No More Learning

The attitude of contemporary art toward tradition, usu-
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ally reviled a s a loss o f tradition, i s predicated o n the inner transformation o f the category of tradition itself. In an essentially nontraditional society , aesthetic tradi- tion a priori is dubious. The authority of the new is that of the historically in- evitable. To this extent it implies objective criticism of the individual, the vehicle of the new: In the new the knot is tied aesthetically between individual and soci- ety. The experience of the modern says more even though its concept, however qualitative it may be, labors under its own abstractness. Its concept is privative; since its origins it is more the negation of what no longer holds than a positive slo- gan. It does not, however, negate previous artistic practices, as styles have done throughout the ages, but rather tradition itself; to this extent it simply ratifies the bourgeois principle in art. The abstractness of the new is bound up with the com- modity character of art. This is why the modern when it was first theoretically articulated-in Baudelaire-bore an ominous aspect. The new is akin to death. What adopts a satanic bearing in Baudelaire is the negative self-reflection of iden- tification with the real negativity of the social situation. Weltschmerz defects to the enemy, the world. Something of this remains admixed as ferment in every- thing modern . For direct protest that did not surrender to its opponent would in art be reactionary: This is why in Baudelaire the imago of nature is strictly taboo . To this day the modern has capitulated whenever it disavowed this taboo; this is the source of the harangues about decadence and of the racket that obstinately accom- panies the modern. Nouveaute is aesthetically the result of historical development, the trademark of consumer goods appropriated by art by means of which artworks distinguish themselves from the ever-same inventory in obedience to the need for the exploitation of capital, which, if it does not expand, if it does not-in its own language-offer something new, is eclipsed. The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction, with its promise of undiminished plentitude. Baudelaire's poetry was the first to codify that, in the midst of the fully developed commodity society, art can ignore this tendency only at the price of its own powerlessness. Only by immersing its autonomy in society's imagerie can art surmount the het- eronomous market. Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alien- ated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become elo- quent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous . Baudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes, and the medium of this experience is the poetic form. This raises him supremely above late romantic sentimentality. The power of his work is that it syncopates the overwhelming objectivity of the commodity character-which wipes out any human trace - with the objectivity of the work in itself, anterior to the living subject: The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity. The modern pays tribute to this in the vestige of the abstract in its concept. If in monopoly capitalism it is primarily exchange value, not use value, that is con- sumed,7 in the modern artwork it is its abstractness, that irritating indeterminate- ness of what it is and to what purpose it is, that becomes a cipher of what the work
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is. This abstractness has nothing in common with the fonnal character of older aesthetic nonns such as Kant's. On the contrary, it is a provocation, it challenges the illusion that life goes on, and at the same time it is a means for that aesthetic distancing that traditional fantasy no longer achieves. From the outset, aesthetic abstraction, which in Baudelaire was a still rudimentary and allegorical reaction to a world that had become abstract, was foremost a prohibition on graven images. This prohibition falls on what provincials8 ultimately hoped to salvage under the name "message":9 appearance as meaningful; after the catastrophe of meaning, appearance becomes abstract. From Rimbaud to contemporary avant-garde art, the obstinacy of this prohibition i s unflagging . It has changed no more than has the fundamental structure of society . The modern is abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconcilable with magic, it is unable to bespeak what has yet to be, and yet must seek it, protesting against the ignominy of the ever-same: This is why Baudelaire's cryptograms equate the new with the unknown, with the hidden telos, as well as with what is monstrous by virtue of its incommensurability with the ever-same and thus with the gout du neant. The arguments against the aes- thetic cupiditas rerum novarum, which so plausibly call as evidence the content- lessness of the category, are at heart pharisaical. The new is not a subjective cate- gory , rather it is a compUlsion of the object itself, which cannot in any other way come to itself and resist heteronomy. The force of the old presses toward the new, without which the old cannot be fulfilled. Yet the moment this is invoked, artistic practice and its manifestations become suspect; the old that it claims to safeguard usually disavows the specificity of the work; aesthetic reflection, however, is not indifferent to the entwinement of the old and new. The old has refuge only at the vanguard of the new: in the gaps, not in continuity. Schoenberg's simple motto- If you do not seek, you will not find - is a watchword of the new; whatever fails to honor it in the context of the artwork becomes a deficiency; not least among the aesthetic abilities is the capacity , in the process of the work ' s production, to sound for residual constraints ; through the new, critique - the refusal - becomes an ob- jective element of art itself. Even the camp followers of the new, whom everyone disdains , are more forceful than those who boldly insist on the tried and true . If in accord with its model, the fetish character of the commodity, the new becomes a fetish, this is to be criticized in the work itself, not externally simply because it became a fetish; usually the problem is a discrepancy between new means and old ends. If a possibility for innovation is exhausted, if innovation is mechanically pursued in a direction that has already been tried, the direction of innovation must be changed and sought in another dimension . The abstractly new can stagnate and fall back into the ever-same. Fetishization expresses the paradox of all art that is no longer self-evident to itself: the paradox that something made exists for its own sake; precisely this paradox is the vital nerve of new art. By exigency, the new must be something willed; as what is other, however, it could not be what was willed. Velleity binds the new to the ever-same, and this establishes the inner
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communication of the modem and myth. The new wants nonidentity, yet inten- tion reduces it to identity; modem art constantly works at the Mtinchhausean trick of carrying out the identification of the nonidentical.
Scars of damage and disruption are the modem's seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants. Antitraditional energy becomes a voracious vortex. To this extent, the modem is myth turned against itself; the timelessness of myth becomes the catastrophic instant that destroys temporal continuity; Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image contains this element. Even when modem art maintains tra- ditional achievements in the form of technical resources, these are transcended by the shock that lets nothing inherited go unchallenged. Given that the category of the new was the result of a historical process that began by destroying a specific tradition and then destroyed tradition as such, modem art cannot be an aberration susceptible to correction by returning to foundations that no longer do or should exist; this is, paradoxically, the foundation of the modem and normative for it. Even in aesthetics, invariants are not to be denied; surgically extracted and dis- played, however, they are insignificant. Music can serve as a model. It would be senseless to contest that it is a temporal art or that, however little it coincides with the temporality of real experience, it too is irreversible. If, however, one wanted to pass beyond vague generalities, such as that music has the task of articulating the relation of its "content" [Inhalt] , its intratemporal elements, to time, one falls im- mediately into pedantry or subreption. For the relation of music to formal musical time is determined exclusively in the relation between the concrete musical event and time. Certainly it was long held that music must organize the intratemporal succession of events meaningfully: Each event should ensue from the previous one in a fashion that no more permits reversal than does time itself. However , the necessity of this temporal sequence was never literal; it participated in art's sem- blance character. Today music rebels against conventional temporal order; in any case, the treatment of musical time allows for widely diverging solutions. As questionable as it is that music can ever wrest itself from the invariant of time, it is
just as certain that once this invariant is an object of reflection it becomes an ele- ment of composition and no longer an apriori. -The violence of the new, for which the name "experimental" was adopted, is not to be attributed to subjective convictions or the psychological character of the artist. When impulse can no longer find preestablished security in forms or content, productive artists are objectively compelled to experiment. This concept of experiment has, however, transformed itself in a fashion that is exemplary for the categories of the modem. Originally it meant simply that the will, conscious of itself, tested unknown or unsanctioned technical procedures. Fundamental to this idea of experimentation was the latently traditionalistic belief that it would automatically become clear whether the results were a match for what had already been established and could thus legitimate themselves. This conception of artistic experimentation became
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accepted as obvious at the same time that it became problematic in its trust in con- tinuity. The gesture of experimentation, the name for artistic comportments that are obligatorily new, has endured but now, in keeping with the transition of aes- thetic interest from the communicating subject to the coherence of the object, it means something qualitatively different: that the artistic subject employs methods whose objective results cannot be foreseen. Even this tum is not absolutely new. The concept of construction, which is fundamental to modem art, always implied the primacy of constructive methods over subjective imagination. Construction necessitates solutions that the imagining ear or eye does not immediately encom- pass or know in full detail. Not only is the unforeseen an effect, it also has an objective dimension, which was transformed into a new quality. The subject, con- scious of the loss of power that it has suffered as a result of the technology unleashed by himself, raised this powerlessnes to the level of a program and did so perhaps in response to an unconscious impulse to tame the threatening heteron- omy by integrating it into subjectivity's own undertaking as an element of the process of production. What helped make this possible is the fact that imagina- tion, the course taken by the object through the subject, does not, as Stockhausen pointed out, have a fixed focus but can adjust to degrees of acuity . What is hazily imagined can be imagined in its vagueness. This is a veritable balancing act for the experimental comportment. Whether this dates back to Mallarme and was for- mulated by Valery as the subject proving its aesthetic power by remaining in self- control even while abandoning itself to heteronomy , or if by this balancing act the subject ratifies its self-abdication, is yet to be decided. In any case, it is clear that insofar as experimental procedures, in the most recent sense, are in spite of every- thing undertaken subjectively, the belief is chimerical that through them art will divest itself of its subjectivity and become the illusionless thing in itself which to date art has only feigned.
The painfulness of experimentation finds response in the animosity toward the so- called isms: programmatic, self-conscious, and often collective art movements. This rancor is shared by the likes of Hitler, who loved to rail against "these im- and expressionists," and by writers who out of a politically avant-garde zealous- ness are wary of the idea of an aesthetic avant-garde . Picasso expressly confirmed this with regard to pre-World War I cubism. Within an ism the quality of individ- ual artists can be clearly distinguished, although initially those who most explic- itly draw attention to the peculiar characteristics of the school tend to be overrated in comparison with those who, like Pissarro among the impressionists, cannot be reduced so conclusively to the program. Certainly a faint contradiction is inherent in the linguistic use of ism insofar as in emphasizing conviction and intention it seems to expel the element of involuntariness from art; yet this criticism is formalistic with regard to movements maligned as isms, just as expressionism and surrealism specifically made involuntary production their willful program. Further, the concept of the avant-garde, reserved for many decades for whatever
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movement declared itself the most advanced, now has some of the comic quality of aged youth. The difficulties in which isms are entangled express the problem- atics of an art emancipated from its self-evidence. The very consciousness to which all questions of what is genuinely binding in art must be submitted has at the same time demolished all standards of aesthetic bindingness: This is the source of the shadow of mere velleity that hangs over the hated isms. The fact that no important art practice has ever existed without conscious will merely comes to self-consciousness in the much beleaguered isms. This compels artworks to be- come organized in themselves and requires as well an external organization for the artworks to the extent that they want to survive in a monopolistically fully or- ganized society. Whatever may be true in the comparison of art with an organism must be mediated by way of the subject and his reason. The truth of this compari- son has long since been taken into the service of an irrationalistic ideology of a rationalized society; this is why the isms that deny that truth are truer. The isms by no means shackled the individual productive forces but rather heightened them, and they did so in part through mutual collaboration.
One aspect of isms has only recently become relevant. The truth content of many artistic movements does not necessarily culminate in great artworks; Benjamin demonstrated this in his study of German baroque drama. lO Presumably the same holds true for German expressionism and French surrealism; not by accident the latter challenged the concept of art itself, a defiance that has ever since remained admixed with all authentic new art. Since art all the same remained art, the essence of the provocation may be sought in the preponderance of art over the artwork. This preponderance is embodied in the isms . What in terms of the work seems failed or no more than a citation , also testifies to impulses that can scarcely be ob- jectivated in the particular work any longer; impulses of an art that transcends it- self; its idea awaits rescue . It is worth noting that the uneasiness with isms seldom includes their historical equivalent, the schools. Isms are , so to speak, the secular- ization of these schools in an age that destroyed them as traditionalistic. Isms are scandalous because they do not fit into the schema of absolute individuation but remain as an island of a tradition that was shattered by the principle of individua- tion. The disdained should at the very least be completely alone, as surety for its powerlessness, its historical inefficacy, and its early, traceless demise. The schools entered into opposition to the modem in a way that was expressed eccentrically in the measures taken by the academies against students suspected of sympathy for modern directions. Isms are potentially schools that replace traditional and insti- tutional authority with an objective authority. Solidarity with them is better than to disavow them , even if this were on the basis of the antithesis of the modern and modernism. The critique of what is up to date, yet without structural legitimation , is not without its justification: The functionless, for instance, that imitates function is regressive. Still, the separation of modernism as the opinions and convictions of the hangers-on of the authentically modem is invalid because without the sub-
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jective opinions that are stimulated by the new, no objectively modern art would crystallize. In truth the distinction is demagogical: Whoever complains about modernism means the modern, just as hangers-on are always attacked in order to strike at the protagonists whom one fears to challenge and whose prestige inspires deference among conformists. The standard of honesty by which the modernists are pharisaically measured implies acquiescence with being who one is, no more nor less, and a refusal to change, a fundamental habitus of the aesthetic reac- tionary. Its false nature is dissolved by the reflection that has now become the essence of artistic education . The critique of modernism in favor of the putatively truly modern functions as a pretext for judging the moderate-whose thinking fronts for the dross of a trivial intellectualism-as being better than the radical; actually it is the other way around. What lagged behind also fails to master the older means that it employs. History rules even those works that disavow it.
In sharp contrast to traditional art, new art accents the once hidden element of being something made, something produced. The portion of it that is -6? cret grew to such an extent that all efforts to secret away the process of production in the work could not but fail. The previous generation had already limited the pure immanence of artworks, which at the same time they drove to its extreme: by employing the author as commentator, by the use of irony, and by the quantity of detail artfully protected from the intervention of art . From this arose the pleasure of substituting for the artworks the process of their own production. Today every work is virtually what Joyce declared Finnegans Wake to be before he published the whole: work in progress. But a work that in its own terms, in its own texture and complexion, is only possible as emergent and developing, cannot without lying at the same time lay claim to being complete and "finished. " Art is unable to extricate itself from this aporia by an act of will. Decades ago Adolf Loos wrote that ornaments cannot be invented; 1 1 the point he was making has a broader range than he signaled. In art the more that must be made, sought, invented, the more uncertain it becomes if it can be made or invented. Art that is radically and explic- itly something made must ultimately confront its own feasibility. What provokes protest in works of the past is precisely what was argran ed and calculated, what did not-as one would have said in the years around 1800-in turn become nature. Progress in art as the process of making and doubts about just that run in counter- point to each other; in fact, such progress has been accompanied by a tendency toward absolute involuntariness, from the automatic writing of fifty years ago to today's tachism and aleatoric music; the observation is correct that the techni- cally integral, completely made artwork converges with the absolutely accidental work; the work that is ostensibly not the result of making is of course all the more fabricated.
The truth of the new, as the truth of what is not already used up, is situated in the intentionless. This sets truth in opposition to reflection, which is the motor of the new. and raises reflection to a second order, to second reflection. It is the opposite
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of its usual philosophical concept, as it is used, for instance, in Schiller's doctrine of sentimental poetry, where reflection means burdening artworks down with inten- tions. Second reflection lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness. "The absurd," however in- adequate as a slogan, testifies to this. Beckett's refusal to interpret his works, com- bined with the most extreme consciousness of techniques and of the implications of the theatrical and linguistic material, is not merely a subjective aversion: As re- flection increases in scope and power, content itself becomes ever more opaque. Certainly this does not mean that interpretation can be dispensed with as if there were nothing to interpret; to remain content with that is the confused claim that all the talk about the absurd gave rise to. Any artwork that supposes it is in possession of its content is plainly naIve in its rationalism; this may define the historically foreseeable limit of Brecht's work. Unexpectedly confirming Hegel's thesis of the transformation of mediation into immediacy, second reflection restores naIvete in the relation of content to first reflection. What is today called a "message" is no more to be squeezed out of Shakespeare's great dramas than out of Beckett's works. But the increasing opacity is itself a function of transformed content. As the negation of the absolute idea, content can no longer be identified with reason as it is postulated by idealism; content has become the critique of the omnipotence of reason, and it can therefore no longer be reasonable according to the norms set by discursive thought. The darkness of the absurd is the old darkness of the new. This darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning.
The category of the new produced a conflict. Not unlike the seventeenth-century querelle des anciens et des modernes, this is a conflict between the new and dura- tion. Artworks were always meant to endure; it is related to their concept, that of objectivation . Through duration art protests against death; the paradoxically tran- sient eternity of artworks is the allegory of an eternity bare of semblance. Art is the semblance of what is beyond death' s reach. To say that no art endures is as ab- stract a dictum as that of the transience of all things earthly; it would gain content only metaphysically, in relation to the idea of resurrection. It is not only reac- tionary rancor that provokes horror over the fact that the longing for the new re- presses duration. The effort to create enduring masterpieces has been undermined. What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place. There is all the less reason to call on tradition, in that retroactively count- less works once endowed with the qualities of endurance-qualities the concept of classicism strove to encompass-no longer open their eyes: The enduring per- ished and drew the category of duration into its vortex. The concept of the archaic defines not so much a phase of art history as the condition of works that have gone dead. Artworks have no power over whether they endure; it is least of all guaran- teed when the putatively time-bound is eliminated in favor of the timeless. For that can only take place at the cost of the work's relation to those contexts in which permanence is exclusively constituted. It was out of Cervantes' ephemeral
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intention to parody the medieval romances that Don Quixote originated. The concept of duration has an implicitly Egyptian, archaic quality of mythical help- lessness; the thought of duration seems to have been remote during productive periods. Probably it becomes an acute concern only when duration becomes prob- lematic and artworks, sensing their latent powerlessness, cling to it. Confusion oc- curs between what a detestable nationalist exhortation once called the "permanent value of artworks"-everything dead, formal, and neutralized in them-and the hidden seed of their survival. Ever since the praise Horace bestowed on himself for a monument "more durable than bronze ," the category of the lasting resonates with an apologetic quality that is foreign to artworks not erected by grace of an Augustan exercise of mercy for the sake of an idea of authenticity that bears more than the trace of the authoritarian. "Beauty itself must die! ":12 This is more true than Schiller imagined. It holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hiero- glyphic, but for everything composed of beauty and of what according to its tradi- tional idea was meant to be unchangeable, the constituents of form. In this regard, the category of tragedy should be considered. It seems to be the aesthetic imprint of evil and death and as enduring as they are. Nevertheless it is no longer possible. All that by which aesthetic pedants once zealously distinguished the tragic from the mournful-the affirmation of death, the idea that the infinite glimmers through the demise of the finite, the meaning of suffering-all this now returns to pass judgment on tragedy. Wholly negative artworks now parody the tragic. Rather than being tragic, all art is mournful, especially those works that appear cheerful and harmonious. What lives on in the concept of aesthetic duration, as in much else , is prima philosophia, which takes refuge in isolated and absolutized deriva- tives after having been compelled to abdicate as totality. Obviously the duration to which artworks aspire is modeled on fixed, inheritable possession; the spiritual should, like material, become property, an outrage ineluctably committed by spirit against itself. As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them. Many artworks of the highest caliber effectively seek to lose themselves in time so as not to be- come its prey , entering thus into insoluble antimony with the necessity for objecti- vation. Ernst Schoen once praised the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks as the only art that aspires not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away. It is ultimately in terms of this idea that the temporal arts of drama and music are to be interpreted, the counterpart of a reification without which they would not exist and yet that degrades them. In the face of the means of mechanical reproduc- tion, these considerations appear obsolete, yet the discontent with these means may nevertheless also be a discontent with the emerging omnipotence of the per- manence of art that runs parallel with the collapse of duration . If art were to free itself from the once perceived illusion of duration, were to internalize its own
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transience in sympathy with the ephemeral life, it would approximate an idea of truth conceived not as something abstractly enduring but in consciousness of its temporal essence. If all art is the secularization of transcendence, it participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed, without this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than that art must go beyond its own concept in order to re- main faithful to that concept. The idea of its abolition does it homage by honoring its claim to truth . Nevertheless , the survival of undermined art is not only an ex- pression of cultural lag, that ever sluggish revolution of the superstructure. The source of art's power ofresistance is that a realized materialism would at the same time be the abolition of materialism, the abolition of the domination of material interests. In its powerlessness, art anticipates a spirit that would only then step forth. To this corresponds an objective need, the neediness of the world, which is contrary to the subjective and now no more than ideological individual need for art. Art can find its continuation nowhere else than in this objective need.
In art what once took care of itself became a specific undertaking, and as a result integration increasingly binds the centrifugal counterforces. Like a whirlpool, in- tegration absorbs the manifold that once defined art. What is left is an abstract unity shorn of the antithetical element by virtue of which art becomes a unity in the first place. The more successful the integration, the more it becomes an empty spinning of gears; teleologically it tends toward infantile tinkering. The power of the aesthetic subject to integrate whatever it takes hold of is at the same time its weakness. It capitulates to a unity that is alienated by virtue of its abstractness and resignedly casts its lot with blind necessity. If the whole of modem art can be understood as the perpetual intervention of the subject, one that is at no point dis- posed to allow the unreftected governance of the traditional play of forces within the artwork, the permanent interventions of the ego are matched by a tendency of the ego to abdicate out of weakness. True to the age-old mechanical principle of the bourgeois spirit, this abdication takes the form of the reification of subjective achievements, effectively locating them exterior to the subject and mistaking the abdication of the subject for a guarantee of ironclad objectivity. Technique, the extended arm of the subject, also always leads away from that subject. The shadow of art's autarchic radicalism is its harmlessness: Absolute color compositions verge on wallpaper patterns. Now that American hotels are decorated with ab- stract paintings ii la maniere de . . . and aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially affordable, radicalism itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical. Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger.
The more art expels the preestablished, the more it is thrown back on what purports to get by, as it were, without borrowing from what has become distant and foreign: Art is thrown back on the dimensionless point of pure subjectivity , strictly on its par- ticular and thus abstract subjectivity. This tendency was passionately anticipated by the radical wing of expressionism up to and including dada. The absence of
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social resonance, however, was not alone to blame for the collapse of expression- ism: It was not possible to persevere within the bounds of a dimensionless point; the contraction of the accessible, the totality of the refusal , terminates in complete impoverishment: the scream or the destitute, powerless gesture, literally the sylla- bles "da-da. " This became an amusement for all concerned , the dadaists as well as the conformists they challenged, because it confessed the impossibility of artis- tic objectivation that is postulated by each and every artistic manifestation, whether intentionally or not; what after all is left to do but scream. The dadaists consistently tried to abrogate this postulate ; the program of their surrealist succes- sors rejected art, yet without being able to shake itself free of it. Their truth was that it would be better not to have art than to have a false one. But they fell to the mercy of the semblance of an absolute subjectivity existing purely for-itself and objectively mediated, yet without the ability to go beyond the position of being- for-itself. Surrealism expresses the foreignness of the alienated only by seeking recourse in itself. Mimesis ties art to individual human experience, which is now exclusively that of being-for-itself. That there is no persevering at this subjective point is by no means only because the artwork forfeits that otherness in which the aesthetic subject is exclusively able to objectivate itself. Clearly the concept of duration-as ineluctable as it is problematic-cannot be unified with the idea that the SUbjective point is also a temporal one. Not only did the expressionists make concessions as they became older and had to earn a living; not only did dadaists convert to Catholicism or enroll in the Communist Party: Artists with the integrity of Picasso and Schoenberg went beyond the subjective point. Their difficulties in this could be sensed and feared right from their first efforts to achieve a so-called new order. Since then these difficulties developed into the difficulties of art as such. To date, all requisite progress beyond the subjective point has been bought at the price of regression through assimilation to the past and by the arbitrariness of a self-posited order. In recent years it has been fashionable to accuse Samuel Beckett of simply repeating his basic idea; he exposed himself to this accusation in a provocative fashion. In this his consciousness was correct that the need for progress is inextricable from its impossibility. The gesture of walking in place at the end of Godot, which is the fundamental motif of the whole of his work, reacts precisely to this situation. Without exception his response is violent. His work is the extrapolation of a negative lctcx. p6C;. The fulfilled moment reverses into per- petual repetition that converges with desolation. His narratives, which he sardon- ically calls novels, no more offer objective descriptions of social reality than-as the widespread misunderstanding supposes - they present the reduction of life to basic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in extremis. These novels do, however, touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which are brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill. The narra- tives are marked as much by an objectively motivated loss of the object as by its correlative, the impoverishment of the subject. Beckett draws the lesson from
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montage and documentation, from all the attempts to free oneself from the illu- sion of a subjectivity that bestows meaning. Even where reality finds entry into the narrative, precisely at those points at which reality threatens to suppress what the literary subject once performed, it is evident that there is something uncanny about this reality. Its disproportion to the powerless subject, which makes it incommensurable with experience, renders reality unreal with a vengeance. The surplus of reality amounts to its collapse; by striking the subject dead, reality itself becomes deathly; this transition is the artfulness of all antiart, and in Beckett it is pushed to the point of the manifest annihilation of reality . The more total society becomes, the more completely it contracts to a unanimous system, and all the more do the artworks in which this experience is sedimented become the other of this society . If one applies the concept of abstraction in the vaguest possible sense, it signals the retreat from a world of which nothing remains except its caput mor- tuum. New art is as abstract as social relations have in truth become. In like man- ner, the concepts of the realistic and the symbolic are put out of service . Because the spell of external reality over its subjects and their reactions has become ab- solute , the artwork can only oppose this spell by assimilating itself to it. At ground zero, however, where Beckett's plays unfold like forces in infinitesimal physics, a second world of images springs forth , both sad and rich , the concentrate of histori- cal experiences that otherwise, in their immediacy, fail to articulate the essential: the evisceration of subject and reality . This shabby , damaged world of images i s the negative imprint o f the administered world . T o th i s extent Beckett i s realisti c . Even in what passes vaguement under the name of abstract art, something sur- vives of the tradition it effaced; presumably it corresponds to what one already perceives in traditional painting insofar as one sees images and not copies of something . Art carries out the eclipse of concretion, an eclipse to which expres- sion is refused by a reality in which the concrete continues to exist only as a mask of the abstract and the determinate particular is nothing more than an exemplar of the universal that serves as its camouflage and is fundamentally identical with the ubiquity of monopoly. This critique of pseudoconcreteness directs its barbs retro- spectively at the whole of art as it has come down to the present. The tangents of the empirical world need only be slightly extended to see that they converge in the insight that the concrete serves for nothing better than that something , by being in some way distinct , can be identified, possessed, and sold. The marrow of experi- ence has been sucked out; there is none, not even that apparently set at a remove from commerce , that has not been gnawed away . At the heart of the economy is a process of concentration and centralization that has the power to absorb what is scattered. It leaves traces of independent existences only for professional statistics and permeates the most subtle spiritual innervations often without its being possi- ble to perceive the mediations. The mendacious personalization of politics and the blather about "man in the age of inhumanity" are appropriate to the objective pseudoindividualization; but this becomes an unbearable burden for art because
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there is no art without individuation. In other words, the contemporary situation of art is hostile to what the jargon of authenticity calls the "message. " The question so insistently posed by East German dramaturgy, "What does he mean? " just barely suffices to frighten hectored authors but would be absurd if applied to any one of Brecht's plays, whose program actually was to set thought processes in motion, not to communicate maxims; otherwise the idea of dialectical theater would have been meaningless from the start. Brecht's efforts to destroy subjective nuances and halftones with a blunt objectivity, and to do this conceptually as well, are artistic means; in the best of his work they become a principle of stylization, not afabula docet. It is hard to determine just what the author of Galileo or The Good Woman of Setzuan himself meant, let alone broach the question of the ob- jectivity of these works, which does not coincide with the subjective intention. The allergy to nuanced expression, Brecht's preference for a linguistic quality that may have been the result of his misunderstanding of positivist protocol sentences, is itself a form of expression that is eloquent only as determinate negation of that expression. Just as art cannot be, and never was, a language of pure feeling, nor a language of the affirmation of the soul, neither is it for art to pursue the results of ordinary knowledge, as for instance in the form of social documentaries that are to function as down payments on empirical research yet to be done. The space between discursive barbarism and poetic euphemism that remains to artworks is scarcely larger than the point of indifference into which Beckett burrowed.
The relation to the new is modeled on a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord, however, was always there; the possible com- binations are limited and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard. The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what exists and is obedient to it. At the center of contemporary antin- omies is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art's temporal end. Hegel was the first to realize that the end of art is implicit in its concept. That his prophecy was not fulfilled is based, paradoxically, on his historical optimism. He betrayed utopia by construing the existing as if it were the utopia of the absolute idea. Hegel' s theory that the world spirit has sublated art as a form is contradicted by another theory of art to be found in his work, which subordinates art to an antagonistic existence that prevails against all affirmative philosophy. This is compelling in architecture: If out of disgust with functional forms and their inherent conformism it wanted to give free reign to fantasy, it would fall immediately into kitsch. Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatiVely. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. In this image of collapse all the stig-
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mata of the repulsive and loathsome in modern art gather. Through the irreconcil- able renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled: This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia-that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise-converges with the possibility oftotal catastrophe. In the image of catastrophe, an image that is not a copy of the event but the cipher of its potential, the magical trace of art's most distant pre- history reappears under the total spell, as if art wanted to prevent the catastrophe by conjuring up its image . The taboo set on the historical telos is the single legiti- mation of that whereby the new compromises itself politically and practically: its claim to being an end in itself.
The shaft that art directs at society is itself social; it is counterpressure to the force exerted by the body social; like inner-aesthetic progress, which is progress in productive and, above all, technical forces, this counterpressure is bound up with progress of extra-aesthetic productive forces. There are historical moments in which forces of production emancipated in art represent a real emancipation that is impeded by the relations of production. Artworks organized by the subject are capable tant bien que mal of what a society not organized by a subject does not allow; city planning necessarily lags far behind the planning of a major, purpose- less, artwork. The antagonism in the concept of technique as something deter- mined inner-aesthetically and as something developed externally to artworks, should not be conceived as absolute. It originated historically and can pass. In electronics it is already possible to produce artistically by manipulating means that originated extra-aesthetically. There is an obvious qualitative leap between the hand that draws an animal on the wall of a cave and the camera that makes it possible for the same image to appear simultaneously at innumerable places. But the objectivation of the cave drawing vis-Ii-vis what is unmediatedly seen already contains the potential of the technical procedure that effects the separation of what is seen from the subjective act of seeing. Each work, insofar as it is intended for many, is already its own reproduction. That in his dichotomization of the auratic and the technological artwork, Benjamin suppressed this element common to both in favor of their difference, would be the dialectical critique of his theory. Cer- tainly the concept of the modern is to be placed chronologically long before the idea of the modern as a historicophilosophical category ; the modem , however, in the latter sense is not a chronological concept but the Rimbaudian postulate of an art ofthe most advanced consciousness, an art in which the most progressive and differentiated technical procedures are saturated with the most progressive and differentiated experiences. But these experiences, being social, are critical. Mod- em works in this sense must show themselves to be the equal of high industrial- ism, not simply make it a topic. Their own comportment and formal language must react spontaneously to the objective situation; the idea of a spontaneous re- action that is a norm defines a perennial paradox of art. Because there is nothing
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that can avoid the experience of the situation, nothing counts that purports to have escaped it. In many authentic modem works industrial thematic material is strictly avoided out of mistrust of machine art as a pseudomorphism. But in that this material is negated by heightened construction and the reduction of the material tolerated, the industrial returns with a vengeance, as in the work of Paul Klee. This aspect of the modem has changed as little as has the fact of industrialization for the life process of human beings; for the time being, this grants the aesthetic concept of the modem its peculiar invariance. The recognition of this invariance, however, admits no less breadth to the historical dynamic than does the industrial mode of production itself, which during the last hundred years has been trans- formed from the nineteenth-century factory to mass production and automation. The substantive element of artistic modernism draws its power from the fact that the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate. In a manner scarcely analyzed yet by sociology , they radiate out into areas of life far removed from them , deep into the zones of subjective experience, which does not notice this and guards the sanctity of its reserves . Art is modem when, by its mode of experience and as the expres- sion of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production. This involves a negative canon, a set of prohibitions against what the modem has disavowed in experience and technique; and such determinate negation is virtually the canon of what is to be done. That this modernity is more than a vague Zeitgeist or being cleverly up to date depends on the liberation of the forces of production . Modem art is equally determined so- cially by the conflict with the conditions of production and inner-aesthetically by the exclusion of exhausted and obsolete procedure s . Modernity tends rather to op- pose the ruling Zeitgeist, and today it must do so; to confirmed culture consumers , radical modem art seems marked by an old-fashioned seriousness and for that rea-
son, among others, crazy. The historical essence of all art is nowhere expressed so emphatically as in the qualitative irresistibility of modem art; that the idea of in- ventions in material production comes to mind is not an accidental association . By an inherent tendency, important artworks annihilate everything of their own time that does not achieve their standard . Rancor is therefore one of the reasons why so many of the cultured oppose radical modem art: The murderous historical force of the modem is equated with the disintegration of all that to which the proprietors of culture despairingly cling. Modem art is questionable not when it goes too far-as the cliche runs-but when it does not go far enough, which is the point at which works falter out of a lack of internal consistency. Only works that expose themselves to every risk have the chance of living on, not those that out of fear of the ephemeral cast their lot with the past. Those renaissances of temperate mod- ernism, promoted by a restorative consciousness and its interested parties, fizzle even in the eyes and ears of a public that is hardly avant-garde.
In emphatic opposition to the illusion of the organic nature of art, the material
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concept of the modem implies conscious control over its mean s . Even here mater- ial production and artistic production converge. The necessity of going to the ex- treme is the necessity for this particular rationality in relation to the material, and not the result of a pseudoscientific competition with the rationalization of the de- mystified world. This necessity categorically distinguishes the materially modem from traditionalism. Aesthetic rationality demands that all artistic means reach the utmost determinacy in themselves and according to their own function so as to be able to perform what traditional means can no longer fulfill. The extreme is demanded by artistic technology; it is not just the yearning of a rebellious attitude . The idea of a moderate modernism is self-contradictory because it restrains aes- thetic rationality. That every element in a work absolutely accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish coincides directly with the modem as desideratum: The moderate work evades this requirement because it receives its means from an available or fictitious tradition to which it attributes a power it no longer possesses. If moderate modernists pride themselves on their honesty, which sup- posedly protects them from getting carir ed away with every fad, this is dishonest given the ways in which moderation makes things easier for them . The purported immediacy of their artistic comportment is thoroughly mediated. The socially most advanced level of the productive forces, one of which is consciousness, is the level of the problem posed at the interior of the aesthetic monad . In their own figuration, artworks indicate the solution to this problem, which they are unable to provide on their own without intervention; this alone is legitimate tradition in art. Each and every important work of art leaves traces behind in its material and tech- nique, and following them defines the modem as what needs to be done, which is contrary to having a nose for what is in the air. Critique makes this definition con- crete. The traces to be found in the material and the technical procedures, from which every qualitatively new work takes its lead, are scars: They are the loci at which the preceding works misfired. By laboring on them, the new work turns against those that left these traces behind; this, not shifts in subjective feelings for life or in established styles, is the actual object of what historicism treated as the generational problem in art . The agon of Greek tragedy still gave evidence of this; only the pantheon of neutralized culture concealed it. The truth content of art- works is fused with their critical content. That is why works are also critics of one another. This, not the historical continuity of their dependencies, binds artworks to one another; "each artwork is the mortal enemy of the other"; 13 the unity of the history of art is the dialectical figure of determinate negation. Only in this way does art serve its idea of reconciliation. A meager and impure idea of this dialecti- cal unity is given by the way in which artists of a single genre perceive themselves to be working in a subterranean collective that is virtually independent of their individual products.
In empirical reality the negation of the negative is hardly ever affirmation , yet in the aesthetic sphere this dialectical maxim bears some truth: The power of imma-
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nent negation is not shackled in subjective artistic production as it is externally. Artists with extreme sensitivity of taste, such as Stravinsky and Brecht, brushed taste against the grain on the basis of taste; dialectic lay hold of taste and drove it beyond itself, and this certainly is also its truth. By virtue of aesthetic elements under the facade, realistic artworks in the nineteenth century on occasion proved to be more substantial than those works that paid obeisance to the ideal of art's purity; Baudelaire extolled Manet and took Flaubert's side. In tenns ofpeinture pure, Manet towered incomparably over Puvis de Chavannes; comparing them is almost comical. The mistake of aestheticism was aesthetic: It confused its own guiding concept with the work accomplished. Idiosyncrasies of artists are sedi- mented in the canon of prohibitions, but they in tum become objectively binding so that in art the particular is literally the universal . For the idiosyncratic comport- ment, which is at first unconscious and hardly theoretically transparent to itself, is the sedimentation of a collective fonn of reaction. Kitsch is an idiosyncratic con- cept that is as binding as it is elusive to definition. That reflection is a requisite of art today means that it must become conscious of its idiosyncrasies and articulate them. As a consequence, art threatens to become allergic to itself; the quintes- sence of the determinate negation that art exercises is its own negation. Through correspondences with the past, what resurfaces becomes something qualitatively other. The defonnation of figures and human faces in modem sculpture and paint- ings are reminiscent prima vista of archaic works in which the cultic replication of people was either not intended or impossible to achieve with the techniques avail- able. But it makes a world of difference whether art, having once achieved the power of replication, negates it, as the word defonnation implies , or if this power has yet to be gained; for aesthetics the difference is greater than the similarity . It is hard to imagine that art, having once experienced the heteronomy of portrayal, would again forget it and return to what it detenninately and intentionally negated. Yet, admittedly, even prohibitions that originated historically are not to be hypostatized; otherwise they call up that favorite sleight of hand of mod- ernists of Cocteau ' s variety that consists of suddenly conjuring up what has been temporarily prohibited and presenting it as if it were altogether fresh, and of rel- ishing the violation of the modem taboo as itself something modem; in this fash- ion modernity has frequently been shunted into reaction. It is problems that return, not preproblematic categories and solutions. The older Schoenberg is reliably re- ported to have said that for the moment there was no discussing harmony . Clearly this was not a prophecy that some day one would again be able to compose with triads, which he by the expansion of the material had relegated to exhausted spe- cial circumstances . The question, however, remains open whether the dimension of simultaneity in music as a whole was not degraded to a mere result, an irrele- vance , something virtually accidental ; music lost one of its dimensions , that of the eloquent simultaneous combination of sound, and this was not the least of the reasons why the immeasurably enriched material was impoverished. Triads and
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other chords from the treasury of tonality are not to be restituted; it is conceivable , however, that if qualitative counterforces someday stir in opposition to the total quantification of music , the vertical dimension could once again become "a matter of discussion" in such a fashion as to allow the ear to listen for harmonies that had regained their specific value. An analogous prediction could be made for counter- point , which was similarly scuttled by blind integration . Of course the possibility of reactionary misuse cannot be disregarded; rediscovered harmony, however it is constituted, would accommodate itself to harmonic tendencies; one need only imagine how easily the equally well-founded longing for the reconstruction of monodic lines could be transformed into the false resurrection of what the ene- mies of new music miss so painfully as melody. The prohibitions are both gentle and strict. The thesis that homeostasis is only binding as the result of a play of forces and not as slack well-proportionedness, implies the weighty prohibition of those aesthetic phenomena that in The Spirit of Utopia Bloch called carpet motifs , a prohibition whose powers are expanding retrospectively, as if it were an invari- ant. Even though it is avoided and negated, however, the need for homeostasis persists. Rather then resolving antagonisms, art at times expresses overwhelming tensions negatively through extreme distance from them. Aesthetic norms, how- ever great their historical importance may be, lag behind the concrete life of art- works; yet all the same these norms participate in the latters' magnetic fields. Nothing, however, is served by affixing a temporal index externally to these norms; the dialectic ofartworks takes place between these norms -more precisely, between the most advanced norms - and the works' specific form.
The need to take risks is actualized in the idea of the experimental, which-in op- position to the image of the artist's unconscious organic labor-simultaneously transfers from science to art the conscious control over materials. Currently offi- cial culture grants special funds to what it mistrustfully, half hoping for failure, calls artistic experimentation, thus neutralizing it. Actually, art is now scarcely possible unless it does experiment. The disproportion between established culture and the level of productive forces has become blatant: What is internally consis- tent appears to society at large as a bogus promissory note on the future, and art, socially dispossessed, is in no way sure that it has any binding force of its own. For the most part, experimentation takes shape as the testing of possibilities, usu- ally of types and species; it therefore tends to degrade the concrete work to a mere example: This is one of the reasons for the aging of new art. Certainly aesthetic means and ends cannot be separated, yet almost by its concept experimentation is primarily concerned with means and content to leave the world waiting in vain for the ends. What is more , during the last several decades the concept of the experi- ment has itself become equivocal . If even as late as 1930 experimentation referred to efforts filtered through critical consciousness in opposition to the continuation of unreflected aesthetic practices, in the meantime the concept has acquired the stipulation that a work should have contents that are not foreseeable in the process
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of production, that, subjectively, the artist should be surprised by the work that results. In this transformation of the concept of experimentation, art becomes conscious of something that was always present in it and was pointed out by Mallarme. The artist's imagination scarcely ever completely encompassed what it brought forth. The combinatorial arts, ars nova, for instance, and later that of the Netherland School, infiltrated the music of the late Middle Ages with effects that probably surpassed the composers' subjective imagination. A combinatorial art that required ofthe artist-as alienated artist-the mediation of subjective imagi- nation , was essential to the development of artistic techniques . This magnified the risk that aesthetic products would deteriorate because of inadequate or feeble imagination. The risk is that of aesthetic regression. Artistic spirit raises itself above what merely exists at the point where the imagination does not capitulate to the mere existence of materials and techniques. Since the emancipation of the subject, the mediation of the work through it is not to be renounced without its reversion to the status of a thing. Music theoreticians of the sixteenth century already recognized this. On the other hand, only stubbornness could deny the productive function of many "surprise" elements in much modern art, in action painting and aleatoric art , that did not result from being passed through the imagi- nation. The solution to this contradiction is that all imagination has an arena of in- determinateness that is not, however, in rigid opposition to it. As long as Richard Strauss still wrote somewhat complex works, the virtuoso himself may have been unable to imagine each sound, each color, and each sounding combination precisely; it is well known that even composers with the best ears are usually as- tonished when they actually hear their orchestral works performed. This indeter- minateness, however-including the indeterminateness that results from the in- ability of the ear, as Stockhausen has noted, to distinguish, much less imagine, each tone of a tone cluster-is built into determinateness as an element of it rather than that it encompasses the whole . In the jargon of musicians: You have to know exactly if something sounds, and only to a certain extent how it sounds. This leaves room for surprises , those that are desired as well as those that require cor- rection; what made its precocious appearance as l 'imprevu in Berlioz is a surprise not only for the listener but objectively as well; and yet the ear can anticipate it. In the experiment, the ego-alien must be respected as well as subjectively mas- tered: Only as something mastered does it bear witness to what has been liberated. The real source of the risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoor- will of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces-the spirit of the artist and his procedures - will be equal to that objectiv- ity. If such a guarantee did exist it would block the possibility of the new, which itself contributes to the objectivity and coherence of the work . What can, without
stirring up the musty odors of idealism, justly be called serious in art is the pathos of an objectivity that confronts the individual with what is more and other than he
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is in his historically imperative insufficiency. The risk taken by artworks partici- pates in their seriousness; it is the image of death in their own sphere. This seri- ousness is relativized, however, in that aesthetic autonomy remains external to suffering , of which the work is an image and from which the work draws its seri- ousness. The artwork is not only the echo of suffering, it diminishes it; form, the organon of its seriousness, is at the same time the organon of the neutralization of suffering. Art thereby falls into an unsolvable aporia. The demand for complete responsibility on the part of artworks increases the burden of their guilt; therefore this demand is to be set in counterpoint with the antithetical demand for irrespon- sibility . The latter is reminiscent of the element of play, without which there is no more possibility of art than of theory. As play, art seeks to absolve itself of the guilt of its semblance. Art is in any case irresponsible as delusion, as spleen, and without it there is no art whatsoever. The art of absolute responsibility terminates in sterility, whose breath can be felt on almost all consistently developed art- works; absolute irresponsibility degrades art to fun; a synthesis of responsibility and irresponsibility is precluded by the concept itself. Any relation to what was once thought of as the dignity of art-what Holderlin called that "noble, grave genius"14-has become ambivalent. True, in the face of the culture industry art maintains that dignity; it enrobes two measures of a Beethoven quartet snatched up from between the murky stream of hit tunes while tuning the radio dial. By contrast, modern art that laid claim to dignity would be pitilessly ideological. To
act dignified it would have to put on airs, strike a pose, claim to be other than what it can be . It is precisely its seriousness that compels modern art to lay aside preten- sions long since hopelessly compromised by the Wagnerian art religion . A solemn tone would condemn artworks to ridiculousness, just as would the gestures of grandeur and might. Certainly, without the subjective form-giving power art is not thinkable, yet this capacity has nothing to do with an artwork's achieving ex- pressive strength through its form. Even subjectively this strength is heavily com- promised, for art partakes of weakness no less than of strength. In the artwork the unconditional surrender of dignity can become an organon of its strength. Consider the strength it took for the rich and brilliant bourgeois heir, Verlaine, to let himself go, to sink so drastically in the world, to turn himself into the passively tumbling instrument of his poetry . To accuse him, as did Stefan Zweig, of having been a weakling, is not only petty but obtuse with regard to the variety of produc- tive artistic comportments: Without his weakness Verlaine would no more have been able to write his most beautiful works than to write those miserable verses he later marketed as rate.