adorno

"Adorno and the autonomy of art"

Adorno and the autonomy of art
Andy Hamilton
Durham University

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Adornoʼs unique brand of Western Marxism, in which the ideals of art for artʼs sake and absolute music remain salient, presents a complex and elusive treatment of the autonomy of art, which it is the task of this article to examine. It may seem puzzling how any kind of Marxist could believe in the autonomy of art. Autonomy is normally taken to mean that art is governed by its own rules and laws, and that artistic value makes no reference to social or political value. 1 Autonomy is taken to oppose the economic conditioning of culture assumed by classical
Marxism. However, Western Marxism questioned the base/superstructure model, and Adornoʼs version of it offers the subtlest account of that relation.2 It is a mark of the perspicacity of Adornoʼs treatment that he was able to do justice both to the social situation of art and music, and to their autonomy status – indeed he did justice to each through the other. Adorno delineates the functionlessness of art, and its social situation in virtue of that functionlessness. For Adorno, autonomous artworks have a social situation but – as I will put it – no direct social function: “Insofar as a social function may be predicated of works of art, it is the function of having no function”.3 That is, autonomous art has as its “purpose” the creation of something without direct purpose or function – pre-bourgeois art such as religious or theatre music, in contrast, does have a direct social function.
Another way of putting this claim is to say that autonomous art constitutes an autonomous practice that does not serve any other practice. That is, it is an end in itself – just as religious practice is also autonomous and lacks direct social function. Adornoʼs picture is that as the artist became free of church and aristocratic patronage towards the end of the 18th century, their work simultaneously

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