No More Learning

Even when art unreservedly obeys the dictates of inspira- tion , the principle of harmony , metamorphosed to the point of unrecognizability, is at work, because inspiration, if it is to count, must gel; that tacitly presupposes an element of organization and coherence, at least as a vanishing point. Aesthetic experience, no less in fact than theoretical experience, is constantly made aware that inspirations and ideas that do not gel impotently dissipate. Art's paratactical logicality consists in the equilibrium of what it coordinates, a homeostasis in which the concept of aesthetic harmony is sublimated as a last resort. With regard to its elements, such aesthetic harmony is negative and stands in a dissonant re- lation to them: They undergo something similar to what individual tones once underwent in the pure consonance of a triad. Thus aesthetic harmony qualifies in its own right as an element. The mistake of traditional aesthetics is that it exalts the relationship of the whole to the parts to one of entire wholeness, to totality, and hoists it in triumph over the heterogeneous as a banner of illusory positivity . The ideology of culture , in which unity , meaning, and positivity are synonyms, in- evitably boils down to a laudatio temporis actio As the sermon goes, society once enjoyed a blessed closure when every artwork had its place, function, and legiti- mation and therefore enjoyed its own closure, whereas today everything is con- structed in emptiness and artworks are internally condemned to failure. However transparent the tenor of such ideas , which invariably maintain an all too secure distance from art and falsely imagine that they are superior to inner-aesthetic necessities, it is better to follow up what is insightful in them rather than to brush
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them aside on the basis of the role they play, since failure to investigate them might contribute to their preservation. On no account does an artwork require an a priori order in which it is received, protected, and accepted. If today nothing is harmonious, this is because harmony was false from the beginning. The closure of the aesthetic , ultimately of the extra-aesthetic , system of reference does not neces- sarily correspond to the dignity of the artwork. The dubiousness of the ideal of a closed society applies equally to that of the closed artwork . It is incontestable that artworks have, as die-hard reactionaries never cease to repeat, lost their social em- beddedness. The transition from this security into the open has become, for them, a horror vacui; that they address an anonymous and ultimately nonexistent audi- ence has not been just a blessing, not even immanently: not for their authenticity and not for their relevance. What ranks as problematic in the aesthetic sphere has its origin here; the remainder became the plunder of boredom. Every new art- work, if it is to be one, is exposed to the danger of complete failure. If in his own time Hermann Grab praised the preformation of styIe in the keyboard music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because it precluded anything obviously bad, it could be rejoined that this style just as certainly excluded the possibility of what is emphatically good. Bach was so incomparably superior to the music that preceded him and that of his epoch because he broke through this preformation. Even the Lukacs of The Theory of the Novel had to admit that the artworks that came after the end of the supposedly meaning-filled age had gained infinitely in richness and depth. S What speaks for the survival of the concept of harmony as an element is that artworks that remonstrate against the mathematical ideal of har- mony and the requirement of symmetrical relations, striving rather for absolute asymmetry, fail to slough off all symmetry. In terms of its artistic value, asymme- try is only to be comprehended in its relation to symmetry; this has recently been confirmed by what Kahnweiler has called the phenomena of distortion in Picasso. Similarly, new music has shown reverence for the tonality that it abolished through the extreme sensitivity that it developed toward its rudiments. This is documented by Schoenberg's ironic comment from the early years of atonality that the "Mondfteck" of Pierrot lunaire was composed according to the strict rules of counterpoint, which only permitted prepared consonants and then only on unaccented beats . The further real domination of nature progresses, the more painful it becomes for art to admit the necessity of that progress within itself. In the ideal of harmony, art senses acquiescence to the administered world , even though art's opposition to this world continues, with steadily increasing autonomy, the domination of nature. Art concerns itself as much as it is contrary to itself. Just how much these innervations of art are bound up with its position in reality could be viscerally sensed in the bombed German cities of the postwar years . In the face of actual chaos the optical order that the aesthetic sensorium had long ago rejected once again became intensely alluring. However, rapidly advancing nature, the
vegetation in the ruins , brought all vacation-minded romanticization of nature to a
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deserved end. For a brief historical moment what traditional aesthetics called "satisfying" harmonic and symmetrical relations returned. When traditional aes- thetics, Hegel's included, praised harmony in natural beauty, it projected the self- satisfaction of domination onto the dominated. What is qualitatively new in recent art may be that in an allergic reaction it wants to eliminate harmonizations even in their negated form, truly the negation of negation with its own fatality: the self- satisfied transition to a new positivity, to the absence of tension in so many paint- ings and compositions of the postwar decades. False positivity is the technologi- cal locus of the loss of meaning. What during the heroic years of modem art was perceived as its meaning maintained the ordering elements of traditional art as de- terminately negated; their liquidation results in a smoothly functioning but empty identity. Even artworks freed from harmonistic-symmetrical ideas are formally characterized by similarity and contrast, static and dynamic, exposition, transi- tion, development, identity, and return. Works are unable to wipe out the differ- ence between the first appearance of an element and its repetition , no matter how modified that may be. The capacity to sense and employ harmonic and symmetri- cal relations in their most abstract form has become progressively more subtle. Whereas in music a more or less tangible reprise was once required to establish symmetry, now a vague similarity of tone color at various points may suffice. Dynamic freed from every static reference and no longer discernible as such by its contrast to something fixed, is transformed into something that hovers and no longer has direction. In the manner of its appearance, Stockhausen's Zeitmaj3e evokes a through-composed cadence, a fully presented yet static dominant. Yet today such invariants become what they are only in the context of change; who- ever tries to distill them from the dynamic complexion of history or from the indi- vidual work thereby misrepresents them.
Because the concept of spiritual order is itself worthless, it cannot be transposed from cultural cogitations to art. Opposites are intermixed in the ideal of the clo- sure of the artwork: The irrevocable compulsion toward coherence, the ever fragile utopia of reconciliation in the image , and the longing of the objectively weakened subject for a heteronomous order, a constant of German ideology. Temporarily deprived of any direct satisfaction, authoritarian instincts revel in the imago of an absolutely closed culture where meaning is guaranteed. Closure for its own sake, independent of truth content and what this closure is predicated on, is a category that in fact deserves the ominous charge of formalism. Certainly this does not mean that positive and affirmative artworks, virtually the whole store of tradi- tional art, are to be dismissed or defended on the basis of the all too abstract argu- ment that, given their abrupt opposition to empirical life. they too are critical and negative . The philosophical critique of unreflective nominalism prohibits any claim that the trajectory of progressive negativity . the negation of objectively binding meaning, is that of unqualified progress in art. However much a song by Webern is more thoroughly constructed, the universality of the language of Schubert's
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Winterreise secures for it an element of superiority. Though it is nominalism that helped art achieve its language in the first place, still there is no language without the medium of a universality beyond pure particularization , however requisite the latter. This overarching universality necessarily bears a degree of affirmation: This can be sensed in the word understanding. Affirmation and authenticity are amalgamated to no small degree. Yet this is no argument against any individual work; at most it is an argument against the language of art as such. There is no art that is entirely devoid of affirmation, since by its very existence every work rises above the plight and degradation of daily existence. The more binding art is to itself, the richer, denser, and more unified its works, the more it tends toward affir- mation-of whatever stamp-by suggesting that its own qualities are those of a world existing in itself beyond art. This apriority of the affirmative is art's ideo- logical dark side. It projects the reflection of possibility onto the existing even as the latter's determinate negation. This element of affirmation withdraws from the immediacy of artworks and what they say and becomes the fact that they continue to speak at allY That the world spirit never made good on its promise has the effect of lending the affirmative works of the past a touching quality rather than ensuring that they remain truly ideological; today, indeed, what appears evil in consummate works is their own consummateness as a monument to force rather than a transfiguration that is too transparent to spur any opposition. According to cliche, great works are compelling. In being so, they cultivate coercion to the same extent that they neutralize it; their gUilt is their guiltlessness. Modem art, with its vulnerability, blemishes, and fallibility, is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: It is the critique of suc- cess. It is predicated on the recognition of the inadequacy of what appears to be adequate; this is true not only with regard to its affirmative essence but also in that in its own terms it is not what it wants to be. Instances are the jigsaw-puzzle aspects ofmusical classicism-the mechanical moments in Bach's technique, the top-down construction in the paintings of the masters-which reigned for cen- turies under the name composition before , as Valery noted , suddenly becoming a matter of indifference with the rise of impressionism.
Art ' s affirmative element and the affirmative element of the domination of nature are one in asserting that what was inflicted on nature was all for the good; by re- enacting it in the realm of imagination, art makes it its own and becomes a song of triumph. In this, no less than in its silliness, art sublimates the circus. In doing so, art finds itself in inextricable conflict with the idea of the redemption of sup- pressed nature. Even the most relaxed work is the result of a ruling tension that turns against the dominating spirit that is tamed in becoming the work. Proto- typical of that is the concept of the classical. The experience of the model of all classicism-Greek sculpture-may retrospectively undermine confidence in it, as well as in later epochs. Classical art relinquished the distance to empirical exis- tence that had been maintained by archaic images and carvings. According to tra-
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ditional aesthetics, classical sculpture aimed at the identity of the universal and the particular-the idea and the individual-because already it could no longer depend on the sensual appearance of the idea. If the idea was to appear in sensual form, it would have to integrate the empirically individuated world of appearance with its principle of form. This sets a limit to full individuation, however; prob- ably Greek classicism had not yet even experienced individuality; this occurred first, in concordance with the direction of social development, in Hellenic sculp- ture . The unity of the universal and the particular contrived by classicism was al- ready beyond the reach of Attic art, let alone the art of later centuries . This is why classical sculptures stare with those empty eyes that alarm-archaically-instead of radiating that noble simplicity and quiet grandeurlO projected onto them by eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Today what is compelling in antiquity is fun- damentally distinct from the correspondence that developed with European classi- cism in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, even in that of Baudelaire . Whoever does not, in the guise of the archaeologist or philologist, sign a covenant with antiquity-which certainly since the rise of humanism has ever and again shown itself not to be disdained-will not find the normative claim of antiquity compelling. Without protracted study, scarcely any of it speaks, and the quality of the works themselves is certainly not beyond question. What is overwhelming is the level of form . Scarcely anything vulgar or barbaric seems to have been passed down, not even from the imperial age, even though there the beginnings of mass production are unmistakable. The floor mosaics of the villas in Ostia, which were presumably meant to be rented, are based on a single model. Ever since Attic clas-
sicism, the real barbarism of antiquity-the slavery, genocide, and contempt for human life-left few traces in art; just how chaste it kept itself, even in "barbaric cultures," does not redound to its credit. The formal immanence of antique art is probably to be explained by the fact that the sensual world had not yet been debased by sexual taboos, which would come to encompass a sphere reaching far beyond its own immediate area; Baudelaire's classicist longing is precisely for that. In capitalism, what forces art against art into an alliance with the vulgar is not only a function of commercialism, which exploits a mutilated sexuality, but equally the dark side of Christian inwardness. The concrete transience of the clas- sical, however, which Hegel and Marx did not experience, exposes the transience of its concept and the norms deriving from it. The dilemma between superficial classicism and the demand that a work be coherent is apparently not one that arises from contrasting true classicism with plaster frauds. But this contrast is no more fruitful than that between modem and modernistic. What is excluded in the name of a putative authenticity as its degenerate form is usually contained in the former as its ferment, the excision of which leaves it sterile and harmless. The concept of classicism stands in need of differentiation: It is worthless so long as in peaceful juxtaposition it lays out in state Goethe's /phigenie and Schiller's Wallenstein. In popular usage, the concept of classicism means social authority,
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achieved for the most part through economic control mechanisms; it is fitting that Brecht was no stranger to this usage. Classicism of this sort should rather be held against artworks , yet it is so external to them that by way of all sorts of medi- ations even authentic works may be bestowed with the accolade. The classical also refers to a standard of style, without its being thereby possible to distinguish between the model, its legitimate appropriation, and fruitless imitation as con- clusively as would suit that common sense that assumes it can knowingly play off the classical against classicism. Mozart would be inconceivable apart from the classicism of the last years of the eighteenth century , with its stylistic imitation of the ancients, yet the trace of these quoted norms in his music provides no basis for any convincing objection to the specific quality of the classical Mozart. Ulti- mately, to call a work classical refers to its immanent success, the uncoerced yet ever fragile reconciliation of the one and the multiplicitous. It has nothing to do with style and mentality, and everything to do with accomplishment; here Valery ' s comment applies that even a romantic artwork , successfully brought off, is by dint of its success classical. ll This concept of the classical is strung taut to the highest degree; it alone is worthy of critique . The critique of the classi- cal, however, is more than the critique of those formal principles by which the classical has , for the most part, been manifest. The ideal of form, which is identi- fied with classicism, is to be translated back into content [Inhalt] . The purity of form is modeled on the purity of the subject, constituting itself, becoming con- scious of itself, and divesting itself of the nonidentical: It is a negative relation to the nonidentical . Yet it implies the distinction of form from content, a distinction concealed by the classical ideal. Form is constituted only through dissimilarity, only in that it is different from the nonidentical; in form's own meaning , the dualism persists that form effaces. The countermovement to myth-a countermovement that classicism shares with the acme of Greek philosophy-was turned directly against the mimetic impulse. Mimesis was displaced by objectifying imitation. This countermovement thereby easily succeeded in subsuming art to Greek en- lightenment and making taboo that by which art takes the side of the suppressed against the domination of the imposed concept or of what slips through domina- tion's narrow mesh. Though in classicism the subject stands aesthetically upright, violence is done to it, to that eloquent particular that opposes the mute universal. In the much admired universality of the classical work the pernicious universality of myth-the inescapability of the spell-is perpetuated as the norm of the proc- ess of formation. In classicism, where the autonomy of art originated, art renounces itself for the first time . It is no accident that since that moment all classicisms have made ready alliance with science. To this day, the scientific mentality has har- bored an antipathy toward art that refuses voluntary subservience to categorial thought and the desiderata of clear-cut divisions . Whatever proceeds as if there is no antinomy is antinomic and degenerates into what bourgeois phraseology is always ready to dub "formal perfection," about which nothing more need be said.
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It is not because of an irrational mentality that qualitatively modern movements frequently correspond, in Baudelaire's sense, with archaic, preclassical move- ments. They are, admittedly, no less exposed to the reactionary than is classicism by the delusion that the attitude to reality manifest in archaic works , from which the emancipated subject wrested itself, is to be reasserted, regardless of what has historically transpired. The sympathy of the modern with the archaic is not repres- sively ideological only when that sympathy turns toward what classicism dis- carded along the course of its development and refuses to endorse the pernicious pressure from which classicism freed itself. But the one is rarely to be found with- out the other. In place of the identity of the universal and the particular, classical works provide its abstract logical radius, effectively a hollow form hopelessly awaiting specification. The fragility of the classical paradigm gives the lie to its paradigmatical status and thus to the classical ideal itself.
Contemporary aesthetics is dominated by the controversy over whether it is sub- jective or objective. These terms, however, are equivocal. Variously the contro- versy may focus on the conclusion drawn from SUbjective reactions to artworks, in contrast to the intentio recta toward them, the intentio recta being considered precritical according to the current schema of epistemology . Or the two concepts could refer to the primacy of objective or subjective elements in the artworks
themselves, in keeping, for instance, with the distinction made in the history of ideas between classical and romantic . Or, lastly , the issue may be the objectivity of the aesthetic judgment of taste. These various meanings need to be distin- guished from each other. With regard to the first, the direction of Hegel ' s aesthet- ics was objective, whereas with regard to the second, his aesthetics probably em- phasized subjectivity more decisively than did that of his predecessors , for whom the participation of the subject in the effect on an observer was limited even in the case of an ideal or transcendental observer. For Hegel, the subject-object dialectic transpires in the object itself. The relation of subject and object in the artwork too must not be forgotten, insofar as it is concerned with objects. This relation changes historically yet persists even in nonrepresentational works, for they take up an attitude to the object by placing it under a taboo. Still, the starting point of the Critique ofJudgment was not simply inimical to an objective aesthetics. Its force was that, as throughout Kant's theories, it was not comfortably installed in any ofthe positions marked out by the system's strategies. Insofar as according to his theory aesthetics is constituted by the subjective judgment of taste, this judg- ment necessarily becomes not only a constituens of the objective work but rather bears in itself an objective necessity, however little this necessity can be reduced to universal concepts. Kant envisioned a subjectively mediated but objective aes- thetics . The Kantian concept of the judgment of taste , by its subjectively directed query, concerns the core of objective aesthetics: the question of quality-good
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and bad, true and false-in the artwork. The subjective query is itself more aes- thetic than is the epistemological intentio obliqua because the objectivity of the artwork is mediated in a manner that is qualitatively different from the objectivity ofknowledge,beingmediatedmore specificallythroughthesubject. Itisvirtually tautological to claim that the determination whether an artwork is an artwork depends on the judgment whether it is, and that the mechanism of such judgments , far more than any investigation of the power ofjudgment as a psychic "ability ," is the theme of the work . "The definition of taste on which I am basing this analysis is that it is the ability tojudge the beautiful. But we have to analyze judgments of taste in order to discover what is required for calling an object beautiful. "1 The canon of the work is the objective validity of the judgment of taste that, while af- fording no guarantee, is nevertheless stringent. The situation of all nominalist art is thus prepared. Analogously with the critique of reason, Kant would like to ground aesthetic objectivity in the subject rather than to displace the former by the latter. Implicitly he holds that the element that unifies the objective and the sub- jective is reason, a subjective ability at the same time that, by virtue of its attrib- utes of necessity and universality, it is the exemplar of all objectivity. For Kant, even the aesthetic is subordinated to the primacy of discursive logic: "I have used the logical functions of judging to help me find the elements that judgment takes into consideration when it reflects (since even a judgment of taste still has refer- ence to the understanding) . I have examined the element of quality first, because an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned first with it. "2 The strongest buttress of subjective aesthetics , the concept of aesthetic feeling, derives from ob- jectivity , not the reverse . Aesthetic feeling says that something is thus , that some- thing is beautiful; Kant would have attributed such aesthetic feeling, as "taste," exclusively to one who was capable of discriminating in the object. Taste is not defined in Aristotelian fashion by sympathy and fear, the affects provoked in the viewer. The contamination of aesthetic feeling with unmediated psychological emotions by the concept of arousal misinterprets the modification of real experi- ence by artistic experience. It would otherwise be inexplicable why people expose themselves to aesthetic experience in the first place. Aesthetic feeling is not the feeling that is aroused: It is astonishment vis-a-vis what is beheld rather than vis- a-vis what it is about; it is a being overwhelmed by what is aconceptual and yet determinate , not the subjective affect released, that in the case of aesthetic experi- ence may be called feeling. It goes to the heart of the matter, is the feeling for it and not a reflex of the observer. The observing subjectivity is to be strictly distin- guished from the subjective element in the object, that is, from the object's ex- pression as well as from its subjectively mediated form. The question, however, of what is and what is not an artwork cannot in any way be separated from the fac- Ulty ofjudging, that is, from the question of quality, of good and bad. The idea of a bad artwork has something nonsensical about it: If it miscarries, if it fails to achieve its immanent constitution, it fails its own concept and sinks beneath the
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apriori ofart. In art,judgments ofrelative merit, appeals to fairness and toleration of the half-finished , all commonsense excuses and even that of humanity , are false; their indulgence damages the artwork by implicitly liquidating its claim to truth. As long as the boundary that art sets up against reality has not been washed away , tolerance for bad works-borrowed from reality-is a violation of art.
To be able to say with good reason why an artwork is beautiful, true, coherent, or legitimate does not mean reducing it to its universal concepts , even if this opera- tion-which Kant both desired and contested-were possible. In every artwork, and not only in the aporia of the faculty of reflective judgment, the universal and the particular are densely intertwined. Kant touches on this when he defines the beautiful as "that which pleases universally without requiring a concept. "3 This universality, in spite of Kant's desperate effort, cannot be divorced from neces- sity; that something "pleases universally" is equivalent to the judgment that it must please each and every person, for otherwise it would be merely an empirical statement. Yet universality and implicit necessity remain ineluctable concepts, and their unity, as Kant conceived it, in the act ofpleasing is external to the work. The requirement of the subsumption of particulars to the unifying concept trans- gresses against the idea of conceptualization from within that, by means of the concept of finality , was to correct in both parts of the Critique of Judgment the classificatory method of "theoretical," natural-scientific reason that emphatically rejects knowledge of the object from within. In this regard, Kant's aesthetics is a hybrid defenselessly exposed to Hegel's critique. His advance must be emanci- pated from absolute idealism; this is the task that today confronts aesthetics. The ambivalence ofKant's theory, however, is defined by his philosophy as a whole, in which the concept of purpose only extends the category into its regulative use and thus to this extent also circumscribes it. He knows what it is that art shares with discursive knowledge , but not that whereby art diverges qualitatively from it; the distinction becomes the quasi-mathematical one between the finite and the in- finite . No single rule by which the judgment of taste must subsume its objects, not even the totality of these rules, has anything to say about the dignity of an artwork. So long as the concept of necessity, as constitutive of aesthetic judgment, is not reflected into itself, it simply reproduces the deterministic mechanism of empiri- cal reality, that mechanism that itself only returns in artworks in a shadowy and modified form; yet the stipulation that beauty be universally pleasing presupposes a consent that is, though without admitting it, subordinate to social convention. If, however, these two elements are harnessed together in the intelligible realm then Kant's doctrine forfeits its content [Inhalt] . 1t is possible concretely to conceive of artworks that fulfill the Kantian judgment of taste and nevertheless miss the mark . Other works , indeed new art as a whole, contradict that judgment and are hardly universally pleasing, and yet they cannot thereby be objectively disqualified as art. Kant achieves his goal of the objectivity of aesthetics, just as he does that of the objectivity of ethics, by way of universally conceptual formalization. This formal-
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ization is, however, contrary to aesthetic phenomena as what is constitutively particular. What each artwork would need to be according to its pure concept is essential to none. Fonnalization, an act of sUbjective reason, forces art back into precisely that merely subjective sphere-ultimately that of contingency-from which Kant wanted to wrest it and which art itself resists. As contrary poles, sub- jective and objective aesthetics are equally exposed to the critique of a dialectical aesthetics: the fonner because it is either abstractly transcendental or arbitrary in its dependence on individual taste; the latter because it overlooks the objective mediatedness of art by the subject. In the artwork the subject is neither the ob- server nor the creator nor absolute spirit, but rather spirit bound up with, prefonned and mediated by the object.
For the artwork and thus for its theory , subject and object are its own proper ele- ments and they are dialectical in such a fashion that whatever the work is com- posed of-material, expression, and fonn-is always both. The materials are shaped by the hand from which the artwork received them; expression, objecti- vated in the work and objective in itself, enters as a subjective impulse; fonn , if it is not to have a mechanical relationship to what is fonned, must be produced sub- jectively according to the demands of the object. What confronts artists with the kind of objective impenetrability with which their material so often confronts them , an impenetrability analogous to the construction of the given in epistemol- ogy, is at the same time sedimented subject; it is expression, that which appears most subjective, but which is also objective in that it is what the artwork exhausts itself on and what it incorporates; finally , it is a subjective comportment in which objectivity leaves its imprint . But the reciprocity of subject and object in the work , which cannot be that of identity, maintains a precarious balance. The subjective process of the work's production is, with regard to its private dimension, a matter of indifference. Yet the process also has an objective dimension that is a condition for the realization of its immanent lawfulness. It is as labor, and not as communi- cation, that the subject in art comes into its own. It must be the artwork's in- eluctable ambition to achieve balance without ever being quite able to do so: This is an aspect of aesthetic semblance. The individual artist also functions as the ex- ecutor of this balance. It is hard to say whether, in the production process, he is faced with a self-imposed task; the marble block in which a sculpture waits, the
piano keys in which a composition waits to be released, are probably more than metaphors for the task. The tasks bear their objective solution in themselves, at least within a certain variational range, though they do not have the univocity of equations. The act carried out by the artist is minimal, that of mediating between the problem that confronts him and is already determined, and the solution, which is itself similarly lodged in the material as a potential. If the tool has been called the extension of an arm, the artist could be called the extension of a tool , a tool for the transition from potentiality to actuality.
Art's linguistic quality gives rise to reflection over what speaks in art; this is its
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veritable subject, not the individual who makes it or the one who receives it. This is masked by the lyrical "I ," which in confessing has over the centuries produced the semblance of the self-evidence of poetic subjectivity. But this subjectivity is on no account identical with the I that speaks in the poem. This is not only because of the poetic fictional character of poetry and of music, in which subjective ex- pression scarcely ever coincides immediately with the condition of the composer. Far more important is that the grammatical I of the poem is only posited by the I that speaks latently through the work; the empirical I is a function of the spiritual I, not the reverse. The part played by the empirical I is not, as the topos of sincer- ity would have it, the locus of authenticity. It remains undecided whether the la- tent I , the speaking I, is the same in the different genres of art and whether or not it changes; it may vary qualitatively according to the materials of the arts; their sub- sumption under the dubious subordinating concept of art obscures this. In any case, this latent I is immanently constituted in the work through the action of the work's language; in relation to the work, the individual who produces it is an ele- ment ofreality like others. The private person is not even decisive in the factual production of artworks. Implicitly the artwork demands the division of labor, and the individual functions accordingly. By entrusting itself fully to its material, pro- duction results in something universal born out of the utmost individuation.
The force with which the private I is externalized in the work is the I's collective essence; it constitutes the linguistic quality of works. The labor in the artwork becomes social by way of the individual, though the individual need not be conscious of society; perhaps this is all the more true the less the individual is conscious of society. The intervening individual subject is scarcely more than a limiting value, something minimal required by the artwork for its crystallization. The emancipation of the artwork from the artist is no l 'art pour l 'art delusion of grandeur but the simplest expression of the work ' s constitution as the expression of a social relation that bears in itself the law of its own reification: Only as things do artworks become the antithesis of the reified monstrosity. Correspondingly, and this is key to art, even out of so-called individual works it is a We that speaks
and not an I - indeed all the more so the less the artwork adapts externally to a We and its idiom. Here again music gives the most extreme expression to certain char- acteristics of the artistic , though this too by no means bestows any primacy on music. Music says We directly, regardless of its intentions . Even the depositional works of its expressionist phase register binding experiences, and the works' bindingness, their formative force, depends on whether these experiences actually speak through the works. In Western music it would be possible to demonstrate how much its most important discovery, the harmonic depth dimension, as well as all counterpoint and polyphony , is the We of the choric ritual that has penetrated into the material. The We introduces its literalness transformed as an immanently acting force and yet maintains the quality of speech. Literary forms , by their direct and ultimately inescapable participation in communicative language, are related
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to a We; for the sake of their own eloquence they must strive to free themselves of all external communicativeness. But this process is not-as it appears to be or seems to itself to be-one of pure subjectivization. Through this process the sub- ject forms itself to collective experience all the more intimately the more it hard- ens itself against linguistically reified expression. The plastic arts speak through the How of apperception. Their We is simply the sensorium according to its his- torical condition pursued to the point that it breaks the relation to representational objectivity that was modified by virtue of the development of its language of form. Images say: "Behold! "; they have their collective subject in what they point to, which is outward , not inward as with music. In the potentiation of its linguistic quality the history of art-which is equivalent to that of progressive individual- ization-is at the same time its opposite. That this We is, however, not socially univocal, that it is hardly that of a determinate class or social positions, has its ori- gin perhaps in the fact that to this day art in the emphatic sense has only existed as bourgeois art; according to Trotsky'S thesis, no proletarian art is conceivable, only socialist art. The aesthetic We is a social whole on the horizon of a certain indeterminateness, though, granted, as determinate as the ruling productive forces and relations of an epoch. Although art is tempted to anticipate a nonexistent so- cial whole, its non-existent subject, and is thereby more than ideology, it bears at the same time the mark of this subject's non-existence. The antagonisms of soci- ety are nevertheless preserved in it. Art is true insofar as what speaks out of it- indeed, it itself-is conflicting and unreconciled,but this truth only becomes art's own when it synthesizes what is fractured and thus makes its irreconcilability de- terminate. Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation; this is a possibility only for its nondiscursive language . Only in this process is its We concretized . What speaks out of it, however, is truly its subject insofar as it indeed speaks out of it rather than being something de- picted by it. The title of the incomparable final piece of Schumann' s Scenesfrom Childhood, "The Poet Speaks ," one of the earliest models of expressionist music, takes cognizance of this. But the aesthetic subject is probably unrepresentable because, being socially mediated, it is no more empirical than the transcendental subject of philosophy. "The objectivation of the artwork takes place at the cost of the replication of the living. Artworks win life only when they renounce likeness to the human. 'The expression of an unadulterated feeling is always banal. The more unadulterated, the more banal. Not to be banal requires effort. "'4
The artwork becomes objective as something made through and through, that is, by virtue of the subjective mediation of all of its elements. The insight of the cri- tique of knowledge that subjectivity and reification are correlative receives unpar- alleled confirmation in aesthetics. The semblance character of artworks, the illu- sion of their being-in-itself, refers back to the fact that in the totality of their subjective mediatedness they take part in the universal delusional context of reifi- cation, and, that, in Marxian terms, they need to reflect a relation of living labor as
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if it were a thing. The inner consistency through which artworks participate in truth also involves their untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art has always revolted against this, and today this revolt has become art's own law of movement. The antinomy of the truth and untruth of art may have moved Hegel to foretell its end. Traditional aesthetics possessed the insight that the primacy of the whole over the parts has constitutive need of the diverse and that this primacy misfires when it is simply imposed from above. No less constitutive, however, is that no artwork has ever been fully adequate in this regard. Granted, the multiplici- tous in the aesthetic continuum wants synthesis, yet at the same time, being deter- mined extra-aesthetically, it withdraws from synthesis. The synthesis that is ex- trapolated out of multiplicity, which it has as a potential in itself, is unavoidably also the negation of this multiplicity. The equilibrium sought by form must mis- fire internally because externally, meta-aesthetically, it does not exist. Antago- nisms that are unsolved in reality cannot be solved imaginatively either; they work their way into the imagination and are reproduced in imagination's own in- consistency; in fact, this happens in proportion to the intensity with which they pursue their coherence. Artworks must act as if the impossible were for them pos- sible; the idea of the perfection of works, with which none can dispense except at the cost of its own triviality, was dubious. Artists have a hard fate not only because of their always uncertain fate in the world but because through their own efforts they necessarily work against the aesthetic truth to which they devote themselves. Inasmuch as subject and object have become disjoint in historical re- ality , art is possible only in that it passed through the subject. For mimesis of what is not administered by the subject has no other locus than in the living subject. The objectivation of art through its immanent execution requires the historical subject. If the artwork hopes through its objectivation to achieve that truth that is hidden from the subject, then this is so because the subject is itself not ultimate . The rela- tion of the objectivity of the artwork to the primacy of the object is fractured. This objectivity bears witness to the primacy of the object in a condition of universal thralldom that only in the subject provides a place of refuge for what is in-itself, while at the same time the form of the objectivity of this in-itself, which is a sem- blance effected by the subject, is a critique of objectivity. This objectivity grants entry exclusively to the membra disjecta of the world of objects, which only in a state of decomposition becomes commensurable to the law of form .
Subjectivity, however, though a necessary condition of the artwork , is not the aes- thetic quality as such but becomes it only through objectivation; to this extent sub- jectivity in the artwork is self-alienated and concealed. This is not comprehended by Riegl's concept of "artistic volition. " Yet this concept discerns an element es- sential to immanent critique: that nothing external adjudicates over the niveau of artworks. They, not their authors, are their own measure; in Wagner's words, their self-posited law. The question of their own legitimation is not lodged beyond their fulfillment. No artwork is only what it aspires to be, but there is none that is more
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than this without aspiring to be something. This bears closely on spontaneity, al- though precisely it also involves the nonvolitional. Spontaneity manifests itself primarily in the conception of the work, through the design evident in it. But con- ception too is no ultimate category: It often transforms the self-realization of the artworks. It is virtually the seal of objectivation that under the pressure of its immanent logic the conception is displaced. This self-alien element that works contrary to the purported artistic volition is familiar, sometimes terrifyingly so, to artists as to critics; Nietzsche broached this issue at the end of Beyond Good and Evil. The element of self-alienness that occurs under the constraint of the material is indeed the seal of what was meant by "genius. " If anything is to be salvaged of this concept it must be stripped away from its crude equation with the creative subject, who through vain exuberance bewitches the artwork into a document of its maker and thus diminishes it. The objectivity of artworks-a thorn in the side of the inhabitants of a society based on barter because they mistakenly expect that art will mollify the alienation-is translated back into the person who stands behind the work, even though he is usually only the character mask of those who want to promote the work as an article of consumption. If one does not simply want to abolish the concept of genius as a romantic residue, it must be understood in terms of its historicophilosophical objectivity. The divergence of subject and individual , adumbrated in Kant's antipsychologism and raised to the level of a principle in Fichte, takes its toll on art, too. Art's authenticity-what is binding in it-and the freedom of the emancipated individual become remote from each other. The con- cept of genius represents the attempt to unite the two with a wave of the wand; to bestow the individual within the limited sphere of art with the immediate power of overarching authenticity. The experiential content of such mystification is that in art authenticity, the universal element, is no longer possible except by way of the principium individuationis, just as, conversely, universal bourgeois freedom is exclusively that of particularization and individuation. This relation, however, is treated blindly by the aesthetics of genius and displaced undialectically into an individual who is supposedly at the same time subject; the intellectus archetypus, which in the theory of knowledge is expressly the idea, is treated by the concept of genius as a fact of art. Genius is purported to be the individual whose spontaneity coincides with the action of the absolute subject. This is correct insofar as the in- dividuation of artworks, mediated by spontaneity, is that in them by which they are objectivated . Yet the concept of genius is false because works are not creations and humans are not creators. This defines the untruth of any genius aesthetics that suppresses the element of finite making, the 'tEXVll in artworks, in favor of their absolute originality , virtually their natura naturans; it thus spawns the ideology of the organic and unconscious artwork, which flows into the murky current of irra- tionalism. From the start, the genius aesthetic shifted emphasis toward the indi- vidual-opposing a spurious universality-and away from society by absolutizing this individual. Yet whatever the misuse perpetrated by the concept of genius, it
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calls to mind that the subject i n the artwork should not b e reduced to its objectiva- tion. In the Critique ofJudgment the concept of genius became the refuge for everything of which hedonism had deprived Kant' s aesthetics. However, with in- calculable consequences, Kant restricted geniality exclusively to the subject, in- different to its ego-alienness, which was later ideologically exploited by contrast- ing genius with scientific and philosophical rationality. The fetishization of the concept of genius that begins with Kant as the fetishization of dirempted, abstract subjectivity-to put it in Hegelian terms-already in Schiller's votive offerings took on a quality of crass elitism. The concept of genius becomes the potential enemy of artworks; with a sidelong glance at Goethe , the person back of the work is purported to be more essential than the artworks themselves. In the concept of genius the idea of creation is transferred with idealistic hubris from the transcen- dental to the empirical subject, to the productive artist. This suits crude bourgeois consciousness as much because it implies a work ethic that glorifies pure human creativity regardless of its aim as because the viewer is relieved of taking any trouble with the object itself: The viewer is supposed to be satisfied with the personality-essentially a kitsch biography-of the artist. Those who produce important artworks are not demigods but fallible, often neurotic and damaged, individuals. An aesthetic mentality, however, that wholly swept away the idea of genius would degenerate into a desolate, pedantic arts-and-crafts mentality devoted to tracing out stencils. The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not in the repetition ofthe imprisoned. In- cidentally, the concept of genius as it came in vogue in the late eighteenth century was in no way charismatic; in that epoch, any individual could become a genius to the extent that he expressed himself unconventionally as nature . Genius was an at- titude to reality , "ingenious doings," indeed almost a conviction or frame of mind; only later, perhaps given the insufficiency of mere conviction in artworks, did genius become a divine blessing. The experience of real unfreedom destroyed the exuberance of subjective freedom as freedom for all and reserved it as the exclu-
sive domain of genius. It becomes ideology in inverse proportion to the world's becoming a less human one and the more consciousness of this- spirit-is neu- tralized. Privileged genius becomes the proxy to whom reality promises what it denies humanity as a whole. What deserves to be salvaged in genius is what is in- strumental to the work. The category of geniality can best be documented when a passage is described as being ingenious. Fantasy alone does not suffice for its defi- nition. The genial is a dialectical knot: It is what has not been copied or repeated, it is free, yet at the same time bears the feeling of necessity; it is art's paradoxical sleight of hand and one of its most dependable criteria. To be genial means to hit upon a constellation, subjectively to achieve the objective, it is the instant in which the methexis of the artwork in language allows convention to be discarded as accidental. The signature of the genial in art is that the new appears by virtue of its newness as if it had always been there; romanticism took note of this. The work
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of fantasy is less creatio ex nihilo, the belief of an art-alien religion of art , than the imagining of authentic solutions in the midst of the effectively preexisting nexus of works. Experienced artists may be overheard referring derisively to a passage: "Here he's a genius. " They chastise the intrusion of fantasy into the logic of the work, an intrusion not subsequently integrated; instances of this are found not only in the work of self-promoting whiz kids but even at Schubert's niveau. The genial remains paradoxical and precarious because the freely discovered and the necessary cannot actually ever be completely fused. Without the ever present pos- sibility of failure there is nothing genial in artworks.
Because of its element of something that had not existed before, the genial was bound up with the concept of originality: thus the concept Originaigenie. As is well known, prior to the age of genius the idea of originality bore no authority. That in their new works composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- turies made use of whole sections of their own earlier works and those of others , or that painters and architects entrusted their designs to students for completion, is easily misused to justify the stereotypical and routine and to denounce subjective freedom. Yet what this practice demonstrates is that originality had yet to become the object of critical reflection, by no means that there was no originality in art- works; one glance at the difference between Bach and his contemporaries suffices to make the point. Originality, the specificity of a determinate artwork, is not anti- thetical to the logicality of artworks, which implies a universal. Often originality emerges from a thoroughly consistent logical construction, of which mediocre talents are incapable . All the same , the question of the originality of older, archaic works is meaningless because the coercion exercised by collective consciousness, in which domination entrenches itself, was so extensive that originality, which presupposes something on the order of emancipated subjectivity , would be anach- ronistic. The concept of originality, as in Benjamin's sense of the "originary,"5 does not so much summon up the primordial as the yet to be in works , their utopic trace. The original is the objective name of each work. If, however, originality arose historically, it is also enmeshed in historical injustice, in the predominance of bourgeois commodities that must touch up the ever-same as the ever-new in order to win customers. Yet with the growing autonomy of art, originality has turned against the market where it was never permitted to go beyond a certain limit. It withdrew into the artworks themselves, into the relentlessness of their in- tegral organization. Originality remains touched by the historical fate of the cate- gory of individualness from which it was derived. Originality no longer obeys what it has been associated with ever since it began to be self-consciously re- flected upon: a so-called individual style . Although the collapse of that style has meanwhile come to be decried by traditionalists, who are in fact defending con- ventional goods, in the most progressive works individual style , cunningly tricked out of the requirements of construction, takes on the quality of a blemish, a defi- ciency, or at the least a compromise. This is one of the most important reasons
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why advanced artistic production aims less at originality in a particular work than at the production of a new type . Originality is in the process of being transformed into the act of inventing types , a transformation in which originality is changed qualitatively without, however, disappearing in the process.
This transformation, which altogether severs originality from mere inspiration, the unique detail that once seemed to be the substance of originality , throws light o n fa n t a s y , i t s o r g a n o n . U n d e r t h e s p e l l o f t h e b e l i e f i n t h e s u bj e c t a s t h e c r e a t o r ' s successor, fantasy effectively meant the capacity to bring forth something deter- minately artistic out of nothing. Its crude concept, that of absolute invention, is the exact correlate of the modem scientific ideal of the strict reproduction of what already exists; here the bourgeois division of labor has furrowed a trench that divides art from any mediation with reality, just as it divides knowledge from everything that in any way transcends reality . This concept of fantasy was never essential to important artworks; the invention, for instance, of fantastic beings in contemporary plastic arts is of minor significance , just as the sudden intervention of a musical motif, though hardly to be discounted, remains powerless so long as it does not surpass its own factuality through what develops out of it. If everything in artworks, including what is most sublime, is bound up with what exists, which they oppose, fantasy cannot be the mere capacity to escape the existing by posit- ing the nonexisting as if it existed. On the contrary, fantasy shifts whatever art- works absorb of the existing into constellations through which they become the other of the existing , if only through its determinate negation. If the effort is made to envision a strictly nonexisting object through what epistemologists dubbed fan- tasizing fiction, nothing is achieved that cannot be reduced-in its parts and even in the elements that constitute its coherence-to what already exists. Only under the spell of the totally empirical does what is qualitatively opposed to it appear, though it does so exclusively as something on a second order of existence mod- eled on the first. Art transcends the nonexisting only by way of the existing; other- wise it becomes the helpless projection of what in any case already exists. Ac- cordingly , fantasy in artworks cannot be restricted to the sudden vision. Although there is no conceiving of fantasy devoid of spontaneity, fantasy, despite being closest to the creatio ex nihilo, is by no means art's one and all. Fantasy may be set in motion primarily by something concrete in the artwork, especially among those artists whose process of production works upward from below. Equally, however, fantasy is active in a dimensionthat a common prejudice holds to be ab- stract, namely in the dimension of the quasi-empty outline, which is then fleshed out and made good on through what prejudice considers the opposite of fantasy: "labor. " Even specifically technological fantasy is not a recent development, as is evident in the compositional style of the Adagio of Schubert's string quintet as well as in the eddies oflight in Turner's seascapes. Fantasy is also, and essentially so, the unrestricted availability of potential solutions that crystallize within the artwork. It is lodged not only in what strikes one both as existing and as the
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residue of something existing, but perhaps even more in the transformation of the existing . The harmonic variant of the main theme in the coda of the first move- ment of the Appassionata, with the catastrophic effect of the diminished seventh chord , is no less a product of fantasy than is the triadic theme of the brooding idea that opens the movement; with regard to genesis it cannot be excluded that the variant that is decisive for the whole might in fact have been Beethoven's initial idea, from which, retroactively as it were, the theme in its primary form was derived. It is no less of an achievement of fantasy that the later sections of the broadly cast development of the first movement of the Eroica give way to lapi- dary harmonic periods, as if suddenly there was no time for differentiation. The growing primacy of construction necessarily reduced the substantiality of the particular inspiration. Just how much labor and fantasy are implicated in each other - their divergence is invariably an index of failure - is supported by the ex- perience of artists that fantasy is subject to command. They sense that the freedom to the involuntary is what distinguishes them from dilettantes. Even subjectively, the mediate and the immediate are in turn mediated in each other aesthetically and in knowledge. Not genetically, but in terms of its constitution, art is the most compelling argument against the epistemological division of sensuality and intel- lect. Reflection is fully capable of the act of fantasy in the form of the determinate consciousness of what an artwork at a certain point needs. The idea that con- sciousness kills , for which art supposedly provides unimpeachable testimony , is a foolish cliche in this context as anywhere else. Even its power to resolve objects into their components , its critical element, is fruitful for the self-reflection of the artwork: It excludes and modifies the inadequate, the unformed, and the incoher- ent. On the other hand, the category of aesthetic dumbness has itsfundamentum in re as the lack of immanent reflection in works, which is evident, for instance, in the stupor of mechanical repetition. What is bad in artworks is a reflection that directs them externally, that forces them; where, however, they immanently want to go can only be followed by reflection, and the ability to do this is spontaneous. If each and every artwork involves a probably aporetic nexus of problems, this is the source ofwhat is perhaps not the worst definition of fantasy . As the capacity to discover approaches and solutions in the artwork, fantasy may be defined as the differential of freedom in the midst of determination.
The objectivity of artworks is no more a residual determination than is any truth. Neoclassicism faltered because it deluded itself with the goal of achieving an ideal of objectivity, which appeared to it in apparently binding styles of the past, by way of a subjectively instituted procedure: It abstractly negated the subject in the work and formulated the imago of a subjectless in-itself, which the subject- itself no longer eliminable by any act of will-could throw into relief solely by means of injury to itself. A rigor that establishes restrictions by imitating long- past heteronomous forms obeys nothing other than that very SUbjective volition that is to be tamed. Valery outlined the problem but did not solve it. Form that is
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merely chosen and posited, which Valery himself sometimes defends, is as acci- dental as the chaotic "vitality" he despised_ The aporia of art today is not to be cured through any willing subordination to authority. It remains an open question just how, without coercion, it would be possible, given an unmitigated nominal- ism, to achieve anything on the order of an objectivity of form; this is impeded by instituted closure. The tendency toward this instituted closure was synchronous with the rise of political fascism, whose ideology similarly feigned that a state freed from the desperation and insecurity of its subjects during the period of late liberalism could be hoped for only on the basis of the abdication of the subject. Of course, this abdication was prompted by more powerful subjects. Even in its falli- bility and weakness, the subject who contemplates art is not expected simply to retreat from the claim to objectivity. Otherwise it would hold that those alien to art-the philistines devoid of any relation to art, who let it affect them as if they were a tabula rasa- would be the most qualified to understand and judge it, and the unmusical would be the best music critics. Like art itself, knowledge of it is consummated dialectically. The more the observer adds to the process, the greater the energy with which he penetrates the artwork, the more he then becomes aware of objectivity from within . He takes part in objectivity when his energy , even that of his misguided subjective "projection," extinguishes itself in the artwork. The subjective detour may totally miss the mark, but without the detour no objectivity becomes evident. -Every step toward the perfection of artworks is a step to- ward their self-alienation, and this dialectically produces ever anew those revolts that are too superficially characterized as subjectivity ' s rebellion against formalism of whatever sort. The growing integration of artworks, their immanent exigency, is also their immanent contradiction. The artwork that carries through its imma- nent dialectic reflects it as resolved: This is what is aesthetically false in the aes- thetic principle . The antinomy of aesthetic reification is also one between the ever fractured metaphysical claim of works to being exempted from time , and the tran- sience of everything that establishes itself in time as enduring. Artworks become relative because they must assert themselves as absolute. Benjamin touched on this once in commenting that "there is no redemption for artworks. " The perennial revolt of art against art has itsfundamentum in re. If it is essential to artworks that they be things , it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things , and
thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an im- potently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world.
That the experience of artworks is adequate only as living experience is more than a statement about the relation of the observer to the observed, more than a state- ment about psychological cathexis as a condition of aesthetic perception. Aes- thetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that
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instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. This is George's symbolist teaching in the poem "The Tapestry,"1 an artpohique that furnishes the title of a volume. Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. By speaking, it becomes something that moves in itself. Whatever in the artifact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the enactment of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself. Analysis is therefore adequate to the work only if it grasps the rela- tion of its elements to each other processually rather than reducing them ana- lytically to purported fundamental elements. That artworks are not being but a process of becoming can be grasped technologically. Their continuity is de- manded teleologically by the particular elements. They are in need of continuity and capable of it by virtue of their incompleteness and, often, by their insignifi- cance. It is as a result of their own constitution that they go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them. This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic experience resem- bles sexual experience, indeed its culmination. The way the beloved image is trans- formed in this experience, the way rigidification is unified with what is most intensely alive, effectively makes the experience the incarnate prototype of aes- thetic experience. Yet it is not only the individual works that are immanently dynamic; so too is their relation to each other. Art is historical exclusively by way of individual works that have taken shape in themselves, not by their external association, not even through the influence that they purportedly exert over each other. This is why art mocks verbal definition. That whereby art's existence is constituted is itself dynamic as an attitude toward objectivity that both withdraws from and takes up a stance toward it and in this stance maintains objectivity trans- formed. Artworks synthesize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and the nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole. The processual quality of artworks is constituted in such a fashion that as artifacts, as something humanly made , they have their place a pri- ori in the "native realm of spirit" but are , in order to become self-identical , in need of what is nonidentical, heterogeneous, and not already formed. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent, compels them to ar- ticulate their own formal language , to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art's- dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. Artworks are such only in actu because their tension does not terminate in pure identity with either extreme . On the other hand, it is only as finished, molded objects that they become force fields
of their antagonisms; otherwise the encapsuled forces would simply run parallel to each other or dissipate. Artworks' paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself. The movement of artworks must be at a standstill and thereby become visible.