Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redemption - Monoskop

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achievement of both Benjamin and Adorno in the 1930s to have been among the first to give theoretical expression to
this tendencywhich Benjamin observed in the case of the Nazi propaganda machine and Adorno attributed to the
culture industry of the West.
The "torn halves of an integral freedom" of which Adorno speaks cannot be made whole in a social totality which
itself remains lacerated. Hence, the antinomical form of the debate corresponds to an objective social predicament,
rather than pointing to a logical deficiency of the dispute itself. For either position, if taken in isolation, ultimately
proves self-defeating. Each requires the other as its necessary complement. Politically committed art and avant garde
art need not preclude each other. Both play an indispensable role, though in contrasting ways, in the critique of the
existing social order. Mechanically structured media such as film possess an unprecedented capacity to convey
socially relevant themes to vast numbers of people. This potential can neither be dismissed outright, as Adorno tends
to do, nor can it be, following Benjamin, hypostatized as "intrinsically revolutionary." Above all, the overly
simplistic didactic tendencies of committed art must be curbed if it is to distinguish itself from mere propaganda, be
it of a Soviet or culture industry slant. Any form of aesthetic communication that seeks to program its recipients to
think in a certain manner immediately forfeits its claim to an emancipatory potential. The task of political art can
never be anything more than to initiate a process of critical self-reflection and debatea fact of which Brecht took
cognizance in theory, whereas in his practice it was honored more in the breach than the observance. The mission of
art can never be one of dispensing readymade ideological slogans and then marketing them as revolutionary truths.
Adorno's position serves as an important corrective to such tendencies.
At the same time, autonomous avant garde art, by refusing to become involved immediately in society, retains a
capacity for critique that is all the more radical. For it is precisely through this moment of refusal, its unwillingness
to play the game, so to speak, that modern art convicts the unreason of society of its own absurdity. By remaining
useless for social purposes, modernism
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