No More Learning

? ? Aesthetic Theory
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? Aesthetic Theory
Theodor W. Adorno
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, Editors
Newly translated, edited, and with a translator's introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor
? ? Continuum
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All rights reserved. No part of this pUblication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Originally published as Asthetische Theorie, (C) 1970 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main This translation published 1997 by The Athlone Press Ltd
This edition published 2002 by Continuum British Library Cataloguing-in-PubUcation Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library ISBN 0-8264-{i757-1
Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Bodrnin
Contents
Translator's Acknowledgments ix Translator's Introduction xi
Art, Society, Aesthetics 1
Art's Self-Evidence LostI-Against the Question ofOrigin2-Truth Content and the Life of Works 3-0n the Relation of Art and Society 4-Critique of the Psychoanalytic Theory ofArt8-The Art Theories ofKant and Freud9-"The Pleasure ofArt" 13-Aesthetic Hedonism and the Happiness ofKnowledge 14
Situation 1 6
Disintegration of the Material 16-Deaestheticization of Art, Critique of the Culture Industry 16-Language of Suffering 18-The New: Its Philosophy of History 19-0n the Problem ofInvariance; Experiment (I)23-Defense ofIsms
24-Isms as Secularized Schools25-Feasibility and Accident; Modernity and Quality26-"Second Reflection"26-The New and Duration27-Dialectic of Integrationandthe "SubjectivePoint"29-TheNew, UtopiaandNegativity32- Modem Art and Industrial Production33-Aesthetic Rationality and Criticism
34-Canon ofProhibitions35-Experiment (II), Seriousness and Irresponsibility 37-Black as an Ideal39-Relation to Tradition40-Subjectivity and Collective 4I-Solipsism, Mimetic Taboo, and Maturity42-Metier43-Expression and
Construction44
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On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique 45
On the Category ofthe Ugly45-Ugliness: Its Social Aspect and Its Philosophy of History48-0n the Concept of the Beautiful50-Mimesis and Rationality53- On the Concept of Construction 56-Technology 58-Dialectic of Function- alism60
Natural Beauty 61
Condemnation ofNatural Beauty6l-Natural Beauty as a "Stepping Out into the Open" 63-0n Cultural Landscape 64-Natural Beauty and Art Beauty Are Interlocked 65-The Experience of Nature Is Historically Deformed 68- Aesthetic Apperception Is Analytical69-Natural Beauty as Suspended History
70-Determinate Indeterminateness7I-Nature as a Cipher of the Reconciled 73-Hegel's Critique ofNatural Beauty: Its Metacritique74-Transitionfrom
Natural to Art Beauty77
Art Beauty: Apparition, Spiritualization, Intuitability 78
"More " as Semblance78-Aesthetic Transcendence and Disenchantment79- Enlightenment and Shudder79-Art and the Art-Alien8l-The Nonexistent82- Image Character83-"Explosion "84-Image Content Is Collective85-Art as Spiritual86-Immanence of Works and the Heterogeneous88-0n Hegel's Aesthetics ofSpirit90-Dialectic ofSpiritualization9l-Spiritualization and the Chaotic93-Art 's Intuitability Is Aporetic94-Intuitability and Conceptuality97
Semblance and Expression 100
Crisis ofSemblancelaO-Semblance, Meaning, and "tour deforce "lO5-Toward the Redemption of SemblancelO7-Expression and Dissonance IlO-Subject- ObjectIll-Expression as Eloquencel12-Domination and Conceptual Knowl- edge113-Expression and Mimesis 114-Dialectic of Inwardness; Aporias of Expression115
Enigmaticalness, Truth Content, Metaphysics 1 18
Critique and Redemption ofMyth118-The Mimetic and the Ridiculous118- Cui bonol19-Enigmaticalness and Understanding120- "Nothing shall be left unchanged"I22-Enigma, Script, Interpretation124-Interpretation as Imitation 125-"Block"126-Fractured Transcendence126-0n the Truth Content of Artworks127-Art and Philosophy; Collective Content ofArtl3O-Truth as Semblance of the Illusionless l3l-Mimesis of the Fatal and Reconciliation
I33-Methexis in Darkness134
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Coherence and Meaning 136
Logicality136-Logic, Causality, Time137-Purposefulness without Purpose 139-Form14O-Form and Content143-The Concept of Articulation (I)146- On the Concept of Material147-The Concept of Subject Matter; Intention and Content149-1ntention and Meaning151-The Crisis of Meaning152-The Concept of Harmony and the Ideology of Closure157-Affirmation159-Critique
of Classicism160
Subject-Object 1 63
Subjective and Objective are Equivocal; On Aesthetic Feeling163-Critique of Kant's Concept of Objectivity165-Precarious Balance166-Linguistic Quality and Collective Subject166-Subject-Object Dialectic16B-"Genius"169- Originality172-Fantasy and Reflection173-0bjectivity and Reification174
Toward a Theory of the Artwork 1 75
Aesthetic Experience Is Processual175-Transience17B-Artifact and Genesis 17B-The Artwork as Monad and Immanent Analysis179-Art and Artworks 1B1-History Is Constitutive; "Intelligibility"1B2-The Necessity of Objecti-
vation and Dissociation1B3-Unity and Multiplicity1B6-The Category of Intensity 1B7- "Why a work can rightfully be said to be beautiful" 1BB- "Depth"1B9-The Concept of Articulation (II)190-0n the Difef rentiation of Progress191-Development of Productive Forces192-The Transformation of Artworks 193-1nterpretation, Commentary, Critique 194-Truth Content Is
Historical; The Sublime in Nature andArt194-The Sublime and Play197
Universal and Particular 1 99
Nominalism and the Decline of Genres199-0n Antiquity's Genre-Aesthetics 202-Philosophy of History of Conventions203-0n the Concept of Style205- The Progress of Art207-The History of Art Is Inhomogeneous209-Progress and Domination of the Material210-"Technique"212-Art in the Industrial Age
217-Nominalism and Open Form219-Construction, Static and Dynamic222
Society 225
Double Character of Art; fait social and Autonomy; On the Fetish Character 225-Reception and Production22B-Choice of Thematic Material; Artistic Subject; Relation to Science229-Art as Comportment232-Ideology and Truth 233- "Guilt" 234-0n the Reception of Advanced Art235-Mediation of Art and Society236-Critique of Catharsis; Kitsch and the Vulgar23B-Attitude to Praxis; Effect, Lived Experience, "Shudder"241-Commitment246-Aestheti-
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cism, Naturalism, Beckett248-Against Administered Art250-The Possibility of Art Today251-Autonomy and Heteronomy252-Political Option254-Progress and Reaction 256-Art and the Poverty of Philosophy 258-Primacy of the Object and Art258-The Problem ofSolipsism and False Reconciliation259
Paraiipomena 262
Theories on the Origin of Art 325
Draft Introduction 332
The Obsolescence of Traditional Aesthetics 332-The Changing Function of
Naivete335-lrreconcilability of Traditional Aesthetics and Contemporary Art 338-Truth-Content and the Fetish Character of Artworks340-The Need for Aesthetics341-Aesthetics as the Refuge ofMetaphysics343-Aesthetic Experi- ence as Objective Understanding345-Work-Immanent Analysis and Aesthetic Theory348-0n the Dialectics ofAesthetic Experience348-Universal and Particular350-Critique of the Phenomenological Research of Origin 351- Relation to Hegel's Aesthetics352-The Open Character ofAesthetics; Aesthetics of Form and Aesthetics of Content (I)353-Aesthetics of Form and Aesthetics of Content (II); Norms and Slogans355-Methodology, "Second Reflection, "
History357
Editors' Afterword 361 Notes 367
Index 379
Translator's Acknowledgments
It is not recorded that Job was working on a translation, but I wouldn't doubt it. Whatever could interfere in this project interfered: illness, earthquake, and unem- ployment took turns with lesser scourges. The translation stretched years beyond the year planned. That it did not finally get left on a doorstep or slid behind a bookshelf lowe in part to friends, to Steve Babson, Jery Zaslove, Marty Jay, Bill Donoghue, Milton Cantor, and most of all to my wife, Odile Hullot-Kentor. And every reader of this book is indebted to Juliane Brand, who painstakingly checked the translation against the original, word by word, suggested innumerable im- provements, and, as its copy editor as well, helped bring the translation to an alto- gether new level. Her expertise, generosity, and calm goodwill made her a won- derful and indispensable ally. I also want to thank Shierry Nicholsen, Mike Richardson, and Don Shumaker for their various contributions.
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Translator's Introduction
Every translation must fit one world inside another, but not every work to be translated has been shaped by emphatic opposition to the world into which it must be fitted. This is, however, the case with Aesthetic Theory, which Theodor Adorno was able to write only by leaving the United States, where he had lived for a decade during the war years, became a citizen, and often thought he might need to remain. Any review of the many American phrases that Adorno scornfully quotes throughout Aesthetic Theory-the "tired businessman," the "pin-up," the "what do I get out of it? " -will confirm that not least of all the book was written in re- fusal of a country that it depicts as a completely commercial order. Even so un- problematically scannable a phrase as "Only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value" draws on the transformation of distinctly European experi- ences of aristocracy. In the United States, such an idea, if it gets as far as cogni- tion, falls askance of the inheritances of a puritanical mind that has always sus- pected that art does not properly work for a living and might encourage others to do the same. And just opening to any page, without bothering to read a word, one sees that the book is visibly antagonistic. No one from the land of edutainment would compose these starkly unbeckoning sheer sides of type, uninterrupted by chapter titles or typographic markers, that have severed and jettisoned every ap- proach and patched over most every apparent handhold.
The book's stylistic peculiarities derive, as a whole, from what makes Aesthetic Theory inimical to an American context: that it is oriented not to its readers but to the thing-in-itself. This is not, as will be immediately suspected, motivated by indifference to its readers. On the contrary. the book makes itself remote from its
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consumption out of interest in, and by its power of, self-immersion. Aesthetic Theory is an attempt to overcome the generally recognized failing of aesthetics- its externality to its object- that Barnett Newman once did the world the favor of putting in a nutshell when he famously quipped, speaking of himself as a painter, that "aesthetics is for me like what ornithology must be like for the birds. "! Art- works are after all unique, not least in that, when they are experienced, they are experienced from within. It is possible to vanish into a novel or a painting and be half-surprised, looking away for a moment, that the world was ever there at all. Anyone turning to aesthetics would expect that, to call itself aesthetics, it would be allied with what is exceptional in the experience of its object. But what is dis- covered instead is a discipline that throughout its history has worked at the con- ceptual undergirding of standards of beauty, the sublime, taste, art's dignity, and so on, while failing to achieve the standard of the experience of what it purports to treat. The suspicion is irrepressible that either aesthetics is the work of the will- fully deaf, blind, and insensate or that art is under a spell that prohibits its inner comprehension, as if here one is permitted entry as nowhere else only on the con- dition that one leave empty-handed and never be able to say what the difference is between it and just having been distracted.
Adorno's Aesthetic Theory means to breach this externality of aesthetics to art. It is hardly the first effort to do so. But when aesthetics has become dissatisfied with itself and tried to escape its externality it has almost always taken the form of pretending to be art in a pictorial, effusive voice, or it has offered to act as maitre d' to a specialized domain of pleasure . Either effort, however, only camouflages the presupposition that intellect must renounce knowing art from within. Aesthetic Theory, by contrast, is oriented to an early aphorism that Adorno wrote about music that was seminal to his thinking about art as a whole: "We don't understand music, it understands us. "2 The aesthetics required by this perception would be re- mote to all art appreciation; its sight lines would run opposite those angled by the intensifying need for art that makes people mill around art museums in constantly greater numbers : it would be art's own understanding ; the presentation of its truth content.
Conjuring this genie out of the bottle would seem to require the sacrifice of subjectivity to what is beyond itself. If the thing-in-itself is to speak, subjectivity's own voice must only interfere . This thesis could perhaps look for confirmation in Dialectic ofEnlightment in which Adorno and Horkheimer show that fascism did not simply coax cornered reason into delirium but was itself a potential implicit in reason's own compulsion toward all-encompassing domination. Yet the authors never sought to subvert subjectivity or to countermand enlightenment, the course of SUbjectivity's development as reason. If enlightenment had come to a dead end in fascism, its abrogation would make terror permanent. Rather, Adorno and Horkheimer took the side of enlightenment and tried to discern the logic of its fail- ure. What they showed was that it missed its aim of human emancipation from
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xiii
natural necessity and the second nature of social constraint because the domina- tion of nature unwittingly requires the sacrifice of subjectivity. The recognition that in maximapotentiaminima licentia is millennia old. But Dialectic ofEnlight- enment took this thought in a strictly modern direction: if the self is progressively limited and deprived through the domination of its object, if humanity is subordi- nated to necessity by the struggle against it, then the emancipation of the subject depends on its capacity to emancipate its object, and this requires all possible sub- jective spontaneity.
Adorno's thesis that subjectivity could only be transcended by way of subjec- tivity, and not by its limitation, is one way of formulating his seminal insight: that identity is the power of nonidentity. The philosophical means for giving shape to what is more than subjectivity would be, paradoxically, those of conceptual cog- nition that, since Kant's Copernican turn, specifically limited knowledge to the world constituted by subjectivity this side of the thing-in-itself. As Adorno wrote in the introduction to Negative Dialectics, he considered it the task of his thought "to use the strength of the subject to break through the fraud of constitutive sub- jectivity. "3 The power of identity-manifest in Kant's transcendentalism as con- cepts that constitutively define the likeness of the world with the subject-would go beyond constitutive subjectivity if concepts could be developed in such a way as to present what is more than conceptual in them. That concepts are more than their definitional content is implicit in the idea of a dialectic of enlightenment: for if enlightenment regresses to the natural necessity that it attempts to dominate, then concepts, which ostensibly serve to identify the world with its knower, are actually artifacts most deeply shaped by what enlightenment never mastered. Identity must be more than identity in that it draws back into itself what it purports to overcome. The concealed content of enlightenment, the content of concepts, would be that nature that subjectivity sought to dominate in its own rise to power.
This defines Adorno's approach in Aesthetic Theory to the possibility of breaching the externality of aesthetics to art: an aesthetics that wants to know art from within-to present what art itself understands-would consist of what a contemporary nominalist intelligence, always verging on irrationalism, dismisses as the oppressive, overstuffed furnishings of an age credulous of absolutes: nat- ural beauty, art beauty, truth, semblance, and so on, the fundamental concepts of aesthetics.
Although these concepts emerged in the effort to master their material, they are more than that. Freed from the compulsion of domination they would potentially reveal their participation in what they sought to dominate and the impress of that through which they developed. Aesthetic concepts would become the ,memory of nature sedirnented in art, which for Adorno takes shape in Aesthetic Theory as the unconscious, mimetically written history of human suffering against which en- lightenment elsewhere seals itself off. Only this content could possibly bring rea- son's struggle for domination to its senses and direct its power to what would ac-
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tually fulfill it. Thus Adorno organized Aesthetic Theory as a paratactical presen- tation of aesthetic concepts that, by eschewing subordinating structures, breaks them away from their systematic philosophical intention so that the self- relinquishment that is implicit in identity could be critically explicated as what is nonintentional in them: the primacy of the object.
Throughout his years in the United States, Adorno on many occasions met with the rejection of his work by publishers who saw his writings simply as disorga- nized. It was obvious to Adorno that what he was pursuing required his return to Germany if only because in the 1950s publishing was still less commercially uni- fied than in the United States and permitted writers greater control over their work than here. 4 One event did, however, finally prompt him to leave. When the editor- ial board at the Psychoanalytic Society of San Francisco finished with his essay "Psychoanalysis Revised," he found that "the entire text was disfigured beyond recognition, the basic intention could not be discerned. "5 As Adorno recounted, the head editor explained that the standards to which the essay had been adjusted, which made it look like every other essay in the journal, were those of the profes- sion: "I would only be standing in my own way"-Adorno was told-"if I passed up its advantages. I passed them up nevertheless. "6 Adorno moved back to Europe.
Adorno's sense that staying here would have impossibly burdened his work was confirmed long after the fact by the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory in 1984. 7 The publisher, partially against the will of the translator, dis- carded the book's form as a superstitiously imposed impediment that would only stymie the book's consumption. 8 Diametrically opposed to the course the book took in its various drafts in Adorno's own hands, a process that led in the final ver- sion to the rejection of the division of the book into chapters, the 1984 translation arrived on bookstore shelves divided into numbered chapters with main headings and subheadings inserted in the text. Paragraph indentations were distributed arbi- trarily throughout, completing the image of a monodirectional sequence of topic sentences that could be followed stepwise from chapter 1 through chapter 12. This subordinated the text's paratactical order to a semblance of progressive argumen- tation that offered to present the book's content conveniently. This device pro- vided a steady external grip on the book while causing it to collapse internally. For in lieu of any argumentative structure in the text itself, because it contains no homogeneous substance that can be followed from start to finish, the flaring clar- ity of paragraph indentations only produced a contrast by which the simulated paragraphs appeared murky in their refusal to parse into stages of thesis and evi- dence. And whereas the paratactical text demands that every sentence undertake to be the topic sentence and that the book be composed of long, complex phrases, each of which seems under the obligation to present the book as a whole, the 1984 translation carved up sentences in the image of declarative vehicles of content. The original paratactical text is concentrically arranged around a mute middle
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point through which every word seeks to be refracted and that it must express. The text cannot refer forward or backward without disturbing this nexus through which the parts become binding on each other. The linear argumentative structure imposed on the text by the translation thus dismissed the text's middle point as a detour and severed its nexus. Compulsory unification serves only to fragment: the imposed structure set whole passages adrift whose suddenly evident isolation re- quired further apparatus to span them. Therefore, transitional phrases were inter- polated such as: "as we saw" or "as we said" or "let us remember. " The narrative persona that was projected into the text at these points and elsewhere was credible insofar as it seemed to substantiate an argumentative model of knowledge and its transmission. But this further contributed to muffling a text that, by its own stan- dards, succeeds only insofar as what is particular in it begins to speak for itself. The rejection of the work's form as a superstition was carried over to the treat- ment of the original's many Greek, Latin, and French concepts and phrases. They were rendered literally, in English, and without any marking, as if their content was clear enough once they had been freed from their alphabetical inconvenience. Thus, for instance, chorismos- the contrary of methexis- was translated as "sepa- ratism:' obfuscating the articulation of the problem of the participation of idea and object from Plato to Benjamin that is, so to speak, the topic of Aesthetic Theory and the whole of Adorno's writings. The many American phrases, which have such abrupt expressive power in the original, were likewise seamlessly absorbed into the scenery. Almost ingeniously the language of the 1984 text pulls away from the movement of thought that can still be sensed gesturing underneath, giving the book a disembodied quality, as if it were dubbed rather than translated. Subordi- nated to the principle of exchange by its coerced identity with the subject's form
of consumption, Aesthetische Theorie in translation became a model of what it protests against: the primacy of the constitutive subject. The irony is, of course, that by narrowing the distance of the book from its readers, ostensibly for their own good, but fundamentally to sell it to them, the work was put beyond them. 9
This volume is an entirely new translation of Aesthetische Theorie. The spatial or- ganization of the text is identical to the original. The major sections of the English text are divided only where the original divides. The sentence structure and phras- ing of the original were maintained wherever possible, given the tremendous dif- ferences of English syntax from the original. All words foreign to the original, including English words, occur here in italic. This translation, however, took its lead not so much from the aim to copy the appearance of the original, but rather from Adorno's description of the hearing implicit to Mahler's music: an "ampli- tude of a hearing encompassing the far distance, to which the most remote analo- gies and consequences are virtually present. "10 In Aesthetic Theory this amplitude occurs, however, not in the mimetic response of musical passages to each other but in the medium of concepts as their subterranean, dynamic relations.
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The coherence of these subterranean relations depends on the text's paratacti- cal form and survives only by a density of insight, not by external structure. This defines the text's-and its translation's-particular vulnerability: the slightest slackening of intensity threatens to dissolve the text into a miscellany. Nothing supports the text except the intensity with which it draws on and pushes against it- self. With few exceptions paratactical works are therefore short, fragmentary, and compacted by the crisis of their own abbreviation. Paratactical texts are intensive, almost to the denial of their quality of extension; and the more extensive the para- tactical work actually is-andAesthetic Theory is almost unparalleled in this-the greater the potential for its unraveling at each and every point. The text therefore requires a rhetoric that will heighten concentration and density and absorb the dozens of ways in which it is constantly exposed. Every reader will note the work's recurrence to abrupt, staccato, sometimes delphically abbreviated expression that heightens the push-pull of the text. Because it rejects certitude as a standard of truth in favor of exactness of insight, it necessarily tends toward the apodictic. Adorno is also able to produce concentration out of nowhere by beginning sen- tences with long-haul subordinate clauses that engage with a "That . . . " that grips cognition like the ratchet on a rollercoaster with a demand for cooperative anti- gravitational struggle to the top of the first slope so momentum can be discovered shooting down the main clause into any number of concluding subordinate sweeps. A paratactical text is inimical to exposition, and Adorno uses the most condensed gestures to invoke rather than propound relevant philosophical argu- ments: a single "sickness unto death" does the work of all of Kierkegaard, "posi- tive negation" all of Hegel and any phrasing that even subliminally hints at "in the age of" is expected to conjure the entire argument of Benjamin's "Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," to which the book is, as a whole, a response. Out of the same demand for density, Adorno refers wherever possible to artists and artworks in the familiar: Recherche is more than enough for Proust's title, the Marriage could not be anything but that of Figaro, and George is plenty for Stefan George .
Wherever parallel linguistic resources were available these and Adorno's many other techniques of condensation and heightening have been used to main- tain the density of this translation. In the case of some titles and authors , however, especially of German authors and works that have become progressively un- known in the aftermath of World War II, they are too improbably remote even to pretend they could be recognized and had to be provided with first names and full titles. And there is another technique of condensed reference, used constantly by Adorno, that could not be incorporated at all because it is uniquely a potential of the original vis-a-vis English. As is well known, German is able to refer by pro- nouns with specificity across any distance of text, long or short, and juggle many nouns with referential consistency. Adorno employs this linguistic resource to an extreme in order to avoid the repetition of nouns in a text that is allergic to even
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xvii
the few millimeters of slack such repetition would feed in. In some passages the weave of pronouns becomes so remote and tenuous that it seems it could only be followed by someone who would comprehend their referents anamnestically, as if known from eternity. They demand a level of concentration that inhabits the text completely. Since English has no comparable pronominal structure, this internal weave of reference could not possibly be matched in translation. It has, therefore, throughout been necessary to choose between potential glibness and precision of reference. Without exception the latter was preferred, however ungainly the re- sult. This is the recognition of an aporia of translation and its result is not entirely a betrayal of Adorno's text. For however difficult his writing may be, it is never vague or simply evocative.
This translation has not supposed that it is simply a failed replica of the perfec- tions of the original. The original has plenty of problems of its own that it imposes on the translation. Some of these problems are reciprocal with the capacities of the original. On one hand, for instance, this paratactical text provides unmatched free- dom: Since the text does not labor under schematic requirements it can and must take a decisively new breath for every line; those insights that authors of tradi- tional forms know to be some of the best of what they have thought but must con- stantly reject as structurally inapposite are what at every point motivate a paratac- tical text. But, on the other hand, this paratactical style is, by that same measure, unable-as mentioned-to refer backward or forward: Adorno never writes, "as mentioned. " Every transition must be a transition in the object itself if it is not to unhinge the text. Thus the text is deprived of a major technique for building on what has been, or of explicitly organizing itself toward what will be, developed elsewhere; and it cannot take the sting out of repetition by acknowledging it. In- stead, Adorno is constantly compelled to start anew saying what has already been said. The text produces a need for repetition that is its innermost antagonist. Thus Adorno throughout repeatedly restates major motifs: that the artwork is a monad, that it is a social microcosm, that society is most intensely active in an artwork where it is most remote from society. If Adorno is a master of thematic variation and able to use the dynamic energy of these repeated motifs not just to justify what is waiting to be said, but as a catapult for new insights, all the same, anyone who actually studies the book will rankle at a repetitiveness that really is as in- evitable as it comes to seem. The text is single-mindedly concerned with escaping jargon and developing what is potentially new in concepts that have become rigid- ified and obsolete, but the obligatory repetitiveness of its formulations courts jar- gon and makes the central motifs of the work vulnerable to facile trivialization by anyone who cares to do so. The paratactical capacity that prompts the text's pro- tean insights engenders repetition that becomes disorienting: all those markers that measure out space and time longitudinally in traditional forms are discarded and there is a constantly looming sense of being caught in a vortex, as if there is
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no knowing whether one has been through a particular passage before, or if per- haps one has never left the spot. The virtual presence of the whole of the text at any one point is impeded by the form in which it is maintained.
This level of repetitiveness is damaging to the original and it takes its toll on the translation. More regrettable, however, because it does not derive from any capac- ity of the text, is the repetition that originates in the fact that it is an opus post- humous. Adorno completed Aesthetic Theory, but he did not finish it: every sec- tion that he intended to write for the book was written; the main body of the text was for the most part complete and composed at the highest level that Adorno achieved in any of his work. Yet Adorno did not live to carry out the final, crucial revision of the text. In this revision he would have rewritten a significant number of passages, inserted a group of passages that had accumulated in various ways external to the main text in the decade during which the book was written, and he would have written a new introduction to the book that would have replaced a draft with which he was dissatisfied)! After Adorno's death, this editing work could only partially be fulfilled by his longtime student and friend, Rolf Tiedemann, and by Adorno's widow, Gretel Adorno. They deciphered Adorno's handwriting in the main text, collected the fragments into the Paralipomena that in this edition comes after the main text, and appended the "Draft Introduction" and an excursus entitled "Theories on the Origin of Art. " At the end of this volume they have provided an afterword in which they describe in detail the state of the text at Adorno's death and how they constructed the present volume. As they point out, they could not rewrite passages even when the needed improvements were self- evident. And the intense philological pressures in a country whose Protestantism invented the discipline and where there are, for instance, left-wing and right-wing editions of HOlderlin, prohibited the exclusion of even obviously contradictory formulations. What weighs most on this text, weighs on it literally: there is much more here than is needed, by about one-fifth. In his final revision Adorno would have been able to discard a great deal. The repetitive discussions of classicism and genius, for instance, which now seem strewn around, could have been grouped and condensed. And had Adorno had the chance to definitively position three ex- tensive sections that were still external to the text at the time of his death, he would have been able to exclude duplicate passages that permit their integration at sev- eral different points. The editors combined and inserted these extensive sections in plausible ways, but there is no doubt that this has resulted in several overlong main parts that disturb the organization of the book. For instance-as Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno point out-various aspects of "Situation" are needed in the book's development from "Art, Society, Aesthetics" to "On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique. " But the sheer girth of "Situation" combines so much material that it diffusely interferes with the tightly wrought organization of the first five main parts. It is, furthermore, questionable whether the excursus,
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xix
"Theories on the Origin of Art," could have been included in the final version. Although it is obviously gennane to the problems Adorno treats throughout Aes- thetic Theory, it is a research essay and in majority stylistically at odds with the rest of the text; and it doesn't make sense to have an "excursus" in a text that is all paratactical divagation anyway. As a guess, however, it is easy to imagine how parts of the excursus could have been used in the new introduction that Adorno wanted to write.
Nothing is to be done about these layers of repetitiveness in the text. They bur- den the book at every point. But it is worth knowing that however overlong the book is, there is nothing to skim. There is, for instance, much in the Paralipomena that is not to be found anywhere else in the text. And if Adorno found the "Draft Introduction" inadequate, it may take some years of research to figure out why. It is in any case probably the best place to begin reading Aesthetic Theory. The paratactical organization of the book does not mean that it can be read equally well in any direction. It is not argumentative; it does not seek to convince; but it does present a logic of insight that has a distinct forward direction that develops concentrically, and, as indicated, this is best perceived by initially reading "Situa- tion" separate from the first five main parts.
The less finished main parts, such as "Situation," were often more difficult to translate than the more finished parts, though this was only a slight difference of degree. No reader will imagine the linguistic mayhem out of which this transla- tion is built. And the ditches, craters, and rubble over which each English sentence passes are more than crushed syntax. The historical breach on the other side of which Gennan now stands makes even this translator involuntarily prefer to say the "original" rather than the Gennan, and made it necessary to say, page by page, that it is, or was, a Jewish language, too. This translation is allied with Adorno's return to Gennany in that his need to return there to be able to write works such as Aesthetic Theory was inseparable from an impulse to pick up the severed threads of what was not fascist in Gennany's past and the value of which, however al- loyed, he never doubted. His enonnous importance in the postwar decades was that he succeeded in helping to reestablish Gennany's own relation to that past, not in the search of the primal or in alliance with any antihumanism, but-as in Aesthetic Theory-in defense of a modernism that would not betray the hopes of the past)2
This is not to say that Adorno returned to Gennany to fit in and help restore the nation to what it once was. What he wrote was completely unpalatable to the fonner-Nazi faculty, still in its prime, that controlled Frankfurt University after the war. They rejected writings such as Minima Moralia as unscholarly and the whole of Adorno's work as essayistic and fragmentary and saw to it that he was not offered a professorship. Only under coercion did they grudgingly bestow on him what became known as a Wiedergutmachungsstuhl, a faculty position made
? xx 0 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
not because he merited it as a philosopher, but in reparation to a Jew who had been deprived by the war of his property, his teaching post. 13 Barely two decades after his return, leftist students who had idolized him and embraced his works rioted in his seminars because he refused to lead them to the barricades. Adorno's freedom to teach was forcibly rescinded, as it had been in the thirties. In the summer recess following the student demonstrations of 1969, he died of a heart attack while try- ing to finish this book.
After Adorno's death, interest in his writings soon dissipated, and today, when he is studied in Germany, he is regarded mainly as a historical curiosity and more likely to be diminished than admired. For over a decade, the most thorough, widely read, and esteemed history of his work-Rolf Wiggershaus's The Franlifurt School-dismisses him as a bitter, hyperemotional complainer, monotonously prejudiced in his views, irresponsibly protean in his thought, and unable to formu- late testable hypotheses,14 Wiggerhaus's book, in that it embodies a generation'S rejection of Adorno echoed in dozens of similar works, points up the fact that
Aesthetic Theory is currently as obliquely remote to Germany as it is to the United States. And this remoteness is requisite to any plausible value it may have. For as Adorno wrote in constantly varied formulations, only what does not fit in can be true. He would not have been interested in seeing this book "received" here. Like all those works whose strands Adorno returned to Germany to pick up, when Aesthetic Theory is seen for what it is, it stands outside and looks in. Although the book does in many ways appear obsolete to us-today no one would try a dialec- tical reversal, now nothing seems precisely the opposite of anything else, and that shift of quantity into quality such as when water cooling becomes ice is no longer an inspiring mystery-this perspective that condescends from the vantage of being up-ta-date as to the odd cut of an old coat or dress reveals its delusiveness when instead it is wondered how we look to it. For even though students once complained that Adorno had no interest in praxis but was preoccupied only with art, from the book's perspective it will be noticed that the word has completely disappeared from contemporary language, whereas for this book on art, "Praxis would be the ensemble of means for minimizing material necessity, and as such it would be identical with pleasure, happiness, and that autonomy in which these means are sublimated. " Much of what catches the eye as obsolete in Aesthetic Theory is what would be new if it were not blocked; here what is perceived as old hat masks the disappointment of what can no longer be hoped for. Aesthetic Theory wants to be what is German that is not German, and if it finds real reso- nance here, it will be with what is American that is not American, none of which could be put on a list of national character traits.
What is hard about translation is not-as those who have never tried it imagine- finding the right word. The right word is always there, it just can't be used: in- evitably it starts with the same letter as the three words on either side of it and, in a
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xxi
translation, pulling four oranges says fake, not jackpot. Line by line, the wrong word is always, unbearably, coming to the rescue. The sureness with which trans- lation taps fate puts the I-Ching to shame: the word needed at any one point has somehow always just been used in the previous clause to cover for some other right word that would not fit.
It has, therefore, throughout been necessary to choose between potential glibness and precision of reference. Without exception the latter was preferred, however ungainly the re- sult. This is the recognition of an aporia of translation and its result is not entirely a betrayal of Adorno's text. For however difficult his writing may be, it is never vague or simply evocative.
This translation has not supposed that it is simply a failed replica of the perfec- tions of the original. The original has plenty of problems of its own that it imposes on the translation. Some of these problems are reciprocal with the capacities of the original. On one hand, for instance, this paratactical text provides unmatched free- dom: Since the text does not labor under schematic requirements it can and must take a decisively new breath for every line; those insights that authors of tradi- tional forms know to be some of the best of what they have thought but must con- stantly reject as structurally inapposite are what at every point motivate a paratac- tical text. But, on the other hand, this paratactical style is, by that same measure, unable-as mentioned-to refer backward or forward: Adorno never writes, "as mentioned. " Every transition must be a transition in the object itself if it is not to unhinge the text. Thus the text is deprived of a major technique for building on what has been, or of explicitly organizing itself toward what will be, developed elsewhere; and it cannot take the sting out of repetition by acknowledging it. In- stead, Adorno is constantly compelled to start anew saying what has already been said. The text produces a need for repetition that is its innermost antagonist. Thus Adorno throughout repeatedly restates major motifs: that the artwork is a monad, that it is a social microcosm, that society is most intensely active in an artwork where it is most remote from society. If Adorno is a master of thematic variation and able to use the dynamic energy of these repeated motifs not just to justify what is waiting to be said, but as a catapult for new insights, all the same, anyone who actually studies the book will rankle at a repetitiveness that really is as in- evitable as it comes to seem. The text is single-mindedly concerned with escaping jargon and developing what is potentially new in concepts that have become rigid- ified and obsolete, but the obligatory repetitiveness of its formulations courts jar- gon and makes the central motifs of the work vulnerable to facile trivialization by anyone who cares to do so. The paratactical capacity that prompts the text's pro- tean insights engenders repetition that becomes disorienting: all those markers that measure out space and time longitudinally in traditional forms are discarded and there is a constantly looming sense of being caught in a vortex, as if there is
xviii 0 lRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
no knowing whether one has been through a particular passage before, or if per- haps one has never left the spot. The virtual presence of the whole of the text at any one point is impeded by the form in which it is maintained.
This level of repetitiveness is damaging to the original and it takes its toll on the translation. More regrettable, however, because it does not derive from any capac- ity of the text, is the repetition that originates in the fact that it is an opus post- humous. Adorno completed Aesthetic Theory, but he did not finish it: every sec- tion that he intended to write for the book was written; the main body of the text was for the most part complete and composed at the highest level that Adorno achieved in any of his work. Yet Adorno did not live to carry out the final, crucial revision of the text. In this revision he would have rewritten a significant number of passages, inserted a group of passages that had accumulated in various ways external to the main text in the decade during which the book was written, and he would have written a new introduction to the book that would have replaced a draft with which he was dissatisfied)! After Adorno's death, this editing work could only partially be fulfilled by his longtime student and friend, Rolf Tiedemann, and by Adorno's widow, Gretel Adorno. They deciphered Adorno's handwriting in the main text, collected the fragments into the Paralipomena that in this edition comes after the main text, and appended the "Draft Introduction" and an excursus entitled "Theories on the Origin of Art. " At the end of this volume they have provided an afterword in which they describe in detail the state of the text at Adorno's death and how they constructed the present volume. As they point out, they could not rewrite passages even when the needed improvements were self- evident. And the intense philological pressures in a country whose Protestantism invented the discipline and where there are, for instance, left-wing and right-wing editions of HOlderlin, prohibited the exclusion of even obviously contradictory formulations. What weighs most on this text, weighs on it literally: there is much more here than is needed, by about one-fifth. In his final revision Adorno would have been able to discard a great deal. The repetitive discussions of classicism and genius, for instance, which now seem strewn around, could have been grouped and condensed. And had Adorno had the chance to definitively position three ex- tensive sections that were still external to the text at the time of his death, he would have been able to exclude duplicate passages that permit their integration at sev- eral different points. The editors combined and inserted these extensive sections in plausible ways, but there is no doubt that this has resulted in several overlong main parts that disturb the organization of the book. For instance-as Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno point out-various aspects of "Situation" are needed in the book's development from "Art, Society, Aesthetics" to "On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique. " But the sheer girth of "Situation" combines so much material that it diffusely interferes with the tightly wrought organization of the first five main parts. It is, furthermore, questionable whether the excursus,
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xix
"Theories on the Origin of Art," could have been included in the final version. Although it is obviously gennane to the problems Adorno treats throughout Aes- thetic Theory, it is a research essay and in majority stylistically at odds with the rest of the text; and it doesn't make sense to have an "excursus" in a text that is all paratactical divagation anyway. As a guess, however, it is easy to imagine how parts of the excursus could have been used in the new introduction that Adorno wanted to write.
Nothing is to be done about these layers of repetitiveness in the text. They bur- den the book at every point. But it is worth knowing that however overlong the book is, there is nothing to skim. There is, for instance, much in the Paralipomena that is not to be found anywhere else in the text. And if Adorno found the "Draft Introduction" inadequate, it may take some years of research to figure out why. It is in any case probably the best place to begin reading Aesthetic Theory. The paratactical organization of the book does not mean that it can be read equally well in any direction. It is not argumentative; it does not seek to convince; but it does present a logic of insight that has a distinct forward direction that develops concentrically, and, as indicated, this is best perceived by initially reading "Situa- tion" separate from the first five main parts.
The less finished main parts, such as "Situation," were often more difficult to translate than the more finished parts, though this was only a slight difference of degree. No reader will imagine the linguistic mayhem out of which this transla- tion is built. And the ditches, craters, and rubble over which each English sentence passes are more than crushed syntax. The historical breach on the other side of which Gennan now stands makes even this translator involuntarily prefer to say the "original" rather than the Gennan, and made it necessary to say, page by page, that it is, or was, a Jewish language, too. This translation is allied with Adorno's return to Gennany in that his need to return there to be able to write works such as Aesthetic Theory was inseparable from an impulse to pick up the severed threads of what was not fascist in Gennany's past and the value of which, however al- loyed, he never doubted. His enonnous importance in the postwar decades was that he succeeded in helping to reestablish Gennany's own relation to that past, not in the search of the primal or in alliance with any antihumanism, but-as in Aesthetic Theory-in defense of a modernism that would not betray the hopes of the past)2
This is not to say that Adorno returned to Gennany to fit in and help restore the nation to what it once was. What he wrote was completely unpalatable to the fonner-Nazi faculty, still in its prime, that controlled Frankfurt University after the war. They rejected writings such as Minima Moralia as unscholarly and the whole of Adorno's work as essayistic and fragmentary and saw to it that he was not offered a professorship. Only under coercion did they grudgingly bestow on him what became known as a Wiedergutmachungsstuhl, a faculty position made
? xx 0 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
not because he merited it as a philosopher, but in reparation to a Jew who had been deprived by the war of his property, his teaching post. 13 Barely two decades after his return, leftist students who had idolized him and embraced his works rioted in his seminars because he refused to lead them to the barricades. Adorno's freedom to teach was forcibly rescinded, as it had been in the thirties. In the summer recess following the student demonstrations of 1969, he died of a heart attack while try- ing to finish this book.
After Adorno's death, interest in his writings soon dissipated, and today, when he is studied in Germany, he is regarded mainly as a historical curiosity and more likely to be diminished than admired. For over a decade, the most thorough, widely read, and esteemed history of his work-Rolf Wiggershaus's The Franlifurt School-dismisses him as a bitter, hyperemotional complainer, monotonously prejudiced in his views, irresponsibly protean in his thought, and unable to formu- late testable hypotheses,14 Wiggerhaus's book, in that it embodies a generation'S rejection of Adorno echoed in dozens of similar works, points up the fact that
Aesthetic Theory is currently as obliquely remote to Germany as it is to the United States. And this remoteness is requisite to any plausible value it may have. For as Adorno wrote in constantly varied formulations, only what does not fit in can be true. He would not have been interested in seeing this book "received" here. Like all those works whose strands Adorno returned to Germany to pick up, when Aesthetic Theory is seen for what it is, it stands outside and looks in. Although the book does in many ways appear obsolete to us-today no one would try a dialec- tical reversal, now nothing seems precisely the opposite of anything else, and that shift of quantity into quality such as when water cooling becomes ice is no longer an inspiring mystery-this perspective that condescends from the vantage of being up-ta-date as to the odd cut of an old coat or dress reveals its delusiveness when instead it is wondered how we look to it. For even though students once complained that Adorno had no interest in praxis but was preoccupied only with art, from the book's perspective it will be noticed that the word has completely disappeared from contemporary language, whereas for this book on art, "Praxis would be the ensemble of means for minimizing material necessity, and as such it would be identical with pleasure, happiness, and that autonomy in which these means are sublimated. " Much of what catches the eye as obsolete in Aesthetic Theory is what would be new if it were not blocked; here what is perceived as old hat masks the disappointment of what can no longer be hoped for. Aesthetic Theory wants to be what is German that is not German, and if it finds real reso- nance here, it will be with what is American that is not American, none of which could be put on a list of national character traits.
What is hard about translation is not-as those who have never tried it imagine- finding the right word. The right word is always there, it just can't be used: in- evitably it starts with the same letter as the three words on either side of it and, in a
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xxi
translation, pulling four oranges says fake, not jackpot. Line by line, the wrong word is always, unbearably, coming to the rescue. The sureness with which trans- lation taps fate puts the I-Ching to shame: the word needed at any one point has somehow always just been used in the previous clause to cover for some other right word that would not fit. If translation were just pinning the tail on the donkey it would be easy, but the donkey is running and the translator is riding another beast, going in some other direction: each language, and each and every word, has its own momentary vector. So, for instance, even when the original wants to dictate the right word-e. g. , Programm-directly into English, with only a slight shift of spelling, it turns out that the English equivalent now instinctually sum- mons up computers-not the self-understood political sense of the original-with barely containable textual implications. Since the right word was always waiting, and had to be left waiting, this translation is made of whatever else was handy: a carrot for the nose, lightbulbs for eyes, some feathers for the mustache. Propped on a bench in the distance with its back to the sunset, perhaps it even looks alive. But it is not to be leaned against and neither will it bear all that much scrutiny. In German this book is almost too interesting to read; for those many passages in English where this is no longer the case, where it was just not possible to find any better way to do it, for the many sentences that were each finally accepted as not really but sort of what it means, I can only say, it was not for lack of trying.
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? Aesthetic Theory
? ? Thispage intentionally left blank
It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed con- sumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken. More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo; everywhere artists rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom than that they immediately sought once again after ostensible yet scarcely adequate order. For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfree- dom of the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain. The autonomy it achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nour- ished by the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered. Drawn from the ideal of humanity, art's constituent elements withered by art's own law of movement. Yet art's autonomy remains ir- revocable. All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function-of which art is itself uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty-are doomed. Indeed, art's autonomy shows signs of blindness. Blindness was ever an aspect of art; in the age of art's emancipation, however, this blindness has begun to pre- dominate in spite of, if not because of, art's lost naIvete, which, as Hegel already perceived, art cannot undo. This binds art to a naIvete of a second order: the un- certainty over what purpose it serves. It is uncertain whether art is still possible; whether, with its complete emancipation, it did not sever its own preconditions. This question is kindled by art's own past. Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation. The cliches of art's recon- ciling glow enfolding the world are repugnant not only because they parody the
? 2 D ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
emphatic concept of art with its bourgeois version and class it among those Sunday institutions that provide solace. These cliches rub against the wound that art itself bears. As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the un- qualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that-shorn of any hope of a world beyond-strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. The principle of auton- omy is itself suspect of giving consolation: By undertaking to posit totality out of itself, whole and self-encompassing, this image is transferred to the world in which art exists and that engenders it. By virtue of its rejection of the empirical world-a rejection that inheres in art's concept and thus is no mere escape, but a law immanent to it-art sanctions the primacy of reality. In a work dedicated to the praise of art, Helmut Kuhn warranted that art's each and every work is a paean. ! His thesis would be true, were it meant critically. In the face of the abnor- mity into which reality is developing, art's inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must tum against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber. Yet art is not to be dismissed simply by its abstract negation. By attacking what seemed to be its foundation throughout the whole of its tradition, art has been qualitatively trans- formed; it itself becomes qualitatively other. It can do this because through the ages by means of its form, art has turned against the status quo and what merely exists just as much as it has come to its aid by giving form to its elements. Art can no more be reduced to the general formula of consolation than to its opposite. The concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it refuses definition. Its essence cannot be deduced from its origin as if the first work were a foundation on which everything that followed were constructed and would collapse if shaken. The belief that the first artworks are the highest and purest is warmed-over romanticism; with no less justification it could be claimed that the earliest artistic works are dull and impure in that they are not yet separated from magic, historical documentation, and such pragmatic aims as communicat- ing over great distances by means of calls or hom sounds; the classical conception of art gladly made use of such arguments. In bluntly historical terms, the facts blur. 2 The effort to subsume the historical genesis of art ontologically under an ul- timate motif would necessarily flounder in such disparate material that the theory would emerge empty-handed except for the obviously relevant insight that the arts will not fit into any gapless concept of art. 3 In those studies devoted to the aes- thetic apxai, positivistic sampling of material and such speculation as is other- wise disdained by the sciences flourish wildly alongside each other; Bachofen is the best example of this. If, nevertheless, one wanted in the usual philosophical fashion categorically to distinguish the so-called question of origin-as that of art's essence-from the question of art's historical origin, that would amount only to turning the concept of origin arbitrarily against the usual sense of the word. The
ART,SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 3
definition of art is at every point indicated by what art once was, but it is legiti- mated only by what art became with regard to what it wants to, and perhaps can, become. Although art's difference from the merely empirical is to be maintained, this difference is transformed in itself qualitatively; much that was not art-cultic works, for instance-has over the course of history metamorphosed into art; and much that was once art is that no longer. Posed from on high, the question whether something such as film is or is no longer art leads nowhere. Because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain. The tension between what motivates art and art's past circumscribes the so-called questions of aes- thetic constitution. Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not ac- cording to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form. It exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that tran- spires with its other. Nietzsche's late insight, honed in opposition to traditional philosophy, that even what has become can be true, is axiomatic for a reoriented aesthetic. The traditional view, which he demolished, is to be turned on its head: Truth exists exclusively as that which has become. What appears in the artwork as its own lawfulness is the late product of an inner-technical evolution as well as art's position within progressive secularization; yet doubtless artworks became artworks only by negating their origin. They are not to be called to account for the disgrace of their ancient dependency on magic, their servitude to kings and amusement, as if this were art's original sin, for art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged. Dinner music is not inescapable for liberated music, nor was dinner music honest service from which autonomous art outrageously with- drew. The former's miserable mechanical clattering is on no account improved because the overwhelming part of what now passes for art drowns out the echo of
that clatter.
The Hegelian vision of the possible death of art accords with the fact that art is a product of history. That Hegel considered art transitory while all the same chalk- ing it up to absolute spirit stands in harmony with the double character of his sys- tem, yet it prompts a thought that would never have occurred to him: that the sub- stance of art, according to him its absoluteness, is not identical with art's life and death. Rather, art's substance could be its transitoriness. It is thinkable, and not merely an abstract possibility, that great music-a late development-was possi- ble only during a limited phase of humanity. The revolt of art, teleologically posited in its "attitude to objectivity"4 toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art; it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it. What reac- tionary cultural pessimism once vociferated against cannot be suppressed by the critique of culture: that, as Hegel ruminated a hundred and fifty years ago, art may have entered the age of its demise. s Just as Rimbaud's stunning dictum6 one
4 D ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
hundred years ago divined definitively the history of new art, his later silence, his stepping into line as an employee, anticipated art's decline. It is outside the purview of aesthetics today whether it is to become art's necrology; yet it must not play at delivering graveside sermons, certifying the end, savoring the past, and ab- dicating in favor of one sort of barbarism that is no better than the culture that has earned barbarism as recompense for its own monstrosity. Whether art is abol- ished, perishes, or despairingly hangs on, it is not mandated that the content [GehaltF of past art perish. It could survive art in a society that had freed itself of the barbarism of its culture . Not just aesthetic forms but innumerable themes have already become extinct, adultery being one of them . Although adultery filled Vic- torian and early-twentieth-century novels, it is scarcely possible to empathize di- rectly with this literature now, given the dissolution of the high-bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy; distorted and impoverished, this litera- ture lives on only in illustrated magazines. At the same time, however, what is au- thentic in Madame Bovary and was once embedded in its thematic content has long since outstripped this content and its deterioration. Obviously this is not grounds for historicophilosophical optimism over the invincibility of spirit. It is equally possible for the thematic material in its own demise to take with it that which is more than merely thematic. Art and artworks are perishable, not simply because by their heteronomy they are dependent, but because right into the small- est detail of their autonomy, which sanctions the socially determined splitting off of spirit by the division of labor, they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it. Admixed with art's own concept is the ferment of its own abolition.
There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted; no imagina- tion without something imagined. This holds true particularly in the case of art's immanent purposiveness. s In its relation to empirical reality art sublimates the lat- ter's governing principle of sese conservare as the ideal of the self-identity of its works; as Schoenberg said, one paints a painting, not what it represents. Inher- ently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by re- ality ' s compulsion to identity . Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality , which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work's own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience. Although the demarcation line between art and the empirical must not be effaced, and least of all by the glorifica- tion of the artist, artworks nevertheless have a life sui generis. This life is not just their external fate. Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow cold, and die. It is a tautology to point out that as humanly manufactured artifacts they do not live as do people. But the emphasis on the artifactual element
ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS 0 5
in art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution, regardless of how it came to be. Artworks are alive in that they speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make them. They speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them. Thus they come into contrast with the arbitrariness of what simply exists. Yet it is precisely as arti- facts, as products of social labor, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content [Inhalt]. Art negates the categorial determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet har- bors what is empirically existing in its own substance. If art opposes the empirical through the element of form-and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation-the mediation is to be sought in the recog- nition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. What are taken to be the purest forms (e. g. , traditional musical forms) can be traced back even in the smallest idiomatic detail to content such as dance. In many instances ornaments in the visual arts were once primarily cultic symbols. Tracing aesthetic forms back to contents, such as the Warburg Institute undertook to do by following the afterlife of classical antiquity, deserves to be more broadly undertaken. The communica- tion of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted. It is easy to imagine that art's autonomous realm has nothing in common with the external world other than borrowed elements that have entered into a fully changed context. Nevertheless, there is no contesting the clicM of which cultural history is so fond, that the devel- opment of artistic processes, usually classed under the heading of style, corre- sponds to social development. Even the most sublime artwork takes up a determi- nate attitude to empirical reality by stepping outside of the constraining spell it casts, not once and for all, but rather ever and again, concretely, unconsciously polemical toward this spell at each historical moment . That artworks as window- less monads "represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production-all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active-are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. Art's double character as both autonomous and/ait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. It is by virtue of this rela- tion to the empirical that artworks recuperate, neutralized, what once was literally and directly experienced in life and what was expulsed by spirit. Artworks partici- pate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them. They are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them.
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The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objec- tive world from which they recoil . The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective ele- ments, defines the relation of art to society . The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world's factual facade converges with the real essence. Art, XO)pi? from the empirically existing, takes up a position to it in accord with Hegel's argument against Kant: The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moral- izing, is the critique of the principle of [ 'art pour tart, which by abstract negation posits the XO)ptO'Il6?