No More Learning

Lodged even in the highest work is an element that is for-other, a mortal remnant of seeking applause. Perfection, beauty itself, asks: "Am I not beautiful? " and thus sins against itself. Conversely, the most lamentable kitsch, which yet neces- sarily appears as art, cannot help raising a claim to what it disdains, the element of being in-itself, which it betrays. Colette was talented. She succeeded in making something as graceful as the small novel Mitsou and something as enigimatic as the heroine's attempted escape in The Innocent Libertine. Altogether she was a refined and linguistically cultivated version of Vicky Baum. 34 She provided un- bearably heart-warming pseudonature and did not balk in the face of intolerable scenes such as the end of the novel in which to general approbation the frigid heroine finally finds pleasure in the arms of her legitimate spouse. Colette de- lighted her audience with family novels set in a milieu of high-class prostitution . The most significant objection to French art, which nourished the whole of mod- ernism, is that the French have no word for kitsch, precisely that which is a source of pride in Germany. The truce between the domains of entertainment and serious art bears witness to the neutralization of culture: Because no spirit is binding for culture's spirit, culture offers its wares in a selection for highbrows, middlebrows, and lowbrows. The social need for amusement and what is called relaxation is ex- ploited by a society whose involuntary members would otherwise hardly put up with the burden and monotony of their life and who in their allotted and adminis- tered leisure time are hardly capable of taking in anything but what is forced on them by the culture industry , and that in truth includes the pseudo-individualization of novels a la Colette. But the need for entertainment does not improve it; it barters off and dulls the dregs of serious art and comes up with meager, abstractly
standardized, and incoherent results. Entertainment, including its more exalted products and especially those that seek a touch of nobility, has become vulgar ever since the exchange society caught hold of artistic production and made it too a commodity. Art is vulgar when it degrades people by cancelling its distance from an already degraded humanity; it confirms what the world has made of them rather than that its gesture revolts against it. Insofar as they embody the identifica-
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tion of people with their own debasement, the grinning cultural commodities are vulgar. No direct relation exists between social need and aesthetic quality, not even in the sphere of so-called functional art. The need to construct buildings in Germany in the decades after World War II was probably more pressing than it had been for centuries. Yet postwar German architecture is pitiful. Voltaire's equation of vrai besoin and vrai plaisir does not hold aesthetically; the quality of artworks can be meaningfully brought into relation with social need only when mediated by a theory of society as a whole, not on the basis of what a people need at any given time, which can for that reason be all the more easily imposed on them.
One of the defining elements of kitsch may well be the simulation of nonexisting feelings and thus their neutralization along with the neutralization of the aesthetic phenomenon. Kitsch is art that cannot be or does not want to be taken seriously and yet through its appearance postulates aesthetic seriousness. But, however illu- minating this may be, it is not adequate, and this applies not only to that broad range of base and unsentimental kitsch. Emotion is simulated; but whose emo- tion? The author's? But the author's emotion cannot be reconstructed, nor is any correlation to it a criterion of art. All aesthetic objectivation diverges from the immediate impulse. Or is it the emotion of those to whom the author ascribes it? Then these emotions would be as fictional as the dramatis personae themselves. If the definition of kitsch is to be meaningful, the expression of the artwork must be considered in itself an index veri etfalsi; but to judge the expressive authenticity of a work leads to such endless complications-one of which is the historical transformation of the truth content of the means of expression-that they could only be solved casuistically and even then not definitively. Kitsch is qualitatively distinct both from art and from its proliferation, as is predetermined by the contra- diction that autonomous art must dispose over the mimetic impulses that are themselves opposed to such control. Through the artwork the mimetic impulses already undergo the injustice that culminates in the abolition of art and its substi- tution by the schemata of fiction. The critique of kitsch must be vigilant, though it takes its toll on art as well. The revolt of art against its a priori affinity with kitsch was one of the essential laws of development in its recent history , and it partici- pates in the destruction of works. What once was art can later become kitsch. Per- haps this history of collapse is the history of the correction of art, its true progress.
In the face of the obvious dependency of fashion on the profit motive and its embeddedness in capitalist industry - which, for instance in the art market , which finances painters but overtly or covertly demands in exchange that they furnish whatever style of work the market expects of them, extends into so-called artistic fashions and directly undermines autonomy-fashion in art is no less corruptible than the zeal of ideological art agents who transform every apology into advertise-
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ment. What makes it worth salvaging, however, is that though it hardly denies its complicity with the profit system, it is itself disdained by that system. By suspend- ing aesthetic values such as those of inwardness, timelessness, and profundity, fashion makes it possible to recognize the degree to which the relation of art to these qualities, which are by no means above suspicion, has become a pretext. Fashion is art's permanent confession that it is not what it claims to be. For its indiscreet betrayals fashion is as hated as it is a powerful force in the system; its double character is a blatant symptom of its antinomy. Fashion cannot be sepa- rated from art as neatly as would suit bourgeois art religion. Ever since the aes- thetic subject polemically distanced itself from society and its prevailing spirit , art communicates with this objective spirit, however untrue it is, through fashion. Fashion is certainly no longer characterized by that spontaneity and simple origi- nality that was earlier, and probably wrongly, attributed to it: It is entirely manipu- lated and in no way a direct adaptation to the demands of the marketplace , even if these demands are sedimented in it and the consensus of the marketplace is still requisite for fashion to succeed. Because, however, manipUlation in the age of monopoly capitalism is itself the prototype of ruling social relations of produc- tion, fashion's octroi itself represents a socially objective power. If, in one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien ,35 fashion - doubtful of any possibility of such spiritual reconciliation - appropriates alienation itself. For fashion, alienation becomes the living model of a social being-thus-and-not-otherwise [So-und-nicht-anders-Sein] , to which it surrenders as if in ecstasy. If it is not to betray itself, art must resist fashion, but it must also innervate fashion in order not to make itself blind to the world, to its own substance. In his poetic work and in his essays, Baudelaire was the first to practice this double relation toward fashion. Of this his eulogy for Constantin Guys36 is the most compelling evidence. For Baudelaire, the artist de la vie moderne is he who remains in self-control while abandoning himself to what is completely ephemeral. Even the first artist of the highest importance who rejected communication did not shut out fashion: Much of Rimbaud's poetry resonates with the tone of Parisian literary cabarets. Radically oppositional art, which ruthlessly renounced everything heterogeneous to it, in its ruthlessness also attacked the fiction of a subject existing purely for-itself, the disastrous illusion of a strictly self-engaging integrity that usually functions to hide a provincial phari- saism. In the age of the growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis-a-vis social objectivity, fashion registers the alien excess of objectivity in subjective spirit, which is painful yet all the same a corrective of the illusion that subjective spirit exists purely within itself. Against its detractors, fashion's most powerful re- sponse is that it participates in the individual impulse, which is saturated with his- tory; it did so paradigmatically in Jugendstil, in the paradoxical universality of loneliness as a style. The disdain of fashion, however, is provoked by its erotic element, in which fashion reminds art of what it never fully succeeded in subli-
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mating. Through fashion, art sleeps with what it must renounce and from this draws the strength that otherwise must atrophy under the renunciation on which art is predicated. If art, as semblance, is the clothing of an invisible body, fashion is clothing as the absolute. As such, they stand in accord with each other. The con- cept of the "latest mode" is a wretched one-linguistically, mode is allied with modernism-for it serves to defame in art what usually contains more truth than what claims to be unaffected by all the excitement and thus manifests a lack of sensitivity that disqualifies it artistically.
In the concept of art, play is the element by which art immediately raises itself above the immediacy of praxis and its purposes . Yet it is at the same time oriented toward the past, toward childhood, if not animality. In play, art-through its re- nunciation of functional rationality - at the same time regresses back of rational- ity. The historical compulsion for art to mature functions in opposition to its playfulness, though it does not cast it off altogether; any straightforward recourse to playful forms, on the other hand, inevitably stands in the service of restorative or archaizing social tendencies. Playful forms are without exception forms of repetitioQ. When they are employed affirmatively they are joined with the repeti- tion compulsion, to which they adapt and which they sanction as normative. In blunt opposition to Schillerian ideology, art allies itself with unfreedom in the specific character of play . Thereby art incorporates an element alien to it; the most recent deaestheticization of art covertly exploits the element of play at the cost of all others. When Schiller celebrates the play drive as quintessentially human because it is free of purpose, he, being the loyal bourgeois he was, interpreted the opposite of freedom as freedom, in accord with the philosophy of his age . The relationship of play to praxis is more complex than Schiller ' s Aesthetic Education makes it appear. Whereas all art sublimates practical elements, play in art-by its neutralization of praxis-becomes bound up specifically with its spell, the compulsion toward the ever-same , and, in psychological dependence on the death instinct, interprets obedience as happiness. In art, play is from the outset disci- plinary; it fulfills the taboo on expression that inheres in the ritual of imitation; when art exclusively plays, nothing remains of expression. Secretly, play is in complicity with fate, a plenipotentiary of the weight of the mythical, which art would like to throw off; the repressive aspect is obvious in such phrases as that of the rhythm of the blood, with which the formal playfulness of dance is so readily invoked. If games of chance are the opposite of art, as forms of play they never- theless extend into art. The putative play drive has ever been fused with the pri- macy of blind collectivity . Only when play becomes aware of its own terror, as in Beckett, does it in any way share in art's power of reconciliation . Art that is totally without play is no more thinkable than if it were totally without repetition, yet art is nevertheless able to define the remainder of horror within itself as being negative.
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Huizinga's much celebrated Homo Ludens has reintroduced the category of play as central to aesthetics, and not only there: Culture, he argues, originates as play. "To speak ofthe 'play element in culture' . . . is not to imply that among the various activities of civilized life an important place is reserved for play, nor that civiliza- tion has arisen out of play by some evolutionary process, in the sense that some- thing that was originally play passed into something that was no longer play and could henceforth be called culture. Rather, I wish to show that . . . culture is ini- tially played. "37 Huizinga's thesis succumbs to the critique ofthe definition of art by its origin . All the same , his thesis has its truth and its untruth . If one grasps the concept of play as abstractly as he does, it is clear that he is defining not some- thing specific but merely forms of comportment, which somehow distance them- selves from the praxis of self-preservation. He fails to realize how much the ele- ment of play is itself an afterimage of praxis rather than of semblance. In all play, action has fundamentally divested itselfof any relation to purpose, but in terms of its form and execution the relation to praxis is maintained. The element of repeti- tion in play is the afterimage of unfree labor, just as sports - the dominant extra- aesthetic form of play - is reminiscent of practical activities and continually ful- fills the function of habituating people to the demands of praxis, above all by the reactive transformation of physical displeasure into secondary pleasure, without their noticing that the contraband of praxis has slipped into it. Huizinga's thesis not only that human beings play with language but that language itself originates in play, sovereignly ignores the practical necessities contained in language, of which language frees itself only eventually, if ever. There is, furthermore, an ap- parent convergence of Huizinga's theory of language with Wittgenstein's; he, too, fails to grasp the constitutive relation of language to the extralinguistic . Neverthe- less, Huizinga's theory of play leads him to insights that are closed to the magical and religious-metaphysical reductions of art. He recognized that from the per- spective of the subject, aesthetic comportments that he comprehends under the name of play are at once true and untrue. This helps him to reach a remarkably compelling idea of humor: "One would like . . . to ask whether the primitive ' s be- lief in his holiest myths is not, even from the beginning , tinged with a certain ele- ment of humor. "38 "A half-joking element verging on make-believe is inseparable from true myth . "39 The religious festivals of primitive peoples are not those "of a complete ecstasy and illusion . . . . There is no lack of an underlying consciousness of things 'not being authentic. ' ''40 ''Whether one is sorcerer or sorcerized, one is always knower and dupe at once. But one chooses to be the dupe. "41 It is in this
consciousness of the untruth of the true that all art participates in humor, as do above all the dark works of modernism; Thomas Mann emphasized this quality in Kafka,42 and in Beckett it is obvious. In Huizinga's formulation, "The unity and indivisibility of belief and disbelief, the indissoluble connection between sacred seriousness and pretense and 'fun,' are best understood in the concept of play. "43 What is here predicated of play holds true for all art as well. Less tenable,
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however, is Huizinga's interpretation of the "hermetic character ofplay," which collides with his own dialectical definition of play as a unity of "belief and dis- belief. " His insistence on a unity in which ultimately the play of animals, children, primitives, and artists is not qualitatively but only gradually distinguished, anes- thetizes consciousness of the contradictoriness of the theory and fails to make good on Huizinga's own insight into the aesthetically constitutive nature of the contradiction.
On Surrealist Shock and Montage. - The paradox that what occurs in the ratio- nalized world nevertheless has history is shocking not least because by virtue of its historicity the capitalist ratio itself is revealed as irrational. Alarmed, the sen- sorium becomes aware of the irrationality of the rational.
Praxis would be the ensemble of means for minimizing material necessity, and as such it would be identical with pleasure, happiness, and that autonomy in which these means are sublimated. This however is impeded by practicality, which denies pleasure in the spirit of a society in which the ideal of full employment is substituted for that of the abolition of labor. The rationalism of a mentality that refuses to allow itself to look beyond the means-ends relation and confront it with its own ends is irrational. Praxis itself is fetishized. This contradicts its own con- cept, necessarily that of a for-other, which the concept loses the moment it is es- tablished as an absolute . This other is art' s - and theory ' s - moving force. The ir- rationality of which practicality accuses art is the corrective of its own irrationality .
The relation of art and society has its locus in art itself and its development , not in immediate partisanship, in what today is called commitment. It is equally fruitless to seek to grasp this relation theoretically by constructing as an invariant the non- conformist attitudes of art throughout history and opposing it to affirmative atti- tudes . There is no dearth of artworks that could only with difficulty be forced into a nonconformist tradition- which is in any case thoroughly fissured - whose ob- jectivity nevertheless maintains a profoundly critical stance toward society .
The demise of art, which is today being proclaimed with as much glibness as re- sentment, would be false, a gesture of conformism. The desublimation, the immedi- ate and momentary gain of pleasure that is demanded of art, is inner-aesthetically beneath art; in real terms, however, that momentary pleasure is unable to grant what is expected of it. The recently adopted insistence on culturing uncultivation, the enthusiasm for the beauty of street battles, is a reprise of futurist and dadaist actions. The cheap aestheticism of short-winded politics is reciprocal with the faltering of aesthetic power. Recommending jazz and rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the affirmative lie of culture but rather furnishes
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barbarism and the profit interest of the culture industry with a subterfuge. The allegedly vital and uncorrupted nature of such products is synthetically processed by precisely those powers that are supposedly the target of the Great Refusal:44 These products are the truly corrupt.
The thesis that the end of art is imminent or has already occurred recurs through- out history, and especially since the beginning of the modem age; Hegel reflects this thesis philosophically, he did not invent it. Though today it poses as being anti-ideological , it was until recently the ideology of historically decadent groups who took their own end to be the end of all things . The shift is probably marked by the Communist ban on modern art, which suspended the immanent aesthetic movement in the name of social progress; the mentality of the apparatchiks, how- ever, who thought this up, was the old petit bourgeois consciousness. Inevitably the thesis of the end of art can be heard at dialectical nodal points where a new form suddenly emerges that is directed polemically against the established form. Since Hegel the prophecy of the imminent end of art has more often been a com- ponent of a cultural philosophy that pronounces its judgment from on high than an element of actual artistic experience; in decrees totalitarian measures were pre- pared. The situation has, however , always looked different from within art. The Beckettian zero point- the last straw for a howling philosophy of culture - is , like the atom, infinitely full. It is not inconceivable that humanity would no longer need a closed, immanent culture once it actually had been realized; today, how- ever, the threat is a false destruction of culture , a vehicle of barbarism. The "/lfaut continuer," the conclusion of Beckett's The Unnamable, condenses this antinomy to its essence: that externally art appears impossible while immanently it must be pursued. What is new is that art must incorporate its own decline; as the critique of the spirit of domination it is the spirit that is able to turn against itself. The self- reflection of art penetrates to its own foundation and concretizes itself in it. The political significance, however, which the thesis of the end of art had thirty years ago, as for instance indirectly in Benjamin's theory ofreproduction, is gone; inci- dentally, despite his desperate advocacy of mechanical reproduction,45 in conver- sation Benjamin refused to reject contemporary painting: Its tradition, he argued, must be preserved for times less somber than our own. Nevertheless, in the face of the threatened transformation into barbarism it is better for art to come to a silent halt rather than to desert to the enemy and aid a development that is tantamount to integration into the status quo for the sake of its superior power. The lie in the in- tellectuals' proclamation of the end of art resides in their question as to what the point is of art , what its legitimation is vis-a-vis contemporary praxis. But the func- tion of art in the totally functional world is its functionlessness; it is pure super- stition to believe that art could intervene directly or lead to an intervention. The instrumentalization of art sabotages its opposition to instrumentalization; only where art respects its own immanence does it convict practical reason of its lack
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of reason. Art opposes the hopelessly antiquated principle of I'artpour I'art not by ceding to external purposes but by renouncing the illusion of a pure realm of beauty that quickly reveals itself as kitsch. By determinate negation artworks absorb the membra disjecta of the empirical world and through their transforma- tion organize them into a reality that is a counterreality, a monstrosity; this was Baudelaire's interpretation of the watchword of ['art pour ['art when he used it. Just how little this is the time for the abolition of art is apparent in its concretely open yet untried possibilities, which languish as if under a spell. Even when art in protest works itself free it remains unfree, for even the protest is constrained. Clearly it would be miserable apologetics to claim that the end of art cannot be en- visioned. In response, art can do no better than close its eyes and grit its teeth.
Sealing art off from empirical reality became an explicit program in hermetic po- etry. In the face of all of its important works-those of Celan, for instance-it is justified to askto what extent they are indeed hermetic; as Peter Szondi points out, that they are self-contained does not mean that they are unintelligible . On the con- trary, hermetic poetry and social elements have a common nexus that must be acknowledged. Reified consciousness, which through the integration of highly industrialized society becomes integral to its members, fails to perceive what is essential to the poems, emphasizing instead their thematic content and putative informational value. Artistically people can only be reached any longer by the shock that imparts a blow to what pseudo-scientific ideology calls communica- tion; for its part art is integral only when it refuses to play along with communica- tion. Hermetic procedures are, however, motivated by the growing pressure to separate the poetry from the thematic material and from the intentions . This pres- sure has extended from reflection to poetry, which seeks to take under its own auspices its raison d'etre, and this effort is at the same time its immanent law of movement. Hermetic poetry-the idea of which originated in the period of lugendstil and has something in common with the then prevalent concept of the "will to style"-can be seen as poetry that sets out to produce, from itself, what otherwise only emerges historically: its essential content; this effort has a chi- merical aspect in that it requires the transformation of emphatic content into inten- tion. Hermetic poetry makes thematic and treats explicitly what earlier in art occurred without its having been aimed at: To this extent Valery ' s idea of a recip- rocal relation between artistic production and self-reflection in the course of po- etic production is already formulated in Mallarme. Out of his desire for a utopian art free of everything art-alien, Mallarme was apolitical and therefore extremely conservative. But by his rejection of the sort of unctuous message as preached by every conservative voice today, he converges with his political counterpole, dadaism; in literary history there is never a scarcity of intermediaries . In the more than eighty years since Mallarme, hermetic poetry has been transformed, partly in response to the social tendency: The cliche about the ivory tower no longer ap-
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plies to the windowless monadic works. The beginnings were not free of the small-mindedness and desperate rapture of an art religion that convinced itself that the world was created for the sake of a beautiful verse or a well-turned phrase . In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German her- metic poetry, Paul Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan's poems want to speak of the most ex- treme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings , indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars. The last rudiments of the organic are liquidated; what Benjamin noted in Baudelaire, that his poetry is without aura, comes into its own in Celan's work. The infinite discre- tion with which his radicalism proceeds compounds his force. The language of the lifeless becomes the last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all mean- ing. The passage into the inorganic is to be followed not only in thematic motifs; rather, the trajectory from horror to silence is to be reconstructed in the hermetic works . Distantly analogous to Kafka' s treatment of expressionist painting , Celan transposes into linguistic processes the increasing abstraction of landscape, pro- gressively approximating it to the inorganic.
By appearing as art, that which insists that it is realistic injects meaning into real- ity , which such art is pledged to copy without illusion . In the face of reality this is a priori ideological. Today the impossibility of realism is not to be concluded on inner-aesthetic grounds but equally on the basis of the historical constellation of art and reality.
Today the primacy of the object and aesthetic realism are almost absolutely op- posed to each other, and indeed when measured by the standard of realism: Beckett is more realistic than the socialist realists who counterfeit reality by their very principle. If they took reality seriously enough they would eventually realize what Lukacs condemned when during the days of his imprisonment in Romania he is reported to have said that he had finally realized that Kafka was a realist writer.
The primacy of the object is not to be confused with the various attempts to ex- tract art from its subjective mediation and to siphon objectivity into it from the outer world. Art puts the prohibition on positive negation to the test, showing that indeed negation of the negative is not the positive, that it does not accomplish the reconciliation with an object that is unreconciled with itself.
The thesis that the sum of taboos implies a canon of what is correct appears in- compatible with the philosophical critique of the concept that the negation of the negation is a positive,46 a concept that both in theory and in the social practice it
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implies signifies the sabotage of the negative labor of understanding [Verstand]. In the idealist model of dialectics, this negative labor of understanding is trans- formed into an antithesis that is constrained by the fact that its critique is to serve the legitimation of the thesis at a higher level. Granted, in this regard art and theory are not absolutely different. The moment idiosyncrasies, the aesthetic plenipotentiaries of negation, are raised to the level of positive rules, they freeze into anonymous abstractions vis-a-vis the particular artwork and artistic experi- ence, and they mechanically subsume the interrelatedness of the artwork's ele- ments at the expense of that interrelatedness. Through canonization, advanced artistic means easily acquire a restorative cast and become allied with structural elements against which the very same idiosyncrasies, themselves transformed into rules, once struggled. If in art everything is a question of nuance, this is no less true of the nuance between proscription and prescription. Speculative ideal- ism, which culminated in Hegel's doctrine of positive negation, may have been borrowed from the idea of the absolute identity of artworks . Given their immanent economic principle and their artifactuality, artworks can in fact in themselves be much more consistent-and in the logical sense of the term more positive-than is theory, which is directly concerned with empirical reality. It is only through the progres s of reflection that the principle of identity proves to be illusory even in the artwork, because its other is constitutive of its autonomy; to this extent artworks too are alien to positive negation.
With regard to the aesthetic object, the thesis of the primacy of the object means the primacy of the object itself, the artwork, over its maker as well as over its recipients . As Schoenberg said, "After all, I paint a picture , not a chair. " Through this immanent primacy, the primacy of the external world is aesthetically medi- ated; unmediatedly, as the primacy of whatever the artwork presents, the primacy of the object would amount to the circumvention of the double character of the artwork. In the artwork, the concept of positive negation gains a new meaning: Aesthetically it is possible to speak of such positivity to the extent that the canon of historically necessary prohibitions serves the primacy of the object, that is, its immanent coherence.
Artworks present the contradictions as a whole, the antagonistic situation as a totality. Only by mediation, not by taking sides, are artworks capable of tran- scending the antagonistic situation through expression. The objective contradic- tions fissure the subject; they are not posited by the subject or the manufacture of his consciousness.
This is the true primacy of the object in the inner composition of artworks . The subject can be fruitfully extinguished in the aesthetic object only because the subject itself is mediated through the object and is simultaneously the suffering subject of expression. The antagonisms are articulated technically; that is, they are articulated in the immanent composition of the work, and it is
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this process of composition that makes interpretation permeable to the tensions external to it. The tensions are not copied but rather form the work ; this alone con- stitutes the aesthetic concept of form .
Even in a legendary better future , art could not disavow remembrance of accumu- lated horror; otherwise its form would be trivial .
Theories on the Origin of Art Excursus
The attempts to derive aesthetics from the origins of art as its essence are in- evitably disappointing) If the concept of origin is situated beyond history, the question takes on an ontological cast far removed from that solid ground that the prestigious concept of origin evokes; moreover, any invocation of the concept of origin that is divested of its temporal element transgresses against the simple meaning of the word, to which the philosophers of origin claim to be privy. Yet to reduce art historically to its prehistorical or early origins is prohibited by its char- acter, which is the result of historical development. The earliest surviving mani- festations of art are not the most authentic, nor do they in any way circumscribe art's range; and rather than best exemplifying what art is, they make it more ob- scure. It needs to be taken into account that the oldest surviving art, the cave paint- ings, belongs as a whole to the visual domain. Next to nothing is known of the music or poetry of the epoch; there are no indications of anything prehistoric that may have differed qualitatively from the optical works . Among aestheticians Croce was probably the first to condemn, in Hegelian spirit, the question ofthe historical origin of art as aesthetically irrelevant: "Since this 'spiritual' activity is its [his- tory ' s) object, the absurdity of propounding the historical problem of the origin of art becomes evident . . . If expression is a form of consciousness, how can one look for the historical origin of what is not a product of nature and is presupposed by human history? How can one assign a historical genesis to a thing that is a cate- gory by means of which all historical processes and facts are understood? "2 How- ever correct the intention may be not to confound what is oldest with the concept of the thing-itself, which only becomes what it is in the first place through its
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development, Croce's argumentation is dubious. By simply identifying art with expression, which is "presupposed by human history ," he once again defines art as what it should never be for the philosophy of history: a "category," an invariant form of consciousness, something that is static in form, even if Croce conceives it as pure activity or spontaneity. His idealism, no less than the Bergsonian streak in his aesthetics, keeps him from being able to perceive the constitutive relation of art to what it itself is not, to what is not the pure spontaneity of the subject; this fundamentally limits his critique of the question of origin. Still, the legion of em- pirical studies that have since been dedicated to the question hardly give cause to revise Croce's verdict. It would be too easy to blame this on the advancing posi- tivism that, out of fear of being contradicted by any next fact, no longer dares to undertake the construction of univocal theory and mobilizes the accumulation of facts in order to prove that genuine science can no longer put up with theory on a grand style. Ethnology, in particular, which according to the current division of labor has the responsibility of interpreting prehistoric findings , has let itself be in- timidated by the tendency stretching back to Frobenius to explicate everything ar- chaically puzzling in terms of religion , even when the findings themselves contra- dict such summary treatment . Nevertheless the scientific exclusion of the question of origin, which corresponds to the philosophical critique of origin, testifies to something more than the powerlessness of science and the terror of positivistic taboos . Melville J. Herskovits ' s study Man and His Work3 is characteristic of the interpretive pluralism that even a disillusioned science is unable to renounce. If contemporary science renounces any monistic answer to the question of the origin of art, the question of what art originally was and has remained ever since, it thereby discloses an element of truth. Art did not become a unified whole until a very late stage. There is reason to doubt whether such integration is not more that of the concept than that of what it claims to comprehend. The forced quality of the term Sprachkunstwerk-the linguistic artwork- now popular among German- ists, awakens suspicion by its unceremonial subsumption of poetry to art through the mediation of language , even though art unquestionably became unified in the course of the process of enlightenment. The most archaic artistic manifestations are so diffuse that it is as difficult as it is vain to try to decide what once did and did not count as art. In later ages as well, art consistently resisted the process of unification in which it was simultaneously caught up. Its own concept is not indif- ferent to this. What seems to grow hazy in the half-light of prehistory is vague not only because of its distance but because it guards something of the indeterminate , of what is inadequate to the concept, which progressive integration tirelessly men-
aces. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the oldest cave paintings, whose naturalism is always so readily affirmed, demonstrated the greatest fidelity to the portrayal of movement, as if they already aspired to what Valery ultimately demanded: the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate , of what has not been nailed down. 4 If so, the impulse of these paintings was not naturalistic imitation but, rather, from
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the beginning a protest against reification . Blame for ambiguity is not, or not only, to be ascribed to the limitedness of knowledge but is characteristic of prehistory itself. Univocity exists only since the emergence of sUbjectivity .
The so-called problem of origin echoes in the controversy over whether naturalis- tic depiction or symbolic-geometrical forms came first. Implicit in this question is the hope that it will provide what is needed to discern the primordial essence of a r t . T h i s h o p e i s d e c e p t i v e . Arn o l d H a u s e r o p e n s h i s S o c i a l H i s t o ry of A rt w i t h t h e thesis that during the Paleolithic age naturalism was older: "The monuments of primitive art . . . clearly suggest . . . that naturalism has the prior claim, so that it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain the theory of the primacy of an art remote from life and nature. "5 The polemical overtone against the neoromantic doctrine of the religious origin of art is unmistakable . Yet this important historian
straight away restricts the thesis of the priority of naturalism. Hauser, while still employing the two habitually contrasting theses, criticizes them as anachronistic: "The dualism of the visible and the invisible, of the seen and the merely known, remains absolutely foreign to Paleolithic art. "6 He recognizes the element of un- differentiatedness from reality in the earliest art, as well as the undifferentiated- ness from reality of the sphere of semblance. 7 Hauser maintains something akin to the priority of naturalism on the basis of a theory of magic that asserts the "recip- rocal dependence of the similar. "8 For him, similarity is effectively replicability, and it exercises practical magic. Accordingly , Hauser divides magic sharply from religion, the former exclusively serving to procure means of sustenance. This sharp division is obviously hard to reconcile with the theorem of a primordial un- differentiatedness. On the other hand, it helps to establish replication as funda- mental, even though other scholars, such as Erik Holm, contest the hypothesis of the utilitarian-magical function of the replica. 9 Hauser, by contrast, contends that "the Paleolithic hunter and painter thought he was in possession of the thing itself in the picture, thought he had won power over the portrayed by the portrayal. "l0 With certain reservations, Resch also tends toward this position. 11 On the other hand, Katesa Schlosser finds that the most striking characteristic of Paleolithic portrayal is the deviation from the natural image; this deviation, however, is not attributed to any "archaic irrationalism" but rather , following Lorenz and Gehlen ,1 2 is interpreted as an expressive form of a biological ratio. Clearly, the thesis of magical utilitarianism and naturalism stands up in the face of the evidence no more than does Holm' s thesis of the religious origin of art. His explicit use of the concept of symbolization already postulates for the earliest period a dualism that Hauser first attributes to the Neolithic period. This dualism, according to Holm, serves a unitary organization of art just as within this dualism there appears the structure of an articulated and therefore necessarily hierarchical and institutional- ized society-one in which production already plays a role. He argues that cult and a unitary canon of forms were established during the same period, and that art was thus divided into a sacred and a profane sphere, that is, into idol sculpture and
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decorative ceramics . This construction of the animistic phase is paralleled by the construction of preanimism or, as science today prefers to call it, the "nonempirical world view," which is marked by the "essential unity of all life. " But the objective impenetrability of the oldest phenomena rebuffs this construction: A concept like the "essential unity of all life" already presupposes a division between form and material in the earliest phase or, at the least, oscillates between the idea of such a division and the idea of unity . The stumbling block here is the concept of unity . Its current use obscures everything, including the relation between the one and the many. In truth, unity should be conceived as it was reflected upon for the first time in Plato's Parmenides: as the unity of the many. The undifferentiated character of prehistory is not a unity of this sort but falls rather on the other side of the dichotomy in which unity has meaning only as a polarity. As a result, such inves- tigations as Fritz Krause's "Masks and Ancestral Figures" also encounters diffi- culties. According to Krause, in the oldest nonanimistic representations "form is bound up with the material rather than being separable from it. Any change of the essence is possible only through a change of material and form, that is, through the complete transformation of the body. This explains the metamorphosis of essences into one another. "13 Krause rightly argues against the conventional con- cept of the symbol that the transformation that takes place in mask ceremonies is not symbolic but rather "formative magic," a term borrowed from the develop-
mental psychologist Heinz Werner. 14 For the Indians, he claims, the mask is not simply the demon whose force is transferred to its bearer: Rather, the bearer him- self becomes the incarnation of the demon and is extinguished as a self. IS There are grounds for doubting this: Every member of a tribe, the masked included, clearly recognizes the difference between his own face and the mask, a difference that according to the neoromantic construction should be imperceptible. Face and mask are no more one and the same than the bearer of the mask can be taken for the incarnation of the demon. Contrary to Krause's claim, the element of dissimu- lation inheres in the phenomenon: Neither the often totally stylized form nor the fact that the bearer of the mask is only partially covered affects the interpretation of the "essential transformation of the bearer by the mask. "16 Something on the order of belief in real transformation is of course equally part of the phenomenon in just the same way that children playing do not distinguish sharply between themselves and the role played yet can at any moment be called back to reality. Even expression is hardly primordial; it too developed historically , perhaps from animism. When a clan member imitatively makes himself into a totemic animal or a fearful divinity, something other than the self-contained individual is expressed. Although expression is seemingly an aspect of subjectivity, in it-externaliza- tion-there dwells just as much that is not the self, that probably is the collective. In that the subject, awakening to expression, seeks collective sanction, expression is already evidence of a fissure. It is only with the stabilization of the subject in self-consciousness that expression becomes autonomous as the expression of the
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subject, while maintaining the gesture of making itself into something. Replica- tion could be interpreted as the reification of this comportment, and it is thus the enemy of precisely that impulse that is rudimentarily objectivated as expression. At the same time such reification by means of replication is also emancipatory: It helps to free expression by placing it at the disposal of the subject. Once people were perhaps as expressionless as animals, who neither laugh nor cry, though their shapes are objectively expressive, something the animals probably do not sense. This is recalled first by gorillalike masks, later by artworks. Expression, art's quasi-natural element, is as such already something other than pure nature. - The extremely heterogeneous interpretations are made possible by an objective ambiguity. Even the claim that heterogeneous elements are intermeshed in pre- historic artistic phenomena is anachronistic. It is more likely that division and unity arose under the pressure to be freed from the spell of the diffuse, accom- panied by the emergence of a more secure social organization . In his conspectus Herskovits coherently argues that developmental theories that deduce art from a primarily symbolical or realistic "principle of validity" are untenable given the contradictory diversity of prehistoric and primitive art. The sharp contrast drawn between primitive conventionalism-in the sense of stylization-and Paleolithic realism isolates a single aspect. It is not possible to discern the general preponder- ance of one principle over another in earliest times any more than this could be done today among surviving primitive peoples. Paleolithic sculpture is said to be for the most part highly stylized, contrary to the contemporary "realistic" por- trayals of the cave paintings; this realism, however, as Herskovits points out, is marked by heterogeneous elements, foreshortenings, for example, that cannot be interpreted as being either perspectival or symbolic . The art of primitive people today is just as complex; realistic elements have in no way suppressed fully styl- ized forms, least of all in sculpture. Immersion in art's origins tantalizes aesthetic theory with various apparently typical procedures, but just as quickly they escape the firm grip that modem interpretational consciousness imagines it possesses. Art anterior to the Paleolithic period is not known. But it is doubtless that art did not begin with works, whether they were primarily magical or already aesthetic. The cave drawings are stages of a process and in no way an early one. The first images must have been preceded by a mimetic comportment-the assimilation of the self to its other-that does not fully coincide with the superstition of direct magical influence; if in fact no differentiation between magic and mimesis had been prepared over a long period of time , the striking traces of autonomous elabo- ration in the cave paintings would be inexplicable. But once aesthetic comport- ment, prior to all objectivation, set itself off from magical practices, however rudimentarily, this distinction has since been carried along as a residue; it is as if the now functionless mimesis, which reaches back into the biological dimension, was vestigially maintained, foreshadowing the maxim that the superstructure is transformed more slowly than the infrastructure. In the traces of what has been
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overtaken by the general course of things, all art bears the suspicious burden of what did not make the grade, the regressive. But aesthetic comportment is not altogether rudimentary . An irrevocable necessity of art and preserved by it, aes- thetic comportment contains what has been belligerently excised from civilization and repressed, as well as the human suffering under the loss, a suffering already expressed in the earliest forms of mimesis. This element should not be dismissed as irrational. Art is in its most ancient relics too deeply permeated with rationality. The obstinacy of aesthetic comportment, which was later ideologically glorified as the eternal natural power of the play drive, testifies rather that to this day no rationality has been fully rational, none has unrestrictedly benefited humanity, its potential, or even a "humanized nature. " What marks aesthetic comportment as irrational according to the criteria of dominant rationality is that art denounces the particular essence of a ratio that pursues means rather than ends. Art reminds us of the latter and of an objectivity freed from the categorial structure. This is the source of art's rationality, its character as knowledge. Aesthetic comportment is the capacity to perceive more in things than they are; it is the gaze under which the given is transformed into an image. Whereas this comportment can be effortlessly impugned as inadequate by the status quo, the latter can indeed only be experi- enced through this comportment. A final intimation of the rationality in mimesis is imparted by Plato's doctrine of enthusiasm as the precondition of philosophy and emphatic knowledge , which he not only demanded on a theoretical level but demonstrated at the decisive point in the Phaedrus. This Platonic doctrine has degenerated into a cultural commodity, yet without forfeiting its truth content. Aesthetic comportment is the unimpaired corrective of reified consciousness that has in the meantime burgeoned as totality. That which in aesthetic comportment propels itself toward the light and seeks to escape the spell manifests itself e con- trario in those who do without it, the aesthetically insensible. To study them would be of inestimable value for the analysis of aesthetic comportment. Even in terms of the standards of the dominant rationality they are in no way the most pro- gressive or developed; nor are they simply those who lack a particular expendable quality. On the contrary, their entire constitution is deformed to a pathological de- gree: They concretize. Those whose thought is no more than projection are fools, which artists must not be on any account; those , however, who do not project at all fail to grasp reality and instead repeat and falsify it by crushing out what glim- mered however distantly to preanimistic consciousness: the communication of all dispersed particulars with each other. This consciousness is no more true than one that confused fantasy and reality. Comprehension occurs only when the concept transcends what it wants to grasp. Art puts this to the test; thinking that proscribes such comprehension becomes outright stupidity and misses the object because it subjugates it. Art legitimates itself within the confines of the spell in that ratio- nality becomes powerless when aesthetic comportment is repressed or, under the pressure of socialization, no longer even constituted. As was already pointed out
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in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeble- mindedness of the artistically insensible, the sucessfully castrated. The narrow- minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is-as trivialities sometimes are-the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this divi- sion in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and tum a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable. Ratio without mimesis is self- negating. Ends, the raison d'etre of raison, are qualitative, and mimetic power is effectively the power of qualitative distinction . The self-negation of reason clearly has its historical necessity: The world, which is objectively losing its openness, no longer has need of a spirit that is defined by its openness; indeed, it can scarcely put up with the traces of that spirit. With regard to its subjective side, the contem- porary loss of experience may largely coincide with the bitter repression of mime- sis that takes the place of its metamorphosis. What in various sectors of German ideology is still called an artistic sensibility is just this repression of mimesis raised to a principle, as which it is transformed into artistic insensibility. Aesthetic comportment, however, is neither immediately mimesis nor its repression but rather the process that mimesis sets in motion and in which, modified, mimesis is preserved. This process transpires equally in the relation of the individual to art as in the historical macrocosm; it congeals in the immanent movement of each and every artwork, in its tensions and in their possible resolution. Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder's own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified con- sciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge .
Draft Introduction
The concept of philosophical aesthetics has an antiquated quality , as does the con- cept of a system or that of morals. This feeling is in no way restricted to artistic praxis and the public indifference to aesthetic theory. Even in academic circles, essays relevant to aesthetics have for decades now noticeably diminished. This point is made in a recent dictionary of philosophy: "There is scarcely another philosophical discipline that rests on such flimsy presuppositions as does aesthet- ics. Like a weather vane it is 'blown about by every philosophical, cultural, and scientific gust; at one moment it is metaphysical and in the next empirical; now normative, then descriptive; now defined by artists, then by connoisseurs; one day art is supposedly the center of aesthetics and natural beauty merely preliminary, the next day art beauty is merely second-hand natural beauty. ' Moritz Geiger's description of the dilemma of aesthetics has been true since the middle of the nineteenth century. There is a double reason for this pluralism of aesthetic theo- ries , which are often even left unfinished: It resides on the one hand in the funda- mental difficulty, indeed impossibility, of gaining general access to art by means of a system of philosophical categories, and on the other, in the fact that aesthetic statements have traditionally presupposed theories of knowledge. The problem- atic of theories of knowledge returns directly in aesthetics, because how aesthetics interprets its objects depends on the concept of the object held by the theory of knowledge. This traditional dependency, however, is defined by the subject matter itself and is already contained in the terminology. "l Although this well describes the situation, it does not sufficiently explain it; the other philosophical disciplines, including the theory ofknowledge and logic, are no less controversial
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and yet interest in them has not flagged to a similar extent. The unusual situation of aesthetics is discouraging. Croce introduced radical nominalism into aesthetic theory. Almost simultaneously, important thinking left behind the so-called fun- damental problems of aesthetics and became immersed in specific formal and material problems, as is the case with Lukacs's Theory ofthe Novel, Benjamin's critique of Elective Affinities, which developed into an emphatic treatise, and his Origin of German Tragic Drama. 2 If the last-named work cunningly defends Croce's nominalism, it at the same time takes into account a situation where con- sciousness no longer hopes that fundamental principles will lead to insight into the traditionally great questions of aesthetics, especially those of a metaphysical dimension, but instead seeks insight in spheres that formerly held the status of exempla. Philosophical aesthetics found itself confronted with the fatal alterna- tive between dumb and trivial universality on the one hand and, on the other, arbi- trary judgments usually derived from conventional opinions. Hegel's program, that thought should not proceed from above but rather relinquish itself to the phe- nomena, was first brought within reach in aesthetics by a nominalism in opposi- tion to which Hegel's own aesthetics, given its classicist components, preserved far more l/. bstract invariants than was coherent with dialectical method. This at the same time threw into question the possibility of aesthetic theory as a traditional theory. For the idea of the concrete, on which each and every artwork, indeed any experience ofbeauty, is fixed, prohibits- similarly as in the study of art-distanc- ing itself from determinate phenomena in the way that philosophical consensus had so long and falsely supposed possible in the spheres of the theory of knowl- edge or ethics. A general theory of the aesthetically concrete would necessarily let slip what interested it in the object in the first place. The reason for the obsoles- cence of aesthetics is that it scarcely ever confronted itself with its object. By its very form, aesthetics seems sworn to a universality that culminates in inadequacy to the artworks and, complementarily, in transitory eternal values. The academic mistrust of aesthetics is founded in the academicism immanent to it. The motive for the lack of interest in aesthetic questions is primarily the institutionalized scientific, scholarly anxiety vis-a-vis what is uncertain and contested, not fear of provincialism and of how backward the formulation of issues is with respect to the nature of those issues. The synoptical, contemplative perspective that science expects of aesthetics has meanwhile become incompatible with progressive art, which - as in Kafka- has lost patience with any contemplative attitude} Aesthetics today therefore begins by diverging from what it treats, having become suspicious of the passive, possibly even culinary, pleasures of spectators. As its standard, contemplative aesthetics presupposes that taste by which the observer disposes over the works from a distance. Taste, on account of its subjectivistic prejudice, itself stands in need of theoretical reflection not only as to why it fails in the face of the most recent modernism but why it may long have been inadequate to ad- vanced art. This critique was anticipated by Hegel's demand that the work itself
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take the place of the judgment of taste;4 yet in his own aesthetics the object did not extricate itself from the perspective - still matted together with taste -of the detached spectator. It was the system that enabled his thought to be fruitful even where it remained at all too great a distance from its objects . Hegel and Kant were the last who, to put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without under- standing anything about art. That was possible so long as art itself was oriented to encompassing norms that were not questioned in individual works and were liqui- fied only in the work ' s immanent problematic . True , there has probably scarcely ever been a work that was important in any regard that did not, by virtue of its own form, mediate these norms and thus virtually transform them. Yet these norms were not simply liquidated; something of them towered over and above the indi- vidual works. The great philosophical aesthetics stood in concordance with art to the extent that they conceptualized what was evidently universal in it; this was in accordance with a stage in which philosophy and other forms of spirit, such as art, had not yet been tom apart. Because the same spirit ruled in philosophy and art, philosophy was able to treat art in a substantial fashion without surrendering itself to the works. Certainly artworks regularly succumbed to the effort-motivated by the nonidentity of art with its universal determinations - to conceive them in their specificity: This resulted in speculative idealism's most painfully mistaken judgments. Kant, who was not pledged to prove that a posteriori was the apriori, was precisely for this reason less fallible. Imprisoned by eighteenth-century art,5 which he would not have hesitated to call precritical-that is, preceding the full emancipation of the subject-he did not compromise himself to the same extent as Hegel by art-alien assertions. He even accorded more space to later radical modem possibilities than did Hegel,6 who confronted art so much more coura- geously. After them came the sensitive connoisseurs, who occupied the mediocre middle ground between the thing-itself as postulated by Hegel and the concept. They combined a culinary relation to art with an incapacity for philosophical con- struction. Georg Simmel was typical of such sensitivity, despite his decisive predilection for the aesthetically individual . The right medium for understanding art is either the unwavering asceticism of conceptualization, doggedly refusing to allow itself to be irritated by facts, or the unconscious consciousness in the midst of the work itself; art is never understood by the appreciative, snugly empathetic spectator; the capriciousness of such an attitude is from the beginning indifferent to what is essential to works, their binding force. Aesthetics was productive only so long as it undiminishedly respected the distance from the empirical and with windowless thoughts penetrated into the content of its other; or when, with a closeness bordering on embodiment, it judged the work from within, as some- times occurs in the scattered remarks of individual artists, which are important not as the expression of a personality that is hardly authoritative with regard to the work, but because often, without recurring to the subject, they document some- thing of the experiential force of the work. These reports are often constrained by
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the naIvete that society insists on finding in art. Artists either stubbornly resist aes- thetics with artisanal rancor, or the antidilettantes devise dilettantic theories that make do. If their comments are to convey anything to aesthetics, they require in- terpretation. Artisanal instruction that wants polemically to usurp the position of aesthetics ultimately develops into positivism, even when it includes sympathy with metaphysics. Advice on how best to compose a rondo is useless as soon as there are reasons-of which artisanal instruction is ignorant-why rondos can no longer be written. Its general rules are in need of philosophical development if they are to be more than a decoction of conventions . When they balk at this transi- tion, they almost inevitably seek succor in a murky Weltanschauung. After the demise of idealistic systems, the difficulty of an aesthetics that would be more than a desperately reanimated branch of philosophy is that of bringing the artist's closeness to the phenomena into conjunction with a conceptual capacity free of any subordinating concept, free of all decreed judgments; committed to the me- dium of concepts , such an aesthetics would go beyond a mere phenomenology of artworks. On the other hand, the effort, under the pressure of the nominalistic sit- uation, to make a transition to what has been called an empirical aesthetics, is in vain. If, for example, in compliance with the prescript of such scientization, one wanted to reach general aesthetic norms by abstracting from empirical descrip- tions and classifying them, the results would be incomparably meager when com- pared with the substantive and incisive categories of the speculative systems . Ap- plied to current artistic practice, such distillates would be no more appropriate than artistic ideals ever were. All aesthetic questions terminate in those of the truth content of artworks: Is the spirit that a work objectively bears in its specific form true? For empiricism this is, as superstition, anathema. For it, artworks are bundles of indeterminate stimuli.