No More Learning

The opposite of a genuine rela- tion to the historical substance of artworks-their essential content-is their rash subsumption to history, their assignment to a historical moment. In Zermatt the Matterhorn, the child's image of the absolute mountain, gives the appearance of being the only mountain on earth; from the Gorn Ridge it appears as one link in a colossal chain . But Gorn Ridge can only be approached from Zermatt. The situa- tion is no different with regard to perspectives on artworks .
The interdependence o f quality and history should not b e conceived according to the stubborn cliche of a crude history of ideas that insists that history is the court
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that determines quality. This wisdom is a historicophilosophical rationalization of its own inadequacy, as if no judgment were possible in the here and now. Such humility is in no way superior to a pontificating judge of art. Cautious, postured neutrality is always ready to bow to ruling opinions. Its conformism extends even into the future. For this neutrality puts its trust in the course of world spirit, in an afterworld in which the authentic would be ever secure, whereas under its un- ceasing spell the world spirit confirms and bequeaths the old untruth. Occasional great discoveries or exhumations, such as those of EI Greco, Buchner, and Lautreamont, have been powerful just because they make evident that the course of history as such in no way makes common cause with what is good. Even with regard to important artworks the course of history must-as Benjamin put it-be brushed against the grain,lO and no one is able to say what important works have been destroyed in the history of art, so deeply forgotten are they that they are not to be retrieved, or so slandered that they are beyond call: Rarely has the violence of historical reality tolerated even intellectual revisions. All the same, the idea of the judgment of history is not simply nugatory. For centuries, examples of the incomprehension of contemporaries have abounded; ever since the end of feudal traditionalism the demand for the new and original has necessarily collided with whatever views are prevailing; simultaneous reception becomes ever more diffi- cult. It is nevertheless striking how few artworks of the highest rank were brought to light even in the epoch of historicism, which ransacked everything it could lay hands on. It must be reluctantly admitted, moreover, that the most famous works of the most famous masters-themselves fetishes in commodity culture-are indeed often, though not always, superior in quality to those that have been ne- glected. In the judgment of history, domination in the form of prevailing opinion entwines with the unfolding truth of artworks. As the antithesis to existing soci-
ety, truth is not exhausted according to society's laws. Rather, truth has its own laws, which are contrary to those of society; and in real history it is not only re- pression that grows but also the potential for freedom, which is unanimous with the truth content of art. The merits of a work, its level of form, its internal con- struction , tend to become recognizable only as the material ages or when the sen- sorium becomes dulled to the most striking features of the work. Beethoven could probably be heard as a composer only after the gesture of the titanic - his primary effect- was outstripped by the crasser effects of younger composers like Berlioz. The superiority of the great impressionists over Gauguin became evident only after his innovations had paled in the face of later developments . For quality to unfold historically, however, depends not just on it but on what came afterward, and it sets in relief what preceded it; perhaps some relation rules between quality and the process of perishing. Inherent in many artworks is the force to break through the social barrier that they establish. Whereas Kafka's writings violate the collusion of the novel reader by the explosive empirical impossibility of what is narrated , it is precisely by virtue of this violation that they become understandable
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to all. The view trumpeted in unison by Westerners and Stalinists of the incompre- hensibility of modern art for the most part holds true descriptively; what is false in this view, however, is that they treat this reception as a fixed entity and ignore the interventions in consciousness of which incompatible works are capable. In the administered world, artworks are only adequately assimilated in the form of the communication of the uncommunicable, the breaking through of reified con- sciousness. Works in which the aesthetic form, under pressure of the truth con- tent, transcends itself occupy the position that was once held by the concept of the sublime. In them, spirit and material polarize in the effort to unite. Their spirit ex- periences itself as sensually unrepresentable , while on the other hand their mater- ial, that to which they are bound external to their boundary, experiences itself as irreconcilable with the unity of the work. Kafka's writings are no more artworks than they could ever have been religious documents. The material-according to Benjamin, the language in particular-becomes desolate, starkly conspicuous; spirit is imbued with the quality of a second-order abstractness. Kant's doctrine of the feeling of the sublime all the more describes an art that shudders inwardly by suspending itself in the name of an illusionless truth content, though without, as art, divesting itself of its semblance character. The enlightenment concept of nature contributed to the invasion of the sublime into art. Along with the critique of the absolutist world of forms that made nature taboo as monstrous, boorish, and plebeian-a critique that was itself part of the general cultural-historical move- ment of the late eighteenth century- artistic practice was penetrated by that which Kant had reserved for nature as sublime and which came increasingly into conflict with taste . The unleashing of the elemental was one with the emancipation of the subject and thus with the self-consciousness of spirit. This self-consciousness spiritualized art as nature . Art's spirit is the self-recognition of spirit itself as nat- ural. The more art integrates into itself what is nonidentical, what is immediately opposed to spirit, the more it must spiritualize itself. Conversely, spiritualization for its part introduced into art what is sensually displeasing and repugnant and what had previously been taboo for art; the sensually unpleasant has an affinity with spirit. The emancipation of the subject in art is the emancipation of art's own autonomy; if art is freed from consideration of its recipient, its sensual facade becomes increasingly a matter of indifference. The facade is transformed into a function of the content, which derives its force from what is not socially approved and prearranged. Art is spiritualized not by the ideas it affirms but through the ele- mental - the intentionless - that is able to receive the spirit in itself; the dialectic of the elemental and spirit is the truth content. Aesthetic spirituality has always been more compatible with thefauve, the savage , than with what has already been appropriated by culture. Spiritualized, the artwork becomes in itself what was pre-
viously attributed to it as its cathartic effect on another spirit: the sublimation of nature. The sublime, which Kant reserved exclusively for nature, later became the historical constituent of art itself. The sublime draws the demarcation line be-
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tween art and what was later called arts and crafts . Kant covertly considered art to be a servant. Art becomes human in the instant in which it terminates this service. Its humanity is incompatible with any ideology of service to humankind. It is loyal to humanity only through inhumanity toward it.
By its transplantation into art the Kantian definition of the sublime is driven be- yond its boundaries. According to this definition, spirit, in its empirical power- lessness vis-a-vis nature , experiences its intelligible essence as one that is superior to nature. However, given that the sublime is supposed to be felt in the face of nature, the theory of subjective constitution implies that nature itself is sublime; self-reflection in the face of its sublimity anticipates something of a reconciliation with nature. Nature, no longer oppressed by spirit, frees itself from the miserable nexus of rank second nature and subjective sovereignty. Such emancipation would be the return of nature , and it - the counterimage of mere existence - is the sublime . Though the traits of domination evident in its dimensions of power and magnitude, the sublime speaks against domination. This is touched on by Schiller's dictum that the human being is only fully human when at play; with the consum- mation ofhis sovereignty he leaves behind the spell of sovereignty's aim. The more empirical reality hermetically excludes this event, the more art contracts into the element of the sublime; in a subtle way, after the fall of formal beauty, the sublime was the only aesthetic idea left to modernism. Even the hubris ofart as a religion, the self-exaltation of art as the absolute , has its truth content in the allergy against what is not sublime in art, against that play that is satisfied with the sovereignty of spirit. What Kierkegaard subjectivistically terms "aesthetic seriousness," the heri- tage of the sublime , is the reversal of works into what is true by virtue of their con- tent. The ascendancy of the sublime is one with art's compulsion that fundamental contradictions not be covered up but fought through in themselves; reconciliation for them is not the result of the conflict but exclusively that the conflict becomes eloquent. Thus, however, the sublime becomes latent. Art that is compelled to- ward a truth content that is the locus of unarbitrated contradictions is not capable of the positivity of negation that animated the traditional concept of the sublime as the presence of the infinite. This corresponds to the decline of the categories of play. Even in the nineteenth century a famous classicist theory defined music, in opposition to Wagner, as the play of sounding , moving forms; the similarity of the process of musical events with the optical patterns of the kaleidoscope, a brooding Biedermeier invention, was frequently underscored. This similarity need not be denied out of the desire to hold culture pure: The collapsing constellations of sym- phonic music, as in Mahler's works, have their true analogue in the kaleidoscopic patterns in which a series of slightly varying images collapses and a qualitatively transformed constellation emerges . It is just that in music what is conceptually in- determinate, its flux and articulation, is exceedingly determinate, and in the total- ity of these determinations that it itself establishes it achieves a content ignored by the concept of the play of forms . What parades as sublimity rings hollow , whereas
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what plays imperturbably regresses to the triviality from which it was born. Ad- mittedly, as art became dynamic, as its immanent determination became that of being an action, its play character also secretly intensified; thus, a half century before Beckett, Debussy entitled his most important orchestral work Jeux. The critique of profundity and seriousness, which once took aim at the overbearing presumptions of provincial inwardness-in that it justifies an industrious and mindless participation, activity for its own sake-is no less ideological than what it criticizes. Indeed, the sublime ultimately reverses into its opposite. To speak of the sublime with regard to specific artworks is at this point impossible without the twaddle of culture religion, and this results from the dynamic of the category of the sublime itself. The dictum that the sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous pronounced by Napoleon at the moment when his luck turned has been overtaken by history and fulfilled in all its horror. At the time the dictum referred to a grandiose style, a pathos-laden discourse that , as a result of a dispro- portion between its high claims and its pedestrian reality, had a comic effect. But the targeted faux pas actually transpires within the concept of the sublime itself. The sublime was supposedly the grandeur of human beings who are spiritual and dominate nature. If, however, the experience of the sublime reveals itself as the self-consciousness of human beings' naturalness, then the composition of the concept changes. Even in Kant's formulation it was tinged with the nothingness of man; in this nothingness, the fragility of the empirical individual, the eternity of his universal destiny-his spirit-was to unfold. If, however, spirit itself is re- duced to its natural dimension , then the annihilation of the individual taking place within it is no longer transcended positively . Through the triumph of the intelligi- ble essence in the individual who stands firm spiritually against death, man puffs himself up as if in spite of everything, as the bearer of spirit, he were absolute . He thus becomes comical. Advanced art writes the comedy of the tragic: Here the sublime and play converge . The sublime marks the immediate occupation of the artwork by theology, an occupation that vindicates the meaning of existence one last time by virtue of its collapse. Against this verdict art is powerless. Something in Kant's construction of the sublime resists the objection that he reserved it ex- clusively for a feeling for nature because he had not yet experienced great subjec- tive art. Unwittingly his doctrine expresses that the sublime is incompatible with the semblance character of art, in a way reminiscent perhaps of what Haydn im- plied in his reaction to Beethoven when he called him the Great Mogul. As bour- geois art stretched out its hand toward the sublime and thereby came into its own, the movement of the sublime toward its own negation was already implied. The- ology for its part resists aesthetic integration. The sublime as semblance has its own absurdity and contributes to the neutralization of truth; this is the accusation of art in Tolstoy'S Kreutzer Sonata. In any case, what is presented as evidence against the aesthetics of subjective feeling is that the feelings are illUSOry. Yet the feelings are real; the semblance is a quality ofthe aesthetic objects. Kant's asceti-
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cism toward the aesthetically sublime objectively anticipates the critique ofheroic classicism and the emphatic art derived from it. However, by situating the sublime in overpowering grandeur and setting up the antithesis of power and powerless- ness, Kant directly affirmed his unquestioning complicity with domination. Art must find domination a source of shame and seek to overturn the perdurable, the desideratum of the concept of the sublime. Even Kant was by no means unaware that the sublime is not quantitative grandeur as such: With profound justification he defined the concept of the sublime by the resistance of spirit to the overpower- ing. The feeling of the sublime does not correspond immediately with what ap- pears; towering mountains are eloquent not as what crushes overwhelmingly but as images of a space liberated from fetters and strictures, a liberation in which it is possible to participate. The legacy of the sublime is unassuaged negativity, as stark and illusionless as was once promised by the semblance of the sublime . This is however at the same time the legacy of the comic, which was always nourished by a feeling for the diminutive, the ludicrously pompous and insignificant, and which , for the most part, shored up established domination. The nonentity is comic by the claim to relevance that it registers by its mere existence and by which it takes the side of its opponent; once seen through, however, the opponent - power, grandeur-has itself become a nonentity. Tragedy and comedy perish in modem
art and preserve themselves in it as perishing.
What befell the categories of the tragic and the comic testifies to the decline of aesthetic genres as such. Art has been caught up in the total process of nominal- ism's advance ever since the medieval ordo was broken up. The universal is no longer granted art through types, and older types are being drawn into the whirl- pool. Croce's art-critical reflection that every work be judged, as the English say, on its own merits raised this historical tendency to the level of theoretical aesthet- ics. Probably no important artwork ever corresponded completely to its genre. Bach, from whom the academic rules of the fugue were derived, wrote no transi- tion section modeled on sequencing in double counterpoint, and the requirement to deviate from mechanical models was ultimately incorporated even in conserva- tory rules . Aesthetic nominalism was the consequence, which Hegel himself over- looked, of his doctrine of the primacy of dialectical stages over the abstract total- ity. But Croce, who tardily drew the implied consequences, dilutes the dialectic by simply dismissing , along with the genres, the element of universality rather than seriously undertaking to transcend it. This is in keeping with the general tendency of Croce's work to adapt the rediscovered Hegel to the reigning spirit of his age by means of a more or less positivistic doctrine of development. Just as the arts as such do not disappear tracelessly in the genera] concept of art, the genres and forms do not merge perfectly into the individual art forms. Unquestionably, Attic tragedy was also the crystallization of no less a universal than the reconciliation of
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myth. Great autonomous art originated in agreement with the emancipation of spirit; it could no more be conceived without an element of universality than could the latter. The principium individuationis, however, which implies the need for the aesthetically partiCUlar, is not only universal as a principle in its own right, it is inherent to the self-liberating subject. Its universal-spirit-is in terms of its own meaning not lodged beyond the particular individuals who bear it. The xroptaJ. 10c; between subject and individual belongs to a late stage of philosophical reflection that was conceived for the sake of exalting the subject as the absolute . The substantial element of genres and forms has its locus in the historical needs of their materials. Thus the fugue is bound up with tonal relations; and it was virtu- ally demanded by tonality as its telos once it had displaced modality and reigned supreme in imitative praxis. Specific procedures, such as the real or tonal answer of a fugue theme, became musically meaningful only when traditional polyphony found itself confronted with the new task of transcending the homophonic gravi- tational pull of tonality , of integrating tonality into polyphonic space and at the same time introducing contrapuntal and harmonic concepts. All the peculiarities of fugal form could be derived from these necessities, of which the composers themselves were in no way conscious. Fugue is the form in which polyphony that has become tonal and fully rationalized is organized; to this extent the fugue as form reaches beyond its individual realizations and yet does not exist apart from them. For this reason , too , the emancipation from the model is universally prefig- ured by the model. If tonality is no longer binding, then fundamental categories of the fugue such as the distinction between dux and comes - the standardized struc- ture of response-and, in particular, the element of reprise in the fugue, which serves the return of the principal key, become functionless and technically false. If the differentiated and dynamic need for expression of individual composers no longer seeks objectivation in the fugue - which, incidentally, was far more differ- entiated than it now seems from the perspective of the consciousness of freedom - the form has at the same time become objectively impossible. Whoever persists in employing this form, which so quickly became archaizing, must "construct" it to the point that what emerges is its bare idea rather than its concreteness; the same holds for other forms. The construction of a predeterminant form acquires an "as if" quality that contributes to its destruction. The historical tendency itself has a universal element. Fugues became fetters historically. Forms can be inspiring. Thorough motivic work, and hence the concrete structuration of music, is predi- cated on the universal element in the fugal form. Even Figaro would never have become what it is if its music had not sought after what opera demands, and that implicitly poses the question of what opera is . The fact that Schoenberg, whether voluntarily or not, continued Beethoven's reflections on how quartets should be written, brought about that expansion of counterpoint that proceeded to revolu- tionize musical material as a whole . The glorification of the artist as creator does him an injustice because it attributes to conscious invention something that is any-
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thing but that. Whoever creates authentic forms fulfills them. -Croce's insight, which swept aside the residue of scholasticism and old-fashioned rationalism, preceded the artworks themselves, a development that neither Croce, who was at heart a classicist, nor his mentor Hegel would have approved. Yet the drive toward nominalism does not originate in reflection but in the artwork's own im- pulse, and to this extent it originates in a universal of art. From time immemorial, art has sought to rescue the special; progressive particularization was immanent to it. Successful works have always been those in which specification has flour- ished most extensively. The universal aesthetic genre concepts, which ever and again established themselves as norms, were always marked by a didactic reflec- tion that sought to dispose over the quality , which was mediated by particulariza- tion, by measuring them according to common characteristics even though these common characteristics were not necessarily what was essential to the works. The authenticity of individual works is stored away in the genre. Still, the propensity toward nominalism is not simply identical with the development of art into its concept-alien concept. The dialectic of the universal and the particular does not, as does the murky concept of the symbol , eliminate their difference . The princip- ium individuationis in art, its immanent nominalism, is not a given but a directive. This directive not only encourages particularization and thus the radical elabora- tion of individual works. Bringing together the universals by which artworks are oriented, it at the same time obscures the boundary against unformed, raw empiria and thus threatens the structuration of works no less than it sets it in motion. Prot<r typical of this is the rise of the novel in the bourgeois age, the rise of the nominal- istic and thus paradoxical form par excellence; every loss of authenticity suffered by modem art derives from this dialectic . The relation of the universal and the particular is not so simple as the nominalistic tendency suggests, nor as trivial as the doctrine of traditional aesthetics, which states that the universal must be par- ticularized. The simple disjunction of nominalism and universalism does not hold. As August Halm,l now disgracefully forgotten, once pointed out when writing of music: The existence and teleology of objective genres and types is as true as the fact that they must be attacked in order to maintain their substantial element. In the history of forms, subjectivity, which produces them, is qualitatively trans- formed and disappears into them. To the extent that Bach produced the form of the fugue on the basis of the initial efforts of his predecessors, and to the extent that it was his subjective product and in a sense fell mute after him, the process in which he produced it was objectively determined: the jettisoning of what was rudi- mentary and insufficiently perfected. What he achieved drew the consequences from what awaited and was needed yet still incoherent in the older canzona and ricercare. The genres are no less dialectical than the particular. Although they originated historically and are transient, they do all the same have something in common with Platonic ideas. The more authentic the works, the more they follow what is objectively required, the object's consistency, and this is always universal.
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The power of the subject resides in its methexis in the universal , not in the sub- ject's simple self-announcement. The forms hold sway over the subject up to that moment when the coherence of the works no longer coincides with the forms. They are exploded by the subject for the sake of coherence, which is a matter of objectivity. The individual work does not do justice to the genres by subsuming itself to them but rather through the conflict in which it long legitimated them, then engendered them, and ultimately canceled them. The more specific the work, the more truly it fulfills its type: The dialectical postulate that the particular is the universal has its model in art. This was first recognized and already defused in Kant. From the perspective of teleology, reason functions in aesthetics as total, identity-positing reason. Itself purely a product, in Kant's terms the artwork ulti- mately knows nothing of the nonidentical . Its purposefulness, which transcenden- tal philosophy renders taboo in discursive knowledge by making it inaccessible to the subject, becomes manipulable in art. The universality in the particular is described virtually as preestablished; the concept of genius must function to guar- antee it, though this is never made explicit. In the simplest sense of the word, in- dividuation distances art from the universal . That art must ii fond perdu become individuated makes its universality problematic; Kant was aware of this . If art is supposed whole and unfragmented, it is bound from the outset to fail; if it is jetti- soned in order to be won, there is no guarantee that it will return; it is lost insofar as the individuated does not on its own, without any deus ex machina, go over into
the universal . The sole path of success that remains open to artworks is also that of their progressive impossibility. If recourse to the pregiven universality of genres has long been of no avail , the radically particular work verges on contingency and absolute indifference, and no intermediary provides for compromise.
In antiquity, the ontological view of art, on which genre aesthetics is based, was part of aesthetic pragmatism in a fashion that is now scarcely imaginable. As is well known, Plato's assessment of art shifted according to his estimation of its presumptive political usefulness. Aristotle's aesthetics remained an aesthetics of effect, though certainly more enlightened in the bourgeois sense and humanized insofar as it sought the effect of art in the affects of individuals, in accord with Hellenistic tendencies toward privatization. The effects postulated by both phi- losophers may already in their own time have become fictive. Still, the alliance of genre aesthetics and pragmatism is not so absurd as it may at first seem. Early on, the conventionalism latent in all ontology accommodated itself to pragmatism as the universal determination of ends; the principium individuationis is opposed not only to genres but to any subsumption by the prevailing praxis. Immersion in the individual work, which is contrary to genres, leads to an awareness of that work's immanent lawfulness. The works become monads and are thus withdrawn from any disciplinary effect they could exercise externally. If the discipline exerted or buttressed by artworks becomes their own lawfulness, they forfeit their crudely authoritarian character vis-a-vis human beings. Authoritarian attitudes and insis-
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tence on optimally pure and unadultered genres are compatible; to authoritarian thinking, unregimented concretion appears defiled and impure; the theory of The Authoritarian Personality noted this as intolerance ofambiguity, and it is unmis- takable in all hierarchical art and society. 2 To be sure, whether the concept of pragmatism can without distortion be applied to antiquity is an open question. As a doctrine of the measurability of intellectual works in terms of their real effect, pragmatism presupposes a break between inner and outer, between the individual and collectivity , that was only beginning to take shape in antiquity , where it never attained the completeness it achieved in the bourgeois world; collective norms did not have anything approaching the same status they have in modem society. Yet today the temptation to overemphasize the divergences between chronologically remote theorems , without being concerned with the invariance of their repressive traits, seems again to have increased. The complicity of Plato's judgments on art with these repressive elements is so obvious that ontological entetement is needed to explain it away with the protestation that back then it all meant something com- pletely different.
Advancing philosophical nominalism liquidated the universals long before the genres and the claims they made revealed themselves to art as posited and fragile conventions, as dead and formulaic. Genre aesthetics asserted itself even in the age of nominalism, right through German idealism, and this was probably not only thanks to Aristotle's authority. The idea of art as an irrational reserve, to which everything is relegated that does not fit into scientism, may also have had a part in this anachronism; there is even better reason to suppose that it was only with the help of genre concepts that theoretical reflection believed it could avoid aesthetic relativism, which to undialectical opinion is bound up with radical in- dividuation . The conventions themselves become enticing -prix du progres -,- to the extent that they were rendered powerless. They appear as afterimages of an authenticity of which art despairs without making them obligatory; that they can- not be taken seriously becomes a surrogate for an unachievable merriment; in that merriment, so willingly cited, the vanishing element of aesthetic play seeks refuge. Having become functionless, the conventions serve as masks. Yet these count among art's ancestors; in the rigidification that makes it a work in the first place, all art is reminiscent of masks . Quoted and distorted conventions are part of en- lightenment in that they absolve the magic masks by recapitulating them in play, though they are almost always inclined to establish themselves positively and to become integrated into art as a force of repression. In any case, conventions and genres did not just stand in the servi? of society; many, however, such as the topos of the maid-turned-master, were already a blunted form of rebellion. As a whole, the distance of art from the crudely empirical in which its autonomy devel- oped would never have been achieved had it not been for conventions; probably no one ever mistook the commedia dell' arte naturalisticall y . If this form of theater was only able to thrive in what was still a closed society, this society provided the
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preconditions for art to come into existence through an opposition in which its social opposition was cloaked. Nietzsche's defense of conventions, which origi- nated in unrelenting opposition to the development of nominalism as well as in resentment toward progress in the aesthetic domination of material, rings false because he misinterpreted conventions literally, as agreements arbitrarily estab- lished and existing at the mercy of volition. Because he overlooked the sedi- mented social compulsion in conventions and attributed them to pure play, he was equally able to trivialize or defend them with the gesture of "Precisely!
" This is what brought his genius, which was superior in its differentiation to that of all his contemporaries, under the influence of aesthetic reaction; ultimately he was no longer able to distinguish levels of form. The postulate of the particular has the negative aspect of serving the reduction of aesthetic distance and thereby joining forces with the status quo; what is repulsive in its vulgarity does not simply dam- age the social hierarchy but serves to compromise art with art-alien barbarism. By becoming the formal laws o f artworks , conventions inwardly shored u p works and made them resistant to the imitation of external life. Conventions contain an element that is external and heterogenous to the subject, reminding it of its own boundaries and the ineffability of its own accidentalness. The stronger the subject becomes and, complementarily, the more the social categories of order and the spiritual categories derived from these social categories weaken, the less it is pos- sible to reconcile the subject and conventions. The increasing fissure between inner and outer leads to the collapse of conventions . If the fragmented subject then freely posits conventions , the contradiction degrades them to being mere adminis- tered events: As the result of choice or decree they fail to provide what the subject expected from them. What later appeared in artworks as the specific, unique, and nonsubstitutable quality of each individual work and became important as such was a deviation from the genre that had reached a point where it turned into a new quality, one mediated by the genre. That universal elements are irrevocably part of art at the same time that art opposes them, is to be understood in terms of art's likeness to language. For language is hostile to the particular and nevertheless seeks its rescue. Language mediates the particular through universality and in the constellation of the universal, but it does justice to its own universals only when they are not used rigidly in accord with the semblance of their autonomy but are rather concentrated to the extreme on what is specifically to be expressed. The universals of language receive their truth content by way of a process that countervails them. "Every salutary effect of language, indeed each that is not essentially destructive, depends on its (the word's, language's) secret. In however many forms language may prove to be effective , it is not through the mediation of contents [Inhalten] but through the purest disclosure of its dignity and essence. And if I prescind from other forms of efficacy-such as poetry and prophecy-it appears to me that the crystal-pure elimination ofthe unutterable from language is the given and most accessible form for us to act within , and to this extent through,
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language. This elimination of the unutterable seems to me to converge precisely with a properly objective, functional style and to indicate the relation between knowledge and action within the linguistic magic . My concept of objective and at the same time highly political style and writing is this: to focus on what is denied to the word; only where this sphere of the wordless discloses itself with unutter- ably pure force can a magical spark spring between word and dynamic act, unify- ing them . Only the intensive aiming of words toward the nucleus of the innermost muteness can be effective. I do not believe that the word at any point stands at a greater remove from the divine than does 'genuine' action, that is, if it is other- wise unable to lead to the divine except by its own self and its own purity . Taken as a means it becomes a rank natural growth. "3 What Benjamin calls the elimina- tion of the unutterable is no more than the concentration of language on the partic- ular, the refusal to establish its universals as metaphysical truth. The dialectical tension between Benjamin's extremely objectivistic and accordingly universal- istic metaphysics of language and a formulation that agrees almost literally with Wittgenstein's famous maxim-which was, incidentally, published five years after Benjamin's letter and thus unknown to him-may be transposed to art, with the admittedly decisive proviso that the ontological asceticism of language is the only way to say the unutterable. In art, universals are strongest where art most closely approaches language: that is, when something speaks, that, by speaking, goes be- yond the here and now. Art succeeds at such transcendence, however, only by virtue of its tendency toward radical particularization; that is, only in that it says nothing but what it says by virtue of its own elaboration, through its immanent process. The element that in art resembles language is its mimetic element; it only becomes universally eloquent in the specific impulse, by its opposition to the uni- versal . The paradox that art says it and at the same time does not say it, is because the mimetic element by which it says it. the opaque and particular, at the same time resists speaking.
When conventions are in an ever unstable eqUilibrium with the subject they are called styles. The concept of style refers as much to the inclusive element through which art becomes language - for style is the quintessence of all language in art - as to a constraining element that was somehow compatible with particularization. The styles deserved their much bemoaned collapse as soon as this peace became recognized as an illusion. What is to be lamented is not that art renounced styles but rather that art, under the spell of its authority, feigned styles; this is the origin of all lack of style in the nineteenth century . Objectively , mourning over the loss of style, which is usually nothing but an incapacity for individuation. stems from the fact that after the collapse of the collective bindingness of art, or the sem- blance of such bindingness - for the universality of art always bore a class charac- ter and was to this extent particular-artworks were no longer radically elabo- rated, any more so than the early automobile succeeded at freeing itself from the model of the buggy, or early photographs from the model of portraiture. The in-
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herited canon has been dismantled; artworks produced in freedom cannot thrive under an enduring societal unfreedom whose marks they bear even when they are daring . Indeed , in the copy of style - one of the primal aesthetic phenomena of the nineteenth century - that specifically bourgeois trait of promising freedom while prohibiting it can be sought. Everything is to be at the service of the hand that grasps it, but the grasping hand regresses to the repetition of what is available, which is not actually that at all. In truth, bourgeois art, because it is radically autonomous, cannot to be conflated with the prebourgeois idea of style; by stub- bornly ignoring this consequence, bourgeois art expresses the antinomy of bour- geois freedom itself. This antinomy results in the absence of style: There is noth- ing left-as Brecht said-to hold on to under the compUlsion of the market and the necessity of adaptation, not even the possibility of freely producing authentic art; for this reason what has already been condemned to oblivion is resurrected. The Victorian terrace houses that deface Baden parody villas all the way into the slums. However, the devastations that are chalked up to an age without style and criticized on aesthetic grounds are in no way the expression of the spirit of an age of kitsch but, rather, products of something extra-aesthetic, that is, of the false rationality of an industry oriented to profit. Because capital mobilizes for its own purposes what strikes it as being the irrational elements of art, it destroys these elements. Aesthetic rationality and irrationality are equally mutilated by the curse of society. The critique of style is repressed by its polemical-romantic ideal; car- ried to its extreme , this critique would encompass the whole of traditional art. Au- thentic artists like Schoenberg protested fiercely against the concept of style; it is a criterion of radical modernism that modernism reject the concept. The concept of style never fully did justice to the quality of works; those works that seem most exactly to represent their style have always fought through the conflict with it; style itself was the unity of style and its suspension. Every work is a force field, even in its relation to style, and this continues to be the case in modernism, where , unbeknownst to modernism and precisely there where it renounced all will to style, something resembling style formed under the pressure of the immanent elaboration of works. The higher the ambition of artworks, the more energetically they carry out the conflict with style, even when this requires renouncing that success in which they already sense affirmation. Retrospectively, style may be exalted only because in spite of its repressive aspects it was not simply stamped externally on artworks but was rather-as Hegel liked to say in regard to antiq- uity-to a certain degree substantial. Style permeated the artwork with something like objective spirit; indeed, it even teased out elements of specification, which it required for its own realization. During periods in which objective spirit was not completely commandeered and spontaneity had yet to be totally administered, there was also still felicity in style. Constitutive in Beethoven's subjective art was the totally dynamic form of the sonata, in other words, the late-absolutist style of Viennese classicism that only came into its own once Beethoven carried out its
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implications . Nothing of the sort is possible any longer, for style has been liqui- dated. Instead, the concept ofthe chaotic is uniformly conjured up. It merely pro- jects the inability to follow the specific logic of a particular work back onto this work; with astonishing regularity the invectives against new art are enunciated in tandem with a demonstrable lack of comprehension, often even of any basic knowledge. There is no avoiding the recognition thatthe bindingness of styles is a reflex of society's repressive character, which humanity intermittently and ever under the threat of regression seeks to shake off; without the objective structure of a closed and thus repressive society, it would be impossible to conceive an obliga- tory style. With regard to individual artworks the concept of style is at best applic- able as the quintessence of the elements that are eloquent in it: The work that does not subsume itself to any style must have its own style or, as Berg called it, its own "tone. " It is undeniable that with regard to the most recent developments, those works that are elaborated in themselves converge. What the academic study of history calls a "personal style" is vanishing. If it protestingly seeks to survive, it almost inevitably collides with the immanent lawfulness of the individual work. The complete negation of style seems to reverse dialectically into style. The dis- covery of conformist traits in nonconformism4 has, however, become no more than a truism, good only to help the bad conscience of conformists secure an alibi from what wants change. This in no way diminishes the dialectic through which the particular becomes universal. That in nominalistically advanced artworks the universal, and sometimes the conventional, reappears results not from a sinful error but from the character of artworks as language, which progressively pro- duces a vocabulary within the windowless monad. Thus expressionist poetry-as Mautz has shown-employs certain color conventions that can also be found in Kandinsky's book. 5 Expression, the fiercest antithesis to abstract universality, re- quires such conventions in order to be able to speak as its concept promises. If ex- pression restricts itself to the locus of the absolute impulse, it would be unable to determine it adequately enough for this impulse to speak out of the artwork . Even though in all its aesthetic media expressionism, contrary to its idea, drew on style- like elements , only among its lesser representatives was this in the interest of ac- commodation to the market: In all other cases this phenomenon followed directly from its idea. For its own realization, expressionism must accept aspects that reach beyond the 'too? n, and this in turn compromises its realization .
NaIve faith in style goes hand in hand with rancor against the concept of progress in art. Conservative cultural philosophy, stubbornly insensible to the immanent tendency that motivates artistic radicalism, has the habit of sagely explaining that the concept of progress is itself outmoded and endures only as a bad relic of the nineteenth century . This provides a semblance of intellectual superiority over the supposed technological dependency of avant-garde artists, as well as a certain demagogical effect; an intellectual benediction is bestowed on a widespread anti- intellectualism that has degenerated into the cultivated terrain of the culture in-
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dustry. The ideological character of such efforts, however, is no dispensation from reflection on the relation of art to progress. As Hegel and Marx knew, in art the concept of progress is more refracted than in the history of the technical forces of production. To its very core, art is enmeshed in the historical movement of growing antagonisms. In art there is as much and as little progress as in society. Hegel' s aesthetics suffers not least of all because- like his system as a whole - it oscillates between thinking in invariants and unrestrained dialectical thinking, and although it grasped, as no previous system had, the historical element of art as the "development of truth," it nevertheless conserved the canon of antiquity. In- stead of drawing dialectics into aesthetic progress, Hegel brought this progress to a halt; for him it was art and not its prototypical forms that was transient. The con- sequences in Communist countries one hundred years later could not have been foreseen: Their reactionary art theory is nourished, not without Marx's approval, on Hegel's classicism. That according to Hegel art was once the adequate stage of spirit and now no longer is, demonstrates a trust in the real progress of conscious- ness of freedom that has since been bitterly disappointed. Hegel' s theorem of art as the consciousness of needs is compelling, and it is not outdated. In fact, the end of art that he prognosticated did not occur in the one hundred fifty years that have since lapsed. It is in no way the case that what was destined to perish has simply been forced along , emptily; the quality of the most important works of the epoch and particularly those that were disparaged as decadent is not open to discussion with those who would simply like to annul that quality externally and thus from below. Even given the most extreme reductionism in art's consciousness ofneeds, the gesture of self-imposed muteness and vanishing, art persists, as in a sort of differential. Because there has not yet been any progress in the world, there is progress in art; "itfaut continuer. " Admittedly, art remains caught up in what Hegel called world spirit and is thus an accomplice , but it could escape this guilt only by destroying itself and thus directly abetting speechless domination and de- ferring to barbarism. Artworks that want to free themselves of their guilt weaken themselves as artworks. One would only succeed in holding true to the mono- dimensionality of the world spirit if one were to insist on reducing it exclusively to the concept of domination. Artworks that, in epochs of liberation that go be- yond the historical instant, are fraternally allied with the world spirit, owe it their breath, vigor, and indeed everything by which they go beyond the ever-sameness oftheadministeredworld. Intheseworks,thesubjectopens its eyes, natureawak- ens to itself, and the historical spirit itselfparticipates' in this awakening. As much as progress in art is not to be fetishized but to be confronted with its truth content, it would be pitiful to distinguish between good progress as temperate and bad progress as what has run wild. Oppressed nature expresses itself more purely in works criticized as artificial, which with regard to the level of the technical forces of production, go to the extreme, than it does in circumspect works whose part; pris for nature is as allied with the real domination of nature as is the nature lover
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with the hunt. Progress in art is neither to be proclaimed nor denied. No later work, even were it the work of the greatest talent, could match the truth content of Beethoven's last quartets without reoccupying their position point by point with regard to material, spirit, and procedures.
The difficulty of coming to a general judgment about the progress of art has to do with a difficulty presented by the structure of its history . It is inhomogeneous . At most, series are to be discemed that have a successive continuity that then breaks off, often under social pressure that can indeed be that of conformity; to this day, continuity in artistic developments has required relatively stable social condi- tions. Continuities in genres parallel social continuity and homogeneity; it can be supposed that there was little change in the Italian public ' s attitude to opera from the time of the Neapolitans to Verdi, perhaps even to Puccini; and a similar con- tinuity of genre, marked by a relatively consistent development of means and prohibitions, can be seen in late medieval polyphony. The correspondence be- tween closed historical developments in art and, possibly, static social structures indicates the limits of the history of genres; any abrupt change of social structure, such as occurred with the emergence of a bourgeois public, brings about an equally abrupt change in genres and stylistic types. Thoroughbass music, which in its beginnings was primitive to the point of regression, repressed the highly devel- oped Dutch and Italian polyphony; its powerful revival in Bach was marginalized tracelessly for decades after his death . Only desultorily is it possible to speak of a transition from one work to another. Spontaneity , the compulsion toward the yet ungrasped, without which art is unthinkable, would otherwise have no place and its history would be mechanically determined. This holds true for the production of individually significant artists; the continuity of their work is often fragmented , not only in the case of the work of purportedly protean natures who seek security by switching models but even in the case of the most discriminating. They some- times produce works that are starkly antithetical to what they have already com- pleted, either because they consider the possibilities of one type of work to be exhausted or as a preventative to the danger of rigidification and repetition. In the works of many artists, production develops as if the new works wanted to recover what the earlier work, in becoming concretized and therefore, as ever, limiting itself, had had to renounce. No individual work is ever what traditional idealist aesthetics praises as a totality . Each is inadequate as well as incomplete, an extract from its own potential, and this runs contrary to its direct continuation if one leaves out of consideration various series of works in which painters, in particular, try out a conception with an eye to its possibilities for development. This discon- tinuous structure is, however, no more causally necessary than it is accidental and disparate . Even if there is no transition from one work to another, their succession nevertheless stands under the unity of the problem posed. Progress, the negation of what exists through new beginnings, takes place within this unity. Problems that previous work either did not solve or spawned in the course of their own solu-
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tions await attention, and that sometimes necessitates a break. Yet not even the unity of the problem provides an uninterrupted structure for the history of art. Problems can be forgotten; historical antitheses can develop in which the thesis is no longer preserved. Just how little progress in art has been a phylogenetically un- broken course can be learned ontogenetically . Innovators rarely have more power over what is old than did their predecessors . No aesthetic progress without forget- ting; hence, all progress involves regression. Brecht made forgetting his program on cultural-critical grounds that are justly suspicious of cultural tradition as a golden chain of ideologies. Phases of forgetting and, complementarily, those of the reemergence of what has long been taboo-for example, the reprise of the di- dactic poem in Brecht-usually involve genres rather than individual works; this is also true of taboos such as that which has today fallen on subjective - and espe- cially erotic-poetry, which was once an expression of emancipation. In fact, the continuity of art can be construed only from a very great distance. Rather, the his- tory of art has nodal points. Although partial histories of genre have their legiti- macy-such as those of landscape painting, portraiture, the opera-they should not be overtaxed. This is strikingly corroborated by the history ofparody and con- trafactum in older music . In Bach's oeuvre it is his technique, the complexion and density of the composition, that is truly progressive and more to the point than whether he wrote secular or religious, vocal or instrumental music; to this extent nominalism retrospectively affects the knowledge of older music. The impossibil- ity of a univocal construction of the history of art and the fatality of all disquisi- tions on its progress-which exists and then again does not exist-originate in art's double character as being socially determined in its autonomy and at the same time social. When the social character of art overwhelms its autonomy, when its immanent structure explosively contradicts its social relations , autonomy is sacrificed and with it art's continuity; it is one of the weaknesses of the history of ideas that it idealistically ignores this. For the most part, when continuity shat- ters it is the relations of production that win out over the forces of production; there is no cause to chime in with such social triumph. Art develops by way of the social whole; that is to say, it is mediated by society'S ruling structure. Art's his- tory is not a string of individual causalities; no univocal necessities lead from one phenomenon to the next. Its history may be called necessary only with regard to the total social tendency, not in reference to its individual manifestations. Its pat construction from above is as false as faith in the incommensurable genius of indi- vidual works that transports them out of the realm of necessity. A noncontradic- tory theory of the history of art is not to be conceived: The essence of its history is contradictory in itself.
Undoubtedly , the historical materials and their dornination- technique - advance; discoveries such as those of perspective in painting and polyphony in music are the most obvious examples. Beyond this, progress is also undeniable in the logical development of established methodology, as is evident in the differentiation of
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harmonic consciousness between the age of thoroughbass composition and the threshold of new music, or in the transition from impressionism to pointillism. Such unmistakable progress is, however, not necessarily that of quality. Only blindness could deny the aesthetic means gained in painting from Giotto and Cimabue to Piero della Francesca; however, to conclude that Piero's paintings are therefore better than the frescos of Assisi would be schoolmarmish. Whereas with regard to a particular work the question of quality can be posed and decided, and whereas relations are thereby indeed implicit in the judgment of various works, such judgments become art-alien pedantry as soon as comparison is made under the heading of "better than": Such controversies are in no way immune from cul- tural nonsense. However much works are distinguished from each other by their quality, they are at the same time incommensurable. They communicate with each other exclusively by way of antitheses: "Every work is the mortal enemy of the other. "6 They become comparable only by annihilating themselves, by realizing their life through their mortality. It is difficult to distinguish-and if at all then only in concreto-which archaic and primitive traits result from technique and which from the objective idea of the work; the two can be separated only arbitrarily. Even flaws may become eloquent , whereas what is excellent may in the course of history narrow the truth content. The history of art is just that antinomical. The subcutaneous structure of Bach ' s most important instrumental works can only be brought out in performance by means of an orchestral palette that he did not have at his disposal; yet it would be ridiculous to wish for perspective in medieval paintings , which would rob them of their specific expression . - Progress can be surpassed by progress. The reduction, and ultimately the canceling, of perspective in modern painting produces correspondences with preperspectival works that raises in estimation the distant past above the more recent past; these correspon- dences become philistine , however, if primitive and superseded methods are em- ployed for modern works and progress in the mastery over the material is dispar- aged and revoked. Even progressive mastery over the material is sometimes paid for with a loss in the mastery over the material. The greater familiarity with exotic musics that had previously been dismissed as primitive suggests that Western music's polyphony and rationalization-which are inseparable and which opened up all its richness and depths -dulled the power of differentiation that is alive in the minimal rhythmic and melodic variations of monadic music; the rigidity-and, for European ears, the monotony-of exotic music was obviously the condition for this differentiation. Ritual pressure strengthened the capacity to differentiate in a narrow sphere, where it was tolerated, whereas European music, under less pressure, was less in need of such correctives. As a result, only Western music achieved full autonomy-the status of art-and the consciousness that is imma- nent to it cannot arbitrarily leave it in order to broaden itself in some fashion . Un- deniably, a finer capacity to differentiate, which is always an aspect of the aes- thetic mastery over material, is bound up with spiritualization; it is the subjective
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correlative of objective control, the capacity to sense what has become possible, as a result of which art becomes freer to its own task : the protest against the mas- tery over material itself. Volition within the involuntary is the paradoxical for- mula for the possible dissolution of the antinomy of aesthetic domination. The mastery over the material implies spiritualization, though this spiritualization, as the autonomy of spirit vis-a-vis its other, immediately endangers itself again. The sovereign aesthetic spirit has a tendency to communicate itself rather than to give voice to what is at stake, which alone would fulfill the idea of spiritualiza- tion. The prix duprogres is inherent in progress itself, and this is most apparent in the declining authenticity and bindingness of art and in the growing sense of acci- dentalness; this is directly identical with progress of the domination of the mater- ial, as seen in the intensification of the elaboration of the individual work. It is un- certain whether this loss is factual or merely semblance. For naIve consciousness, as for that of the musician, a song from Die Winterreise may seem more authentic than one by Webem, as ifthe former had hit upon something objective whereas in the latter the content is narrowed to merely individual experience. Yet this distinc- tion is dubious. In works with the dignity of Webem's music, differentiation- which to untutored ears damages the objectivity of the content - is of a piece with the developing capacity to shape the work more precisely, to purge it of all residue of the schematic, and precisely this is what is called objectivation. Intimate expe- rience of authentic modem art loses the feeling of contingency that arises as long as a language is perceived to be necessary that has not been demolished simply by the subjective need for expression but rather by this need in the process of objecti- vation. Clearly artworks themselves are not indifferent to the transformation of their binding element into monad . That they appear to become more indifferent is not simply the result of their diminishing social effect. There is reason to think that works, through the shift to pure immanence, forfeit their coefficient of fric- tion, an element of their essence; that they also become more indifferent in them- selves . However, that radically abstract images can be displayed in public spaces without irritating anyone does not justify any restoration of representational art, which is a priori comforting even when Che Guevara is chosen for the goal of rec- onciliation with the object. Finally, progress is not only that of the domination of material and spiritualization but also the progress of spirit in Hegel's sense of the consciousness of freedom. Whether the domination of the material in Beethoven goes beyond that in Bach can be disputed endlessly; with regard to various dimen- sions, each had superior mastery of the material. Although the question of whom to rank higher is idle, the same cannot be said of the insight that the voice of the maturity of the subject, the emancipation from and reconciliation with myth-that is, the truth content-reached a higher development in Beethoven than in Bach. This criterion surpasses all others.
The aesthetic name for mastery over material-technique, a borrowing from an- tiquity, which ranked the arts among artisanal activities-is ofrecent date in its
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present acceptation. It bears the traces of a phase in which, analogous to science, methods were considered to be independent of their object. In retrospect , all artis- tic procedures that form the material and allow themselves to be guided by it coa- lesce under the technological aspect, including those procedures that originated in the artisanal praxis ofthe medieval production ofgoods, a praxis from which art, resisting integration into capitalism, never completely diverged. In art the thresh- old between craft and technique is not, as in material production, a strict quantifi- cation of processes, which is incompatible with art's qualitative telos; nor is it the introduction of machines; rather, it is the predominance of conscious free control over the aesthetic means, in contrast to traditionalism, under the cover of which this control matured . Vis-a-vis content [Gehaltl , the technical aspect is only one aspect among many others; no artwork is nothing but the quintessence of its technical elements. That any view of artworks that perceives nothing but how they are made falls short of aesthetic experience is admittedly a standard apolo- getic topos proferred by cultural ideology, yet it nevertheless remains true in opposition to the functionalist view of art at the point where functionalism is for- saken. Technique is, however, constitutive of art, because in it is condensed the fact that each artwork is a human artifact and that what is artistic in it becomes a human product. Technique and content must be distinguished; what is ideological is the abstraction that extracts the supratechnical from what is purportedly merely technique, as if in important works technique and content did not produce each other reciprocally. Shakespeare' s nominalistic breakthrough into mortal and infi- nitely rich individuality-as content-is as much a function of an antitectonic, quasi-epic succession of short scenes as this episodic technique is under the con- trol of the content: a metaphysical experience that explodes the meaning-giving order of the old unities. In the priestly word "message" the dialectical relation of content and technique is reified as a simple dichotomy. Technique has key signifi- cance for the knowledge of art; it alone leads reflection to the interior of works, though of course only on condition that one speak their language. Because the content is not something made, technique does not circumscribe art as a whole, yet it is exclusively from its concretion that the content can be extrapolated. Tech- nique is the definable figure of the enigma in artworks , at once rational and con- ceptless. It authorizes judgment in a region that does not make judgments. Cer- tainly the technical questions of artworks become infinitely complex and cannot be solved on the basis of a single maxim. Yet in principle they can be immanently decided. Technique, as the measure of the "logic" of works, is also the measure of the suspension of logic. The surgical excision of technique would suit a vulgar mentality, but it would be false. For the technique of a work is constituted by its problems, by the aporetic task that it objectively poses to itself. It is only with regard to this problem that the technique of a work can be discerned and the ques- tion answered as to whether or not it suffices , just as inversely the objective prob- lem of the work must be inferred from its technical complexion. If no work can
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be understood without an understanding of its technique, technique conversely cannot be understood without an understanding of the work . The degree to which, beyond the specification of a particular work, a technique is universal or monado- logical varies historically, yet even in idolized eras, when style was binding, tech- nique had the responsibility of assuring that style did not abstractly rule the work but entered into the dialectic of the work's individuation. How much more signifi- cant technique is than art-alien irrationalism would like to admit is obvious in that, presupposing the capacity for the experience of art, experience unfolds all the more richly the more deeply consciousness penetrates the artwork's technical complexion. Understanding grows along with an understanding of the technical treatment of the work. That consciousness kills is a nursery tale; only false con- sciousness is fatal. Metier initially makes art commensurable to consciousness because for the most part it can be learned. What a teacher finds fault with in a student's work is the first model of a lack of metier; corrections are the model of metier itself. These models are preartistic insofar as they recapitulate preestab- lished patterns and rules; they take a step beyond this when they become the com- parison of technical means with the sought-after goal. At a primitive level of edu- cation, beyond which, admittedly, the usual study of composition rarely goes, the teacher finds fault with parallel fifths and in their place suggests better voiceleading ; but if he is not a pedant, he will demonstrate to the student that parallel fifths are legitimate artistic means for intended effects, as in Debussy, and that external to tonality the prohibition loses its meaning altogether. Metier ultimately sloughs off its provisional, limited shape. The experienced eye that surveys a score or a drawing ascertains, almost mimetically, before any analysis, whether the objet d'art has metier and innervates its level of form. Yet this does not suffice.