论阿多诺对现代主义的辩护

由于对现代主义的问题有了清醒的认识,阿多诺对现代主义的辩护就不是单纯的辩护,而是有所批判地加以捍卫.这就使得阿多诺的美学理论与后现代主义理论发生了纠葛.通过对阿多诺的现代主义美学进行辩证的考察,可以揭示阿多诺与后现代主义的本质区别:即前者坚持现代主义这一"必要的恶"以实现艺术真理这一更大的善;后者则全盘抛弃了现代主义及其真理诉求.

The Necessary Evil:Adorno's defense of Modernism

Due to his awareness of the problems of Modernism, Adorno's plea for modernism is not a simple advocacy but a critical defense. And that makes his aesthetical theory has something to do with (postmodernism). This essay tries to disclose the essential difference between his theory of modernism and that of postmodernism. While the former adheres to modernism which is regarded as "the necessary evil" to achieve the goodness of artistic truth, the latter totally abandons modernism and its truth appeal. Adorno thought that the contrast between the pre-capitalist society and the capitalist society does not lie in the fact that capitalism destroys the cultural autonomy. On the contrary, however, the autonomy of cultural form can only be acquired under the condition of capitalism. When works of art can be exchanged as (commodities), they are disentangled from the religious context and become autonomous. This point has often been neglected by the Chinese scholars who tend to emphasize adorno's insistence on artistic autonomy and his opposition to capitalism and its cultural industry. Although Adorno abandons Lukacs' concept of historical subjectivity, he never gives up the hypothesis of historical unity-the unity of continuity and discontinuity, and this hypothesis makes Adorno see the historical import of modern art in the truth which it disclosed. And it is the very hypothesis that makes Adorno differ from many postmodernists, especially those of deconstructionists. Thus the whole problem involves in Adorno's special conception of metaphysics which is different both from the traditional conception of metaphysics and from the postmodernist conception of "the end of (metaphysics)"-non-identical thinking or negative dialectics. In thinking about the metaphysical foundation of Adorno's aesthetics, the first question results from the reliance on the concept of truth as the self-presentation of reality. It is the maintaining of this idea that makes Adorno differentiate from the post-structuralists who (totally) deny the concept of truth and from Habermasian critics who confirm only the discourse concept of truth.