No More Learning

This has been well docu- mented in the twentieth century by the effort to recover authentic artworks that succumbed to the terror of idealism's scorn. Karl Kraus sought to rescue linguistic objects as a part of his vindication of what capitalism has oppressed: animal , land- scape, woman. The reorientation of aesthetic theory toward natural beauty is al- lied with Kraus's effort. Hegel obviously lacked the sensibility needed to recog- nize that genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name-natural beauty-had faded. The substantiality of the experience of natural beauty, however, reaches deep into modem art: In Proust, whose Recherche is an artwork and a metaphysics of art, the experience of a hawthorne hedge figures as a fundamental phenomenon of aesthetic comport- ment. Authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves completely a second nature, have consistently felt the urge, as if in need of a breath of fresh air, to step outside of themselves. Since identity is not to be their last word , they have sought consolation in first nature: Thus the last act of Figaro is played out of doors, and in Freischutz Agathe, standing on the balcony , suddenly becomes aware of the starry night. The extent to which this tak- ing a breath depends on what is mediated , on the world of conventions , is unmis- takable. Over long periods the feeling of natural beauty intensified with the suffer- ing of the subject thrown back on himself in a mangled and administered world; the experience bears the mark of Weltschmerz . Even Kant had misgivings about art made by human beings and conventionally opposed to nature. "The superiority ofnatural beauty over that of art, namely, that-even ifart were to excel nature in form-it is the only beauty that arouses a direct interest, agrees with the refined and solid way of thinking of all people who have cultivated their moral feeling. "! Here it is Rousseau who speaks, and no less in the following sentence: "A man who has taste enough to judge the products of fine art with the greatest correctness and refinement may still be glad to leave a room in which he finds those beauties that minister to vanity and perhaps to social joys , and to tum instead to the beauti- ful in nature, in order to find there, as it were, a voluptuousness for the mind in a train of thought that he can never fully umavel . If that is how he chooses, we shall ourselves regard this choice of his with esteem and assume that he has a beautiful soul, such as no connoisseur and lover of art can claim to have because of the in- terest he takes in his objects. "2 The gesture of stepping out into the open is shared
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by these theoretical sentences with the artworks of their time. Kant lodged the sublime-and probably along with it all beauty that rises above the mere play of form-in nature. By contrast, Hegel and his generation achieved a concept of art that did not-as any child of the eighteenth century took for granted-"minister to vanity and social joys. " But they thereby missed the experience that is still expressed unreservedly by Kant in the bourgeois revolutionary spirit that held the humanly made for fallible and that, because the humanly made was never thought fully to become second nature , guarded the image of first nature .
The degree to which the concept of natural beauty has been historically trans- formed is made most strikingly evident by the fact that it was probably only in the course of the nineteenth century that the concept was enlarged by a new domain: the cultural landscape, an artifactitious domain that must at first seem totally op- posed to natural beauty . Historical works are often considered beautiful that have some relation to their geographical setting , as for instance hillside towns that are related to their setting by the use of its stone . A law of form does not, as in art , pre- dominate in them; they are seldom planned, although sometimes the effect of a plan is produced by the arrangement of the town around a church or marketplace, just as economic-material conditions at times spawn artistic forms . Certainly these cultural landscapes do not bear the character of inviolability that the accepted view associates with natural beauty. Engraved as their expression is history, and engraved as their form is historical continuity, which integrates the landscapes dynamically as in artworks. The discovery of this aesthetic dimension and its ap- propriation through the collective sensorium dates back to romanticism, probably initially to the cult of the ruin. With the collapse of romanticism, that hybrid do- main, cultural landscape, deteriorated into an advertising gimmick for organ festi- vals and phony security; the prevailing urbanism absorbs as its ideological com- plement whatever fulfills the desiderata of urban life without bearing the stigmata of market society on its forehead. But if a bad conscience is therefore admixed with the joy of each old wall and each group of medieval house s , the pleasure sur- vives the insight that makes it suspicious. So long as progress, deformed by utili- tarianism, does violence to the surface of the earth, it will be impossible-in spite of all proof to the contrary-completely to counter the perception that what ante- dates the trend is in its backwardness better and more humane. Rationalization is not yet rational; the universality of mediation has yet to be transformed into living life; and this endows the traces of immediacy, however dubious and antiquated, with an element of corrective justice. The longing that is assuaged and betrayed by them and made pernicious through spurious fulfillment is nevertheless legiti- mated by the denial of gratification continually imposed by the status quo. But perhaps the most profound force of resistance stored in the cultural landscape is the expression of history that is compelling, aesthetically, because it is etched by the real suffering of the past. The figure of the constrained gives happiness be- cause the force of constraint must not be forgotten; its images are a memento . The
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cultural landscape, which resembles a ruin even when the houses still stand, em- bodies a wailful lament that has since fallen mute. If today the aesthetic relation to the past is poisoned by a reactionary tendency with which this relation is in league, an ahistorical aesthetic consciousness that sweeps aside the dimension of the past as rubbish is no better. Without historical remembrance there would be no beauty. The past, and with it the cultural landscape, would be accorded guiltlessly to a liberated humanity, free especially of nationalism. What appears untamed in nature and remote from history, belongs-polemically speaking-to a historical phase in which the social web is so densely woven that the living fear death by suffocation. Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for natural beauty; as is well known, agricultural occupations, in which nature as it appears is an immediate object of action , allow little appreciation for landscape . Natural beauty, purportedly ahistorical, is at its core historical; this legitimates at the same time that it relativizes the concept. Wherever nature was not actually mastered, the image of its untamed condition terrified. This explains the strange predilection of earlier centuries for symmetrical arrangements of nature. In sym- pathy with the spirit of nominalism, the sentimental experience of nature delighted in the irregular and unschematic. The progress of civilization, however, easily deceives human beings as to how vulnerable they remain even now. Delight in nature was bound up with the conception of the subject as being-for-itself and virtually infinite in itself; as such the subject projected itself onto nature and in its isolation felt close to it; the subject's powerlessness in a society petrified into a second nature becomes the motor of the flight into a purportedly first nature. In Kant, as a result of the subject's consciousness of freedom, the fear of nature's force began to become anachronistic; this consciousness of freedom, however, gave way to the subject ' s anxiety in the face of perennial unfreedom. In the expe- rience of natural beauty, consciousness of freedom and anxiety fuse. The less se- cure the experience of natural beauty, the more it is predicated on art. Verlaine's "la mer est plus belle que les cathedrales" i s intoned from the vantage point of a high civilization and creates-as is the case whenever nature is invoked to throw light on the world human l? eings have made-a salutary fear.
Just how bound up natural beauty is with art beauty is confirmed by the experi- ence of the former. For it, nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labor and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images. Nature, as appearing beauty , is not perceived as an object of action. The sloughing off of the aims of self-preservation-which is emphatic in art-is carried out to the same degree in aesthetic experience of nature . To this extent the difference between the two forms of beauty is hardly evident. Mediation is no less to be inferred from the relation of art to nature than from the inverse relation. Art is not nature, a belief that idealism hoped to inculcate, but art does want to keep nature's promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back into itself. This
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much is true in Hegel's theorem that art is inspired by negativity, specifically by the deficiency of natural beauty , in the sense that so long as nature is defined only through its antithesis to society, it is not yet what it appears to be. What nature strives for in vain, artworks fulfill: They open their eyes. Once it no longer serves as an object of action, appearing nature itself imparts expression, whether that of melancholy, peace, or something else. Art stands in for nature through its aboli- tion in effigy; all naturalistic art is only deceptively close to nature because, analo- gous to industry, it relegates nature to raw material. The resistance to empirical reality that the subject marshals in the autonomous work is at the same time resis- tance to the immediate appearance of nature. For what becomes perceptible in nature no more coincides with empirical reality than does-according to Kant's grandly paradoxical conception -th e thing itself with the world of "phenomena," the categorially constituted objects . Just as in early bourgeois times natural beauty originated from the historical progress of art, this progress has since gnawed away at natural beauty; something of this may have been distortedly anticipated in Hegel's depreciation of natural beauty. Rationality that has become aesthetic, a disposition over materials that fits them together according to their own immanent tendencies , is ultimately similar to the natural element in aesthetic comportment. Quasi-rational tendencies in art-the outcome of subjectivization-such as the critical rejection of topoi , the complete internal organization of individual works progressively approximate, though not by imitation, something natural that has been veiled by the mastery of the omnipotent subject; if anywhere , then it is in art that "origin is the goal . "3 That the experience of natural beauty , at least according to its subjective consciousness, is entirely distinct from the domination of nature, as if the experience were at one with the primordial origin, marks out both the strength and the weakness of the experience: its strength, because it recollects a world without domination, one that probably never existed; its weakness, because through this recollection it dissolves back into that amorphousness out of which genius once arose and for the first time became conscious of the idea of freedom that could be realized in a world free from domination. The anamnesis of freedom in natural beauty deceives because it seeks freedom in the old unfreedom. Natural beauty is myth transposed into the imagination and thus, perhaps, requited. The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom some- thing of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fright ap- pears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divinations , forever presaging ill fortune. With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity. This is why genius, once it has be- come aware of itself, is no longer satisfied with natural beauty . As its prose char- acter intensifies , art extricates itself completely from myth and thus from the spell of nature, which nevertheless continues in the SUbjective domination of nature.
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Only what had escaped nature as fate would help nature to its restitution. The more that art is thoroughly organized as an object by the subject and divested of the subject' s intentions , the more articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidified significative language; this would perhaps be the same language that is inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name, "The Book of Nature. " Along the trajectory of its rationality and through it, humanity becomes aware in art of what rationality has erased from memory and of what its second reflection serves to remind us. The vanishing point of this development- admittedly an aspect only of modem art-is the insight that nature, as something beautiful, cannot be copied. For natural beauty as something that appears is itself image. Its portrayal is a tautology that, by objectifying what appears, eliminates it. The hardly esoteric judgment that paintings of the Matter- horn and purple heather are kitsch has a scope reaching far beyond the displayed subject matter: What is innervated in the response is, unequivocally, that natural beauty cannot be copied. The uneasiness this causes flares up only in the face of extreme crudeness, leaving the tasteful zone of nature imitations all the more se- cure. The green forest ofGerman impressionism is ofno higher dignity than those views of the Konigssee painted for hotel lobbies. French impressionists, by con- trast, knew very well why they so seldom chose pure nature as a subject; why, when they did not tum to artificial subjects like ballerinas and racing jockeys or the dead nature of Sisley's winter scenes, they interspersed their landscapes with emblems of civilization that contributed to the constructive skeletonization of form, as Pissarro did, for example. It is hard to determine the extent to which the intensifying taboo on the replication of nature affects its image. Proust's insight that Renoir transformed the perception of nature not only offers the consolation that the writer imbibed from impressionism, it also implies horror: that the reifica- tion of relations between humans would contaminate all experience and literally become absolute. The face of the most beautiful girl becomes ugly by a striking resemblance to the face of a film star on whom it was carefully modeled: Even when nature is experienced as spontaneously individuated, as if it were protected from administration, the deception is predictable. Natural beauty, in the age of its total mediatedness, is transformed into a caricature of itself; not the least of the causes for this is the awe felt for natural beauty, which imposes asceticism on its contemplation for as long as it is overlaid with images of being a commodity. Even in the past the portrayal of nature was probably only authentic as nature morte: when painting knew to read nature as the cipher of the historical, if not as that of the transience of everything historical. The Old Testament prohibition on images has an aesthetic as well as a theological dimension . That one should make no image, which means no image ofanything whatsoever, expresses at the same time that it is impossible to make such an image. Through its duplication in art, what appears in nature is robbed of its being-in-itself, in which the experience of nature is fulfilled. Art holds true to appearing nature only where it makes land-
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scape present in the expression of its own negativity; Borchardt's "Verse bei Be- trachtung von Landschaft-Zeichnungen geschrieben" [verses written while con- templating landscape drawings]4 expressed this inimitably and shockingly. Where painting and nature seem happily reconciled-as in Corot-this reconciliation is keyed to the momentary: An everlasting fragrance is a paradox.
Natural beauty, such as it is perceived unmediated in appearing nature, is compro- mised by the Rousseauian retoumons. The mistakenness of the crude antithesis of technique and nature is obvious in the fact that precisely nature that has not been pacified by human cultivation, nature over which no human hand has passed- alpine moraines and taluses -resembles those industrial mountains of debris from which the socially lauded aesthetic need for nature flees. Just how industrial it looks in inorganic outer space will someday be clear. Even in its telluric expan- sion, as the imprint of total technique, the concept of idyllic nature would retain the provincialism of a minuscule island. In schema borrowed from bourgeois sexual morality, technique is said to have ravished nature, yet under transformed relations of production it would just as easily be able to assist nature and on this sad earth help it to attain what perhaps it wants . Consciousness does justice to the experience of nature only when, like impressionist art, it incorporates nature's wounds. The rigid concept of natural beauty thereby becomes dynamic. It is broadened by what is already no longer nature. Otherwise nature is degraded to a deceptive phantasm. The relation of appearing nature to what is inert and thing- like in its deadness is accessible to its aesthetic experience. For in every particular aesthetic experience of nature the social whole is lodged. Society not only pro- vides the schemata of perception but peremptorily determines what nature means through contrast and similarity. Experience of nature is coconstituted by the ca- pacity of determinate negation. With the expansion of technique and, even more important, the total expansion of the exchange principle, natural beauty increas- ingly fulfills a contrasting function and is thus integrated into the reified world it opposes. Coined in opposition to absolutism's wigs and formal gardens, the con- cept of natural beauty forfeited its power, because bourgeois emancipation under the sign of the alleged natural rights of human beings made the world of experi- ence not less but more reified than it was in the eighteenth century. The unmedi- ated experience of nature , its critical edge blunted and subsumed to the exchange relation such as is represented in the phrase "tourist industry," became insignifi- cantly neutral and apologetic, and nature became a nature reserve and an alibi. Natural beauty is ideology where it serves to disguise mediatedness as immedi- acy. Even adequate experience of natural beauty obeys the complementary ideol- ogy of the unconscious . If in keeping with bourgeois standards it is chalked up as a special merit that someone has feeling for nature-which is for the most part a moralistic-narcissistic posturing as if to say: What a fine person I must be to enjoy myself with such gratitude-then the very next step is a ready response to such testimonies of impoverished experience as appear in ads in the personal column
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that claim "sensitivity to everything beautiful. " Here the essence of the experience of nature is deformed. There is hardly anything left of it in organized tourism. To feel nature, and most of all its silence, has become a rare privilege and has in turn become commercially exploitable. This, however, does not amount to the con- demnation of the category of natural beauty tout court. The disinclination to talk about it is strongest where love of it survives. The "How beautiful! " at the sight of a landscape insults its mute language and reduces its beauty; appearing nature wants silence at the same time that anyone capable of its experience feels com- pelled to speak: in order to find a momentary liberation from monadological con- finement. The image of nature survives because its complete negation in the arti- fact - negation that rescues this image - is necessarily blind to what exists beyond bourgeois society, its labor, and its commodities. Natural beauty remains the alle- gory of this beyond in spite of its mediation through social immanence. If, how- ever, this allegory were substituted as the achieved state of reconciliation, it would be degraded as an aid for cloaking and legitimating the unreconciled world as one in which-as the claim goes-beauty is indeed possible.
The "Oh how beautiful," which according to a verse of Friedrich Hebbel disturbs the "celebration ofnature,"5 is appropriate to the tense concentration vis-a-vis art- works, not nature. Its beauty is better known through unconscious apperception; in the continuity of such perception natural beauty unfolds, sometimes suddenly. The more intensively one observes nature, the less one is aware of its beauty, unless it was already involuntarily recognized. Planned visits to famous views, to the landmarks ofnatural beauty, are mostly futile. Nature's eloquence is damaged by the objectivation that is the result of studied observation, and ultimately some- thing of this holds true as well for artworks, which are only completely percep- tible in temps duree, the conception of which Bergson probably derived from artistic experience. If nature can in a sense only be seen blindly, the aesthetic imperatives of unconscious apperception and remembrance are at the same time archaic vestiges incompatible with the increasing maturation of reason. Pure immediacy does not suffice for aesthetic experience . Along with the involuntary it requires volition, concentrating consciousness; the contradiction is ineluctable. All beauty reveals itselfto persistent analysis, which in turn enriches the element of involuntariness; indeed, analysis would be in vain if the involuntary did not reside hidden within it. In the face of beauty , analytical reflection reconstitutes the temps duree through its antithesis. Analysis terminates in beauty just as it ought to appear to complete and self-forgetting unconscious perception. Thus analysis subjectively redescribes the course that the artwork objectively describes within itself: Adequate knowledge of the aesthetic is the spontaneous completion of the objective processes that, by virtue of the tensions of this completion, transpire within it. Genetically, aesthetic comportment may require familiarity with natural beauty in childhood and the later abandonment of its ideological aspect in order to transform it into a relation to artifacts.
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As the antithesis of immediacy and convention became more acute and the hori- zon of aesthetic experience widened to include what Kant called the sublime , nat- ural phenomena overwhelming in their grandeur began to be consciously perceived as beautiful. Historically this attitude of consciousness was ephemeral . Thus Karl Kraus's polemical genius-perhaps in concurrence with the modem style of a Peter Altenberg-spurned the cult of grandiose landscapes and certainly took no pleasure in high mountain ranges, which probably prompt undiminished joy only in tourists, whom the culture critic rightly scorned. This skepticism toward natural grandeur clearly originates in the artistic sensorium . As its powers of dif- ferentiation develop, it begins to react against the practice in idealist philosophy of equating grand designs and categories with the content of artworks . The confu- sion of the two has in the meantime become the index of art-alien comportment. Even the abstract magnitude of nature, which Kant still venerated and compared to moral law , is recognized as a reflex of bourgeois megalomania, a preoccupation with setting new records, quantification, and bourgeois hero worship. This cri- tique , however , fails to perceive that natural grandeur reveals another aspect to its beholder: that aspect in which human domination has its limits and that calls to mind the powerlessness of human bustle. This is why Nietzsche in Sils Maria felt himself to be "two thousand meters above sea level, but even higher than that above all things human. " These vicissitudes in the experience of natural beauty prohibit the establishment of any apriority of its theory as completely as art does. Whoever wishes to define the conceptual invariants of natural beauty would make himself as ridiculous as Husserl did when he reports that while ambulating he perceived the green freshness of the lawn. Whoever declaims on natural beauty verges on poetastery. Only the pedant presumes to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly in nature, but without such distinction the concept of natural beauty would be empty. Neither categories such as formal magnitude-which is contra- dicted by the micrological perception of the beautiful in nature, probably its most authentic form-nor the mathematical, symmetrical proportions favored by older aesthetics furnish criteria of natural beauty. According to the canon of universal concepts it is undefinable precisely because its own concept has its substance in what withdraws from universal conceptuality. Its essential indeterminateness is manifest in the fact that every part of nature, as well as everything made by man that has congealed into nature, is able to become beautiful, luminous from within. Such expression has little or nothing to do with formal proportions. At the same time, however, every individual object of nature that is experienced as beautiful presents itself as if it were the only beautiful thing on earth; this is passed on to every artwork . Although what is beautiful and what is not cannot be categorically distinguished in nature, the consciousness that immerses itself lovingly in some- thing beautiful is compelled to make this distinction. A qualitative distinction in natural beauty can be sought, if at all, in the degree to which something not made by human beings is eloquent: in its expression. What is beautiful in nature is what
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appears to b e more than what i s literally there. Without receptivity there would be no such objective expression, but it is not reducible to the subject; natural beauty points to the primacy of the object in subjective experience. Natural beauty is per- ceived both as authoritatively binding and as something incomprehensible that questioningly awaits its solution. Above all else it is this double character of nat- ural beauty that has been conferred on art. Under its optic, art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty. It develops in tandem with the alle- gorical intention that manifests it without deciphering it; in tandem with meanings that are not objectified as in significative language. The quality of these meanings may be thoroughly historical as in HOlderlin's "Winkel von Hardt" [the shelter at Hardt]. 6 In this poem, a stand of trees becomes perceived as beautiful, as more beautiful than the others, because it bears, however vaguely, the mark of a past event; a rock appears for an instant as a primeval animal, while in the next instant the similarity slips away. This is the locus of one dimension of romantic experi- ence that has outlasted romantic philosophy and its mentality. In natural beauty, natural and historical elements interact in a musical and kaleidoscopically chang- ing fashion. Each can step in for the other, and it is in this constant fluctuation, not in any unequivocal order of relationships, that natural beauty lives. It is spectacle in the way that clouds present Shakespearian dramas, or the way the illuminated edges of clouds seem to give duration to lightning flashes. While art does not reproduce those clouds, dramas nonetheless attempt to enact the dramas staged by clouds; in Shakespeare this is touched on in the scene with Hamlet and the courtiers. Natural beauty is suspended history, a moment of becoming at a stand- still. Artworks that resonate with this moment of suspension are those that are justly said to have a feeling for nature. Yet this feeling is-in spite of every affin- ity to allegorical interpretation-fleeting to the point of deja vu and is no doubt all the more compelling for its ephemeralness.
Wilhelm von Humboldt occupies a position between Kant and Hegel in that he holds fast to natural beauty yet in contrast to Kantian formalism endeavors to con- cretize it. Thus in his writing on the Vasks, which was unfairly overshadowed by Goethe's Italian Journey, he presents a critique of nature that, contrary to what would be expected one hundred and fifty years later, has not become ridiculous in spite of its earnestness. Humboldt reproaches a magnificent craggy landscape for the lack of trees. His comment that "the city is well situated, yet it lacks a moun- tain" makes a mockery of such judgments: Fifty years later the same landscape would probably have seemed delightful. Yet this naiVete, which does not delimit the use of human taste at the boundary of extrahuman nature, attests to a relation to nature that is incomparably deeper than admiration that is content with what- ever it beholds. The application of reason to landscape not only presupposes, as is obvious to anyone, the rationalistic-harmonistic taste of an epoch that assumes the attunement of even the extrahuman to the human. Beyond that, this attitude of reason to nature is animated throughout by a philosophy of nature that interprets
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nature as being meaningful in itself, a view Goethe shared with Schelling. This concept of nature, along with the experience of nature that inspired it , is irretriev- able. But the critique of nature is not only the hubris of a spirit that has exalted it- self as an absolute. It has some basis in the object. As true as the fact that every object in nature can be considered beautiful is the judgment that the landscape of Tuscany is more beautiful than the surroundings of Gelsenkirchen. Surely the waning of natural beauty accompanied the collapse of the philosophy of nature. The latter, however, perished not only as an ingredient of cultural history; the experience that was its substance, as well as the source of happiness in nature, was fundamentally transformed. Natural beauty suffers the same fate as does educa- tion: It is vitiated as the inevitable consequence of its expansion. Humboldt's de- scriptions of nature hold their own in any comparison; his depictions of the wildly turbulent Bay of Biscay occupy a position between Kant's most powerful pas- sages on the sublime and Poe's portrayal of the maelstrom, but they are irretriev- ably bound up with their historical moment. Solger's and Hegel's judgment, which derived the inferiority of natural beauty from its emerging indeterminacy, missed the mark. Goethe still wanted to distinguish between objects that were worthy of being painted and those that were not; this lured him into glorifying the hunt for motifs as well as veduta painting, a predilection that discomfited even the pompous taste of the editor of the jubilee edition of Goethe's works. Yet because of its concreteness, the classifying narrowness of Goethe's judgments on nature is nevertheless superior to the sophisticated leveling maxim that everything is equally beautiful. Obviously, under the pressure of developments in painting the definition of natural beauty has been transformed. It has been too often remarked with facile cleverness that kitsch paintings have even infected sunsets. Guilt for the evil star that hangs over the theory of natural beauty is borne neither by the corrigible weakness of thought about it nor by the impoverished aim of such thought. It is determined, rather, by the indeterminateness of natural beauty, that of the object no less than that of the concept. As indeterminate, as antithetical to definitions, natural beauty is indefinable, and in this it is related to music, which drew the deepest effects in Schubert from such nonobjective similarity with nature. Just as in music what is beautiful flashes up in nature only to disappear in the instant one tries to grasp it. Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable.
It is for this reason that art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it. The paradoxes of aesthetics are dictated to it by its object: "Beauty demands, perhaps, the slavish imitation of what is indeter- minable in things. "7 If it is barbaric to say of something in nature that it is more beautiful than something else, the concept of beauty in nature as the concept of something that can be distinguished as such nevertheless bears that barbarism
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teleologically in itself, whereas the figure of the philistine remains prototypically that of a person who is blind to beauty . The origin of this paradox is the enigmatic characterofnature's language. This insufficiency ofnatural beauty may in fact- in accord with Hegel's theory of aesthetic stages-have played a role in motivat- ing emphatic art. For in art the evanescent is objectified and summoned to dura- tion: To this extent art is concept, though not like a concept in discursive logic. The weakness of thought in the face of natural beauty , a weakness of the subject, together with the objective intensity of natural beauty demand that the enigmatic character of natural beauty be reflected in art and thereby be determined by the concept, although again not as something conceptual in itself. Goethe's "Wan- derer's Night Song" is incomparable not because here the subject speaks-as in all authentic works, it is, rather, that the subject wants to fall silent by way of the work-but because through its language the poem imitates what is unutterable in the language of nature . No more should be meant by the ideal of form and content coinciding in a poem, if the ideal itself is to be more than a hollow phrase .
Natural beauty is the trace of the nonidentical in things under the spell of universal identity. As long as this spell prevails, the nonidentical has no positive existence. Therefore natural beauty remains as dispersed and uncertain as what it prom- ises, that which surpasses all human immanence. The pain in the face of beauty, nowhere more visceral than in the experience of nature, is as much the longing for what beauty promises but never unveils as it is suffering at the inadequacy of the appearance, which fails beauty while wanting to make itself like it. This pain reappears in the relation to artworks. Involuntarily and unconsciously, the ob- server enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure self-abandonment- that moment of free exhalation in nature-survives. Natural beauty shares the weakness of every promise with that promise's inextinguishability. However words may glance off nature and betray its language to one that is qualitatively different from its own, still no critique of natural teleology can dismiss those cloudless days of southern lands that seem to be waiting to be noticed. As they draw to a close with the same radiance and peacefulness with which they began, they emanate that everything is not lost, that things may yet tum out: "Death, sit down on the bed, and you hearts, listen carefully: / An old man points into the glimmering light / Under the fringe of dawn ' s first blue: / In the name of God and the unborn, / I promise you: / World, never mind your woes, / All is still yours, for the day starts anew! "8 The image of what is oldest in nature reverses dialectically into the cipher of the not-yet-existing, the possible: As its appearance this cipher is more than the existing; but already in reflecting on it this almost does it an in- justice. Any claim that this is how nature speaks cannot be judged with assurance , for its language does not make judgments; but neither is nature ' s language merely the deceptive consolation that longing reflects back to itself. In its uncertainty, natural beauty inherits the ambiguity of myth, while at the same time its echo-
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consolation-distances itself from myth in appearing nature. Contrary to that philosopher of identity, Hegel, natural beauty is close to the truth but veils itself at the moment of greatest proximity. This, too, art learned from natural beauty. The boundary established against fetishism of nature - the pantheistic subterfuge that would amount to nothing but an affirmative mask appended to an endlessly repetitive fate - is drawn by the fact that nature , as it stirs mortally and tenderly in its beauty, does not yet exist. The shame felt in the face of natural beauty stems from the damage implicitly done to what does not yet exist by taking it for exis- tent. The dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing; by its expression it repels intentional humanization. This dignity has been transformed into the hermetic character of art, into-as Holderlin taught-art's renunciation of any usefulness whatever, even if it were sublimated by the addition of human meaning . For com- munication is the adaptation of spirit to utility, with the result that spirit is made one commodity among the rest; and what today is called meaning participates in this disaster. What in artworks is structured, gapless, resting in itself, is an after- image of the silence that is the single medium through which nature speaks . Vis-a- vis a ruling principle , vis-a-vis a merely diffuse juxtaposition , the beauty of nature is an other; what is reconciled would resemble it.
Hegel makes the transition to art beauty from natural beauty, whose necessity he initially concedes: "Now, as the physically objective idea, life that animates na- ture is beautiful in that as life the true, the idea, is immediately present in individ- ual and adequate actuality in its first natural form. "9 This thesis, which begins by casting natural beauty as more impoverished than it is, presents a paradigm of dis- cursive aesthetics: It is deduced from the identification of the real with the ratio- nal , or more specifically, from the definition of nature as the idea in its otherness. The idea is credited, condescendingly, to natural beauty's account. The beauty of nature unfolds from Hegel's theodicy of the real: Because the idea can take no other form than that in which it is realized, its first appearance or "first natural form" is "suitable" and therefore beautiful. This concept of natural beauty is im- mediately circumscribed dialectically; the concept of nature as spirit is taken no further because-probably with a polemical eye toward Schelling-nature is to be understood as spirit in its otherness, not directly reducible to that spirit. There is no mistaking the progress of critical consciousness here. The Hegelian move- ment of the concept seeks truth-which cannot be stated immediately-in the naming of the particular and the limited: of the dead and the false. This provides for the disappearance of natural beauty when it has scarcely been introduced: "Yet, because of this purely physical immediacy, the living beauty of nature is produced neitherfor nor out of itself as beautiful, nor for the sake of a beautiful appearance. The beauty of nature is beautiful only for another, i . e . , for us, for the mind which apprehends beauty . " to Thus the essence of natural beauty , the anam- nesis of precisely what does not exist for-an-other, is let slip. This critique of nat- ural beauty follows an inner tendency ofHegel's aesthetics as a whole, follows its
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objectivistic tum against the contingence of subjective sentiment. Precisely the beautiful, which presents itself as independent from the subject, as absolutely something not made, falls under suspicion of being feebly subjective; Hegel equates this directly with the indeterminacy of natural beauty . Throughout , Hegel ' s aesthetics lacks receptivity for the speech of what is not significative; the same is true of his theory of language. ll It can be argued immanently against Hegel that his own definition of nature as spirit in its otherness not only contrasts spirit with nature but also binds them together without, however, the binding ele- ment being investigated in his system ' s Aesthetics or Philosophy ofNature. Hegel ' s objective idealism becomes crass, virtually unreftected partisanship for subjective spirit in the Aesthetics. What is true in this is that natural beauty, the unexpected promise of something that is highest, cannot remain locked in itself but is rescued only through that consciousness that is set in opposition to it. What Hegel validly opposes to natural beauty is of a part with his critique of aesthetic formalism and thus of a playful eighteenth-century hedonism that was anathema to the emanci- pated bourgeois spirit. "The form ofnatural beauty, as an abstract form, is on the one hand determinate and therefore restricted; on the other hand it contains a unity and an abstract relation to itself . . . This sort of form is what is called regularity and symmetry, also conformity to law, and finally harmony. "12 Hegel elsewhere speaks in sympathy with the advances of dissonance, though he is deaf to how much it has its locus in natural beauty . In pursuit of this intention of dissonance, aesthetic theory at its apex, in Hegel, took the lead over art; only as neutralized sanctimonious wisdom did it, after Hegel, fall behind art. In Hegel, the formal, "mathematical" relations that once supposedly grounded natural beauty are con- trasted with living spirit and rejected as subaltern and pedestrian: The beauty of regularity is "a beauty of abstract understanding. "13 His disdain for rationalistic aesthetics , however, clouds his vision for what in nature slips through the concep- tual net of this aesthetics . The concept of the subaltern occurs literally in the pas- sage of natural beauty to art beauty: "Now this essential deficiency [of natural
beauty] leads us to the necessity of the Ideal, which is not to be found in nature, and in comparison with it the beauty of nature appears subordinate. "14 Natural beauty, however, is subordinate not in itself but for those who prize it. To what- ever degree the determinacy of art surpasses that of nature, the exemplar of art is provided by what nature expresses and not by the spirit with which men endow nature. The concept of a posited ideal, one that art should follow, and one that is "purified," is external to art. The idealist disdain for what is not spirit in nature takes vengeance on what in art is more than subjective spirit. The timeless ideal becomes hollow plaster; in the history of German literature the most obvious evi- dence for this is the fate of Hebbel's dramatic works, which share much with Hegel. Hegel deduces art rationalistically enough, strangely ignoring its historical genesis, from the insufficiency of nature: "Thus it is from the deficiencies of im- mediate reality that the necessity of the beauty of art is derived. The task of art
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must therefore be firmly established in art's having a calling to display the appear- ance of life, and especially of spiritual animation (in its freedom, externally too) and to make the external correspond with its concept. Only so is the truth lifted out of its temporal setting, out of its straying away into a series of finites. At the same time it has won an external appearance through which the poverty of nature and prose no longer peeps; it has won an existence worthy of truth. "15 The inner thread of Hegel's philosophy is revealed in this passage: Natural beauty gains le- gitimacy only by its decline, in such a way that its deficiency becomes the raison d'etre of art beauty. At the same time natural beauty is subsumed on the basis of its "calling" to a purpose, and a transfiguring affirmative purpose at that, in obedi- ence to a bourgeois topos dating back at least to d'Alembert and Saint-Simon. What Hegel chalks up as the deficiency of natural beauty-the characteristic of escaping from fixed concept-is howeverthe substance ofbeauty itself. In Hegel's transition from nature to art, on the other hand, the much touted polysignificance of Aufhebung is nowhere to be found. Natural beauty flickers out without a trace of it being recognizable in art beauty. Because natural beauty is not thoroughly ruled and defined by spirit, Hegel considers it preaesthetic. But the imperious spirit is an instrument, not the content, of art. Hegel calls natural beauty prosaic. This phrase, which designates the asymmetry that Hegel overlooks in natural beauty , is at the same time unable to comprehend the development of more recent art, every aspect of which could be viewed as the infiltration of prose into formal principles. Prose is the ineradicable reflex of the disenchantment of the world in art, and not just its adaptation to narrow-minded usefulness. Whatever balks at prose becomes the prey of an arbitrarily decreed stylization. In Hegel's age the vector of this development could not yet be completely foreseen; it is in no way identical with realism, but rather is related to autonomous procedures that are free of any relation to representational realism and to topoi. In this regard Hegel's Aesthetics i s reactionary in classicist fashion. I n Kant the classicist conception of beauty was compatible with the conception of natural beauty; Hegel sacrifices natural beauty to subjective spirit, but subordinates that spirit to a classicism that is external to and incompatible with it, perhaps out of fear of a dialectic that even in the face of the idea of beauty would not come to a halt. Hegel's critique of Kant's formalism ought to have valorized nonformal concreteness. This critique was not, however, within Hegel's purview; it is perhaps for this reason that he confused the material elements of art with its representational content [Inhalt]. By rejecting the fleetingness of natural beauty, as well as virtually everything non- conceptual, Hegel obtusely makes himself indifferent to the central motif of art, which probes after truth in the evanescent and fragile. Hegel's philosophy fails vis-a-vis beauty: Because he equates reason and the real through the quintessence of their mediations, he hypostatizes the subjective preformation of the existing as the absolute; thus for him the nonidentical only figures as a restraint on subjec- tivity rather than that he determines the experience of the nonidentical as the
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telos and emancipation of the aesthetic subject. Progressive dialectical aesthetics becomes necessary to critique even Hegel's aesthetics.
The transition from natural beauty to art beauty is dialectical as a transition in the form of domination. Art beauty is what is objectively mastered in an image and which by virtue of its objectivity transcends domination. Artworks wrest them- selves from domination by transforming the aesthetic attitude, shaped by the ex- perience of natural beauty, into a type of productive labor modeled on material labor. As a human language that is both organizing as well as reconciled, art wants once again to attain what has become opaque to humans in the language of nature . Artworks have this much in common with idealist philosophy: They locate recon- ciliation in identity with the subject; in this respect idealist philosophy-as is ex- plicit in Schelling-actually has art as its model, rather than the reverse. Artworks extend the realm of human domination to the extreme, not literally, though, but rather by the strength of the establishment of a sphere existing for itself, which just through its posited immanence divides itself from real domination and thus negates the heteronomy of domination. Only through their polar opposition, not through the pseudomorphosis of art into nature, are nature and art mediated in each other. The more strictly artworks abstain from rank natural growth and the replication of nature, the more the successful ones approach nature. Aesthetic objectivity, the reflection of the being-in-itself of nature, realizes the subjective teleological element of unity; exclusively thereby do artworks become compara- ble to nature. In contrast, all particular similarity of art to nature is accidental, inert, and for the most part foreign to art. The feeling of an artwork's necessity is synonymous with this objectivity . As Benjamin showed, the concept of necessity has generally been mishandled by historians of ideas. By dubbing it necessary, they try to understand or to legitimate historical material to which there is other-
wise no relation, as for instance in the praise of a piece of dull music as a neces- sary preliminary stage to great music . The proof of such necessity can never be adduced; neither in the particular work nor in the historical relation of artworks and styles to each other is there any transparent lawfulness such as that estab- lished by the natural sciences, and as regards psychological necessity the situation is no better. The necessity of art cannot be propounded more scientifico but rather only insofar as a work, by the power of its internal unity, gives evidence ofbeing thus-and-only-thus,16 as if it absolutely must exist and cannot possibly be thought away. The being-in-itself to which artworks are devoted is not the imitation of something real but rather the anticipation of a being-in-itself that does not yet exist, of an unknown that-by way of the subject-is self-determining. Artworks say that something exists in itself, without predicating anything about it. In fact, the spiritualization that art has undergone during the past two hundred years and through which it has come to maturity has not alienated art from nature, as is the opinion ofreified consciousness; rather, in terms ofits own form, art has converged with natural beauty. A theory of art that, in conformity with SUbjective reason,
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simplistically identifies the tendency of art to subjectivization with the develop- ment of scientific reason , omits for the benefit of plausibility the content [Gehalt] and direction of artistic development. With human means art wants to realize the language of what is not human. The pure expression of artworks, freed from every thing-like interference, even from everything so-called natural, converges with nature just as in Webern's most authentic works the pure tone, to which they are reduced by the strength of subjective sensibility, reverses dialectically into a nat- ural sound: that of an eloquent nature , certainly , its language, not the portrayal of a part of nature . The total subjective elaboration of art as a nonconceptual language is the only figure, at the contemporary stage of rationality, in which something like the language of divine creation is reflected, qualified by the paradox that what is reflected is blocked. Art attempts to imitate an expression that would not be interpolated human intention. The latter is exclusively art's vehicle. The more perfect the artwork, the more it forsakes intentions. Mediate nature, the truth con- tent of art, takes shape, immediately, as the opposite of nature. If the language of nature is mute , art seeks to make this muteness eloquent; art thus exposes itself to failure through the insurmountable contradiction between the idea of making the mute eloquent, which demands a desperate effort, and the idea of what this effort would amount to, the idea of what cannot in any way be willed.
Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it i s . To wrest this more from that more's contingency, to gain control of its semblance, to determine it as sem- blance as well as to negate it as unreal: This is the idea of art. This artifactual more does not in itself guarantee the metaphysical substance of art. That substance could be totally null, and still the artworks could posit a more as what appears. Artworks become artworks in the production of this more; they produce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they once again become separated from transcendence. The actual arena of transcendence in artworks is the nexus of their elements. By straining toward, as well as adapting to, this nexus, they go beyond the appearance that they are, though this transcendence may be unreal. Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual. Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning. Although this transcendence is subjectively mediated, it is manifested objectively, yet all the more desultorily. Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality of being art. Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect. This implies an essential criterion of new art. Compositions fail as back- ground music or as the mere presentation of material , just as those paintings fail in which the geometrical patterns to which they are reducible remain factually what they are; this is the reason for the relevance of divergences from mathematical
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forms in all those works that employ them. The striven-for shudder comes to noth- ing: It does not occur. One of the paradoxes of artworks is that what they posit they are actually not permitted to posit; this is the measure of their substantiality . The more cannot be adequately described by the psychological definition of a gestalt, according to which a whole is more than its parts . For the more is not sim- ply the nexus of the elements, but an other, mediated through this nexus and yet divided from it. The artistic elements suggest through their nexus what escapes it. Here one comes up against an antinomy of the philosophy of history . In his treat- ment ofthe theme ofaura-a concept closely related to the concept ofthe appear- ance that by virtue of its internal unity points beyond itself-Benjamin showed that, beginning with Baudelaire, aura in the sense of "atmosphere" is taboo;! al- ready in Baudelaire the transcendence of the artistic appearance is at once effected and negated . From this perspective, the deaestheticization of art is not only a stage of art's liquidation but also the direction of its development. All the same, the so- cialized rebellion since Baudelaire against aura and atmosphere has not meant the simple disappearance of the crackling noise in which the more of the phenomenon announces itself in opposition to this phenomenon. One need only compare good poems by Brecht that are styled as protocol sentences with bad poems by authors whose rebellion against being poetic recoils into the preaesthetic. In Brecht's dis- enchanted poetry what is fundamentally distinct from what is simplistically stated constitutes the works' eminent rank. Erich Kahler may have been the first to recognize this; and it is best confirmed by the poem "Two Cranes. "2 Aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment converge in the moment of falling mute: in Beckett's oeuvre. A language remote from all meaning is not a speaking language and this is its affinity to muteness. Perhaps all expression, which is most akin to transcendence, is as close to falling mute as in great new music nothing is so full of expression as what flickers out-that tone that disengages itself starkly from the dense musical texture-where art by virtue of its own movement converges with its natural element.
The instant of expression in artworks is however not their reduction to the level of their materials as to something unmediated; rather, this instant is fully mediated. Artworks become appearances, in the pregnant sense of the term-that is, as the appearance of an other-when the accent falls on the unreality of their own real- ity. Artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone, and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden. This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work. This immanent character of being an act establishes the similarity of all artworks, like that of natural beauty, to music, a similarity once evoked by the term muse. Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification; the terror of that age is recapitulated vis-ii-vis reified objects. The deeper the Xroplcr? 6? between the circumscribed, particular things and the paling
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essence, the more hollowly artworks gaze, the sole anamnesis of what could exist beyond the Xropt(J/l6? . Because the shudder is past and yet survives, artworks objectivate it as its afterimage. For if at one time human beings in their power- lessness against nature feared the shudder as something real, the fear is no less intense, no less justified, that the shudder will dissipate. All enlightenment is ac- companied by the anxiety that what set enlightenment in motion in the first place and what enlightenment ever threatens to consume may disappear: truth. Thrown back on itself, enlightenment distances itself from that guileless objectivity that it would like to achieve; that is why, under the compulsion of its own ideal of truth, it is conjoined with the pressure to hold on to what it has condemned in the name of truth. Art is this mnemosyne. The instant of appearance in artworks is indeed the paradoxical unity or the balance between the vanishing and the preserved. Art- works are static as much as they are dynamic; art gemes that fall below approved culture, such as circus tableaux and revues and probably mechanisms such as the water fountains of the seventeenth century, confess to what authentic3 artworks conceal in themselves as their secret apriori. Artworks remain enlightened be- cause they would like to make commensurable to human beings the remembered shudder, which was incommensurable in the magical primordial world. This is touched upon by Hegel's formulation of art as the effort to do away with foreign- ness. 4 In the artifact the shudder is freed from the mythical deception of its being- in-itself, without however the work's being reduced to subjective spirit. The in- creasing autonomy of artworks , their objectivation by human being s , presents the shudder as something unmollified and unprecedented. The act of alienation in this objectivation, which each artwork carries out, is corrective. Artworks are neutral- ized and thus qualitatively transformed epiphanies. If the deities of antiquity were said to appear fleetingly at their cult sites, or at least were to have appeared there in the primeval age , this act of appearing became the law of the permanence of art- works, but at the price of the living incarnation of what appears. The artwork as appearance is most closely resembled by the apparition,S the heavenly vision. Artworks stand tacitly in accord with it as it rises above human beings and is carried beyond their intentions and the world of things. Artworks from which the apparition has been driven out without a trace are nothing more than husks, worse than what merely exists, because they are not even useful. Artworks are nowhere more reminiscent of mana than in their extreme opposition to it, in the subjec- tively posited construction of ineluctability. That instant-which is what artworks are-crystallized, at least in traditional works, at the point where out of their particular elements they became a totality . The pregnant moment6 of their objec- tivation is the moment that concentrates them as appearance, which is by no means just the expressive elements that are dispersed over the artworks. Artworks surpass the world of things by what is thing-like in them, their artificial objectiva- tion. They become eloquent by the force of the kindling of thing and appearance. They are things whose power it is to appear. Their immanent process is extemal-
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ized as their own act, not as what humans have done to them and not merely for humans .
The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks , though because of its fleetingness and status as empty entertainment it has scarcely been acknowledged by theoretical consideration; only Valery pursued ideas that are at least related. Fireworks are apparition K<xi E? OX"V: They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, van- ishes , and indeed cannot be read for its meaning. The segregation of the aesthetic sphere by means of the complete afunctionality of what is thoroughly ephemeral is no formal definition of aesthetics. It is not through a higher perfection that art- works separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming actual, like fire- works , incandescently in an expressive appearance. They are not only the other of the empirical world: Everything in them becomes other. It is this to which the preartistic consciousness of artworks responds most intensely. This consciousness submits to the temptation that first led to art and that mediates between art and the empirical. Although the preartistic dimension becomes poisoned by its exploita- tion , to the point that artworks must eliminate it, it survives sublimated in them. It is not so much that artworks possess ideality as that by virtue of their spiritual- ization they promise a blocked or denied sensuality . That quality can be compre- hended in those phenomena from which artistic experience emancipated itself, in the relics of an art-alien art, as it were, the justly or unjustly so-called lower arts such as the circus, to which in France the cubist painters and their theoreticians turned, and to which in Germany Wedekind turned. What Wedekind called "cor- poreal art" has not only remained beneath spiritualized art, not only remained just its complement: In its intentionlessness, however, it is the archetype of spiritual- ized art. By its mere existence. every artwork. as alien artwork to what is alien- ated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter- tendency to it. The preartistic level of art is at the same time the memento of its anticultural character, its suspicion of its antithesis to the empirical world that
leaves this world untouched. Important artworks nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer. When, suspected of being infantile, it is absent from art, when the last trace of the vagrant fiddler disappears from the spiritual chamber musician and the illusionless drama has lost the magic of the stage, art has capitulated . The curtain lifts expectantly even at the beginning of Beckett's Endgame; plays and stagings that eliminate the curtain fumble with a shallow trick . The instant the cur- tain goes up is the expectation of the apparition.