Aesthetics in Critical Theory

First published Tue Mar 25, 2025

Critical theory arose as a response to perceived inadequacies inMarxist theory, and perceived changes in modern capitalism. Criticaltheorists emphasized the ability of capitalism to shape the thoughtand experience of individuals: it distorts how modern society and itsproducts appear to us, and how we think about them. So, aestheticexperience – like all other experience – is moulded to andcompromised by capitalism. For critical theory, if we seek tounderstand aesthetics we need to acknowledge this distortingeffect.

Critical theorists ask us to pay attention to how art, and aestheticexperience, suffer under capitalism, and become part of the way inwhich capitalism prevents the formation of a better life. They arguethat art at all levels is succumbing to commodification – whichis to say, is increasingly conforming to the demands of makingprofitable products, rather than the demands of producing good art.For critical theorists, commodification brings with it standardizationand external influence incompatible with genuine artistic achievement.This concern applies both to popular culture and ‘high’culture, although in different ways.

For critical theory, aesthetics and art are thus part of the wrongstate of things: the world pervasively formed by instrumental reason,reification, and ideology. As a result, genuine art, and aestheticexperience, are increasingly being made less possible in capitalistsociety – as are uncompromised thought and life moregenerally.

However, critical theory also recommends art and aesthetic experienceas part of the potential solution to this wrong state of things.Artworks and aesthetic experiences can overturn the delusive effectsof capitalism, and disclose the genuine, changeable, nature of things.Through formal rigour and imaginative openness, art can exposecontradictions, suppressed phenomena, and produce representations ofalternative ways of living. Art’s liberating properties are thusaligned with formal experimentation.

1. History

As noted in the separate entry,critical theory can be thought of narrowly or broadly. Thought of broadly,‘critical theory’ picks out philosophical work whichcombines a moral-political conviction that human flourishing ispresently blocked, and a methodological conviction that interrogationof prevailing norms, practices, and concepts is necessary (but perhapsinsufficient) to remove this blockage. Thought of narrowly,‘critical theory’ picks out a specific area of philosophyanimated by these twin convictions – the work of philosophersassociated with the FrankfurtInstitut fürSozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). This group isoften referred to as the ‘Frankfurt School’.

This entry will use ‘critical theory’ in the narrow sense.This entry will be further narrowed by focusing almost exclusively onthe first generation of the Frankfurt School. For economy, I will use‘critical theory’ as shorthand for the more unwieldy‘first-generation critical theory’. Closely relatedfigures – like Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Ernst Bloch(1885–1977) – will not be collected under this phrase, butexplicitly picked out as and when they are relevant.

The Frankfurt School is often spoken of as having three generations.Core figures in the first generation include Max Horkheimer(1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), and HerbertMarcuse (1898–1979). Horkheimer, who would become a closecollaborator with Adorno, took directorship of the Institute in 1930.The Institute was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Horkheimer wasinstrumental in relocating and re-starting the Institute, eventuallysettling in America in 1934. Adorno and Marcuse followed. The mostfamous of their works would beDialectic of Enlightenment(Adorno & Horkheimer 1944 [2002]),One-Dimensional Man(Marcuse 1964), andNegative Dialectics (Adorno 1966 [2006]).As important as this American context – and exposure to Americanpopular culture – would be to their aesthetics, so too was theGerman cultural milieu of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, beforejoining the Institute Adorno had studied musical composition with theatonal composer Alban Berg (later commemorated in Adorno’sAlban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, 1968 [1991]),befriended philosopher and critic Siegfried Kracauer, and writtenmusical criticism for the journal,Musikblätter desAnbruch (Claussen 2008: 52–56, 102–106, 152). WalterBenjamin’s ideas were broadly disseminated via his friendshipwith Adorno (for more on their relationship, including with respect toaesthetics, see Rosen 2004, Buck-Morss 1977 & 1991, Nicholsen1997b). The ideas of Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch were alsoinfluential on the first-generation critical theorists, as we willsee.

The second and third generations of critical theory are roughly markedby the coming to prominence of Jürgen Habermas (1929–) andAxel Honneth (1949–), respectively. The three generations arenot merely distinguished by their personnel. There are importanttheoretical differences. TheCambridge Habermas Lexiconbegins its ‘Aesthetics’ entry (Duvenage 2019) with thestatement that ‘Whereas aesthetics plays an important role amongthe thinkers of the first generation … this is not so forHabermas.’’ (For an opposing view of Habermas’relationship to aesthetics, however, see Duvenage 2003, McMahon 2011,Mackin 2022.) Honneth seldom mentions aesthetics (though see Honneth2007). While there are valuable remarks on aesthetics in the work ofboth, then, they do not obviously belong in a discussion of thecharacteristic shape of the interface between critical theory andaesthetics. Critical theory’s distinctive treatment ofaesthetics is thus confined largely to the first generation.

2. Why Does Critical Theory Have an Aesthetics?

In 1937’s ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’Horkheimer offers the following statement about the programme he andhis colleagues pursue, and its moral urgency –

If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent socialpractice, which forms the individual’s life down to its leastdetails, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goeson in the society …. The goal at which the [critical theorist]aims, namely the rational state of society, is forced upon him bypresent distress … It is the task of the critical theoreticianto reduce the tension between his own insight and oppressed humanityin whose service he thinks …. (Horkheimer 1937 [2002: 210, 217,221])

It is not surprising that this approach produced books with titleslikeEclipse of Reason (Horkheimer 1947),One-DimensionalMan (Marcuse 1964) orProphets of Deceit (Lowenthal& Guterman 1949). But the emergence of books with titles likeAesthetic Theory (Adorno 1970 [2004]), orThe AestheticDimension (Marcuse 1978) is perhaps harder to anticipate. Giventhe nature of critical theory, and its urgent pursuit of concreteimprovement in people’s material and social lives, one mightwonder why critical theory has an aesthetics at all.

One answer is that ‘critical theory’ has no need for anaesthetics. Its practitioners simply happened to like to think aboutart and did so. It is certainly true that many of the members of thefirst generation had biographical connections to, or a pre-establishedinterest in, the world of art. But critical theory has an aestheticsfor theoretical, not biographical, reasons. To make these reasonsclear we need to take a detour through the work of Karl Marx(1818–1883), and then Georg Lukács (1885–1971).

2.1 Commodity Fetishism

Critical theory is grounded in a very particular approach to Marx,which emphasizes capitalism’s power to determine the world ofindividual thought and experience (see Kautzer 2017). This approachrests on a keen interest in commodity fetishism, a phenomenon whichMarx discusses relatively briefly in volume one ofCapital:

A commodity is … a mysterious thing, simply because in it thesocial character of men’s labour appears to them as an objectivecharacter stamped upon the product of that labour; because therelation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour ispresented to them as a social relation, existing not betweenthemselves, but between the products of their labour. This is thereason why the products of labour become commodities, social things…. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to theproducts of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, andwhich is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.(Marx 1867 [1932: 83])

For Marx, commodity fetishism is an effect produced by the objectivestructure of social exchange. The buying and selling of goods drawsequivalences between the goods exchanged. But this equivalence isperformed not by comparing the labour time expended on those goods,but by comparing what appear to be properties of the commoditiesthemselves. Price indices are driven by social facts about exchangeand production; but these social facts vanish from view, and theprices themselves appear to be properties of objects. (“Thisgold bar is worth £__, and thus equivalent in value to 1,000coats, 2,000 bricks and so on” – not “The sociallynecessary labour time involved in gold mining is such that a goldbar’s exchange value is expressed as …”). Capitalismthus presents itself as natural. This conceals the fact that exchangevalue arises not from the nature of things, but rather from the way weorganize our labour. In turn, this conceals the fact that the way weorganize our labour is not natural but in fact open to change.

On Marx’s account commodity fetishism affects the way in whichwe experience, and therefore theorize about, the social world. Itconceals the true nature of capitalism. This concealment can beunderstood as something like an optical illusion. Marx uses theinstructive analogy of the appearance of air:

The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so faras they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour… by no means, dissipates the mist through which the socialcharacter of labour appears to us to be an objective character of theproducts themselves …. [T]his fact appears to theproducers … to be just as real and final, as the fact, that,after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, theatmosphere itself remained unaltered. (Marx 1867 [1932: 85–86])

While the appearance of air – or of commodities – is notaltered by our coming into scientific knowledge of their trueconstitution, the fact remains that we can and have acquired thisknowledge in spite of that appearance. Thus, for Marx all that isneeded to ‘see through’ commodity fetishism is to employreason to enquire into what lies beneath the apparent nature ofcapitalism.

2.2 Reification

Lukács’ most influential work,History and ClassConsciousness (1923), extends and revises Marx’s analysisof commodity fetishism. Unlike Marx, Lukács does not seecapitalism as merely presenting a misleading appearance (as an opticalillusion might) but exerting an effect on our very way of thinking andperceiving altogether (as a hallucination or delusion might).Accordingly, Lukács held commodity fetishism to have a systemicand general influence on consciousness. He used the term‘Verdinglichung’ or ‘reification’ toname the broader effects he saw as stemming from commodity fetishism.Reification covers not only thought about or adjacent to the economy,but thoughtin general:

In the process we witness, illuminatingly, how here, too, thecontemplative nature of man under capitalism makes itsappearance … all issues are subjected to an increasingly formaland standardised treatment and in which there is an ever-increasingremoteness from the qualitative and material essence of the‘things’ to which bureaucratic activity pertains.(Lukács 1923 [1971a: 97–99])

The richness and unpredictability of the world is glossed over by aform of thought which presumes complete agreement between abstractconcepts and particular things. And this narrowing of thought isreplicated in a narrowing of experience. Reification as a form ofthought is grounded in and enforced by a broader tendency towardsstandardization which capitalism carries with it, from commodification(the increasing tendency to convert goods into products produced forexchange in line with the demands of the market), to bureaucratization(the administration of the social world according to inflexiblerules), and so on. The claim, then, is that under capitalism we cometo conceive of and experience the world in terms of generalcategories.

This is a problem because these general categories are, it is claimed,overly restrictive. The world has properties (causal, moral, andfunctional) which are not captured by these categories, and hence areexcluded from reified thought and reified experience. Facts whichmight undermine the present social order (the exploitation integral tocapitalist production, for example) are excluded from thought andexperience. This also has moral implications. General moral andpolitical categories (like ‘citizen’, ‘human’,‘worker’, and so on) will tend towards excluding personswho do not conform to the restrictive standards these categories comewith.

The idea of reification – if we hope to overcome it, or indeedto explain our ability to perceive it – requires us to positsome counter-reifying force. For Lukács, it is the proletariat(working class) that are (potentially) this force. The proletariatneed only realize the exploitative nature of capitalist production andrecognize that they have the power to change this process. Theproletariat are necessarily always on the brink of this realization,in Lukács’ view, as their working conditions areintrinsically counter-reifying. They themselves are the contingenthuman labour which is concealed by the apparently natural andnecessary world of capitalism and commodities.

2.3 Critical Theory’s Account of Reification

While Lukács’ account of reification exerted greatinfluence on the Frankfurt School (see Feenberg 2017, Kavoulakos2017), the proletarian strand of his thought did not. Returning toHorkheimer’s seminal “Traditional and CriticalTheory” we find the following remark:

But it must be added that even the situation of the proletariat is, inthis society, no guarantee of correct knowledge. … Even to theproletariat the world superficially seems quite different than itreally is (Horkheimer 1937 [2002: 213–214]).

This leaves critical theory in a difficult position. If reification istotal, and counter-reifying forces are totally absent, thenHorkheimer’s claim to be thinking in ‘service of’those oppressed by capitalism is incoherent. Critical theory requiresa counter-reifying force to explain how it can perceive and see beyondthe epistemic errors produced by reification.

For Marx, commodity fetishism was a problem with the comprehension oflabour, which could be solved either through reading more accurateliterature about labour (hence the writing ofCapital), orbetter acquainting oneself with the reality of the production process(hence Marx’s ability to writeCapital). Lukácsappears to identify revolutionary proletarian consciousness as themeans to undo the effects of reification, although the mechanics ofits formation are not entirely clear. For critical theory, bycontrast, commodity fetishism and reification are not problems whichcan be overcome by modifying either the content of experience (byreadingCapital, say) or the social position of theexperiencer. One can learn as much as possible about the conditions ofthe working class, and be as close to the production process as onelikes, but reification will still obtain.

For critical theory, reification is a problem with the very form ofexperience itself; and the solution to reification will come throughprocesses which can engage and manipulate that form of experience.Thus, for critical theory reification is an aesthetic problem in itsoriginal and broadest sense: as concerned with the realm of sensibleexperience.

Critical theory’s task will be to find avenues which can disruptthe influence of reification and make the genuine state of things– and the genuine possibilities for change – open tothought and experience. Several avenues for producing this effect wereexplored, but chief among them was art, and aesthetic experience.

3. The Problem of Commodification

Lukács, whose early work had been so influential on Criticaltheory, later became much closer to Soviet orthodoxy, even to theextent that he repudiated his earlier work on reification. He alsobroke with his earlier, equally influential, work on aesthetics (like1910’sSoul and Form). Here too Lukács movedinto closer alignment with Soviet thought. The Soviet art movementknown as Socialist realism explicitly thematized concrete social andpolitical factors in art, in order to instil a correct understandingof them in the art appreciator. Lukács was not uncritical ofthe actual implementation of this movement, especially under Stalin(Lukács 1971b: 116–130), and nor does he deny the qualityand power of the ‘critical realists’ who likewise includeconcrete historical detail, but without explicit socialist ideology(Lukács 1971b, chapters 2 and 3). But above all it is realismin opposition to the ‘decadent formalism’ (Lukács1971b: 133–135) of modernism that Lukács urged as bestserving the moral and political aims of Marxism.

Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin, by contrast, found their favouriteexamples of the liberating power of art in multiple schools and timeperiods, including modernism, nearly all of which refused any overtpolitical content. They also openly questioned the efficacy andquality of much political art (see, e.g., Marcuse 1978: 19; 33–39,Schoolman 1976: 58–60, Klassen & Blumenfeld 2018, Adorno1961 [1977a], 1977b). This rejection was seen by many, including thelater Lukács, as evidence of elitism, political disengagement,and immoral indifference to the world at large (see Zuidervaart 1994:28–44 for an overview).

However, critical theory’s rejection of ‘politicallyengaged’ art is not driven by disagreement with the politics ofsuch artworks. Rather, it stems from an apparently apoliticaldisagreement about the necessary and appropriate relationship betweencontent and form. critical theory generally emphasizes the primacy ofform in explaining both art’s achievement and itscounter-reifying effects (see Hartle 2018 for an overview of thedevelopment of this position). The demands of such formal success are(it is claimed) incompatible with direct political engagement. Toclarify this, we need to look more closely at what form and contentmean in this context.

3.1 Form and Content

For critical theory, aesthetic value is reducible neither to form norcontent. A complex relationship between the two is at the core ofcritical theory’s aesthetics. It is claimed that form andcontent are inextricable and mutually informing. But here again, weshould not confuse this with more familiar positions. The claim is notthat form and content are identical (as in A.C. Bradley’sinfamous claim in 1909’sOxford Lectures on Poetry, orCleanth Brooks’ (1947: 192–215) ‘Heresy ofParaphrase’). Rather, the claim most often advanced is thatcontent is converted into, or ‘sedimented into’, formwhile still not becoming identical with it.

This idea requires further explanation. When Marcuse and Adorno claimthat content is converted into form within art, they are bestunderstoodnot as advancing the claim that the surface themesand content of the artwork are rendered formal, but as claiming thatthe meaning of the artwork is expressed primarily by the formalproperties of the artwork.

For example, while Kafka’sThe Trial has as its surfacecontent a story about a man who is subjected to an interminable andsenseless trial for an unknown crime, its true meaning (according toAdorno) is an expression of certain features of capitalism (seefurther O’Connor 2013). This expression of its deeper meaning isachieved through the texture and organization of the novel itself,rather than in its apparent themes. Nowhere doesThe Trialbaldly state that capitalism has produced an absurd and inhuman formof life. Nor, importantly, is it necessary that Kafka believed such athing. Critical theory’s claim is that the truth of life undercapitalism is in some way communicated to the form of artworksdirectly. (Some problems with this view are presented in section3.3.)

To see why content must be converted into form in this way for art tobe successful, and why this seemingly abstruse issue prevents criticaltheorists from endorsing expressly political art, we need to look oncemore at reification.

The theory of reification claims that thought has taken on acharacteristically abstract and instrumental character. It is thisform of thought which ultimately underlies the persistence and dangersof capitalism. Anything which can be assimilated by this form ofthought is rendered exchangeable and serves as evidence of theappropriateness of that form of thought itself. This means that moralor political claims in art can themselves become part of theircommodity value, and fail to disrupt the form of thought which causedthe moral or political injuries that motivated the art itself. Thedissenting novel, music, or film is something which for all itssincerity is still offered alongside all the others, and whose mode ofdelivery and consumption replicates, and vindicates, the very form ofexchange – and hence consciousness – it seeks toundermine.

3.2 Avoiding Commodification

If art is able to show a form of life and thought outside ofcapitalism, then it must resist absorption by the characteristicstructure of capitalism. Via Marx, critical theorists see thecharacteristic structure of capitalism as commodity exchange.Commodity exchange has the characteristic function of renderingobjects perfectly exchangeable by assigning them monetary value. ViaLukács, critical theorists see commodity exchange also having acharacteristic, reified kind of experience and thought – thatwhich sees objects as all conforming to general laws, concepts, andtypes.

From this, we see that successful art must resist being easily turnedinto a generic commodity, and must also resist being formed by andwholly comprehensible through pre-set types. In art’s case,these pre-set types would include compositional conventions, cliches,platitudes and the like.

These are structural reasons why art must resist easy adoption by themarket (and, in turn, audiences). It must also resist easy adoption toavoid contradicting its own meaning. If art is aimed againstexchangeability and cliché, then it must also be aimed againsthaving its content easily converted into products andclichés.

This is why form is primary in understanding art’s ability toundo the effects of reification. It is only through theproblematization of the relationship between form and content, and artand its consumption, that the meaning of an artwork can be protectedfrom commodification and nullification. Art is obliged to ceaselesslyformally innovate, and to ceaselessly reject pre-set establishedcompositional norms.

In this way, art’s meaning – its critical relationship tocapitalism – is communicated in its form, and not in itsexplicit subject matter. Artworks avoid baldly stating claims aboutthe inhumanity of contemporary society – these could becomeslogans; be resold and defused – and instead show it throughtheir challenging formal organization.

How, exactly, this critical content becomes converted into formalproperties is not clear. Nor is it clear how broad social problemscome to be encapsulated in specific artworks authored by specificartists. This is a problem which critical theory never fully mastered.In Adorno’s work, there is no suggestion that this formalizationof content is a product of the artist’s conscious orsubconscious intention. Rather, the process is ‘blind’,and the social content enters the artwork, and creative process, notas thematic content but as formal problems with which the artist isfaced (see Hulatt 2016a).

Marcuse (1978: 14–15), for his part, likewise emphasizes themigration of social content into form, and notes that it is a centralperplexity in Marxist aesthetics. In a move which mirrorsAdorno’s attempt to see social problems as translated intoartistic problems, Marcuse (1978: 41) explains this migration partlyin terms of the social preformation of the meaning of artisticmaterials. The very stuff out of which art is made (‘word,colour, tone’) carries socially encoded meanings, expectationsand conventions. This ‘limitation of aesthetic autonomy’,he writes, ‘is the condition under which art can become a socialfactor’.

Unlike Adorno, however, Marcuse also sees art as a repository of‘transhistorical’ truths and features. These relate bothto certain core definitional features of art and aesthetic response(Marcuse 1978: 15–16) and to core features of thetranshistorical ‘species being’ he sees as underlyinghuman experience (Marcuse 1978: 29). Marcuse introduces thesenon-historicist elements in order to rule out a reductive Marxistaccount which would claim that art’s function, quality andmeaning is chained to its society and class position. Marcuse holdsthat aesthetic properties cannot be so reducible, as this would renderour appreciation of artworks across epochs and economic systemsinexplicable. Further, it would nullify art’s important abilityto speak beyond and outstrip contemporary ideals and norms.

While for Adorno art’s relationship to its social content wasthoroughly hostile – both in its defiance of contemporary norms,and its demonstration of the revisability of those norms –Marcuse offers a more variegated picture. Art critically engages withand negates society, but also describes unrealized potentials forimprovement (see, e.g., Marcuse 2006: 140–149). This differencebetween the two thinkers will be discussed further in section 4.

3.3 Popular Culture

Adorno and Horkheimer coined the phrase ‘Culture Industry’in their jointly authored bookDialectic of Enlightenment. Itwas intended ironically, as an insulting oxymoron. This irony has beenovertaken by history. The music and film spheres, for example, proudlyrefer to themselves as industries. This outcome illustrates, after afashion, the thesis and limits of critical theory’s critique ofpopular culture.

To critical theory, culture is in a process of coming to an end. Thiscoming to an end is precipitated by ever-increasing strength of normsof exchange and standardization (‘industry’) incontrolling the production of art (‘culture’) (see furtherHulatt 2016b). This thesis is developed in part sociologically,through examination of the mechanics of radio transmission, thenascent Hollywood system, the distribution and sale of records, and soon. Empirical research into this claim was pursued in various ways,including the Princeton Radio Research Project at which Adorno workedonce he arrived in America (see further Jenemann 2007).

The thesis was also developed through aesthetic analysis of popularculture itself. Critical theory found Western popular artformswanting, judging whole genres and media devoid of merit.Adorno’s criticisms of specific popular artworks were oftenmordant and unsympathetic, and have had an outsize effect onperception of critical theory’s stance towards popular culture.It can appear that critical theory simply rejects popular culture asinferior, and seeks a return to the kind of high culture many criticaltheorists enjoyed in fin-de-siecle Germany. Such snobbery would appearparticularly odd in supposedly radical Marxist philosophy. However,the broader account of popular culture – its superiority to‘high culture’ in some respects, and the tragedy of itsunrealized technical potential – is innovative and oftenoverlooked.

In a 1936 letter to Benjamin, Adorno remarks that popular and‘high’ art are ‘two torn halves, which do not add upto a whole’ (Adorno 1977c: 123). This remark conveys a number ofthings which must be borne in mind. The existence of two separatespheres of popular culture and high art is a reflection of the wrongstate of things – their opposition and polarization would not bepart of a good society. Both popular culture and high-art havecapacities and deficiencies which the other lacks – indeed, theyeach form a mirror image of the other. However, these two spheres ofculture cannot be re-unified by sheer force of will – they donot add up to a unified whole, because they have been objectivelydriven apart by the nature of the social whole. (Marcuse 1965 takes asimilar view.)

We see, then, that Adorno does not see popular culture as merelycoarse product. It in fact preserves properties key to art, and servesas a rebuke to ‘high’ culture. For example, popular musicis pleasant to listen to, and more or less immediately accessible.This kind of accessibility and pleasure is part of what ideal artwould be – and it is part of the failure of modern art that ithas been forced to lose both its accessibility and its beauty. (Wewill enter into the reasons why it suffers this loss momentarily.)Adorno is also not blind to the economic injustices which govern theworld of high art – the leisure time and disposable incomenecessary to acquire a taste in classical music for example.

Conversely, classical music has the virtue that it delivers on what itpromises – genuine novelty, pure aesthetic satisfaction andformal achievement. By contrast, popular music promises novelty,ungoverned satisfaction of impulses, and perhaps some associatedlifestyle, but is forced to repeatedly renege on these promises (seefor example Adorno’s discussion of syncopation in Jazz, inLewandowski 1996). One way of putting Adorno’s point is thatpopular culture is not objectionable because it stimulates thepassions, but because it does not truly satisfy them (Rebentisch &Trautmann 2019: 22–23). This criticism is shared by Marcuse, whosees increasingly permissive popular culture not as objectionablebecause it is permissive (he is in favour of relaxed sexualmores, for instance) but because it never delivers on its promise. ForMarcuse the release of emotions in cultural products – be theysexual longing, political frustration, or repressed aggression –is allowed just enough to ensure the popularity of the product, andnot explored in its full transformative power.

This idea of reneging on promises also underwrites Adorno’scriticism of movements to popularize high culture. For example, Adornodeeply objected to the transmission of performances of Beethoven overthe radio. This was not because Beethoven was too good for the public,but because the technology involved was not good enough for thepublic. The genuine experience of a live performance was beingreplaced by a low resolution transmission – and the public wereinvited to believe they had received the genuine article. (Or soAdorno claims, Adorno 1945: 209–210.)

This thread runs through critical theory’s treatment of popularculture – not a suspicion of popularity, accessibility, orpleasurability, but a suspicion of the failure to genuinely providethese things. Popular music and cinema promise excitement and novelty– but in fact work according to pre-set schema. Popular mediapromises to bring excitement of high culture into the home – butin fact the transmission is poor, and incapable of properly conveyingwhat you wish to listen to. This is the mirror image of highculture’s failure. Quoting Brecht, Adorno notes thatculture’s ‘mansion is built out of dogshit’ (Adorno2006: 366). By this he means that high culture is dependent on asociety whose inequality and inhumanity makes the better form of lifehigh art outlines ever more impossible. (For more on the role ofBrecht in Adorno’s thought, see Rothe 2018.)

Under capitalism, both high culture and popular culture are not goodenough for the public; not vice versa.

4. Aesthetic Experience Against Reification

In section 3.2, the counter-reifying force of art was explainednegatively. The unusual formal organization of artworks serves toprotect their content from being nullified by the effects ofcommodification and reification. But the position is not simply thatthe artwork conceals its meaning such that it cannot be easilycommodified. It is that the meaning of the artwork in some fashionbreaks with and undermines the false consciousness it has beenprotected against. Art is thus not merely defensively organized, butaggressively organized also. It does not merely elude reification, butactively combats it.

This claim is one of the more vexed and complex elements of criticaltheory’s aesthetics. To anticipate, it will be thesubject’sexperience of the artwork which is held tohave this aggressive counter-reifying effect. That experience will beelicited by the appreciator’s active participation in attendingto the form/content organization of the artwork.

The counter-reifying effect of art appears to be socio-historicallyspecific (it can be lost over time) and critical (the artwork appearsto indict and overturn certain pathologies of thought and socialorganization). In this section we will look more closely at howvarious critical theorists explain this view.

4.1 Ernst Bloch

We can find one source of this idea in the work of a contemporary,Ernst Bloch, who had a marked influence on the Frankfurt School. Blochsaw art as combining a faithful account of both the current state ofthings, and of possibilities usually ignored. This is the‘not-yet’ which Bloch saw as concealed by conventionalexperience, but forcibly disclosed by the successful artwork (as wellas other cultural products – see Kellner and O’Hara 1976).The utopian aspect to the artwork – its representation ofanother form of life – is in some sense fantastical andimaginary. It is not a depiction of how things are, but a depiction ofhow they genuinely might be. But in this way, art discloses the closeproximity of another way of ordering life, and the malleability ofthat which appeared as necessary and natural (see Moir 2018, Levitas1990).

As with Adorno and Marcuse, Bloch apparently paradoxically combines akeen attention to the formal constitution of the artwork and itsautonomy (Bloch 2000: 118) with a commitment to the claim that socialconditions enter into the artwork (Bloch 2000: 129–141).Crucially, it is the combination of the autonomous processes of artand the participation of the appreciator which yields up a disruptiveexperience (Bloch 2000: 143). This disruption within the aestheticexperience serves to point beyond the integration of theartwork’s form and its material; and via the relationshipbetween the artwork and the social content it integrates, it likewisepoints beyond the established social order (Bloch 2000: 117, 149,155–156). This is the utopian moment integral to great art, forBloch. InSpirit of Utopia Bloch largely develops thisthought through analysis of music, but in later works likePrinciple of Hope (Bloch 1954–59), the same approach isrecapitulated and applied not only to the various artistic media, butother cultural areas also (see Bloch 1989).

This core vision – of the artwork as eliciting in aestheticexperience a changed outlook on a reified society – is inheritedby both Adorno and Marcuse. But both revise Bloch’s approach indiffering ways.

4.2 Adorno

For Adorno art does not directly show the world as it really is, butmakes plain the contradictions and distortions internal to reifiedconsciousness itself. Rather than disclosing new potentials for actionand change, art instead discloses the full estrangement betweenreified consciousness and the world. In other words genuine aestheticexperience is a process of disillusionment. Our reified consciousnessperceives no obvious difference between the world as we take it to be,and the world as it is. But art forcibly discloses this difference.The art appreciator comes to learn the depth and extent of theirignorance, and the urgency of breaking with the dominant form ofthought. The utopianism of Bloch reappears in a more muted form– art gives us awareness that the demands and tendencies ofcapitalist society are not absolute but could in principle change.Adorno’s caveat is that we do not know how or in what directionthis change should be effected. This is due to the broader ethicaldislocation produced by modern society. (For differing takes onAdorno’s negative ethics see Finlayson 2002, Freyenhagen 2011,2013, Bernstein 2001; a transcribed discussion between Adorno andBloch on the nature of utopian thinking provides useful furtherdetail, in Bloch 1989: 1–18).

The way in which art demonstrates the disconnection between reifiedthought and the world is highly complex. We can say that for Adornoart engages the conceptual structure of thought and experience, andguides it such that this structure is lead to collapse in the courseof its being applied. This is a power it shares with philosophy, withthe key difference that philosophy achieves this explicitly –through manipulation of and argument about concepts in the course oftheir application in thought – and art accomplishes it throughthe manipulation of aesthetic material. To answer how the‘hermetically sealed’ artwork is able to do this, we wouldneed to spell out Adorno’s claim that extra-aesthetic content issedimented into formal aesthetic problematics in individual artworks.This is beyond the scope of the present entry (but see Hulatt 2016a,Nicholsen 1997a, Paddison 2011, Sherratt 2009: 169–209).

4.3 Marcuse

Marcuse sees artworks as having a liberating potential, and asdisclosing to us possibilities for change. Art discloses thesepossibilities in both a destructive and creative way. It isdestructive in that it serves as an ‘indictment’ ofcertain governing forms of thought and experience. But it is alsocreative; art serves to re-present the genuine state of things, andthus uncovers the objective potentials for ‘liberation’which are concealed there (Marcuse 1978: 6). Marcuse’s work canthus be understood as an amalgam of some of the formal sophisticationof Adorno’s aesthetics with the utopian emphasis ofBloch’s account.

For Bloch and Adorno, engagement with the artwork leads in radicallydiffering directions. For Adorno, aesthetic experience does not pointtowards a better future, nor show any signs of such a future in thepresent. It rather shows the inhumanity of the present. This is the‘indictment’ Marcuse likewise finds in art. For Bloch, bycontrast, aesthetic experience presents an account of the genuinestate of things, which includes already existing anticipations of abetter form of life. These ‘anticipations’ provide theintelligible, if incomplete, link between the present and the utopiathat could emerge from it. These Marcuse often refers to as moments of‘liberation’.

It may seem that the two points from Bloch and Adorno are in tension,and thus that Marcuse is ill-advised to try to combine them. However,Marcuse introduces a third theoretic element which resolves theapparent tension – the work of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).The rational, critical element of Marcuse’s account conformssignificantly to Adorno’s approach – but the utopianism ofBloch is recast in a psychoanalytic register.

Marcuse understands the utopian function of art to be discharged byits ability to facilitate ‘desublimation’ – theexpression of repressed urges. This should not be confused withcatharsis. Catharsis – in which emotions are activated and then‘purged’ – leaves the subject pacified, free of thetroublesome energies that were activated. This pacifying effect ofcatharsis in art is criticized by Marcuse, and desublimation is heldto avoid it.

For Marcuse, desublimation is an expression of repressed emotions,urges and potentialities of which the appreciator was unaware. Onlearning of their existence, the appreciator is made aware of‘repressed potentialities of man and nature’ and isgranted an ‘emancipation of sensibility’ which pointstowards the form of life, and of sensibility, which revolution wouldbring about (Marcuse 1978: 8–9; see further 43–44). Thisis continuous with Marcuse’s broader political program, forwhich a better world would not only entail re-organization of thestructure of society, but also of the psychological structure thatsociety imposes on individuals (see Kellner 1999, Marcuse 1955).

For Marcuse, then, the aesthetic experience is both critical andrationally ordered, and an arena for the liberation of drives,emotions and potentials. These respectively articulate thecontradictions and intolerability of the present, and unharness thelibidinal resources which could realize the potential for a betterfuture.

5. Natural beauty

In the 20^th century philosophers – anglophone andnon-anglophone – largely shifted away from discussing theaesthetics of nature. The Frankfurt School were a marked exception tothis tendency. In their emphasis on the moral and aestheticsignificance of nature’s beauty, critical theorists anticipatemany features of contemporary work inenvironmental aesthetics. Like environmental aestheticians, critical theorists understand ourappreciation of nature’s beauty to be morally significant. Theyalso likewise see aesthetic appreciation of nature to be bound up withthe recognition of and resistance to humanity’s destruction andexploitation of nature.

Critical theorists differ sharply from contemporary environmentalaestheticians, however, in their account of what carries this moralsignificance. It is not nature ‘in itself’, without humaninterference, that is of prime importance. Any idea of nature beingahistorically beautiful ‘in itself’ is rejected. It isnature in relation to our current human capacities, needs, andprojects which carries both beauty and a moral impetus to relate tonature in a less damaging fashion.

This section will touch briefly on some of the distinctive features oftheir work on this theme.

5.1 Nature and History

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse consistently problematized thedistinction between nature and history. They did not claim that nature– as picked out by the physical sciences – washistorically relative. They rather claimed that the concept (andexperience) of nature – as a realm of facts and values outsideof human control – was historically determined in its contentand means of application.

When Adorno and Horkheimer claim that what is natural is historicalthey are interested in normative conceptions of nature which are usedeither to make the contingent appear necessary (‘capitalismsimply follows human nature’) or to advocate for inhumanetreatment of persons. Likewise, they propose that nature asexperienced is influenced by these historical factors. (Adorno’scomplex account of nature is developed in its various strands in Cook2011, Vogel 1996: 51–101, Flodin 2018, 2022.)

Natural beauty in both its scope (what counts as natural) and quality(those aesthetic properties which can attach in virtue of anobject’s being natural) is seen as a historical phenomenon(Hammer 2015: 45–72). This further means that natural beautystands under the threat of cliché, ideological misuse, andco-optation, just as artworks do. Simply, the aesthetic properties ofnature shift across time – and what is thus appropriate injudging natural beauty likewise develops over time (Daniels 2020).

Any well-developed aesthetics of nature includes not only a criterionof appropriate judgement, but also a criterion of the appropriateobjects of judgement. Trivially, aesthetic judgements of nature cannotbe well-formed when aimed at an object which is the product of, andperceived under the description of, complete artificiality.Conventionally, the meaningful debate to be had is over what degree,if any, objects produced by artifice are appropriate objects of theappreciation of natural beauty.

Critical theory adds a unique complication to this debate. It deniesthat the merely natural is an appropriate object for aestheticexperience (Johnson 2011). We will explore this in the nextsection.

5.2 Mere Nature

Critical theory sets a high store on the aesthetic experience ofnature, but not on the experience of mere nature. This is madeparticularly stark inAesthetic Theory, where Adorno comparesraw nature with industrial materials:

[N]ature that has not been pacified by human cultivation, nature overwhich no human hand has passed – alpine moraines and taluses– resembles … industrial mountains of debris. …[Human artifice] is said to have ravished nature, yet undertransformed relations of production it would just as easily be able toassist nature and on this sad earth help it to attain what perhaps itwants. … [I]n every particular aesthetic experience of naturethe social whole is lodged. Society … determines what naturemeans[.] (Adorno 1970 [2004: 89])

This rejection of an aesthetics of nature in the raw is combined witha keen interest in natural beauty. This appears paradoxical, but canbe elucidated through comparison with contemporary environmentalaesthetics.

For environmental aesthetics, mere nature is indeed an appropriateobject of aesthetic attention (see, e.g., Budd 1996: 211–213,Saito 1998). The properties of mere nature, as opposed to artworks,are held to undermine some traditional dichotomies. For example,Ronald Hepburn (1966) influentially observed that nature needs to be‘framelessly’ appreciated as an enclosing space. The usualstrict separation between an art-object and its environs is notpresent, as nature is both the immediate object of interest (a copseof trees, for example) and the enclosure continuous with the object(the vista in which the copse is situated). Separately, it has beenclaimed that appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature benefitsfrom, or requires, theoretical understanding of nature itself and itsstructure (for examples of such scientific cognitivism, see Carlson1979, Eaton 1998, Parsons 2006). Such scientifically groundedappreciation of nature is held to be objective appreciation of natureas what it is.

Critical theory’s rejection of mere nature can be seen asstemming from a similar desire to appreciate nature ‘as what itis’, and a similar conviction that doing so will dissolve theoppositions and dichotomies familiar from art. But critical theoryurges us to further dissolve the dichotomy between nature and humanartifice itself.

Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse see nature and humanity as notseparate but continuous (for an overview of this, and its relation toLukács and Marx, see Feenberg 1981: 240–255). And soproper contemplation of nature ‘as-it-is’ is ofnature-for-us, as parts of that nature. Mere nature is nature whichstands opposed to us, and which we are approaching as if it wereradically different to us, rather than a fellow piece of nature. Thisis why Adorno sees untamed nature as resembling unrefined industrialmaterial – in both cases (the merely natural; the industrialbyproduct) we have objects which appear to stand opposed to humanneed, and present as hostile to us.

This is what stands behind remarks by both Adorno and Marcuse to theeffect that both humanity and nature are not fully realized. Nature byitself, for Adorno and Marcuse, is unreconciled and hostile towardshumans, who are themselves part of nature. For nature’s ownbenefit, a different kind of relationship between humans and nature isrequired. And natural beauty is held to point towards it (Krebber2020: 184–186).

It is common to find in environmental aesthetics an admission that thearea of enquiry is bound up either with moral intuitions aboutnature’s value, or in some way importantly tied to a broadermoral project of environmental conservation and transformation (e.g.Saito 1984, Saito 2018, Carlson 2018, Alcaraz León 2022,Carlson & Lintott 2008). Here again, Adorno and Marcuse can beunderstood as sharing this feature and transforming it. Theirenvironmental aesthetics is not embedded in care fornature-without-humans, but for nature-for-humans, and correlatively,humans-for-nature.

5.3 Reconciliation, Ruins and Landscapes

Adorno and Marcuse embed aesthetic response to nature into a broaderproject of reconceiving and reorienting the relationship betweenhumanity and nature. Following on from a myriad of influences (someanthropological – chiefly Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss(1902–1903), James George Frazer (1890), and Roger Caillois(e.g., 1937) – and some philosophical) critical theoryunderstands the relationship between humanity and nature to have beenpredominantly ‘dominating’, just as humanity’srelationship to itself has been dominating and oppressive. Similarly,just as aesthetic experience offers a vision of a different order ofsocial being, so too does aesthetic experience of nature offer avision of a reconciled relationship between human agency andnature.

Mere nature, then, is ineligible to produce such an insight, as merenature is outside of and opposed to a relationship with humanity. Thisleads Adorno to find images of reconciliation in, paradoxically,images of bygone eras of the exploitation of nature. Here Adornointersects with the rich aesthetic traditions of both the picturesqueand the ruin, but brings a very different sensibility to thesephenomena. InAesthetic Theory he writes,

Historical works are often considered beautiful that have somerelation to their geographical setting, as for instance hillside townsthat are related to their setting by the use of its stone …. Solong as progress … does violence to the surface of the earth, itwill be impossible – in spite of all proof to the contrary– completely to counter the perception that what antedates thetrend is in its backwardness better and more humane. (Adorno 1970[2004: 84])

What grounds Adorno’s positive aesthetic evaluation here is theimage of a relationship between nature and humanity which, from ourtimeframe, appears more pacified. Given the environmentally disastrouslogic of modern society, the images of a reconciled, utopianrelationship to nature can be found only retrospectively, in the imageof the less-bad relationships to nature which have now passedaway.

6. Conclusion – Critical Theory and Aesthetics

We can pick out four features of critical theory’s distinctivetreatment of aesthetics. The first of these is a product of criticaltheory’s general methodology at that time. First generationcritical theory largely holds that any object of experience or theoryis a part in and reflective of a social totality of facts andprocesses (see further Jay 1992). The form and depth of this‘reflection’ varies; but the general view is that anyelement of this totality could be determined by, and inform us about,any other. This warrants speculative kinds of philosophicalinterpretation, in which facts apparently limited to one sphere (oflogic, or psychology, say) are in fact determined by and reflective ofapparently disconnected spheres (of economic exchange, or socialinstitutions, say). Art is no exception to this approach. Both worksof high art and ephemeral pieces of pop culture can havephilosophical, social, and political content as parts of theirobjective constitution.

Secondly, this emphasis on the philosophical richness of art iscombined with a primary interest in aesthetic form. In turn, thisamalgam is wedded to a conviction that aesthetic experience –despite being formally rigorous and content-laden – can offer aform of insight unavailable through conventional conceptual reasoning.This insight – precisely by being a break with the kind ofexperience moulded to the ‘wrong state of things’ –is held to have emancipatory promise.

Thirdly, the tensions and instabilities between these jointly heldaesthetic methodologies are not accidental, but intentional. Criticaltheory refuses to attempt to deliver static definitions, but alsorefuses to do without such definitions. (It is neither‘rationalized’, nor irrational.) Art really does havegeneral features; but successful artworks always both engage anddestabilize general concepts. There is an emphasis on the necessity ofusing concepts to understand art, and on the ability of artworks toultimately elude conceptual capture. This complex approach –which is incapable of delivering a closed definition of art oraesthetic value – is intended to prioritize fidelity toaesthetic experience over dogmatic conceptual structures.

Fourthly, and following from the preceding three features, there isthe seemingly paradoxical conviction that artworks are political andpractical via their very refusal of explicit politics andpracticality. It is artworks of surpassing quality, attended to fortheir own sake, that have a liberating potential. Critical theorytends to assume (and sometimes explicitly argue) that artists whoprimarily pursue a non-artistic goal in their art (political orotherwise) cannot realize this level of quality, and art-appreciatorswho seek a pay-off in art (political or otherwise) cannot properlyattend to the value of artworks.

These four features all reach their most extreme expression in thework of Theodor Adorno. But they are also pursued at differing levelsof extremity and emphasis in other critical theorists and thinkersassociated with them, most obviously Marcuse, Benjamin and Bloch.

For critical theorists, there is a balance to be struck betweenanalysing art – and hence articulating it in conceptual terms– and making clear the importance of the artwork’s abilityto outstrip concepts altogether. The preceding has been an account ofthe ways in which critical theory has explored and handled thisdemanding balancing act, and the broader theoretic considerationswhich, together with the artworks investigated, entered into thatbalance.

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