Art and Language: Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

Adorno suggests that art is essentially expressive language since it is the imitation of natural language. The telos of art’s expression is expressing what the repressed things and human long for speaking. The authentic art preserves the trace of primordial human’s instinct: mimesis. Through the subject miming the object in the expression of art, the real cognition is realized. The crystallization of art language is dialectics of identification and the revolt of identification. Adorno compares artwork with script, hieroglyph and puzzle picture because art is the unification of image and sign of language, form and content in art, and therefore art language is the redemption of the reified language. Chuang Tzu’s language theory can be also compared with the language theory of Adorno.