No More Learning

If artworks are in fact absolute commodities in that they are a social prod- uct that has rejected every semblance of existing for society , a semblance to which commodities otherwise urgently cling, the determining relation of production, the commodity form, enters the artwork equally with the social force of production and the antagonism between the two. The absolute commodity would be free of the ideology inherent in the commodity form, which pretends to exist for-another, whereas ironically it is something merely for-itself: It exists for those who hold power. This reversal of ideology into truth is a reversal of aesthetic content, and not immediately a reversal of the attitude of art to society . Even the absolute com- modity remains salable and has become a "natural monopoly. " That artworks are offered for sale at the market-just as pots and statuettes once were - is not their misuse but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production. Thoroughly nonideological art is indeed probably completely impos- sible. Its mere antithesis to empirical reality does not suffice to make it so; Sartre3 rightly accented that the principle of l 'art pour l 'art, which has prevailed in France since Baudelaire, just as in Germany the aesthetic ideal of art prevailed as an in- stitution of moral reform, was taken up by the bourgeoisie as a means for the neutralization of art with the same willingness with which in Germany art was appropriated as a costumed ally of social control and order. What is ideological in
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the principle of I'art pour I'art does not have its locus in the energetic antithesis of art to the empirical world but rather in the abstractness and facile character of this antithesis. The idea of beauty advocated by I'artpour I'art, at least as it has devel- oped since Baudelaire , was not to be classical formalism, yet it did indeed exclude all content [/nhalt] as disruptive that did not, before undergoing the law of form and thus precisely anti-artistically, submit to a dogmatic canon of beauty: It is in this spirit that George in a letter excoriates Hofmannsthal for having allowed the painter in the Death of Titian to die of the plague . 4 L 'art pour l 'art' s concept of beauty becomes at once strangely empty and imprisoned by thematic material, a sort of lugendstil arrangement as revealed in Ibsen's formulaic descriptions of vine leaves entwined in locks of hair and of dying in beauty . Beauty , powerless to define itself and only able to gain its definition by way of its other, a sort of aerial root, becomes entangled in the fate of artificial ornamentation. This idea of beauty is limited because it sets itself up as directly antithetical to a society rejected as ugly rather than, as Baudelaire and Rimbaud did, extracting this antithesis from the content [Inhalt]-from the imagery of Paris, in Baudelaire's instance-and putting it to the test: Only in this fashion could sheer distance become the inter- vention of determinate negation. It is precisely the autarchy of neoromantic and symbolist beauty , its timidity vis-a-vis those social elements in which form exclu- sively becomes form, that accounts for its rapid transformation into something so easily consumable. This beauty deceives about the commodity world by setting it aside; this qualifies it as a commodity . Their latent commodity form has inner- artistically condemned the works of l 'art pour [ 'art to kitsch, as which they are today ridiculed. In Rimbaud it would be possible to show that bitterly sarcastic opposition to society cohabits uncritically with a submissiveness comparable to Rilke's rapture over cabaret songs and the fragrance of an old chest; ultimately it was affirmation that triumphed, and the principle of l'art pour l'art was not to be saved. It is for this reason that socially the situation of art is today aporetic. If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the machinations of the status quo; if art remains strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integration as one harm- less domain among others. The social totality appears in this aporia, swallowing whole whatever occurs. That works renounce communication is a necessary yet by no means sufficient condition of their unideological essence. The central crite- rion is the force of expression, through the tension of which artworks become elo- quent with wordless gesture. In expression they reveal themselves as the wounds of society; expression is the social ferment of their autonomous form. The princi- pal witness for this is Picasso's Guemica that, strictly incompatible with pre- scribed realism, precisely by means of inhumane construction , achieves a level of expression that sharpens it to social protest beyond all contemplative misunder- standing. The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts; where in their expression, historically determined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light. It is actually this against which the rage at art reacts.
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Artworks are able to appropriate their heterogeneous element, their entwinement with society, because they are themselves always at the same time something social. Nevertheless, art's autonomy, wrested painfully from society as well as so- cially derived in itself, has the potential of reversing into heteronomy; everything new is weaker than the accumulated ever-same , and it is ready to regress back into it. The We encapsuled in the objectivation of works is not radically other than the external We, however frequently it is the residue of a real We that is past. That is why collective appeal is not simply the original sin of artworks; rather, something in their law of form implies it. It is not out of obsession with politics that great Greek philosophy accorded aesthetic effect so much more weight than its objec- tive tenor would imply . Ever since art has come within the purview of theoretical reflection, the latter has been tempted-by raising itself above art-to sink be- neath art and surrender it to power relations. What is today called situating a work involves exiting from the aesthetic sphere; the cheap sovereignty that assigns art its social position, after dismissing its immanence of form as a vain and naIve self- delusion, tends to treat the work as if it were nothing but what its social function condemns it to. The good and bad marks Plato distributed to art according to whether or not it conformed to the military virtues of the community he confused with utopia, his totalitarian rancor against real or spitefully invented decadence, even his aversion to the lies of poets, which are after all nothing but art's sem- blance character, which Plato hoped to summon to the support of the status quo- all this taints the concept of art in the same moment in which it was first con- sciously reflected upon . The purging of the affects in Aristotle' s Poetics no longer makes equally frank admission of its devotion to ruling interests, yet it supports them all the same in that his ideal of sublimation entrusts art with the task of pro- viding aesthetic semblance as a substitute satisfaction for the bodily satisfaction of the targeted public ' s instincts and needs: Catharsis is a purging action directed against the affects and an ally of repression. Aristotelian catharsis is part of a super- annuated mythology of art and inadequate to the actual effects of art. In return, artworks have realized in themselves, by spiritualization, what the Greeks pro- jected on their external effect: They are, in the process they carry out between the law ofform and their material content, their own catharsis. Sublimation, even aesthetic sublimation , incontestably participates in civilatory progress and even in inner-artistic progress itself, but it also has its ideological side: Art, as a surrogate satisfaction, by virtue of the fact that it is spurious , robs sublimation of the dignity for which the whole of classicism made propaganda, a classicism that survived for more than two thousand years under the protection of Aristotle's authority. The doctrine of catharsis imputes to art the principle that ultimately the culture indus- try appropriates and administers. The index of its untruth is the well-founded doubt whether the salutary Aristotelian effect ever occurred; substitute satisfac- tion may well have spawned repressed instincts . - Even the category of the new, which in the artwork represents what has yet to exist and that whereby the work
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transcends the given, bears the scar of the ever-same underneath the constantly new. Consciousness, fettered to this day , has not gained mastery over the new, not even in the image: Consciousness dreams ofthe new but is not able to dream the new itself. If the emancipation of art was possible only through the appropriation of the commodity character, through which art gained the semblance of its being- in-itself, then in the course of that development the commodity character was dropped from the artworks; Jugendstilplayed no small role in this, with its ideol- ogy of the reintroduction of art into life as well as with the sensations of Wilde, d'Annunzio, and Maeterlinck, who served as preludes to the culture industry. Pro- gressive subjective differentiation, the heightening and expansion of the sphere of aesthetic stimuli, made these stimuli manipulable; they were able to be produced for the cultural marketplace. The attunement of art to the most fleeting individual reactions was bound up with the reification of these reactions; art's growing simi- larity to subjective physical existence distanced it-as far as the majority of artis- tic production was concerned-from its objectivity and at the same time com- mended it to the public; to this extent the watchword I 'art pour I 'art was the mask of its opposite. What is true in the uproar over decadence is that subjective differ- entiation has an aspect of ego-weakness, an aspect shared with the mentality of the culture industry'S customers and something the culture industry knew how to exploit. Kitsch is not, as those believers in erudite culture would like to imagine, the mere refuse of art, originating in disloyal accommodation to the enemy; rather, it lurks in art, awaiting ever recurring opportunities to spring forth. Although kitsch escapes, implike, from even a historical definition, one of its most tena- cious characteristics is the prevarication of feelings, fictional feelings in which no one is actually participating, and thus the neutralization of these feelings. Kitsch parodies catharsis. Ambitious art, however, produces the same fiction of feelings; indeed, this was essential to it: The documentation of actually existing feelings, the recapitulation of psychical raw material, is foreign to it. It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despair- ing efforts. The vulgar is related in a complementary fashion to the manufactured and bartered-off feeling, and indeed vulgarity is an aspect of every salable feeling. It is as hard to say what is vulgar in artworks as to answer Erwin Ratz's question5 how it is that art, whose a priori gesrure protests against vulgarity, is yet capable of being integrated with the vulgar. Only in a mutilated fashion does the vulgar represent the plebeian that is held at a distance by the so-called high arts . When art has allowed itself, without condescension, to be inspired by a plebeian element, art has gained in an authentic weightiness that is the opposite of the vulgar. Art becomes vulgar through condescension: when, especially by means of humor, it appeals to deformed consciousness and confirms it. It suits domination if what it has made out of the masses and what it drills into them can be chalked up to their own guilty desires. Art respects the masses by presenting itself to them as what
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they could be rather than by adapting itself to them in their degraded condition. Socially, the vulgar in art is the subjective identification with objectively repro- duced humiliation. In place of what is withheld from them, the masses reactively , resentfully, enjoy what i s produced b y renunciation and usurps the place o f what has been renounced. It is ideology that low art, entertainment, is socially legiti- mate and self-evident; it is solely that condition that expresses the omnipresence of repression. The model of aesthetic vulgarity is the child in the advertisement, taking a bite of chocolate with eyes half-closed, as if it were a sin. The repressed returns in the vulgar, bearing the marks of repression; it is the subjective expres- sion ofthe failure ofthat sublimation that art praises so overzealously as catharsis and for which it gives itself credit because it senses how little sublimation, like all culture, has actually turned out to date. In the age of total administration, culture no longer needs to humiliate the barbarians it has created; it suffices that by its rit- uals it strengthens the barbarism that has subjectively been sedimenting over cen- turies. That art stands as a reminder of what does not exist, prompts rage; this rage is transferred to the image of that otherness and befouls it. The archetypes of the vulgar that the art of the emancipatory bourgeoisie held in check, sometimes inge- niously-in its clowns, servants, and Papagenos-are the grinning advertisement beauties whose praise of toothpaste brands unites the billboards of all lands; those who know they are being cheated by so much feminine splendor blacken out the all too brilliant teeth of these archetypes and in total innocence make the truth visi- ble above the gleam of culture. This, at least, is perceived by the vulgar. Because aesthetic vulgarity undialectically imitates the invariants of social degradation, it has no history; its eternal return is celebrated by graffiti. No subject matter is ever to be taboo and excluded from art as vulgar; vulgarity is a relation to the material and to those to whom the appeal is made . The expansion of the vulgar to the total- ity has meanwhile swallowed up what once laid claim to the noble and sublime: This is one of the reasons for the liquidation of the tragic. It succumbed in the denouement of the second act of Budapest operettas. Today , everything that goes under the name of "light" art is to be rejected; that also applies, however, to what is noble, the abstract antithesis to reification and at the same time its booty. Ever since Baudelaire, the noble has been associated with political reaction, as if democracy as such, the quantitative category of masses, and not the perpetuation of oppression were the source of the vulgar. Fidelity to the noble in art should be maintained, just as the noble should reflect its own culpability, its complicity with privilege. Its refuge remains exclusively the unflinching power of resistance in the act of forrning. The noble becomes spurious and itself vulgar when it extols itself, for to this day there has not been anything noble . Contradiction gnaws at the noble ever since Holderlin's verse that nothing sacred is any longer fit for use,6 the same contradiction that an adolescent might have sensed who read a socialist journal with political sympathy and at the same time was put off by the language and mentality and the ideological undercurrent of a culture for all. What that paper in
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fact promoted , of course , was not the potential of a freed people but rather people as the complement of class society , the statically conceived universal of voters who must be reckoned with.
The counterconcept to aesthetic comportment is, quite simply, the concept of the philistine, which often overlaps with the vulgar yet remains distinct from it by its indifference or hatred, whereas vulgarity greedily smacks its lips . Socially impli- cated in the guilt ofthose who lay claim to aesthetic nobility, the philistine's dis- dain grants intellectual labor an immediately higher rank than manual labor. That art benefits from certain advantages becomes, for art's self-consciousness and for those who react aesthetically, something better in-itself. This ideological element in art stands in need of permanent self-correction. Art is capable of this because, as the negation of practical life, it is itself praxis, and indeed not simply on the basis of its genesis and the fact that, like every artifact, it is the result of activity. Just as its content is dynamic in itself and does not remain self-identical, in the course of their history the objectivated artworks themselves once again become practical comportments and tum toward reality. In this, art and theory are allied. Art recapitulates praxis in itself, modified and in a sense neutralized, and by doing so it takes up positions toward reality . Beethoven's symphonic language , which in its most secret chemistry is the bourgeois process of production as well as the ex- pression of capitalism's perennial disaster, at the same time becomes afait social by its gesture of tragic affirmation: Things are as they must and should be and are therefore good. At the same time, this music belongs to the revolutionary process of bourgeois emancipation, just as it anticipates its apologetics. The more deeply artworks are deciphered, the less their antithesis to praxis remains absolute; they themselves are something other than their origin, their fundament, that is, this very antithesis to praxis, and they unfold the mediation of this antithesis. They are less than praxis and more: less, because, as was codified once and for all in Tolstoy'S Kreutzer Sonata, they recoil before what must be done, perhaps even thwart it, although they are less capable of this than is suggested by Tolstoy'S renegade asceticism. Their truth content cannot be separated from the concept of humanity. Through every mediation , through all negativity, they are images of a transformed humanity and are unable to come to rest in themselves by any ab-
straction from this transformation. Art, however, is more than praxis because by its aversion to praxis it simultaneously denounces the naror w untruth of the prac- tical world. Immediate praxis wants to know nothing of this as long as the practi- cal organization of the world has yet to succeed. The critique exercised a priori by art is that of action as a cryptogram of domination. According to its sheer form, praxis tends toward that which, in terms of its own logic, it should abolish; vio- lence is immanent to it and is maintained in its sublimations, whereas artworks, even the most aggressive, stand for nonviolence. They are a constant indictment of the workaday bustle and the practical individual, back of which is concealed the barbaric appetite of the species , which is not human as long as it permits itself
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to be ruled by this appetite and is fused with domination. The dialectical relation of art to praxis is that of its social effect. That artworks intervene politically is doubtful; when it does happen, most often it is peripheral to the work; if they strive for it, they usually succumb to their own terms . Their true social effect is an extremely indirect participation in spirit that by way of subterranean processes contributes to social transformation and is concentrated in artworks; they only achieve such participation through their objectivation. The effect of artworks is not that they present a latent praxis that corresponds to a manifest one, for their autonomy has moved far beyond such immediacy; rather, their effect is that of recollection, which they evoke by their existence. If the historical genesis of art- works refers back to causal contexts, these do not disappear tracelessly in them; the process enacted internally by each and every artwork works back on society as the model of a possible praxis in which something on the order of a collective sub- ject is constituted. However little the external effect matters in art, and however important its form is, its intrinsic form nevertheless has an effect. Therefore the critical analysis of the effect of artworks has a great deal to say about what art- works, in their character as things, have sealed up in themselves; this could be demonstrated in the ideological effect of Wagner's music. It is not social reflec- tion on artworks and their inner chemistry that is false but rather the subordination of artworks to abstract social correlations determined from above that are indiffer- ent to the tension between the historical causal nexus and the content of the work . Just how far artworks intervene on a practical level is incidentally determined not only by them but far more importantly by the social moment. Beaumarchais's comedies were certainly not politically committed i n the style o f Brecht or Sartre , yet they in fact had a certain political effect because their tangible content [Inhalt] harmonized with a social movement that relished finding itself flattered in them. Because it is second-hand, the social effect ofart is obviously paradoxical; what is attributed to its spontaneity in fact depends on the general social tendency. Conversely, Brecht's work, which, beginning with SaintJoan o/the Stockyards, wanted to provoke social change, was probably socially powerless, and the astute Brecht by no means deceived himself on this score. Its effect is captured by the English expression of preaching to the saved. His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous art- works presuppose in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them. His didactic style , however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to fame . Neverthe- less, it is not least of all due to Brecht that the artwork gained self-consciousness of itself as an element of political praxis and thus acquired a force opposed to its ideological blindness. Brecht's cult ofpracticality became an aesthetic constituent
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of his works and it is not to be eliminated from what in his work stands at a remove from the realm of causal contexts, namely their truth content. The acute reason today for the social inefficacy of artworks - those that do not surrender to crude propaganda - is that in order to resist the all-powerful system of communi- cation they must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhaps make them accessible to the pUblic. Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness; in any case, agitative effects dissipate rapidly, presumably because even artworks of that type are perceived under the general category of irrational- ity: Their principle, of which they cannot rid themselves, stalls the immediate practical impulse. Aesthetic cultivation leads away from the preaesthetic contam- ination of art and reality. The distance acquired, which is its result, not only re- veals the objective character of the artwork. It also affects the SUbjective comport- ment, in that it severs primitive identifications and puts the recipient qua empirical psychological person out of action, which benefits his relation to the work. Sub- jectively, art requires self-exteriorization; this is what was meant by Brecht's cri- tique ofempathic aesthetics. This exteriorization is, however, practical insofar as it determines the person who experiences art and steps out of himself as a ? roov 1tOA. t'tlKOV, just as art itself is objectively praxis as the cultivation of conscious- ness; but it only becomes this by renouncing persuasion. Whoever takes up an ob- jective stance vis-a-vis the artwork will hardly allow himself to become enthused by it in the fashion prescribed by the idea of a direct appeal . This would be incom- patible with the comprehending attitude appropriate to the cognitive character of artworks. By the affront to reigning needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar, artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality. The moment they hope to achieve the effect under whose absence they suffer by adapting to existing needs they deprive people of precisely that which-to take the jargon of needs seriously and tum it against itself-they could "offer" them. Aesthetic needs are fairly vague and unarticulated; the practices of the culture in- dustry have not changed this as much as they would like the world to believe and, indeed, as much as many like to claim. That culture failed implies that there actu- ally are no subjective cultural needs independent of supply and the mechanisms of distribution. The need for art is itself largely ideological: Life would be possible without art, too, not only objectively but also with regard to the psychological econ- omy of consumers who in modified circumstances are easily moved to changing their taste , in that their taste follows the line of least resistance. In a society that has disaccustomed men and women from thinking beyond themselves, whatever sur- passes the mere reproduction of their life and those things they have been drilled to believe they cannot get along without, is superfluous. What is true in the most recent rebellion against art is that - in the face of the absurdly incessant scarcity , the expanding and self-reproducing barbarism, the ever present threat of total
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catastrophe - phenomena that are not preoccupied with the maintenance of life take on a ridiculous aspect. Whereas artists can afford to be indifferent to a cultural mechanism that in any case swallows up everything and excludes nothing , not even what is relatively good, this mechanism nevertheless tinges everything that thrives within it with something of its objective indifference. What Marx was still able to presuppose, to some degree innocently, as cultural needs in the concept of a soci- ety ' s general level of achievement , has its dialectic in the fact that in the meantime one does culture a greater honor by forgoing it and not taking part in its festivals than by agreeing to be force-fed. Aesthetic motifs are no less critical of cultural needs than are empirically real ones. Artworks want to break up the eternal ex- change of need and satisfaction, instead of doing injustice to unfulfilled needs by supplying them with substitute satisfactions. Every aesthetic and sociological the- ory of need makes use of what bears the characteristically old-fashioned name of lived aesthetic experience. 7 Its insufficiency is evident in the constitution of lived artistic experiences themselves , if such exist. The supposition of lived artistic ex- periences is based on the assumption of an equivalence between the content of experience -put crudely, the emotional expression of works - and the subjective experience of the recipient. A listener is, in other words, to become excited when the music seems to do so, whereas to the extent that one understands anything, one should become emotionally all the more disinterested the pushier the work's ges- ticulations become . Science could hardly think up anything more alien to art than those experiments that presume to measure aesthetic effect and aesthetic experi- ence by recording the heartbeat. The fount ofany such equivalence remains murky. What purportedly is to be lived or relived in the work- according to popular as- sumption, the feelings ofthe author-is itselfonly a partial element in works and certainly not the decisive one. Works are not depositions of impulses-in any case such depositions are always much disliked by listeners and least likely to be empathically "reexperienced"; they are, rather, radically modified by the autono- mous nexus of the artwork. The interplay of the constructive and the mimetically expressive elements in art is simply suppressed or distorted by the theory of lived experience: The equivalence it posits is not an equivalence at all; rather, one par- ticular aspect is abstracted. This aspect, again removed from the aesthetic nexus of the work and translated back into the empirical world, for a second time be- comes an other of what in any case it is in the work . The shock aroused by impor- tant works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions. Rather , this shock i s the moment i n which recipients forget themselves and disap- pear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing; the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangi- ble. This immediacy, in the fullest sense, of relation to artworks is a function of mediation , of penetrating and encompassing experience [Eifahrung) ; it takes shape in the fraction of an instant, and for this the whole of consciousness is re- quired, not isolated stimuli and responses. The experience of art as that of its truth
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or untruth is more than subjective experience: It is the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness. The experience is mediated through subjectivity precisely at the point where the subjective reaction is most intense. In Beethoven many situations are scenes a jaire, perhaps even with the flaw of being staged. The entrance ofthe reprise in the Ninth Symphony, which is the result ofthe sym- phonic process, celebrates its original introduction. It resonates like an overwhelm- ing "Thus it is. " The shudder is a response, colored by fear of the overwhelming; by its affirmation the music at the same time speaks the truth about untruth. Non- judging, artworks point - as with their finger - to their content without its thereby becoming discursive. The spontaneous reaction of the recipient is mimesis of the immediacy of this gesture. In it, however, artworks are not exhausted. The position that this musical passage, once integrated, achieves by its gesture is sub- ject to critique: It poses the question whether the power of being thus-and-not- otherwise - at the epiphany of which such moments in art are aimed - is the index of its truth . Full comprehending experience [Eifahrung] , which terminates in judgment on the nonjudging work, demands a decision and, by extension, the con- cept. The lived experience [Erlebnis] is exclusively an element of such compre- hending experience and faulty because it is subject to persuasion. Works such as the Ninth Symphony exercise a mesmerizing effect: The force they achieve through their structure becomes the force of their effect. In the development of music after Beethoven the suggestive force of works , initially borrowed from so- ciety, has been shunted back to society and become agitative and ideological. Shudder, radically opposed to the conventional idea of experience [Erlebnis], pro- vides no particular satisfaction for the I; it bears no similarity to desire. Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken , perceives its own limited- ness and finitude . This experience [Eifahrung] is contrary to the weakening of the I that the culture industry manipulates. For the culture industry the idea of the shudder is idle nonsense; this is probably the innermost motivation for the deaes- theticization of art. To catch even the slightest glimpse beyond the prison that it itself is, the I requires not distraction but rather the utmost tension; that preserves the shudder, an involuntary comportment, incidentally, from becoming regres- sion. In his Aesthetic ojthe Sublime Kant faithfully presented the power of the subject as the precondition of the sublime. True, the annihilation of the I in the face of art is to be taken no more literally than is art. Because, however, what are called aesthetic experiences [Erlebnisse] are as such psychologically real, it
would be impossible to understand them if they were simply part and parcel of the illusoriness of art. Experiences are not "as if. " The disappearance of the I in the moment of the shudder is not real; but delirium, which has a similar aspect, is nevertheless incompatible with artistic experience. For a few moments the I be- comes aware , in real terms , of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away , though it does not actually succeed in realizing this possibility . It is not the aes- thetic shudder that is semblance but rather its attitude to objectivity: In its imme-
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diacy the shudder feels the potential as if it were actual. The I is seized by the unmetaphorical, semblance-shattering consciousness: that it itself is not ultimate, but semblance . For the subject, this transforms art into what it is in-itself, the his- torical voice of repressed nature, ultimately critical of the principle of the I, that internal agent of repression. This subjective experience [Eifahrung] directed against the I is an element of the objective truth of art. Whoever experiences [erlebt] artworks by referring them to himself, does not experience them; what passses for experience [Erlebnis] is a palmed-off cultural surrogate . Even of this surrogate one's conceptions are simplifications. The products of the culture indus- try, more shallow and standardized than any of its fans can ever be, may simulta- neously impede the identification that is their goal. The question as to what the culture industry inflicts on men and women is probably all too naIve: Its effect is much more diffuse than the form of the question suggests . The empty time filled with emptiness does not even produce false consciousness but is an exertion that leaves things just as they are .
The element of objective praxis inherent in art is transformed into subjective intention when, as a result of society's objective tendency and of the critical reflection of art, art's antithesis to society becomes irreconcilable. The accepted term for this subjective intention is commitment. Commitment is a higher level of reflection than tendency; it is not simply out to correct unpleasant situations, al- though the committed all too easily sympathize with the idea of solving problems by means of "appropriate measures. "8 Commitment aims at the transformation of the preconditions of situations, not at merely making recommendations; to this extent it inclines toward the aesthetic category of essence. The polemical self- consciousness of art presupposes its spiritualization; the more sensitized art be- comes toward that sensual immediacy with which it was formerly equated, the more critical its posture becomes toward raw reality , which - an extension of the rank growth of first nature-reproduces itself socially in ever expanded form. It is not only formally that the critically reflexive tendency toward spiritualization sharp- ens the relation of art to its subject matter. Hegel's break from sensualist aesthet- ics was of a part both with the spiritualization of the artwork and with the accen- tuation of its subject matter. Through spiritualization the artwork is transformed, in itself, into what was once blindly attested to be its effect on other spirits. - The concept of commitment is not to be taken too literally. If it is made the yard- stick of censorship, it recapitulates in its attitude toward artworks that element of dominating supervision to which they stood opposed prior to all supervisable commitment. This does not amount, however, to jettisoning categories such as that of a program or its crude progeny according to the whim of an aesthetics of taste. What they register becomes their legitimate subject matter in a phase in which they are motivated by the longing and the will that the world be other than it is. But this gives them no dispensation from the law of form; even spiritual con- tent [Inhalt] remains material and is consumed by the artworks, even when their
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self-consciousness insists that this subject matter is essence. Brecht taught noth- ing that could not have been understood apart from his didactic plays, indeed, that could not have been understood more concisely through theory , or that was not al- ready well known to his audience: That the rich are better off than the poor; that the way of the world is unjust; that repression persists within formal equality; that objective evil transforms private goodness into its own opposite; that-admit- tedly a dubious wisdom - goodness requires the masks of evil.
But the sententious vehemence with which he translates these hardly dew-fresh insights into scenic gestures lends his works their tone; the didacticism led him to his dramaturgical innovations , which overthrew the moribund theater of philosophy and intrigue. In his plays, theses took on an entirely different function from the one their content [Inhalt] intended. They became constitutive; they made the drama anti-illusory and contributed to the collapse of the unitary nexus of meaning. It is this, not com- mitment, that defines their quality, yet their quality is inseparable from the com- mitment in that it becomes their mimetic element. Brecht's commitment does for the work what it gravitates toward on its own: It undermines it. As often occurs, in commitment, something that is sealed up in art becomes external by means of growing control and practicability. Artworks became for-themselves what they previously were in-themselves. The immanence of artworks, their apparently a priori distance from the empirical, would not exist without the prospect of a world transformed by self-conscious praxis. In Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare was not promoting love without familial guardianship ; but without the longing for a situa- tion in which love would no longer be mutilated and condemned by patriarchal or any other powers , the presence of the two lost in one another would not have the sweetness-the wordless, imageless utopia-over which, to this day, the cen- turies have been powerless; the taboo that prohibits knowledge of any positive utopia also reigns over artworks. Praxis is not the effect of works; rather, it is encapsuled in their truth content. This is why commitment is able to become an aesthetic force of production . In general , the bleating against tendentious art and against commitment is equally subaltern. The ideological concern to keep culture pure obeys the wish that in the fetishized culture, and thus actually, everything remains as it was. Such indignation has much in common with the opposing posi- tion's indignation that has been standardized in the phrase about the obsolete ivory tower from which, in an age zealously proclaimed an age of mass communi- cation, art must issue. The common denominator is the message; although Brecht's good taste steered him away from the word, the idea was not foreign to the posi- tivist in him. The two positions are intensely self-contradictory . Don Quixote may have served a particular and irrelevant program, that of abolishing the chivalric romance, which had been dragged along from feudal times into the bourgeois age. This modest program served as the vehicle by which the novel became an exem- plary artwork. The antagonism of literary genres in which Cervantes's work orig- inated was transformed, in his hands, into an antagonism of historical eras of,
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ultimately, metaphysical dimension: the authentic expression of the crisis of im- manent meaning in the demystified world. Works such as Werther, which have no programam tic aspect, contributed significantly to the emancipation of bourgeois consciousness in Germany. Goethe, by giving shape to the collision of society with the feelings of an individual who, finding himself alone and unloved, is driven to suicide , protested powerfully against a hardened petty bourgeoisie with- out even naming it. However, what the two basic censorial positions of bourgeois consciousness hold in common-that the artwork must not want to change the world and that it must be there for all - is a plaidoyer for the status quo; the for- mer defends the domestic peace of artworks with the world and the latter remains vigilant that the sanctioned forms of public consciousness be maintained. Today, hermetic and committed art converge in the refusal of the status quo. Interference is prohibited by reified consciousness because it reifies the already reified art- work; for reified consciousness the work's objectivation in opposition to society appears as its social neutralization. That side of artworks that faces outward is falsified as their essence without any regard to the process of their formation or, ultimately, their truth content. No artwork, however, can be socially true that is not also true in-itself; conversely , social false consciousness is equally incapable of becoming aesthetically authentic. Social and immanent aspects of artworks do not coincide, but neither do they diverge so completely as the fetishism of culture and praxis would like to believe. That whereby the truth content of artworks points beyond their aesthetic complexion, which it does only by virtue of that aesthetic complexion, assures it its social significance. This duality is not a stipu- lation that rules abstractly over the sphere of art. It is art's vital element and lodged within each and every work. Art becomes something social through its in-itself, and it becomes in-itself by means of the social force of production effec- tive in it. The dialectic of the social and of the in-itself of the artwork is the dialec- tic of its own constitution to the extent that it tolerates nothing interior that does not externalize itself, nothing external that is not the bearer of the inward, the truth content.
The dual nature of artworks as autonomous structures and social phenomena results in oscillating criteria: Autonomous works provoke the verdict of social in- difference and ultimately of being criminally reactionary; conversely, works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as them- selves. Immanent critique can possibly break through this rigid alternative. Stefan George certainly merited the reproach of being socially reactionary long before he propounded the maxims of his secret Germany, just as the poor-peoples' poetry ofthe late 1880s and 1890s, Amo Holz's, for instance, deserves to be criti- cized as being crudely unaesthetic. 9 Both types, however, should be confronted with their own concept. George's self-staged aristocratic posturings contradict the self-evident superiority that they postulate and thereby fail artistically; the verse "And- that we lack not a bouquet of myrrh" 10 is laughable, as is the verse on the
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Roman emperor who, after having his brother murdered, gently gathers up the purple train of his toga) l The brutality of George's social attitude, the result of failed identification, appears in his poetry in the violent acts of language that mar the purity of the self-sufficient work after which George aspired. In programmatic aestheticism, false social consciousness becomes the shrill tone that gives it the lie. Without ignoring the difference in quality between George, who was a great poet in spite of everything, and the mediocre naturalists , they have in common the fact that the social and critical content of their plays and poems is almost always superficial. It lags far behind what was already fully elaborated by social theory, in which they were scarcely interested. Arno Holz's parody ofpolitical hypocrisy, Social Aristocrats, suffices to prove this. Because artistically they overwhelmed society with verbiage, they felt duty bound to a vulgar idealism, as for instance in the image of the worker who dreams of something higher, whatever it may be, and who through the fate of his class origin is prevented from achieving it. The question of the provenance of his solidly bourgeois ideal of upward mobility is ignored. Naturalism's innovations-the renunciation of traditional categories of form, the distilling of the self-contained plots and even, as at points in Zola, the abandonment of the continuity of empirical time-are more advanced than its concept. The ruthless, effectively aconceptual presentation of empirical detail in Savage Paris destroyed the familiar surface coherence of the novel in a fashion not unlike that of its later monadic-associative form. As a result, naturalism re- gressed except when it took the most extreme risks. Carrying out intentions con- tradicts its principle. Yet naturalist plays abound in passages whose intention is plain: People are to speak plainly, yet in following the author's stage directions they speak as no one would ever speak. In the realist theater it is already inconsis- tent that even before they open their mouths people know so precisely what it is they are going to say. Perhaps it would be impossible to organize a realistic play ac- cording to its conception without its becoming , a contre coeur, dadaistic; through its unavoidable minimum of stylization, however, realism admits its impossibility and virtually abolishes itself. Taken in hand by the culture industry , it has become mass deception. The spiritedly unanimous rejection of Sudermannl2 may be be- cause his box office successes let out of the bag what the most talented naturalists hid: the manipulated, fictive aspect of every gesture that lays claim to being be- yond fiction when, instead, fiction envelops every word spoken on stage, however it resists and defends itself. These products, a priori cultural goods, are easily coaxed to become a nalve and affirmative image of culture . Even aesthetically there are not two types of truth. How the contradictory desiderata can reciprocally inter- penetrate without being averaged out as a mediocre compromise between a pur- portedly good form and an appropriate social content [lnhalt] can be learned from Beckett's dramatic art. Its associative logic, in which one sentence draws after it the next sentence or the reply , just as in music a theme motivates its continuation or its contrast, scorns all imitation of its empirical appearance. The result is that,
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hooded, the empirically essential is incorporated according to its exact historical importance and integrated into the play character of the work . The latter expresses the objective condition both of consciousness and of the reality that shapes it. The negativity of the subject as the true form of objectivity can only be presented in radically subjective form, not by recourse to a purportedly higher reality. The gri- macing clowns, childish and bloody, into which Beckett's subject is decomposed, are that subject' s historical truth; socialist realism is, by comparison , simply childish. In Godot the relation of domination and servitude , along with its senile lunatic form, is thematic in a phase in which control over others' labor continues, even though humanity no longer needs it for its self-preservation. This motif, truly one of the essential laws ofcontemporary society, is taken further in Endgame. In both works Beckett' s technique hurls it to the periphery: Hegel ' s chapter is trans- formed into anecdotes with sociocritical no less than dramaturgical function. In Endgame the tellurian partial catastrophe, the bloodiest of Beckett's clown jokes, is presupposed both thematically and formally in that it has obliterated art's con- stituent, its genesis. Art emigrates to a standpoint that is no longer a standpoint at all because there are no longer standpoints from which the catastrophe could be named or formed , a word that seems ridiculous in this context. Endgame is neither a play about the atom bomb nor is it contentless; the determinate negation of its content [Inhalt] becomes its formal principle and the negation of content alto- gether. Beckett's oeuvre gives the frightful answer to art that, by its starting point, by its distance from any praxis, art in the face of mortal threat becomes ideology through the harmlessness of its mere form, regardless of its content. This explains the influx of the comic into emphatic works. It has a social aspect. In that their ef- fectively blindfolded movement originates exclusively in themselves, their move- ment becomes a walking in place and declares itself as such, just as the unrelenting seriousness ofthe work declares itself as frivolous, as play. Art can only be recon- ciled with its existence by exposing its own semblance, its internal emptiness. Its most binding criterion today is that in terms of its own complexion, unreconciled with all realistic deception, it no longer tolerates anything harmless. In all art that is still possible , social critique must be raised to the level of form, to the point that it wipes out all manifestly social content [Inhalt].
With the continuing organization of all cultural spheres the desire grows to assign art its place in society theoretically and indeed practically; this is the aim of innu- merable round table conferences and symposia. Once art has been recognized as a social fact, the sociological definition of its context considers itself superior to it and disposes over it. Often the assumption is that the objectivity of value-free positivistic knowledge is superior to supposedly subjective aesthetic standpoints. Such endeavors themselves call for social criticism. They tacitly seek the primacy of administration , of the administered world even over what refuses to be grasped by total socialization or at any rate struggles against it. The sovereignty of the topographical eye that localizes phenomena in order to scrutinize their function
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and right to exist is sheer usurpation. It ignores the dialectic of aesthetic quality and functional society. A priori, in conformist fashion, the accent falls, if not on art's ideological effect, then at least on the consumability of art, while dismissing all that in which today social reflection would have its object: This is decided in advance, in conformist fashion. Because the expansion of technical administrative procedures is fused with the scientific apparatus of investigation, it appeals to those sorts of intellectuals who indeed sense something of the new social necessi- ties but nothing of the necessities of art. Their mentality is that of an imaginary sociological lecture on culture whose title should be: "The Function of Television for the Adaptation of Europe to the Developing Countries. " Social reflection on art has nothing to contribute in this spirit other than to make it thematic and thereby resist it. Then, as now, Steuermann ' s 1 3 comment holds good that the more that is done for culture , the worse it turns out.
For contemporary consciousness, and especially for student activists, the imma- nent difficulties of art, no less than its social isolation, amount to its condemna- tion. This is a sign of the historical situation, and those who want to abolish art would be the last to admit it. The avant-gardist disruptions of aesthetically avant- garde performances are as chimerical as the belief that they are revolutionary and that revolution is a form of beauty : Obtuseness to art is below, not above , culture , and commitment itself is often nothing but a lack of talent or concentration, a slackening of energy . Their most recent trick, which was admittedly already prac- ticed by Fascism, revalorizes ego-weakness, the incapacity for sublimation, as a superior quality and sets a moral premium on the line of least resistance. It is claimed that the age of art is over; now it is a matter of realizing its truth content, which is facilely equated with art's social content: The verdict is totalitarian. What today lays claim t o having been read solely out o f the material , and what in its dullness indeed offers the most compelling reason for the verdict on art, in fact does the greatest violence to the material. The moment art is prohibited and it is decreed that it must no longer be, art-in the midst of the administrative world- wins back the right to exist, the denial of which itself resembles an administrative act. Whoever wants to abolish art cherishes the illusion that decisive change is not blocked. Exaggerated realism is unrealistic. The making of every authentic work contradicts the pronunciamento that no more can be made. The abolition of art in a half-barbaric society that is tending toward total barbarism makes itself barbarism's social partner. Although their constant refrain is concreteness, they judge abstractly and summarily, blind to the precise and unsolved tasks and possi- bilities that have been repressed by the most recent aesthetic actionism, such as the tasks and possibilities of a truly freed music that traverses the freedom of the subject rather than being abandoned to thing-like alienated contingency . Yet there is no arguing over the question whether art is necessary. The question itself is falsely posed because the necessity of art - if the idea must be maintained when the issue is the realm of freedom - is its nonnecessity. To evaluate art according to
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the standard of necessity covertly prolongs the principle of exchange, the philis- tine's concern for what can be gotten for it. The verdict that it is no longer possible to put up with it, the obedient contemplation of a purportedly given state, is itself a shop-worn bourgeois gesture, the wrinkled brow that worries, "Where is this all going to end? " Yet precisely this type of teleology is inimical to art insofar as art stands as plenipotentiary for the in-itself that does not yet exist. In terms of their historicophilosophical significance, works are all the more important the less they coincide with their stage of development. The question is a surreptitious form of social control. Many contemporary works can be characterized as an anarchy that effectively implies a wish to be quit of it all . The summary judgment passed on art, which is itself inscribed on those works that would like to substitute themselves for art, resembles the verdict pronounced by Lewis Carroll's Queen of Hearts: "Off with their heads. " After these beheadings to the sound of a pop, in which the sound of Popular Music resonates, the head grows back. Art has everything to fear but the nihilism of impotence. By its social proscription, art is degraded to pre- cisely that role of/ait social that it refuses to resume. The Marxist theory of ide- ology, which is ambiguous in itself, is falsified as a total theory of ideology in Mannheimian fashion and blindly applied to art. If ideology is socially false con- sciousness, it does not follow that all consciousness is ideological. Beethoven's last quartets are consigned to the underworld of obsolete semblance only on the basis of ignorance and incomprehension . Whether art is still possible today cannot be decided from above , from the perspective of the relations of production. The question depends , rather, on the state of the forces of production. It encompasses what is possible but not yet realized: an art that refuses to let itself be terrorized by positivist ideology. As legitimate as Herbert Marcuse's critique ofthe affirmative character of culture was,14 its thesis requires the investigation of the individual artwork: Otherwise it would become an anticulture league, itself no better than any cultural asset. Rabid criticism of culture is not radical . If affirmation is indeed an aspect of art, this affirmation is no more totally false than culture-because it failed-is totally false. Culture checks barbarism, which is worse; it not only re- presses nature but conserves it through its repression; this resonates in the concept of culture , which originates in agriculture . Life has been perpetuated through cul- ture , along with the idea of a decent life; its echo resounds in authentic artworks . Affirmation does not bestow a halo on the status quo; in sympathy with what exists, it defends itself against death, the telos of all domination. Doubting this comes only at the price of believing that death itself is hope.
The double character of art-something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society's functional context and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and society's functional context-is directly apparent in the aes- thetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and/ails sociaux. They require a dou- ble observation that is no more to be posited as an unalloyed whole than aesthetic autonomy and art can be conflated as something strictly social. This double char-
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acter becomes physiognomically decipherable, whether intentionally so or not, when one views or listens to art from an external vantage point, and, certainly , art always stands in need of this external perspective for protection from the fetish- ization of its autonomy. Music, whether it is played in a cafe or, as is often the case in America, piped into restaurants, can be transformed into something com- pletely different, of which the hum of conversation and the rattle of dishes and whatever else becomes a part. To fulfill its function, this music presupposes dis- tracted listeners no less than in its autonomous state it expects attentiveness. A medley is sometimes made up of parts of artworks, but through this montage the parts are fundamentally transformed. Functions such as warming people up and drowning out silence recasts music as something defined as mood, the commodi- fied negation of the boredom produced by the grey-on-grey commodity world. The sphere of entertainment, which has long been integrated into production, amounts to the domination of this element of art over all the rest of its phenomena. These elements are antagonistic. The subordination of autonomous artworks to the element of social function buried within each work and from which art origi- nated in the course of a protracted struggle, wounds art at its most vulnerable point. Yet someone sitting in a cafe who is suddenly struck by the music and lis- tens intensely may feel odd to himself and seem foolish to others . In this antago- nism the fundamental relation of art and society appears . The continuity of art is destroyed when it is experienced externally, just as medleys willfully destroy it in the material. Heard in the corridors of the concert hall, little remains of one of Beethoven's orchestral works than the imperial kettle drum; even in the score the drums represent an authoritarian gesture, which the work borrowed from society in order to sublimate it in the elaboration of the composition. For art's two char- acters are not completely indifferent to each other. If a work of authentic music strays into the social sphere of background music, it may unexpectedly transcend that sphere by the purity that is stained by social function. On the other hand, the derivation ofauthentic works from social functions, as in the case ofBeethoven's kettle drums, cannot be washed away; Wagner's irritation with those vestiges of divertissement in Mozart has since been sharpened into a soup{:on even against those works that voluntarily bid farewell to entertainment. After the age of aes- thetic autonomy , the position of artists in society , to the extent that it is significant with regard to mass reception, tends to revert into heterogeneity. If prior to the French Revolution artists were lackeys, they have since become entertainers. The culture industry calls its crack performers by their first name , just as head waiters and hair dressers chummily refer to the jet set. The demolition of the difference between the artist as aesthetic subject and the artist as empirical person also attests to the abolition of the distance of the artwork from the empirical world, without however art's thereby returning to a realm of freedom, which in any case does not exist. This deceptively manufactured proximity of art serves profit. From the vantage point of art, its double character clings to each of its works as a flaw of its
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dishonest origin, just as socially artists were once treated as dishonest persons. This same origin, however, is also the locus of its mimetic essence. Its dishonesty, which contradicts the dignity laid claim to by its autonomy, which puffs itself up out of guilt over its participation in society, redounds to its honor as mockery of the honesty of socially useful labor.
The relation of social praxis and art, always variable, may well have changed radi- cally once again over the last forty or fifty years . During World War I and prior to Stalin, artistic and politically advanced thought went in tandem; whoever came of age in those years took art to be what it in no way historically had been: a priori politically on the left. Since then the Zhdanovs and Ulbrichts have not only en- chained the force of artistic production with the dictate of socialist realism but actually broken it; socially the aesthetic regression for which they are responsible is transparent as a petty bourgeois fixation. By comparison, during the decades after the Second War, with the world divided into two political blocs, the ruling interests in the West have signed a revocable peace with radical art; abstract paint- ing is subsidized by heavy German industry, and in France de Gaulle's minister of culture is Andre Malraux . Avant-garde doctrines, if their opposition to com- munis opinio is grasped with sufficient abstractness and if they remain to some degree moderate, are sometimes susceptible to elitist reinterpretation, as has been the case with Pound and Eliot. Benjamin already noted the fascist penchant in futurism, which can be traced back to peripheral aspects of Baudelaire's mod- ernism. 15 All the same, when Benjamin in his later work distanced himself from the aesthetic avant-garde at those points where it failed to toe the Communist Party line, Brecht's hatred of Tui intellectuals may well have played a part. The elitist isolation of advanced art is less its doing than society's; the unconscious standards of the masses are the same as those necessary to the preservation of the relations in which the masses are integrated, and the pressure of heteronomous life makes distraction compulsory, thus prohibiting the concentration of a strong ego that is requisite to the experience of the nonstereotypical. This breeds resent- ment: the resentment of the masses toward what is denied them by the education that is reserved for the privileged; and-ever since Strindberg and Schoenberg- resentment of the aesthetically progressive toward the masses. The yawning schism between their aesthetic trouvailles and a political posture that is manifest in the content [InhaltJ and intention of works, significantly damages artistic consistency. The social interpretation of older literature in terms of its political content [Inhalt] is ofuncertain value. The interpretation of Greek myths, such as Vico's interpretation of that of Cadmus, was ingenious. Yet the reduction of Shakespeare's plays to the idea of class struggle, as Brecht meant to do, goes too far and misses what is essential, except in those dramas where class struggle is clearly a theme. This is not to claim that what is essential is indifferent to society and, in human terms, timeless: That is drivel. Rather, the social element is medi- ated by the objective formal posture of the plays, what Lukacs called their "per-
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spective. " What is social in Shakespeare is categories such as those of the individ- ual and passion: traits such as Caliban's bourgeois concreteness and the corrupt Venetian merchants, the conception of a semimatriarchal world in Macbeth and King Lear; the complete disgust for power in Antony and Cleopatra as well as Prospero's gesture of resignation. By contrast, the conflicts of patricians and plebeians drawn from Roman history are merely cultural goods. In Shakespeare, the more literally the Marxist thesis is held that all history is that of class struggle, the more dubious it appears. Class struggle objectively presupposes a high level of social integration and differentiation, and subjectively it requires class con- sciousness, which first developed rudimentarily in bourgeois society. It is nothing new to note that class itself, the social subsumption of atoms to a general concept that expresses their constitutive as well as heterogeneous relations, is structurally a bourgeois reality. Social antagonisms are as old as the hills; only desultorily did they become class struggles: where market economies related to bourgeois soci- ety began to take shape. For this reason the interpretation of everything historical as class struggle has a slightly anachronistic air,just as the model ofall ofMarx's constructions and extrapolations was that of liberal entrepreneurial capitalism. True , social antagonisms shimmer through Shakespeare ' s plays at every point, yet they are manifest in individuals and are collective only in crowd scenes that fol- low topoi such as that of the suggestibility of mobs. From a social perspective it is at least evident that Shakespeare could not have been Bacon . That early bourgeois dialectical dramatist beheld the theatrum mundi not from the perspective of pro- gress but from that of the victims of progress. Severing this ensnarement through social as well as aesthetic maturation is made prohibitively difficult by the social structure. If in art formal characteristics are not facilely interpretable in political terms, everything formal in art nevertheless has substantive implications and they extend into politics. The liberation of form, which genuinely new art desires, holds enciphered within it above all the liberation of society, for form-the social nexus of everything particular-represents the social relation in the artwork; this is why liberated form is anathema to the status quo. This is confirmed by psycho- analysis. It holds that all art, the negation of the reality principle, protests against the image of the father and is to this extent revolutionary. This objectively implies the political participation of the unpolitical . So long as social imbrication was not yet so agglomerated that form itself became subversive protest, the relation of art- works to existing social reality was less contentious. Without altogether surren- dering to this reality, art was able to appropriate social elements without any great to-do, to continue clearly to resemble society , and to communicate with it. Today the socially critical aspect of artworks has become opposition to empirical reality as such because the latter has become its own self-duplicating ideology, the quin- tessence of domination. Whether art in turn becomes socially irrelevant-empty play and decoration of social bustle-depends on the extent to which its construc- tions and montages are simultaneously de-montages, destroying while receiving
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the elements of reality and shaping them freely as something other. The unity of art's aesthetic and social criteria is constituted by whether, in transcending empir- ical reality, it succeeds at concretizing its relation to what it has transcended; in doing so it gains a sort of prerogative. Without letting itself be put upon by politi- cal activists to provide the messages that suit them, art would then harbor no doubt as to what it is after. Fearless of any contradiction, Picasso and Sartre opted for a politics that disdained what they stood for aesthetically and only put up with them to the extent that their names had propaganda value . Their attitude is impres- sive because they do not subjectively dissolve the contradiction, which has an ob- jective justification, by the univocal commitment to one thesis or its opposite. The critique of their attitude is pertinent only as one of the politics for which they vote; the smug assertion that they only hurt themselves misses the point. Hardly last among the aporia of the age is that no thought holds true that does not do damage to the interests, even the objective interests, of those who foster it.
Today the nomenclature of formalism and socialist realism is used, with great consequence, to distinguish between the autonomous and the social essence of art. This nomenclature is employed by the administered world to exploit for its own purposes the objective dialectic that inheres in the double character of each and every artwork: These two aspects are severed from each other and used to divide the sheep from the goats . This dichotomization is false because it presents the two dynamically related elements as simple alternatives. The individual artist is supposed to choose. Thanks to an ever present social master plan, inclination is always encouraged in the antiformalistic directions; the others are pronounced narrow specializations restricted to the division of labor and possibly even susceptible to naIve bourgeois illusions. The loving care with which appara- tchiks lead refractory artists out of their isolation tallies with the assassination of Meyerhold. 16 In truth the abstract antithesis of formalistic and antiformalistic art cannot be maintained once art wants to be more than an open or covert pep talk. Around the time of World War I, or somewhat later modem painting polarized into cubism and surrealism. But cubism itself revolted, in terms of its actual con- tent [Inhalt], against the bourgeois idea of a gaplessly pure immanence of art- works. Conversely, important surrealists such as Max Ernst and Andre Masson, who refused to collude with the market and initially protested against the sphere of art itself, gradually turned toward formal principles, and Masson largely aban- doned representation, as the idea of shock, which dissipates quickly in the the- matic material, was transformed into a technique of painting. With the intention to unmask the habitual world in a flash of light as semblance and illusion, the step toward nonrepresentational art has teleologically already been taken. Construc- tivism, officially the antagonist of realism, has by virtue of its anti-illusory lan- guage deeper relations with the historical transformation of reality than does a realism long overlaid with a romantic varnish because its principle-the sham reconciliation with the object-has gradually become romantic. With regard to
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content, the impulses of constructivism were those of the ever problematic adequacy of art to the disenchanted world, which could no longer be achieved by traditional realism without becoming academic.