But exactly how both false objectivism and false subjectivism are to be
avoided and aesthetic affirmation is to be achieved remains a problem that
no recipe or formula can address. Lukács himself tends to favor a somewhat
more objectivist-representationalist stance, in taking Balzac’sPère Goriotand
Gerhart Hauptmann’sWeaversas exemplars of artistic success.^26 Adorno, in
contrast, favors the more modernist-formalist works of Joyce, Beckett, and
Brecht, and he argues that a certain subjectivism and tendency toward
abstraction are necessary in order for art to maintain a critical distance on
social actuality, indicting its failure to satisfy deep subjective longings for
satisfaction. For Adorno, art has become and must remain“an enigma”in
comparison with either a commodity or a social sermon;“it achieves mean-
ing by forming its emphatic absence of meaning”(as a coherent plot or
symbol of social achievement).^27 Genuine modern art manifests a“double
character as both autonomous [through being driven toward abstraction, in
the face of the weight of social actuality] andfait social”; in modern art“the
unsolved antagonisms of reality return as immanent problems of form.”^28 In
any case, whether predominantly formal-abstract-subjectivist or predomin-
antly realist-objectivist-representationalist-vernacular, art will remain sur-
rounded with penumbrae – including at least kitsch, entertainment,
decoration, propaganda, pornography, and narcissicist self-display–from
which it will be difficult to distinguish it with sharpness in every single case.
Just how to blend a sense of divided social actuality with the fruitful expres-
sion of deep, subjective longing remains a standing problem. And yet aes-
thetic affirmation, in the form of sensuous gesture that presents a subject
matter as a focus for thought and emotional attitude, distinctively fused to
the imaginative exploration of material, remains possible.
Structuralism and structural opposition in social life:
Le ́vi Strauss and Althusser
For the past forty-five or so years and centrally under the influence of
structuralism and poststructuralism, thinking about the task of art as aes-
thetic affirmation–in a line of thinking that runs from Kant and Schiller
(^26) Lukács,“Art and Objective Truth,”pp. 802A–B.
(^27) Adorno,Aesthetic Theory, p. 127.
(^28) Ibid., pp. 5, 6.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 263