The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

In Minima Moralia, Adorno offers the following. I have come to accept the darkness of its vision and the light of its insistence, and now offer it to you.

The subjugation of life to the process of production imposes as a humiliation on everyone something of the isolation and solitude that we are tempted to regard as resulting from our own superior choice. It is as old a component of bourgeois ideology that each individual, in his particular interest, considers himself better than all others, as that he values the others, as the community of all customers, more highly than himself. Since the demise of the old bourgeois class, both ideas have led an afterlife in the minds of intellectuals, who are at once the last enemies of the bourgeois and the last bourgeois. In still permitting themselves to think at all in the face of the naked reproduction of existence, they act as a privileged group; in letting matters rest there, they declare the nullity of their privilege. Private existence, in striving to resemble one worthy of man, betrays the latter, since any resemblance is withdrawn from general realization, which yet more than ever before has need of independent thought. There is no way out of this entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one's own existence, and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having the air to breathe in hell.

(Adorno 1974, 27–28)

Like many passages in Adorno, this verges on the histrionic, an instance of explosive behavior that draws more attention to itself than to its object, thus betraying what it would redeem or at least preserve from further harm. And yet, we live in a time where temperate reflection has little to no purchase on social life. Reason, in its idealist sense, the capacity to reflect freely upon and order the rules that govern the understanding, persists like an exotic curio in the foyer of a robber baron, a passing fancy to assure our neighbors and perhaps ourselves that we are not so barbaric after all.¹ When Adorno quips, "In psycho-analysis nothing is true but the exaggerations," I therefore rethink his own exaggerations [End Page 44] and regard them as attempts to release a truth in times of monstrous, systemic oppression, times when those enjoying seats of power are occasionally happy to afford us the luxury of our malcontent (49).

I begin with this passage because it bears directly on what follows and the philosophy of art in general. First, in reflecting upon art, one plays the role of an intellectual, a class that often takes itself to be more insightful or cultured than others while simultaneously trying to prove, even sell, its relevance to those for whom reflection has little exchange value and thus little value altogether. Second, insofar as it seeks something other than the naked reproduction of existence, a process evident in the production of generic types (a paper cup, a pound of bacon, a Monet coffee cup) or the manufacture of pure commodities (bare entities enlivened by capital), the work of art occupies a social position similar to the intellectual and her reflections. And yet, these labors, seemingly at odds with business as usual, are possible in part because capital enables them, say in the form of a publishing house, a university endowment, a museum and its revenues, a gallery's ventures, and so forth.

This is the entanglement, out of which a way is lacking. The Midas touch of global capital swims and glitters in everything we hold: the laptop with which I write, the office in which I write, the occasional industrial haze that blurs the ridge in the distance. To my left, just across the quad, our renovated museum has re...