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Analysis Of Theodor W. Adorno 's ' The '

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about the world around us, even just for a moment. This boldly claims a kind of autonomy for art, but one that is distinct from Theodor W. Adorno’s conception and more in-line with the affirmative notions the aesthetic impulse. As such, the kind of aesthetics that I am eluded to here is not just a state of contemplation. It is much more. As Cramerotti describes in his aforementioned essay, ‘it is rather the capacity of an art form to put our sensibility in motion, and convert what we feel about nature and the human race into a concrete (visual or bodily) experience’. It is useful to introduce Deleuze’s categories of the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’ and put them into motion. In his 1968 text ‘Difference and Repetition’, Deleuze explains that ‘the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself. The process it undergoes is actualisation. It would be wrong to see only a verbal despite here: it is a question of existence itself’. Deleuze’s category of the ‘virtual’, the realm of affects and Paterson’s documents of darkness are united in their intangibility and their capacity to move the spectator beyond the familiar. Collectively, these forces harness the ability to transport the viewer to another time and place.

In his 1992 text ‘Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm’, Guattari describes this capacity as an ‘ethico-aesthetic’ paradigm, which pertains to subjectivity as well as art. He argues that ‘new complexes of subjectivation become possible’

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