No More Learning

Even in the nineteenth century , im- pressionist technique in painting was based on the rightly or wrongly interpreted scientific analysis of retinal processes. Of course the theoretical and reflexive ele- ments in art seldom went untransformed. At times, art misunderstood the sciences to which it appealed, as is perhaps the case most recently with electronic music . Yet the productive impulse was little harmed by the rationality that was brought to bear on it. The physiological theorems of the impressionists were probably foils for the in part fascinated, in part socially critical experiences of the metropolis and the dynamic of their paintings. By means of the discovery of a dynamic immanent to the reified world, they wanted to resist reification, which was most palpable in metropolitan life. In the nineteenth century, natural scientific explanations func- tioned as the self-unconscious agent of art. The basis of this affinity between art
and science was that the ratio to which the most progressive art of the epoch re- acted was none other than the ratio of the natural sciences . Whereas in the history of art, scientific theories tend to wither away, without them artistic practices would
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no more have developed than, inversely, these theorems can adequately explain such practices. This has consequences for reception: It is inadequate if it is less re- flexive than the object it receives. Not knowing what one sees or hears bestows no privileged direct relation to works but instead makes their perception impossible. Consciousness is not a layer in a hierarchy built over perception; rather, all ele- ments of aesthetic experience are reciprocal. No artwork consists in the super- imposition of layers; that is exclusively the result of the calcululation of the cul- ture industry, that is, a result ofreified consciousness. It can, for instance, be noted in extended, complex music that there is a constantly varying threshold between what is primarily perceived and what is determined by the reflexive perception of consciousness. The understanding of the meaning of a fleeting musical passage often depends on the intellective comprehension of its function in a whole that is not present; the purportedly immediate experience itself depends on what goes beyond pure immediacy. The ideal perception of artworks would be that in which what is mediated becomes immediate; nai:vete is the goal, not the origin.
Yet the flagging interest in aesthetics is not only predicated on aesthetics as a dis- cipline but equally, and indeed more so, on its object. Insofar as aesthetics con- cerns itself primarily with the how rather than with the fact of art, it seems silently to imply the possibility of art. This position has become uncertain. Aesthetics can no longer take the fact of art for granted in the way that Kant's theory of knowl- edge presupposed the mathematical natural sciences. Although traditional theory was in no way encumbered by such concerns, aesthetic theory cannot escape the reality that art that holds fast to its concept and refuses consumption becomes anti- art, and that art' s distress with itself following the real catastrophes and faced with the coming ones stands in moral disproportion to its continued existence. At its Hegelian zenith, philosophical aesthetics prognosticated the end of art. Although aesthetics later forgot this, art senses it all the more deeply. Even if art remained what it once was and can no longer remain, it would become something wholly dif- ferent in the society that is emerging and by virtue of its changed function in that society . Artistic consciousness rightly mistrusts reflection that by its very topic and by the style expected of it disports itself as if a firm foundation existed, whereas it is retrospectively dubious that any such solid foundation ever existed; it was and was not already that ideology into which the contemporary cultural bustle, along with its art department, is clearly being transformed. The question of the possibility of art is so relevant that it has taken a form that mocks its putatively more radical formulation of whether and how art is even possible at all . The question has instead become that of the concrete possibility of art today. The uneasiness with art is not only that of a stagnating social consciousness vis-a-vis the modem. At every point this uneasiness extends to what is essential to art, to its most advanced works. Art, for its part, seeks refuge in its own negation, hoping to survive through its death. Thus contemporary theater turns against the status of being a plaything, a peep- show with glitter; against imitating the world even with sets strung with barbed
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wire. The pure mimetic impulse-the happiness of producing the world once over-which animates art and has stood in age-old tension with its antimytho- logical, enlightening component, has become unbearable under the system of total functional rationality . Art and happiness both arouse the suspicion of infantilism, although the anxiety that such infantilism inspires is itself regression, the miscon- strual of the raison d'etre of all rationality; for the movement of the principle of self-preservation, to the extent that it is not fetishized, leads by its own force to the desideratum of happiness; nothing stronger speaks for art. In the contemporary novel the impulses against the fiction of the constant presence of the narrator par- ticipate in art's self-disgust. This has in large measure defined the history ofnarra- tion since Proust, though the genre has been unable to shake off completely the rubric "fiction," which stands at the head of the best-seller lists, however much aesthetic semblance has become social anathema. Music struggles to free itself of the element by which Benjamin, somewhat overgenerously, defined all art prior to the age of its technical reproducibility: aura, the sorcery that emanates from music, even if it were antimusic, whenever it commences to sound. Yet art does not labor on traits of this sort as it does on correctable residues of its past, for these traits seem inextricably grown together with art's own concept. The more, how- ever, art itself- in order not to barter away semblance for lies - is driven to reflect on its own presuppositions and when possible to absorb into its own form such reflection as if it were a counterpoison, the more skeptical it becomes toward the presumption of having self-consciousness imposed on it externally. Aesthetics is compelled to drag its concepts helplessly behind a situation of art in which art, in- different to what becomes of it, seeks to undermine those concepts without which it can hardly be conceived. No theory, aesthetic theory included, can dispense with the element of universality. This tempts aesthetics to take the side of invari- ants of precisely the sort that emphatic modem art must attack. The mania of cul- tural studies for reducing the new to the ever-same, as for example the claim that surrealism is a form of mannerism, the lack of any sense for the historical situa- tion of artistic phenomena as the index of their truth , corresponds to the tendency of philosophical aesthetics toward those abstract rules in which nothing is invari- ant other than that they are ever and again given the lie by spirit as it takes shape . What sets itself up as an eternal aesthetic norm is something that developed and is transient; the claim to imperishability has become obsolete. Even a university- certified schoolmaster would hesitate to apply to prose such as Kafka' s Metamor- phosis or The Penal Colony, in which the secure aesthetic distance to the object is shockingly undermined, a sanctioned criterion such as that of disinterested satis- faction; anyone who has experienced the greatness of Kafka's writing must sense how awkwardly inapplicable to it any talk of art is. The situation is no different
in the case of a priori genres such as the tragic or comic in contemporary drama, however much contemporary works may be marbled by them in the way that the enormous apartment building in Kafka's parabie is marbled with medieval ruins.
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Although Beckett ' s plays can no longer be taken for tragic or comic, they are not therefore, as would suit academic aesthetics, hybrids on the order of tragicomedy. On the contrary, Beckett's plays pass historical judgment over these categories as such, faithful to the historical innervation that there is no more laughing over the classics of comic theater except in a state of renewed barbarism. In accord with the tendency of modern art to make its own categories thematic through self- reflection, plays like Godot and Endgame - in the scene in which the protagonists decide to laugh-are more the tragic presentation of comedy's fate than they are comic; in the actors' forced laughter, the spectator's mirth vanishes. Early in the century already, Wedekind named a piece a clef, whose target was the publisher of Simpiicissimus,12 a "satire on satire. " Academic philosophers adopt a false superi- ority when they survey the history of art to procure for themselves the satisfaction of nil admirari and, living in the domestic company of eternal values, derive from the ever-sameness of things the profit of separating out what is truly different and endangers the status quo, in order to dismiss it as a rehashing of the classics. This attitude is in league with a sociopsychologically and institutionally reactionary at- titude . It is only in the process of critical self-consciousness that aesthetics is able once again to reach art, if it was ever capable of this in the first place.
Although art, frightened by the traces left by aesthetics, mistrusts it as something that had fallen far behind its own development, it must at the same time secretly fear that an aesthetics that was no longer anachronistic would sever the threads of life, which are already stretched to the limit. Such an aesthetics, it is feared, would lay claim to deciding if and how art should survive after the fall of metaphysics, to which art owes its existence and content. The metaphysics of art has become the court of judgment that rules over art's continued existence. The absence of theological meaning, however modified, culminates in art as the crisis of its own meaning. The more ruthlessly artworks draw the consequences from the contem- porary condition of consciousness, the more closely they themselves approximate meaninglessness. They thereby achieve a historically requisite truth, which, if art disowned it, would condemn art to doling out powerless consolation and to com- plicity with the status quo. At the same time, however, meaningless art has begun to forfeit its right to exist; in any case, there is no longer any art that has remained inviolable. To the question as to why it exists, art has no other response than what Goethe called the dregs of absurdity, which all art contains. This residue rises to the surface and denounces art. Just as it is rooted at least in part in fetishes, art, through its relentless progress, relapses back into fetishism and becomes a blind end in itself, revealing itself as untruth , a sort of collective delusion , as soon as its objective truth content, its meaning, begins to waver. If psychoanalysis followed its own principle to its culmination, it would-like all positivism-necessarily demand the end of art, just as it tends to analyze it away in the treatment of pa- tients. If art is sanctioned exclusively as sublimation, as a means for the mainte- nance of psychic economy, its truth content is contravened and art lingers on only
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as a pious deception. The truth of all artworks would, on the other hand, not exist without the fetishism that now verges on becoming art's untruth. The quality of artworks depends essentially on the degree of their fetishism, on the veneration that the process of production pays to what lays claim to being self-produced, to the seriousness that forgets the pleasure taken in it. Only through fetishism, the blinding of the artwork vis-a-vis the reality of which it is part, does the work tran- scend the spell of the reality principle as something spiritual .
From these perspectives, aesthetics proves to be not so much obsolete as neces- sary . Art does not stand in need of an aesthetics that will prescribe norms where it finds itself in difficulty, but rather of an aesthetics that will provide the capacity for reflection, which art on its own is hardly able to achieve. Words such as mate- rial , form, and formation, which flow all too easily from the pens of contemporary artists, ring trite; to cure contemporary language of this is one of the art-practical functions of aesthetics. Above all, however, aesthetics is demanded by the de- velopment of artworks. If they are not timelessly self-same, but rather become what they are because their own meaning is a process of becoming, they summon forth forms of spirit-commentary and critique, for example-through which this process is. fulfilled. These forms remain weak, however, so long as they do not reach the truth content of the works. They only become capable of this by being honed to aesthetics . The truth content of an artwork requires philosophy . It is only in this truth content that philosophy converges with art or extinguishes itself in it. The way toward this is defined by the reflected immanence of works, not by the external application of philosophems. The truth content of works must be rigor- ously distinguished from all philosophy that is pumped into them by authors or theorists; the difference between the two, it must be suspected, has for close to two hundred years been unbridgeable. 13 On the other hand, aesthetics brusquely repudiates the claim of philology - however useful it may be in other contexts - that it assures the truth content of artworks . In the age of the irreconcilability of traditional aesthetics and contemporary art, the philosophical theory of art has no choice but, varying a maxim of Nietzsche's, by determinate negation to think the categories that are in decline as categories of transition. The elucidated and con- crete dissolution of conventional aesthetic categories is the only remaining form that aesthetics can take ; it at the same time sets free the transformed truth of these categories . If artists are compelled to permanent reflection , that reflection needs to be wrested free of its accidentalness so that it does not degenerate into arbitrary, amateurish auxiliary hypotheses, homemade rationalizations, or into arbitrary declarations of intentions framed by a Weltanschauung, without any justification from what is actually achieved. No one should any longer entrust himself naIvely to the technological parti pris of contemporary art; otherwise this art would con- sign itselftotally to the substitution ofthe goal-that is, the work-by the means, the procedures by which it was produced. The propensity toward this harmonizes all too fundamentally with the general direction of society toward the apotheosis
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of means, production for the sake of production, total employment and all that is part of it, because the goals themselves - the rational organization of humanity - are blocked. Whereas in philosophy, aesthetics fell out of fashion, the most ad- vanced artists have sensed the need for it all the more strongly. It is clear that even Boulez is far from envisioning a normative aesthetics of the traditional sort but sees, rather , the necessity of a historicophilosophical theory of art. What he means by "orientation estbetique" could best be translated as the critical self awareness of the artist. l4 If, as Hegel thought, the hour of naIve art is past, art must embody reflection and take it to the point where it no longer remains external and foreign to it; this would be the role of aesthetics today. Boulez's central point is that he had been puzzled by the current opinion of avant-garde artists , who believe that annotated instructions for the employment of technical procedures already amount to an artwork; on the contrary, the only criterion-according to Boulez-is what the artist does, not how and with whatever advanced means he intended to make it. Boulez, too, realizes, with regard to the contemporary artistic process, that in- sight into the historical situation-through which the antithetical relation to tradi- tion is mediated-converges with binding implications for production. The dog- matic separation of craft and aesthetics, which Schoenberg decreed out of a then justified critique of a praxis-alien aesthetics, a separation that was self-evident to the artists of his generation as well as to those of the Bauhaus , is disavowed by Boulez in the name of craft and metier. Even Schoenberg'S Theory ofHarmony was only able to maintain this separation because he limited himself in this book to means that had long not been his own; had he discussed those he would have been irresistibly compelled to undertake aesthetic reflection, given that he lacked didactically communicable rules for the new craft. Such reflection responds to the fatal aging of the modern as a result of the tensionlessness of the totally technical artwork. This tensionlessness can hardly be dealt with in an exclusively inner-
technical fashion, even though in technical criticism something of the supratech- nical constantly registers . That significant contemporary art is a matter of indiffer- ence in a society that tolerates it, marks art itself as something indifferent that in spite of all its effort might equally well be something else or nothing at all. What currently passes for technical criteria in no way facilitates judgment on the level of artistic achievement and most often relegates it to the obsolete category of taste. As Boulez points out, many works, of which the question as to their value no longer makes sense, are beholden solely to their abstract opposition to the cul- ture industry , not to their content or the capacity to realize it. The critical decision they elude could only be the responsibility of an aesthetics that proves itself equal to the most advanced developments to the same extent that it matches and super- sedes the latter with its power of reflection . This aesthetics is obliged to renounce the concept of taste , in which the claim of art to truth is in danger of coming to a miserable end. The guilt lies with previous aesthetics that, by virtue of taking its starting point in the subjective judgment of taste, peremptorily deprived art of its
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claim to truth. Hegel, who took this claim seriously and emphasized art's opposi- tion to pleasurable or useful play, was for this reason the enemy of taste, without however being able to break through its contingency in the concrete analyses of his Aesthetics. It is to Kant's credit that he recognized the aporia of aesthetic ob- jectivity and the judgment of taste . He did indeed carry out an aesthetic analysis of the judgment of taste in terms of its elements, but he conceived them at the same time as latent, aconceptually objective elements. In so doing he pointed up the nominalistic threat to every emphatic theory-a threat that cannot be dismissed by any act of will-and at the same time perceived the elements in which theory goes beyond itself. By virtue of the intellective movement of his object, a move- ment that effectively closed its eyes to the object, Kant brought into thought the deepest impulses of an art that only developed in the one hundred fifty years after his death: an art that probed after its objectivity openly, without protection of any kind. What needs to be carir ed through is what in the theories of Kant and Hegel awaits redemption through second reflection. Terminating the tradition of philo- sophical aesthetics must amount to giving it its due .
The dilemma of aesthetics appears immanently in the fact that it can be consti- tuted neither from above nor from below, neither from concepts nor from acon- ceptual experience. The only possibility for aesthetics beyond this miserable al- ternative is the philosophical insight that fact and concept are not polar opposites but mediated reciprocally in one another. This must be appropriated by aesthetics, for art again stands in need of aesthetics now that criticism has shown itself to be so disoriented by false and arbitrary judgments that it fails vis-a-vis art. Yet if aes- thetics is to amount neither to art-alien prescriptions nor to the inconsequential classification of what it happens upon, then it is only conceivable as dialectical aesthetics; dialectical method is not unsuitably defined as the refusal to rest con- tent with the diremption of the deductive and inductive that dominates rigid, indurative thought, and this is expressly rejected by the earliest formulations of dialectics in German idealism, those of Fichte. 15 Aesthetics must no more lag behind art than behind philosophy. Although it abounds in the most important insights, Hegel's aesthetics no more satisfied the concept of dialectics in his main works than did other material parts of the system . This is not easy to correct. Aes- thetic dialectics is not to presuppose a metaphysics of spirit, which in Hegel as in Fichte was to guarantee that the individual, with which induction begins, and the universal, which provides the basis for deduction, are one. What was volatilized in emphatic philosophy cannot be revived by aesthetics, itself a philosophical discipline. Kant's theory is more apposite to the contemporary situation, for his aesthetics attempts to bind together consciousness of what is necessary with con- sciousness that what is necessary is itself blocked from consciousness. It follows its course, in effect, blindly. His aesthetics feels its way in the dark and yet is led by a compulsion toward what it seeks. This is the puzzle in which all aesthetic efforts today are bound up: Aesthetics, not entirely helpless, seeks to untangle the
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knot. For art is, or at any rate was until the most recent developments, under the impress of its semblance, what metaphysics, which is without semblance , always wanted to be. When Schelling declared art the organon of philosophy he involun- tarily admitted what great idealistic speculation either passed over in silence or denied in the interest of its self-preservation . Correspondingly, Schelling did not, as is well known, carry through the thesis of identity as relentlessly as did Hegel. The aesthetic contours of Hege l ' s philosophy, that of a gigantic "as if," were then recognized by Kierkegaard and could be demonstrated in detail in his Logic)6 Art is that-for the most part material-existent that is determined as spirit in pre- cisely the fashion that idealism simply asserted extra-aesthetic reality to be. Expe- rience is obscured by the naive cliche that depicts the artist as an idealist or, de- pending on taste, as a fool in the service of the purportedly absolute reason of his work . Artworks are , in terms of their own constitution, objective as well as - and not only because they have their genesis in spiritual processes-spiritual; other- wise they would be in principle indistinguishable from eating and drinking. The contemporary debates originating in Soviet aesthetics, which insist that the claim to the primacy of the law of form as the primacy of the spiritual is an idealistic view of social reality, are groundless. Only as spirit is art the opposite of empirical reality, which becomes the determinate negation of the existing world order. Art is to be dialectically construed insofar as spirit inheres in it, without art's possess- ing it or giving surety of it as something absolute. However much they seem to be entities, artworks are crystallizations of the process between spirit and its other. This implies the difference from Hegel's aesthetics. There the objectivity of the artwork is the truth of spirit: It is spirit that has gone over into its own otherness and become identical with itself. For Hegel, spirit is one with totality, also with the totality in art. After the collapse of the general thesis of Idealism, however, spirit is strictly one aspect of artworks; granted, it is that aspect that makes the artifact art, yet it is not in any way present without what is opposed to it. Spirit no more devours its opposite than history has known pure artworks that have achieved the identity of spirit and nonspirit. Constitutively, the spirit of artworks
is not pure. Those works that seem to embody such identity are not the most important. What in artworks opposes spirit is, however, on no account what is natural in their materials and objects; they constitute merely a limiting value in art- works. They bear what is opposed to them in themselves; their materials are his- torically and socially preformed as are their procedures, and their heterogeneous element is that in them that resists their unity and is needed by its unity for it to be more than a Pyrrhic victory over the unresisting. In this, aesthetic reflection is unanimous with the history of art, which irresistibly moved the dissonant into the center of the work until finally its difference from consonance was destroyed. Art thereby participates in the suffering that, by virtue of the unity of its process, finds its way to language rather than disappearing. It is because it recognizes this and allies art with the consciousness of need that Hegel ' s aesthetics , in spite of its har-
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monistic elements and its faith in the sensual appearance of the idea, is distin- guished from merely formal aesthetics. He who was first to envision the end of art named the most compelling reason for its continuation: the continuation of needs, mute in themselves, that await the expression that artworks fulfill by proxy. How- ever; if the element of spirit is immanent to artworks, this implies that this element is not identical with the spirit that produces them, not even with the collective spirit of the epoch. The determination of the spirit in artworks is the highest task of aesthetics; for this reason it is all the more pressing that aesthetics not let phi- losophy prescribe to it that category of spirit. Common sense, inclined to equate the spirit of artworks with what their makers infuse into them, must rapidly enough discover that artworks are so coconstructed by the opposition of the artis- tic material, by their own postulates, by historically contemporary models and procedures that are elemental to a spirit that may be called - in a condensed fash- ion that deviates from Hegel-objective, that their reduction to subjective spirit becomes absurd . This sets the question of the spirit of artworks at a distance from their genesis. The dynamic relation of material and labor, as Hegel developed it in the dialectic of the master and the slave, is pregnantly reproduced in art. If that chapter of the Phenomenology historically conjures up feudalism, art itself, its mere existence , bears an archaic quality . The reflection on this is inseparable from reflection on art's right to continue to exist. Today the neotroglodytes are more aware of this than is the naIvete of an unperturbed cultural consciousness. Aesthetic theory, wary of a priori construction and cautious of an increasing ab- stractness, has as its arena the experience of the aesthetic object. The artwork is not to be known simply externally but demands of theory that , at whatever level of abstraction, it be understood. Philosophically the concept of understanding and categories such as empathy have been compromised by Dilthey and his followers. If one sets aside such theorems and insists on an understanding of artworks that
would be knowledge determined strictly through their objectivity, difficulties amass. In advance it must be admitted that, if knowledge is anywhere achieved in layers , this is so in aesthetics . Any fixation of the starting point of this layering in experience would be arbitrary . It reaches back far behind aesthetic sublimation , where it is indivisible from lived perception. Experience remains related to such perception, while at the same time it only becomes what it is by distancing itself from immediacy, into which it stands permanently in danger of sinking back, as happens to those excluded from education who use the present rather than the past tense when narrating the events of a film or play; yet, without any trace of such immediacy, artistic experience is no less in vain than when it capitulates to imme- diacy. In Alexandrian fashion it circumvents the claim to an immediacy of exis- tence that is registered by every artwork, whether it wants to or not. Pre-artistic experience of the aesthetic is indeed false, in that it identifies and counteridentifies with artworks as in empirical life and, if possible, even to a heightened degree, and thus precisely by way of a comportment that subjectivism holds to be the
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instrument of aesthetic experience. By approaching the artwork aconceptually, this comportment remains trapped within the radius of taste , and its relation to the work is no less oblique than if it misused art to illustrate philosophical positions. The malleable, readily identifying sensibility collapses when faced with the se- verity of the artwork ; yet obdurate thought cheats itself of the element of receptiv- ity, without which it is no longer thought. Preartistic experience requires projec- tion,l7 yet aesthetic experience-precisely by virtue of the a priori primacy of subjectivity in it-is a countermovement to the subject. It demands something on the order of the self-denial of the observer, his capacity to address or recognize what aesthetic objects themselves enunciate and what they conceal. Aesthetic experience first of all places the observer at a distance from the object. This res- onates in the idea of disinterested observation . Philistines are those whose relation to artworks is ruled by whether and to what degree they can, for example, put themselves in the place of the actors as they come forth; this is what all parts of the culture industry are based on and they foster it insistently in their customers. The more artistic experience possesses its objects and the closer it approaches them in a certain sense, the farther it is at the same time shifted away from them; artistic enthusiasm is art-alien. It is thus that aesthetic experience, as Schopenhauer knew, breaks through the spell of obstinate self-preservation; it is the model of a stage of consciousness in which the I no longer has its happiness in its interests, or, ulti- mately, in its reproduction. -That, however, to follow the course of action in a novel or a drama and note the various motivations, or adequately to recognize the thematic content of a painting, does not amount to understanding the works is as obvious as that they cannot be understood apart from such aspects. There are exact scholarly descriptions of artworks, even analyses-thematic analyses of music, for example-that miss everything essential. A second layer of under-
standing is that of the intention of the work , that which the work itself states and what traditional aesthetics calls its idea, an example of which would be the guilti- ness of subjective morality in Ibsen's Wild Duck. The intention of the work is, however, not equivalent with its content, and thus its understanding remains pro- visional. The question remains at this level of understanding whether the intention is realized in the structure of the work; whether the form carries out the play of forces, the antagonisms, that objectively govern the work over and beyond its in- tention. Moreover, the understanding of the intention does not yet grasp the truth content of the work. For this reason the understanding of works is essentially a process, one apart from all biographical accidentalness and in no way comparable to that ominous lived experience [Erlebnis] that is supposed to deliver up all secrets with a wave of the magic wand and indeed provide a doorway into the ob- ject. Understanding has as its idea that one become conscious of the artwork's content by way of the full experience [Eifahrung] of it. This concerns the work's relation to its material, to its appearance and intention, as much as it concerns its own truth or falseness in terms of the artworks' specific logic, which instructs as
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to the differentiation between what is true and false in them. Artworks are under- stood only when their experience is brought to the level of distinguishing between true and not true or, as a preliminary stage, between correct and incorrect. Critique is not externally added into aesthetic experience but, rather, is immanent to it. The comprehension of an artwork as a complexion of truth brings the work into rela- tion with its untruth, for there is no artwork that does not participate in the untruth external to it, that of the historical moment. Aesthetics that does not move within the perspective of truth fail s its task; usually it is CUlinary . Because the element of truth is essential to artworks, they participate in knowledge, and this defines the only legitimate relation to them. Consigning them to irrationality profanes what is important in them under the pretext of what is putatively ultimate. The knowledge of artworks is guided by their own cognitive constitution: They are the form of knowledge that is not knowledge of an object. This paradox is also the paradox of artistic experience. Its medium is the obviousness of the incomprehensible. This is the comportment of artists; it is the objective reason back of their often apoc- ryphal and helpless theories. The task of a philosophy of art is not so much to ex- plain away the element of incomprehensibility , which speculative philosophy has almost invariably sought to do, but rather to understand the incomprehensibility itself. This incomprehensibility persists as the character of art, and it alone pro- tects the philosophy of art from doing violence to art . The question of comprehen- sibility becomes urgent to the extreme in the face of the contemporary production of art. For the category of comprehensibility, if it is not to be situated in the sub- ject and thus condemned to relativity, postulates something objectively compre- hensible in the artwork. If the artwork assumes the expression of incomprehensi- bility and in its name destroys its own internal comprehensibility, the traditional hierarchy of comprehension collapses. Its place is taken by reflection on art's enigmatic character. Yet, it is precisely the so-called literature of the absurd-a pastiche concept tacked onto such heterogeneous material that i t now serves only the misunderstanding of facile agreement- that proves that understanding, mean- ing, and content are not equivalents . The absence of meaning becomes intention, though not always with the same consequence. A play like lonesco's Rhinoceros, for instance, though it insists that common sense accede in the metamorphosis of
people into rhinos , permits the clear inference of what used to be called the idea of an artwork in its internal opposition to sheepish, standardized consciousness, to which the well-functioning I is more successfully adapted than one who has not completely kept up with dominant instrumental rationality . The intention of radi- cal absurdity may have originated in art' s need to translate the condition of meta- physical meaninglessness into a language of art that would cast meaning aside; thus it was, perhaps, a polemical act against Sartre, whose works firmly and sub- jectively posit this metaphysical experience.
In Beckett the negative metaphysical content affects the content along with the form. The work does not, however, thereby become something simply incomprehensible; the well-founded refusal of
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its author to offer explanations for so-called symbols is faithful to an aesthetic tradition that has elsewhere been dismissed. A relation, not identity, operates be- tween the negativity of the metaphysical content and the eclipsing of the aesthetic content. The metaphysical negation no longer permits an aesthetic form that would itself produce metaphysical affirmation; and yet this negation is nevertheless able to become aesthetic content and determine the form .
The concept of artistic experience, a concept into which aesthetics is transformed and which by its desideratum of understanding is incompatible with positivism, nevertheless in no way coincides with the currently popular concept of work- immanent analysis. Yet work-immanent analysis, which is self-evident to artistic experience and its hostility to philology , unquestionably marks decisive progress in scholarship. Various branches of art scholarship, such as the academic study of music , only awoke from their pharisaical lethargy when they caught up with this method rather than busying themselves with everything except what concerns the structure of artworks. But in its adaptation by scholarship work-immanent analy- sis, by virtue of which scholarship hoped to cure itself of its alienness to art, has in tum taken on a positivist character that it wants to go beyond. The strictness with which it concentrates on its object facilitates the disowning of everything in the artwork that-a fact to the second power-is not present, not simply the given facts of the matter. Even motivic-thematic musical analyses , though an improve- ment on glib commentaries, often suffer from the superstition that analyzing the work into basic materials and their transformations leads to the understanding of what, uncomprehended and correlative to the asceticism of the method, is gladly chalked up to a faulty irrationality. The work-immanent approach is indeed not all that removed from mindless craft, although its diagnoses are for the most part immanently correctable because they suffer from insufficient technical insight. Philosophical aesthetics , closely allied with the idea of work-immanent analysis , has its focal point where work-immanent analysis never arrives. Second reflection must push the complex of facts that work-immanent analysis establishes, and in which it has its limit, beyond itself and penetrate to the truth content by means of emphatic critique. Work-immanent analysis is in itself narrow-minded, and this is surely because it wants to knock the wind out of social reflection on art. That art on the one hand confronts society autonomously, and, on the other hand, is itself social, defines the law of its experience. Whoever experiences only the material aspect of art and puffs this up into an aesthetics is philistine , yet whoever perceives art exclusively as art and ensconces this as its prerogative deprives himself of its content. For the content of art cannot simply be art, unless it is to be reduced to an indifferent tautology. Contemplation that limits itselfto the artwork fails it. Its inner construction requires, in however mediated a fashion, what is itself not art. Experience alone is in no position to legislate aesthetically because a boundary is prescribed to it by the philosophy of history. If experience crosses this limit it de- generates into empathic appreciation . Many artworks of the past, and among them
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the most renowned, are no longer to be experienced in any immediate fashion and are failed by the fiction of such immediacy. If it is true that the rhythm of history is accelerating geometrically, then even artworks that do not reside in the distant past are being pulled into this process. They bear a stubborn semblance of sponta- neous accessibility, which must be destroyed to permit their comprehension. Art- works are archaic when they can no longer be experienced. This boundary is not fixed, nor is it simply continuous; rather, it is fragmentary and dynamic and can be liquefied by correspondance. The archaic is appropriated as the experience of what is not experiential. The boundary of experientiality, however, requires that the starting point of any such appropriation be the modem . It alone throws light on the past, whereas academic custom for the most part limits itself to the past, re- bounds from it, and at the same time , by violating the distance, transgresses the ir- retrievable. Ultimately, however, even in the most extreme refusal of society, art is essentially social and not understood when this essence is misunderstood. I8 Artistic experience thereby forfeits its prerogatives. Guilt for this is borne by a delusory process that takes place between the categories. Artistic experience is brought of its own accord into movement by the contradiction that the constitutive immanence of the aesthetic sphere is at the same time the ideology that under- mines it. Aesthetic experience must overstep itself. It traverses its antithetical ex- tremes rather than settling peacefully into a spurious median between them. It neither renounces philosophical motifs, which it transforms rather than drawing conclusions from them, nor does it exorcise from itself the social element. One is no more equal to a Beethoven symphony without comprehending its so-called purely musical course than if one is unable to perceive in it the echo of the French Revolution; 19 how these two aspects are mediated in the phenomenon belongs to the obstinate and equally unavoidable themes of philosophical aesthetics. Not ex- perience alone but only thought that is fully saturated with experience is equal to the phenomenon . It is not for aesthetics to adapt itself aconceptually to aesthetic phenomena. Consciousness of the antagonism between interior and exterior is requisite to the experience of art. The description of aesthetic experiences, theory and judgment, is insufficient. What is required is experience of works rather than thoughts simply applied to the matter, yet no artwork adequately presents itself as immediately given; none is to be understood strictly on its own terms. All works are formed in themselves according to their own logic and consistency as much as they are elements in the context of spirit and society. The two aspects are not to be neatly separated, as is the scientific habit. True consciousness of the external world participates in the work's immanent coherence; the spiritual and social standpoint of an artwork can only be discerned on the basis of its internal crystal- lization . There is nothing artistically true whose truth is not legitimated in an over- arching context; and there is no artwork whose consciousness is true that does not prove itself in terms of aesthetic quality . The kitsch of the Soviet bloc says some- thing about the untruth of the political claim that social truth has been achieved
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there. If the model of aesthetic understanding is a comportment that moves im- manently within the artwork, and if understanding is damaged as soon as con- sciousness exits this sphere, then consciousness must in return remain constantly mobile both internally and externally to the work, in spite of the opposition to which this mobility of thought exposes itself. To whoever remains strictly inter- nal, art will not open its eyes, and whoever remains strictly external distorts art- works by a lack of affinity. Yet aesthetics becomes more than a rhapsodic back and forth between the two standpoints by developing their reciprocal mediation in the artwork itself.
As soon as the artwork is considered from an external vantage, bourgeois con- sciousness tends to become suspicious of alienness to art, even though in its own relation to artworks bourgeois consciousness tends to disport itself externally to them. The suspicion must be kept in mind that artistic experience as a whole is in no way as immediate as the official art religion would have it. Every experience of an artwork depends on its ambience, its function, and, literally and figuratively, its locus. Overzealous naiVete that refuses to admit this distorts what it considers so holy. In fact, every artwork, even the hermetic work, reaches beyond its monado- logical boundaries by its formal language. Each work, if it is to be experienced, requires thought, however rudimentary it may be, and because this thought does not permit itself to be checked, each work ultimately requires philosophy as the thinking comportment that does not stop short in obedience to the prescriptions stipulated by the division of labor . By virtue of the universality of thought , every reflection demanded by the artwork is also an external reflection; its fruitfulness is determined according to what it illuminates interior to the work. Inherent to the idea of aesthetics is the intention of freeing art, through theory, from its indura- tion, which it suffers as a result of the inescapable division of labor. Understand- ing artworks is not X(Opi? from their explanation; not from their genetic explana- tion but from that of their complexion and content, though this is not to say that explanation and understanding are identical. Understanding has as much need of the nonexplanatory level of the spontaneous fulfillment of the work as it does of the explanatory level; understanding goes beyond the art understanding of connoisseurs. Explanation ineluctably involves the tracing back of the new and the unknown to the known, even if what is best in the work struggles against it. Without such reduction, which violates the works, they could not survive. Their essence, what is uncomprehended in them, requires acts of identification and comprehension; it is thereby falsified as something familiar and old. To this extent the life of artworks is ultimately contradictory . Aesthetics must become conscious of this paradox and it must not act as if its opposition to tradition could dispense with rational means . Aesthetics moves within the medium of universal concepts even in the face of the radically nominalist situation of art and in spite of the utopia of the particular that aesthetics prizes along with art. This is not only the difficulty of aesthetics but also its fundamentum in reo If, in the experience of the real , it is
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the universal that is mediated, in art it is the particular that is mediated; just as nonaesthetic knowledge, in its Kantian formulation, poses the question ofthe pos- sibility of universal judgment, the question posed by every artwork is how, under the domination of the universal, a particular is in any way possible. This binds aesthetics-however little its method can amount to subsumption by the abstract concept-to concepts, though admittedly to those whose telos is the particular. If anywhere, Hegel's theory of the movement of the concept has its legitimacy in aesthetics; it is concerned with the dynamic relation of the universal and the par- ticular, which does not impute the universal to the particular externally but seeks it rather in the force fields of the particular itself. The universal is the stumbling block of art: By becoming what it is, art cannot be what it wants to become. In- dividuation, which is art's own law, has its boundaries set by the universal. Art leads beyond, and yet not beyond; the world it reflects remains what it is because it is merely reflected by art. Even dada, as the deictic gesture into which the word is transformed in the effort to shake off its conceptuality, was as universal as the childishly reiterated demonstrative word that dadaism took as its motto. Whereas art dreams the absolutely monadological, it is both happily and unhappily suf- fused with the universal . Art must contract to the geometrical point of the absolute -cOOE 'tt and go beyond it. This imposed the objective limit to expressionism; art would have been compelled to go beyond it even if the artists had been less ac- commodating: They regressed behind expressionism . Whenever artworks on their way toward concretion polemically eliminate the universal, whether as a genre, a type , an idiom, or a formula, the excluded is maintained in them through its nega-
tion; this state of affairs is constitutive of the modern .
Insight into the life of the universal in the midst of aesthetic particularization, however, drives universality beyond the semblance of that static being-in-itself that bears the primary responsibility for the sterility of aesthetic theory . The cri- tique of invariants does not aim at their exclusion but, rather, conceives them in their own variability. Aesthetics is not involved with its object as with a primor- dial phenomenon. Because phenomenology and its successors oppose conceptual procedures that move from the top down as well as those that move up from below, they are important to aesthetics, which shares in this opposition. As a phe- nomenology of art, phenomenology would like to develop art neither by deducing it from its philosophical concept nor by rising to it through comparative abstrac- tion; rather, phenomenology wants to say what art is. The essence it discerns is, for phenomenology, art' s origin and at the same time the criterion of art's truth and falsehood. But what phenomenology has conjured up in art as with a wave of the magic wand, remains extremely superficial and relatively fruitless when con- fronted with actual artworks. Whoever wants something more must engage a level of content that is incompatible with the phenomenological commandment of pure essentiality. The phenomenology of art comes to grief on the presupposition of the possibility of being without presupposition. Art mocks efforts to reduce it to
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pure essentiality. It is not what it was fated to have been from time immemorial but rather what it has become. It is no more fruitful to pursue the question of the individual origin of artworks in the face of their objectivity,-which subsumes the work's sUbjective elements, than it is to search out art's own origin. It is not an ac- cident but rather its law that art wrested itself free. Art never completely fulfilled the detenninations of its pure concept as it acquired them and indeed struggled against them; according to Valery, the purest artworks are on no account the high- est. If art were reduced to fundamental elements of artistic comportment, such as the instinct for imitation, the need for expression, or magical imagery, the results would be arbitrary and derivative. These elements play their part; they merge with art and survive in it; but not one of them is the whole of it. Aesthetics is not obliged to set off on the hopeless quest for the primal archetype of art, rather it must think such phenomena in historical constellations. No isolated particular category fully conceives the idea of art. It is a syndrome that is dynamic in itself. Highly mediated in itself, art stands in need of thinking mediation; this alone, and not the phenomenologist's purportedly originary intuition, leads to art's concrete concept . 20
Hegel's central aesthetic principle, that beauty is the sensuous semblance of the idea, presupposes the concept of the idea as the concept of absolute spirit. Only if the all-encompassing claim of absolute spirit is honored, only if philosophy is able to reduce the idea of the absolute to the concept, would Hegel's aesthetic principle be compelling. In a historical phase in which the view of reality as the fulfillment of reason amounts to bloody farce, Hegel's theory-in spite of the wealth of genuine insight that it unlocked - is reduced to a meager fonn of conso- lation. If his conception of philosophy carried out a fortunate mediation of history with truth, the truth of the philosophy itself is not to be isolated from the misfor- tune ofhistory. Certainly Hegel's critique ofKant holds good. Beauty that is to be more than symmetrically trimmed shrubbery is no mere fonnula reducible to sub- jective functions of intuition; rather, beauty's fundament is to be sought in the ob- ject. But Hegel's effort to do this was vitiated because it unjustly postulated the meta-aesthetical identity of subject and object in the whole. It is no accidental fail- ing on the part of individual thinkers but rather predicated on an objective aporia that today philosophical interpretations of literary works-especially when, as in Heidegger, poetic language is mythologically exalted-fail to penetrate the con- struction of the works to be int? rpreted and instead prefer to work them up as the arena for philosophical theses: Applied philosophy, a priori fatal, reads out of works that it has invested with an air of concretion nothing but its own theses . If aesthetic objectivity, in which the category of the beautiful is itself only one ele- ment, remains canonical for all convincing reflection, it no longer devolves upon a preestablished conceptual structure anterior to aesthetics and begins to hover, as incontestable as it is precarious. The locus of aesthetics has become exclusively the analysis of contexts, in the experience of which the force of philosophical
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speculation is drawn in without depending on any fixed starting positions. The aesthetic theories of philosophical speculation are not to be conserved as cultural monuments, but neither are they to be discarded, and least of all in favor of the pu- tative immediacy of artistic experience: Implicitly lodged in artistic experience is the consciousness of art, that is, philosophy, with which the naIve consideration of works imagines it has disposed. Art does not exist as the putative lived experience of the subject who encounters it as a tabula rasa but only within an already devel- oped language of art. Lived experiences are indispensable, but they are no final court of aesthetic knowledge . Precisely those elements of art that cannot be taken immediately in possession and are not reducible to the subject require conscious- ness and therefore philosophy. It inheres in all aesthetic experience to the extent that it is not barbarically alien to art. Art awaits its own explanation . It is achieved methodically through the confrontation of historical categories and elements of aesthetic theory with artistic experience, which correct one another reciprocally.
Hegel's aesthetics gives a true account of what needs to be accomplished. The de- ductive system, however, prevents that dedication to objects that is systematically postulated. Hegel's work places thought under an obligation, even though his own answers are no longer binding. If the most powerful aesthetics-Kant's and Hegel ' s - were the fruits of systematic thinking , the collapse of these systems has thrown them into confusion without, however, destroying them. Aesthetics does not proceed with the continuity of scientific thinking. The particular aesthetics of the various philosophies cannot be reduced to a common formulation as their truth; rather their truth is to be sought in their conflict. To do so, it is necessary to renounce the erudite illusion that an aesthetician inherits problems from others and is now supposed to go calmly to work on them. If the idea of objectivity re- mains the canon of all convincing aesthetic reflection, then its locus is the contra- diction of each and every aesthetic object in itself, as well as that of philosophical ideas in their mutual relation. That aesthetics, in its desire to be more than chatter, wants to find its way out into the open, entirely exposed, imposes on it the sacri- fice of each and every security that it has borrowed from the sciences; no one expressed this necessity with greater candor than the pragmatist John Dewey. Be- cause aesthetics is not supposed tojudge art from an external and superior vantage point, but rather to help its internal propensities to theoretical consciousness, it cannot settle into a zone of security to which every artwork that has in any way succeeded gives the lie. Artworks, right up to those of the highest level, know the lesson taught to the bungler whose fingers stumble on the piano keys or who sketches carelessly: The openness of artworks-their critical relation to the previ- ously established, on which their quality depends-implies the possibility of complete failure, and aesthetics alienates itself from its object the moment that by its own form it deceives on this score . That no artist knows with certainty whether anything will come of what he does, his happiness and his anxiety, which are totally foreign to the contemporary self-understanding of science, subjectively
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registers something objective: the vulnerability of all art. The insight that perfect artworks scarcely exist brings into view the vanishing point of this vulnerability. Aesthetics must unite this open vulnerability of its object with that object's claim to objectivity as well as with aesthetics' own claim to objectivity. If aesthetics is terrorized by the scientific ideal it recoils from this paradox; yet this paradox is aesthetics' vital element. The relation between determinacy and openness in aes- thetics is perhaps clarified by the fact that the ways available to experience and thought that lead into artworks are infinitely many, yet they converge in truth content. This is obvious to artistic praxis, and theory should follow it much more closely than it has. Thus at a rehearsal the first violinist of a string quartet told a musician who was helping out, though himselfnot actively playing, to contribute whatever critique and suggestions occurred to him; each of these remarks, to the extent that they were just, directed the progress of the work ultimately to the same point, to the correct performance. Even contradictory approaches are legitimate, such as those that concern the form and those that concern the relatively tangible thematic levels . Right up to the present, all transformations of aesthetic comport- ment, as transformations of the comportment of the subject, involved changes in the representational dimension; in every instance new layers emerged, were dis- covered by art and adapted to it, while others perished. Until that period when representational painting declined, even in cubism still, the work could be ap- proached from the representational side as well as from that of pure form. Aby Warburg ' s studies and those of his school are evidence of this . Motif studies , such as Benjamin ' s on Baudelaire , are able under certain conditions to be more produc- tive aesthetically, that is, with regard to specifically formal questions, than the offi- cial formal analysis that seems to have a closer relation to art. Formal analysis had, and indeed still has, much to recommend it over dogmatic historicism. However, by extracting and thus isolating the concept of form from its dialectic with its other, it in tum tends toward petrification. At the opposite extreme, Hegel too did not escape the danger of such ossification. What even his sworn enemy Kierkegaard so admired him for, the accent he put on content [Inhalt] vis-a-vis form, did not merely announce opposition to empty and indifferent play, that is, the relation of art to truth, which was his preeminent concern. Rather, at the same time it revealed an overestimation of the thematic content of artworks regardless of their dialectic with form. As a result, an art-alien and philistine element entered Hegel's aesthet- ics , which manifests its fatal character in the aesthetics of dialectical materialism, which in this regard had no more misgivings about Hegel than did Marx . Granted, pre-Hegelian and even Kant's aesthetics had no emphatic concept of the artwork and relegated it to the level of a sublimated means of pleasure. Still, Kant's em- phasis on the work's formal constituents, through which the work becomes art in the first place, does more honor to the truth content of art than Hegel does , who directly intended this but never developed it out of art itself. The elements of form, which are those of sublimation, are-compared to Hegel-still bound by
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the eighteenth century at the same time that they are more progressive and mod- em; formalism, which is justly attributed to Kant, two hundred years later became the virulent password of anti-intellectual reaction. All the same, a weakness is unmistakable in the fundamental approach of Kant's aesthetics, apart from the controversy between formal and so-called content aesthetics. This weakness con- cerns the relation of his approach to the specific contents of the critique of aes- thetic judgment. Parallel to his theory of knowledge, Kant seeks to establish-as if it were obvious-the subjective-transcendental foundation for what he called, in eighteenth-century fashion, the "feeling of the beautiful. " According to the Critique ofPure Reason, however, the artifacts would be constituta and thus fall within the sphere of objects, a sphere situated external to the transcendental prob- lematic . In this sphere , according to Kant, the theory of art was already potentially a theory of objects and at the same time a historical theory . The relation of subjec- tivity to art is not, as Kant has it, that of a form of reaction to artworks; rather, that relation is in the first place the element of art's own objectivity, through which art objects are distinguished from other things. The subject inheres in their form and content [Gehalt] and only secondarily, and in a radically contingent fashion, insofar as people respond to them. Admittedly, art points back to a condition in which there was no fixed dichotomy between the object and reaction to it; this was re- sponsible for mistaking forms of reaction that are themselves the correlative of reified objectification as a priori. If it is maintained that, just as in the life process of society, production rather than reception is primary in art and in aesthetics, this implies the critique of traditional, naive aesthetic subjectivism. Recourse is not to be had to lived experience, creative individuality, and the like; rather, art is to be conceived in accord with the objectively developing lawfulness of production. This is all the more to be insisted upon because the problematic-defined by Hegel- of the affects released by the artwork has been hugely magnified by their manipu- lation . The subjective contexts of reception are frequently turned, according to the will of the culture industry, against the object that is being reacted to. Yet art- works respond to this by withdrawing even more into their own structure and thus contribute to the contingency of the work's effects, whereas in other historical periods there existed, if not harmony, then at least a certain proportion between the work and the response it received. Artistic experience accordingly demands a comprehending rather than an emotional relation to the works; the subject inheres in them and in their movement as one of their elements; when the subject encoun- ters them from an external perspective and refuses to obey their discipline, it is alien to art and becomes the legitimate object of sociology .
Aesthetics today should go beyond the controversy between Kant and Hegel and not simply level it. Kant's concept of what is pleasing according to its form is retro- grade with regard to aesthetic experience and cannot be restored. Hegel's theory of content [Inhalt] is too crude. Music certainly has a determinate content-what transpires in it-and yet it nevertheless mockS the idea of content endorsed by
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Hegel. His subjectivism is so total, his idea of spirit so all-pervasive, that the differentiation of spirit from its other, and thus the determination of that other, does not come into play in his aesthetics. Because for him everything proves to be subject, what is specific to the subject-the spirit as an element of artworks- atrophies and capitulates to the thematic element, exempt from the dialectic. He is not to be spared the reproach that in his Aesthetics, in spite of magnificent insights, he became caught up in the philosophy of reflection against which he struggled. Contrary to his own thinking, he followed the primitive notion that content or material is formed or "worked over" by the aesthetic subject; in any case he liked to play off primitive notions against reflection by way of reflection. It is precisely in the artwork that, in Hegel's terms, content and material must always already be subject. It is only by way of this subjectivity that the work be- comes something objective, that is, other. For the subject is in itself objectively mediated; by virtue of its artistic figuration its own-latent-objective content [Gehalt] emerges. No other idea of the content [lnhalt] of art holds good; official Marxist aesthetics no more understood the dialectic than it understood aesthetics. Form is mediated in-itself through content-not however in such a fashion that form confronts what is simply heterogeneous to it-and content is mediated by form; while mediated the two must be distinguished, but the immanent content [Inhalt] of artworks, their material and its movement, is fundamentally distinct from content [Inhalt] as something detachable, such as a plot in a play or the sub- ject of a painting, which. Hegel in all innocence equated with content [Inhalt]. Hegel, like Kant, lagged behind the aesthetic phenomena: Hegel missed what is specifically aesthetic , and Kant missed its depth and richness. The content [Inhalt] of a picture is not simply what it portrays but rather all the elements of color, structures, and relations it contains; the content of music is, for instance, as Schoenberg put it, the history of a theme. The object portrayed may also count as an element of content; in literature, the action or the narar ted story may also count; content, however, is no less what all of this undergoes in the work, that whereby it is organized and whereby it is transformed. Form and content are not to be confused, but they should be freed from their rigid antithesis, which is insuf- ficient to both extremes. Bruno Liebruck's insight that Hegel's politics and phi- losophy of right inhere more in the Logic than in the lectures and writings devoted to these material disciplines holds true also for Hegel's aesthetics: It has yet to be raised to an undiminished dialectic. At the beginning of the second part, Hegel's Logic shows that the categories of reflection had their own origin and develop- ment and yet were all the same valid as such; in the same spirit Nietzsche in the Twilight ofthe Idols dismantled the myth that nothing that develops is able to be true . Aesthetics must make this insight its own. What sets itself up in aesthetics as an eternal norm is, in that it became what it is, transitory and obsolete by virtue of its own claim to immortality. By contrast, however, the contemporary exigencies and norms that issue from the dynamic of history are not accidental and arbitrary
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but, by virtue of their historical content [Gehalt] , objective; what is ephemeral in aesthetics is what is fixed, its skeleton. Aesthetics is under no obligation to deduce the objectivity of its historical content [Gehalt] in historicizing fashion, as being the inevitable result of the course of history; rather, this objectivity is to be grasped according to the form of that historical content. It is not, as the trivial par- adigm would have it, that aesthetics moves and is transformed in history: History is immanent to the truth content of aesthetics. For this reason it is the task of the historicophilosophical analysis of the situation to bring to light in a rigorous fash- ion what was formerly held to be the apriori of aesthetics. The slogans that were distilled out of the situation are more objective than the general norms according to which, as is philosophical custom, they are to justify themselves; certainly it needs to be shown that the truth content of great aesthetic manifestos and similar documents has taken the place once held by philosophical aesthetics . The aesthet- ics that is needed today would be the self-consciousness of the truth content of what is radically temporal. This clearly demands, as the counterpoint to the analy- sis of the situation, that traditional aesthetic categories be confronted with this analysis; it is exclusively this confrontation that brings the artistic movement and the movement of the concept into relation.
That today a general methodology cannot, as is customary, preface the effort of reconceiving aesthetics, is itself of a part with methodology. The gUilt for this is borne by the relation between the aesthetic object and aesthetic thought. The insistence on method cannot be stringently met by opposing another method to the one already approved. So long as the work is not entered-in keeping with Goethe's maxim-as a chapel would be entered, all the talk about objectivity in matters of aesthetics, whether it be the objectivity of artistic content or that of its knowledge, remains pure assertion. The chattering, automated objection that in- sists that claims to objectivity are only subjective opinions, or that the aesthetic content in which aesthetics that aims at objectivity terminates is nothing but pro- jection, can be met fully only by the proof of objective artistic content in artworks themselves . The fulfillment of this proof legitimates method at the same time that it precludes its supposition. If aesthetic objectivity were presupposed as the ab- stract universal principle of the fulfillment of the method, without support from any system, it would be at a disadvantage; the truth of this objectivity is consti- tuted by what comes later, in the process of its development, not by what is simply posited. The process has nothing but the development oftruth to oppose as a prin- ciple to the insufficiency of the principle. Certainly the fulfillment of aesthetic objectivity requires critical reflection on principles . This protects it from irrespon- sible conjecture.