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raymond geuss, art and criticism in adorno, outside ethics, 168

Works of art for Adorno are inherently useless objects which present an "image" (Bild) of a kind of meaningfulness and freedom which society promises its members but does not provide. The fact that art is both something many people find meaningful-even if it isn't clear what "meaningful" means—and yet something which by most of the standards of everyday life is useless, is already for Adorno a good sign, because it violates the Enlightenment principle of universal functionalism, that is, the principle that everything must be useful for something, and that the meaningful and the functional are inherently connected.

13 Brecht's views but not necessarily his actual theatrical practice, which, Adorno admits, was more sophisticated.
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raymond geuss, art and criticism in adorno, outside ethics, 179

I have claimed that Adorno wanted to embed some Kantian themes about the importance and centrality of aesthetic form in a basically Left Hegelian philosophical view: a strictly formalist aesthetics isn't required by the inherent nature and invariant structures of the human cognitive apparatus, but it can be the most appropriate way for art to attain its highest vocation under certain historical circumstances. This doesn't, of course, mean that he wants to get a