Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought

"Intermediality" arrived at the scene of cultural production both as a reaction to the appearance of the artworks composed of various media and as a name for a new--"inter-medial," "multi-modal" or even "post-medial"--condition of the general symbolic economy. While the descriptive adequacy, indeed phenomenological necessity, of the concept in specific cases (like those of Thomas Struth's Video Portraits or Jean-Luc Godard's Voyage(s) in Utopia) is beyond question, the extension of the concept beyond such descriptive uses remains tentative and subject to disagreement. Fortunately, the resistance to "intermediality" happens to be as significant and revealing a phenomenon as the pertinent applications of the concept itself. At the risk of laying undue stress on the obvious, I consider the morphology of the word itself. Although less explicitly than "idea idea," "intermediality" wants to say the same thing twice, for both of its constituent parts, "inter-" and "media," designate "between-ness." Holding up a mirror to each other, "inter-" and "media" communicate a sense of stasis. Thereby, they shift our attention onto the movement within the inter-medial dimension, rather than through it. While the word is new, it presses into service an old, indeed archaic argument for the centrality of the medium to representation: it can be found in Aristotle's Poetics, Lessing's Laocoon, and the newer Laocoons that proliferated in the twentieth century beginning with Irving Babbitt's The New Laocoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts (1910). Rather than being a stranger, then, "intermediality" is a baby in the media-specificity basket, the latest addition to the long-suffering, yet tenacious Laocoon family. The resistance to the term, I would suggest, has much to do with the recognition of this association, and a suspicion that the "talk of intermediality" will raise the ghosts of the disagreements surrounding medium-specificity and the epistemological stances that radiate from this "bewitched spot" of critical theory. (To name some of this stances: David Bordwell's conceptualization of "style" as a media-specificity placeholder; Noel Carroll's demotion of media-specificity; Friedrich Kittler's techno-romanticism; theories of post-medial condition such as Henry Jenkins's "convergence" (for an overview of the debate, see Petho). Instead of speaking directly to the current promise of intermediality (or the lack of thereof), in what follows I sketch a transition other than the one from the mono-medial to inter-medial production, namely from "aesthetics" to "aesthetic theory." Because, as I alleged above, the term itself comes from the traditional, media-centric epistemology of the aesthetic, the two transitions cannot be divorced, and the critical, non-descriptive, hypothesis-forming value of "intermediality" will depend on how and whether it connects with the practice of "aesthetic theory." By the time European modernism came of age in 1910s, systematic aesthetics became entrenched as a vigorous publishing industry supplying multi-volume expositions of the categories of aesthetic validity; inevitably, the artworks appeared incidental to the epistemological interests that would lead them through formal arguments like prisoners on a chain gang. When all was said and done, this flowering of aesthetic discourse turned out to be deceptive. Instead of bringing the transcendental account of cognition to systematic closure, Theodore Lipps, Johannes Volkelt, and Hermann Cohen, to name just a few, laid bare the limitations of the neo-Kantian critical project as such and thereby cast in doubt the viability of grounding the aesthetic in theory of knowledge. To put this point in historical terms, the reading of Neo-Kantian aesthetics led those schooled in neo-Kantian epistemology--thinkers as diverse and influential as Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, but also Bakhtin, Lukacs, and Rosenzweig--to abandon its project of establishing transcendental framework