but for this gesture. In his analyses of specific artworks—his particular interest was
modern literature and serious music—the purport of his text was invariably to show
exactly how the social determination of the material, combined with its autonomous
artistic processing, enabled the artist to produce a work that contains a critical atti-
tude toward social reality.
In an essay about Commitmenthe clarifies his position further. Committed art,
art that endeavors to win over the public to a certain way of thinking, is based in
Adorno’s view on false premises. To the extent that it can be called art, it is subject
to the autonomous formal principles of the medium that it uses. In this constellation
the intention of the artist is only one moment in the whole process, and that moment
cannot be the only one that determines the final result. A work such as Picasso’s
Guernicais in the first instance an autonomous work: it is not made with the sole aim
of denouncing the evils of war. Effectively, however, this is what it does, precisely
because as a work of art it reflects critically on the given reality:
Even autonomous works of art like the Guernicaare determinate nega-
tions of empirical reality: they destroy what destroys, what merely ex-
ists and as mere existence recapitulates the guilt endlessly....... The
artist’s imagination is not a creatio ex nihilo;only dilettantes and sensi-
tive types conceive it as such. By opposing empirical reality, works of
art obey its forces, which repulse the spiritual construction, as it were,
throwing it back upon itself.^87It is in this complicated relation with reality that the critical power of art is im-
plied—not in the explicit commitment of the artist. Adorno even sees a danger in the
latter: “Hidden in the notion of a ‘message,’ of art’s manifesto, even if it is politically
radical, is a moment of accommodation to the world: the gesture of addressing the
listener contains a secret complicity with those being addressed, who can, however,
be released from their illusions only if that complicity is rescinded.”^88 The fact that
one wants to convey a message means that one is conforming to the norm of what
can be communicated and understood, to the norm of identity thinking. This implies
a betrayal of art’s singularity, the essence of which is precisely not to conform, thus
offering through its resistance a sanctuary to the nonidentical. Only by remaining
faithful to itself can art genuinely exercise criticism and keep alive the hope of some-
thing different: “An ‘it shall be different’ is hidden in even the most sublimated work
of art. If art is merely identical with itself, a purely scientized construction, it has al-
ready gone bad and is literally preartistic. The moment of intention is mediated solely
through the form of the work, which crystallizes into a likeness of an Other that ought
to exist.”^89
Adorno had already expressed this view much earlier. Traces of it recur in his
discussion with Benjamin about the latter’s essay on works of art.^90 Adorno does not
agree with Benjamin that little can be expected of autonomous art with regard to pos-
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity