Citation

Weitzman E. German Q. 2008; 81(2): 185-202.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, American Association of Teachers of German)

DOI

10.1111/j.1756-1183.2008.00016.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

“Fun” functions as at once cipher and overdetermined signifier in Adorno's writings. Clearly of the enemy camp, the term variously encompasses kitsch and “culinary” art, commodity fetishism, fascist ideologies, historical amnesia, and the general tawdriness and tackiness of Southern California in the 1950s. But “fun” is also closely allied with the play (and perhaps also the pleasure) “without which there is no more possibility of art than of theory” (Aesthetic Theory 38). These and similar ambiguities offer the possibility for reexamining, and even recuperating, the importance of fun in Adorno's own aesthetics. This essay first examines the at times contradictory significations of “fun” and its associated terms in Aesthetic Theory and other works. Second, it asks what “fun” art might actually mean in terms of Adorno's theories, focusing in particular on the question of the art-cognizing subject and the status of “fun” as both the anathema and the inevitability of aesthetics.