ABSTRACT
The problem with Adorno's social theory, according to Habermas, is that his understanding of instrumental rationality takes on the all-pervasive tendency of the phenomenon he is describing: he simply fails to recognize the existence of non-reified rationality in any sphere except an agonized thought process which is itself implicated. It was argued in Chapter 1 that this diagnosis is too extreme but, though Habermas's interventions have their own problems, the distinction he makes between system and lifeworld is useful. Accepting Habermas's critique of Adorno's theory of instrumental reason, Albrecht Wellmer has attempted to translate Adornian aesthetics into the framework of a theory of communicative action receptive to Benjamin's sanguine appraisal of modernism. The argument is based on the claim that if Adorno's concept of rationality is expanded communicatively, 'then his truth aesthetics may also be expanded "pragmatically'" (Wellmer 1985c: 65). The utopian dimension is shifted away from Adorno's dialectical constructs towards a multidimensional perspective of unblocked communication, whereby individuals communicate both with themselves and with one another. By emphasizing art as a dialogical medium rather than a model of such communicative relationships, Wellmer intends to redirect the emphasis placed by Adorno on the power of art to point beyond itself, towards
Wellmer's 'stereoscopic' reading of Adorno claims that the mimetic only functions as the other for Adorno because it is excluded by a philosophy of consciousness that cannot encompass the mimetic in conceptual thought; but, he contends, when one shifts to a philosophy of intersubjectivity, the mimetic becomes a communicative moment of mind, grounded in language. In the course of his argument, however, Wellmer comes close to claiming that, for Adorno, mimesis functions as the other of reason; a stance that is skewed, since it is only the other of a reason governed by a fetish of identity. An emancipated rationality,
in Adorno's opinion, would be able to function without subsuming or marginalizing the particularity voiced by aesthetic-expressive considerations.
