191sible revolutionary social developments. He also does not share Benjamin’s belief in
the progressive character of the new reproduction techniques. As far as the first
point was concerned, Adorno thought that Benjamin was perhaps correct in diag-
nosing a “decay of the aura” of the work of art, but that this process of decay also
had to do with internal artistic developments and therefore could not be attributed
only to the influence of reproducibility. Adorno stresses that “l’art pour l’artis just as
much in need of a defense”^91 and that Benjamin is mistaken in attributing a counter-
revolutionary function to the autonomous work of art.
He has similar difficulties with the potential for emancipation that Benjamin
perceived in the new medium of film. He accuses Benjamin of having an undialecti-
cal approach in that he condemns the domain of high culture in an unqualified fash-
ion while uncritically lauding everything that pertains to “low” culture: “Both bear the
stigmata of capitalism, both contain elements of change.... Both are torn halves of
an integral freedom, to which however they do not add up. It would be romantic to
sacrifice one to the other.”^92 Adorno shares with Benjamin the belief that history is
sedimented in the materials and techniques that the artist employs in his work: it fol-
lows for him that the artist, precisely through the fact of using these materials and
techniques, can reveal the true face of history. It is due to this belief that for Adorno
the truth content of a work of art does line up with its artistic significance.
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theorydescribes the condition of modern art as a situation
that is dominated by antinomian structures and expectations from which there is no
definitive escape. The whole aim of modern art is to give concrete form to utopia (in
one way or another it remains a promesse de bonheur), but on the other hand art is
not in a position actually to become a utopia because if it did so it would lose its effi-
caciousness and degenerate into an empty form of consolation. Modern art is radi-
cally autonomous in its attitude toward social reality but remains nevertheless tied to
it through its hidden strands of negation and criticism. Modern art is the result of a
combination of mimesis and reason, with these two moments of cognition being es-
sentially incompatible, and the work of art not really capable of mediating between
them. A definitive solution, a genuine reconciliation, a satisfactory harmony, would
seem to Adorno not to be within the bounds of possibility. At the same time, art does
occupy a privileged position in his eyes precisely because it succeeds in giving form
to these incongruities without detracting from either of the two polarities. In its best
moments art succeeds in referring to the utopian form while at the same time ex-
posing its inaccessibility under present societal relations.
Contradictions and paradoxes, according to Adorno, also govern social reality
in a broader sense. That is how The Dialectic of Enlightenmentinterprets modernity:
Enlightenment is supposedly founded in reason but is transformed into myth; the
new is desirable because it represents the promise of the radical other and yet at the
same time it is only a flimsy mask for the return of the old. Horkheimer and Adorno
give us a tragic picture of the Enlightenment, with the tragic element lying above all
in the fact that people in general are not aware of the contradictions and absurdities190