No More Learning

In the meantime , of course , artworks have set a taboo even on spiri- tually mediated suavity as being too similar to its vulgar form. This development may well lead to a sharpening of the taboo on the sensual, although it is some- times hard to distinguish to what extent this taboo is grounded in the law of form and to what extent simply in the failure of craft; a question, incidentally, that like many of its ilk becomes a fruitless topic of aesthetic debate . The taboo on the sen- sual ultimately encroaches on the opposite of pleasure because, even as the re- motest echo, pleasure is sensed in its specific negation. For this aesthetic senso- rium dissonance bears all too closely on its contrary , reconciliation; it rebuffs the semblance of the human as an ideology of the inhuman and prefers to join forces with reified consciousness. Dissonance congeals into an indifferent material; in- deed, it becomes a new form of immediacy, without any memory trace of what it developed out of, and therefore gutted and anonymous. For a society in which art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it, art frag- ments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the most part has little to do with the object itself. Subjective pleasure in the artwork would approx- imate a state of release from the empirical as from the totality of heteronomous. Schopenhauer may have been the first to realize this. The happiness gained from artworks is that of having suddenly escaped , not a morsel of that from which art escaped; it is accidental and less essential to art than the happiness in its knowl- edge ; the concept of aesthetic pleasure as constitutive of art is to be superseded . If in keeping with Hegel ' s insight all feeling related to an aesthetic object has an ac- cidental aspect, usually that of psychological projection, then what the work de- mands from its beholder is knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its truth and untruth to be grasped. Aesthetic hedonism is to be confronted with the passage from Kant's doctrine of the sublime, which he timidly excluded from art: Happiness in artworks would be the feeling they instill of standing firm. This holds true for the aesthetic sphere as a whole more than for any particular work.
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Along with the categories, the materials too have lost their a priori self-evidence, and this is apparent in the case of poetic language . The disintegration of the mate- rials is the triumph of their being-for-other. Hofmannsthal's The Lord Chandos Letterl became famous as the first striking evidence of this. Neo-romantic poetry as a whole can be considered as an effort to oppose this disintegration and to win back for language and other materials a degree of substantiality . The aversion felt toward Jugendstil, however, is a response to the failure of this effort. Retrospec- tively, in Kafka's words, it appears as a lighthearted journey going nowhere. In the opening poem to a cycle from the "Seventh Ring," an invocation of a forest, George needed only to juxtapose Gold and Kameol [carnelian] to be able to hope that, in keeping with his principle of stylization, the choice of words would glim- mer poetically. 2 Six decades later the word choice can be recognized as a decora- tive arrangement, no longer superior to the crude accumulation of all possible pre- cious materials in Wilde ' s Dorian Gray, where the interiors of a chic aestheticism resemble smart antique shops and auction halls and thus the commercial world Wilde ostensibly disdained. Analogously, Schoenberg remarked that Chopin was fortunate: He needed only to compose in F-sharp major, a still unexploited key, for his music to be beautiful. This, however, requires the historicophilosophical caveat that the materials of early musical romanticism, such as Chopin's rare tonalities , did indeed radiate the force of the untrodden, whereas these same mate- rials were by 1900 already debased to the condition of being "select. " The fate suffered by this generation's works, their juxtapositions and keys, inexorably befell the traditional concept of the poetic as something categorically higher and sacred. Poetry retreated into what abandons itself unreservedly to the process of disillusionment. It is this that constitutes the irresistibility of Beckett's work.
Art responds to the loss of its self-evidence not simply by concrete transforma- tions of its procedures and comportments but by trying to pull itself free from its own concept as from a shackle: the fact that it is art. This is most strikingly con- firmed by what were once the lower arts and entertainment, which are today ad- ministered , integrated , and qualitatively reshaped by the culture industry . For this lower sphere never obeyed the concept of pure art, which itself developed late . This sphere, a testimony of culture's failure that is constantly intruded upon this culture , made it will itself to failure -just what all humor , blessedly concordant in both its traditional and contemporary forms, accomplishes. Those who have been duped by the culture industry and are eager for its commodities were never famil- iar with art: They are therefore able to perceive art's inadequacy to the present life process of society - though not society ' s own untruth - more unobstructedly than do those who still remember what an artwork once was. They push for the deaes- theticization3 of art. 4 Its unmistakable symptom is the passion to touch every- thing, to allow no work to be what it is, to dress it up, to narrow its distance from its viewer. The humiliating difference between art and the life people lead, and in which they do not want to be bothered because they could not bear it otherwise,
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must be made to disappear: This is the subjective basis for classifying art among the consumer goods under the control of vested interests. If despite all this, art does not become simply consumable, then at least the relation to it can be modeled on the relation to actual commodity goods. This is made easier because in the age of overproduction the commodity's use value has become questionable and yields to the secondary gratification of prestige , of being in step , and , finally, of the com- modity character itself: a parody of aesthetic semblance. Nothing remains of the autonomy of art-that artworks should be considered better than they consider themselves to be arouses indignation in culture customers-other than the fetish character of the commodity , regression to the archaic fetishism in the origin of art: To this extent the contemporary attitude to art is regressive. What is consumed is the abstract being-for-other of the cultural commodities, though without their ac- tually being for others; by serving the customers, they themselves are betrayed. The old affinity ofthe beholder andthe beheld is turned on its head. Insofar as the now typical attitude makes the artwork something merely factual, even art's mimetic element, itself incompatible with whatever is purely a thing, is bartered off as a commodity. The consumer arbitrarily projects his impulses-mimetic remnants -on whatever is presented to him. Prior to total administration, the sub- ject who viewed, heard, or read a work was to lose himself, forget himself, extin- guish himself in the artwork. The identification carried out by the subject was ideally not that of making the artwork like himself, but rather that of making him- self like the artwork. This identification constituted aesthetic sublimation; Hegel named this comportment freedom to the object. He thus paid homage to the sub- ject that becomes subject in spiritual experience through self-relinquishment, the opposite of the philistine demand that the artwork give him something. As a tab- ula rasa of subjective projections, however, the artwork is shorn of its qualitative dimension. The poles of the artwork's deaestheticization are that it is made as much a thing among things as a psychological vehicle of the spectator. What the reified artworks are no longer able to say is replaced by the beholder with the stan- dardized echo of himself, to which he hearkens . This mechanism is set in motion and exploited by the culture industry . It contrives to make that appear near and fa- miliar to its audience that has been estranged from them and brought close again only by having been heteronomously manipulated. Even the social argumentation
against the culture-industry, however, has its ideological component. Autonomous art was not completely free of the culture industry's authoritarian ignominy. The artwork's autonomy is, indeed, not a priori but the sedimentation of a historical process that constitutes its concept. In the most authentic works the authority that cultic objects were once meant to exercise over the gentes became the immanent law of fonn. The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalized. This holds true as well for artworks. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters. Because, however, artworks always tum one
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side toward society, the domination they internalized also radiated externally. Once conscious of this nexus, it is impossible to insist on a critique of the culture industry that draws the line at art. Yet whoever, rightly, senses unfreedom in all art is tempted to capitulate, to resign in the face of the gathering forces of admin- istration, with the dismissive assertion that "nothing ever changes," whereas instead, in the semblance of what is other, its possibility also unfolds. That in the midst of the imageless world the need for art intensifies-as it does also among the masses, who were first confronted with art through mechanical means of reproduction-tends to arouse doubts rather than, given the externality of this need for art, enabling art's continued existence to be defended. The comple- mentary character of this need, an afterimage of magic as consolation for dis- enchantment, degrades art to an example of mundus vult decipi and deforms it. Also belonging to the ontology of false consciousness are those characteristics in which the bourgeoisie, which liberated at the same time that it bridled spirit, self- maliciously accepts and enjoys of spirit only what it cannot completely believe of it. To the extent that art corresponds to manifest social need it is primarily a profit- driven industry that carries on for as long as it pays, and by its smooth functioning it obscures the fact that it is already dead. There are flourishing genres and sub- genres of art, traditional opera for one, that are totally eviscerated without this being in the slightest apparent in official culture; in the difficulties however of just approximating its own standard of perfection, opera's spiritual insufficiency pre- sents insurmountable practical problems; its actual demise is imminent. Trust in the needs of those who with heightened productive powers were to raise the whole to a higher form no longer makes sense, now that these needs have been integrated by a false society and transformed into false ones. Those needs do, just as was prognosticated, find satisfaction, but this satisfaction is itself false and robs humans of their human rights.
Today it would be fitting to approach art, in Kantian fashion, as a given; whoever pleads its cause manufactures ideologies and makes art one of them. If thought is in any way to gain a relation to art it must be on the basis that something in reality, something back of the veil spun by the interplay of institutions and false needs, objectively demands art, and that it demands an art that speaks for what the veil hides. Though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irra- tionalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowl- edge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential, as is obvious in post-Hitler Germany. In an age of incomprehensible horror, Hegel's principle, which Brecht adopted as his motto, that truth is concrete, can perhaps suffice only for art. Hegel's thesis that art is consciousness of plight has been confirmed beyond anything he could have envisioned. Thus his thesis was
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transformed into a protest against his own verdict on art, a cultural pessimism that throws into relief his scarcely secularized theological optimism, his expectation of an actual realization of freedom. The darkening of the world makes the irra- tionality of art rational: radically darkened art. What the enemies of modem art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists , call its negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn . In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it. That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this , not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.
Fantastic art in romanticism, as well as its traces in mannerism and the baroque, presents something nonexistent as existing . The fictions are modifications of em- pirical reality . The effect they produce is the presentation of the nonempirical as if it were empirical . This effect is facilitated because the fictions originate in the em- pirical. New art is so burdened by the weight of the empirical that its pleasure in fiction lapses. Even less does it want to reproduce the facade. By avoiding conta- mination from what simply is, art expresses it all the more inexorably. Already Kafka's power is that ofa negative feel for reality; what those who misunderstand him take to be fantastic in his work is "Comment c'est". By its ? 1t0Xll from the empirical world, new art ceases to be fantastic. Only literary historians would class Kafka and Meyrink5 together, and it takes an art historian to class Klee and Kubin together. Admittedly, in its greatest works, such as parts of Poe's Pym, Kiirnberger's Der Amerika-Miide,6 and Wedekind's Mine-Haha, fantastic art plays over into what modernity achieved in its freedom from normal referential- ity. All the same, nothing is more damaging to theoretical knowledge of modem art than its reduction to what it has in common with older periods. What is specific to it slips through the methodological net of "nothing new under the sun"; it is reduced to the undialectical , gapless continuum of tranquil development that it in fact explodes. There is no denying the fatality that cultural phenomena cannot be interpreted without some translation of the new into the old, yet this implies an element of betrayal. Second reflection would have the responsibility of correcting this . In the relation of modem artworks to older ones that are similar, it is their dif- ferences that should be elicited. Immersion in the historical dimension should reveal what previously remained unsolved; in no other way can a relation between the present and the past be established . In comparison, the aim of the current his- tory of ideas is virtually to demonstrate that the new does not exist. Yet since the mid-nineteenth century and the rise of high capitalism, the category of the new has been central , though admittedly in conjunction with the question whether any- thing new had ever existed. Since that moment no artwork has succeeded that re- buffed the ever fluctuating concept of the modem . Works that thought they would
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save themselves from the problematic attributed to the modem only accelerated their demise. Even a composer as immune to the charge of modernism as Anton Bruckner, would not have attained his most important achievements had he not worked with the most advanced material of his period, Wagner's harmony, which he then of course paradoxically transformed . His symphonies pose the question how the old is after all still possible, which is to say as something new; the ques- tion testifies to the irresistibility of the modem, whereas the "after all" is already something false, which the conservatives of the time could deride as something incoherent. That the category of the new cannot be brushed off as art-alien sen- sationalism is apparent in its irresistibility. When, prior to World War I, the con- servative yet eminently sensitive English music critic Ernest Newman heard Schoenberg'S Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, he warned that one should not under- estimate this man Schoenberg: With him it was all or nothing. Newman's hatred thus registered the destructive element of the new with a surer instinct than that of the apologists of the new. Even the old Saint-Saens sensed something of this when, rejecting the effect of Debussy's music, he insisted that surely there must be alternatives to it. Whatever shuns or evades those transformations in the mater- ial that important innovations entail thereby shows itself to be impoverished and ineffectual. Newmanmusthavenoticedthatthesoundsliberatedby Schoenberg's Pieces for Orchestra could no longer be dreamed away and henceforward bore consequences that would ultimately displace the traditional language of composi- tion altogether. This process continues throughout the arts; after a play by Beckett one need only see a work by a moderate lesser contemporary to realize how much the new is a nonjudging judgment. Even the ultrareactionary Rudolf Borchadt confirmed that an artist must dispose over the achieved standard of his period. The new is necessarily abstract: It is no more known than the most terrible secret of Poe's pit. Yet something decisive, with regard to its content, is encapsuled in the abstractness of the new. Toward the end of his life Victor Hugo touched on it in his comment that Rimbaud bestowed afrisson nouveau on poetry. The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of indetermi- nacy. At the same time, however, the shudder is a mimetic comportment reacting mimetically to abstractness. Only in the new does mimesis unite with rationality without regression: Ratio itself becomes mimetic in the shudder of the new and it does so with incomparable power in Edgar Allan Poe , truly a beacon for Baudelaire and all modernity. The new is a blind spot, as empty as the purely indexical ges- ture "look here . " Like every historicophilosophical category , tradition is not to be understood as if, in an eternal relay race, the art of one generation, one style, one maestro, were passed on to the succeeding one. Sociologically and economically, since Max Weber and Sombart, the distinction is made between traditional and nontraditional periods; tradition itself, as a medium of historical movement, de- pends essentially on economic and social structures and is qualitatively trans- formed along with them. The attitude of contemporary art toward tradition, usu-
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ally reviled a s a loss o f tradition, i s predicated o n the inner transformation o f the category of tradition itself. In an essentially nontraditional society , aesthetic tradi- tion a priori is dubious. The authority of the new is that of the historically in- evitable. To this extent it implies objective criticism of the individual, the vehicle of the new: In the new the knot is tied aesthetically between individual and soci- ety. The experience of the modern says more even though its concept, however qualitative it may be, labors under its own abstractness. Its concept is privative; since its origins it is more the negation of what no longer holds than a positive slo- gan. It does not, however, negate previous artistic practices, as styles have done throughout the ages, but rather tradition itself; to this extent it simply ratifies the bourgeois principle in art. The abstractness of the new is bound up with the com- modity character of art. This is why the modern when it was first theoretically articulated-in Baudelaire-bore an ominous aspect. The new is akin to death. What adopts a satanic bearing in Baudelaire is the negative self-reflection of iden- tification with the real negativity of the social situation. Weltschmerz defects to the enemy, the world. Something of this remains admixed as ferment in every- thing modern . For direct protest that did not surrender to its opponent would in art be reactionary: This is why in Baudelaire the imago of nature is strictly taboo . To this day the modern has capitulated whenever it disavowed this taboo; this is the source of the harangues about decadence and of the racket that obstinately accom- panies the modern. Nouveaute is aesthetically the result of historical development, the trademark of consumer goods appropriated by art by means of which artworks distinguish themselves from the ever-same inventory in obedience to the need for the exploitation of capital, which, if it does not expand, if it does not-in its own language-offer something new, is eclipsed. The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded reproduction, with its promise of undiminished plentitude. Baudelaire's poetry was the first to codify that, in the midst of the fully developed commodity society, art can ignore this tendency only at the price of its own powerlessness. Only by immersing its autonomy in society's imagerie can art surmount the het- eronomous market. Art is modern art through mimesis of the hardened and alien- ated; only thereby, and not by the refusal of a mute reality, does art become elo- quent; this is why art no longer tolerates the innocuous . Baudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes, and the medium of this experience is the poetic form. This raises him supremely above late romantic sentimentality. The power of his work is that it syncopates the overwhelming objectivity of the commodity character-which wipes out any human trace - with the objectivity of the work in itself, anterior to the living subject: The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity. The modern pays tribute to this in the vestige of the abstract in its concept. If in monopoly capitalism it is primarily exchange value, not use value, that is con- sumed,7 in the modern artwork it is its abstractness, that irritating indeterminate- ness of what it is and to what purpose it is, that becomes a cipher of what the work
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is. This abstractness has nothing in common with the fonnal character of older aesthetic nonns such as Kant's. On the contrary, it is a provocation, it challenges the illusion that life goes on, and at the same time it is a means for that aesthetic distancing that traditional fantasy no longer achieves. From the outset, aesthetic abstraction, which in Baudelaire was a still rudimentary and allegorical reaction to a world that had become abstract, was foremost a prohibition on graven images. This prohibition falls on what provincials8 ultimately hoped to salvage under the name "message":9 appearance as meaningful; after the catastrophe of meaning, appearance becomes abstract. From Rimbaud to contemporary avant-garde art, the obstinacy of this prohibition i s unflagging . It has changed no more than has the fundamental structure of society . The modern is abstract by virtue of its relation to what is past; irreconcilable with magic, it is unable to bespeak what has yet to be, and yet must seek it, protesting against the ignominy of the ever-same: This is why Baudelaire's cryptograms equate the new with the unknown, with the hidden telos, as well as with what is monstrous by virtue of its incommensurability with the ever-same and thus with the gout du neant. The arguments against the aes- thetic cupiditas rerum novarum, which so plausibly call as evidence the content- lessness of the category, are at heart pharisaical. The new is not a subjective cate- gory , rather it is a compUlsion of the object itself, which cannot in any other way come to itself and resist heteronomy. The force of the old presses toward the new, without which the old cannot be fulfilled. Yet the moment this is invoked, artistic practice and its manifestations become suspect; the old that it claims to safeguard usually disavows the specificity of the work; aesthetic reflection, however, is not indifferent to the entwinement of the old and new. The old has refuge only at the vanguard of the new: in the gaps, not in continuity. Schoenberg's simple motto- If you do not seek, you will not find - is a watchword of the new; whatever fails to honor it in the context of the artwork becomes a deficiency; not least among the aesthetic abilities is the capacity , in the process of the work ' s production, to sound for residual constraints ; through the new, critique - the refusal - becomes an ob- jective element of art itself. Even the camp followers of the new, whom everyone disdains , are more forceful than those who boldly insist on the tried and true . If in accord with its model, the fetish character of the commodity, the new becomes a fetish, this is to be criticized in the work itself, not externally simply because it became a fetish; usually the problem is a discrepancy between new means and old ends. If a possibility for innovation is exhausted, if innovation is mechanically pursued in a direction that has already been tried, the direction of innovation must be changed and sought in another dimension . The abstractly new can stagnate and fall back into the ever-same. Fetishization expresses the paradox of all art that is no longer self-evident to itself: the paradox that something made exists for its own sake; precisely this paradox is the vital nerve of new art. By exigency, the new must be something willed; as what is other, however, it could not be what was willed. Velleity binds the new to the ever-same, and this establishes the inner
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communication of the modem and myth. The new wants nonidentity, yet inten- tion reduces it to identity; modem art constantly works at the Mtinchhausean trick of carrying out the identification of the nonidentical.
Scars of damage and disruption are the modem's seal of authenticity; by their means, art desperately negates the closed confines of the ever-same; explosion is one of its invariants. Antitraditional energy becomes a voracious vortex. To this extent, the modem is myth turned against itself; the timelessness of myth becomes the catastrophic instant that destroys temporal continuity; Benjamin's concept of the dialectical image contains this element. Even when modem art maintains tra- ditional achievements in the form of technical resources, these are transcended by the shock that lets nothing inherited go unchallenged. Given that the category of the new was the result of a historical process that began by destroying a specific tradition and then destroyed tradition as such, modem art cannot be an aberration susceptible to correction by returning to foundations that no longer do or should exist; this is, paradoxically, the foundation of the modem and normative for it. Even in aesthetics, invariants are not to be denied; surgically extracted and dis- played, however, they are insignificant. Music can serve as a model. It would be senseless to contest that it is a temporal art or that, however little it coincides with the temporality of real experience, it too is irreversible. If, however, one wanted to pass beyond vague generalities, such as that music has the task of articulating the relation of its "content" [Inhalt] , its intratemporal elements, to time, one falls im- mediately into pedantry or subreption. For the relation of music to formal musical time is determined exclusively in the relation between the concrete musical event and time. Certainly it was long held that music must organize the intratemporal succession of events meaningfully: Each event should ensue from the previous one in a fashion that no more permits reversal than does time itself. However , the necessity of this temporal sequence was never literal; it participated in art's sem- blance character. Today music rebels against conventional temporal order; in any case, the treatment of musical time allows for widely diverging solutions. As questionable as it is that music can ever wrest itself from the invariant of time, it is
just as certain that once this invariant is an object of reflection it becomes an ele- ment of composition and no longer an apriori. -The violence of the new, for which the name "experimental" was adopted, is not to be attributed to subjective convictions or the psychological character of the artist. When impulse can no longer find preestablished security in forms or content, productive artists are objectively compelled to experiment. This concept of experiment has, however, transformed itself in a fashion that is exemplary for the categories of the modem. Originally it meant simply that the will, conscious of itself, tested unknown or unsanctioned technical procedures. Fundamental to this idea of experimentation was the latently traditionalistic belief that it would automatically become clear whether the results were a match for what had already been established and could thus legitimate themselves. This conception of artistic experimentation became
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accepted as obvious at the same time that it became problematic in its trust in con- tinuity. The gesture of experimentation, the name for artistic comportments that are obligatorily new, has endured but now, in keeping with the transition of aes- thetic interest from the communicating subject to the coherence of the object, it means something qualitatively different: that the artistic subject employs methods whose objective results cannot be foreseen. Even this tum is not absolutely new. The concept of construction, which is fundamental to modem art, always implied the primacy of constructive methods over subjective imagination. Construction necessitates solutions that the imagining ear or eye does not immediately encom- pass or know in full detail. Not only is the unforeseen an effect, it also has an objective dimension, which was transformed into a new quality. The subject, con- scious of the loss of power that it has suffered as a result of the technology unleashed by himself, raised this powerlessnes to the level of a program and did so perhaps in response to an unconscious impulse to tame the threatening heteron- omy by integrating it into subjectivity's own undertaking as an element of the process of production. What helped make this possible is the fact that imagina- tion, the course taken by the object through the subject, does not, as Stockhausen pointed out, have a fixed focus but can adjust to degrees of acuity . What is hazily imagined can be imagined in its vagueness. This is a veritable balancing act for the experimental comportment. Whether this dates back to Mallarme and was for- mulated by Valery as the subject proving its aesthetic power by remaining in self- control even while abandoning itself to heteronomy , or if by this balancing act the subject ratifies its self-abdication, is yet to be decided. In any case, it is clear that insofar as experimental procedures, in the most recent sense, are in spite of every- thing undertaken subjectively, the belief is chimerical that through them art will divest itself of its subjectivity and become the illusionless thing in itself which to date art has only feigned.
The painfulness of experimentation finds response in the animosity toward the so- called isms: programmatic, self-conscious, and often collective art movements. This rancor is shared by the likes of Hitler, who loved to rail against "these im- and expressionists," and by writers who out of a politically avant-garde zealous- ness are wary of the idea of an aesthetic avant-garde .
Picasso expressly confirmed this with regard to pre-World War I cubism. Within an ism the quality of individ- ual artists can be clearly distinguished, although initially those who most explic- itly draw attention to the peculiar characteristics of the school tend to be overrated in comparison with those who, like Pissarro among the impressionists, cannot be reduced so conclusively to the program. Certainly a faint contradiction is inherent in the linguistic use of ism insofar as in emphasizing conviction and intention it seems to expel the element of involuntariness from art; yet this criticism is formalistic with regard to movements maligned as isms, just as expressionism and surrealism specifically made involuntary production their willful program. Further, the concept of the avant-garde, reserved for many decades for whatever
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movement declared itself the most advanced, now has some of the comic quality of aged youth. The difficulties in which isms are entangled express the problem- atics of an art emancipated from its self-evidence. The very consciousness to which all questions of what is genuinely binding in art must be submitted has at the same time demolished all standards of aesthetic bindingness: This is the source of the shadow of mere velleity that hangs over the hated isms. The fact that no important art practice has ever existed without conscious will merely comes to self-consciousness in the much beleaguered isms. This compels artworks to be- come organized in themselves and requires as well an external organization for the artworks to the extent that they want to survive in a monopolistically fully or- ganized society. Whatever may be true in the comparison of art with an organism must be mediated by way of the subject and his reason. The truth of this compari- son has long since been taken into the service of an irrationalistic ideology of a rationalized society; this is why the isms that deny that truth are truer. The isms by no means shackled the individual productive forces but rather heightened them, and they did so in part through mutual collaboration.
One aspect of isms has only recently become relevant. The truth content of many artistic movements does not necessarily culminate in great artworks; Benjamin demonstrated this in his study of German baroque drama. lO Presumably the same holds true for German expressionism and French surrealism; not by accident the latter challenged the concept of art itself, a defiance that has ever since remained admixed with all authentic new art. Since art all the same remained art, the essence of the provocation may be sought in the preponderance of art over the artwork. This preponderance is embodied in the isms . What in terms of the work seems failed or no more than a citation , also testifies to impulses that can scarcely be ob- jectivated in the particular work any longer; impulses of an art that transcends it- self; its idea awaits rescue . It is worth noting that the uneasiness with isms seldom includes their historical equivalent, the schools. Isms are , so to speak, the secular- ization of these schools in an age that destroyed them as traditionalistic. Isms are scandalous because they do not fit into the schema of absolute individuation but remain as an island of a tradition that was shattered by the principle of individua- tion. The disdained should at the very least be completely alone, as surety for its powerlessness, its historical inefficacy, and its early, traceless demise. The schools entered into opposition to the modem in a way that was expressed eccentrically in the measures taken by the academies against students suspected of sympathy for modern directions. Isms are potentially schools that replace traditional and insti- tutional authority with an objective authority. Solidarity with them is better than to disavow them , even if this were on the basis of the antithesis of the modern and modernism. The critique of what is up to date, yet without structural legitimation , is not without its justification: The functionless, for instance, that imitates function is regressive. Still, the separation of modernism as the opinions and convictions of the hangers-on of the authentically modem is invalid because without the sub-
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jective opinions that are stimulated by the new, no objectively modern art would crystallize. In truth the distinction is demagogical: Whoever complains about modernism means the modern, just as hangers-on are always attacked in order to strike at the protagonists whom one fears to challenge and whose prestige inspires deference among conformists. The standard of honesty by which the modernists are pharisaically measured implies acquiescence with being who one is, no more nor less, and a refusal to change, a fundamental habitus of the aesthetic reac- tionary. Its false nature is dissolved by the reflection that has now become the essence of artistic education . The critique of modernism in favor of the putatively truly modern functions as a pretext for judging the moderate-whose thinking fronts for the dross of a trivial intellectualism-as being better than the radical; actually it is the other way around. What lagged behind also fails to master the older means that it employs. History rules even those works that disavow it.
In sharp contrast to traditional art, new art accents the once hidden element of being something made, something produced. The portion of it that is -6? cret grew to such an extent that all efforts to secret away the process of production in the work could not but fail. The previous generation had already limited the pure immanence of artworks, which at the same time they drove to its extreme: by employing the author as commentator, by the use of irony, and by the quantity of detail artfully protected from the intervention of art . From this arose the pleasure of substituting for the artworks the process of their own production. Today every work is virtually what Joyce declared Finnegans Wake to be before he published the whole: work in progress. But a work that in its own terms, in its own texture and complexion, is only possible as emergent and developing, cannot without lying at the same time lay claim to being complete and "finished. " Art is unable to extricate itself from this aporia by an act of will. Decades ago Adolf Loos wrote that ornaments cannot be invented; 1 1 the point he was making has a broader range than he signaled. In art the more that must be made, sought, invented, the more uncertain it becomes if it can be made or invented. Art that is radically and explic- itly something made must ultimately confront its own feasibility. What provokes protest in works of the past is precisely what was argran ed and calculated, what did not-as one would have said in the years around 1800-in turn become nature. Progress in art as the process of making and doubts about just that run in counter- point to each other; in fact, such progress has been accompanied by a tendency toward absolute involuntariness, from the automatic writing of fifty years ago to today's tachism and aleatoric music; the observation is correct that the techni- cally integral, completely made artwork converges with the absolutely accidental work; the work that is ostensibly not the result of making is of course all the more fabricated.
The truth of the new, as the truth of what is not already used up, is situated in the intentionless. This sets truth in opposition to reflection, which is the motor of the new. and raises reflection to a second order, to second reflection. It is the opposite
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of its usual philosophical concept, as it is used, for instance, in Schiller's doctrine of sentimental poetry, where reflection means burdening artworks down with inten- tions. Second reflection lays hold of the technical procedures, the language of the artwork in the broadest sense, but it aims at blindness. "The absurd," however in- adequate as a slogan, testifies to this. Beckett's refusal to interpret his works, com- bined with the most extreme consciousness of techniques and of the implications of the theatrical and linguistic material, is not merely a subjective aversion: As re- flection increases in scope and power, content itself becomes ever more opaque. Certainly this does not mean that interpretation can be dispensed with as if there were nothing to interpret; to remain content with that is the confused claim that all the talk about the absurd gave rise to. Any artwork that supposes it is in possession of its content is plainly naIve in its rationalism; this may define the historically foreseeable limit of Brecht's work. Unexpectedly confirming Hegel's thesis of the transformation of mediation into immediacy, second reflection restores naIvete in the relation of content to first reflection. What is today called a "message" is no more to be squeezed out of Shakespeare's great dramas than out of Beckett's works. But the increasing opacity is itself a function of transformed content. As the negation of the absolute idea, content can no longer be identified with reason as it is postulated by idealism; content has become the critique of the omnipotence of reason, and it can therefore no longer be reasonable according to the norms set by discursive thought. The darkness of the absurd is the old darkness of the new. This darkness must be interpreted, not replaced by the clarity of meaning.
The category of the new produced a conflict. Not unlike the seventeenth-century querelle des anciens et des modernes, this is a conflict between the new and dura- tion. Artworks were always meant to endure; it is related to their concept, that of objectivation . Through duration art protests against death; the paradoxically tran- sient eternity of artworks is the allegory of an eternity bare of semblance. Art is the semblance of what is beyond death' s reach. To say that no art endures is as ab- stract a dictum as that of the transience of all things earthly; it would gain content only metaphysically, in relation to the idea of resurrection. It is not only reac- tionary rancor that provokes horror over the fact that the longing for the new re- presses duration. The effort to create enduring masterpieces has been undermined. What has terminated tradition can hardly count on one in which it would be given a place. There is all the less reason to call on tradition, in that retroactively count- less works once endowed with the qualities of endurance-qualities the concept of classicism strove to encompass-no longer open their eyes: The enduring per- ished and drew the category of duration into its vortex. The concept of the archaic defines not so much a phase of art history as the condition of works that have gone dead. Artworks have no power over whether they endure; it is least of all guaran- teed when the putatively time-bound is eliminated in favor of the timeless. For that can only take place at the cost of the work's relation to those contexts in which permanence is exclusively constituted. It was out of Cervantes' ephemeral
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intention to parody the medieval romances that Don Quixote originated. The concept of duration has an implicitly Egyptian, archaic quality of mythical help- lessness; the thought of duration seems to have been remote during productive periods. Probably it becomes an acute concern only when duration becomes prob- lematic and artworks, sensing their latent powerlessness, cling to it. Confusion oc- curs between what a detestable nationalist exhortation once called the "permanent value of artworks"-everything dead, formal, and neutralized in them-and the hidden seed of their survival. Ever since the praise Horace bestowed on himself for a monument "more durable than bronze ," the category of the lasting resonates with an apologetic quality that is foreign to artworks not erected by grace of an Augustan exercise of mercy for the sake of an idea of authenticity that bears more than the trace of the authoritarian. "Beauty itself must die! ":12 This is more true than Schiller imagined. It holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hiero- glyphic, but for everything composed of beauty and of what according to its tradi- tional idea was meant to be unchangeable, the constituents of form. In this regard, the category of tragedy should be considered. It seems to be the aesthetic imprint of evil and death and as enduring as they are. Nevertheless it is no longer possible. All that by which aesthetic pedants once zealously distinguished the tragic from the mournful-the affirmation of death, the idea that the infinite glimmers through the demise of the finite, the meaning of suffering-all this now returns to pass judgment on tragedy. Wholly negative artworks now parody the tragic. Rather than being tragic, all art is mournful, especially those works that appear cheerful and harmonious. What lives on in the concept of aesthetic duration, as in much else , is prima philosophia, which takes refuge in isolated and absolutized deriva- tives after having been compelled to abdicate as totality. Obviously the duration to which artworks aspire is modeled on fixed, inheritable possession; the spiritual should, like material, become property, an outrage ineluctably committed by spirit against itself. As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them. Many artworks of the highest caliber effectively seek to lose themselves in time so as not to be- come its prey , entering thus into insoluble antimony with the necessity for objecti- vation. Ernst Schoen once praised the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks as the only art that aspires not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away. It is ultimately in terms of this idea that the temporal arts of drama and music are to be interpreted, the counterpart of a reification without which they would not exist and yet that degrades them. In the face of the means of mechanical reproduc- tion, these considerations appear obsolete, yet the discontent with these means may nevertheless also be a discontent with the emerging omnipotence of the per- manence of art that runs parallel with the collapse of duration . If art were to free itself from the once perceived illusion of duration, were to internalize its own
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transience in sympathy with the ephemeral life, it would approximate an idea of truth conceived not as something abstractly enduring but in consciousness of its temporal essence. If all art is the secularization of transcendence, it participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed, without this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than that art must go beyond its own concept in order to re- main faithful to that concept. The idea of its abolition does it homage by honoring its claim to truth . Nevertheless , the survival of undermined art is not only an ex- pression of cultural lag, that ever sluggish revolution of the superstructure. The source of art's power ofresistance is that a realized materialism would at the same time be the abolition of materialism, the abolition of the domination of material interests. In its powerlessness, art anticipates a spirit that would only then step forth. To this corresponds an objective need, the neediness of the world, which is contrary to the subjective and now no more than ideological individual need for art. Art can find its continuation nowhere else than in this objective need.
In art what once took care of itself became a specific undertaking, and as a result integration increasingly binds the centrifugal counterforces. Like a whirlpool, in- tegration absorbs the manifold that once defined art. What is left is an abstract unity shorn of the antithetical element by virtue of which art becomes a unity in the first place. The more successful the integration, the more it becomes an empty spinning of gears; teleologically it tends toward infantile tinkering. The power of the aesthetic subject to integrate whatever it takes hold of is at the same time its weakness. It capitulates to a unity that is alienated by virtue of its abstractness and resignedly casts its lot with blind necessity. If the whole of modem art can be understood as the perpetual intervention of the subject, one that is at no point dis- posed to allow the unreftected governance of the traditional play of forces within the artwork, the permanent interventions of the ego are matched by a tendency of the ego to abdicate out of weakness. True to the age-old mechanical principle of the bourgeois spirit, this abdication takes the form of the reification of subjective achievements, effectively locating them exterior to the subject and mistaking the abdication of the subject for a guarantee of ironclad objectivity. Technique, the extended arm of the subject, also always leads away from that subject. The shadow of art's autarchic radicalism is its harmlessness: Absolute color compositions verge on wallpaper patterns. Now that American hotels are decorated with ab- stract paintings ii la maniere de . . . and aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially affordable, radicalism itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical. Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger. The more art expels the preestablished, the more it is thrown back on what purports to get by, as it were, without borrowing from what has become distant and foreign: Art is thrown back on the dimensionless point of pure subjectivity , strictly on its par- ticular and thus abstract subjectivity. This tendency was passionately anticipated by the radical wing of expressionism up to and including dada. The absence of
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social resonance, however, was not alone to blame for the collapse of expression- ism: It was not possible to persevere within the bounds of a dimensionless point; the contraction of the accessible, the totality of the refusal , terminates in complete impoverishment: the scream or the destitute, powerless gesture, literally the sylla- bles "da-da. " This became an amusement for all concerned , the dadaists as well as the conformists they challenged, because it confessed the impossibility of artis- tic objectivation that is postulated by each and every artistic manifestation, whether intentionally or not; what after all is left to do but scream. The dadaists consistently tried to abrogate this postulate ; the program of their surrealist succes- sors rejected art, yet without being able to shake itself free of it. Their truth was that it would be better not to have art than to have a false one. But they fell to the mercy of the semblance of an absolute subjectivity existing purely for-itself and objectively mediated, yet without the ability to go beyond the position of being- for-itself. Surrealism expresses the foreignness of the alienated only by seeking recourse in itself. Mimesis ties art to individual human experience, which is now exclusively that of being-for-itself. That there is no persevering at this subjective point is by no means only because the artwork forfeits that otherness in which the aesthetic subject is exclusively able to objectivate itself. Clearly the concept of duration-as ineluctable as it is problematic-cannot be unified with the idea that the SUbjective point is also a temporal one. Not only did the expressionists make concessions as they became older and had to earn a living; not only did dadaists convert to Catholicism or enroll in the Communist Party: Artists with the integrity of Picasso and Schoenberg went beyond the subjective point. Their difficulties in this could be sensed and feared right from their first efforts to achieve a so-called new order. Since then these difficulties developed into the difficulties of art as such. To date, all requisite progress beyond the subjective point has been bought at the price of regression through assimilation to the past and by the arbitrariness of a self-posited order. In recent years it has been fashionable to accuse Samuel Beckett of simply repeating his basic idea; he exposed himself to this accusation in a provocative fashion. In this his consciousness was correct that the need for progress is inextricable from its impossibility. The gesture of walking in place at the end of Godot, which is the fundamental motif of the whole of his work, reacts precisely to this situation. Without exception his response is violent. His work is the extrapolation of a negative lctcx. p6C;. The fulfilled moment reverses into per- petual repetition that converges with desolation. His narratives, which he sardon- ically calls novels, no more offer objective descriptions of social reality than-as the widespread misunderstanding supposes - they present the reduction of life to basic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in extremis. These novels do, however, touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which are brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill. The narra- tives are marked as much by an objectively motivated loss of the object as by its correlative, the impoverishment of the subject. Beckett draws the lesson from
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montage and documentation, from all the attempts to free oneself from the illu- sion of a subjectivity that bestows meaning. Even where reality finds entry into the narrative, precisely at those points at which reality threatens to suppress what the literary subject once performed, it is evident that there is something uncanny about this reality. Its disproportion to the powerless subject, which makes it incommensurable with experience, renders reality unreal with a vengeance. The surplus of reality amounts to its collapse; by striking the subject dead, reality itself becomes deathly; this transition is the artfulness of all antiart, and in Beckett it is pushed to the point of the manifest annihilation of reality . The more total society becomes, the more completely it contracts to a unanimous system, and all the more do the artworks in which this experience is sedimented become the other of this society . If one applies the concept of abstraction in the vaguest possible sense, it signals the retreat from a world of which nothing remains except its caput mor- tuum. New art is as abstract as social relations have in truth become. In like man- ner, the concepts of the realistic and the symbolic are put out of service . Because the spell of external reality over its subjects and their reactions has become ab- solute , the artwork can only oppose this spell by assimilating itself to it. At ground zero, however, where Beckett's plays unfold like forces in infinitesimal physics, a second world of images springs forth , both sad and rich , the concentrate of histori- cal experiences that otherwise, in their immediacy, fail to articulate the essential: the evisceration of subject and reality . This shabby , damaged world of images i s the negative imprint o f the administered world . T o th i s extent Beckett i s realisti c . Even in what passes vaguement under the name of abstract art, something sur- vives of the tradition it effaced; presumably it corresponds to what one already perceives in traditional painting insofar as one sees images and not copies of something . Art carries out the eclipse of concretion, an eclipse to which expres- sion is refused by a reality in which the concrete continues to exist only as a mask of the abstract and the determinate particular is nothing more than an exemplar of the universal that serves as its camouflage and is fundamentally identical with the ubiquity of monopoly. This critique of pseudoconcreteness directs its barbs retro- spectively at the whole of art as it has come down to the present. The tangents of the empirical world need only be slightly extended to see that they converge in the insight that the concrete serves for nothing better than that something , by being in some way distinct , can be identified, possessed, and sold. The marrow of experi- ence has been sucked out; there is none, not even that apparently set at a remove from commerce , that has not been gnawed away . At the heart of the economy is a process of concentration and centralization that has the power to absorb what is scattered. It leaves traces of independent existences only for professional statistics and permeates the most subtle spiritual innervations often without its being possi- ble to perceive the mediations. The mendacious personalization of politics and the blather about "man in the age of inhumanity" are appropriate to the objective pseudoindividualization; but this becomes an unbearable burden for art because
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there is no art without individuation. In other words, the contemporary situation of art is hostile to what the jargon of authenticity calls the "message. " The question so insistently posed by East German dramaturgy, "What does he mean? " just barely suffices to frighten hectored authors but would be absurd if applied to any one of Brecht's plays, whose program actually was to set thought processes in motion, not to communicate maxims; otherwise the idea of dialectical theater would have been meaningless from the start. Brecht's efforts to destroy subjective nuances and halftones with a blunt objectivity, and to do this conceptually as well, are artistic means; in the best of his work they become a principle of stylization, not afabula docet. It is hard to determine just what the author of Galileo or The Good Woman of Setzuan himself meant, let alone broach the question of the ob- jectivity of these works, which does not coincide with the subjective intention. The allergy to nuanced expression, Brecht's preference for a linguistic quality that may have been the result of his misunderstanding of positivist protocol sentences, is itself a form of expression that is eloquent only as determinate negation of that expression. Just as art cannot be, and never was, a language of pure feeling, nor a language of the affirmation of the soul, neither is it for art to pursue the results of ordinary knowledge, as for instance in the form of social documentaries that are to function as down payments on empirical research yet to be done. The space between discursive barbarism and poetic euphemism that remains to artworks is scarcely larger than the point of indifference into which Beckett burrowed.
The relation to the new is modeled on a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord, however, was always there; the possible com- binations are limited and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard. The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what exists and is obedient to it. At the center of contemporary antin- omies is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art's temporal end. Hegel was the first to realize that the end of art is implicit in its concept. That his prophecy was not fulfilled is based, paradoxically, on his historical optimism. He betrayed utopia by construing the existing as if it were the utopia of the absolute idea. Hegel' s theory that the world spirit has sublated art as a form is contradicted by another theory of art to be found in his work, which subordinates art to an antagonistic existence that prevails against all affirmative philosophy. This is compelling in architecture: If out of disgust with functional forms and their inherent conformism it wanted to give free reign to fantasy, it would fall immediately into kitsch. Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatiVely. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. In this image of collapse all the stig-
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mata of the repulsive and loathsome in modern art gather. Through the irreconcil- able renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled: This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia-that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise-converges with the possibility oftotal catastrophe. In the image of catastrophe, an image that is not a copy of the event but the cipher of its potential, the magical trace of art's most distant pre- history reappears under the total spell, as if art wanted to prevent the catastrophe by conjuring up its image . The taboo set on the historical telos is the single legiti- mation of that whereby the new compromises itself politically and practically: its claim to being an end in itself.
The shaft that art directs at society is itself social; it is counterpressure to the force exerted by the body social; like inner-aesthetic progress, which is progress in productive and, above all, technical forces, this counterpressure is bound up with progress of extra-aesthetic productive forces. There are historical moments in which forces of production emancipated in art represent a real emancipation that is impeded by the relations of production. Artworks organized by the subject are capable tant bien que mal of what a society not organized by a subject does not allow; city planning necessarily lags far behind the planning of a major, purpose- less, artwork. The antagonism in the concept of technique as something deter- mined inner-aesthetically and as something developed externally to artworks, should not be conceived as absolute. It originated historically and can pass. In electronics it is already possible to produce artistically by manipulating means that originated extra-aesthetically. There is an obvious qualitative leap between the hand that draws an animal on the wall of a cave and the camera that makes it possible for the same image to appear simultaneously at innumerable places. But the objectivation of the cave drawing vis-Ii-vis what is unmediatedly seen already contains the potential of the technical procedure that effects the separation of what is seen from the subjective act of seeing. Each work, insofar as it is intended for many, is already its own reproduction. That in his dichotomization of the auratic and the technological artwork, Benjamin suppressed this element common to both in favor of their difference, would be the dialectical critique of his theory.