Adorno and Heidegger inside/outside postmodern culture

Abstract

None of the notions at the heart of the postmodern - differend, simulacrum, irony, pastiche, multiple coding, the sublime, ambiguity - derive from Hedegger or Adorno. Both stamped, however, postmodern culture. Hedegger and Adorno give access to environmental aesthetics. Both stained critical regionalism as defensible posture in architecture theory. Heidegger inspired the concept of xveak being (Vattimo) supporting an aesthetics of oscillation. Although we may not subsume Adorno under an aesthetics of the sublime, Lyotard, yet, rearticulates a stance close to Adorno: both conceive art in terms of alluding to the absolute. Heidegger's and Adorno's relevance today consists in assisting or remapping of postmodernity. Being not completely absorbed in it they allow us to look at it from some distance. As thinker of facticity, of the tlirown-ness of Dasein and of atmospheric tuning, Heidegger backs an aesthetics of performance which is based on a full notion of event. Adorno reinforces Lyotard's split between a slackened and a justifiable version of postmodernity along lines separating pure entertainment, and culture industry from art. Its end is an ethics of authenticity.