Horkheimer And Adorno On The ‘Convergence’ Of Art And Science

In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (University of Stanford Press, Cultural Memory in the Present Series, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, p. 13, 2002) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno write:

The prevailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of cultures, finally causes them, through their internal tendencies as exact opposites, to converge. Science in its neopositivist interpretation, becomes aestheticism, a system of isolated signs devoid of any intention transcending the system; it becomes the game which mathematicians have long since proudly declared their activity to be.  Meanwhile, art as integral replication has pledged itself to positivist science, even in its specific techniques. it becomes indeed, the world over again, an ideological doubling, a complicated reproduction.

Physics and mathematics are often said to find a merger of sorts in string theory, whose speculations dabble in dimensions galore and disdain empirical confirmation. Here, physicists may be found approaching registers of speech only thought to be found in ‘pure’ mathematicians; their work appears to be exclusively concerned with, and expressed through, sign and symbol; the beauty of their creations could be assessed as works of theoretical art. Within such an evaluative dimension might lie string theory’s most coveted prize, once it has disdained the grubby business of verification and correspondence. The arc nears completion here. Elsewhere, art is condemned to realist reproduction, censured for flights of irresponsible fancy. It is asked to leave behind its critical and absurdist and skeptical being in favor of one more firmly anchored in the here and now, all the better to clone it, and faithfully and apologetically do its bit for its continued propagation; art is informed of the need to be reactionary. Such critiques might sound old-fashioned to the worldly-wise in the twenty-first century, but they are never too far from the surface when worries about self-indulgent or narcissistic or navel-gazing art are periodically expressed.

As can be seen, the situation that Horkheimer and Adorno described is as present today as it was when their words were originally penned. Realist art and aestheticist science still converge; the former is urged to stick to the sensible and the apprehensible; the latter seeks to move away from tedious correspondence and to go on flights of symbolic fantasy.  Horkheimer and Adorno urged this observation upon us to make us notice its ideological import: science becomes exclusively positivist, unconcerned with intervention; art becomes implicated in the ‘realities’ it seeks to depict. The standpoint of critique is  lost; science and art are enlisted as allies through various understandings that are not normatively neutral. This ideological maneuver is especially acute because science aspires to epistemic hegemony via its apparent commitment to realism and art aspires to radical critique through its lack of fidelity to that same standpoint. The ‘real’ aspires to fantasy; the fantastic is instructed to conform to the ‘real.’ Both are defanged and removed from the realm of critical theory and its interjections into the world of politics and society.