the center of contemporary antinomies is that art must be and wants to be utopia,
and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet
at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing sem-
blance and consolation.”^40 This is exactly what becomes clear in Constant’s New
Babylon project. As a project that aspires to embody the utopian goal of history, it is
based on a negation of all that is false and fraudulent in present society; it therefore
highlights the necessity of putting an end to oppression and domination. The quality
of the project, however, does not lie in the fact that it offers a harmonious or idyllic
image of this final goal. On the contrary, New Babylon does not lend itself to use as
an instrument of illusion or consolation. Its truth lies in its negativity and in the dis-
sonances that continually pervade its image of harmony and well-being.
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theoryprovides us with remarkable tools with which to
examine an ambivalent project such as New Babylon. It can properly be called one of
the most elaborate attempts to describe the major contradictions that art is faced
with in modern conditions, and in my view the book has lost little of its relevance,
even if some of Adorno’s ideas may well be dated in certain respects.^41
Adorno (1903–1969) belonged to the first generation of the theorists of the
Frankfurter Schule. On his father’s side he was of Jewish origin. Like so many oth-
ers, he was forced to emigrate from Germany in the early thirties, first to England and
later to America. In 1950, he returned to Frankfurt, but the shock caused by the Holo-
caust lingered on, permeating his later work. His texts are dominated by the ques-
tion of how it is possible for the ideals of the Enlightenment, the ideas of reason,
progress, and universal emancipation, to turn into their opposite when they are put
into practice. He views modernization as leading to repression and manipulation
rather than to liberation, and he poses the question of why and how this develop-
ment took place. The most explicit treatment of these questions is to be found in the
famous book that he wrote with Max Horkheimer during the war, Dialectic of En-
lightenment. His other major works—Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory—
also are steeped in this sense of the paradoxical and contradictory character of
modernity. His approach is original and unusual in that he combines an analysis of the
philosophical question about the nature of the Enlightenment and modernization
with an intense interest in contemporary artistic developments. This dual approach,
embracing both philosophical and aesthetic aspects, is responsible for the presence
in his work of a programmatic as well as a transitory conception of modernity. The
purpose of his work is to clarify the complexities of modernity, to analyze its differ-
ent manifestations, and to determine the relations between them.
Constellating the Nonidentical
Martin Jay introduces Adorno’s thought by describing it in terms of a constellation of
five primary points of light and energy that have had a decisive influence on his
work.^42 The first and brightest star in this constellation is that of nonorthodox, non-
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Architecture as Critique of Modernity