By Yanis Iqbal

As I watched the new season of Wednesday, I found myself absorbed in the majesty and mystery of Nevermore Academy. Its labyrinthine towers, shadowed corridors, and gothic facades seemed to pulse with historic depth, offering an experience at once enchanting and strangely gratifying. I took genuine delight in the way the architecture staged secrets, hinted at hidden worlds, and wrapped spectacle in an atmosphere of enigma. This enjoyment was sensuous, almost bodily, as if the sheer aesthetic presence of Nevermore suspended the weight of ordinary reality. Yet as I lingered in that pleasure, I could not help but recall Theodor Adorno’s reflections on art and aesthetic gratification, and the philosophical suspicion he cast upon precisely such moments of enchantment.

Art as “Firework”

On the one hand, the artwork produces an instant that is deeply gratifying, even libidinally and somatically so. This is the moment of the “firework,” the flash of reconciliation, the appearance of a world momentarily freed from the crushing weight of empirical reality and objectification. The artwork stages a coherence or harmony that, for a brief instant, allows us to feel as if alienation had been overcome. This is not simply an intellectual recognition; it touches us at the level of the body, of the senses, of desire. The aesthetic form organizes dissonance into a fleeting unity, offering a utopian glimmer, a somatic libidinal gratification that corresponds to our longing for a reconciled world. The pleasure we take in this instant is real, precisely because the artwork gives form to what is otherwise absent: a vision of essence, of harmony, of possibility. But this vision is always fragile, always a product of illusion. The firework dazzles only to vanish, leaving behind the dark night of unreconciled reality.

On the other hand, Adorno insists that this gratification is itself deceptive, or at least incomplete. The artwork’s instant of reconciliation is not a true fulfillment but the staging of an illusion, the Schein des Scheinlosen, the illusion of the non-illusory. The real critical function of art is not to gratify, but to make felt the very failure of reconciliation: to expose, through its own illusory coherence, the absence of genuine wholeness in the world. Here, aesthetic experience shifts from somatic utopia to philosophical act, from libidinal satisfaction to epistemic confrontation. The artwork, in its very beauty and form, invites reflection on the brokenness it can only momentarily mask. The satisfaction it offers is always shadowed by the awareness that this satisfaction is constructed, that the harmony is not real, that what appears as truth is in fact the trace of a deeper untruth, namely the untruth of the world as it is. The artwork’s task is thus not to provide a utopia of feeling, but to make the failure of utopia perceptible, to let us sense the negativity at the core of experience.

This is why Adorno wants to have it both ways. He denies that the artwork contains truth content in any positive, possessed sense, because that would reduce art to a tool for subjectivity, a mere means to gratify or affirm the viewer’s desire. But he also affirms that art bears a potential truth content: not as a thing it has, but as a potential unlocked through philosophical reflection. The artwork, left to itself, can only negatively point toward truth: it stages the illusion of reconciliation, only for that illusion to collapse upon scrutiny. The work of philosophy is necessary to complete what art can only begin: to think through the negation that art performs, to break through the illusion without falling into the false comfort of positive doctrine. In this sense, the truth content of art is historical: it crystallizes the contradictions, hopes, and failures of history in sensuous form. And the work of thought, of critical philosophy, is not to unpack this truth content as if it were latent meaning waiting to be revealed, but to carry forward art’s negation of falsehood, to negate the negation that art stages in form.

Imaginative Tinkering

In Fredric Jameson’s framework, by contrast, we feel pleasure precisely because of how deeply our dissatisfaction with society runs. The gratification offered by utopian imagining or aesthetic construction is not a free-floating, static pleasure transmitted by some perfect image of reconciliation. Instead, it is a pleasure that emerges through its oppositional relationship to the alienated, fragmented, and oppressive conditions of social reality. Pleasure, in this sense, is never autonomous or self-contained. It is tightly bound to its capacity to negate, symbolically or imaginatively, the constraints and contradictions of the present. The delight we take in constructing alternative worlds, systems, or models is charged with the awareness, whether explicit or implicit, that these acts are gestures of refusal, symbolic escapes that highlight what is intolerable in the existing order.

This means that the pleasure of utopia is dynamic, active, and processual, not the passive consumption of a ready-made image of harmony. Jameson compares this to the work of the hobbyist or the tinkerer: the joy lies not in contemplating a finished product that promises reconciliation, but in the doing itself, in the construction, the adjustment, the imaginative play with forms that defy the limits of what is. The satisfaction comes from the labor of negation, from symbolically dismantling the structures of domination and building, even temporarily or imperfectly, something different. The act of imaginative model-building is pleasurable because it materializes the longing for transformation; it allows us to rehearse possibilities, to simulate alternatives, to feel out the contours of what might be possible beyond the deadlocks of the present. The pleasure thus a lived, libidinal engagement with the process of negation.

In this way, the gratification Jameson describes is inseparable from critique. It is not that we first critique reality and then take pleasure in some fantasy; rather, the very act of imaginative tinkering is how critique happens. The pleasure of utopian construction is the felt form of our dissatisfaction being processed, symbolically worked over, and temporarily suspended in a space where contradictions can be explored, elaborated, and kept alive. This is why Jameson’s account is so powerful: it refuses to see utopian pleasure as compensation or distraction. Instead, it recognizes in this pleasure the dialectical pulse of political imagination, the way dissatisfaction gives rise to creative labor that both delights and critiques, both negates and reconfigures. The delight we take in utopia is thus not an escape from the world’s contradictions but the aesthetic form in which we struggle with them and keep the desire for their overcoming alive.

The architectural design of Nevermore Academy gratifies precisely because it stages the kind of model-building, tinkering, and imaginative elaboration that Jameson links to utopian pleasure. The sprawling, gothic labyrinth of towers, cloisters, stairwells, and hidden chambers offers more than a visual spectacle. It encodes a historicity that invites the viewer to trace lineages, piece together fragments, and imagine systems of meaning and function behind every detail. The pleasure of gazing at Nevermore’s architecture lies in this sense of incompletion and openness to construction: every corridor suggests further passageways, every window hints at hidden rooms, every gargoyle seems to harbor a secret. The viewer is compelled into a mental labor of model-building, reconstructing the school as a symbolic system where histories, myths, and unfinished experiments converge.

This labor resonates with Jameson’s account of utopian gratification. The delight does not come from contemplating a perfect, reconciled image of harmony. Instead, the fractured, enigmatic character of Nevermore’s architecture compels imaginative work. Its labyrinthine design mirrors the contradictions of our own alienated social reality, but in the specificity of the aesthetic form, inviting symbolic play rather than resignation. By tinkering with the architecture imaginatively, by building mental models of how its spaces interconnect or what histories they encode, we participate in the very process of negation that Jameson foregrounds. We find pleasure because the act of reconstructing Nevermore symbolically suspends the fragmentation of the real world, allowing us to imagine coherence where social reality offers only experiential disjunction.

The story of Isaac Night stengthens this link between architecture and imaginative construction. His secret laboratory in Iago Tower, hidden corridors, and the machinery that transforms abilities extend the architectural imagination into the realm of systems and models. The architecture here is an active machinery of utopian experimentation, an unfinished workshop of both liberation and tragedy. The fact that Isaac’s clockwork heart continues to tick faintly through the Skull Tree dramatizes Jameson’s point: gratification arises not from a closed and reconciled world but from the persistence of an unfinished, experimental project. The ruins and anomalies left behind demand further tinkering and elaboration, ensuring that pleasure remains bound to the process of construction rather than its end.

In this sense, Nevermore’s architecture exemplifies the aesthetic form of dissatisfaction being processed. Its soaring facades, subterranean chambers, and uncanny anomalies become material for imaginative tinkering that transforms critique into libidinal play. We do not passively consume Nevermore’s design as a static object of beauty; instead, we actively engage in reconstructing it, tracing its mysteries, and elaborating its systems. The gratification stems from this dialectical labor: a felt engagement with the negation of the present, a temporary space in which contradictions are suspended and explored. Nevermore’s architecture, then, is not an escape from reality’s deadlocks but a utopian workshop where the desire for their overcoming remains alive through aesthetic construction.

The Necessity of Aesthetic Pleasure

To return to the initial skepticism about pleasure that we began with, let us conclude with the place of aesthetic gratification in capitalist society. The experiential reality of capitalist life presses upon us with a relentless imperative: survival. Our thinking becomes organized around the practical submission demanded by this condition, reducing consciousness to the rhythms of rote tasks and routines. The repetitive labor of securing existence fosters resignation, an affective stance that treats fragmentation and alienation as unalterable facts of life. Under such conditions, the imagination risks atrophy, and desire threatens to collapse into the minimal wish for endurance rather than the expansive longing for transformation. The everyday world disciplines us into accepting what is, rather than sustaining an openness to what might be.

It is precisely in this scenario that aesthetic experiences such as Wednesday’s representation of Nevermore Academy acquire their force. They cannot be dismissed as mere products of mass culture peddling false images of reconciliation. On the contrary, they open imaginative and somatic spaces where the labor of desire is renewed. Desire, after all, is not some automatic vitality endlessly regenerating itself. It requires cultivation, construction, and maintenance. To linger in the labyrinthine forms of Nevermore, to tinker with its incompletions, to mentally reconstruct its systems, is already to practice this labor. The gratification offered by such aesthetic encounters becomes the workshop where dissatisfaction is processed and reactivated, where the wish for revolution is rehearsed rather than extinguished.

In this way, the aesthetic does not reconcile us to the present but unsettles the hold of resignation upon us. It gives body to an alternative temporality in which the imagination takes precedence over rote necessity, and desire is reawakened as a force demanding more than survival. Nevermore’s soaring towers, secret labs, and ticking clockwork heart exemplify how even within popular cultural forms, architecture and narrative can organize libidinal play that resists closure. They remind us that critique need not banish pleasure, and that pleasure itself can be a mode of critique. The aesthetic must be seen and strengthened as the somatic rehearsal of a future beyond it, a terrain where the desire for transformation is kept alive precisely through the act of imaginative construction.

Author Bio: Yanis Iqbal (he/they) is studying political science at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He has published over 350 articles on social, political, economic, and cultural issues. He is the author of Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia (Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024) and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-imperialist political philosophy with Iskra Books.