No More Learning

The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form. It exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that tran- spires with its other. Nietzsche's late insight, honed in opposition to traditional philosophy, that even what has become can be true, is axiomatic for a reoriented aesthetic. The traditional view, which he demolished, is to be turned on its head: Truth exists exclusively as that which has become. What appears in the artwork as its own lawfulness is the late product of an inner-technical evolution as well as art's position within progressive secularization; yet doubtless artworks became artworks only by negating their origin. They are not to be called to account for the disgrace of their ancient dependency on magic, their servitude to kings and amusement, as if this were art's original sin, for art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged. Dinner music is not inescapable for liberated music, nor was dinner music honest service from which autonomous art outrageously with- drew. The former's miserable mechanical clattering is on no account improved because the overwhelming part of what now passes for art drowns out the echo of
that clatter.
The Hegelian vision of the possible death of art accords with the fact that art is a product of history. That Hegel considered art transitory while all the same chalk- ing it up to absolute spirit stands in harmony with the double character of his sys- tem, yet it prompts a thought that would never have occurred to him: that the sub- stance of art, according to him its absoluteness, is not identical with art's life and death. Rather, art's substance could be its transitoriness. It is thinkable, and not merely an abstract possibility, that great music-a late development-was possi- ble only during a limited phase of humanity. The revolt of art, teleologically posited in its "attitude to objectivity"4 toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art; it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it. What reac- tionary cultural pessimism once vociferated against cannot be suppressed by the critique of culture: that, as Hegel ruminated a hundred and fifty years ago, art may have entered the age of its demise. s Just as Rimbaud's stunning dictum6 one
4 D ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
hundred years ago divined definitively the history of new art, his later silence, his stepping into line as an employee, anticipated art's decline. It is outside the purview of aesthetics today whether it is to become art's necrology; yet it must not play at delivering graveside sermons, certifying the end, savoring the past, and ab- dicating in favor of one sort of barbarism that is no better than the culture that has earned barbarism as recompense for its own monstrosity. Whether art is abol- ished, perishes, or despairingly hangs on, it is not mandated that the content [GehaltF of past art perish. It could survive art in a society that had freed itself of the barbarism of its culture . Not just aesthetic forms but innumerable themes have already become extinct, adultery being one of them . Although adultery filled Vic- torian and early-twentieth-century novels, it is scarcely possible to empathize di- rectly with this literature now, given the dissolution of the high-bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy; distorted and impoverished, this litera- ture lives on only in illustrated magazines. At the same time, however, what is au- thentic in Madame Bovary and was once embedded in its thematic content has long since outstripped this content and its deterioration. Obviously this is not grounds for historicophilosophical optimism over the invincibility of spirit. It is equally possible for the thematic material in its own demise to take with it that which is more than merely thematic. Art and artworks are perishable, not simply because by their heteronomy they are dependent, but because right into the small- est detail of their autonomy, which sanctions the socially determined splitting off of spirit by the division of labor, they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it. Admixed with art's own concept is the ferment of its own abolition.
There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted; no imagina- tion without something imagined. This holds true particularly in the case of art's immanent purposiveness. s In its relation to empirical reality art sublimates the lat- ter's governing principle of sese conservare as the ideal of the self-identity of its works; as Schoenberg said, one paints a painting, not what it represents. Inher- ently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by re- ality ' s compulsion to identity . Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality , which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work's own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience. Although the demarcation line between art and the empirical must not be effaced, and least of all by the glorifica- tion of the artist, artworks nevertheless have a life sui generis. This life is not just their external fate. Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow cold, and die. It is a tautology to point out that as humanly manufactured artifacts they do not live as do people. But the emphasis on the artifactual element
ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS 0 5
in art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution, regardless of how it came to be. Artworks are alive in that they speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make them. They speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them. Thus they come into contrast with the arbitrariness of what simply exists. Yet it is precisely as arti- facts, as products of social labor, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content [Inhalt]. Art negates the categorial determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet har- bors what is empirically existing in its own substance. If art opposes the empirical through the element of form-and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation-the mediation is to be sought in the recog- nition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. What are taken to be the purest forms (e. g. , traditional musical forms) can be traced back even in the smallest idiomatic detail to content such as dance. In many instances ornaments in the visual arts were once primarily cultic symbols. Tracing aesthetic forms back to contents, such as the Warburg Institute undertook to do by following the afterlife of classical antiquity, deserves to be more broadly undertaken. The communica- tion of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted. It is easy to imagine that art's autonomous realm has nothing in common with the external world other than borrowed elements that have entered into a fully changed context. Nevertheless, there is no contesting the clicM of which cultural history is so fond, that the devel- opment of artistic processes, usually classed under the heading of style, corre- sponds to social development. Even the most sublime artwork takes up a determi- nate attitude to empirical reality by stepping outside of the constraining spell it casts, not once and for all, but rather ever and again, concretely, unconsciously polemical toward this spell at each historical moment . That artworks as window- less monads "represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production-all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active-are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. Art's double character as both autonomous and/ait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. It is by virtue of this rela- tion to the empirical that artworks recuperate, neutralized, what once was literally and directly experienced in life and what was expulsed by spirit. Artworks partici- pate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them. They are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them.
6 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTIlETICS
The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objec- tive world from which they recoil . The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective ele- ments, defines the relation of art to society . The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world's factual facade converges with the real essence. Art, XO)pi? from the empirically existing, takes up a position to it in accord with Hegel's argument against Kant: The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moral- izing, is the critique of the principle of [ 'art pour tart, which by abstract negation posits the XO)ptO'Il6? of art as absolute. The freedom of artworks, in which their self-consciousness glories and without which these works would not exist, is the ruse of art's own reason. Each and every one of their elements binds them to that over which, for their happiness, they must soar and back into which at every mo- ment they threaten once again to tumble. In their relation to empirical reality, art- works recall the theologumenon that in the redeemed world everything would be as it is and yet wholly other. There is no mistaking the analogy with the tendency of the profane to secularize the realm of the sacred to the point that only as secu- larized does the latter endure; the realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular. Accordingly, the pure concept of art could not define the fixed circumference of a sphere that has been secured once and for all; rather, its closure is achieved only in an intermittent and fragile bal- ance that is more than just comparable to the psychological balance between ego and id. The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed. Every artwork is an in- stant; every successful work is a cessation, a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye. If artworks are answers to their own questions, they themselves thereby truly become questions. The tendency to per- ceive art either in extra-aesthetic or preaesthetic fashion, which to this day is undiminished by an obviously failed education , is not only a barbaric residue or a danger of regressive consciousness. Something in art calls for this response. Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Only when art's other is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds , without the autonomy of the artwork becoming a matter of indifference. Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it. The great epics, which have survived even their own oblivion, were in their own age intermingled with historical and geographical reportage; Valery the artist took note of how much of their material had yet to be recast by the formal requirements of the Homeric, pagan-Germanic, and Christian epics, without this reducing their rank vis-a-vis drossless works . Likewise tragedy, which may have been the origin of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, was an afterimage of cultic acts that were intended to have
ART,SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 7
real effects. The history of art as that of its progressive autonomy never succeeded in extirpating this element , and not just because the bonds were too strong . At the height of its form, in the nineteenth century, the realistic novel had something of what the theory of so-called socialist realism rationally plotted for its debasement: reportage, the anticipation of what social science would later ascertain. The fa- natic linguistic perfection of Madame Bovary is probably a symptom of precisely this contrary element; the unity of both, of reportage and linguistic perfectionism, accounts for the book' s unfaded actuality . In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this integration at the same time maintain what re- sists it and the fissures that occur in the process of integration. Integration as such does not assure quality; in the history of art, integration and quality have often di- verged. For no single select category, not even the aesthetically central concept of the law of form, names the essence of art and suffices to judge its products. Essen- tial to art are defining characteristics that contradict its fixed art-philosophical concept. Hegel's content-aesthetics [Inhaltsiisthetik] recognized that element of otherness immanent to art and thus superseded formal aesthetics, which appar- ently operates with a so much purer concept of art and of course liberated histori- cal developments such as nonrepresentational painting that are blocked by Hegel' s and Kierkegaard's content-aesthetics. At the same time, however, Hegel's idealist dialectic, which conceives form as content, regresses to a crude , preaesthetic level. It confuses the representational or discursive treatment of thematic material with the otherness that is constitutive of art. Hegel transgresses against his own dialec- tical conception of aesthetics, with consequences he did not foresee; he in effect helped transform art into an ideology of domination. Conversely, what is unreal and nonexistent in art is not independent of reality . It is not arbitrarily posited, not invented, as is commonly thought; rather, it is structured by proportions between what exists, proportions that are themselves defined by what exists, its deficiency , distress, and contradictoriness as well as its potentialities; even in these propor- tions real contexts resonate. Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron filings. Not only art's elements, but their constellation as well, that which is specifically aesthetic and to which its spirit is usually chalked up, refer back to its other. The identity of the artwork with existing reality is also that of the work's gravitational force, which gathers around itself its membra disjecta, traces of the existing. The artwork is related to the world by the principle that contrasts it with the world, and that is the same principle by which spirit organized the world. The synthesis achieved by means of the artwork is not simply forced on its elements; rather, it recapitulates that in which these elements communicate with one an- other; thus the synthesis is itself a product of otherness. Indeed, synthesis has its foundation in the spirit-distant material dimension of works, in that in which syn- thesis is active. This unites the aesthetic element of form with noncoercion. By its difference from empirical reality the artwork necessarily constitutes itself in
8 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
relation to what it is not, and to what makes it an artwork in the first place. The insistence on the nonintentional in art-which is apparent in art's sympathy with its lower manifestations beginning at a specific historical point with Wedekind's derision of the "art-artist," with Apollinaire, and indeed with the beginnings of cubism-points up art's unconscious self-consciousness in its participation in what is contrary to it; this self-consciousness motivated art's culture-critical tum that cast off the illusion of its purely spiritual being.
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. The constitu- tion of art's sphere corresponds to the constitution of an inward space of men as the space of their representation: A priori the constitution of this space partici- pates in sublimation. It is therefore plausible to conceive of developing the defini- tion of art out of a theory of psychic life . Skepticism toward anthropological theo- ries of human invariants recommends psychoanalytic theory. But this theory is more productive psychologically than aesthetically. For psychoanalysis considers artworks to be essentially unconscious projections of those who have produced them, and, preoccupied with the hermeneutics of thematic material, it forgets the categories of form and, so to speak, transfers the pedantry of sensitive doctors to the most inappropriate objects, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Baudelaire. The narrow-mindedness, in spite of all the emphasis on sex, is revealed by the fact that as a result of these studies, which are often offshoots of the biographical fad, artists whose work gave uncensored shape to the negativity of life are dimissed as neurotics. Laforgue's book9 actually in all seriousness accuses Baudelaire of having suffered from a mother complex. The question is never once broached whether a psychically sound Baudelaire would have been able to write The Flowers ofEvil, not to mention whether the poems turned out worse because of the neuro- sis. Psychological normalcy is outrageously established as the criterion even, as in Baudelaire , where aesthetic quality is bluntly predicated on the absence of mens sana. According to the tone of psychoanalytic monographs , art should deal affir- matively with the negativity of experience. The negative element is held to be nothing more than the mark of that process of repression that obviously goes into the artwork. For psychoanalysis, artworks are daydreams; it confuses them with documents and displaces them into the mind of a dreamer, while on the other hand, as compensation for the exclusion of the extramental sphere, it reduces art- works to crude thematic material , falling strangely short of Freud's own theory of the "dreamwork. " As with all positivists, the fictional element in artworks is vastly overestimated by the presumed analogy with the dream. In the process of production, what is projected is only one element in the artist's relation to the art- work and hardly the definitive one; idiom and material have their own impor- tance, as does, above all, the product itself; this rarely if ever occurs to the ana- lysts. The psychoanalytic thesis, for instance, that music is a defense against the threat of paranoia, does indeed for the most part hold true clinically, yet it says nothing about the quality and content of a particular composition. The psycho-
ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS 0 9
analytic theory of art is superior to idealist aesthetics in that it brings to light what is internal to art and not itself artistic. It helps free art from the spell of absolute spirit. Whereas vulgar idealism, rancorously opposed to knowledge of the artwork and especially knowledge of its entwinement with instinct, would like to quaran- tine art in a putatively higher sphere , psychoanalysis works in the opposite direc- tion, in the spirit of enlightenment. Where it deciphers the social character that speaks from a work and in which on many occasions the character of its author is manifest, psychoanalysis furnishes the concrete mediating links between the struc- ture of artworks and the social structure. But psychoanalysis too casts a spell re- lated to idealism, that of an absolutely subjective sign system denoting subjective instinctual impulses. It unlocks phenomena, but falls short of the phenomenon of art. Psychoanalysis treats artworks as nothing but facts, yet it neglects their own objectivity, their inner consistency, their level of form, their critical impulse, their relation to nonpsychical reality, and, finally, their idea of truth. When a painter, obeying the pact of total frankness between analyst and patient, mocked the bad Viennese engravings that defaced his walls, she was informed by the analyst that this was nothing but aggression on her part. Artworks are incomparably less a copy and possession of the artist than a doctor who knows the artist exclusively from the couch can imagine. Only dilettantes reduce everything in art to the un- conscious, repeating cliches. In artistic production, unconscious forces are one sort of impUlse, material among many others. They enter the work mediated by the law of form; if this were not the case, the actual subject portrayed by a work would be nothing but a copy. Artworks are not Thematic Apperception Tests of their makers. Part of the responsibility for this philistinism is the devotion of psychoanalysis to the reality principle: Whatever refuses to obey this principle is always merely "escape"; adaptation to reality becomes the summum bonum. Yet reality provides too many legitimate reasons for fleeing it for the impulse to be met by the indignation of an ideology sworn to harmony; on psychological grounds alone , art is more legitimate than psychology acknowledges . True , imag- ination is escape, but not exclusively so: What transcends the reality principle toward something superior is always also part of what is beneath it; to point a taunting finger at it is malicious. The image of the artist, as one of the tolerated, integrated as a neurotic in a society sworn to the division of labor, is distorted. Among artists of the highest rank, such as Beethoven or Rembrandt, the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality; this, truly, would be a worthwhile object for the psychology of art. It would need to decipher the artwork not just as being like the artist but as being unlike as well, as labor on a reality re- sisting the artist. If art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a bet- ter world. This frees the total dialectic, whereas the view of art as a merely subjec- tive language of the unconscious does not even touch it.
Kant's aesthetics is the antithesis ofFreud's theory ofartas wish fulfillment. Dis-
10 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
interested liking is the first element of the judgment of taste in the "Analytic of the Beautiful. "l0 There interest is termed "the liking that we combine with the repre- sentation of the existence of an object. "l l It is not clear, however, if what is meant by the "representation of the existence of an object" is its content, the thematic material in the sense of the object treated in the work, or the artwork itself; the pretty nude model or the sweet resonance of a musical tone can be kitsch or it can be an integral element of artistic quality . The accent on "representation" is a con- sequence of Kant's SUbjectivistic approach, which in accord with the rationalistic tradition, notably that of Moses Mendelssohn, tacitly seeks aesthetic quality in the effect the artwork has on the observer. What is revolutionary in the Critique of Judgment is that without leaving the circle of the older effect-aesthetics Kant at the same time restricted it through immanent criticism; this is in keeping with the whole of his subjectivism, which plays a significant part in his objective effort to save objectivity through the analysis of subjective elements. Disinterestedness sets itself at a distance from the immediate effect that liking seeks to conserve, and this initiates the fragmentation of the supremacy of liking. For, once shorn of what Kant calls interest, satisfaction becomes so indeterminate that it no longer serves to define beauty . The doctrine of disinterested satisfaction is impoverished vis-a-vis the aesthetic; it reduces the phenomenon either to formal beauty, which when isolated is highly dubious, or to the so-called sublime natural object. The sublimation of the work to absolute form neglects the spirit of the work in the in- terest of which sublimation was undertaken in the first place. This is honestly and involuntarily attested by Kant's strained footnote,12 in which he asserts that a judgment of an object of liking may indeed be disinterested, yet interesting; that is, it may produce interest even when it is not based on it. Kant divides aesthetic feeling-and thus, in accord with the whole of his model, art itself-from the power of desire , to which the "representation of the existence of an object" refers; the liking of such a representation "always has reference to the power of desire. "13 Kant was the first to achieve the insight, never since forgotten, that aesthetic com- portment is free from immediate desire; he snatched art away from that avaricious philistinism that always wants to touch it and taste it. Nevertheless, the Kantian motif is not altogether alien to psychoanalytic art theory : Even for Freud artworks are not immediate wish fulfillments but transform unsatisfied libido into a socially productive achievement, whereby the social value of art is simply assumed, with uncritical respect for art's public reputation. Although Kant emphasizes the dif- ference between art and the power of desire - and thereby between art and empiri- cal reality - much more energetically than does Freud, he does not simply idealize art: The separation of the aesthetic sphere from the empirical constitutes art. Yet Kant transcendentally arrested this constitution, which is a historical process, and simplistically equated it with the essence ofthe artistic, unconcerned that the sub? jective , instinctual components of art return metamorphosed even in art's maturest form, which negates them. The dynamic character of the artistic is much more
ART. SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 11
fully grasped by Freud's theory of sublimation. But for this Freud clearly had to pay no smaller a price than did Kant. If in the latter's case, in spite of his prefer- ence for sensual intuition, the spiritual essence of the artwork originates in the dis- tinction between aesthetic and practical, appetitive behavior, Freud's adaptation of the aesthetic to the theory of the instincts seems to seal itself off from art's spiri- tual essence; for Freud, artworks are indeed, even though sublimated, little more than plenipotentiaries of sensual impulses, which they at best make unrecogniz- able through a sort of dreamwork. The confrontation of these two heterogeneous thinkers-Kant not only rejected philosophical psychologism but in his old age increasingly rejected all psychology-is nevertheless permitted by a commonal- ity that outweighs the apparently absolute difference between the Kantian con- struction of the transcendental subject, on the one hand, and the Freudian recourse to the empirically psychological on the other: Both are in principle subjectively oriented by the power of desire , whether it is interpreted negatively or positively. For both , the artwork exists only in relation to its observer or maker. By a mecha- nism to which his moral philosophy is subordinate, even Kant is compelled to consider the existing individual, the ontic element, more than is compatible with the idea of the transcendental subject. There is no liking without a living person who would enjoy it. Though it is never made explicit, the Critique ofJudgment is as a whole devoted to the analysis of constituta. Thus what was planned as a bridge between theoretical and practical pure reason is vis-a-vis both an UAAO 'Y? vo? . Indeed, the taboo on art - and so far as art is defined it obeys a taboo, for definitions are rational taboos - forbids that one take an animalistic stance toward the object, that is, that one dominate it by physically devouring it. But the power of the taboo corresponds to the power that it prohibits. There is no art that does not contain in itself as an element, negated, what it repulses. If it is more than mere indifference, the Kantian "without interest" must be shadowed by the wildest interest, and there is much to be said for the idea that the dignity of artworks de- pends on the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested. Kant denies this in favor of a concept of freedom that castigates as heteronomous whatever is not born exclusively of the subject. His theory of art is distorted by the insuffi- ciency of the doctrine of practical reason. The idea of something beautiful, which possesses or has acquired some degree of autonomy in the face of the sovereign I, would, given the tenor of his philosophy, be disparaged as wandering off into in- telligible realms. But along with that from which art antithetically originated, art is shorn of all content, and in its place he posits something as formal as aesthetic satisfaction. For Kant, aesthetics becomes paradoxically a castrated hedonism, desire without desire. An equal injustice is done both to artistic experience, in which liking is by no means the whole of it but plays a subordinate role, and to sensual interest, the suppressed and unsatisfied needs that resonate in their aes- thetic negation and make artworks more than empty patterns. Aesthetic disinter- estedness has broadened interest beyond particularity. The interest in the aesthetic
1 2 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
totality wanted to be, objectively, an interest in a correct organization of the whole. It aims not at the fulfillment of the particular but rather at unbound possi- bility , though that would be no possibility at all without the presupposition of the fulfillment of the particular. Correlative to the weakness of Kant's aesthetics, Freud's is much more idealistic than it suspects. When artworks are translated purely into psychical immanence, they are deprived of their antithetic stance to the not-I, which remains unchallenged by the thorniness of artworks. They are exhausted in the psychical performance of gaining mastery over instinctual renun- ciation and, ultimately, in the achievement of conformity. The psychologism of aesthetic interpretation easily agrees with the philistine view of the artwork as harmoniously quieting antagonisms, a dream image of a better life, unconcerned with the misery from which this image is wrested. The conformist psychoanalytic endorsement of the prevailing view of the artwork as a well-meaning cultural commodity corresponds to an aesthetic hedonism that banishes art' s negativity to the instinctual conflicts of its genesis and suppresses any negativity in the finished work. If successful sublimation and integration are made the end-all and be-all of the artwork , it loses the force by which it exceeds the given , which it renounces by its mere existence. The moment, however, the artwork comports itselfby retaining the negativity ofreality and taking a position to it, the concept of disinterestedness is also modified. Contrary to the Kantian and Freudian interpretation of art, art- works imply in themselves a relation between interest and its renunciation. Even the contemplative attitude to artworks, wrested from objects of action, is felt as the announcement of an immediate praxis and-to this extent itself practical - as a refusal to play along. Only artworks that are to be sensed as a form of comport- ment have a raison d'etre. Art is not only the plenipotentiary of a better praxis than that which has to date predominated, but is equally the critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo and in its service . It gives the lie to production for production's sake and opts for a form of praxis beyond the spell of labor. Art's promesse du bonheur means not only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness but that happiness is beyond praxis. The measure of the chasm separating praxis from happiness is taken by the force of negativity in the artwork. Certainly Kafka does not awaken the power of desire.
Yet the real fear triggered by prose works like Metamorphosis or The Penal Colony, that shock of revulsion and disgust that shakes the physis, has, as defense, more to do with desire than with the old disinterestedness canceled by Kafka and what fol- lowed him. As a response, disinterestedness would be crudely inadequate to his writings. Ultimately disinterestedness debases art to what Hegel mocked, a pleas- ant or useful plaything of Horace's Ars Poetica. It is from this that the aesthetics of the idealist age, contemporaneously with art itself, freed itself. Only once it is done with tasteful savoring does artistic experience become autonomous. The route to aesthetic autonomy proceeds by way of disinterestedness; the emanci- pation of art from cuisine or pornography is irrevocable. Yet art does not come
ART,SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 13
to rest in disinterestedness, For disinterestedness immanently reproduces-and transforms-interest. In the false world all 1l00vll is false. For the sake of happi- ness , happiness is renounced. It is thus that desire survives in art.
Pleasure masquerades beyond recognition in the Kantian disinterestedness. What popular consciousness and a complaisant aesthetics regard as the taking pleasure in art, modeled on real enjoyment, probably does not exist. The empirical subject has only a limited and modified part in artistic experience tel quel, and this part may well be diminished the higher the work's rank. Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he is convicted by expressions like "a feast for the ears. " Yet if the last traces ofpleasure were extirpated, the question of what artworks are for would be an embarrassment. Actually, the more they are understood, the less they are enjoyed. Formerly, even the traditional attitude to the artwork, ifit was to be absolutely relevant to the work, was that of admiration that the works exist as they do in themselves and not for the sake of the observer. What opened up to, and overpowered, the beholder was their truth, which as in works of Kafka's type out-
weighs every other element. They were not a higher order of amusement. The re- lation to art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared into the material; this is even more so in modern works that shoot to- ward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film. Ask a musician if the music is a pleasure , the reply is likely to be - as in the American joke of the gri- macing cellist under Toscanini-"1just hate music. " For him who has a genuine relation to art, in which he himself vanishes , art is not an object; deprivation of art would be unbearable for him, yet he does not consider individual works sources of joy. Incontestably, no one would devote himself to art without-as the bourgeois put it-getting something out of it; yet this is not true in the sense that a balance sheet could be drawn up: "heard the Ninth Symphony tonight, enjoyed myself so and so much" even though such feeble-mindedness has by now established itself as common sense. The bourgeois want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better. Reified consciousness provides an ersatz for the sensual immedi- acy of which it deprives people in a sphere that is not its abode. While the art- work's sensual appeal seemingly brings it close to the consumer, it is alienated from him by being a commodity that he possesses and the loss of which he must constantly fear. The false relation to art is akin to anxiety over possession. The fetishistic idea of the artwork as property that can be possessed and destroyed by reflection has its exact correlative in the idea of exploitable property within the psychological economy of the self. If according to its own concept art has become what it is, this is no less the case with its classification as a source of pleasure; in- deed, as components of ritual praxis the magical and animistic predecessors of art were not autonomous; yet precisely because they were sacred they were not ob- jects of enjoyment. The spiritualization of art incited the rancor of the excluded and spawned consumer art as a genre, while conversely antipathy toward con- sumer art compelled artists to ever more reckless spiritualization. No naked Greek
1 4 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
sculpture was a pin-up. The affinity of the modem for the distant past and the ex- otic is explicable on the same grounds: Artists were drawn by the abstraction from natural objects as desirable; incidentally, in the construction of "symbolic art" Hegel did not overlook the unsensuous element of the archaic. The element of pleasure in art, a protest against the universally mediated commodity character, is in its own fashion mediable: Whoever disappears into the artwork thereby gains dispensation from the impoverishment of a life that is always too little . This plea- sure may mount to an ecstasy for which the meager concept of enjoyment is hardly adequate , other than to produce disgust for enjoying anything . It is striking, incidentally, that an aesthetic that constantly insists on subjective feeling as the basis of all beauty never seriously analyzed this feeling. Almost without excep- tion its descriptions were banausic, perhaps because from the beginning the sub- jective approach made it impossible to recognize that something compelling can be grasped of aesthetic experience only on the basis of a relation to the aesthetic object, not by recurring to the fun of the art lover. The concept of artistic enjoy- ment was a bad compromise between the social and the socially critical essence of the artwork. If art is useless for the business of self-preservation-bourgeois society never quite forgives that-it should at least demonstrate a sort of use- value modeled on sensual pleasure . This distorts art as well as the physical fulfill- ment that art's aesthetic representatives do not dispense. That a person who is incapable of sensual differentiation-who cannot distinguish a beautiful from a flat sound, a brilliant from a dull color-is hardly capable of artistic experience, is hypostatized. Aesthetic experience does indeed benefit from an intensified sen- sual differentiation as a medium of giving form, yet the pleasure in this is always indirect. The importance of the sensual in art has varied; after an age of asceticism pleasure becomes an organ ofliberation and vivaciousness, as it did in the Renais- sance and then again in the anti-Victorian impulse of impressionism; at other moments creatural sadness has borne witness to a metaphysical content by erotic excitement permeating the forms. Yet however powerful, historically, the force of pleasure to return may be, whenever it appears in art literally, undefracted, it has an infantile quality . Only in memory and longing , not as a copy or as an immedi- ate effect, is pleasure absorbed by art. Ultimately, aversion to the crudely sensual alienates even those periods in which pleasure and form could still communicate in a more direct fashion; this not least of all may have motivated the rejection of impressionism.
Underlying the element of truth in aesthetic hedonism is the fact that in art the means and the ends are not identical. In their dialectic, the former constantly asserts a certain, and indeed mediated, independence. Through the element of sensuous satisfaction the work's sine qua non, its appearance, is constituted. As Alban Berg said, it is a prosaic matter to make sure that the work shows no nails sticking out and that the glue does not stink; and in many of Mozart's composi- tions the delicacy of expression evokes the sweetness of the human voice. In
ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS 0 15
important artworks the sensous illuminated by its art shines forth as spiritual just as the abstract detail, however indifferent to appearance it may be, gains sensuous luster from the spirit of the work. Sometimes by virtue of their differentiated for- mal language, artworks that are developed and articulated in themselves play over, secondarily, into the sensuously pleasing. Even in its equivalents in the vi- sual arts , dissonance , the seal of everything modern, gives access to the alluringly sensuous by transfiguring it into its antithesis, pain: an aesthetic archetype of am- bivalence. The source of the immense importance of all dissonance for new art since Baudelaire and Tristan-veritably an invariant of the modern-is that the immanent play of forces in the artwork converges with external reality: Its power over the subject intensifies in parallel with the increasing autonomy of the work . Dissonance elicits from within the work that which VUlgar sociology calls its so- cial alienation. 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.
16 0 SITUATION
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,
SITUATION 0 17
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
? 18 0 SITUATION
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
SITUATION 0 19
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
20 0 SITUATION
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-
SITUATION 0 21
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
22 0 SITUATION
is. This abstractness has nothing in common with the fonnal character of older aesthetic nonns such as Kant's.