By David Pan · Friday, April 5, 2024 Telos 206 (Spring 2024): The Intuitive and the Conceptual is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 We often have the experience of intuiting something without being able to precisely define what that intuition is. Sometimes this intuition leads to a more well-defined insight, and sometimes it might lead to some kind of action, even in the absence of clear conceptual definitions. Yet it is difficult to ascertain what kind of knowledge or awareness such intuitions consist of. What is an intuition as opposed to a defined concept of something? How seriously should we take such intuitions? Are they something separate and qualitatively different than concepts? Are they just fuzzy concepts? Do they really exist at all? These are crucial questions because they lead to conclusions about the status of concepts themselves. If the alternative to clear concepts is nothing at all, then the sociopolitical corollary would be that the alternative to conceptual knowledge and the holders of such knowledge would also be nothing at all. By contrast, if intuitions are separate from concepts and real, then expert knowledge might possibly have some deficiencies in comparison with intuitions. The essays in this issue of Telos explore in one way or another this question of the status of conceptual knowledge as opposed to intuitive awareness.
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By João Pedro Cachopo · Monday, March 27, 2023 It happened on May 11, 1997. After a defeat, a victory, and three draws, Deep Blue, programmed by IBM, would eventually win the sixth and decisive game of the historic chess match against Garry Kasparov. The Russian chess player, incredulous and upset, did not take the defeat well. In fact, given the machine’s behavior during the game, he protested: some of its moves seemed to indicate human intervention.
Today, more than twenty-five years later, the most amazing thing is that Kasparov thought it possible to continue to beat a computer that was already capable of analyzing one hundred million moves per second at that time. Nevertheless, it is ironic that his defeat was later speculated to be due to the fact that Kasparov had interpreted a move resulting from a software bug as strategic. According to Nate Silver, who tells the anecdote in The Signal and the Noise, it was that move, enigmatic in its aims, that fatally distracted the chess player.
The controversy surrounding Artificial Intelligence is back. However, it is no longer just due to its ability to calculate that the machine, in the era of “big data” and “deep learning,” threatens to surpass human intelligence. Take the case of OpenAI. With Dall-E and ChatGPT, the uses of Artificial Intelligence invade the domains of creation and knowledge. In the former case, a program capable of creating images in the style of this or that artist, enlarging their masterpieces, and crossbreeding their styles. In the latter case, a program capable of producing text by gathering, synthesizing, and cross-referencing information in informal conversations with the user. Disbelief and unease are spreading. Human pride is wounded. Was Kasparov’s defeat not enough? Do they now want to dethrone Vermeer, Beethoven, Kant?
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By Lillian Hingley · Thursday, May 31, 2018 As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Peter Bürger’s “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism” from Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91).
Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1984) is one of the landmark texts on aesthetic theory published in the twentieth century. One of the book’s significant claims is that modernism and the avant-garde should be defined as distinct aesthetic movements; specifically, he defines modernism as the less radical cousin of the avant-garde. This distinction is important to note because it is also the crux of Bürger’s thesis in a later article, “Adorno’s Anti-Avant-Gardism,” a historicist critique of Adorno’s “modernist” aesthetic theory that was published in Telos 86 (Winter 1990–91). By acknowledging the pre-established position Bürger was bringing to this article, we can question how useful his distinction may be when constructing an Adornian aesthetic theory today.
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By James Hellings · Monday, October 15, 2012 James Hellings’s “Messages in a Bottle and Other Things Lost to the Sea: The Other Side of Critical Theory or a Reevaluation of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” appears in Telos 160 (Fall 2012). Read the full version online at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here.
 Drawing on a range of modern and contemporary works of art and literature (Edgar Allan Poe, Caspar David Friedrich, Bas Jan Ader, Tacita Dean), this essay seeks to exaggerate the aesthetic side of Adorno’s critical theory, re-evaluating the latter through a detailed analysis of the image of messages in a bottle. In overturning and displacing the critical genealogy of this image and in anchoring it to the construction of Adorno’s aesthetic and the work of art, I challenge the so-called “prevalent view” that transforms Adorno’s image into a pejorative logo for his alleged withdrawal into political quietism, pessimism, and resignation: a “strategy of hibernation.” Neither the critical theorists nor the activist critics of the Frankfurt School, I argue, have exclusivity over the image of messages in a bottle. If art is “the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked,” then the work of art in Adorno’s aesthetics best expresses the paradox of engagement through disengagement, which itself translates Adorno’s standpoint on social praxis. Art turns socio-political, as with Friedrich’s Rückenfiguren, by turning away. Adorno valued radical new art for its distancing effect, for its great refusal, for becoming society’s Other. Art works well when complex antagonistic fragments crystallize into a force field, confronting, critiquing, and transforming the damaged life of society. Art, like the bottle of messages, is a container for truth and hope addressed to imaginary witnesses of an uncertain future, sent in spite of the aggressive indifference of the world, and aesthetics becomes, here at least, the privileged other of critical theory.
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