Theodor Adorno also takes up these concerns in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno claims that art is a social act, yet one produced by the tension between the formal autonomy of the work, on the one hand, and its rootedness within society, on the other. The tensions within works of art are expressive of conflicts within the larger sociohistorical processes from which they emerge. He says, “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.” For Adorno, art operates through its own internal tensions to expose hidden contradictions within society as a whole.

DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno's aesthetic theory: artworks internalize and express social antagonisms as formal problems.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 19