dorno’s understanding of realism in the present is often taken to have been simply negative: once a progressive artistic form, it had degenerated under the pressure of the culture industry in the west, and of the party apparatus in the east, into a set form that merely duplicated the world and played a key role in upholding an air- mative culture. This view largely informs his postwar critique of Lukács, which draws on the earlier quarrel over expressionism in the 1930s. In the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, too, the negative view is predominant; there are however traces of another conception of realism that Adorno deems to be not only adequate but also indispensable for art at present, one that would be attuned to the reality of the administered world, not simply as a mirror relection, but as a way to gain a critical purchase on the con- temporary world. The first quarrel over expressionism The wider context in which Adorno’s understanding of realism must be seen takes us back to the 1930s, and the attack on modernism launched by Lukács in his essay “Größe und Verfall des Expression- ismus” (1934), occasioning an extensive debate in the Moscow-based exile liter- ary review Das Wort, with contributions from, among others, Herwarth Walden, Bela Balasz, Hanns Eisler, and most no- tably Lukács’s former philosophical ally Ernst Bloch, as well as further interven- tions by Bertolt Brecht, and, indirectly, Walter Benjamin. 1 While Adorno himself never took part in this irst discussion, it forms the matrix for his postwar quarrels with Lukács, which extend all the way to his inal position in Aesthetic Theory. These inal relections can be taken as an ultimate attempt to sort out the terms and preconditions for the earlier debate, on the level both of ar- tistic practices and of the underlying philosophical assumption, whose result however, as we will see, is far from unambiguous. THE TERM “EXPRESSIONISM” might seem to indicate that the ter- rain of the initial debate was a rather limited one, but what was at stake was nothing less than the meaning of modern art in the widest sense of the term, for which expressionism was only a shorthand. The immediate political thrust of the debate was Lukács’s initial allegation that modernism, unwittingly or not, paved the way for fascism in presenting us with an incoher- ent and fragmented world as well as an equally incoherent and fragmented subject, the efect of which was not only political impotence, but also a call for the return of an authoritarian and fascist politics that promised the resurrection of a stable order. Initially, therefore, the charge was largely phrased in terms of political issues, and less based on general philosophical and theoretical claims, although the latter were made explicit as the debate progressed. In Bloch’s answer, “Diskussionen über Expressionismus” (1938), 2 he mounts a defense that has since been repeated in many versions, and in some respects still resonates in Adorno’s inal claims in Aesthetic Theory. Apart from chastising Lukács for his rudimentary awareness of current artistic production, notably painting and music, Bloch advances an argument more based on principles: if capitalism leads to a fragmentation of subject and object alike, this renders an equally fragmented art necessary, i.e. an art that, if it is to be true, must stay close to experience in its immediacy, whereas the nineteenth-century forms advocated by Lukács have become obsolete, not just Adorno’s Realism by Sven-Olov Wallenstein abstract Adorno’s understanding of realism in the pres- ent is often taken to have been simply nega- tive. In the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, too, the negative view is predominant; there are however traces of another concep- tion of realism. Adorno proposes, although with some caveats, not only the possibility of what he calls an adequate conception of realism, but also that this is something that art in the present can and must not avoid. KEY WORDS: socialist realism, Adorno, nega- tive dialectic, Hegel 28 peer-reviewed article 28 peer-reviewed article