Page 99 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

concrete political function to art. This view is denounced in that Marcuse (a follower of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory) recognises that same political poten- tial in art itself as such. Marcuse claims that art is autonomous with respect to those social relations, which are both denounced and transcended by
art itself; the aesthetic fact does not represent reality but rather establishes itself as a new (even more real) reality and it is in this autonomy with respect to the world that its critical force lies. His dissection of the revolutionary work revolves around the link between form and content; the aesthetic
form is not opposed to content, not even dialectically. In an artwork, form
is transformed into content, and vice-versa. He wrote: “Literature can be called revolutionary in a meaningful sense only with reference to itself, as content having become form. The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension. Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change.”15 Art’s autonomy with respect to “that which is given” (reality) is the negation of conformism with that reality. Marcuse states that the autonomy of art contains a categorical imperative: things must change.
What is understood by this autonomy of art in a clarifying manner in both Adorno and Marcuse can, once again, also be interpreted as totality, or at least an aim for it. “Autonomy” and “totality” are related to the deep differ- ence and discontinuity of art with respect to reality, from which the work of art emerges, but to which it returns transfigured into a new entity distinct from other objects.16 Thus, in this meaning so dear to Adorno, art is resistance,
or a haven for disobedience. Sinaga writes that “art as a totality continues
to be one of the permanent witnesses to this unity in crisis and its sensitive awareness still preserves the potential of warning of advances and losses.”17 In this text of 1989 (with a clarifying title) he also states that “defending art
as a further expression of reality and not as its representation amounts to defining its very structural unity and its autonomy, for there is more to artistic creation than merely illustrating ideas or capturing the sociological essence of the moment with varying degrees of success.”18 Something that does prevent the social message—denunciation of the current economic system within late capitalism—from oozing out of texts like “Take Brasil Easy” and “Comercio total” (Total Trade), genuine conceptual and literary capsules concerning how art today can think about the global order.
How can we translate this autonomy if not through a whole series of spatial metaphors or a whole poetics of space? We are entering a twilight zone in which light and darkness become spatial indicators or markers. Sinaga’s
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15. Ibid., pp. XIII-XIII.
16. “Totality” and “autonomy” are
terms which have lent themselves
to ideological misunderstandings throughout the twentieth century where there was hardly any consensus owing to the many meanings of
both terms. Whereas combating totality was viewed in art history as
a reflex action of the influence of post-structuralist thought that praised difference and the fragmentary, and where the term was too reminiscent
of “totalitarianism”, totality in Marxist tradition (and in Adorno) refers to the organic and holistic need to grasp
and understand the world from the supremacy of the whole over the parts. See Martin Jay, Marxism & Totality; The Adventures of a Concept From Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley/ Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. The term “autonomy” has fared similarly when voiced by Adorno, Marcuse or Clement Greenberg, among others.
17. Fernando Sinaga, “Sobre el arte como resistencia”, op. cit., p. 55.
18. Ibid., p. 55.