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The essay by Adorno and Horkheimer about The Culture Industry (in the volume Dialectic of Enlightment) represents for Alberto Abruzzese the starting point of a reasoning on the intellectuals' role, the crisis of humanistic and academic knowledge and the new “screen and network” society. The author uses The Culture Industry as a text on the western civilization's sunset and at the same time on the metamorphosis of mass cultural production. Abruzzese refers to those scholars who deepened these issues with passion and acumen. From Benjamin to Canetti, from Debord to Foucault, from Lukacs to McLuhan: Abruzzese analyses a whole research path in media culture with the frankness of a personal self-examination.
Starting from Warburg, the distinguishing mark of an image, considered as identity-difference of visible and invisible, is its offering itself as an implementation of a temporality, and at the same time of a memory that is immanent in the sensible structure of the image. It’s what we find both in Benjamin and in Adorno: in both cases, it is just because the image is marked by a “internal time” that it is able to have a critical function towards reality, and at the same time an utopian character that is all the same with its non-renounceable testimonial task.
This study points out the methodological centrality assumed by the notion of “physiognomy”, both in Benjamin and in Adorno, namely the idea that the forms of the works of art, and generally those of the visual phenomena, are direct “expression”, in a micro-monadological way, of an historical-social sense, not otherwise attainable. On the one hand Benjamin’s physiognomy shows a particular interpretative “openness” to its objects, on the other that of Adorno remains subjected to an epistemological model of “totality”, from the Hegelian-Marxian tradition, which risks compromising the hermeneutic efficacy of its own original philosophical approach.
Both Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno consider ‘aesthetical experience’ as an “image experience” assuming a power of images “to set free forces” directed to produce or support aesthetical-political (Benjamin) or aesthetical-critical (Adorno) requirements. Profane illumination, ‘thinkimages’, phantasmagory, dialectical images, decayed ‘aura’ and technicalized images in Benjamin’s theory of aesthetical modernity. Expressive feature or “mimetic” eloquence in nature and art countering reality, dismantled ‘aura’ in contemporary desacralized work of art, but also persisting ‘aura’ in its meaningful dimension in Adorno’s aesthetical theory.
As an exemplum of that kind of “modern” art, in terms of Adorno, Kafka’s work is marked not only by its strictly “realistic” character, but also by the unavoidable critical and testimonial value of that realism. According to this perspective, both in Adorno and in Benjamin the testimonial aspect of Kafkian writing – that is of a writing as “dialectical image”, as memory of the unfullfilled possibility – it’s all the same not with its symbolical or “epiphanical” aspect but instead with its “allegorical” one.