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.
This essay argues that the ethical claim of Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia depends on its being read as an original version of the modernist idea of ethical critique as the aesthetic presentation of individual experience. While contemporary efforts to understand Minima Moralia as a form of substantive critique have merit, they have not fully appreciated the character of this work as a type of ethical performance. The second section of the essay lays out the background of this model of ethical critique in Adorno’s understanding of the system of universal fungibility. Adorno’s ethical performance, I argue, is a way of rescuing the ethical import of particularity. The execution of this idea in Minima Moralia through the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration is then examined in the third section. I then turn, finally, to a discussion of the key conceptual contrast between “lingering” and possessiveness. These terms allow Adorno to theorize injustice as a distortion of particularity, and also provide the model for a form of thinking and comportment that resists that distortion. 
