content (and context) in which the work exists in (namely Earth in the 20th century after WWII and the Holocaust). The closest works I found in Baghdad University's English library to Adorno was Matthew Arnold. This makes me more mad than seeing homeless kids on the banks of the Tigris. It is the fucking 21st century: everyone should have the right to reasonable access to Theodor Adorno.