No More Learning

Subjective experience contributes images that are not images ofsome- thing, and precisely they are essentially collective; thus and in no other way is art mediated to experience. By virtue of this experiential content,1O and not primarily as a result of fixation or forming as they are usually conceived, artworks diverge from empirical reality: empiria through empirical deformation. This is the affinity of artworks to the dream, however far removed they are from dreams by their law of form. This means nothing less than that the subjective element of artworks is mediated by their being-in-themselves. The latent collectivity of this SUbjectivity frees the monadological artwork from the accidentalness of its individuation. So- ciety , the determinant of experience , constitutes artworks as their true SUbject; this is the needed response to the current reproach of subjectivism raised to art by both left and right. At every aesthetic level the antagonism between the unreality of the imago and the reality of the appearing historical content is renewed. The aesthetic images, however, emancipate themselves from mythical images by subordinating themselves to their own unreality; that is what the law of form means. This is the artworks' methexis in enlightenment. The view of art as politically engaged or di- dactic regresses back of this stage of enlightenment . Unconcerned with the reality of aesthetic images, this view shuffles away the antithesis of art to reality and in- tegrates art into the reality it opposes. Only those artworks are enlightened that, vigilantly distant from the empirical, evince true consciousness.
That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are: This is their spirit. The determination of artworks by spirit is akin to their determi- nation as phenomenon,! ! as something that appears, and not as blind appearance. What appears in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical with it- the nonfactual in their facticity - is their spirit. It makes artworks, things among things, something other than thing. In- deed, artworks are only able to become other than thing by becoming a thing, though not through their localization in space and time but only by an immanent process of reification that makes them self-same, self-identical. Otherwise one could not speak of their spirit, that is, of what is utterly unthinglike. Spirit is not
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simply spiritus, the breath that animates the work as a phenomenon; spirit is as much the force or the interior of works, the force of their objectivation; spirit par- ticipates in this force no less than in the phenomenality that is contrary to it. The spirit of artworks is their immanent mediation, which transforms their sensual moments and their objective arrangement; this is mediation in the strict sense that each and every element in the artwork becomes manifestly its own other. The aesthetic concept of spirit has been severely compromised not only by idealism but also by writings dating from the nascence of radical modernism, among them those of Kandinsky. In his justified revolt against sensualism, which even in lugendstil accorded a preponderance to sensual satisfaction, Kandinsky abstractly isolated the contrary of this principle and reified it so that it became difficult to distinguish the "You should believe in spirit" from superstition and an arts-and- crafts enthusiasm for the exalted. The spirit in artworks transcends equally their status as a thing and the sensual phenomenon, and indeed only exists insofar as these are among its elements. Put negatively: In artworks nothing is literal, least of all their words; spirit is their ether, what speaks through them, or, more pre- cisely, what makes artworks become script. Although nothing counts in artworks that does not originate in the configuration of their sensual elements-all other spirit in the artworks, particularly injected philosophical thematics and putatively expressed spirit, all discursive ingredients, are material like colors and tones-the
sensual in artworks is artistic only if in itself mediated by spirit. Even the sensually most dazzling French works achieve their rank by the involuntary transformation of their sensual elements into bearers of a spirit whose experiential content is melancholic resignation to mortal, sensual existence; never do these works relish their suaveness to the full, for that suaveness is always curtailed by the sense of form. The spirit of artworks is objective, regardless of any philosophy of objective or subjective spirit; this spirit is their own content and it passes judgment over them: It is the spirit of the thing itself that appears through the appearance. Its ob- jectivity has its measure in the power with which it infiltrates the appearance. Just how little the spirit of the work equals the spirit of the artist, which is at most one element of the former, is evident in the fact that spirit is evoked through the arti- fact, its problems, and its material. Not even the appearance of the artwork as a whole is its spirit, and least of all is it the appearance of the idea purportedly em- bodied or symbolized by the work; spirit cannot be fixated in immediate identity with its appearance. But neither does spirit constitute a level above or below ap- pearance; such a supposition would be no less of a reification. The locus of spirit is the configuration of what appears. Spirit forms appearance just as appearance forms spirit; it is the luminous source through which the phenomenon radiates and becomes a phenomenon in the most pregnant sense of the word. The sensual ex- ists in art only spiritualized and refracted. This can be elucidated by the category of "critical situation" in important artworks of the past, without the knowledge of which the analysis of works would be fruitless. Just before the beginning of the
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reprise of the first movement of Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata, which Tolstoy defamed as sensuous, the secondary subdominant produces an immense effect. Anywhere outside of the Kreutzer sonata the same chord would be more or less insignificant. The passage only gains significance through its place and function in the movement . It becomes crucially significant in that through its hie et nunc it points beyond itself and imparts the feeling of a critical situation over what pre- cedes and follows it. This feeling cannot be grasped as an isolated sensual quality , yet through the sensual constellation of two chords at a critical point it becomes as irrefutable as only something sensual can be. In its aesthetic manifestation, spirit is condemned to its locus in the phenomenon just as spirits were once thought to have been condemned to their haunts; if spirit does not appear, the artworks are as negligible as that spirit. Spirit is indifferent to the distinction drawn by the history of ideas between sensual and idealistic art. Insofar as there is sensual art, it is not simply sensual but embodies the spirit of sensuality; Wedekind' s concept of car- nal spirit registered this. Spirit, art's vital element, is bound up with art's truth content, though without coinciding with it. The spirit of works can be untruth. For truth content postulates something real as its substance, and no spirit is immedi- ately real . With an ever increasing ruthlessness , spirit determines and pulls every- thing merely sensual and factual in artworks into its own sphere. Artworks thereby become more secular, more opposed to mythology, to the illusion of spirit-even its own spirit-as real. Thus artworks radically mediated by spirit are compelled to consume themselves. Through the determinate negation of the real- ity of spirit, however, these artworks continue to refer to spirit: They do not feign spirit, rather the force they mobilize against it is spirit's omnipresence. Spirit today is not imaginable in any other form; art offers its prototype. As tension be- tween the elements of the artwork, and not as an existence sui generis, art's spirit is a process and thus it is the work itself. To know an artwork means to apprehend this process. The spirit of artworks is not a concept, yet through spirit artworks be- come commensurable to the concept . B y reading the spirit of artworks out of their configurations and confronting the elements with each other and with the spirit that appears in them, critique passes over into the truth of the spirit, which is lo- cated beyond the aesthetic configuration. This is why critique is necessary to the works. In the spirit of the works critique recognizes their truth content or distin- guishes truth content from spirit. Only in this act, and not through any philoso- phy of art that would dictate to art what its spirit must be, do art and philosophy converge .
The strict immanence ofthe spirit of artworks is contradicted on the otherhand by a countertendency that is no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the internal unity of their own construction , to introduce within themselves caesuras that no longer permit the totality of the appearance. Because the spirit of the works is not identical with them, spirit breaks up the objective form through which it is constituted; this rupture is the instant ofapparition. Ifthe
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spirit of artworks were literally identical with their sensual elements and their organization, spirit would be nothing but the quintessence of the appearance: The repudiation of this thesis amounts to the rejection of idealism. If the spirit of art- works flashes up in their sensual appearance, it does so only as their negation: Unitary with the phenomenon, spirit is at the same time its other. The spirit of art- works is bound up with their form, but spirit is such only insofar as it points beyond that form. The claim that there is no difference between articulation and the articulated, between immanent form and content, is seductive especially as an apology for modern art, but it is scarcely tenable. This becomes evident in the realization that technological analysis does not grasp the spirit of a work even when this analysis is more than a crude reduction to elements and also emphasizes the artwork's context and its coherence as well as its real or putative initial con- stituents; it requires further reflection to grasp that spirit. Only as spirit is art the antithesis of empirical reality as the determinate negation of the existing order of the world. Art is to be construed dialectically insofar as spirit inheres in it, without however art's possessing spirit as an absolute or spirit's serving to guarantee an absolute to art. Artworks, however much they may seem to be an entity, crystallize between this spirit and its other. In Hegel's aesthetics the objectivity of the art- work was conceived as the truth of spirit that has gone over into its own otherness and become identical with this otherness. For Hegel, spirit is at one with totality, even with the aesthetic totality. Certainly spirit in artworks is not an intentional particular but an element like every particular constitutive of an artwork; true, spirit is that particular that makes an artifact art, though there is no spirit without its antithesis. In actual fact, history knows no artworks in which there is a pure identity of the spiritual and the nonspiritual. According to its own concept, spirit in artworks is not pure but rather a function of that out of which it arises. Those works that appear to embody such identity and are content with it are hardly ever the most important ones. Granted, that which in artworks is opposed to spirit is in no way the natural aspect of its materials and objects; rather, it is a limit. Materials and objects are as historically and socially preformed as are their methods; they are definitively transformed by what transpires in the works. What is hetero- geneous in artworks is immanent to them: It is that in them that opposes unity and yet is needed by unity if it is to be more than a pyrrhic victory over the unresisting . That the spirit of artworks is not to be equated with their immanent nexus-the
arrangement of their sensual elements-is evident in that they in no way consti- tute that gapless unity, that type of form to which aesthetic reflection has falsely reduced them. In terms of their own structure, they are not organisms; works of the highest rank are hostile to their organic aspect as illusory and affirmative. In all its genres, art is pervaded by intellective elements. It may suffice to note that without such elements, without listening ahead and thinking back, without expec- tation and memory , without the synthesis of the discrete and separate , great musi- cal forms would never have existed. Whereas to a certain extent these functions
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may be attributed to sensual immediacy-that is, that particular complexes of elements incorporate qualities of what is antecedent and forthcoming-artworks nevertheless achieve a critical point where this immediacy ends; where they must be "thought," not in external reflection but on their own terms; the intellective me- diation belongs to their own sensual arrangement and determines their perception. If there is something like a common characteristic of great late works, it is to be sought in the breaking through of form by spirit. This is no aberration of art but rather its fatal corrective. Its highest products are condemned to a fragmentariness that is their confession that even they do not possess what is claimed by the imma- nence of their form.
Objective idealism was the first to stress vigorously the spiritual as against the sensual element of art. It thus equated art' s objectivity with spirit: In thoughtless accord with tradition, idealism identified the sensual with the accidental. Univer- sality and necessity , which for Kant dictate the canon of aesthetic judgment even though they remain problematic, became construable for Hegel by means of the omnipotent category of spirit. The progress of this aesthetics beyond all previous thinking is evident; just as the conception of art was liberated from the last traces of feudal divertissement, its spiritual content, as its principal determination, was at least potentially wrested from the sphere of mere meaning, of intentions. Since Hegel conceives of spirit as what exists in and for itself, it is recognized in art as its substance and not as a thin, abstract layer hovering above it. This is implicit in the definition of beauty as the sensual semblance of the idea. Philosophical ideal- ism, however, was in no way as kindly disposed toward aesthetic spiritualization as the theoretical construction would perhaps indicate. On the contrary, idealism set itself up as the defender of precisely that sensuality that in its opinion was being impoverished by spiritualization; that doctrine of the beautiful as the sen- sual semblance of the idea was an apology for immediacy as something meaning- ful and, in Hegel's own words, affirmative. Radical spiritualization is antithetical to this. This progress had a high price, however, for the spiritual element of art is not what idealist aesthetics calls spirit; rather, it is the mimetic impulse fixated as totality . The sacrifice made by art for this emancipation, whose postulate has been consciously formulated ever since Kant's dubious theorem that "nothing sensu- ous is sublime," 12 is presumably already evident in modernity . With the elimina- tion of the principle of representation in painting and sculpture, and of the ex- ploitation of fragments in music, it became almost unavoidable that the elements set free-colors, sounds, absolute configurations of words-came to appear as if they already inherently expressed something. This is, however, illusory, for the el- ements become eloquent only through the context in which they occur. The super- stitious belief in the elementary and unmediated, to which expressionism paid homage and which worked its way down into arts and crafts as well as into philos- ophy , corresponds to capriciousness and accidentalness in the relation of material and expression in construction. To begin with, the claim that in itself red pos-
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sesses an expressive value was an illusion, and the putative expressive values of complex, multitonal sounds were in fact predicated on the insistent negation of traditional sounds . Reduced to "natural material" all of this is empty, and theories that mystify it have no more substance than the charlatanism of Farbton experi- ments. It is only the most recent physicalism that, in music for instance, carries out a reduction literally to elements: This is spiritualization that progressively exorcises spirit. Here the self-destructive aspect of spiritualization becomes obvi- ous. While the metaphysics of spiritualization has become philosophically ques- tionable, the concept is at the same time too universal to do justice to spirit in art. Nevertheless, the artwork continues to assert itself as essentially spiritual even when spirit is for all intents and purposes no longer to be presupposed as a sub- stance. Hegel's aesthetics does not resolve the question of how it is possible to speak of spirit as a determination of the artwork without hypostatizing its objec- tivity as absolute identity. Thereby the controversy is in a sense referred back to the Kantian court ofjustice. In Hegel, the spirit of art was deducible from the sys- tem as one level of its manifestation and was, as it were, univocal in potentially each and every genre and artwork , but only by relinquishing the aesthetic attribute of ambiguity. Aesthetics is, however, not applied philosophy but rather in itself philosophical . Hegel ' s reflection that "the science of art has greater priority than does art itself"13 is the admittedly problematical product of his hierarchical view of the relation of the domains of spirit to each other. On the other hand, in the face of growing theoretical interest in art, Hegel's theorem of the primacy of science has its prophetic truth in art's need of philosophy for the unfolding of its own con- tent. Paradoxically, Hegel's metaphysics of spirit results in a certain reification of spirit in the artwork through the fixation of its idea. In Kant, however, the ambigu- ity between the feeling of necessity and the fact that this necessity is not a given but something unresolved is truer to aesthetic experience than is Hegel's much more modem ambition of knowing art from within rather than in terms of its sub- jective constitution from without. If this Hegelian philosophical tum is justified, it in no way follows from a systematic subordinating concept but rather from the sphere that is specific to art. Not everything that exists is spirit, yet art is an entity that through its configurations becomes something spiritual. If idealism was able to requisition art for its purposes by fiat, this was because through its own consti- tution art corresponds to the fundamental conception of idealism, which indeed without Schelling's model of art would never have developed into its objective form. Art cannot be conceived without this immanently idealistic element, that is, without the objective mediation of all art through spirit; this sets a limit to dull- minded doctrines of aesthetic realism just as those elements encompassed in the name of realism are a constant reminder that art is no twin of idealism.
In no artwork is the element of spirit something that exists; rather, it is something in a process of deVelopment and formation. Thus, as Hegel was the first to per- ceive , the spirit of artworks is integrated into an overarching process of spirituali-
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zation: that of the progress of consciousness. Precisely through its progressive spiritualization, through its division from nature , art wants to revoke this division from which it suffers and which inspires it. Spiritualization provided art anew with what had been excluded from it by artistic practice since Greek antiquity: the sensuously unpleasing , the repulsive; Baudelaire virtually made this development art's program . Hegel aimed at justifying the irresistibility of spiritualization in the theory of what he called the romantic artwork. 14 Since then, everything sensually pleasing in art, every charm of material, has been degraded to the level of the preartistic . Spiritualization, as the continuous expansion of the mimetic taboo on art, the indigenous domain of mimesis, works toward art's dissolution. But being also a mimetic force, spiritualization at the same time works toward the identity of the artwork with itself, thereby excluding the heterogeneous and strengthening its image character. Art is not infiltrated by spirit; rather, spirit follows artworks where they want to go, setting free their immanent language. Still, spiritualization cannot free itself of a shadow that demands its critique; the more substantial spiri- tualization became in art, the more energetically-in Benjamin's theory no less than in Beckett ' s literary praxis - did it renounce spirit , the idea. However, in that spiritualization is inextricable from the requirement that everything must become form, spiritualization becomes complicitous in the tendency that liquidates the tension between art and its other. Only radically spiritualized art is still possible , all other art is childish; inexorably, however, the childish seems to contaminate the whole existence of art. -The sensuously pleasing has come under a double at- tack. On the one hand, through the artwork's spiritualization the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly become the appearance of the inward . On the other hand, the absorption of resistant material and themes opposes the culinary consumption of art even if, given the general ideological tendency to integrate everything that resists integration, consumption undertakes to swallow everything up whole, however repulsive it might seem. In early impressionism, with Manet, the polemical edge of spiritualization was no less sharp than it was in Baudelaire . The further artworks distance themselves from the childish desire to please, the more what they are in themselves prevails over what they present to even the most ideal viewer, whose reflexes increasingly become a matter of indifference. In the sphere of natural beauty, Kant's theory of the sublime anticipates the spiritualiza- tion that art alone is able to achieve. For Kant, what is sublime in nature is nothing but the autonomy of the spirit in the face of the superior power of sensuous exis- tence, and this autonomy is achieved only in the spiritualized artwork. Admit- tedly, the spiritualization of art is not a pristine process. Whenever spiritualization is not fully carried out in the concretion of the aesthetic structure , the emancipated spiritual element is degraded to the level of subaltern thematic material . Opposed to the sensuous aspect, spiritualization frequently turns blindly against that as- pect's differentiation, itself something spiritual, and becomes abstract. In its early period, spiritualization is accompanied by a tendency to primitivism and, contrary
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to sensuous culture , tends toward the barbaric: In their own name the fauvists made this their program. Regression shadows all opposition to affirmative culture. Spiri- tualization in art must prove its ability to rise above this threat of regression and to recover the suppressed differentiation; otherwise, art deteriorates into a violent act of spirit. All the same, spiritualization is legitimate as the critique of culture through art, which is part of culture and finds no satisfaction in its failure. The function of barbaric traits in modern art changes historically. The good souls who cross themselves in front of reproductions of the Demoiselles d 'Avignon or while listening to Schoenberg's early piano pieces, are without exception more barbaric than the barbarism they fear. As soon as new dimensions emerge in art, they refuse older ones and initially prefer impoverishment and the renunciation of false richness, even of highly developed forms of reaction. The process of spiritualiza- tion in art is never linear progress. Its criterion of success is the ability of art to ap- propriate into its language of form what bourgeois society has ostracized, thereby revealing in what has been stigmatized that nature whose suppression is what is truly evil. The perennial indignation, unchanged by the culture industry, over the ugliness of modern art is, despite the pompous ideals sounded, hostile to spirit; it interprets the ugliness? , and especially the unpleasing reproaches, literally rather than as a test of the power of spiritualization and as a cipher of the opposition in which this spiritualization proves itself. Rimbaud's postulate of the radically modern is that of an art that moves in the tension between spleen et ideal, between spiritualization and obsession with what is most distant from spirit. The primacy of spirit in art and the inroads made by what was previously taboo are two sides of the same coin. It is concerned with what has not yet been socially approved and preformed and thereby becomes a social condition of determinate negation. Spiri- tualization takes place not through ideas announced by art but by the force with which it penetrates layers that are intentionless and hostile to the conceptual. This is not the least of the reasons why the proscribed and forbidden tempt artistic sen- sibilities. Spiritualization in new art prohibits it from tarnishing itself any further with the topical preferences of philistine culture: the true, the beautiful, and the good. Into its innermost core what is usually called art's social critique or engage- ment, all that is critical or negative in art, has been fused with spirit, with art's law of form. That these elements are at present stubbornly played off against each other is a symptom of the regression of consciousness.
Theories that argue that art has the responsibility of bringing order-and, indeed, not a classificatory abstract order but one that is sensuously concrete-to the chaotic multiplicity of the appearing or of nature itself, suppress in idealistic fash- ion the telos of aesthetic spiritualization: to give the historical figures of the natural and repression of the natural their due. Accordingly, the relation of the process of spiritualization to the chaotic is historical . It has often been said, probably first by Karl Kraus, that in society as a whole it is art that should introduce chaos into order rather than the reverse. The chaotic aspects of qualitatively new art are
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opposed to order- the spirit of order- only at first glance. They are the ciphers of a critique of a spurious second nature: Order is in truth this chaotic. The element of chaos and radical spiritualization converge in the rejection of sleekly polished images of life; in this regard art that has been spiritualized to the extreme, such as that beginning with Mallarme's, and the dream-chaos of surrealism are more closely related than their disciples realize; incidentally, there are cross-links be- tween the young Breton and symbolism, as well as between the early German ex- pressionists and George, whom they challenged. In its relation to the unmastered, spiritualization is antinomical. Because spiritualization always constrains the sen- suous elements, its spirit fatefully becomes a being sui generis and thus according to its own immanent tendency spiritualization also works against art. Art's crisis is accelerated by spiritualization, which opposes selling artworks off as objects of sensuous gratification. Spiritualization becomes a counterforce to the gypsy wagon of wandering actors and musicians, the socially outcast. Yet however deep the compulsion may lie that art divest itself of every trace of being a show, of its ancient deceitfulness in society , art no longer exists when that element has been totally eradicated and yet it is unable to provide any protected arena for that ele- ment. No sublimation succeeds that does not guard in itself what it sublimates. Whether or not the spiritualization of art is capable of this will decide if art sur- vives or if Hegel's prophecy of the end of art will indeed be fulfilled, a prophecy that, in the world such as it has become, amounts to the thoughtless and-in the detestable sense-realistic confirmation and reproduction of what is. In this re- gard, the rescue of art is eminently political, but it is also as uncertain in itself as it is threatened by the course of the world.
Insight into the growing spiritualization of art , by virtue of the development of its concept no less than by its relation to society, collides with a dogma that runs throughout bourgeois aesthetics: that of art's intuitability. l5 Already in Hegel spir- itualization and intuitability could no longer be reconciled, and the first somber prophecies on the future of art were the result . Kant had already formulated the norm of intuitability in section 9 of the Critique ofJudgment: "[T]he beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept. "16 The "without a concept" may be said to converge with the quality of art's pleasingness as dispensation from the labor and exertion imposed-and not only since Hegel's philosophy-by the con- cept. Whereas art long ago relegated the ideal of pleasingness to musty antiquity , the theory of art has not been able to renounce the concept of intuitability , a monu- ment to old-fashioned aesthetic hedonism, even though every modem artwork- by now even the older works-demands the labor of observation with which the doctrine of intuitability wanted to dispense. The advancement of intellective me- diation into the structure of artworks, where this mediation must to a large extent perform what was once the role of pregiven forms, constrains the sensuously unmediated whose quintessence was the pure intuitability of artworks . Yet bour- geois consciousness entrenches itself in the sensuously unmediated because it
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senses that only its intuitability reflects a gaplessness and roundedness of art- works that then , in whatever circuitous fashion , is attributed to the reality to which the artworks respond. If, however, art were totally without the element of intu- ition, it would be theory, whereas art is instead obviously impotent in itself when, emulating science, it ignores its own qualitative difference from the discursive concept; precisely art's spiritualization, as the primacy of its procedures , distances art from naive conceptuality and the commonsense idea of comprehensibility. Whereas the norm of intuitability accentuates the opposition of art to discursive thinking, it suppresses nonconceptual mediation, suppresses the nonsensuous in the sensuous structure, which by constituting the structure already fractures it and puts it beyond the intuitability in which it appears. The norm of intuitability, which denies what is implicitly categorial in artworks, reifies intuitability itself as opaque and impenetrable, makes it in terms of its pure form into a copy of the pet- rified world, always alert for anything that might disturb the harmony the work purportedly reflects. In actuality, the concretion of artworks, in the apparition that ripples disconcertingly through them , goes far beyond the intuitability that is habitually held up against the universality of the concept and that stands in accord with the ever-same. The more inexorably the world is ruled throughout, ever-the- same, by the universal, the more easily the rudiments of the particular are mis- taken for immediacy and confused with concretion, even though their contin- gency is in fact the stamp of abstract necessity. Artistic concretion is, however, neither pure existence, conceptless individualization, nor that form of mediation by the universal known as a type. In terms of its own determination, no authentic artwork is typical. Lukacs's thinking is art-alien when he contrasts typical, "nor- mal" works with atypical and therefore irrelevant ones . If he were right, artworks would be no more than a sort of anticipation of a science yet to be completed. The patently idealist assertion that the artwork of the present represents the unity of the universal and the particular is completely dogmatic. The assertion, a surrepti- tious borrowing of the theological doctrine of the symbol, is given the lie by the a priori fissure between the mediate and the immediate, from which no mature art- work has yet been able to escape; if this fissure is concealed rather than that the work immerses itself in it, the work is lost. It is precisely radical art that, while refusing the desideratum of realism, stands in a relation of tension to the symbol. It remains to be demonstrated that symbols or metaphors in modem art make themselves progressively independent of their symbolic function and thereby con- tribute to the constitution of a realm that is antithetical to the empirical world and its meanings. Art absorbs symbols in such a fashion that they are no longer sym- bolic; advanced artists have themselves carried out the critique of the character of the symbol. The ciphers and characters of modem art are signs that have forgotten themselves and become absolute. Their infiltration into the aesthetic medium and their refusal of intentionality are two aspects of the same process. The transforma- tion of dissonance into compositional "material" is to be interpreted analogously.
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In literature, this transformation can be followed relatively early in the relation- ship between Strindberg and late Ibsen, where Strindberg is already anticipated. The increasing literalization of what was previously symbolic shockingly endows the spiritual element, which was emancipated through second reflection, with an independence that is mortally eloquent in the occult layer of Strindberg's work and becomes productive in the break from any form of replicability .
That none of his works are a symbol points up that in none of them does the absolute reveal itself; otherwise art would be neither semblance nor play but rather something factually real. Given their constitutive refractedness, pure intuitability cannot be attributed to artworks. Art is preemptively mediated by its as-if character. If it were completely intuitable , it would become part of the empirical world that it re- sists. Its mediatedness, however, is not an abstract apriori but involves every con- crete aesthetic element; even the most sensuous elements are always unintuitable by virtue of their relation to the spirit of the work. No analysis of important works could possibly prove their pure intuitability , for they are all pervaded by the con- ceptual. This is literally true in language and indirectly true even in the noncon- ceptual medium of music, where regardless of a work's psychological genesis the stupid and the intelligent can be explicitly distinguished. The desideratum of intu- itability wants to conserve the mimetic element of art while remaining blind to the fact that this element survives only through its antithesis, the works' rational con- trol over everything heterogeneous to them. Shorn of its antithesis, intuitability would become a fetish. In the aesthetic domain the mimetic impulse affects even the mediation, the concept, that which is not present. The concept is as indispens- ably intermixed in art as it is in language , though in art the concept becomes quali- tatively other than collections of characteristics shared by empirical objects. The intermixture of concepts is not identical with asserting the conceptuality of art; art is no more concept than it is pure intuition, and it is precisely thereby that art protests against their separation. The intuitive element in art differs from sensuous perception because in art the intuitive element always refers to its spirit. Art is the intuition of what is not intuitable; it is akin to the conceptual without the concept. It is by way of concepts, however, that art sets free its mimetic, nonconceptual layer. Whether by reflection or unconsciously, modem art has undermined the dogma of intuitability. What remains true in the doctrine of intuitability is that it emphasizes the element of the incommensurable, that which in art is not exhausted by discursive logic, the sine qua non of all manifestations of art. Art militates against the concept as much as it does against domination, but for this opposition it, like philosophy, requires concepts. Art's so-called intuitability is an aporetic construction: With a pass of the magic wand it means to reduce to iden- tity what is internally disparate and in process in artworks, and therefore this construction glances off artworks, none of which result in such identity. The wordAnschaulichkeit [intuitabilityl,itselfborrowedfromthetheoryofdiscursive knowledge , where it stipulates a formed content, testifies to the rational element in
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art as much as it conceals that element by dividing off the phenomenal element and hypostatizing it. Evidence of the aporia of the concept of aesthetic intuition is provided by the Critique ofJudgment. The "Analytic of the Beautiful" concerns the "Elements of the Judgment of Taste . " Of these Kant says in a footnote to sec- tion 1 : "I have used the logical functions of judging to help me find the elements that judgment takes into consideration when it reflects (since even a judgment of taste still has reference to the understanding). I have examined the element of quality first, because an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned with it first. "! ? This flagrantly contradicts the thesis that beauty pleases universally without a concept. It is admirable that Kant's aesthetics let this contradiction stand and expressly reflected on it without explaining it away. On the one hand, Kant treats the judgment of taste as a logical function and thus attributes this func- tion to the aesthetic object to which the judgment would indeed need to be ade- quate; on the other hand, the artwork is said to present itself "without a concept," a mere intuition, as if it were simply extralogical. This contradiction, however, is in fact inherent in art itself, as the contradiction between its spiritual and mimetic constitution. The claim to truth, which involves something universal and which each artwork registers , is incompatible with pure intuitability . Just how fateful the insistence on the exclusively intuitable character of art has been is obvious from its consequences. In Hegel's terms, it serves the abstract separation of intuition and spirit. The more the work is said to be purely identical with its intuitability, the more its spirit is reified as an "idea," as an immutable content back of its appearance. The spiritual elements that are withdrawn from the structure of the phenomenon are hypostatized as its idea. The result usually is that intentions are
exalted as the work's content, while correlatively intuition is allotted to sensuous satisfaction. The official assertion of artworks' common unity could, however, be refuted in each of those so-called classical works on which the assertion is founded: Precisely in these works the semblance of unity is what has been con- ceptually mediated. The dominant model is philistine: Appearance is to be purely intuitable and the content purely conceptual , corresponding to the rigid dichotomy between freedom and labor. No ambivalence is tolerated. This is the polemical point of attack for the break from the ideal of intuitability. Because aesthetic appearance cannot be reduced to its intuition, the content of artworks cannot be reduced to the concept either. The false synthesis of spirit and sensuousness in aesthetic intuition conceals their no less false, rigid polarity; the aesthetics of intu- ition is founded on the model of a thing: In the synthesis of the artifact the tension , its essence, gives way to a fundamental repose .
Intuitability! 8 is no characteristica universalis of art. It is intermittent. Aestheti- cians have hardly taken notice of this; one of the rare exceptions is Theodor Meyer, now virtually forgotten. He showed that there is no sensuous intuition, no set of images, that corresponds to what literature says; on the contrary, its concre- tion consists in its linguistic form rather than in the highly problematic optical
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representation that it supposedly provokes. 19 Literature does not require comple- tion through sensuous representation; it is concrete in language and through it, it is suffused with the nonsensuous, in accordance with the oxymoron of non- sensuous intuition. Even in concept-alien art there is a nonsensuous element at work . Theories that deny this element for the sake of their thema probandum join forces with that philistinism that is always ready to dub the music it/finds cozy a "feast for the ears. " Precisely in its great and emphatic forms, music embodies complexes that can only be understood through what is sensuously not present, through memory or expectation, complexes that hold such categorical determina- tions embedded in their own structure. It is impossible,for instance, to interpret as a mere continuation the at times distant relations between the development of the first movement of the Eroica and the exposition , and the extreme contrast to this exposition established by the new theme: The work is intellective in itself, with- out in any way being embarrassed about it and without the integration of the work thereby impinging on its law of form. The arts seem to have moved so far in the direction of their unity in art that the situation is no different in the visual arts . The spiritual mediation of the artwork , by which it contrasts with the empirical world, cannot be realized without the inclusion of the discursive dimension. If the art- work were in a rigorous sense intuitable, it would be permanently relegated to the contingency of what exists sensuously and immediately, to which the artwork in fact opposes its own type of logicity . Its quality is determined by whether its con- cretion divests itself of its contingency by virtue of its integral elaboration. The puristic and to this extent rationalistic separation of intuition from the conceptual serves the dichotomy of rationality and sensuousness that society perpetrates and ideologically enjoins. Art would need rather to work in effigy against this di- chotomy through the critique that it objectively embodies; through art's restric- tion to sensuousness this dichotomy is only confirmed. The untruth attacked by art is not rationality but rationality's rigid opposition to the particular; if art separates out intuitability and bestows it with the crown of the particular, then art endorses that rigidification, valorizing the detritus of societal rationality and thereby serv- ing to distract from this rationality. The more gaplessly a work seeks to be intu- itable and thus fulfill aesthetic precept, the more its spiritual element is reified, Xropi<; from the appearance and isolated from the forming of apparition . Behind the cult of intuitability lurks the philistine convention ofthe body that lies stretched out on the sofa while the soul soars to the heights: Aesthetic appearance is to be effortless relaxation, the reproduction of labor power, and spirit is reduced hand- ily to what is called the work's "message. " Constitutively a protest against the claim of the discursive to totality, artworks therefore await answer and solution and inevitably summon forth concepts. No work has ever achieved the indiffer- ence of pure intuitability and binding universality that is presupposed a priori by traditional aesthetics. The doctrine of intuition is false because it phenomenologi- cally attributes to art what it does not fulfill. The criterion of artworks is not the
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purity of intuition but rather the profundity with which they carry out the tension with the intellective elements that inhere in them. Nevertheless, the taboo on the nonintuitive elements of artworks is not without justification. What is conceptual in artworks involves judgment, and to judge is contrary to the artwork. Although judgments may occur in it, the work itself does not make judgments, perhaps be- cause ever since Attic tragedy the work has been a hearing . If the discursive ele- ment takes primacy, the relation of the artwork to what is external to it becomes all too unmediated and the work accomodates itself even at those points where , as in Brecht, it takes pride in standing in opposition to reality: The work actually becomes positivistic. The artwork must absorb into its immanent nexus its discur- sive components in a movement that is contrary to the externally directed, apo- phantic movement that releases the discursive. The language of advanced lyrical poetry achieves this, and that is how it reveals its specific dialectic. It is evident that artworks can heal the wounds that abstraction inflicts on them only through the heightening of abstraction, which impedes the contamination of the concep- tual ferment with empirical reality: The concept becomes a "parameter. " Indeed, because art is essentially spiritual, it cannot be purely intuitive. It must also be thought: art itself thinks. The prevalence of the doctrine of intuition , which con- tradicts all experience of artworks, is a reflex to social reification. It amounts to the establishment of a special sphere of immediacy that is blind to the thing-like dimensions of artworks, which are constitutive of what in art goes beyond the thing as such. Not only do artworks, as Heidegger pointed out in opposition to ide- alism,19 have things that function as their bearers-their own objectivation makes them into things of a second order. What they have become in themselves-their inner structure, which follows the work's immanent logic-cannot be reached by pure intuition; in the work what is available to intuition is mediated by the struc- ture of the work, in contrast to which the intuitable is a matter of indifference. Every experience of artworks must go beyond what is intuitable in them. If they were nothing but intuitable they would be of subaltern importance, in Wagner's words: an effect without a cause. Reification is essential to artworks and contra- dicts their essence as that which appears; their quality of being a thing is no less dialectical than their intuitable element. But the objectivation of the artwork is not - as was thought by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who no longer entirely under- stood Hegel-unitary with its material; rather, its objectivation is the result ofthe play of forces in the work and related to its thing-character as an act of synthesis. There is some analogy here to the double character of the Kantian thing as the transcendent thing-in-itself and as an object subjectively constituted through the law of its phenomena. For artworks are things in space and time; whether this holds for hybrid musical forms such as improvisation, once extinct and now resuscitated , is hard to decide; in artworks the element that precedes their fixation as things constantly breaks through the thing-character. Yet even in improvisation much speaks for their status as a thing: their appearance in empirical time and,
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even more important, the fact that they demonstrate objectivated, mostly conven- tional patterns. For insofar as artworks are works they are things in themselves, objectified by virtue of their particular law of form. That in drama not the text but the performance is taken to be what matters, just as in music not the score but the living sound is so regarded, testifies to the precariousness of the thing-character in art, which does not, however, thereby release the artwork from its participation in the world of things. For scores are not only almost always better than the perfor- mances, they are more than simply instructions for them; they are indeed the thing itself. Incidentally, both concepts of the artwork as thing are not necessarily dis- tinct. The realization of music was, at least until recently , the interlinear version of the score. The fixation through print or scores is not external to the work; only through them does the work become autonomous from its genesis: That explains the primacy of the text over its performance. What is not fixated in art is -for the most part only illusorily-closer to the mimetic impulse but usually below-not above-the fixated, a vestige of an obsolete and usually regressive practice. The most recent rebellion against the fixation of artworks as reification, for instance the replacement of the mensural system with neumic-graphic imitations of musi- cal gestures, is by comparison still significative and simply reification of an older level. Of course this rebellion would not be as extensive if the artwork did not suf- fer from its immanent condition as a thing. Only a philistine and stubborn faith in artists could overlook the complicity of the artwork's thing-character with social reification and thus with its untruth: the fetishization of what is in itself a process as a relation between elements. The artwork is at once process and instant. Its ob- jectivation, a condition of aesthetic autonomy, is also rigidification. The more the social labor sedimented in the artwork is objectified and fully formed, the more the work echoes hollowly and becomes alien to itself.
The emancipation from the concept of harmony has revealed itself to be a revolt against semblance: Construction inheres tautologically in expression, which is its polar opposite. The rebellion against semblance did not, however, take place in favor of play, as Benjamin supposed, though there is no mistaking the playful quality of the permutations, for instance, that have replaced fictional develop- ments. The crisis of semblance may engulf play as well, for the harmlessness of play deserves the same fate as does harmony, which originates in semblance. Art that seeks to redeem itself from semblance through play becomes sport. A mea- sure of the intensity of the crisis of semblance is that it has befallen music, which prima vista is inimical to the illUSOry. In music, fictive elements wither away even in their sublimated form, which includes not only the expression of nonexistent feelings but even structural elements such as the fiction of a totality that is recog- nized as unrealizable. In great music such as Beethoven's-and probably this h o l d s tr u e far be y o n d t h e r a n g e o f t h e t e m p o r a l a r t s - t h e s o - c a l l e d p r i m a l e l e m e n t s
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turned u p b y analysis are usually eminently insubstantial . Only insofar as these el- ements asymptotically approximate nothingness do they meld - as a pure process ofbecoming-into a whole. As differentiated partial elements, however, time and again they want to be something previously existent: a motif or a theme . The im- manent nothingness of its elementary determinations draws integral art down into the amorphous, whose gravitational pull increases the more thoroughly art is or- ganized. It is exclusively the amorphous that makes the integration of the artwork possible. Through the completion ofthe work, by setting unformed nature at a dis- tance, the natural element returns as what has yet to be formed, as the nonarticu- lated. When artworks are viewed under the closest scrutiny , the most objectivated paintings metamorphose into a swarming mass and texts splinter into words. As soon as one imagines having a firm grasp on the details of an artwork , it dissolves into the indeterminate and undifferentiated, so mediated is it. This is the mani- festation of aesthetic semblance in the structure of artworks. Under micrological study, the particular-the artwork's vital element-is volatilized; its concretion vanishes. The process, which in each work takes objective shape, is opposed to its fixation as something to point to, and dissolves back from whence it came. Art- works themselves destroy the claim to objectivation that they raise. This is a measure of the profundity with which illusion suffuses artworks, even the non- representational ones. The truth of artworks depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity what is not identical with the concept, what is according to that concept accidental. The purposefulness of artworks re- quires the purposeless , with the result that their own consistency is predicated on the illusory; semblance is indeed their logic. To exist, their purposefulness must be suspended through its other. Nietzsche touched on this with the obviously problematic dictum that in an artwork everything can just as well be different from the way it is; presumably this holds true, only within the confines of an
established idiom, within a "style" that guarantees some breadth of variation. If the immanent closure of artworks is not to be taken strictly, however, semblance overtakes them precisely at the point they imagine themselves best protected from it. They give the lie to the claim to closure by disavowing the objectivity they pro- duce. They themselves, not just the illusion they evoke, are the aesthetic sem- blance. The illusory quality of artworks is condensed in their claim to wholeness. Aesthetic nominalism culminates in the crisis of semblance insofar as the artwork wants to be emphatically substantial. The irritation with semblance has its locus in the object itself. Today every element of aesthetic semblance includes aesthetic inconsistency in the form of contradictions between what the work appears to be and what it is. Through its appearance it lays claim to substantiality; it honors this claim negatively even though the positivity of its actual appearance asserts the gesture of something more, a pathos that even the radically pathos-alien work is unable to slough off. If the question as to the future of art were not fruitless and suspiciously technocratic, it would come down to whether art can outlive sem-
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blance . A typical instance of this crisis was the trivial revolt forty years ago against costumes in the theater: Hamlet in a suit, Lohengrin without a swan. This was per- haps not so much a revolt against the infringement of artworks on the prevailing realistic mentality as against their immanent imagerie, which they were no longer able to support. The beginning of Proust's Recherche is to be interpreted as the effort to outwit art's illusoriness: to steal imperceptively into the monad of the artwork without forcibly' positing its immanence of fonn and without feigning an omnipresent and omniscient narrator. The contemporary problem faced by all artworks, how to begin and how to close, indicates the possibility of a compre- hensive and material theory of aesthetic fonn that would also need to treat the categories ofcontinuity, contrast, transition, development, and the "knot," as well as, finally, whether today everything must be equally near the midpoint or can have different densities. During the nineteenth century aesthetic semblance was heightened to the point of phantasmagoria. Artworks effaced the traces of their production, probably because the victorious positivistic spirit penetrated art to the degree that art aspired to be a fact and was ashamed of whatever revealed its com- pact immediateness as mediated. ' Artworks obeyed this tendency well into late modernism. Art's illusoriness progressively became absolute; this is concealed behind Hegel' s tenn "art-religion," which was taken literally by the oeuvre of the Schopenhauerian Wagner. Modernism subsequently rebelled against the sem- blance of a semblance that denies it is such. Here the many efforts converge that are undisguisedly detennined to pierce the artwork's hennetic immanent nexus, to release the production in the product, and, within limits, to put the process of production in the place of its results - an intention, incidentally, that was hardly foreign to the great representatives of the idealist epoch. The phantasmagorical side of artworks, which made them irresistible, became suspicious to them not only in the so-called neo-objective movements, that is, in functionalism, but also in traditional fonns such as the novel. In the novel the illusion of peeping into a box and a world beyond, which is controlled by the fictive omnipresence of the narrator, joins forces with the claim to the reality of a factitious world that is at the same time, as fiction, unreal. Those antipodes, George and Karl Kraus, rejected the novel, but even the novelists Proust and Gide, who commented on the fonn's pure immanence by breaking through it, are testimony to the same malaise and not merely the often adduced antiromantic mood of the time. The phantasmagorical dimension, which strengthens the illusion of the being-in-itself of works technologically , could be better understood as the rival of the romantic artwork, which from the beginning sabotaged the phantasmagorical dimension through irony. Phantasmagoria became an embarrassment because the gapless being-in-itself, after which the pure artwork strives, is incompatible with its deter- mination as something humanly made and therefore as a thing in which the world of things is embedded a priori . The dialectic of modem art is largely that it wants to shake off its illusoriness like an animal trying to shake off its antlers . The apor-
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ias in the historical development of art cast their shadows over its possibility as a whole. Even antirealist movements such as expressionism took part in the rebel- lion against semblance. At the same time that it opposed the replication of the external world , however, it sought the undisguised manifestation of real psychical states and approximated the psychograph. In the aftermath ofthat rebellion, how- ever, artworks are at the point of regressing to the status of a mere thing as if in punishment for the hubris of being more than art . The recent and for the most part childishly ignorant emulation of science is the most tangible symptom of this re- gression . Many works of contemporary music and painting, in spite of the absence of representational objectivity and expression, would rightly be subsumed by the concept of a second naturalism. Crudely physicalistic procedures in the material and calculable relations between parameters helplessly repress aesthetic sem- blance and thereby reveal the truth of their positedness. The disappearance of this positedness into their autonomous nexus left behind aura as a reflex of human self-objectivation. The allergy to aura, from which no art today is able to escape, is inseparable from the eruption of inhumanity. This renewed reification, the re- gression of artworks to the barbaric literalness of what is aesthetically the case,2 and phantasmagorical guilt are inextricably intertwined. As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses faith in its possibility and begins to display outwardly what cannot become art-canvas and mere tones-it becomes its own enemy, the direct and false continuation of purposeful rationality. This tendency culminates in the happening. There is no separating what is legitimate in the rebellion against semblance as illusion from what is illusory-the hope that aesthetic semblance could rescue itself from the morass in which it is sunk by pulling itself up by the scruff of its own neck. Clearly the immanent semblance character of artworks cannot be freed from some degree of external imitation of reality, however latent, and therefore cannot be freed from illusion either. For everything that artworks contain with regard to form and materials, spirit and sub- ject matter, has emigrated from reality into the artworks and in them has divested itself of its reality: Thus the artwork also becomes its afterimage. Even the purest aesthetic determination, appearance, is mediated to reality as its determinate negation. The difference of artworks from the empirical world, their semblance character, is constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it. If for the sake of their own concept artworks wanted absolutely to destroy this refer- ence back to the empirical world, they would wipe out their own premise. Art is indeed infinitely difficult in that it must transcend its concept in order to fulfill it; yet in this process where it comes to resemble realia it assimilates itself to that reification against which it protests: Today engagement inescapably becomes aes- thetic concession. The ineffability of illusion prevents the solution of the antin- omy of aesthetic semblance by means of a concept of absolute appearance . Sem- blance, which heralds the ineffable, does not literally make artworks epiphanies, however difficult it may be for genuine aesthetic experience not to trust that the
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absolute is present in authentic artworks. It inheres in the grandeur of art to awaken this trust. That whereby art becomes an unfolding of truth is at the same time its cardinal sin, from which it cannot absolve itself. Art drags this sin along with it because it acts as if absolution had been bestowed on it. -That in spite of everything it remains an embarrassment for art to bear even the slightest trace of semblance cannot be separated from the fact that even those works that renounce semblance are cut offfrom real political effect, which was the original inspiration for the rejection of semblance by dadaism. Mimetic comportment-by which hermetic artworks criticize the bourgeois maxim that everything must be useful - itself becomes complicitous through the semblance of being purely in-itself, a semblance from which there is no escape even for art thatdestroys this semblance. If no idealist misunderstanding were to be feared, one could formulate the law of each and every work-and not miss by much naming art's inner lawfulness-as the obligation to resemble its own objective ideal and on no account that of the artist's. The mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves. Whether univocally or ambiguously, this law is posited by the initial act of each artwork; by virtue of its constitution each work is bound by it. It divides aesthetic from cul- tic images. By the autonomy of their form, artworks forbid the incorporation of the absolute as if they were symbols. Aesthetic images stand under the prohibition on graven images. To this extent aesthetic semblance, even its ultimate form in the hermetic artwork, is truth. Hermetic works do not assert what transcends them as though they were Being occupying an ultimate realm; rather, through their powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world they emphasize the element of powerlessness in their own content. The ivory tower-in disdain for which those who are led in democratic countries and the Fuhrer of totalitarian countries are united-has in its unwavering mimetic impulse, which is an impulse toward self-likeness, an eminently enlightening aspect; its spleen is a truer consciousness than the doctrines of didactic or politically engage art, whose regressive character is, almost without exception, blatantly obvious in the trivial wisdom those doc- trines supposedly communicate. Therefore, in spite of the summary verdicts passed on it everywhere by those who are politically interested , radical modem art is progressive, and this is true not merely of the techniques it has developed but of its truth content. What makes existing artworks more than existence is not simply another existing thing, but their language. Authentic artworks are eloquent even when they refuse any form of semblance, from the phantasmagorical illusion to the faintest auratic breath. The effort to purge them of whatever contingent sub- jectivity may want to say through them involuntarily confers an ever more defined shape on their own language. In artworks the term expression refers to precisely this language. There is good reason that where this term has been technically employed longest and most emphatically, as the directive espressivo in musical scores, it demands nothing specifically expressed, no particular emotional con- tent. Otherwise espressivo could be replaced by terms for whatever specific thing
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is to be expressed. The composer Artur Schnabel attempted to do just this, but without success.
No artwork is an undiminished unity; each must simulate it, and thus collides with itself. Confronted with an antagonistic reality, the aesthetic unity that is estab- lished in opposition to it immanently becomes a semblance. The integration of artworks culminates in the semblance that their life is precisely that of their ele- ments. However, the elements import the heterogeneous into artworks and their semblance becomes apocryphal. In fact, every penetrating analysis of an artwork turns up fictions in its claim to aesthetic unity, whether on the grounds that its parts do not spontaneously cohere and that unity is simply imposed on them, or that the elements are prefabricated to fit this unity and are not truly elements. The plurality in artworks is not what it was empirically but rather what it becomes as
soon as it enters their domain; this condemns aesthetic reconciliation as aestheti- cally specious. The artwork is semblance not only as the antithesis to existence but also in its own terms. It is beleaguered with inconsistencies. By virtue oftheir nexus of meaning, the organon of their semblance , artworks set themselves up as things that exist in themselves . By integrating them , meaning itself-that which creates unity-is asserted as being present in the work, even though it is not ac- tual. Meaning, which effects semblance, predominates in the semblance charac- ter.