Social Theory and Social Aesthetics

The imaginative power of reasoning inherent in critical theory is also at work in aesthetic reasoning. The use of the imagination is not only a matter of understanding the real situation, but of being able to predict what goes beyond it. This paper will inquire the potentiality of aesthetics for social theorizing and research methodologies starting from the work of Adorno and Marcuse. The power of aesthetics is to create an imagination that makes social transformation possible. Works of art writes Adorno "emerge from the empirical world and produce one that is opposed to it by a peculiar essence, as if it were also something essential"(Adorno2009: 4). These new worlds produced by works of art are related to the profound impulses that animate social change. If imagination is a means of transcending the actual towards what is possible, but not yet realised, it is also the key to a possible new turn in contemporary sociological argumentation and capable of breaking down fences that divide the two worlds: that of logical rationality and that of sensory rationality, which come together in the concept of social embodiment. The aesthetic dimension, writes Marcuse, cannot validate the reality principle. Like the imagination, “the realm of aesthetics has retained its freedom from the reality principle at the price of losing its efficacy in reality.(...)In Kant's philosophy, the aesthetic dimension occupies the central position between sensoriality and morality - the two poles of human existence. If this is the case “the aesthetic dimension must contain principles valid for both realms. Since it was civilisation that inflicted this wound on modern man, only a new form of civilisation can heal it.” (Marcuse1955: 194-205). This paper inquires a sociological approach able of inquiring emotions, a-rational phenomena and how they are linked to the rational irrationality of contemporary society.