No More Learning

From the perspective of the philosophy of history , it is hardly an improper generalization of what is all too divergent if one derives the antiharmonic gestures of Michelangelo , of the late Rembrandt , and of Beethoven's last works not from the subjective suffering of their development as artists but from the dynamic of the concept of harmony itself and ultimately from its insufficiency . Dissonance is the truth about harmony . If the ideal of harmony is taken strictly, it proves to be unreachable according to its own concept. Its desid- erata are satisfied only when such unreachableness appears as essence, which is how it appears in the late style of important artists. Far beyond any individual oeu- vre, this style has exemplary force: that of the historical suspension of aesthetic harmony altogether. The rejection of the ideal of classicism is not the result of the alternation of styles or, indeed, of an alleged historical temperament; it is, rather, the result of the coefficient of friction in harmony itself, which in corporeal form presents what is not reconciled as reconciled and thereby transgresses the very postulate of the appearing essence at which the ideal of harmony aims. The eman- cipation from this ideal is an aspect of the developing truth content of art .
The rebellion against semblance, art's dissatisfaction with itself, has been an in- termittent element of its claim to truth from time immemorial. Art, whatever its material, has always desired dissonance, a desire suppressed by the affirmative power of society with which aesthetic semblance has been bound up. Dissonance is effectively expression; the consonant and harmonious want to soften and elimi- nate it. Expression and semblance are fundamentally antithetical. If expression is scarcely to be conceived except as the expression of suffering-joy has proven inimical to expression, perhaps because it has yet to exist, and bliss would be beyond expression-expression is the element immanent to art through which, as one of its constituents, art defends itself against the immanence that it develops by its law of form. Artistic expression comports itself mimetically, just as the expres- sion of living creatures is that of pain. The lineaments of expression inscribed in artworks, if they are not to be mute, are demarcation lines against semblance. Yet, in that artworks as such remain semblance, the conflict between semblance- form in the broadest sense-and expression remains unresolved and fluctuates historically. Mimetic comportment-an attitude toward reality distinct from the fixated antithesis of subject and object-is seized in art-the organ of mimesis since the mimetic taboo-by semblance and, as the complement to the autonomy of form, becomes its bearer. The unfolding of art is that of a quid pro quo: Expres-
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sion, through which nonaesthetic experience reaches most deeply into the work, becomes the archetype of everything fictive in art, as if at thejuncture where art is most permeable to real experience culture most rigorously stood guard that the border not be violated. The expressive values of artworks cease to be immediately those of something alive. Refracted and transformed, they become the expression oftheworkitself: Thetermmusicajictaistheearliestevidenceofthis. Thatquid pro quo not only neutralizes mimesis , it also derives from it. If mimetic comport- ment does not imitate something but rather makes itself like itself, this is precisely what artworks take it upon themselves to fulfill. In their expression, artworks do not imitate the impulses of individuals , nor in any way those of their authors; in cases where this is their essential determination, they fall as copies precisely to the mercy of that reification that the mimetic impulse opposes. At the same time ar- tistic expression enforces on itself history's judgment that mimesis is an archaic comportment, that as an immediate practice mimesis is not knowledge, that what makes itself like itself does not become truly alike, that mimetic intervention failed. Thus mimesis is banished to art that comports itself mimetically , just as art absorbs the critique of mimesis into itself by carrying out the objectivation of this impulse.
Although there has rarely been doubt that expression is an essential element of art-even the present hesitancy toward expression confirms its relevance and actually holds for art as a whole-its concept, like most key aesthetic concepts, is recalcitrant to the theory that wants to name it: What is qualitatively contrary to the concept per se can only with difficulty be brought within the bounds of its con- cept; the form in which something may be thought is not indifferent to what is thought. From the perspective of the philosophy of history , expression in art must be interpreted as a compromise. Expression approaches the transsubjective; it is the form of knowledge that - having preceded the polarity of subject and object- does not recognize this polarity as definitive. Art is secular, however, in that it at- tempts to achieve such knowledge within the bounds of the polarity of subject and object, as an act of autonomous spirit. Aesthetic expression is the objectification of the non-objective , and in fact in such a fashion that through its objectification it becomes a second-order nonobjectivity: It becomes what speaks out of the artifact not as an imitation of the subject. Yet precisely the objectivation of expression, which coincides with art, requires the subject who makes it and-in bourgeois terms-makes use of his own mimetic impulses. Art is expressive when what is objective, subjectively mediated, speaks, whether this be sadness, energy, or long- ing. Expression is the suffering countenance of artworks. They tum this counte- nance only toward those who return its gaze, even when they are composed in happy tones or glorify the vie opportune of rococo . If expression were merely the doubling of the subjectively felt, it would be null and void; the artist who con- demns a work as being an impression rather than an invention knows this per- fectly well. Rather than such feelings, the model of expression is that of extra-
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artistic things and situations. Historical processes and functions are already sedimented in them and speak out of them. Kafka is exemplary for the gesture of art when he carries out the retransformation of expression back into the actual occurrences enciphered in that expression-and from that he derives his irre- sistibility. Yet expression here becomes doubly puzzling because the sedimented, the expressed meaning, is once more meaningless; it is natural history that leads to nothing but what, impotently enough, it is able to express. Art is imitation exclusively as the imitation of an objective expression, remote from psychology, of which the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world and which now subsists only in artworks. Through expression art closes itself off to being- for-another, which always threatens to engulf it, and becomes eloquent in itself: This is art's mimetic consummation. Its expression is the antithesis of expressing something.
Such mimesis is the ideal ofart,not its practical procedure, nor is it an attitude di- rected toward expressive values. The contribution made to expression by the artist is the power of mimicry, which in him releases the expressed; if what is expressed becomes the tangible content [InhaltJ of the artist's soul, and the artwork a copy of this content, the work degenerates into a blurred photograph. Schubert' s resig- nation has its locus not in the purported mood of his music, nor in how he was feeling-as if the music could give a clue to this-but in the It is thus4 that it an- nounces with the gesture of letting oneself fall: This is its expression. Its quintes- sence is art ' s character of eloquence,s fundamentally distinct from language as its medium. It is worth speculating whether the former is incompatible with the lat- ter; that would in part explain the effort of prose since Joyce to put discursive lan- guage out of action, or at least to subordinate it to formal categories to the point that construction becomes unrecognizable: The new art tries to bring about the transformation of communicative into mimetic language. By virtue of its double character, language is a constituent of art and its mortal enemy . Etruscan vases in the Villa Giulia are eloquent in the highest degree and incommensurable with all communicative language. The true language of art is mute, and its muteness takes priority over poetry's significative element, which in music too is not altogether lacking. That aspect of the Etruscan vases that most resembles speech depends most likely on their Here I am or This is what I am, a selfhood not first excised by identificatory thought from the interdependence of entities. Thus the rhinoceros, that mute animal, seems to say: "I am a rhinoceros. " Rilke's line "for there is no place / without eyes to see you,"6 which Benjamin held in high esteem, codified the nonsignificative language of artworks in an incomparable fashion: Expression is the gaze of artworks. Compared to significative language, the language of ex- pression is older though unfulfilled: as if artworks, by molding themselves to the subject through their organization, recapitulated the way the subject originated, how it wrested itself free. 7 Artworks bear expression not where they communicate the subject, but rather where they reverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity,
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ofensoulment, for which tremolo ofany sort is a miserable surrogate. This is the affinity of the artwork to the subject and it endures because this protohistory sur- vives in the subject and recommences in every moment of history. Only the sub- ject is an adequate instrument of expression however much, though it imagines itself unmediated, it is itself mediated. However much the expressed resembles the subject, however much the impulses are those of the subject, they are at the same time apersonal, participating in the integrative power of the ego without ever becoming identical with it. The expression of artworks is the nonsubjective in the subject; not so much that subject's expression as its copy; there is nothing so expressive as the eyes ofanimals-especially apes-which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human. By the transposition of impulses into artworks, which make them their own by virtue of their integration, these impulses remain the plenipotentiary in the aesthetic continuum of extra-aesthetic nature yet are no longer incarnate as its afterimage. This ambivalence is registered by every gen- uine aesthetic experience, and incomparably so in Kant's description of the feel- ing of the sublime as a trembling between nature and freedom. Such modification of mimesis is, without any reflection on the spiritual, the constitutive act of spiri- tualization in all art. Later art only develops this act, but it is already posited in the modification of mimesis through the work , provided that it does not occur through mimesis itself as, so to speak, the physiologically primordial form of spirit. The modification shares the guilt of the affirmative character of art because it mollifies the pain through imagination just as the spiritual totality in which this pain disap- pears makes it controllable and leaves it untransformed.
However much art is marked and potentiated by universal alienation, it is least alienated insofar as everything in it passes through spirit-is humanized-without force. Art oscillates between ideology and what Hegel confirmed as the native do- main of spirit, the truth of spirit's self-certainty. No matter how much spirit may exert domination in art, its objectivation frees it from the aims of domination. In that aesthetic structures create a continuum that is totally spirit, they become the semblance of a blocked being-in-itself in whose reality the intentions of the sub- ject would be fulfilled and extinguished. Art corrects conceptual knowledge be- cause,incompleteisolation,itcariresoutwhatconceptualknowledgeinvainawaits from the nonpictorial subject-object relation: that through a subjective act what is objective would be unveiled. Art does not postpone this act ad infinitum but de- mands it of its own finitude at the price of its illusoriness. Through spiritualization, the radical domination of nature - its own - art corrects the domination of nature as the domination of an other. What establishes itself in the artwork as an alien and rudimentary fetish that endures in opposition to the subject is the plenipo- tentiary of the nonalienated; by contrast, however, what comports itself in the world as though it were unidentical nature is reduced all the more surely to the material of the domination of nature, to a vehicle of social domination, and is thus truly alienated. Expression, by which nature seeps most deeply into art, is at the same
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time what is not literally nature , a memento of what expression itself is not, of what could not have become concrete except through the how of that expression .
The mediation of expression in artworks through their spiritualization-which in expressionism's early period was evident to its most important exponents- implies the critique of that clumsy dualism of form and expression that orients traditional aesthetics as well as the consciousness of many genuine artists. 8 Not that this dichotomy is without any basis. The preponderance of expression at one point, and ofthe formal aspect at another, cannot be denied, especially in older art, which offered impulses a framework. Since then both elements have become inextricably mediated by each other. Where works are not fully integrated, not fully formed , they sacrifice precisely the expressivity for the sake of which they dispense with the labor and effort of form, and the supposedly pure form that dis- avows expression rattles mechanically. Expression is a phenomenon of inter- ference, a function of technical procedures no less than it is mimetic. Mimesis is itself summoned up by the density of the technical procedure, whose immanent rationality indeed seems to work in opposition to expression. The compulsion exerted by integral works is equivalent to their eloquence, to what speaks in them , and no merely suggestive effect; suggestion is , furthermore , itself related to mimetic processes. This leads to a subjective paradox of art: to produce what is b l i n d , e x p r e s s i o n , b y w a y o f r e f l e c t i o n , t h a t i s , t h r o u g h fo r m ; n o t t o r a t i o n a l i z e t h e blind but to produce it aesthetically, "To make things of which we do not know what they are. "9 This situation, which has today been sharpened to an antithesis, has a long prehistory. In speaking ofthe precipitate ofthe absurd, the incommen- surable, in every artwork, Goethe not only formulated the modern constellation of the conscious and unconscious but also envisioned the prospect that the sphere of art sheltered from consciousness as a preserve of the unconscious would become that spleen as which art understood itself to be in the second romanticism since Baudelaire: a virtually self-transcending preserve built into rationality. Pointing this out, however, does not dispatch art: Whoever argues against modernism in this fashion holds mechanically to the dualism of form and expression. What the- orists take for a strictly logical contradiction is familiar to artists and unfolds in their work as that control over the mimetic element that summons up, destroys, and redeems its spontaneity . Spontaneity amid the involuntary is the vital element of art, and this ability is a dependable criterion of artistic capacity, though it does not gloss over the fatality of this capacity . Artists are familiar with this capacity as their sense of form . It provides the mediating category to the Kantian problematic of how art, which Kant considered blatantly nonconceptual, subjectively bears that element of the universal and the necessary that, according to the critique of reason, is reserved exclusively for discursive knowledge. The sense of form is the reflection, at once blind and binding, of the work in itself on which that reflection must depend; it is an objectivity closed to itself that devolves upon the subjective mimetic capacity, which for its part gains its force through its antithesis, rational
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construction. The blindness of the sense of form corresponds to the necessity in the object. The irrationality of the expressive element is for art the aim of all aes- thetic rationality. Its task is to divest itself, in opposition to all imposed order, both of hopeless natural necessity and chaotic contingency. Aesthetic necessity be- comes aware of its fictive element through the experience of contingency . But art does not seek to dojustice to contingency by its intentional, fictive incorporation in order thus to depotentiate its subjective mediations . Rather, art does justice to the contingent by probing in the darkness of the trajectory of its own necessity. The more truly art follows this trajectory, the less self-transparent art is. It makes itself dark. Its immanent process has the quality of following a divining rod. To follow where the hand is drawn: This is mimesis as the fulfillment of objectivity; examples of automatic writing, including the Schoenberg who wrote Erwartung, were inspired by this utopia, only to be compelled to discover that the tension between expression and objectivation does not issue in their identity. There is no middle position between the self-censorship of the need for expression and the concessiveness of construction. Objectivation traverses the extremes. When untamed by taste or artistic understanding the need for expression converges with the bluntness of rational objectivity . On the other hand, art ' s "thinking of itself," its noesis noeseos, is not to be restrained by any preordained irrationality. Aes- thetic rationality must plunge blindfolded into the making of the work rather than directing it extemally as an act of reflection over the artwork. Artworks are smart or foolish according to their procedures, not according to the thoughts their au- thor has about them. Such immanent understanding of the material assures that Beckett's work is at every point sealed tightly against superficial rationality. This is by no means the exclusive prerogative of modem art but equally evident in the abbreviations in late Beethoven, in the renunciation of superfluous and to this extent irrational ornamentation. Conversely, lesser artworks, facile music espe- cially, are marked by an immanent stupidity, to which modernism's ideal ofmatu- rity was a polemical reaction. The aporia of mimesis and construction compels artworks to unite radicalism with deliberation, without the aid of any apocryphal,
trumped-up hypotheses.
Deliberation , however, does not resolve the aporia. Historically, one of the roots of the rebellion against semblance is the allergy to expression; here, if anywhere in art, the relation between the generations plays a part. Expressionism became the father image. Empirically it has been confirmed that inhibited, conventional, and aggressive-reactionary individuals tend to reject "intraception"-self-awareness- in any form, and along with it expression as such, as being all too human. 1O They are the ones who, in a context of general estrangement from art, declare them- selves with particular resentment against modernism. Psychologically they obey defense mechanisms with which a weakly developed ego repudiates whatever dis- turbs its restricted functional capacity and may, above all, damage its narcissism. This psychological posture is that of an "intolerance to ambiguity, " an impa-
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tience with what is ambivalent and not strictly definable; ultimately, it is the refusal of what is open, of what has not been predetermined by any jurisdiction, ultimately of experience itself. Immediately back of the mimetic taboo stands a sexual one: Nothing should be moist; art becomes hygienic. Many artistic direc- tions identify with this taboo and with the witch hunt against expression . The anti- psychologism of modernism has shifted its function. Once a prerogative of the avant-garde, which rebelled against lugendstil as well as against a realism pro- tracted by a tum toward inwardness, this antipsychologism was meanwhile socialized and made serviceable to the status quo. The category of inwardness, ac- cording to Max Weber's thesis, is to be dated back to Protestantism, which sub- ordinated works to faith. Although inwardness, even in Kant, implied a protest against a social order heteronomously imposed on its subjects, it was from the be- ginning marked by an indifference toward this order, a readiness to leave things as they are and to obey. This accorded with the origin of inwardness in the labor process: Inwardness served to cultivate an anthropological type that would duti- fully , quasi-voluntarily , perform the wage labor required by the new mode of pro- duction necessitated by the relations of production . With the growing powerless- ness of the autonomous subject, inwardness consequently became completely ideological , the mirage of an inner kingdom where the silent majority are indem- nified for what is denied them socially; inwardness thus becomes increasingly shadowy and empty, indeed contentless in itself. Art no longer wants to accom- modate itself to this situation . Yet art is scarcely imaginable without the element of inwardness. Benjamin once said that in his opinion inwardness could go fly a kite. This was directed against Kierkegaard and the "philosophy of inwardness" that claimed him as their founder, even though that term would have been as anti- pathetic to the theologian as the word ontology. Benjamin had in mind abstract subjectivity that powerlessly sets itself up as substance. But his comment is no more the whole truth than abstract subjectivity is. Spirit-certainly Benjamin's own-must enter itself if it is to be able to negate what is opaque. This could be demonstrated by the antithesis of Beethoven and jazz, a contrast to which many musicians' ears are already beginning to be deaf. Beethoven is, in modified yet determinable fashion , the full experience of external life returning inwardly, just as time-the medium of music-is the inward sense; popular music, in all of its many varieties does not undergo this sublimation and is, as such, a somatic stimu- lant and therefore regressive vis-a. -vis aesthetic autonomy. Even inwardness par- ticipates in dialectics, though not as Kierkegaard thought. The result of the liqui- dation of inwardness was by no means the surfacing of a type of person cured of ideology but rather one who never became an individual in the first place, the type David Riesmann termed "outer-directed. " This casts a reconciling light on the category of inwardness in art. In fact, the rabid denunciation of radically ex- pressive works as being examples of hyperbolic late romanticism has become the predictable babble of all those who favor a return to the pristine. Aesthetic self-
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relinquishment in the artwork requires not a weak or confonnist ego but a forceful one. Only the autonomous self is able to tum critically against itself and break through its illusory imprisonment. This is not conceivable as long as the mimetic element is repressed by a rigid aesthetic superego rather than that the mimetic ele- ment disappears into and is maintained in the objectivation of the tension between itself and its antithesis. All the same, semblance is most strikingly obvious in expression because it makes its appearance as if it were illusionless even while subsuming itself to aesthetic semblance; major criticism of expression has been sparked by its perception as theatrics. In the fully administered world, the mimetic taboo-a keystone ofbourgeois ontology-encroached on the zone that had been tolerantly reserved for mimesis, whereby it beneficially revealed human immedi- acy to be a lie. Beyond this, however, the allergy to expression supports that ha- tred of the subject without which no critique of the commodity world would even be meaningful. The subject is abstractly negated. Indeed, the subject-which in compensation inflates itself the more powerless and functional it becomes-is false consciousness the moment it lays claim to expression by feigning a rele- vance that was withdrawn from it. Yet the emancipation of society from the supremacy of its relations of production has as its aim what these relations have to date impeded-the real establishment of the subject-and expression is not sim- ply the hubris of the subject but the lament over its miscarir age as a cipher of its possibility. Certainly. the allergy to expression may be most profoundly legiti- mated by the fact that something in expression tends toward mendacity, regard- less of any aesthetic manipulation. Expression is a priori imitation. Latently im- plicit in expression is the trust that by being spoken or screamed all will be made better: This is a rudiment of magic, faith in what Freud polemically called the "omnipotence of thought. " Yet expression is not altogether circumscribed by the magic spell. That it is spoken, that distance is thus won from the trapped immedi- acy of suffering, transfonns suffering just as screaming diminishes unbearable pain. Expression that has been objectivated as language endures; what has once been said never fades away completely, neither the evil nor the good, neither the slogan of "the final solution" nor the hope of reconciliation. What accedes to lan- guage enters the movement of a humanness that does not yet exist; it is compelled toward language and alive only by virtue of its helplessness. Stumbling along be- hind its reification , the subject limits that reification by means of the mimetic ves- tige, the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of mutilated life , which subverts the subject to ideology. The inextricability of reification and mimesis defines the aporia of artistic expression. There is no general test for deciding if an artist who wipes out expression altogether has become the mouthpiece of reified consciousness or of the speechless, expressionless expression that denounces it. Authentic art knows the expression of the expressionless, a kind of weeping with- out tears. By contrast, Neue Sachlichkeit's polished extirpation of expression con- tributes to universal confonnism and subordinates antifunctional art to a principle
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that originates entirely in functionality. This form ofreaction fails to recognize in expression what is not metaphorical, not ornamental; the more unreservedly art- works open themselves to this, the more they become depositions of expression and effectively invert Sachlichkeit. At the very least it is evident that antiexpressive and, like Mondrian's, affirmatively mathematized artworks have by no means passed final judgment on expression. If the subject is no longer able to speak directly, then at least it should-in accord with a modernism that has not pledged itself to absolute construction - speak through things, through their alienated and mutilated form.
The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the ? ontemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be com- prehended. What is so resistlessly absorbed as a cliche by the watchword-the absurd-could only be recuperated by a theory that thinks its truth. It cannot sim- ply be divided off from the spiritualization of artworks as counterpoint to that spiritualization; this counterpoint is, in Hegel's words, the ether of artworks; it is spirit itself in its omnipresence and not the intention of the enigma. For in that it negates the spirit that dominates nature, the spirit of artworks does not appear as spirit. It ignites on what is opposed to it, on materiality. In no way is spirit most present in the most spiritual artworks. Art is redemptive in the act by which the spirit in it throws itself away. Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of artworks produces the shudder by exter- nalizing it in objects . Thus art participates in the actual movement of history in ac- cord with the law of enlightenment: By virtue of the self-reflection of genius, what once seemed to be reality emigrates into imagination, where it survives by becom- ing conscious of its own unreality . The historical trajectory of art as spiritualiza- tion is that of the critique of myth as well as that toward its redemption: The imag- ination confirms the possibilities of what it recollects. This double movement of spirit in art describes its protohistory, which is inscribed in its concept, rather than its empirical history . The uncheckable movement of spirit toward what has eluded it becomes in art the voice that speaks for what was lost in the most distantly archaic .
Mimesis in art is the prespiritual; it is contrary to spirit and yet also that on which spirit ignites. In artworks, spirit has become their principle of construction, al- though it fulfills its telos only when it emerges from what is to be constructed, from the mimetic impulses, by shaping itself to them rather than allowing itself to be imposed on them by sovereign rule. Form objectivates the particular impulses only when it follows them where they want to go of their own accord. This alone is the methexis of artworks in reconciliation . The rationality of artworks becomes spirit only when it is immersed in its polar opposite. The divergence of the con- structive and the mimetic , which no artwork can resolve and which is virtually the
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original sin of aesthetic spirit, has its correlative in that element of the ridiculous and clownish that even the most significant works bear and that, unconcealed, is inextricable from their significance. The inadequacy of classicism of any persua- sion originates in its repression of this element; a repression that art must mistrust. The progressive spiritualization of art in the name of maturity only accentuates the ridiculous all the more glaringly; the more the artwork's own organization assimilates itself to a logical order by virtue of its inner exactitude , the more obvi- ously the difference between the artwork's logicity and the logicity that governs empirically becomes the parody of the latter; the more reasonable the work be- comes in terms of its formal constitution, the more ridiculous it becomes accord- ing to the standard of empirical reason. Its ridiculousness is, however, also part of a condemnation of empirical rationality; it accuses the rationality of social praxis of having become an end in itself and as such the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends. The ridiculous in art, which philistines recognize better than do those who are naIvely at home in art, and the folly of a rationality made absolute indict one other reciprocally; incidentally, when viewed from the perspective of the praxis of self-preservation, happiness-sex-is equally ridiculous, as can be spitefully pointed out by anyone who is not driven by it. Ridiculousness is the resi- due of the mimetic in art, the price of its self-enclosure. In his condemnation of this element, the philistine always has an ignominious measure ofjustification. The ridiculous, as a barbaric residuum of something alien to form, misfires in art if art fails to reflect and shape it. If it remains on the level of the childish and is taken for such, it merges with the ca1culatedjUn of the culture industry . By its very concept, art implies kitsch , just as by the obligation it imposes of sublimating the ridiculous it presupposes educational privilege and class structure;fun is art's punishment for this. All the same, the ridiculous elements in artworks are most akin to their in- tentionless levels and therefore, in great works, also closest to their secret. Foolish subjects like those of The Magic Flute and Der Freischutz have more truth con- tent through the medium of the music than does the Ring, which gravely aims at the ultimate. In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the pri- mordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adultsdrive out ofthemjust as they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to recapture it and be flooded with joy; the lan- guage of little children and animals seems to be the same.
In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up; the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.
As a thing that negates the world of things, every artwork is a priori helpless when it is called on to legitimate itself to this world; still, art cannot simply refuse the demand for legitimation by pointing to this apriority . It is hard to be astonished by art's enigmaticalness if it is taken neither as a source of pleasure, as it is for those
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alien to art, nor as an exceptional realm, as it is for the connoisseur, but as the sub- stance of personal experience; yet this substance demands that the elements of art not be abandoned but secured when art is fundamentally challenged by its experi- ence. An inkling of this is had when artworks are experienced in so-called cultural contexts that are alien or incommensurable to them. In these situations artworks are displayed naked to the test of their cui bono, a test from which they are pro- tected only by the leaky roof of their own familiar context. In such situations the disrespectful question, which ignores the taboo surrounding the aesthetic zone, often becomes fateful to the quality of a work; observed completely externally the artworks' dubiousness is uncovered as relentlessly as when they are observed completely internally. The enigmaticalness of artworks remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became an enigma; it is history that ever and again makes them such, and, conversely, it is history alone-which gave them their authority - that holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d'etre. The enigmaticalness of artworks is less their irrationality than their ratio- nality; the more methodically they are ruled, the more sharply their enigmatical- ness is thrown into relief. Through form, artworks gain their resemblance to lan- guage, seeming at every point to say just this and only this, and at the same time whatever it is slips away.
All artworks-and art altogether-are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art. That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language. This characteristic cavorts clownishly; if one is within the artwork, if one participates in its immanent completion, this enigmaticalness makes itself invisible; if one steps outside the work, breaking the contract with its immanent context, this enig- maticalness returns like a spirit. This gives further reason for the study of those who are alien to art: In their proximity the enigmaticalness of art becomes out- rageous to the point that art is completely negated, unwittingly the ultimate criti- cism of art and, in that it is a defective attitude, a confirmation of art's truth. It is impossible to explain art to those who have no feeling for it; they are not able to bring an intellectual understanding of it into their living experience. For them the reality principle is such an obsession that it places a taboo on aesthetic comport- ment as a whole; incited by the cultural approbation of art, alienness to art often changes into aggression, not the least of the causes of the contemporary deaes- theticization of art. Its enigmaticalness may in an elementary fashion confirm the so-called unmusical , who does not understand the " l anguage of music," hears noth- ing but nonsense, and wonders what all the noise is about; the difference between what this person hears and what the initiated hear defines art's enigmaticalness. This is ofcourse not restricted to music, whose aconceptuality makes it almost too obvious. Whoever refuses to reenact the work under the discipline it imposes falls under the empty gaze cast by a painting or poem, the same empty gaze that, in a sense, the art-alien encounter in music; and it is precisely the empty questioning
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gaze that the experience and interpretation o f artworks must assimilate if they are not to go astray; failing to perceive the abyss is no protection from it; however consciousness seeks to safeguard itself from losing its way is fateful. There is no answer that would convince someone who would ask such questions as "Why imi- tate something? " or "Why tell a story as if it were true when obviously the facts are otherwise and it just distorts reality? " Artworks fall helplessly mute before the question "What's it for? " and before the reproach that they are actually pointless. If, for instance, one responded that fictive narration can touch more deeply on the essence of historical reality than can factual reportage, a possible reply would be that precisely this is a matter of theory , and that theory has no need of fiction . This manifestation of the enigmaticalness of art as incomprehension in the face of questions of putatively grand principle is familiar in the broader context of the bluff inherent in the question as to the meaning of life . 1 The awkwardness prompted by such questions can easily be confused with their irrefutability; their level of ab- straction is so remote from what is effortlessly subsumed, that the actual question vanishes. Understanding art's enigmaticalness is not equivalent to understanding specific artworks, which requires an objective experiential reenactment from within in the same sense in which the interpretation of a musical work means its faithful performance. Understanding is itself a problematic category in the face of art's enigmaticalness. Whoever seeks to understand artworks exclusively through the immanence of consciousness within them by this very measure fails to understand them and as such understanding grows, so does the feeling of its insufficiency caught blindly in the spell of art, to which art's own truth content is opposed. If one who exits from this immanent context or was never in it registers the enigmati- calness with animosity, the enigmaticalness disappears deceptively into the artis- tic experience. The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level and the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness becomes. It only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest experience of art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance , only to return to those who thought they under- stood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question "What is it? " Art's enigmaticalness can, however, be recognized as constitutive where it is ab- sent: Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks . Enigma here is not a glib synonym for "problem," a concept that is only aesthetically significant in the strict sense of a task posed by the immanent composition of works. In no less strict terms, artworks are enigmas. They contain the potential for the solution; the solution is not objectively given. Every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer. The newspaper picture puzzle recapitulates playfully what artworks carry out in earn- est. Specifically, artworks are like picture puzzles in that what they hide-like Poe's letter-is visible and is, by being visible, hidden. The German language, in
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its protophilosophic description of aesthetic experience, rightly expresses that one understands something of art, not that one understands art. Connoisseurship of art is the combination of an adequate comprehension of the material and a narrow- minded incomprehension ofthe enigma; it is neutral to what is cloaked. Those who peruse art solely with comprehension make it into something straightforward, which is furthest from what it is. If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears. Of all the arts, music is the prototypical example of this: It is at once completely enigmatic and totally evident. It cannot be solved, only its form can be deciphered, and precisely this is requisite for the philosophy of art. He alone would understand music who hears with all the alienness of the unmusical and with all of Siegfried ' s familiarity with the language of the birds . Understanding , however, does not extinguish the enigmaticalness of art. Even the felicitously interpreted work asks for further understanding, as if waiting for the redemptive word that would dissolve its constitutive darkening. Following artworks through in the imagina- tion is the most complete , most deceptive surrogate for understanding, though ob- viously also a step toward it. Those who can adequately imagine music without hearing it possess that connection with it required for its understanding. Under- standing in the highest sense-a solution of the enigma that at the same time maintains the enigma- depends on a spiritualization of art and artistic experience whose primary medium is the imagination. The spiritualization of art approaches its enigmaticalness not directly through conceptual elucidation, but rather by con- cretizing its enigmaticalness. The solution of the enigma amounts to giving the reason for its insolubility, which is the gaze artworks direct at the viewer. The de- mand of artworks that they be understood, that their content be grasped , is bound to their specific experience; but it can only be fulfilled by way of the theory that reflects this experience. What the enigmaticalness of artworks refers to can only be thought mediatedly. The objection to the phenomenology of art , as to any phe- nomenology that imagines it can lay its hands directly on the essence, is not that it is antiempirical but, on the contrary, that it brings thinking experience to a halt. The much derided incomprehensibility of hermetic artworks amounts to the ad- mission of the enigmaticalness of all art. Part of the rage against hermetic works is that they also shatter the comprehensibility of traditional works. It holds true in general that the works sanctioned by tradition and public opinion as being well understood withdraw behind their galvanized surface and become completely incomprehensible; those manifestly incomprehensible works that emphasize their enigmaticalness are potentially the most comprehensible. Art in the most em- phatic sense lacks the concept even when it employs concepts and adapts its facade to comprehension. No concept that enters an artwork remains what it is; each and
every concept is so transformed that its scope can be affected and its meaning refashioned. In Trakl's poems the word "sonata" acquires a unique importance by its sound and by the associations established by the poem; if one wanted to envi- sion a particular sonata on the basis of the diffuse sounds that are suggested, the
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sense of the word in the poem could be missed just as the conjunct image would be incongruous with such a sonata and the sonata form itself. At the same time this would be legitimate, because the word coalesces out of fragments and scraps of sonatas and its very name is reminiscent of the sound that is meant and awak- ened in the work. The term sonata describes works that are highly articulated, mo- tivically and thematically wrought, and internally dynamic; their unity is a clearly differentiated manifold, with development and reprise. The verse, "There are rooms filled with chords and sonatas"2 retains little of this but has, rather, the feel- ing of the childish naming of names; it has more to do with the spurious title Moonlight sonata than with the composition itself and yet i s no coincidence ; with- out the sonatas that his sister played there would not have been the isolated sounds in which the melancholy of the poet sought shelter. Something of this marks even the poem's simplest words, which are drawn from communicative language; that is why Brecht's critique of autonomous art, that it simply reiterates what some- thing is, misses the mark. Even Trakl's omnipresent "is" is alienated in the art- work from its conceptual sense: It expresses no existential judgment but rather its pale afterimage qualitatively transformed to the point of negation; the assertion that something is amounts to both more and less and includes the implication that something is not. When Brecht or William Carlos Williams sabotages the poetic and approximates an empirical report, the actual result is by no means such a report: By the polemical rejection of the exalted lyrical tone, the empirical sen- tences translated into the aesthetic monad acquire an altogether different quality. The antilyrical tone and the estrangement of the appropriated facts are two sides of the same coin. Judgment itself undergoes metamorphosis in the artwork. Art- works are, as synthesis, analogous to judgment; in artworks, however, synthesis does not result in judgment; of no artwork is it possible to determine its judgment or what its so-called message is. It is therefore questionable whether artworks can possibly be engage, even when they emphasize their engagement. What works amount to, that in which they are unified, cannot be formulated as ajudgment, not even as one that they state in words and sentences. Morike has a little poem entitled "Mousetrap Rhyme. " If one restricted interpretation to its discursive content, the poem would amount to no more than sadistic identification with what civilized custom has done to an animal disdained as a parasite:
Mousetrap Rhyme
The child circles the mousetrap three times and chants:
Little guest, little house.
Dearest tiny or grown-up mouse boldly pay us a visit tonight
when the moon shines bright!
But close the door back of you tight, you hear?
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And careful for your little tail ! After dinner we will sing After dinner we will spring And make a little dance: Swish, Swish!
My oid cat will probably be dancing with}
The child's taunt, "My oid cat will probably be dancing with"-if it really is a taunt and not the involuntarily friendly image of child, cat, and mouse dancing, the two animals on their hind legs - once appropriated by the poem, no longer has the last word. To reduce the poem to a taunt is to ignore its social content [Inhalt] along with its poetic content. The poem is the nonjUdgmental reflex of language on a miserable, socially conditioned ritual, and as such it transcends it by subordi- nating itself to it. The poem's gesture, which points to this ritual as if nothing else were possible, holds court over the gapless immanence of the ritual by turning the force of self-evidence into an indictment of that ritual . Art judges exclusively by abstaining from judgment; this is the defense of naturalism. Form, which shapes verse into the echo of a mythical epigram, negates its fatefulness. Echo reconciles. These processes, transpiring in the interior of artworks, make them truly infinite in themselves. It is not that artworks differ from significative language by the absence of meanings; rather, these meanings through their absorption become a matter of accident. The movements by which this absorption of meaning occurs are concretely prescribed by every aesthetically formed object.
Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being determinate and indeterminate . They are question marks , not univocal even through synthesis. Nevertheless their figure is so precise that it determines the point where the work breaks off. As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by the structure. This is the function of the work's immanent logic, of the lawfulness that transpires in it, and that is the theodicy of the concept of purpose in art. The aim of artworks is the determination of the indeterminate . Works are purposeful in themselves , without having any positive purpose beyond their own argran ement; their purposefulness , however, is legitimated as the figure of the answer to the enigma. Through organi- zation artworks become more than they are. In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of ecriture has become relevant , inspired probably by Klee's drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illumines the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writ- ing. If no artwork is ever a judgment, each artwork contains elements derived from judgment and bears an aspect of being correct and incorrect , true and false . Yet the silent and determinate answer of artworks does not reveal itself to inter- pretation with a single stroke, as a new immediacy , but only by way of all media-
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tions, those of the works' discipline as well as those of thought and philosophy. The enigmaticalness outlives the interpretation that arrives at the answer. If the enigmaticalness of artworks is not localized in what is experienced in them, in aesthetic understanding -if the enigmaticalness only bursts open in the distance- the experience that immerses itself in the artworks and is rewarded with corrobo- ration itself becomes enigmatic: the enigma that what is multivocally entwined can be univocally and compellingly understood as such. For the experience of art- works , whatever its starting point , is as Kant himself described it, necessarily im- manent and transparent right into its most sublime nuance. The musician who understands the score follows its most minute impulses, and yet in a certain sense he does not know what he plays; the situation is no different for the actor, and pre- cisely in this is the mimetic capacity made manifest most drastically in the praxis of artistic performance as the imitation of the dynamic curves of what is per- formed; it is the quintessence of understanding this side of the enigma. However, as soon as the experience of artworks flags, they present their enigma as a gri- mace. Incessantly the experience of artworks is threatened by their enigmatical- ness. If enigmaticalness disappears completely from the experience, if experience supposes that it has become completely immanent to the object, the enigma's gaze suddenly appears again; thus is preserved the artworks' seriousness, which stares out of archaic images and is masked in traditional art by their familiar language
until strengthened to the point of total alienation.
Ifthe process immanent to artworks constitutes the enigma, that is, what surpasses the meaning of all its particular elements , this process at the same time attenuates the enigma as soon as the artwork is no longer perceived as fixed and thereupon vainly interpreted but instead once again produced in its objective constitution. In performances that do not do this, that do not interpret, the in-itselfofthe artworks, which such asceticism claims to serve , becomes the booty of its muteness; every noninterpretive performance is meaningless. If some types of art, drama, and to a certain extent music , demand that they be played and interpreted so that they can become what they are - a norm from which no one is exempt who is at home in the theater or on the podium and knows the qualitative difference between what is required there and the texts and scores - these types actually do no more than illu- minate the comportment of an artwork, even those that do not want to be per- formed: This comportment is that each artwork is the recapitulation of itself. Art- works are self-likeness freed from the compulsion of identity. The Aristotelian dictum that only like can know like, which progressive rationality has reduced to a marginal value, divides the knowledge that is art from conceptual knowledge: What is essentially mimetic awaits mimetic comportment. If artworks do not make themselves like something else but only like themselves, then only those who imitate them understand them. Dramatic or musical texts should be regarded exclusively in this fashion and not as the quintessence of instructions for the per- formers: They are the congealed imitation of works, virtually of themselves, and
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to this extent constitutive although always permeated with significative elements. Whether or not they are performed is for them a matter of indifference; what is not, however, a matter of indifference is that their experience -which in terms of its ideal is inward and mute-imitates them. Such imitation reads the nexus of their meaning out of the signa of the artworks and follows this nexus just as imita- tion follows the curves in which the artwork appears. As laws of their imitation the divergent media find their unity, that of art. If in Kant discursive knowledge is to renounce the interior of things, then artworks are objects whose truth cannot be thought except as that of their interior. Imitation is the path that leads to this interior.
Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales : "If you want the absolute , you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it. " The truth of discursive knowl- edge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowl- edge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with art. Through the freedom of the subject in them, artworks are less subjective than is discursive knowledge. With unerring compass, Kant subordinated art to a concept of tele- ology whose positive application he did not concede to empirical understanding . However, the block that according to Kant's doctrine obstructs the in-itself to people, shapes that in-itself in artworks - the doctrine's proper domain, in which there is no longer to be any difference between what is in-itself and what is for- itself-as enigmatic figures: Precisely because they are blocked, artworks are im- ages of being-in-itself. Ultimately , what lives on in art's enigmaticalness, through which art most abruptly opposes the unquestionable existence of objects of action , i s the latter ' s own enigma. Art becomes an enigma because it appears to have solved what is enigmatical in existence, while the enigma in the merely existing is forgotten as a result of its own overwhelming ossification. The more densely people have spun a categorial web around what is other than subjective spirit, the more fundamentally have they disaccustomed themselves to the wonder of that other and deceived themselves with a growing familiarity with what is foreign. Art hopes to correct this, though feebly and with a quickly exhausted gesture. A priori , art causes people to wonder , just as Plato once demanded that philosophy do, which, however , decided for the opposite .
The enigma of artworks is their fracturedness. If transcendence were present in them, they would be mysteries, not enigmas; they are enigmas because, through their fracturedness, they deny what they would actually like to be. Only in the recent past-in Kafka's damaged parables-has the fracturedness of art become thematic. Retrospectively. all artworks are similar to those pitiful allegories in graveyards, the broken-off stelae. Whatever perfection they may lay claim to, art- works are lopped off; that what they mean is not their essence is evident in the fact that their meaning appears as if it were blocked. The analogy here to astrological superstition, which similarly depends on a purported relationship as much as it leaves this relationship obscure, is too insistently obvious to be dismissed lightly:
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Art's blemish is that it is bound up with superstition. Art all too happily, and irra- tionally, revalues this blemish as a merit. The much touted complexity of art is the falsely positive name for its enigmaticalness. This enigmaticalness, however, has an antiaesthetic aspect, which Kafka irrevocably unveiled. By their failure with regard to their own element of rationality , artworks threaten to relapse into myth, from which they have been precariously wrested. Art is mediated in spirit-the element of rationality - in that it produces its enigmas mimetically, just as spirit devises enigmas, but without being capable of providing the solution; it is in art's enigmaticalness, not in its meanings, that spirit is manifest. In fact, the praxis of important artists has an affinity with the making of puzzles, as is evident in the delight taken by composers over many centuries in enigmatic canons. Art's enig- matic image is the configuration of mimesis and rationality. This enigmatical- ness emerged out of a historical process. Art is what remains after the loss of what was supposed to exercise a magical, and later a cultic, function. Art's why-and- wherefore - its archaic rationality, to put it paradoxically - was forfeited and transformed into an element of its being-in-itself. Art thus became an enigma; if it no longer exists for the purpose that it infused with meaning, then what is it? Its enigmaticalness goads it to articulate itself immanently in such a fashion that it achieves meaning by forming its emphatic absence of meaning . To this extent , the enigmaticalness of artworks is not all there is to them; rather, every authentic work also suggests the solution to its unsolvable enigma.
Ultimately , artworks are enigmatic in terms not of their composition but of their truth content. The indefatigably recurring question that every work incites in who- ever traverses it-the "What is it all about? "-becomes "Is it true? "-the ques- tion of the absolute , to which every artwork responds by wresting itself free from the discursive form of answer. A taboo on any possible answer is all that discur- sive thought can offer. Art itself, which is the mimetic struggle against this taboo, seeks to impart the answer and yet, being nonjudging, does not impart it; thus art becomes as enigmatic as the terror born of the primordial world, which, though it metamorphoses, does not disappear; all art remains the seismogram of that terror. The key to art's enigma is missing, just as it has been lost for the writings of many peoples who have perished. The most extreme form in which the question posed by the enigmaticalness of art can be formulated is whether or not there is meaning. For no artwork is without its own coherence, however much this coherence may be transformed into its own opposite. Through the objectivity of the work, this coherence posits the claim to the objectivity of meaning in-itself. This claim is not only nonnegotiable, it is contravened by experience. Enigmaticalness peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer that it requires-like that of the sphinx - were always the same, although only by way of the diversity , not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception-that is the enigma.
The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by
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each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth con- tent. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justifica- tion of aesthetics . Although no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determina- tions, as is the case with what art judges, each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless turns toward interpretive reason. No message is to be squeezed out of Hamlet; this in no way impinges on its truth con- tent. That great artists, the Goethe who wrote fairy tales no less than Beckett, want nothing to do with interpretations only underscores the difference ofthe truth con- tent from the consciousness and the intention of the author and does so by the strength of the author' s own self-consciousness. Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation. The claim that there is nothing to inter- pret in them, that they simply exist, would erase the demarcation line between art and nonart. Ultimately, perhaps, even carpets, ornaments, all nonfigural things longingly await interpretation. Grasping truth content postulates critique . Nothing is grasped whose truth or untruth is not grasped, and this is the concern of critique. The historical development of works through critique and the philosophical de- velopment of their truth content have a reciprocal relation. The theory of art must not situate itself beyond art but must rather entrust itself to its laws of movement while recognizing that artworks hermetically seal themselves off against the con- sciousness of these laws of movement. Artworks are enigmatic in that they are the physiognomy of an objective spirit that is never transparent to itself in the mo- ment in which it appears. The absurd, the category most refractory to interpreta- tion, inheres in that spirit that is requisite to the interpretation of artworks. At the same time, the need of artworks for interpretation, their need for the production of their truth content, is the stigma of their constitutive insufficiency. Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy be- tween the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma. They have truth content and they do not have it. Positive science and the philosophy de- rived from it do not attain it. It is neither the work's factual content nor its fragile and self-suspendable logicality. Nor-despite traditional philosophy-is art's truth content its idea, even if that idea is so broad as to include the tragic or the conflict between the finite and the infinite. Indeed, in its philosophical construc- tion such an idea rises above subjective intention. Yet, however applied, it re- mains external to the artwork and abstract. Even idealism's emphatic concept of the idea relegates artworks to examples of the idea as instances of what is ever- the-same. Thispasses sentenceontheruleoftheideainart,justasthisideacanno longer hold its ground to philosophical critique. The content [Gehalt] of art does not reduce without remainder into the idea, rather, this content is the extrapolation of what is irreducible; among academic aestheticians only Friedrich Theodor Vischer had an inkling of this . Just how little the truth content converges with the subjective idea, with the intention of the artist, is evident to the most rudimentary consideration. There are artworks in which the artist brought out clearly and sim-
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ply what he wanted, and the result, nothing more than an indication of what the artist wanted to say, is thereby reduced to an enciphered allegory. The work dies as soon as philologists have pumped out of it what the artist pumped in, a tauto- logical game whose schema is true also of many musical analyses . The difference between truth and intention in artworks becomes evident to critical consciousness when the object of the artist's intention is itself false, those usually eternal truths in which myth simply reiterates itself. Mythical inevitability usurps truth. Innu- merable artworks suffer from the fact that they lay claim to being a process of constant self-transformation and development and yet subsist as an atemporal se- quence of what is ever-the-same. It is at such points of fracture that technological critique becomes the critique of the untrue and thus allies itself with the truth con- tent. There are good reasons to hold that in artworks technical failure is indicated by the metaphysically false.