fectly. The dream of a perfect autonomy is constantly threatened by the confusing
plurality that mimesis represents. It is, in other words, threatened by instability, by
feminization.^105
The Issue of Critique
The question that now emerges is that of the critical content of mimesis. For Adorno,
as we have seen, the critical potential of artworks is closely linked to their mimetic
character: in his view the thing that is specific to works of art is their implementation
in mimetic form of a concrete negation of certain aspects of social reality. He sees
the degree to which this contradictory operation succeeds as a criterion for judging
the quality of artworks.
With the French poststructuralists, the emphasis is less on mimesis as a
strategy for developing a critique of society within the domain of art. They too see
mimesis as an oppositional agency capable of undermining the dominance of logo-
centrism. But while in Adorno art is seen as one of the few safe havens still available
to mimesis, the French thinkers see it as also regularly operating elsewhere: in texts,
in psychoanalysis, in behavioral patterns, in new social movements. Moreover, they
are less inclined to speak in terms of a “critique.” This difference of perception be-
tween Adorno and the poststructuralists has a great deal to do with some more gen-
eral differences between critical theory and recent French thought.
Adorno’s opposition to identity thinking, for instance, is strongly influenced by
his sociopolitical position that has its roots in the Marxist tradition; Derrida’s decon-
struction of metaphysics, on the other hand, came about through a radicalization of
a reflection on language. Thus, Adorno puts a strong emphasis on the link between
the exchange principle and identity thinking, a relation that Derrida pays little heed to.
Adorno’s philosophical and aesthetic analyses inevitably lead to conclusions that are
sociocritical in content, something that is much less the case with Derrida and other
poststructuralists.
Secondly, Adorno, as an exponent of the Frankfurt School, never abandoned
his belief in rationality and in the fundamental possibility of ideology critique, despite
the numerous modifications he formulates and the note of doubt that can often be
heard in his work. For Adorno there is no question that the totality of society forms
the horizon of every system of thought, no matter how difficult it may be to grasp the
trends and developments that determine it.^106 This sort of claim to rationality and to-
tality is no longer made by the poststructuralists. They confine themselves to sug-
gesting purely local strategies for achieving meaning, rejecting the possibility of
having any fundamentalinfluence on social reality or of genuinely being able to redi-
rect it in an emancipatory sense. Some of them go as far as to exclude everypossi-
bility for critique. According to Baudrillard, for instance, the defense mechanisms of
the society of the spectacle are so accurate that it can succeed effortlessly in con-
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity