## The Outside In: Art and the 'Non-Aesthetic'

Louis Hartnoll

Abstract: This  essay  proposes  a  case  for  grasping  'Marxist  aesthetics'  as  a generalised  philosophical  approach  to  the  study  of  art  and  experience  that underscores the pertinence of the 'external' logic of capital. Such a logic, as this essay will develop through an account of arguments developed by Theodor W. Adorno and Peter Gorsen, must be seen to apply to both the history of aesthetics as a subdiscipline and the objects that aesthetics purports to study. The first part of the essay reconstructs the double crisis of aesthetics and art as figured in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory ,  focusing on how this was heightened in the post-war period through the increasing incursion of 'non-art' and the 'non-aesthetic' into the artwork. As Adorno therein argues, a dialectical philosophical aesthetics should negotiate this double crisis through the assessment of aesthetic categories in their decline. After demonstrating how this plays out in his theory of the double character of art, the essay then outlines Gorsen's notion of  the  de-aestheticisation  of  art,  by  which  he  seeks  to  analyse  mid-century artistic practice as post-avant-garde. For Gorsen, de-aestheticised art rehearses the attempt by the historic avant-garde to abolish the distinction between art and  life  in  the  absence  of  widespread  and  organised  revolutionary  political movements. Tracing these arguments, the essay concludes with a brief case for fostering a 'Marxist non-aesthetics,' understood as the inscription of historical and social contradictions into aesthetics in order to remain with, rather than abandon, such contradictions.

Keywords: Theodor W. Adorno; Peter Gorsen; Philosophical Aesthetics; Anti-Aesthetics; Avant-garde Art

## The Outside In: Art and the 'Non-Aesthetic'

Louis Hartnoll

Terminating the tradition of philosophical aesthetics must amount to giving it its due .

-Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Insofar as it is conceivable, the theory of a 'Marxist aesthetics' is best construed as  a  theory  proposing  the  inadequacy  of  viewing  aesthetics  as  an  internally coherent, self-contained discourse. By seeking to demonstrate the importance of  the  history  and  logic  of  capital  to  aesthetic  categories  and  experience, Marxist aesthetics aims to register how social contradictions perennially return in and punctuate aesthetics, whether conceived as a prefigured set of normative prescriptions,  an  account  of  quotidian  or  exceptional  sensation,  or  a  philosophical subdiscipline. Always requiring an analytical moment external to it, any  image  of  aesthetics  as  properly  self-sustaining  is  thus  essentially  undermined. For historians and theorists of art, this becomes a concern both insofar as formalist readings of art's autonomy have sought to equate modernism with a  purist  notion  of  its  aesthetic  character, 1 and  insofar  as  aesthetics  is  judged inappropriate for the critical analysis of art, particularly post-conceptual art. This paper sets out an attempt to heighten the above tensions and to make a case for where they may aid the theory of art under the rubric of a 'Marxist non-aesthetics,' and does so in three parts. 2

First,  I  propose  a  reading  of  the  status  accorded  aesthetics  in  Theodor  W. Adorno's Aesthetic Theory as emphatically contradictory. In many regards, this contradiction provides one of the key theoretical frameworks through which the book should be read and against which it should be tested. To try to articulate this as directly as possible, the dilemma can be understood as a claim for the  enduring  necessity  of  philosophical  aesthetics  at  a  time  in  which  it  has fallen into historical obsolescence, a thinking of the redundancy of aesthetics at  a  moment  in  which  history  was  beginning  to  demonstrate  precisely  how little it could be a sufficient discourse on art. As one of the key framing devices outlined in the draft introduction, Adorno figures this in his analysis of the crisis of aesthetics. As I recount, Adorno views the protracted and deepening crisis of aesthetics not as something to be transformed into a rallying defence of it as a tradition-as we find, say, in contemporary conservative philosophical defences of beauty-but as an imperative to think this crisis as part of its structural constitution and to examine what might be philosophically generative of its contradictions.

Following this, I then demonstrate how this thinking of categories in decline returns in Adorno's theory of art's double character and through what he variously terms the extra-, pre-, sub-, and supra-aesthetic in the work of art, here broadly  categorised  as  a  work's  'non-aesthetic'  element. With  such  notions, which  tend  to  be  critically  underappreciated  in  interpretations  of Aesthetic Theory , my claim is that Adorno aims to account for the admixture of 'artistic' and  'non-artistic'  materials  and  characteristics  registered  in  an  aesthetic encounter with a work of art. Taken together, these two sections jointly reaffirm an interpretation of Adorno that critically recovers and advances the Marxian content of his thought.

Whilst readers of this special issue may not need convincing that Adorno was a Marxist thinker, it bears briefly repeating that, accepting some notable exceptions,  this  dimension  has  generally  been  overlooked,  downplayed,  or  denied in the academic reception of his work. 3 Against such a tendency and in neighbouring other recent interventions into, for instance, his critique of political economy, 4 the register I adopt here aims at a Marxist and dialectical reinterpretation of Adorno's philosophy that remains faithful to it by seeking to betray some of its key moments. 5 With respect to Adorno's philosophical aesthetics, such a reading would not only need to recognise and underscore that Aesthetic Theory was left incomplete and that we are necessarily driven, by the force of its  own movement, to go beyond his extant philosophical account, it would also require thematising and theorising elements that Adorno may have found anathema.  Such  an  interpretative  framework,  best  termed  'post-Adornian,' equally forces us to view Aesthetic Theory as constitutively insufficient, reading with, against, and through it ideas that are extraneous to his work.

With  eyes  fixed  elsewhere,  therefore,  the  final  section  reviews  other,  more direct post-war attempts to variously historicise and theorise non-, anti-, and post-aesthetic elements and tendencies in art. A brief outline of some of these accounts serves both to indicate that we can retroactively recognise Aesthetic Theory as  reflecting on these historical changes and to introduce the work of Peter Gorsen, who would expand and develop a post-Adornian theory of these changes through his notion of the de-aestheticisation of art. With this, Gorsen sought to develop a historical thesis regarding twentieth-century tendencies to abolish the difference between the bourgeois institution of art and the everyday, so openly thematised by the historic avant-garde. Such histories of artistic practice, Gorsen suggests, de-aestheticise art not only in that they make a claim for the  historically  diminishing  role  that  aesthetics  plays  for  critical  judgement, they also foreground art's supposed loss of autonomy and render programmatic art as non-aesthetic-which is, at the same time, an 'aestheticisation of actuality.' 6 Ultimately, though this tendency risks reproducing avant-gardist strategies  without maintaining the broader revolutionary political project, Gorsen also takes it as dimly and perhaps invertedly preserving an aspiration towards such revolutionary societal transformation.

Reconstructing  and  developing  Gorsen's  arguments  within  the  context  of Adorno's, this paper ultimately aims to argue that the enduring case for a Marxist non-aesthetics within the theory of art arises from an internal recognition of the insufficiency of aesthetics by aesthetics. Which is to say, Marxist aesthetics proves critically and dialectically functional by underscoring that place where aesthetics breaks down, where it reaches its limit and recognises its own deficiencies  in  the  perceptual  identification  of  those  'non-aesthetic,'  seemingly extraneous elements that pierce the work. Rather than abandoning aesthetics within an analysis of art, especially as part of the recognition of historic changes within the history of art, this paper claims that we need to instead recognise how it participates within a frame of heightened dialectical tensions. Or, as Paul Mattick Jr. writes: 'The rise of artworld anti-aesthetics sets a valuable example for philosophers of art, suggesting the need for a critical engagement with the assumptions, and so with the history, of aesthetics itself.' 7

## Aesthetics in Crisis

As Adorno claims in the draft introduction to Aesthetic Theory ,  philosophical aesthetics finds itself languishing at its current historical juncture, appearing as  'antiquated'  to  artists,  philosophers,  and  the  general  public  alike. 8 In  his reading, over the course of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, aesthetics suffered a protracted slide into relative redundancy, driven by developments in its historical unfolding and by its own structural imperatives. The philosophical position he most directly attributes to accelerating this waning is the 'radical nominalism' of Benedetto Croce, the Italian neo-Idealist philosopher, whose work problematised the view of the discipline as the production of universal norms, standards, and concepts by insisting on the importance, radicalising a position already found in G.W.F. Hegel, of turning to the concrete, 'on which each and every artwork, indeed any experience of beauty, is fixed,' and the attendant prohibition of the necessity of philosophical distance, which specialised consensus had 'falsely supposed possible in the spheres of the theory of knowledge or ethics.' 9 At the same time, as a philosophical discipline and in view of its theoretical aspirations, aesthetics appears unable to remain with such a position. Adorno writes:

A general theory of the aesthetically concrete would necessarily let slip what interested it in the object in the first place. The reason for the obsolescence of aesthetics  is  that  it  scarcely  ever  confronted  itself  with  its  object.  By  its  very form, aesthetics seems sworn to a universality that culminates in inadequacy to the artworks and, complementarily, in transitory eternal values. The academic mistrust of aesthetics is founded in the academicism immanent to it. 10

Torn between its descent towards a nominalist treatment of the concrete and its ascent towards producing universalisable claims, the split of aesthetics arises not simply because of internal contradictions, as if their resolution could be overcome simply in theory, but also attends a split that is constitutive of its basic objects. Given that, for Adorno, one of these objects includes the history of art and given that developments within this history have led to the loss of art's self-evident right to exist, philosophical aesthetics experiences not only a crisis in its constitution, but also a crisis of applicability and relevance. 11

Though he does not adequately thematise the issues involved in designating aesthetics the proper philosophical discourse of art-issues that arise insofar as aesthetics is both overly generic, in that the traditional Kantian notion covers a broader range of objects and can say little about the distinctive social-ontology of art, and excessively narrow, in that 'it seals and legitimates the exclusion of art's other aspects from the philosophical concept of art, reducing it to a single plane of significance' 12 -we can and should read Adorno's resolute tendency to  use  the  term  'aesthetics'  over  'philosophy  of  art'  as  quietly  stressing  an antipathy,  which  he  partly  learned  from  Walter  Benjamin,  to  the  external application of philosophical concepts to artworks and the disjuncture between such philosophical concepts and an artwork's truth content. Or rather, it is the division of aesthetics in its base insistence on a version of nominalism and its broad aspirations to the theoretical, articulated at a moment when aesthetics appears to have been superseded, that provides the impetus to remain with it. If,  then,  Adorno  seldomly  claims  his  mature  project  to  be  a  'philosophy  of art,' preferring to describe it as a 'philosophical aesthetics,' we should therefore interpret this as a dialectical commitment to aesthetics at a moment of its advanced dissolution. He writes:

The dilemma of aesthetics appears immanently in the fact that it can be constituted  neither  from  above  nor  from  below,  neither  from  concepts  nor  from aconceptual experience. The only possibility for aesthetics beyond this miserable alternative is the philosophical insight that fact and concept are not polar opposites but mediated reciprocally in one another. This must be appropriated by aesthetics, for art again stands in need of aesthetics now that criticism has shown itself to be so disoriented by false and arbitrary judgments that it fails vis-à-vis art. Yet if aesthetics is to amount neither to art-alien prescriptions nor to the inconsequential classification of what it happens upon, then it is only conceivable as dialectical aesthetics; dialectical method is not unsuitably defined as the refusal to rest content with the diremption of the deductive and inductive that dominates rigid, indurative thought, and this is expressly rejected by the earliest formulations of dialectics in German idealism, those of Fichte. 13

Far from the straightforward adoption of aesthetics as a 'traditional theory,' as  the  maintenance  of  a  philosophical  trajectory  that  is  unable  to  think  the social content of its concepts, Adorno's notion of philosophical aesthetics thus attempts to name that remaining with the dilemma of dialectically approaching the truth content of an artwork as it is mediated in experience. Philosophical aesthetics thus becomes not a meditation on 'pure feeling,' as if any experience of 'the aesthetic' were entirely unmediated, but the contradictory attempt to think 'extra-aesthetic logic' from within an aesthetic encounter and to do so through a set of historically ailing concepts and categories. 14 Philosophical aesthetics proceeds not by convention, but 'by determinate negation to think the categories that are in decline as categories of transition. The elucidated and concrete dissolution of conventional aesthetic categories is the only remaining form that aesthetics can take; it at the same time sets free the transformed truth of these categories.' 15

Adorno's claim here operates in two registers: as an analysis of philosophical aesthetics and as a methodological proposition. This is to say that this claim posits not only metaphilosophical judgement on how philosophical aesthetics should proceed, but also identifies one of the key interpretative strategies to be employed when reading Aesthetic Theory itself. Perhaps, had the book been finished before his death, and had the introduction been situated at the front of the printed edition rather than the back, we would have been spared some of the flat, tensionless secondary interpretations that have since come to dominate.  Or  to  put  more  directly  a  point  that  bears  repeating, Aesthetic  Theory should not be read as a straightforward treatment and defence of high or late modernism which elevates a narrow set of its historically dominant traits into an inflexible ontology of art. Rather, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has pointed out, the book aimed to question 'the very possibility of philosophical aesthetics in the context of avant-garde art.' It sought not to shore up a particular philosophical and artistic tradition, 'not to develop a theory specifically for modern art,' but instead 'maintained that modern art challenged the very possibility of systematic aesthetics tout court .' 16

To think aesthetic categories in their decline, as testifying to moments of transition, is to try to think history as it shapes thought and experience. Following this view, philosophical aesthetics has little to do with that doctrine of 'norms and models that are meant to help people in a fixed, immutable way in the orientation of an intellectual or artistic production.' 17 Whilst such a lamentation of stable aesthetic criteria-a position that tends to confuse 'the so-called chaos of today' with the 'chaos [that] has already become the law governing their own actions and imagination'-correctly recognises the historical character of aesthetics, it does so to bolster that conservative prescription to return to a prelapsarian image and social function of art. 18 Equally, however, Adorno stresses an antipathy to those cruder versions of theory that offer little more than an application of external categories. 19 Though aesthetics cannot do without a referent to 'external' elements, elements that are constitutive of aesthetics and require it to constantly 'overstep itself,' we cannot simply apply critical social concepts to works of art without seeing how they are fundamentally tested and transformed. On this point, he is worth quoting at length:

One  is  no  more  equal  to  a  Beethoven  symphony  without  comprehending its  so-called  purely  musical  course  than  if  one  is  unable  to  perceive  in  it  the echo  of  the  French  Revolution;  how  these  two  aspects  are  mediated  in  the phenomenon  belongs  to  the  obstinate  and  equally  unavoidable  themes  of philosophical  aesthetics.  Not  experience  alone  but  only  thought  that  is  fully saturated with experience is equal to the phenomenon. It is not for aesthetics to  adapt  itself  aconceptually  to  aesthetic  phenomena.  Consciousness  of  the antagonism between interior and exterior is requisite to the experience of art. The description of aesthetic experiences, theory and judgment, is insufficient. What is required is experience of works rather than thoughts simply applied to the matter, yet no artwork adequately presents itself as immediately given; none is to be understood strictly on its own terms. All works are formed in themselves according to their own logic and consistency as much as they are elements in the context of spirit and society. The two aspects are not to be neatly separated, as is the scientific habit. True consciousness of the external world participates in the work's immanent coherence; the spiritual and social standpoint of an artwork can only be discerned on the basis of its internal crystallization. There is nothing artistically true whose truth is not legitimated in an overarching context; and there  is  no  artwork  whose  consciousness  is  true  that  does  not  prove  itself  in terms of aesthetic quality. 20

Adorno's model of philosophical aesthetics is one that proposes to approach the  truth  content  of  an  artwork  by  registering  the  historical  redundancy  of traditional aesthetic categories and criteria. Instead of buttressing a collapsing discipline, such a model names the privileging of experience within the critical comprehension  of  art  via  an  internal  reflection  on  the  historical  crisis  of aesthetics for thinking its object. And whilst there are many approaches that equally prove, for one reason or another, fundamentally inadequate for thinking art,  the  claim  here  is  that  philosophical  aesthetics  uniquely  foregrounds  a contingency, a profound historicity, that registers shifts within the history of art. Indeed, as the following sections will suggest, we might even venture that aesthetics most readily demonstrates its proximity to art only at that moment in which it is seen to be most distant. In Adorno's view, neither as a doctrine of values, a set of established norms, nor a belief in mere feeling, but only as a historically and socially conditioned, conceptually mediated experience of its own crisis does philosophical aesthetics name anything of theoretical worth. His unfinished book, Aesthetic Theory , aims at both the exposition and demonstration of this argument, both a case for what remains of philosophical aesthetics at a moment of its crisis and a testing of this crisis through the determinate negation of its categories.

## Theorising the Non-Aesthetic

The artwork is not only aesthetic  but  sub-  and  supra-aesthetic;  in  that  it originates in layers of the empirical, has a thing-like character, a fait social , and  ultimately  converges  with  the  meta-aesthetic  in  the  idea  of  truth,  it implies a critique of any chemically pure attitude to art .

-Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (trans. amended)

Several aesthetic categories, ideas, and distinctions arise in and through Adorno's mature work, but few so distinctly turn on the limitations of an aesthetics in decline as does his theory of the double character of art, as autonomous and social fact. Bracketing from the present exposition a thoroughgoing account of its dynamic as an analytically separable latent contradiction, 21 I want to suggest that the double character of art foregrounds the above problematic of aesthetics in two basic ways.

First, there is the problem of the conflation of art's autonomy with the aesthetic. Though Adorno often falls short of a sufficient critique of this conflation, a shortcoming perhaps attributable to his 'lingering aestheticism,' 22 it must be maintained that art's autonomy is a critical proposition about art within the historically particular social relations of capital. Such historical conditions and social relations constitutively structure art, historico-ontologically, and return as part of the formal character of and congealed institutional framework around a work. 23 In his theorisation of it, Adorno builds on a definitive post-German Idealist, more explicitly Romantic, philosophical legacy that characterises art as 'a certain kind of production of meaning in the object, an autopoiesis, distinct from both techné and mimesis.' 24 As Peter Osborne points out, art's autonomy should therefore not be made to bear either on the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic nor, too, on the supposed autonomy of the artist. Where the former incorrectly traces the origin of the theory of art's autonomy to Kant's Critique of  the  Power  of  Judgement and  locates  it  in  a  distinctive  aesthetic  experience, the  latter  tends  to  argue  for  either  the  artist's  unique  position  within  the social division of labour, their exceptionalism vis-à-vis the wage relation, or an overinvested notion of their unique 'creativity.' 25 Neither of these interpretations  properly  accords  with  the  arguments  offered  by  Adorno,  downplaying autonomy's historical character and thereby diminishing its continuing function as a socio-critical category.

Second, and more important for my purposes, there is the formal registration of an artwork's 'non-artistic' and 'non-aesthetic' elements. Again, though the terminological conflation of the artistic and the aesthetic belies the substantial incongruity  of  these  two  concepts,  and  I  take  it  to  be  a  task  left  to  a  postAdornian philosophy of art to both deepen and heighten this contradiction, the concern here is that of the incompleteness of the artwork's aesthetic mediation of  the  external  world,  of  its  self-posited  dual  incorporation  of  and  distinction from what merely exists. In Adorno's view, this mediation should not be fundamentally characterised as representational, as the mimetic depiction of 'real world subjects,' no matter how clearly we might be able identify distinct buildings in a veduta or name historical individuals in a group portrait. Rather, it is the tautological process that describes the production of an artwork as the combined activity through which an artwork is produced, the self-positing of an artwork as a formal and objective mediation which ontologically distinguishes it from the merely existing. Or, to borrow one of his prized Schoenberg quips: 'After all, I paint a picture, not a chair.' 26 Such mediation is, however, never total or complete, but retains traces of its social origins. In this sense, artworks are the bearers of both aesthetic and non-aesthetic elements, both seemingly distanced  from  the  'outside  world'  and  offering  interrupting  glimpses  of where the 'outside' is let in. This basic interplay is imaged in what he terms a dual rejection and harbouring of the empirical and connotes an immanent condition of art, part of its ' ontological double-coding ,' as Osborne writes. 27 The resulting dynamic tension between these movements then becomes a formal marker of art's autonomous and social character, where an artwork appears to have achieved its socially determined freedom from social determination. This, as he suggests in the following dense and far-reaching lines, thereby necessitates an internal and external apprehension of a work, a double observation:

The double  character  of  art-something  that  severs  itself  from  empirical  reality  and thereby from social interdependency [ gesellschaftlichen Wirkungszusammenhang ] and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and social interdependency - is directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and faits sociaux .  They require a double observation that is no more to be posited as  an  unalloyed  whole  than  aesthetic  autonomy  and  art  can  be  conflated  as something  strictly  social.  This  double  character  becomes  physiognomically decipherable, whether intentionally so or not, when one views or listens to art from an external vantage point, and, certainly, art always stands in need of this external perspective for protection from the fetishisation of its autonomy. 28

## And again:

To whoever remains strictly internal, art will not open its eyes, and whoever remains  strictly  external  distorts  artworks  by  a  lack  of  affinity.  Yet  aesthetics becomes more than a rhapsodic back and forth between the two standpoints by developing their reciprocal mediation in the artwork itself. 29

As I am reconstructing and reading it, this 'double observation' is that model of  philosophical  aesthetics  Adorno  lays  out  in  the  draft  introduction,  from which the second quote is taken, naming that experiential recognition of the insufficiency of aesthetics for grasping the full formal complexity of a work. An 'aesthetic'  approach  to  an  artwork  will  be  fundamentally  stumped  by  those elements that appear to be 'extraneous,' elements that deviate from what we might take to be artistic materials, that call into question traditional categories  such  as  beauty,  and  that  combine  to  produce  the  compulsion  to  think the importance of an extra-aesthetic logic to art. This vantage point will find itself confronted by those aspects that are most disharmonious, jarring, or nonbelonging, find itself registering its own limits by observing momentary flashes of extraneous conditions to which art is subject.

Simultaneously,  however,  an  'extra-aesthetic'  or  'pre-aesthetic'  approach is  both  equally  dubious  and  equally  necessary.  Dubious  insofar  as  it  cannot account  for  the  artwork's  particular  formal  mediation  of  reality,  that  it  was produced as an artwork . Necessary insofar as it is the condition upon which an artwork becomes physiognomically decipherable as having separated itself as an artwork, that it was produced as an artwork. 30 The harsh and undifferentiating gaze  that  finds  in  a  work  nothing  other  than  its  external  referent,  so  neatly encapsulated in that oft-cited retort 'it is just a pile of bricks,' fails correctly. At once, it is both 'a barbaric residue or a danger of regressive consciousness' and  yet  is  a  proper  response  to  changes  in  art  history.  'Something  in  art,' Adorno writes, 'calls  for  this  response.  Only  when  art's  other  is  sensed  as  a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer,  to  dissolve  the  thematic  bonds,  without  the  autonomy  of  the  artwork becoming a matter of indifference. Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it.' 31 In an Adornian register, art's  critical  claim to autonomy should thus be understood as contingent on the material recognition that it is internally limited, that it is socially situated and produced as part of the division of labour. In this, Adorno does not simply seek to advance the claim, which should now be a matter of mere interpretative convention, that art's autonomy is always relative, always socially conditioned, but instead that the critical effectivity of the autonomy of art is constitutively contingent on those moments in which it breaks down. As he argues, what is  included  in  a  work  as  referents  to  the  'empirical'  are  those  historically received elements which materially constitute its 'thing-like character' and are aesthetically legible as non-artistic-elements 'directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and faits  sociaux .' 32 Properly speaking, because  the  tense  interplay  between  an  artwork's  'internal'  and  'external' elements is only rehearsed within the work, in an artwork's apparent rejection and separation from the merely existing, this dynamic plays out only at the level of art's autonomy. It is only at this level that a reduction of a work to its basic elements and processes risks destabilising the dynamic entirely. Though this is the case, it simultaneously cannot be recognised only internally to autonomy. The double observation of art is nothing more than the approach to art that maintains this tension simultaneously, that finds the double character within the work, and which Adorno names philosophical aesthetics.

## The De-Aestheticisation of Art

Today, when one speaks of autonomy one does so only in the context of the loss of autonomy, a crisis of the means of visual expression, under the mark of the de-aestheticisation of art on the one hand and the aestheticisation of actuality on the other. And it is precisely here that we find the starting point for a redefinition of the relation of the ordinary and everyday [Alltag und Alltäglichkeit] to art and the aesthetics of art .

-Peter Gorsen, 'Thesen zur künstlerischen Verarbeitung'

By the 1960s, that period in which Adorno was drafting and redrafting his unfinished  magnum opus, it  would  not  have  taken  a  great  deal  of  effort  to discover, within the walls of a gallery, museum, or temporary exhibition space, not  only  a  painting  that  represents  an  aesthetically  mediated  chair,  but  the formal incorporation of an ordinary chair itself. Though of course not entirely unique to the decade, the period saw a whole suite of seemingly 'non-artistic' materials and references-from the industrial metals and forms employed by Charlotte Posenenske through to the language of commerce and mass media drawn  on  by  Peter  Roehr,  to  select  two  examples  from  Frankfurt-become increasingly constitutive of the basic grammar of artistic form. Such a tendency would engender, as Harold Rosenberg would describe, a 'profound crisis' in art.  It  produced  a  state  of  generalised  anxiety,  a  process  in  which  'painting, sculpture, drama, music, have been undergoing a process of de-definition,' and would ultimately crystalise in what Rosenberg termed the 'anxious object,' an artwork unsure of itself, not knowing 'whether it is a masterpiece or junk.' 33

The artwork now profoundly unlike what it once was, the coming years and decades would broadly see artists, critics, and theorists debate the consequences of  the  post-war abandonment of several traditional claims of art and several aesthetic categories and values which subtend these claims, proceeding, handin-hand, with art's 'movement toward de-aestheticisation'; something which, from the standpoint of the early 1970s, appeared to Rosenberg as 'a reaction against and a continuation of the trend toward formalistic over-refinement in the art of the sixties, and particularly in the rhetoric that accompanied it.' 34

Increasingly, as the advent of conceptual art so concisely articulates, the latent antagonism and separation of art from the aesthetic came to be paradigmatic of the development and theorisation of contemporary art. This internal tension would return, in the debates of the 1980s and 1990s, as the 'anti-aesthetic' character of 'postmodern art.' 35 Thus, in 1983, condensing and framing a series of  interventions,  many  of  which  were  made  by  his October colleagues,  Hal Foster would describe the concept of the anti-aesthetic as rendering antiquated certain modernist notions of autonomy, as putting into question the notion and applicability of the aesthetic, and as challenging 'the idea that aesthetic experience exists apart, without 'purpose,' all but beyond history, or that art can  now  effect  a  world  at  once  (inter)subjective,  concrete  and  universal-a symbolic totality. Like 'postmodernism,' then, 'anti-aesthetic' marks a cultural position on the present: are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid?' 36 Though  polemical,  undeveloped,  and  not  entirely  systematic,  as  he  would later  admit, 37 Foster's  anti-aesthetic  sought  to  identify  not  only  a  prior  and existing  tendency  in  art  history  but  was  also  extrapolated  to  encompass  a set  of  occupied  positions  that  stressed  an  antipathy  to  the  reconciliatory aspects of aesthetic experience. 38

Such claims would provoke the ire of figures such as Donald Kuspit, once a student of Adorno, in his theorising of 'post-aesthetic art.' The role of aesthetics in art-by which Kuspit means art's pretensions to elevate itself above the ordinary, to express and mediate an experience that transcends reality, to occasion a claim to formal and moral value, and to creatively wield beauty as the 'ultimate protest against ugliness'-has been thoroughly 'maligned,' evidence for which he finds in the writing and work of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman. 39 For Kuspit, who attempts in The End of Art a  psychoanalytic, philosophical, and humanist defence for the normative rehabilitation of beauty and aesthetic experience, the post-aesthetic artist's abandonment of a creative approach to formal concerns is an unacknowledged contribution to the barbarism of the world.  Such  an  artist  forgoes  the  'aesthetic  autonomy'  of  art  which  is,  for Kuspit, something of 'a prelude to personal autonomy, even a basic part of it.' 40

In sketching this paradigm of art history and theory, I want to reinforce that Adorno's  own  abstracted  set  of  arguments  about  the  crisis  of  aesthetics  and the dynamic interplay of the aesthetic and non-aesthetic are more than philosophical  conundrums  and  conjectures,  suggesting  instead  that  they  are  best interpreted as an early attempt to reflect on these historical changes in art in the post-war period, particularly on questions of the social character of form. That is, at a moment in which distributed artistic practices had animated the 'dialectic of the boundary,' 41 as Peter Bürger once phrased it, between art and non-art, Adorno figures such changes through an argument about dialectical interplay between the historical crisis of aesthetic experience and the historical crisis of artistic form. Though my claim here is one that pertains predominantly to  an  interpretation  of  Adorno's Aesthetic  Theory ,  the  extended  critical  theoretical  work on these historical tendencies would only first be directly taken up by Peter Gorsen, a philosopher and theorist whose work is poorly known outside of the German-speaking world. 42

Gorsen's  contribution  to  my  concerns  are  most  densely  compressed  into  his thesis  on  art's Entästhetisierung (de-aestheticisation),  a  term  he  adopted  not from Rosenberg but from an earlier essay and comments by Odo Marquard. 43 For  Marquard  and  others  in  the  circle  around  the  hermeneuticians,  literary critics,  and  reception  theorists  that  Hans  Robert  Jauss  had  assembled  in 1966, a parallel  set  of  concerns  had  been  framed  primarily  as  a  question  of a  reinterpretation  of  art  and  literary  history,  of  reinterpreting,  in  different ways,  through  different  disciplines,  and  with  different  conclusions,  'two epochal cesuras': the first of which arose with 'the anti-aesthetic pretensions of Christian art,' pretensions that were buried during the Middle Ages before being rediscovered again in the move to the Romantic period; while the second arose  with  the  emergence  of  the  'no-longer-beautiful  arts'  and  had  ushered in modernity. As Jauss suggests, art and literature in the post-war period had rendered the 'aesthetic' itself a marginal phenomenon ( Grenzphänomen ), had maligned beauty as the definitive criterion for their assessment, and had forced a  reappraisal  of  a  series  of  minor  categories  such  as  the  ugly,  the  macabre, the disgusting, the obscene, the hideous, and the heinous. 44 How, Marquard wondered as he began to reflect on some of the contributions to Jauss's volume, could art and its theory have arrived at a situation in which there was both 'licence and the compulsion to de-aestheticise the aesthetic?' 45 In probing at this question, Gorsen viewed it less as a concern with the centuries-long history of literature and philosophical aesthetics than with the more recent histories of  artistic  experiment  and  Marxist  theories  of  capitalist  modernity.  Gorsen's theory of the de-aestheticisation of art thus emerges as partly a theoretical reformulation and extension of Adorno's notion of Entkunstung ,  de-artification, 46 partly  an  encounter  with  post-Adornian  critical  theoretical  reflection  on  art in  the  work  of  Herbert  Marcuse  and  Jürgen  Habermas,  partly  a  reckoning with Henri Lefebvre's theory of the capitalist organisation of the everyday, and partly, but most importantly, an interpretation of the history of art, particularly with respect to the reverberations of countercultural movements and artistic experiments of the 1960s. For this latter, Gorsen departs from his problem by producing a 'sexual aesthetics,' turning to the history of the relation between art and the erotic, the pornographic, the moral, the obscene, the psychiatric, and the unwell to outline a theory that, as Kerstin Stakemeier argues, could be  characterised  'an  immoral  and,  in  view  of  the  contemporary,  ultimately antisocial art of the modern genders and their sex beyond their social second nature [ gesellschaftlichen Zweitnatürlichkeit ].' 47

Though bound up in these histories, the problem of de-aestheticisation posed itself to Gorsen as essentially one of assessing the place of the aesthetic in the wake of the historic avant-garde. 48 How, in other words, does art persist after avant-gardist attempts to abolish it? How are we to understand post-war art as responding to a dilemma prefigured by the avant-garde? What irrevocable ruptures  in  aesthetics  had  the  historic  avant-garde  caused?  And  what  consequences  are  there  to  assessing  recent  artistic  practice,  as  well  as  the  theory and criticism that reflects on it, against this background? As he writes in the introduction to Transformierte Alltäglichkeit oder Transzendenz der Kunst (The transformed everyday or transcendence of art):

We know that the attempt to reconnect art to life praxis has consistently failed (most recently in the sixties) and we observe that this failure is implicated in modern art history, causing a chain of de-aestheticisations ,  of  boundary transgressions  of  traditional  aesthetics,  conceptually  registered  as  'anti-art',  'art of artlessness [ Kunstlösigkeit ]',  'destruction in art', etc. Since the turn of the century, they manifest themselves in the tendency to dissolve the aesthetic work and semblance character into a life context that encompasses art and actuality. 49

Whilst unsuccessful in its attempt at the complete and absolute dissolution of art, in the complete and absolute melding of art and life, the advanced ambitions of the avant-garde resulted in art's fundamental transformation, preserved by the figure of art's de-aestheticisation. In Gorsen's view, following his reading of  Adorno,  this  is  simultaneously  a  permanent  loss  of  art's  traditional  transcendental function and a gain in its embrace of avant-garde art-abolitionist tendencies. 50 Which  is  to  say  that  the  1950s,  1960s,  and  1970s  saw  artists variously rehabilitate and redeploy certain tactics that confront the bourgeois institution of art-tactics that lean on attempts at the radical dissolution of art into life-in full view of their historic unfulfillment.

Extrapolating from Gorsen, we can see this overarching tendency as having an essentially twofold function. On the one hand, it participates in the retroactive  recoding  of  the  historic  avant-garde  as  a  mere  moment internal to  the bourgeois history of art, rather than an experimental effort, at times revolutionary, towards its undoing. Such artistic practices thereby belatedly redouble on  those  largely  successful  pre-war  efforts  to  institutionally  appropriate  the historic avant-garde as part of its standard canon. 51 And consequentially, on the other hand, the transgressive character of avant-gardism has been reduced to a set of available artistic ideas, impulses, and techniques, reduced to a purportedly 'progressive' insistence by artists, critics, and theoreticians on an overly simplistic social refunctionalisation and actualisation of art. Such an insistence reframes and risks appearing to resolve, through a 'false de-differentiation of art and life,' 52 what Gorsen took to be the dominant post-war dichotomy posed to art: whether to transform or transcend the everyday. But why is this necessarily  false?  As  a  philosophically  trained  reader  of  the  critical  and  heterodox Marxist tradition, Gorsen maintained that the ambition to dissolve art into life could not be properly achieved on the basis of an overstated overcoming of the distinction, but only through political and social revolution. Life, that is, is not some idyllic state that art merely emerges from and to which it should return, but the domain through which capital reproduces itself and alienates us. It, too, needs to be overcome. As Marcuse argued on this point:

Art cannot become reality, cannot realise itself without cancelling itself as Art in all its forms, even in its most destructive, most minimal, most 'living' forms. The gap which separates Art from reality, the essential otherness of Art, its 'illusory' character can be reduced only to the degree to which reality itself tends towards Art as reality's own Form, that is to say, in the course of a revolution, with the emergence of a free society. 53

In  the  attempted  self-dissolution  of  art  into  life,  Gorsen  takes  the  historic avant-garde as having aimed not at a prefigurative image of emancipation, but at the radical transformation of the conditions of alienation, of capital's structural determination of everyday life. In the absence of a widespread proletarian movement which poses a substantial threat to capital and in the absence of an avant-gardism which would link itself to such a movement, the 'progressive' attempt to de-differentiate art and life by bridging the two, misrecognises what was constitutive of the historic avant-garde as well as the conditions in which life subsists. Gorsen writes:

One is not 'modern' or 'avant-garde' by proclamation. Whoever considers the development of art in the twentieth century against the background of failed political and social revolution will observe that this failure took shape in the aesthetic  transgression  of  limits  of  the  avant-garde,  its  so-called  'expanded concept  of  art,'  and,  having  reached  an  extremity  in  the  self-dissolution  of art,  continues  through  to  the  present  under  the  headings  of  the  happening, actionism, live performance, body art, and conceptual art as well as pop art, environmental, optical, minimal, and kinetic art, and so on. Such transgressions of limits, while maintaining a fragmentary distance from reality, have been variously debated under the banner of the 'aestheticisation of the inaesthetic (ugly), de-aestheticisation of  the  aesthetic  (beautiful)'  and  in  the  relation  of  art  and illness, art and pornography, aesthetics and sexuality. 54

Where  the  fate  of  early  twentieth-century  European  avant-gardes  had  been bound  to  the  fate  of  historic  emancipatory  movements,  to  the  fate  of  the revolutionary working class, the defeat of those movements remains preserved in  artistic  form. Which is to suggest that post-war body art, conceptual art, environmental  art,  and  the  other  examples  listed  above  variously  rehearse the  failures  of  the  historic  avant-garde  through  the  transgression  of  artistic limits,  doing  so  as  a  way  of  revising,  not  abolishing,  the  bourgeois  institution of art. Transgression of the traditional aesthetic criteria and purposes of art  thereby  comes  to  signify  something  internal  to  art,  the  means  by  which it is 'expanded,' not that which moves beyond it. What Gorsen thus intends to describe as the 'chain of de-aestheticisations' is the dialectical tension that arises in art seeking to incorporate and foreground non-art elements without seeking to properly, by which is also meant socially and politically, overcome the  socio-ontological  distinction  that  separates  art  from  non-art.  In  view  of then-recent  debates  on Warenand Alltagsästhetik ,  commodity  and  everyday aesthetics, Gorsen takes this dialectic as not only coming to increasingly define the dominant grammar through which art is produced and through which art's autonomy is purportedly jeopardised, but also and inversely, as the rendering 'aesthetic' of ordinary life: 55

The relation of art to actuality, as the 'supplier of its material', has decisively changed. We can establish the current loss of autonomy in two regards: first, art increasingly approximates the aesthetics of the everyday, ultimately dissolving itself in it; second, the ordinary and the everyday [ Alltag und Alltäglichkeit ] are increasingly subjected to an aestheticisation process. 56

That the mundane now appears in bright colours and clean lines or that now 'everyone is an artist,' to parrot Gorsen parroting Joseph Beuys, is no cause for  celebration.  Here  Gorsen  is  critical  of  what  he  calls  the  'political  catchword' of everyday aesthetics, dismissing those that do not adequately see how everyday life plays its role in perpetuating alienation and domination, finding little that could be recuperated of the role that aesthetics, aesthetic principles, and aesthetic categories now play in accelerating capital's subsumption of social relations. 57 This  dynamic  runs  alongside  the  de-aestheticisation  of  art  in  the convergence of art and life as a convergence of art and the commodity forman aestheticisation 'of commodities, advertising, public relations, and design, which draw on the most technologically advanced media such as photography, film, and television' 58 -producing a competing 'autonomous' sphere.

Though  Gorsen  is  too  absolute  in  his  account  of  art's  'loss  of  autonomy,' or  better,  too  hasty  to  claim  that  the  de-aestheticised  conditions  of  art  have forgone autonomy rather than heightening the dynamic tension of art's double character,  he  is  correct  to  assert  that  the  historical  division  of  art  and  the aesthetic, that that questionable thing known as 'the aesthetic' is increasingly shown to be inadequate to the production, reception, and theorisation of art, remains bound to both the history of art and the history of capital. Or rather, that aesthetics is the improper discourse with which to think art, that it cannot account for the complexity of avant-gardist and post-avant-gardist art, that its categories  misattribute  an  elevated  experience  of  artistic  form  as  the  criteria against  which  it  should  be  judged,  and  so  on,  is  made  increasingly  clear  by capital's employment of its categories and norms. 59

To try to reformulate Gorsen's answer to Marquard's question then, the licence and compulsion to de-aestheticise names the post-avant-gardist condition of late modern, or better pre-contemporary, art through which the chasm between art and aesthetics was both widening and collapsing. Such a condition preserves, in a contorted form, the avant-gardist revolutionary belief that capital, and with it art, could be abolished. In our intermediary condition, marked by capital's transformation of social relations as the transformation of its modes of exploitation and domination, this belief is negatively rendered in post-avant-gardist art, in experiments in de-aestheticisation:

The unmistakable process of the de-aestheticisation of art comes to a standstill in the structures of alienation of the actuality of life. That which we observe as de-aestheticisation and as subjectless art in the history of the twentieth century and  which  we  can  continue  to  describe  as  aesthetically  immanent  expresses, under  conditions  of  a  commodity-producing  society,  the inevitably  failing and  simultaneously aestheticised  hope that  the  qualitative  difference  between art and life can be abolished, the aesthetic semblance character of the artwork dismantled, and the promise of happiness practically honoured. 60

## Toward a Theory of 'Marxist Non-Aesthetics'

Without  a  sufficient grasp of its intrinsic and  extrinsic contradictions, aesthetics cannot comprehend art in any sufficient way. The sometimes gradual, sometimes abrupt history of the discipline is the history of coming to terms with these contradictions, figured as its growing sense of obsolescence. In the mid-twentieth century, in particular, this issue was forced by the tendency of post-avant-gardist  art  to  break  all  allegiance  to  those  categories  with  which aesthetics believed it grasped and evaluated its object. So often experienced as a permanent loss-of its 'centre,' of its autonomy, of its transcendent function, and  so  on-this  is  properly  thought  as  the  historical  foregrounding  of  the socio-ontological dialectic of art and non-art figured as a crisis of art's secure relation to itself, art's Entkunstung , and aesthetics' intimate relation to art, art's Entästhetisierung .  This  double  crisis,  the  point  from  which Aesthetic  Theory properly  departs,  thematises  this  through  the  encroachment  of  non-artistic materials into the work and the concordant demise of traditional philosophical categories. The critical theoretical claim on this tendency is not one that lurches towards  a  conservative  lament  or  a  'progressive'  postmodern  abandonment, but one that negatively assesses such discrepancies as the social and historical content of ailing aesthetic categories. Here constructed through a rereading of Adorno and Gorsen, I take Marxism to be well disposed to think the integrally 'non-aesthetic'-well  disposed,  that  is,  to  advance  an  understanding  of  the insufficiency of aesthetic apprehension to grasp the form and content of a work, to delineate the historically unstable boundary between art and non-art as a socially determined dialectic, and to recognise in the appearance of historical crises  a  permeation  by  the  'external'  logic  of  capital.  If  history  has  demonstrated that aesthetics is insufficient to art, a Marxist non-aesthetics proposes a case for remaining within the troubled discipline of philosophical aesthetics precisely  because  of  its  deficiencies  and  complications.  Though  the  move  to a  philosophy  of  art  might  theoretically  overcome  these  limitations,  turning instead to a lineage that does not falsely equivocate by inadvertently elevating one element above others, it also does not remain with them. Equally, however, a  Marxist  non-aesthetics  would  have  to  the  discipline-which  a  survey  of present interventions may take to be a neutral and uncomplicated endeavourwith its constitutive contradictions, for if the cause to stay with philosophical aesthetics arises out of its heightened insufficiency, it is also to not occlude that this insufficiency is constitutive.

- 1   For a critique of 'the formalist trap' in the theory of art's autonomy, see Kim West, The Autonomy of Art Is Ordinary: Notes in Defense of an Idea of Emancipation (Sternberg Press, 2024), 22-35.
- 2   I would particularly like to thank Tobias Dias for his insightful comments on the draft version of this article.
- 3   See Dirk Braunstein, Adorno's Critique of Political Economy , trans. Adam Baltner (Brill, 2023), 350-53.
- 4   In addition to Braunstein, Adorno's Critique , a non-exhaustive list would have to include the following: Beverley Best, Werner Bonefeld, and Chris O'Kane, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory , 3 vols. (SAGE, 2018); Charles A. Prusik, Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society (Bloomsbury, 2020); Peter Osborne, 'Adorno and Marx,' in A Companion to Adorno , ed. Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and Max Penske (Wiley Blackwell, 2020); Werner Bonefeld and Chris O'Kane, eds., Adorno and Marx: Negative Dialectics and the Critique of Political Economy (Bloomsbury, 2022).
- 5   A case is made (in my view convincingly) for the necessity of adopting a post-Adornian position in John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015).
- 6   Peter Gorsen, 'Thesen zur künstlerischen Verarbeitung alltagsästhetischer Äußerungen,' in Transformierte Altäglichkeit oder Transzendenz der Kunst: Reflexionen zur Entästhetisierung (Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1981), 272. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own.
- 7   Paul Mattick Jr., 'Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics in the Visual Arts,' The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 258.
- 8   Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Athlone Press, 1997), 332.
- 9   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 333.
- 10   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 333.
- 11  On the parallelism between the crises in art and in aesthetics, see Alexander García Düttmann, 'De-Arting,' in From an Aesthetic Point of View: Philosophy, Art and the Senses , ed. Peter Osborne (Serpent's Tail, 2000), 71-87.
- 12   Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013), 43.
- 13   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 334.
- 14   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 336.
- 15   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 341.
- 16   Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Fleeting Promise of Art: Adorno's 'Aesthetic Theory' Revisited (Cornell University Press, 2013), 6-7.
- 17   Theodor W. Adorno, 'Without Model: In Place of a Preface,' in Without Model: Parva Aesthetica , trans. Wieland Hoban (Seagull Books, 2023), 7.
- 18   Adorno, 'Without Model,' 7-8.
- 19   'Social concepts should not be applied to the works from without but rather drawn from an exacting examination of works themselves.' Theodor W. Adorno, 'On Lyric Poetry and Society,' in Notes to Literature , vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Columbia University Press, 1991), 39. In his reading of Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson offers an interesting addendum to this line of thought when he writes: 'the category of mechanical effectivity retains a purely local validity in cultural analysis where it can be shown that billiard-ball causality remains one of the (nonsynchronous) laws of our particular fallen social reality. It does little good, in other words, to banish 'extrinsic' categories from our thinking, when the latter continue to have a hold on the objective realities about which we plan to think. There seems, for instance, to have been an unquestionable causal relationship between the admittedly extrinsic fact of the crisis in late nineteenth-century publishing, during which the dominant three-decker lending library novel was replaced by a cheaper one-volume format, and the modification of the 'inner form' of the novel itself.' Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Routledge, 1989), 25.
- 20   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 349.
- 21   As I have argued elsewhere, the double character of art is not to be read straightforwardly as a dialectic-an interpretation common in the secondary that then tends to see in it an interplay between autonomy and heteronomy, thereby overlooking the (anti-)sociological content of Adorno's claim, reproducing a sociological naïveté that Adorno elsewhere criticised, and betraying the properly Marxian reference and legacy that it contains-but instead understood as a pre-dialecticised unity. See Louis Hartnoll, Manifest Contradiction: Adorno, Sociology, and the Double Character of Art (Ph.D. diss., Centre for Research in Modern Europen Philosophy, Kingston University London) 2023.
- 22   Peter Osborne, 'Crisis as Form,' in Crisis as Form (Verso, 2022), 32.
- 23   Osborne, Anywhere , 38-46.
- 24   Osborne, Anywhere , 44.
- 25   Adorno's theory of the artist is instead better construed as a theory of their peculiar unfreedom , an unfreedom bestowed by their given task as 'executor' and as 'the extension of a tool, a tool for the transition from potentiality to actuality.' Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 166.
- 26   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 323.
- 27   Osborne, 'Crisis as Form,' 38, emphasis in the original.
- 28   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 252-53, with minor amendments. In a certain sense, these remarks are consistent with Adorno's earlier theorisation of the sociology of music's 'dual relation to its object: an internal and external dimension,' its being both consistent with and resistant to the social conditions it finds itself in and social functions that are attributed to it. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music,' Sound Figures , trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford University Press, 1999), 2.

- 29   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 350.
- 30   On the legacy of physiognomy in critical theory, see Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (Yale University Press, 2005), 137-242.
- 31   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 6.
- 32   Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , 252.
- 33   Harold Rosenberg, 'On the De-definition of Art,' in The De-Definition of Art (Secker and Warburg, 1972), 12. Cf. Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (Horizon Press, 1964).
- 34   Rosenberg, 'De-aestheticization,' in De-Definition of Art , 29. Or, as Paul Mattick Jr. insists: 'Once any object chosen by an artist can be art, art is no longer aesthetic-that is, effective through its perceptual properties-in nature. Accordingly, 'taste' in the traditional sense loses its role to the newly invented art theory, which is increasingly thought of as constitutive of art itself. Mattick Jr., 'Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics,' 254.
- 35   For a short overview of this and other terms, see James Elkins, 'Introduction,' in Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic , ed. James Elkins and Harper Montgomery (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 1-16.
- 36   Hal Foster, 'Postmodernism: A Preface,' in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture , ed. Hal Foster (Bay Press, 1983), xv.
- 37   Hal Foster in James Elkins et al., 'Introductory Seminar,' in Elkins and Montgomery, Beyond the Aesthetic , 31-33.
- 38   In the opening roundtable, Diarmuid Costello indicates something of this ambiguity when he asks: 'Is the anti-aesthetic one expression of postmodernism in art, or is it, conversely, a theoretical discourse or set of discourses that take issue with various forms of postmodernism in art, for example, those captured in Jameson's formulation?' Diarmuid Costello in Elkins et al., 'Introductory Seminar,' 31.
- 39   Donald Kuspit, The End of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31.
- 40   Kuspit, End of Art , 38.
- 41   Peter Bürger, 'Aporias of Modern Aesthetics,' trans. Ben Morgan, in Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics , ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), 5.
- 42   A student of Adorno and Habermas, Gorsen would write shortly after the posthumous publication of Aesthetic Theory that the book 'is not philosophy applied to art, but the philosophical in itself; not a theory of the aesthetic, but the self-unfolding truth of the aesthetic.' Though early translations of Das Prinzip Obszön (The principle of obscenity) exist in both Spanish and Italian, to my knowledge there has yet to be any systematic translation of his most important essays and interventions into either English or any other language-though work by Kerstin Stakemeier will soon begin to ameliorate this. For an overview of his published work, see Martin Zeiller, ed., Peter Gorsen: Bausteine zu einer Bibliografie,

1962-2018 (Universität für angewandte Kunst, 2018). For a translation of one of his early essays, see Peter Gorsen, 'Prolegomena to a Hedonistic Enlightenment,' in Why Art Criticism? A Reader , ed. Beate Söntgen and Julia Voss (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2022), 167-75.

- 43   See Odo Marquard, 'Zur Bedeutung der Theorie des Unbewussten für eine Theorie der nicht mehr schönen Kunst,' in Die nicht mehr schönen Künste: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen , ed. Hans Robert Jauss (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1968), 375-92, as well as his comments to the discussions. An English translation of Marquard's essay, alongside some select pieces from the original Poetik und Hermeneutik anthologies, can be found in Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, eds., New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1979).
- 44   Hans Robert Jauss, 'Vorwort,' in Jauss, Die nicht mehr schönen Künste , 11.
- 45   Odo Marquard in 'Siebte Diskussion: Grenzphänomene des Ästhetischen in der fortgeschrittenen Neuzeit,' in Jauss, Die nicht mehr schönen Künste , 629.
- 46   See, for instance, the comparisons and links made in Peter Gorsen, 'Wider die Sozialpartner der Barbarie: Theodor W. Adornos Ästhetische Theorie ,' in Transformierte Alltäglichkeit , 75-81. To date, the most significant historical analysis and development of Adorno's concept of 'de-artification' remains Kerstin Stakemeier, Entkunstung: Artistic Models for the End of Art (Ph.D. diss, University College London, 2010). See also, Kerstin Stakemeier, 'Deartification: This Side of Art; Ideology Critique, Autonomy and Reproduction,' in Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, and Frederic J. Schwartz, eds., Re/New Marxist Art History (Art Books, 2013), 494-504. Though I would contest other aspects of his interpretation, Richard Wolin is somewhat correct to link this to Benjamin's reflections of the 1930s when he writes: 'In Aesthetische Theorie Benjamin's notion of the de-auraticization of art becomes the concept of de-aestheticization [ Entkunstung ], which signifies a final dissolution of the essential aesthetic qualities which have up until this century been inseparable from the concept of art itself.' Richard Wolin, 'The De-aestheticization of Art: On Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie ,' Telos 41 (1979): 111. The same link is also posited in Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno (University of California Press, 1982), 155.
- 47   Kerstin Stakemeier, Entgrenzter Formalismus: Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (b\_books, 2017), 168. For an English-language contribution to the critical reception of Gorsen and his work on sexuality, see Kerstin Stakemeier, '(Dis)Alienating. Implicating. Aesthetics in Love,' in this special issue.
- 48   Drawing on Rosenberg, Mattick Jr. makes a similar claim in arguing: 'To a great extent, it is worth noting, the art celebrated under the rubric of the anti-aesthetic shares formal features with art of the earlier avant-garde, in particular with dada and surrealism in its use of text, photography,

and stylishly ordered juxtapositions of images and objects.' Mattick Jr., 'Aesthetics and Anti-Aesthetics,' 256. For a critical assessment of Gorsen's theory of the avant-garde, see Tobias Dias, 'The Aporia of Praxis: Materialist Aesthetics, the Avant-Garde, and Socially Engaged Art,' in this special issue.

- 49   Gorsen, 'Einleitung,' 8.
- 50   'It was Adorno who first philosophically reflected on the loss of transcendence in new art (just as Horkheimer had with religion, Gehlen with morality): he perceived it to be a new quality of art which had assimilated its de-astheticisation.' Gorsen, 'Einleitung,' 10.
- 51   Efforts that would subsequently result in positing US abstract expressionism as the heir to European avant-gardism. Osborne, Anywhere , 18-22.
- 52   Gorsen, 'Einleitung,' 11.
- 53   Herbert Marcuse, 'Art as Form of Reality,' New Left Review 74 (1972): 56, emphasis in the original.
- 54   Gorsen, 'Einleitung,' 17, emphasis in the original. I have here translated the phrase 'Life performance' as 'live performance' in the assumption that this is a typo in Gorsen's English.
- 55  Though this is left as only indicative, in his account of post-war artistic practice, Rosenberg links the prehistory of the aestheticisation of the everyday to the Fascist aestheticisation of politics. He writes: 'In the distant background of art povera [sic.] is the 'real' art of Marinetti's bursting shrapnel of the First World War visualised as a stupendous earthwork, and the patterns and rhythms of the Nuremberg rallies seen as communicative systems.' Rosenberg, 'De-aestheticization,' 37. With Eunsong Kim, we could equally understand the 'aestheticisation' of the everyday as part of a history of racialised property relations, of the rendering of those property relations as aesthetic categories and value judgements. See, in particular, chapters three and six of Eunsong Kim, The Politics of Collecting: Race and the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press, 2024).
- 56   Gorsen, 'Thesen zur künstlerischen Verarbeitung,' 272-73.
- 57   Citing Burger's Theory of the Avant-Garde , Gorsen writes that 'the actuality [ Aktualität ] of everyday aesthetics is much more a symptom and first result of the general demolition of art and its historical consciousness by capitalism itself.' Gorsen, 'Thesen zur künstlerischen Verarbeitung,' 271.
- 58   Gorsen, 'Thesen zur künstlerischen Verarbeitung,' 274.
- 59   For one argument that regards the discipline of aesthetics as coeval with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere, changes in patronage and statecraft, etc., see Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (University of Chicago Press, 2008).
- 60   Gorsen, 'Einleitung,' 17-18, emphasis in the original. Cf. Peter Gorsen, 'Subjektlose Kunst,' in Transformierte Alltäglichkeit , 57-73.23 Osborne, Anywhere , 38-46.