No More Learning

Their stringency and internal structuration are borrowed from their intellectual domination of reality . To this extent what is transcendent to them is imported into them as that by which they in the first place become an immanent nexus. These categories are, however, so completely modified that only the shadow of bindingness remains . Irrevocably, aesthetics presupposes immersion in the par- ticular work. There is no denying the progress made even in academic art scholar- ship through the demand for immanent analysis and the renunciation of methods concerned with everything but the artwork. At the same time, however, immanent analysis bears an aspect of self-deception . There is no determination of the particu- larity of an artwork that does not, as a universal , according to its form, go beyond the monad. It is delusive to claim the concept, which must be introduced exter- nally to the monad in order to open it up from within and thus to shatter it, has its source exclusively in the object. The monadological constitution of artworks in themselves points beyond itself. If it is made absolute, immanent analysis falls prey to ideology, against which it struggled when it wanted to devote itself to the artworks internally rather than deducing their worldviews. Today it is already evident that immanent analysis, which was once a weapon of artistic experience against philistinism, is being misused as a slogan to hold social reflection at a dis- tance from an absolutized art. Without social reflection, however, the artwork is not to be understood in relation to that of which it constitutes one element, nor is it to be deciphered in terms of its own content. The blindness of the artwork is not only a corrective of the nature-dominating universal, it is also its correlative; as always the blind and the empty belong together in their abstractness. No particular in the artwork is legitimate without also becoming universal through its particu- larization. True, as an investigative procedure subsumption never reveals aes- thetic content, but if subsumption is rejected altogether, no content would be thinkable; aesthetics would have to capitulate in front of the artwork as before a factum brutum. The aesthetically determined particular is to be referred to the ele- ment of its universality exclusively by way of its monadological closure. With a regularity that is indicative of something structural, immanent analyses-if their contact with what has been formed is close enough-lead to universal determina- tions that emerge directly from the most extreme specification. Certainly this is also due to the analytical method: Explanation amounts to the reduction to what is already known, whose synthesis with what is to be explained inescapably involves a universal. But the reversal of the particular into the universal is no less deter- mined by the individual object. Where it is concentrated in itself to an extreme, it executes tensions that originate in the genre. Exemplary here are Anton Webern's works, in which sonata movements shrink to aphorisms. Aesthetics is not obliged,
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 181
as under the spell of its object, to exorcise concepts. Rather, its responsibility is to free concepts from their externality to the particular object and to bring them within the work. If anywhere, then it is in aesthetics that Hegel's formulation of the movement of the concept has its locus. The reciprocal relation of the universal and the particular, which takes place unconsciously in artworks and which aes- thetics must bring to consciousness, is what truly necessitates a dialectical ap- proach. It could be objected that a residual dogmatic trust is operative here; exter- nal to the Hegelian system, it could be claimed, the movement of the concept has no sphere of legitimacy ; the object can only be grasped as the life of the concept if the totality of what is objective coincides with spirit. To that the reply is that the monads, which artworks are, lead by way of their own principle of particulariza- tion to the universal. The universal determinations of art are not simply an exi- gency of their conceptual reflection . They testify to the boundaries of the principle ofindividuation, which is nomore to be ontologized than is its opposite. Artworks get ever closer to these boundaries the more uncompromisingly they pursue the principium individuationis; the artwork that appears as something universal bears the accidental quality of being an example of its genre: It is spuriously individual . Even dada, the purely deictic gesture, was as universal as the demonstrative pro- noun; that expressionism was more powerful as an idea than in its works perhaps has its origins in the fact that its utopia of the pure 'too? ' n is itself a fragment of false consciousness. Yet the universal becomes substantial in artworks only by its self-transformation. Thus in Webern the universal musical form of the devel- opment becomes a "knot" and renounces its developmental function. Its place is taken by a succession of segments of differing levels of intensity. As a result the knot, like passages, become something wholly other, something more present and less relational than any development section ever was. Not only does the dialectic of the universal and particular descend into the depths of the universal in the midst of the particular. At the same time it destroys the invariance of the universal categories.
Just how little a universal concept of art suffices for artworks is demonstrated by the artworks themselves in that, as Valery noted, few fulfill the strict concept. Guilt for this is borne not only by the weakness of artists in the face of the formi- dable concept of their object, but also by the concept itself. The more single- mindedly artworks devote themselves to the emerging idea of art, the more pre- carious becomes the relation of artworks to their other, a relation that is itself demanded by the concept. But this relation can be conserved only at the price of precritical consciousness, desperate naivete: Today this is one of art's aporia. It is evident that supreme works are not the most pure, but tend to contain an extra- artistic surplus, especially an untransformed material element that burdens their immanent composition; however, it is no less evident that once the complete im- manent elaboration of artworks , unsupported by anything unreflected that is other than art, has taken shape as an aesthetic norm, it is not possible willfully to
182 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
reintroduce impure elements. The crisis of the pure artwork in the wake of the European catastrophes cannot be solved by breaking out of the pure work into an extra-aesthetic materiality whose moralistic pathos is pitched to obscure the fact that it is the easy way out; the line of least resistance is hardly suited to being established as the norm . The antinomy of pure versus impure art is subordinate to the more general antinomy that art is not the subordinating concept of its genres. These differ as much specifically as they diverge from one another. 4 The question beloved of traditionalist apologists of every stripe- "But is that still music? " - is fruitless; it is concrete, however, to analyze the deaesthetization of art as a praxis that, devoid of reflection and this side of art's own dialectic, progressively deliv- ers art over to the extra-aesthetic dialectic. By contrast, that stereotypical question wants to use art's abstract subordinating concept to constrain the movement of those discrete, mutually distinguishing elements in which art consists. Currently, however, art stirs most energetically where it decomposes its subordinating con- cept. In this decomposition, art is true to itself: It breaks the mimetic taboo on the impure as a hybrid. -The inadequacy of the concept of art is registered by the linguistic sensorium in the expression a Sprachkunstwerk, a literary artwork. Not without a certain legitimacy, a literary historian coined it as a synonym for poetry in the largest sense. But the concept also does damage to poetic works that are art- works and yet, because of their relatively autonomous discursive element, not only artworks or not artworks throughout. Art likewise is in no way simply equiva- lent with artworks, for artists are always also at work on art and not only on art- works. Art as such is independent even of the artworks' consciousness. Func- tional forms and cult objects may develop historically into artworks; to deny this implies making oneself dependent on art's self-understanding, whose dynamic development is lodged in its own concept. The distinction urged by Benjamin between the artwork and the document5 holds good insofar as it rejects works that are not in themselves determined by the law of form; many works, however, are objectively artworks even when they do not present themselves as art. The name of exhibitions entitled "Documenta," which provide an enormous service, glosses over this problem and thus abets a historicist aesthetic consciousness that they, being museums of the contemporary, want to oppose. Concepts of this sort, and especially those of the so-called classics of modernism, contribute all too well to the loss of tension in post-World War II art , much of which goes slack the moment it appears. They comfortably adapt to the model of an epoch that likes to call itself the atomic age.
The historical moment is constitutive of artworks; authentic works are those that surrender themselves to the historical substance of their age without reservation and without the presumption of being superior to it. They are the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch; this, not least of all, establishes their relation to knowledge. Precisely this makes them incommensurable with historicism, which, instead of following their own historical content, reduces them to their external
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 183
history. Artworks may be all the more truly experienced the more their historical substance is that of the one who experiences it. The bourgeois world of art is ideo- logically blind even in the supposition that artworks that lie far enough in the past can be better understood than those of their own time . The layers of experience borne by important contemporary artworks, that which wants to speak in them, are-as objective spirit-incomparably more commensurable to contemporaries than are works whose historico-philosophical presuppositions are alienated from actual consciousness. The more intensively one seeks to comprehend Bach, the more puzzling is the gaze he returns, charged as it is with all the power that is his. Unless corrupted by willful stylization, a living composer would hardly be able to write a fugue that is better than a conservatory exercise or a parody or a feeble imitation of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The most extreme shocks and gestures of alienation ofcontemporary art-seismograms ofa universal and inescapable form of reaction-are nearer than they appear to be by virtue of historical reification. What is considered to be intelligible to all is what has become unintelligible; what the manipulated repel as all too strange is what is secretly all too comprehen- sible, confirming Freud' s dictum that the uncanny is repulsed only because it is all too familiar. What is blessed on the other side of the Iron Curtain as cultural heri- tage and accepted on this side as western tradition is exclusively manipulable experiences that can be turned on and off at will. They are more than familiar to convention, whereas the familiar can scarcely be actualized any longer. These experiences die off in the same instant that they become immediately accessible; their tensionless accessibility seals their fate. This is to be demonstrated equally by the fact that obscure and doubtlessly uncomprehended works are laid out in state in the pantheon of the classics and stubbornly repeated,6 as by the fact that- except for a vanishing few that are reserved as exceptions for the most extreme avant-garde-the performances of traditional works tum out false and nonsensi- cal: objectively incomprehensible. To make this evident, opposition is needed to the semblance of comprehensibility that has grown like a patina over each of these works and their performances. The aesthetic consumer is allergic to having this demonstrated: With some justification he feels that he is being robbed of what he protects as his possession, though he does not know that he is already robbed of it as soon as he claims it as his own. Foreignness to the world is an element of art:
Whoever perceives it other than as foreign fail s to perceive it at all .
Spirit in artworks is posited by their structure, it is not something added from outside. This is responsible in no small way for the fetish character of artworks: Because their spirit emerges from their constitution, spirit necessarily appears as something-in-itself, and they are artworks only insofar as spirit appears to be such. Nevertheless artworks are, along with the objectivity of their spirit, some- thing made. Reflection must equally comprehend the fetish character, effectively sanction it as an expression of its objectivity, and critically dissolve it. To this extent an art-alien element, which art senses, is admixed to aesthetics. Artworks
184 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
organize what is not organized. They speak on its behalf and violate it; they col- lide with it by following their constitution as an artifact. The dynamic that each artwork encapsulates is what is eloquent in it. One of the paradoxes of artworks is that, though they are dynamic in themselves , they are fixated, whereas it is only by being fixated that they are objectivated. Thus it is that the more insistently they are observed the more paradoxical they become: Each artwork is a system of irrecon- cilables. Their process itself could not be presented without fixation; improvisa- tions are usually no more than juxtapositions, so to speak, marching in place . The written word and musical notation, if glimpsed for once strictly externally, are a disconcerting paradox of something existent that is in its own tenns a process of becoming. The mimetic impulses that motivate the artwork, that integrate them- selves in it and once again disintegrate it, are fragile, speechless expression. They only become language through their objectivation as art. Art, the rescue of nature, revolts against nature's transitoriness. Artworks become like language in the de- velopment of the bindingness of their elements , a wordless syntax even in linguis- tic works. What these works say is not what their words say. In art's intentionless language the mimetic impulses are bequeathed to the whole, which synthesizes them. In music an event or situation is able retroactively to shape a preceding de- velopment into something awesome even when it was not that in the first place. Such retroactive metamorphosis is exemplary as a metamorphosis by way of the spirit of the works . Artworks are distinguished from the gestalts on which psycho- logical theory is based in that in artworks the elements are not merely maintained in a sort of independence, as is indeed possible in gestalts . Insofar as artworks ap- pear, they are not-as psychical gestalts are purported to be-immediately given. By their spiritual mediation they enter into a contradictory relation with each other that appears in them at the same time that they strive to solve it. The ele- ments are not arranged in juxtaposition but rather grind away at each other or draw each other in; the one seeks or repulses the other. This alone constitutes the
nexus of the most demanding works. The dynamic of artworks is what speaks in them; through spiritualization the works attain the mimetic impulses that primar- ily their spirit subjugates. Romantic art hopes to conserve the mimetic element by refraining from mediating it through fonn; the whole is to say what the particular scarcely still has the capacity to say. Nevertheless, romantic art cannot simply ignore the compulsion toward objectivation. It degrades what objectively refuses synthesis to something that is disconnected. If it dissociates itself in details, it inclines nonetheless, contrary to its superficial qualities, to the abstractly fonnal. In one of the greatest composers, Robert Schumann, this quality is bound up es- sentially with the tendency toward disintegration . The purity with which his work shapes an unreconciled antagonism is what gives it its power and rank. Precisely because of the abstract being-for-itself of fonn, the romantic artwork regresses back of the classicist ideal, which it rejects as fonnalistic . In classicism the media- tion of the whole and part was far more emphatically sought, though admittedly
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 185
not without traces of resignation in the whole, which oriented itself to types , but in the particular as well, which was tailored to the whole. At every point the declin- ing forms of romanticism tend toward the academic. Under this aspect, a sturdy typology of artworks emerges unavoidably. One type moves from above, from the whole down; the other moves in the opposite direction. That both types have en- dured fairly distinctly is demonstrated by the antinomy that produces them and that is not to be resolved by any type: the irreconcilability of the universal and the particular. Rather than schematically extinguishing the particular, as was the pre- dominant praxis of the age preceding him, Beethoven, showing an elective affin- ity for the spirit of the mature bourgeois spirit of the natural sciences, faced the antinomy of the universal and the particular by qualitatively neutralizing the par- ticular. He thus did more than merely integrate music as a continuum of what is in the process of becoming , more than merely shield the form from the emerging threat of empty abstraction. In foundering, the particular elements dissolve into each other and determine the form through the process of their foundering. In Beethoven the particular is and is not an impulse toward the whole, something that only in the whole becomes what it is, yet in itself tends toward the relative in- determinateness of basic tonal relations and toward amorphousness. If one hears or reads his extremely articulated music closely enough, it resembles a contin- uum of nothing. The tour de force of each of his great works is literally Hegelian, in that the totality ofnothing determines itself as a totality of being, though it does so only as semblance and not with the claim of absolute truth. Yet this claim to absolute truth is at the very least suggested as the works' ultimate content by the composition's immanent stringency. The element of nature is represented by a polar opposition between the latently diffuse and ungraspable on the one hand, and the compelling force that constrains and shapes it on the other. The demon, the compositional subject that forges and hurls whole blocks, faces the undiffer- entiated smallest unities into which each and every movement is dissociated; ultimately there is no material at all but only the unadorned system of basic tonal relations. -Artworks are, however, again paradoxical in that not even their
dialectic is literal; it does not transpire as does history, their secret model. In accord with the concept of the artifact, their dialectic is reproduced in existing works, which is the opposite of the process that they at the same time are: This is paradigmatic of art's illusory element. It remains to be shown, extrapolating from Beethoven, that in terms of their technical praxis all authentic works are tours de force: Many artists of the late bourgeois era-Ravel, Valery-recognized this as their own task. Thus the once disdained concept of the "artiste" recovers its dig- nity. That trick is no primitive form of art and no aberration or degeneration but art's secret, a secret that it keeps only to give it away at the end. Thomas Mann alludes to this with his provocative comment that art is a higher form of prank. Technological as well as aesthetic analyses become fruitful when they compre- hend the tour de force in works . At the highest level of form the detested circus act
186 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
is reenacted: the defeat of gravity, the manifest absurdity of the circus-Why all the effort? -is in nuce the aesthetic enigma. This comes to bear on questions of artistic performance. To perform a play or a composition correctly means to for- mulate it correctly as a problem in such a fashion that the incompatible demands it makes on the performer are recognized . The task of a rendering that will do justice to a work is in principle infinite .
By its opposition to the empirical world each artwork programmatically, as it were , establishes its unity . What has passed by way of spirit determines itself in its oneness against the accidental and chaotic that are embedded in nature. Unity is more than merely formal: By its force artworks wrest themselves free from fatal disintegration. The unity of artworks is their caesura from myth. In themselves, and in accord with their immanent determination, they achieve a unity that is impressed upon the empirical objects of rational knowledge: Unity emerges from their own elements, from the multiplicity; thus they do not extirpate myth but mollify it. Turns of phrase such as that a certain painter well understood how to compose figures in a harmonious scene , or that the timing and placing of a pedal point in a Bach prelude have an especially felicitous effect-Goethe himself was on occasion not averse to formulations of this type-now have an archaic and provincial quality because they lag behind the concept of immanent unity and , ad- mittedly, at the same time avow the surplus of arbitrary will in every work. Such comments praise what is defective in innumerable works , even if it is a defect that is constitutive of art. The material unity of artworks is all the more illusory the more its forms and elements are topoi and do not emerge immediately from the complexion of the individual work. One aspect of the opposition of modern art to immanent semblance, its insistence on the real unity of the unreal, is that it no longer tolerates anything universal in the form of an unreflected immediacy in itself. That the unity of the work does not, however, completely originate in the work's individual impulses is not due simply to how these impulses are manipu- lated . Semblance is defined by these impulses as well. While gazing longingly and needingly toward the unity they could fulfill and reconcile, they always at the same time flee from it. The prejudice of the idealist tradition in favor of unity and synthesis has neglected this. Unity is motivated not least of all by the fact that according to their own propensity the individual elements seek to escape it. Dis- persed multiplicity does not offer itself neutrally to aesthetic synthesis as does epistemology's chaotic material, which, devoid of quality, neither anticipates nor eludes its forming. If the unity of artworks is also inescapably the violence done to multiplicity - symptomatic of which is the use in aesthetic criticism of expressions such as "mastery over the material"-multiplicity must, like the ephemeral and alluring images of nature in antiquity's myths, fear unity. The unity of logos, be- cause it mutilates, is enmeshed in the nexus of its guilt. Homer's tale of Penelope, who in the evening unraveled what she had accomplished during the day, is a self- unconscious allegory of art: What cunning Penelope inflicts on her artifacts, she
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK D 187
actually inflicts on herself. Ever since Homer's verses this episode is not the ad- dition or rudiment for which it is easily mistaken, but a constitutive category of art: Through this story, art takes into itself the impossibility of the identity of the one and the many as an element of its unity. Artworks, no less than reason, have their cunning. If the diffuseness and individual impulses of artworks were left to their own immediacy, to themselves, they would blow away without a trace. Art- works register what would otherwise vanish. Through unity the impulses forfeit their independence; it is only metaphorically that they are any longer sponta- neous . This compels criticism even of very great artworks . The idea of greatness as a rule is bound up with the element of unity, sometimes at the cost of its relation to the nonidentical; for this reason the concept of greatness itself is dubious in art. The authoritarian effect of great artworks, especially in architecture, both legiti- mates and indicts them. Integral form is inseparable from domination, though it sublimates it; the instinct against it is specifically French. Greatness is the guilt that works bear, but without this guilt they would remain insufficient. This is per- haps the reason for the superiority of major fragments, and the fragmentary char- acter of others that are more finished, over fully complete works. This has always been registered by various types of form that are not among the most highly re- garded. The quodlibet and medley in music, and in literature the apparently com- fortable epic suspension of the ideal of dynamic unity, testify to this need. In every instance the renunciation of unity as a principle of form itself remains unity sui generis, however mediocre the quality. Yet this unity is not binding, and an element of this absence of bindingness is probably binding in all artworks. As soon as unity becomes stable, it is already lost.
The degree to which unity and multiplicity are internal to each other in artworks can be grasped in terms of the question of their intensity . Intensity is the mimesis achieved through unity and ceded by the multiplicity to the totality , although this totality is not immediately present in such a fashion that it could be perceived as an intensive force; the power accumulated in the totality is, so to speak , restored to the detail. That in many of its elements the artwork becomes more intense, thick- ens, and explodes, gives the impression of being an end in itself; the great unities of composition and construction seem to exist only for the purpose of such inten- sity. Accordingly, contrary to current aesthetic views, the whole in truth exists only for the sake ofits parts-that is, its lca. tp6C;,the instant-and not the reverse; what works in opposition to mimesis ultimately seeks to serve it. One who reacts preartistically, who loves various passages of a composition or painting without considering the form, perhaps without noticing it, perceives something that is rightfully driven out by aesthetic cultivation yet remains essential to it. Whoever lacks an appreciation for beautiful passages-in painting, too, as with Proust's Bergotte, who, seconds before his death, is captivated by a small section of a yel- low wall in a Vermeer painting - is as alien to the artwork as one who is incapable of experiencing its unity. All the same, such details gain their luminosity only by
188 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
virtue of the whole . Many measures in Beethoven sound like the sentence in Elec- tive Affinities: "Like a star hope fell from the heavens below"; this is true of the Adagio of the Sonata in D Minor, op. 31 , no. 2. It only requires playing the pas- sage first in context and then alone to be able to recognize how much its incom- mensurableness,radiating over the passage, owes to the work as a whole. The pas- sage becomes extraordinary because its expression is raised above what precedes it by the concentration of a lyrical, humanized melody. It is individuated in rela- tion to, and by way of, the totality; it is its product as well as its suspension. Even totality, the gapless fittedness of artworks, is no ultimate category. Although it is intransigent in the face of regressive-atomistic perception, it is relativized because its force is proved exclusively in the particular into which it radiates.
The concept ofan artwork implies that ofits success. Failed artworks are not art: Relative success is alien to art; the average is already the bad. The average is in- compatible with the medium of particularization. Middling artworks, the healthy soil of minor masters so appreciated by historians of a similar stamp, presuppose an ideal similar to what Lukacs had the audacity to defend as a "normal artwork. " However, being the negation of the spurious universal of the norm, art tolerates neither normal works nor middling ones that correspond to a norm or establish their meaning in terms of their distance to it. There is no scale for the ranking of artworks ; their self-identity mocks the dimension of "more or less. " For success, inner consistency is an essential element, but in no way the only one. That the art- work touch on something, the richness of the detail in the whole, the gesture of generosity even in the most brittle works: These are models of the demands that are present to art without their being reducible to the coordinates of inner con- sistency; their plenitude would probably elude general theoretical reflection. Yet they suffice for casting doubt not only on the concept of consistency but on that of success, which is in any case distorted by its association with the image of the straining model student. Yet the idea of success is all the same requisite if art is not to be abandoned to crude relativism; and the idea of success is active in the self-criticism that resides in each artwork and makes it one in the first place. Immanent to consistency is that it is not all there is to art; this distinguishes its emphatic concept from its academic correlative. What is only and thoroughly consistent, is not consistent. What is nothing but consistent, regardless of what is to be formed, ceases to be something in-itself and degenerates into something completely for-an-other: This defines academic polish.
Academic works are bad because the elements their logicality should synthesize engender no counter- impulses and in fact do not exist. The work undertaken by their unity is superflu- ous, tautological, and, insofar as it appears as the unity of something, inconsistent. These works are dry, which is in general what results when mimesis withers; according to the doctrine of temperament, Schubert -the mimic par excellence- would be sanguine, moist. The mimetically diffuse can be art because art is in sympathy with diffuseness; this is not the case for unity, which strangles the dif-
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 189
fuse element of art to honor art. An artwork whose form springs from its truth content, however, is emphatically successful. It is not obliged to erase the traces of the process by which it has come to be what it is, its artificiality; the phan- tasmagorical is its opposite in that through its appearance it portrays itself as achieved instead of carrying through the process whereby it might actually suc- ceed; this is the only moral of artworks. By pursuing it, artworks approximate themselves to a naturalness that is not unjustly demanded of art; they distance themselves from it as soon as they take the image of naturalness under their own charge. The idea of success is intolerant of administration, for it postulates objec- tive aesthetic truth. Admittedly there is no aesthetic truth without the logicality of the work. But to become aware of it requires consciousness of the whole process, which is sharpened as the critical problem posed by the work. The objective qual- ity of the work is mediated through this process . Artworks have mistakes and can be vitiated by them, but there is no single mistake that the true consciousness of the process would not be able to legitimate as correct, thereby annulling the judg- ment. One is not necessarily a pedant to raise objections on the basis of composi- tional experience to the first movement of Schoenberg ' s String Quartet in F-sharp Minor. The immediate continuation of the first main theme in the viola anticipates preCisely the motive of the second theme and as a result damages the economy that demands the binding contrast of a prolonged thematic dualism. If, however, one thinks through the movement as a whole, as a single instant, then the similar- ity is meaningful as an anticipation. Or: On the grounds of orchestrational logic it could be objected that in the last movement of Mahler's Ninth Symphony, at the reintroduction of the main strophe, its melody twice appears in the same charac- teristic color-that of the solo hom-rather than being subjected to the principle of coloristic variation. On the first occasion, however, this sound is so penetrating, indeed exemplary, that the music does not disengage itself from it and yields to it: Thus the repetition turns out to be correct. The answer to the concrete aesthetic question of why a work can justly be said to be beautiful, consists in the casuistic pursuit of just such self-reflecting logic. The empirical interminability of these reflections changes nothing in the objectivity of what they grasp. The objection lodged by healthy common sense-that the monadological rigor of immanent critique and the categorical claim of aesthetic judgment are incompatible because every norm trespasses on the immanence of the work , whereas without any norm the work is no more than accidental-perpetuates that abstract division ofthe uni- versal and particular that makes artworks null and void. That whereby it is possi- ble to distinguish what is correct and what is false in an artwork according to its own measure is the elements in which universality imposes itself concretely in the monad. In what is formed in itself or incompatible with itself a universal is lodged, even though it is impossible to pull it away from the specific form and hypostatize it.
The ideological , affirmative aspect of the concept of the successful artwork has its
1 90 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
corrective in the fact that there are no perfect works . If they did exist, reconcilia- tion would be possible in the midst of the unreconciled, to which realm art be- longs. In perfect works art would transcend its own concept; the tum to the friable and the fragmentary is in truth an effort to save art by dismantling the claim that artworks are what they cannot be and what they nevertheless must want to be; the fragment contains both those elements. The rank of an artwork is defined essen- tially by whether it exposes itself to, or withdraws from, the irreconcilable. Even in so-called formal elements there is by virtue of their relation to the unreconcil- able a return of content [Inhalt] that is refracted by their law. This dialectic in the form constitutes its depth; without it form would be what philistines take it to be: empty play . Yet depth is not to be equated with the abyss of subjective inward- ness, which is said to yawn wide in artworks; rather, it is an objective category of works; the clever chatter about the superficiality of depth is as sophistic as is its solemn praise. In superficial works, synthesis does not intervene in the hetero- geneous elements to which it refers but runs parallel with them. Those works are deep that neither mask the divergent or antagonistic nor leave it unreconciled. By forcing it into appearance that issues from the unreconciled, they incorporate the possibility of conciliation. Giving form to antagonisms does not reconcile or elirni- nate them. By appearing and determining all labor in the artwork, they become something essential; by becoming thematic in the aesthetic image, their substan- tiality emerges with all the more plasticity. Certainly many historical phases pro- vided greater possibilities of reconciliation than does the contemporary historical situation, which radically refuses it. As the nonviolent integration of what diverges , however, the artwork at the same time transcends the antagonisms of existence without perpetrating the deception that they no longer exist. The deepest antin- omy of artworks, the most threatening and fruitful, is that they are irreconcilable by way of reconciliation, whereas actually their constitutive irreconcilability at the same time deprives them too of reconciliation. Yet they converge with knowl- edge through their synthetic function, the joining of the disjoint.
It is not possible to conceive the rank or quality of an artwork apart from its degree of articulation . In general , artworks are more valuable in direct relation to how articulated they are, when nothing dead, nothing unformed, remains; when there is no part that has not been passed through in the forming process. The more deeply this process has penetrated, the more successful the work. Articulation is the redemption of the many in the one . For artistic praxis the demand for articula- tion means that every specific form idea must be driven to its extreme . For its real- ization in the artwork, even the form idea that is the opposite of distinctness-the vague-requires the utmost distinctness of form, as in Debussy. Distinctness is not to be confused with bombastic, exalted gesturing, even though irritation with the latter originates more in anxiety than in critical consciousness. That styleflam- boyant, which still stands in poor repute , may be perfectly appropriate and "objec- tive" according to the requirements of something that is to be presented. Even
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 191
when the temperate, expressionless, disciplined, and middling is sought, it must be carried out with the utmost energy ; the indecisive and mediocre is as bad as the harlequinade and the excitement that, through the choice of inappropriate means, becomes exaggerated. The more articulated the work, the more its idea becomes eloquent; mimesis receives succor from its counterpole. Although the category? of articulation, correlative with the principle of individuation, was not reflected until the modem age, it has objectively retroactive force even over works of the past: Their rank cannot be isolated from the later course of history. Many older works must fall because, built on stereotypes, they dispensed with articulation. Prima facie the principle of articulation, as a principle of artistic procedure, bears anal- ogy to the progress of subjective reason, taking it in strictly formal terms that the dialectical treatment of art relegates to being one element among others . This idea of articulation, however, would be too cheap. For articulation does not consist of differentiation that serves exclusively as a means for unification; rather , it consists in the realization of that differentiated something that is-as Holderlin wrote- good. 7 Aesthetic unity gains its dignity through the multiplicitous itself. It does justice to the heterogeneous . The generosity of artworks, the antithesis of their im- manent discipline, is an aspect of their richness, however ascetically hidden that richness may be; abundance protects them from ignominious rehashing. It prom- ises what reality denies, but as an element subordinate to the law of form, not as a treasure that the work holds in its hands ready for the taking . The degree to which aesthetic unity is itself a function of multiplicity is evident in works that out of abstract enmity to unity seek to dissolve themselves into the multiplicitous, to renounce that whereby the differentiated becomes something differentiated in the first place. Works that are absolutely in flux, whose plurality is without reference to unity, thereby become undifferentiated, monotonous, and indifferent.
The truth content of artworks, on which their rank ultimately depends, is historical right into its innermost cell. It is, however, not related to history in such a fashion that it, and thus the rank of artworks, simply varies with time. Of course such vari- ation takes place, and artworks of quality, for example, are able to strip them- selves of their outer layers in the course of history . In the process, however, truth content-quality-does not fall prey to historicism. History is immanent to art- works, not an external fate or fluctuating estimation. Truth content becomes his- torical by the objectivation of correct consciousness in the work. This conscious- ness is no vague timeliness, no Katp6<; that would justify the course of a world history, that is not the development of truth. Rather, ever since freedom emerged as a potential, correct consciousness has meant the most progressive conscious- ness of antagonisms on the horizon of their possible reconciliation. The criterion of the most progressive consciousness is the level of productive forces in the work, part of which, in the age of art's constitutive reflectedness, is the position that consciousness takes socially. As the materialization of the most progressive consciousness, which includes the productive critique of the given aesthetic and
? 192 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
extra-aesthetic situation, the truth content of artworks is the unconscious writing of history bound up with what has until now been repeatedly vanquished. Admit- tedly, just what is progressive is never so obvious as the innervation of fashion would like to dictate; it too has need of reflection. The determination of what is progressive involves the state of theory as a whole, for the decision cannot be re- solved on the basis of isolated elements. By virtue of its artisanal dimension, all art has a quality of blind making. This element of the spirit of the times is perma- nently suspect of being reactionary. Even in art the operational dulls the critical edge; it is here that the self-confidence of the technical forces of production is compelled to recognize the limit of its identity with the utmost progressive con- sciousness. No modem work of rank, however stylistically and subjectively ori- ented to the past, is able to avoid this. Regardless of how much Anton Bruckner sought for theological restoration through his works, they are more than this os- tensible intention. They participate in truth content precisely because, in spite of everything, they appropriated the harmonic and instrumental discoveries of their period; what they desire as eternal becomes substantial exclusively as modem and in opposition to the modem. Rimbaud's iftaut etre absolument modeme, itself modem, remains normative. However, because art's temporal nucleus is not its thematic actuality but its immanent organization, Rimbaud's norm-whatever it owes to reflection-finds its resonance in what is in a certain sense an uncon- scious impulse of disgust for the musty and stagnant . The capacity for sensing this is bound up with what is anathema to cultural conservatism: fashion. It has its truth as the unconscious consciousness of the temporal nucleus of art and is nor- matively legitimate insofar as it is not manipulated by the culture industry and tom away from objective spirit. Great artists since Baudelaire have conspired with fashion; if they denounced it, these denunciations were given the lie by the im- pulses of their own work. Although art resists fashion when it seeks to level art heteronomously, it is allied with it in its instinct for the historical moment and in its aversion to provincialism and the subaltern, the refusal of which delineates the only humanly worthy concept of artistic niveau. Even such artists as Richard Strauss, perhaps even Monet, diminished in quality when, seemingly happy with themselves and with what they had achieved, they forfeited the power for histori- cal innervation and the appropriation of the most progressive materials.
The subjective impulse that registers what is to be done is the appearance of some- thing objective transpiring back of this impulse, the development of productive forces, which art in its innermost has in comom n with society and at the same time opposes through its own development. In art, development has mUltiple mean- ings. It is one of the means that crystallize in art's autarchy; further, it is the ab- sorption of techniques that originate socially, external to art, and that, because they are alien and antagonistic, do not always result in progress; and, lastly, human productive forces also develop in art, in the form of subjective differentia- tion , for example, although such progress is often accompanied by the shadow of
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 193
regression in other dimensions. Progressive consciousness ascertains the condi- tion of the material in which history is sedimented right up to the moment in which the work answers to it; precisely by doing so, progressive consciousness is also the transforming critique of technique; in this moment, consciousness reaches out into the open, beyond the status quo. It is n6t possible to eliminate from this consciousness the element of spontaneity, it is in that element that the spirit of the age indicates its determinacy and surpasses its mere reproduction. What does not simply reiterate given procedures is itself historically produced in accord with Marx's comment that each epoch solves the tasks that are posed to it;8 in each epoch the aesthetic forces of production, the talents, emerge that-as if by second nature-correspond to the level of technique and by a sort of secondary mimesis drive it further; the categories that are held to be extratemporal natural endowments are just so temporally mediated: Thus even the cinematographic gaze may appear innate. Aesthetic spontaneity is vouchsafed by its relation to extra-aesthetic reality: It is the determinate opposition to reality by way of adapta- tion to it. Just as spontaneity, which traditional aesthetics wanted to exempt from time as the creative principle, is temporal in itself, it participates in time that is individualized in the particular; by doing so, it gains the possibility of becoming objective in artworks. The concept of artistic volition is right in that it conceives the intrusion of the temporal into what is artistic, however impossible it is to reduce the artistic to the SUbjective denominator that is implicit in the idea of voli- tion. In Parsifal, just as in all artworks, even in those of the so-called temporal arts, time becomes space.
By virtue of what it stores within itself no less than by its own rationality, which it transposes to the logicality of artworks, the spontaneous subject is something universal; as that which brings forth a work in the here and now, it is a temporal particular . This was registered by the ancient doctrine of genius , but it was falsely attributed to charisma. This coincidence of the universal and the particular goes over into artworks, whereby the subject becomes aesthetically objective. Art- works are therefore transformed objectively, on no account simply in terms of their reception: The force bound up in them lives on. And yet reception should not be schematically neglected; Benjamin once spoke of the traces that the innumer- able eyes of beholders have left behind on many paintings,9 and Goethe's dictum that it is hard to judge what once made a great impression indicates more than merely respect for established opinion. The transformation of works is not pre- vented by their fixation in stone or on canvas, in literary texts or musical scores, even if the will, mythically trapped as ever, does its part in this fixation to seal the works away from time. The fixated is a sign, a function, not something in-itself; the process between what has been fixated and the spirit is the history of works. If each work is in a condition of eqUilibrium, each may yet once again enter into mo- tion . The elements of equilibrium are irreconcilable with each other. The develop- ment of artworks is the afterlife of their immanent dynamic. What works say
? 1 94 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
through the configuration of their elements in different epochs means something objectively different, and this ultimately affects their truth content. Works may become uninterpretable and fall mute; often their quality suffers; in general, the inner transformation of works most often involves a decline, a collapse into ideol- ogy. The past offers up ever fewer works of value. The so-called cultural reserve shrinks: The neutralization of culture as a "reserve" is the external aspect of the internal collapse of works. The historical transformation of artworks extends to their level of form . Although today no emphatic art can be imagined that does not lay claim to the highest level of form, this is no guarantee of survival . Conversely , works that may have held no great ambition for themselves sometimes display qualities they hardly had initially. Mathias Claudius and Johann Peter Hebel show greater powers of enduring than do more ambitious authors like Friedrich Hebbel or the Haubert of SalammbO ; parody, which thrives better at the lower than at the higher level of form, codifies the relationship. Levels of form should be main- tained and relativized.
However, if finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming , they are in tum dependent on forms in which their process crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, and critique. These are not simply brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves with them; rather they are the arena of the historical development of artworks in themselves, and thus they are forms in their own right. They serve the truth content of works as something that goes beyond them, which separates this truth content-the task of critique-from elements of its untruth. If the unfolding of the work in these forms is not to mis- carry , they must be honed to the point where they become philosophical. It is from within, in the movement of the immanent form of artworks and the dynamic of their relation to the concept of art, that it ultimately becomes manifest how much art-in spite of, and because of, its monadological essence-is an element in the movement of spirit and of social reality . The relation to the art of the past, as well as the barriers to its apperception , have their -locus in the contemporary condition of consciousness as positively or negatively transcended; the rest is nothing more than empty erudition . All inventorying consciousness of the artistic past is false .
Only a liberated, reconciled humanity will someday perhaps be able to devote it- self to the art of the past without ignominy , without that infamous rancor at con- temporary art , and thus make amends to the dead . The opposite of a genuine rela- tion to the historical substance of artworks-their essential content-is their rash subsumption to history, their assignment to a historical moment. In Zermatt the Matterhorn, the child's image of the absolute mountain, gives the appearance of being the only mountain on earth; from the Gorn Ridge it appears as one link in a colossal chain . But Gorn Ridge can only be approached from Zermatt. The situa- tion is no different with regard to perspectives on artworks .
The interdependence o f quality and history should not b e conceived according to the stubborn cliche of a crude history of ideas that insists that history is the court
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 195
that determines quality. This wisdom is a historicophilosophical rationalization of its own inadequacy, as if no judgment were possible in the here and now. Such humility is in no way superior to a pontificating judge of art. Cautious, postured neutrality is always ready to bow to ruling opinions. Its conformism extends even into the future. For this neutrality puts its trust in the course of world spirit, in an afterworld in which the authentic would be ever secure, whereas under its un- ceasing spell the world spirit confirms and bequeaths the old untruth. Occasional great discoveries or exhumations, such as those of EI Greco, Buchner, and Lautreamont, have been powerful just because they make evident that the course of history as such in no way makes common cause with what is good. Even with regard to important artworks the course of history must-as Benjamin put it-be brushed against the grain,lO and no one is able to say what important works have been destroyed in the history of art, so deeply forgotten are they that they are not to be retrieved, or so slandered that they are beyond call: Rarely has the violence of historical reality tolerated even intellectual revisions. All the same, the idea of the judgment of history is not simply nugatory. For centuries, examples of the incomprehension of contemporaries have abounded; ever since the end of feudal traditionalism the demand for the new and original has necessarily collided with whatever views are prevailing; simultaneous reception becomes ever more diffi- cult. It is nevertheless striking how few artworks of the highest rank were brought to light even in the epoch of historicism, which ransacked everything it could lay hands on. It must be reluctantly admitted, moreover, that the most famous works of the most famous masters-themselves fetishes in commodity culture-are indeed often, though not always, superior in quality to those that have been ne- glected. In the judgment of history, domination in the form of prevailing opinion entwines with the unfolding truth of artworks. As the antithesis to existing soci-
ety, truth is not exhausted according to society's laws. Rather, truth has its own laws, which are contrary to those of society; and in real history it is not only re- pression that grows but also the potential for freedom, which is unanimous with the truth content of art. The merits of a work, its level of form, its internal con- struction , tend to become recognizable only as the material ages or when the sen- sorium becomes dulled to the most striking features of the work. Beethoven could probably be heard as a composer only after the gesture of the titanic - his primary effect- was outstripped by the crasser effects of younger composers like Berlioz. The superiority of the great impressionists over Gauguin became evident only after his innovations had paled in the face of later developments . For quality to unfold historically, however, depends not just on it but on what came afterward, and it sets in relief what preceded it; perhaps some relation rules between quality and the process of perishing. Inherent in many artworks is the force to break through the social barrier that they establish. Whereas Kafka's writings violate the collusion of the novel reader by the explosive empirical impossibility of what is narrated , it is precisely by virtue of this violation that they become understandable
196 D TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
to all. The view trumpeted in unison by Westerners and Stalinists of the incompre- hensibility of modern art for the most part holds true descriptively; what is false in this view, however, is that they treat this reception as a fixed entity and ignore the interventions in consciousness of which incompatible works are capable. In the administered world, artworks are only adequately assimilated in the form of the communication of the uncommunicable, the breaking through of reified con- sciousness. Works in which the aesthetic form, under pressure of the truth con- tent, transcends itself occupy the position that was once held by the concept of the sublime. In them, spirit and material polarize in the effort to unite. Their spirit ex- periences itself as sensually unrepresentable , while on the other hand their mater- ial, that to which they are bound external to their boundary, experiences itself as irreconcilable with the unity of the work. Kafka's writings are no more artworks than they could ever have been religious documents. The material-according to Benjamin, the language in particular-becomes desolate, starkly conspicuous; spirit is imbued with the quality of a second-order abstractness. Kant's doctrine of the feeling of the sublime all the more describes an art that shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an illusionless truth content, though without, as art, divesting itself of its semblance character. The enlightenment concept of nature contributed to the invasion of the sublime into art. Along with the critique of the absolutist world of forms that made nature taboo as monstrous, boorish, and plebeian-a critique that was itself part of the general cultural-historical move- ment of the late eighteenth century- artistic practice was penetrated by that which Kant had reserved for nature as sublime and which came increasingly into conflict with taste . The unleashing of the elemental was one with the emancipation of the subject and thus with the self-consciousness of spirit. This self-consciousness spiritualized art as nature . Art's spirit is the self-recognition of spirit itself as nat- ural. The more art integrates into itself what is nonidentical, what is immediately opposed to spirit, the more it must spiritualize itself. Conversely, spiritualization for its part introduced into art what is sensually displeasing and repugnant and what had previously been taboo for art; the sensually unpleasant has an affinity with spirit. The emancipation of the subject in art is the emancipation of art's own autonomy; if art is freed from consideration of its recipient, its sensual facade becomes increasingly a matter of indifference. The facade is transformed into a function of the content, which derives its force from what is not socially approved and prearranged. Art is spiritualized not by the ideas it affirms but through the ele- mental - the intentionless - that is able to receive the spirit in itself; the dialectic of the elemental and spirit is the truth content. Aesthetic spirituality has always been more compatible with thefauve, the savage , than with what has already been appropriated by culture. Spiritualized, the artwork becomes in itself what was pre-
viously attributed to it as its cathartic effect on another spirit: the sublimation of nature. The sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself. The sublime draws the demarcation line be-
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 197
tween art and what was later called arts and crafts . Kant covertly considered art to be a servant. Art becomes human in the instant in which it terminates this service. Its humanity is incompatible with any ideology of service to humankind. It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity toward it.
By its transplantation into art the Kantian definition of the sublime is driven be- yond its boundaries. According to this definition, spirit, in its empirical power- lessness vis-a-vis nature , experiences its intelligible essence as one that is superior to nature. However, given that the sublime is supposed to be felt in the face of nature, the theory of subjective constitution implies that nature itself is sublime; self-reflection in the face of its sublimity anticipates something of a reconciliation with nature. Nature, no longer oppressed by spirit, frees itself from the miserable nexus of rank second nature and subjective sovereignty. Such emancipation would be the return of nature , and it - the counterimage of mere existence - is the sublime . Though the traits of domination evident in its dimensions of power and magnitude, the sublime speaks against domination. This is touched on by Schiller's dictum that the human being is only fully human when at play; with the consum- mation ofhis sovereignty he leaves behind the spell of sovereignty's aim. The more empirical reality hermetically excludes this event, the more art contracts into the element of the sublime; in a subtle way, after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism. Even the hubris ofart as a religion, the self-exaltation of art as the absolute , has its truth content in the allergy against what is not sublime in art, against that play that is satisfied with the sovereignty of spirit. What Kierkegaard subjectivistically terms "aesthetic seriousness," the heri- tage of the sublime , is the reversal of works into what is true by virtue of their con- tent. The ascendancy of the sublime is one with art's compulsion that fundamental contradictions not be covered up but fought through in themselves; reconciliation for them is not the result of the conflict but exclusively that the conflict becomes eloquent. Thus, however, the sublime becomes latent. Art that is compelled to- ward a truth content that is the locus of unarbitrated contradictions is not capable of the positivity of negation that animated the traditional concept of the sublime as the presence of the infinite. This corresponds to the decline of the categories of play. Even in the nineteenth century a famous classicist theory defined music, in opposition to Wagner, as the play of sounding , moving forms; the similarity of the process of musical events with the optical patterns of the kaleidoscope, a brooding Biedermeier invention, was frequently underscored. This similarity need not be denied out of the desire to hold culture pure: The collapsing constellations of sym- phonic music, as in Mahler's works, have their true analogue in the kaleidoscopic patterns in which a series of slightly varying images collapses and a qualitatively transformed constellation emerges . It is just that in music what is conceptually in- determinate, its flux and articulation, is exceedingly determinate, and in the total- ity of these determinations that it itself establishes it achieves a content ignored by the concept of the play of forms . What parades as sublimity rings hollow , whereas
? 198 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
what plays imperturbably regresses to the triviality from which it was born. Ad- mittedly, as art became dynamic, as its immanent determination became that of being an action, its play character also secretly intensified; thus, a half century before Beckett, Debussy entitled his most important orchestral work Jeux. The critique of profundity and seriousness, which once took aim at the overbearing presumptions of provincial inwardness-in that it justifies an industrious and mindless participation, activity for its own sake-is no less ideological than what it criticizes. Indeed, the sublime ultimately reverses into its opposite. To speak of the sublime with regard to specific artworks is at this point impossible without the twaddle of culture religion, and this results from the dynamic of the category of the sublime itself. The dictum that the sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous pronounced by Napoleon at the moment when his luck turned has been overtaken by history and fulfilled in all its horror. At the time the dictum referred to a grandiose style, a pathos-laden discourse that , as a result of a dispro- portion between its high claims and its pedestrian reality, had a comic effect. But the targeted faux pas actually transpires within the concept of the sublime itself.