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THE SEMBLANCE OF SUBJECTIVITY: ESSAYS IN ADORNO'S ESTHETIC THEORY, edited by Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997, 358 + viii pp., $35.00.
The editors see their volume as profiling three themes: (1 ) the culture industry, (2) the autonomy of art, and (3) the aesthetics of nature. 1. Contrary to Walter Benjamin's optimism about the future of mass media, Adorno believed that the culture industry promoted regressive forms of consciousness and thwarts our ability to evaluate the actual uses of cultural objects. 2. While "formalism" often connotes a steadfastly asocial approach to art, Adorno's view is that the autonomy of art actually opens up a space for the exposure of societal wounds. 3. Unlike Hegel, Adorno tries to make a space for an aesthetics of nature, which also brings into the picture the concept of mimesis.
For Adorno, mimesis has nothing to do with the replication of nature but is, rather, a species of openness to it. Natural beauty, for Adorno, speaks to us in ways that cannot be easily digested by the apparatuses of instrumental reasoning. Sheirry Weber Nicholsen, in her contribution to the volume, speaks of natural beauty, like art itself, as enigmatic. In another essay, Heinz Paetzold wonders about the bearing of Adorno's view about natural beauty on contemporary interests in environmental ethics. And Martin Jay contrasts Adorno's views on mimesis with those of the poststructuralist Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, finding unexpected similarities between the pair.
While there are differences between the views of Hegel's and Adorno's stances vis-d-vis nature, many who are concerned with issues in philosophical ecology will probably feel that Adorno's aesthetics of nature is too obviously a corollary to his social philosophy. (Is the Matterhorn's main point that it reminds us that...