No More Learning

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. Today whatever proclaims itself informelle17 becomes aesthetic only by articulating itself as form; otherwise it would amount to no more than a document. In the case of such exemplary artists of the epoch as Schoenberg, Klee, and Picasso, the expressive mimetic element and the constructive element are of equal intensity, not by seeking a happy mean between them but rather by way of the extremes: Yet each is simultaneously content-laden, expression is the negativity of suffering, and construction is the effort to bear up under the suffering of alienation by exceeding it on the horizon of undiminished and thus no longer violent rationality. Just as in thought, form and content are as distinct as they are mediated in one another, so too in art. The concepts of progress and reaction are hardly applicable to art as long as the ab- stract dichotomy of form and content is acceded to. This dichotomy is recapitu- lated in assertion and counterassertion. Some call artists reactionary because they purportedly champion socially reactionary theses or because through the form of their works they supposedly aid political reason in some admittedly discreet and not quite graspable fashion; others dub artists reactionary for falling behind the level of artistic forces of production. But the content [Gehalt] of important art- works can deviate from the opinion of their authors . It is obvious that Strindberg repressively inverted Ibsen's bourgeois-emancipatory intentions. On the other hand, his formal innovations, the dissolution of dramatic realism and the recon- struction of dreamlike experience, are objectively critical. They attest to the transition of society toward horror more authentically than do Gorki's bravest accusations. To this extent they are also socially progressive, the dawning self- consciousness of that catastrophe for which the bourgeois individualistic society is preparing: In it the absolutely individual becomes a ghost as in Ghost Sonata. In counterpoint to this are the greatest works of naturalism: the unmitigated horror of the first act of Hauptmann's Hannele's Ascension causes the reversal of faithful reproduction into the wildest expression. Social criticism of a politically decreed resuscitation of realism is important, however, only if it does not capitulate vis-a- vis l'art pour l'art. What is socially untrue in that protest against society has become socially evident. The carefully chosen words, for instance, of a Barbey
d' Aurevilly have since dulled to an old-fashioned naIvete hardly befitting any ar- tificial paradise; Aldous Huxley was already struck by the emerging comicalness of Satanism. The evil that both Baudelaire and Nietzsche found to be lacking in the liberalistic nineteenth century, was for them nothing more than the mask of drives no longer subject to Victorian repression. As a product of the repressed drives of the twentieth century, evil broke through the civilizatory hurdles with a bestiality compared to which Baudelaire's outrageous blasphemies took on a harmlessness that contrasts grotesquely with their pathos. Despite his preemi- nence, Baudelaire presaged Jugendstil. Its lie was the beautification of life with-
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out its transfonnation; beauty itself thereby became vacuous and, like all abstract negation, allowed itself to be integrated into what it negated . The phantasmagoria of an aesthetic world undisturbed by purposes of any kind became an alibi for the subaesthetic world.
It can be said that philosophy, and theoretical thought as a whole, suffers from an idealist prejudice insofar as it disposes solely over concepts; only through them does it treat what they are concerned with, which it itself never has. Its labor of Sisyphus is that it must reflect the untruth and guilt that it takes on itself, thereby correcting it when possible. It cannot paste its ontic substratum into the text; by speaking of it, philosophy already makes it into what it wants to free itself from. Modem art has registered dissatisfaction with this ever since Picasso disrupted his pictures with scraps of newspaper, an act from which all montage derives. The social element is aesthetically done justice in that it is not imitated, which would effectively make it fit for art, but is, rather, injected into art by an act of sabotage. Art itself explodes the deception of its pure immanence , just as the empirical ruins divested of their own context accommodate themselves to the immanent princi- ples of construction . By conspicuously and willfully ceding to crude material , art wants to undo the damage that spirit-thought as well as art-has done to its other, to which it refers and which it wants to make eloquent. This is the deter- minable meaning of the meaningless intention-alien element of modem art, which extends from the hybridization of the arts to the happenings. 18 It is not so much that traditional art is thereby sanctimoniously condemned by an arriviste judg- ment but that, rather, the effort is made to absorb even the negation of art by its own force. What is no longer socially possible in traditional art does not on that account surrender all truth. Instead it sinks to a historical, geological stratum that is no longer accessible to living consciousness except through negation but with- out which no art would exist: a stratum of mute reference to what is beautiful, without all that strict a distinction between nature and work. This element is con- trary to the disintegrative element into which the truth of art has changed; yet it survives because as the fonning force it recognizes the violence of that by which it measures itself. It is through this idea that art is related to peace. Without per- spective on peace, art would be as untrue as when it anticipates reconciliation. Beauty in art is the semblance of the truly peaceful. It is this toward which even the repressive violence of fonn tends in its unification of hostile and divergent elements.
It is false to arrive at aesthetic realism from the premise of philosophical material- ism. Certainly, art, as a fonn of knowledge, implies knowledge of reality, and there is no reality that is not social. Thus truth content and social content are medi- ated, although art's truth content transcends the knowledge of reality as what ex- ists. Art becomes social knowledge by grasping the essence, not by endlessly talk- ing about it, illustrating it, or somehow imitating it. Through its own figuration, art brings the essence into appearance in opposition to its own semblance. The
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epistemological critique of idealism, which secures for the object an element of primacy, cannot simply be transposed to art. Object in art and object in empirical reality are entirely distinct. In art the object is the work produced by art, as much containing elements of empirical reality as displacing, dissolving, and reconstruct- ing them according to the work's own law. Only through such transformation, and not through an ever falsifying photography, does art give empirical reality its due, the epiphany of its shrouded essence and the merited shudder in the face of it as in the face of a monstrosity. The primacy of the object is affirmed aesthetically only in the character of art as the unconscious writing of history, as anamnesis of the vanquished, of the repressed, and perhaps of what is possible. The primacy of the object, as the potential freedom from domination of what is , manifests itself in art as its freedom from objects. If art must grasp its content [Gehalt] in its other, this other is not to be imputed to it but falls to it solely in its own immanent nexus. Art negates the negativity in the primacy of the object, negates what is heteronomous and unreconciled in it, which art allows to emerge even through the semblance of the reconciliation of its works .
At first glance one argument of dialectical materialism bears persuasive force. The standpoint of radical modernism, it is claimed, is that of solipsism, that of a monad that obstinately barricades itself against intersubjectivity; the reified divi- sion of labor has run amok. This derides the humanity that awaits realization. However, this solipsism-the argument continues-is illusory, as materialistic criticism and long before that great philosophy have demonstrated; it is the delu- sion of the immediacy of the for-itself that ideologically refuses to admit its own mediations . It is true that theory , through insight into universal social mediation, has conceptually surpassed solipsism. But art, mimesis driven to the point of self- consciousness, is nevertheless bound up with feeling, with the immediacy of experience; otherwise it would be indistinguishable from science, at best an in- stallment plan on its results and usually no more than social reporting. Collective modes of production by small groups are already conceivable , and in some media even requisite; monads are the locus of experience in all existing societies. Be- cause individuation, along with the suffering that it involves, is a social law, soci- ety can only be experienced individually. The substruction of an immediately col- lective subject would be duplicitous and would condemn the artwork to untruth because it would withdraw the single possibility of experience that is open to it today. If on the basis of theoretical insight art orients itself correctively, according to its own mediatedness, and seeks to escape from the monadic character that it has recognized as social semblance, historical truth remains external to it and becomes untruth: The artwork heteronomously sacrifices its immanent determina- tion. According to critical theory, mere consciousness of society does not in any real sense lead beyond the socially imposed objective structure, any more than the
artwork does, which in terms of its own determinations is itself a part of social reality . The capacity that dialectical materialisin antimaterialistically ascribes to
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and demands of the artwork is achieved by that artwork, if at all, when in its ob- jectively imposed monadologically closed structure it pushes its situation so far that it becomes the critique of this situation. The true threshold between art and other knowledge may be that the latter is able to think beyond itself without abdi- cating, whereas art produces nothing valid that it does not fill out on the basis of the historical standpoint at which it finds itself. The innervation of what is his- torically possible for it is essential to the artistic form of reaction. In art, substan- tiality means just this . If for the sake of a higher social truth art wants more than the experience that is accessible to it and that it can form, that experience becomes less, and the objective truth that it posits as its measure collapses as a fiction that patches over the fissure between subject and object. They are so falsely reconciled by a trumped-up realism that the most utopian phantasies of a future art would be unable to conceive of one that would once again be realistic without falling back into unfreedom. Art possesses its other immanently because, like the subject, im- manence is socially mediated in itself. It must make its latent social content elo- quent: It must go within in order to go beyond itself. It carries out the critique of solipsism through the force of externalization in its own technique as the tech- nique of objectivation. By virtue of its form, art transcends the impoverished, en- trapped subject; what wants willfully to drown out its entrapment becomes infan- tile and makes out of its heteronomy a social-ethical accomplishment. It may be objected here that the various peoples' democracies are still antagonistic and that they therefore preclude any but an alienated standpoint, yet it is to be hoped that an actualized humanism would be blessedly free of the need for modern art and
would once again be content with traditional art. This concessional argument, however, is actually not all that distinct from the doctrine of overcoming individ- ualism. To put it bluntly, it is based on the philistine cliche that modern art is as ugly as the world in which it originates , that the world deserves it and nothing else would be possible, yet surely it cannot go on like this forever. In truth, there is nothing to overcome; the word itself is indexfalsi. There is no denying that the antagonistic situation, what the young Marx called alienation and self-alienation, was not the weakest agency in the constitution of modern art. But modern art was certainly no copy , not the reproduction of that situation. In denouncing it, trans- posing it into the image, this situation became its other and as free as the situation denies the living to be. If today art has become the ideological complement of a world not at peace , it is possible that the art of the past will someday devolve upon society at peace; it would, however, amount to the sacrifice of its freedom were new art to return to peace and order, to affirmative replication and harmony. Nor is it possible to sketch the form of art in a changed society . In comparison with past art and the art of the present it will probably again be something else; but it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom counterfeits as positivity. If in fulfillment of
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the wish a future art were once again to become positive, then the suspicion that negativity were in actuality persisting would become acute; this suspicion is ever present, regression threatens unremittingly, and freedom-surely freedom from the principle of possession -cannot be possessed. But then what would art be, as the writing of history , if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering.
Paralipomena
Aesthetics presents philosophy with the bill for the fact that the academic system degraded it to being a mere specialization. It demands of philosophy precisely what philosophy has neglected to do: that it extract phenomena from their exis- tence and bring them to self-reflection; this would be the reflection of what is pet- rified in the sciences, not a specialized science located beyond them. Aesthetics thereby yields to what its object, like any object, immediately seeks. Every art- work, if it is to be fully experienced, requires thought and therefore stands in need of philosophy, which is nothing but the thought that refuses all restrictions. Under- standing [ Verstehen] and criticism are one; the capacity of understanding, that of comprehending what is understood as something spiritual, is none other than that of distinguishing in the object what is true and false, however much this distinc- tion must deviate from the procedure of ordinary logic. Emphatically , art is knowl- edge, though not the knowledge of objects. Only he understands an artwork who grasps it as a complex nexus of truth , which inevitably involves its relation to un- truth, its own as well as that external to it; any other judgment of artworks would remain arbitrary. Artworks thus demand an adequate relation to themselves. They postulate what was once the aim of the philosophy of art, which, in its present form, it no longer accomplishes, neither vis-a-vis contemporary consciousness nor vis-a-vis current artworks.
The idea o f a value-free aesthetics i s nonsense. T o understand artworks , as Brecht , incidentally, well knew, means to become aware of their logicality and its oppo- site, and of their fissures and their significance. No one can understand Wagner's
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Meistersinger who fails to perceive that element denounced by Nietzsche of a nar- cissistically self-staging positivity, that is, its element of untruth. The diremption of understanding and value is a scientific institution; without values nothing is understood aesthetically, and vice versa. In art, more than in any other sphere, it is right to speak of value. Like a mime, every work says: ''I'm good, no? "; to which what responds is a comportment that knows to value.
While the effort of aesthetics today presupposes the critique of its universal prin- ciples and norms as binding, this effort is itself necessarily restricted to the me- dium of universal thought. It is not within the purview of aesthetics to abolish this contradiction. Aesthetics must acknowledge the contradiction and reflect it, obe- dient to the theoretical need that art categorically registers in the age of its reflec- tion . The necessity , however, of such universality in no way legitimates a positive doctrine of aesthetic invariants. In the obligatorily universal determinations, his- torical processes have sedimented what-to vary an Aristotelian formula-art was. The universal determinations of art are what art developed into. The histori- cal situation of art, which has lost any sense of art's very raison d'etre, turns to the past in the hope of finding the concept of art, which retrospectively acquires a sort of unity. This unity is not abstract but is, rather, the unfolding ofart according to its own concept. At every point, therefore, the theory of art presupposes con- crete analyses, not as proofs and examples but as its own condition. Benjamin, who philosophically potentiated to the extreme the immersion in concrete art- works , was himself motivated toward a tum to universal reflection in his theory of reproduction . 1
The requirement that aesthetics be the reflection of artistic experience without relinquishing its resolutely theoretical character can best be fulfilled by incorpo- rating the movement of the concept into the traditional categories and confronting them with artistic experience. At the same time, no continuum between the poles is to be construed. The medium of theory is abstract and this is not to be masked by the use of illustrative examples . And yet, a spark may occasionally flash up - as it did in Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit-between the concretion of spiritual experience and the medium of the universal concept. This can occur in such a fashion that the concrete is not merely an illustration but rather the thing itself, around which abstract reasoning turns, yet without which the name is not to be found. To this end, aesthetics must take its orientation from the process of produc- tion, which encompasses the objective problems and desiderata presented by the products themselves. The primacy of the sphere of production in artworks is the primacy of their nature as products of social labor, by contrast with the contin- gency of their subjective origins. The relation to the traditional categories, how- ever, is unavoidable because only the reflection of these categories makes it possi- ble to open theory to artistic experience. In the transformation of the categories,
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which such reflection expresses and effects, historical experience penetrates theory. Through the historical dialectic, which thought liberates in the traditional categories , these categories lose their spurious abstractness without sacrificing the universal that inheres in thought: Aesthetics aims at concrete universality. The most ingenious analyses of individual works are not necessarily aesthetics; this is their inadequacy as well as their superiority over what is called the science of art.
Recourse to the traditional categories is legitimated by actual artistic experience, for these categories do not simply vanish from contemporary works but return in their negation. Experience culminates in aesthetics: It makes coherent and conscious what transpires in artworks obscurely and unelucidated, and what in- sufficiently transpires in the particular artwork. In this regard, even a nonidealistic aesthetics is concerned with "ideas. "
The qualitative difference between art and science does not simply consist in using the latter as an instrument for knowing the former. The categories employed by science stand in so obtuse a relation to the inner-artistic categories that their direct projection onto the extra-aesthetic categories inevitably wipes out what the investigation was supposed to explain. The growing relevance of technology in artworks must not become a motive for subordinating them to that type of reason that produced technology and finds its continuation in it.
What survives of the classical is the idea of artworks as something objective, mediated by subjectivity. Otherwise art would in fact be an arbitrary, insignificant, and perhaps historically outdated amusement. It would be reduced to the level of an ersatz produced by a society whose energy is no longer consumed by the acqui- sition of means of subsistence and in which, nevertheless, direct instinctual satis- faction is limited. Art opposes this as the tenacious protest against a positivism that would prefer to subordinate it to a universal heteronomy. Not that art, drawn into the social web of delusion, could not actually be what it opposes. Yet its exis- tence is incompatible with the forces that want to humble and subsume it. What speaks out of important artworks is opposed to subjective reason's claim to total- ity. Its untruth becomes manifest in the objectivity of artworks. Cut loose from its immanent claim to objectivity, art would be nothing but a more or less organized system of stimuli-conditioning reflexes that art would autistically and dogmati- cally attribute to that system rather than to those on which it has an effect. The re- sult would be the negation of the difference between artworks and merely sensual qualities; it would be an empirical entity, nothing more than-in American argot- a battery of tests, and the adequate means for giving an account of art would be program analysis or surveys of average group reactions to artworks or genres- except that, perhaps out ofrespect for recognized branches ofculture, positivism seems seldom to go to the extremes logically implied by its own method. If, as a theory of knowledge, it contests all objective meaning and classes as art every
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thought that is irreducible to protocol sentences, it a limine-though without ad- mitting it-negates art, which it takes no more seriously than does the tired busi- nessman who uses it as a massage; if art corresponded with positivistic criteria, positivism would be art's transcendental subject. The concept of art toward which positivism tends converges with that of the culture industry , which indeed fonnu- lates its products as those of a system of stimuli, which is what the subjective the- ory of projection considers art to be. Hegel's argument against a subjective aes- thetics based on the sensibility of recipients took issue with its arbitrariness. But this was not the end of it. The culture industry, using statistical averages, calcu- lates the subjective element of reaction and establishes it as universal law . It has become objective spirit. This however in no way weakens Hegel's critique. For the universality of contemporary style is the negative immediacy, the liquidation of every claim to truth raised by the work as well as the pennanent deception of the recipients by the implicit assurance that it is for their own good that the money with which they are furnished by concentrated economic power is once again taken away from them. This all the more directs aesthetics-and sociology as
well, insofar as it perfonns a subsidiary function for subjective aesthetics as a sociology of putative communication-to the objectivity of the artwork. In their actual research, positivistically minded scientists working, for instance, with the Murray Test, oppose any analysis of the objective expressive content of the test images, which they consider excessively dependent on the observer and thus sci- entifically unacceptable; ultimately they would need to proceed in this manner with artworks that are not, as in that test, aimed at their recipients but rather con- front those recipients with their-the artworks' -objectivity. As with any apolo- getic for art, positivism would have an easy time with the bare asseveration that artworks are no sum of stimuli, dismissing artworks as rationalization and pro- jection, good for winning social status, modeled on the relation that millions of cultural philistines have to art. Or, more radically, positivism could disqualify the objectivity of art as a vestige of animism that, like any other vestige, is obliged to give way to enlightenment. Whoever refuses to be swindled out of the experience of objectivity or refuses to cede authority over art to the art-alien must proceed immanently, must join with subjective fonns of reaction, of which art and its con- tent are-in positivist human understanding-mere reflections. What is true in positivism is the platitude that without the experience of art nothing can be known about it and there can be no discussion of it. But precisely this experience contains the distinction that positivism ignores: To put it drastically, this is whether one uses a hit song, in which there is nothing to understand, as a backdrop for all kinds of psychological projections , or whether one understands a work by submitting to the work's own discipline. What philosophical aesthetics held to be liberating in art- in philosophical argot, what transcended time and space-was the self-negation of the contemplator who is virtually extinguished in the work. This extinguishing is exacted by the artworks and is the index veri etfalsi; only he who submits to its
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objective criterion understands it; he who is unconcerned about it is a consumer. The subjective element is nevertheless maintained in an adequate relation to art: The greater the effort to participate in the realization of the work and its structural dynamic, the more contemplation the subject invests in the work, the more suc- cessfully does the subject, forgetting itself, become aware of the work's objectiv- ity; even in the work's reception, subjectivity mediates objectivity. Notjust in the sublime, as Kant thought, but in all beauty the subject becomes conscious of its own nullity and attains beyond it to what is other. Kant's doctrine of the sublime falls short only in that it established the counterpart to this nullity as a positive infinity and situates it in the intelligible subject. Pain in the face of beauty is the longing for what the subjective block closes off to the subject, of which the sub- ject nevertheless knows that it is truer than itself. Experience, which would with- out violence be free of the block, results from the surrender of the subject to the aesthetic law of form. The viewer enters into a contract with the artwork so that it will speak. Those who brag of having "got" something from an artwork transfer in philistine fashion the relation of possession to what is strictly foreign to it; they extend the comportment of unbroken self-preservation , subordinating beauty to that interest that beauty, according to Kant's ever valid insight, transcends. That there would nevertheless be no beauty without the subject, that beauty becomes what is in-itself only by way of its for-other, is the fault of the self-positing of the subject. Because this self-positing disrupted beauty , it has need of its recollection by the subject in the image. The melancholy of evening is not the mood of he who feels it, yet it grips only him who has himself been so differentiated, has so much become subject, that he is not blind to it. Only the strong and developed subject, the product of all control over nature and its injustice , has the power both to step back from the object and to revoke its self-positing. The subject of aesthetic sub- jectivism, however, is weak, "outer directed. "2 The overestimation of the subjec- tive element in the artwork and the lack of a relation to the artwork are equivalent. The subject only becomes the essence of the artwork when it confronts it for- eignly, externally, and compensates for the foreignness by substituting itself for the work. Of course the objectivity of the artwork is not completely and ade- quately open to knowledge, and in the works it is never beyond question; the dif- ference between what is demanded by the problem posed by the works and the solution to this demand gnaws away at their objectivity. This objectivity is not a positive fact but rather an ideal toward which the work and knowledge of it tend. Aesthetic objectivity is not unmediated; he who thinks he holds it in the palm of his hand is led astray by it. If it were unmediated it would coincide with the sensu- ous phenomena of art and would suppress its spiritual element , which is, however, fallible both for itself and for others . Aesthetics effectively means the study of the conditions and mediations of the objectivity of art. Hegel ' s argumentation against Kant's subjectivistic grounding of aesthetics is too facile: In that the object is a priori spirit, the Hegelian immersion in the object or in its categories-which in
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Hegel still coincide with the genres-transpires without meeting any resistance. The collapse of the absoluteness of spirit brings down with it the absoluteness of artworks. This is why it is so difficult for aesthetics not to capitulate to positivism and perish in it. Yet the dismemberment of the metaphysics of spirit does not expel spirit: Its spiritual element is strengthened and concretized once it is recog- nized that not everything in it must be spirit, which, incidentally, Hegel himself did not hold. If the metaphysics of spirit was patterned on art, after the collapse of metaphysics the spirit of art is, so to speak, restituted. The inadequate subjective- positivistic theorems of art must be demonstrated in art itself, not deduced from a philosophy of spirit. Aesthetic norms that are said to correspond to the perceiving subject's invariant forms of reaction are empirically invalid; thus the academic psychology is false that, in opposing new music, propounds that the ear is unable to perceive highly complex tonal phenomena that deviate too far from the natural overtone relations: There is no disputing that there are individuals who have this capacity and there is no reason why everyone should not be able to have it; the limitations are not transcendental but social, those of second nature. If an empiri- cally oriented aesthetics uses quantitative averages as norms, it unconsciously sides with social conformity. What such an aesthetics classifies as pleasing or painful is never a sensual given of nature but something preformed by society as a whole, by what it sanctions and censors, and this has always been challenged by artistic production. Subjective reactions such as disgust for the suave, a motive force in new art, are elements of resistance to the heteronomous social order that have migrated into the sensorium. In general, the supposed basis of art is predi- cated on subjective forms of reaction and comportments; even the apparent acci- dents of taste are governed by a latent compulsion, albeit not always that of the material itself; any subjective form of reaction that is indifferent to the work is extra-aesthetic. At the very least, however, every subjective element in artworks is also motivated by the material itself. The sensibility of the artist is essentially the capacity to hear what is transpiring within the material, to see with the work's own eyes. The more strictly aesthetics, in accord with Hegel's postulate, is con- structed on the movement of the material itself, the more objective it becomes and the less it confuses subjectively founded, dubious invariants with objectivity. It was Croce's achievement to have dialectically done away with every standard external to the work; Hegel's classicism prevented him from doing the same. In his Aesthetics he broke offthe dialectic just as he did in the political thought of the Philosophy ofRight. Only on the basis of the experience of radically nominalistic
new art is Hegel's aesthetics to be fully realized; here even Croce hesitated.
Aesthetic positivism, which replaced the theoretical decipherment of artworks by taking inventories of their effects , can claim to be true only insofar as it denounces that fetishization of artworks that is itself part and parcel of the culture industry and aesthetic decline . Positivism draws attention to the dialectical element that no
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artwork is ever pure . For many aesthetic forms , such as opera, the effect was con- stitutive; if the internal movement of the genre compels it to renounce the primacy of effect, then the genre essentially becomes impossible. Whoever naIvely takes the artwork for the pure in-itself, as which all the same it must be taken, becomes the naIve victim of the work as self-posited and takes semblance for a higher real- ity, blind to the constitutive element in art. Positivism is the bad consciousness of art: It reminds art that it is not unmediatedly true.
Whereas the thesis of the projective character of art ignores its objectivity - its quality and truth content- and is unable to conceive an emphatic concept of art, it is important as the expression of a historical tendency. What in philistine fashion it inflicts on artworks corresponds to the positivistic caricature of enlightenment, ofunfettered subjective reason. Reason's social superiority penetrates the works. This tendency , which would like to render artworks impossible through their de- aestheticization, cannot be arrested by insisting that art must exist: Nowhere is that chiseled in stone. The theory of art as a subjective projection ultimately termi- nates in the negation of art, and this must be kept in mind if the theory of projec- tion itself is not to be ignominiously neutralized according to the model of the cul- ture industry. But positivistic consciousness has, as false consciousness, its own difficulties: It needs art as an arena in which it may dispose of what does not have any place in its own suffocatingly narrow space. Moreover, positivism, ever cred- ulously devoted to the factually given, is obliged somehow to come to terms with art, simply because it exists. The positivists try to rescue themselves from this dilemma by taking art no more seriously than does a tired businessman. This al- lows them to be tolerant toward artworks, which, according to the positivist's own thought, no longer exist.
Just how little artworks are subsumed in their genesis, and how much, for this rea- son, philological methods do them an injustice, can be graphically demonstrated. Schikaneder had no need to dream up Bachofen. 3 The libretto of The Magic Flute amalgamates the most disparate sources without unifying them. Objectively, how- ever, the work reveals the conflict between matriarchy and patriarchy, between lunar and solar principle s . This explains the resilience of the text, long defamed as worse than mediocre by pedants. The libretto occupies a boundary line between banality and profundity, but is protected from the former because the coloratura role of the Queen of the Night is not presented as an "evil force . "
Aesthetic experience crystallizes in the individual work. Still, no particular aes- thetic experience occurs in isolation, independently of the continuity of experi- encing consciousness. The temporally sequestered and atomistic is as contrary to aesthetic experience as it is to all experience: In the relation to artworks as monads, the pent-up force of aesthetic consciousness constituted beyond the individual
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work must participate. It is in this sense that "understanding art" is meaningful. The continuity of aesthetic experience is colored by all other experience and by all knowledge , though , of course , it is only confirmed and corrected in the actual con- frontation with the phenomenon.
To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky's Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind's Lulu than does Berg's music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg's work is to Stravinsky's and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out ofjust such conflicts.
The feelings provoked by artworks are real and to this extent extra-aesthetic. By contrast to these feelings, a cognitive posture that runs counter to the observing sub- ject is more applicable, more just to the aesthetic phenomenon , without confusing it with the empirical existence of the observing subject. In that, however, the artwork is not only aesthetic but sub- and supra-aesthetic; in that it originates in empirical layers of life , has the quality of being a thing , a/ait social, and ultimately converges with the meta-aesthetic in the idea of truth, it implies a critique of any chemically pure attitude to art. The experiencing subject, from which aesthetic experience distances itself, returns in aesthetic experience as a transaesthetic subject. The aesthetic shudder once again cancels the distance held by the subject. Although artworks offer themselves to observation, they at the same time disorient the ob- server who is held at the distance of a mere spectator; to him is revealed the truth of the work as if it must also be his own. The instant of this transition is art' s highest. It rescues subjectivity , even subjective aesthetics, by the negation of subjectivity . The subject, convulsed by art, has real experiences; by the strength of insight into the artwork as artwork, these experiences are those in which the SUbject's petrification in his own subjectivity dissolves and the narrowness of his self-positedness is re- vealed. If in artworks the subject finds his true happiness in the moment of being convulsed, this is a happiness that is counterposed to the subject and thus its instru- ment is tears , which also express the grief over one ' s own mortality . Kant sensed something of this in his aesthetic of the sublime , which he excluded from art .
An absence of nruvete-a reflective posture-toward art clearly also requires naIvete, insofar as aesthetic consciousness does not allow its experiences to be regulated by what is culturally approved but rather preserves the force of sponta- neous reaction toward even the most avant-garde movements. However much in- dividual and even artistic consciousness is mediated by society, by the prevailing objective spirit, it remains the geometric site of that spirit's self-reflection and broadens it. NaIvete toward art is a source of blindness; but whoever lacks it to- tally is truly naror w-minded and trapped in what is foisted upon him.
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The "isms" must be defended as watchwords, as witnesses to the universal state of reflection, and, insofar as they function in the formation of movements, as the successors of what tradition once performed. This arouses the rage of the dichoto- mous bourgeois mind. Although it insists on planning and willing everything, under its control art is supposed to be, like love, spontaneous, involuntary , and un- conscious. Historicophilosophically this is denied it. The taboo on watchwords is reactionary .
The concept of the new has inherited what once the individualistic concept of originality wanted to express and which in the meantime is opposed by those who do not want the new,who denounce it as unoriginal and all advanced forms as indistinguishable.
If recent art movements have made montage their principle, subcutaneously all artworks have always shared something of this principle; this could be demon- strated in detail in the puzzle technique of the great music of Viennese classicism, which nevertheless corresponds perfectly with the idea of organic development in that era's philosophy.
The distortion of the structure of history by the parti pris for real or putatively great events also affects the history of art. Indeed, history always crystallizes in the qualitatively new, but the antithesis must also be held in mind: that the sudden appearance of a new quality , the dialectical reversal, is virtually a non-entity . This enervates the myth of artistic creativity. The artist carries out a minimal transition, not the maximal creatio ex nihilo. The differential of the new is the locus of pro- ductivity. It is the infinitesimally small that is decisive and shows the individual artist to be the executor of a collective objectivity of spirit in contrast to which his own part vanishes. This was implicitly recognized in the idea of genius as recep- tive and passive, which opens a view to that in artworks that makes them more than their primary definition, more than artifacts. Their desire to be thus and not otherwise functions in opposition to the character of an artifact by driving it to its extreme; the sovereign artist would like to annul the hubris of creativity. Herein lies the morsel of truth to be found in the belief that everything is always possible. The keys of each and every piano hold the whole Appassionata; the composer need only draw it out, but this, obviously, required Beethoven.
In spite of the aversion to what in modernism is regarded as antiquated, the situa- tion of art vis-a-vis Jugendstil has in no way changed as radically as that aversion would like to suppose. This could explain both the aversion to Jugendstil and the undiminished actuality of Schoenberg's Pierrot, as well as of many works by Maeterlinck and Strindberg, which, though they are not identical with Jugendstil, can nevertheless be attributed to it. Jugendstil was the first collective effort to
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extract from art an otherwise absent meaning; the collapse of this effort paradig- matically circumscribes the contemporary aporia of art. This effort exploded in expressionism; functionalism and its counterparts in nonapplied arts were its ab- stract negation. The key to contemporary anti-art, with Beckett at its pinnacle, is perhaps the idea of concretizing this negation, of culling aesthetic meaning from the radical negation of metaphysical meaning. The aesthetic principle of form is in itself, through the synthesis of what is formed, the positing of meaning even when meaning is substantively rejected. To this extent, whatever it wills or states, art remains theology; its claim to truth and its affinity to untruth are one and the same. This emerged specifically in Jugendstil. The situation culminates in the question of whether, after the fall of theology and in its total absence, art is still possible. But if, as in Hegel-who was the first to express historicophilosophical doubts as to this possibility-this necessity subsists, art retains an oracular qual- ity; it is ambiguous whether the possibility of art is a genuine witness to what endures of theology or if it is the reflection of an enduring spell.
As is evident in its name, Jugendstil is a declaration of permanent puberty: It is a utopia that barters off its own unrealizability .
Hatred of the new originates in a concealed tenet of bourgeois ontology: that the transient should be transient, that death should have the last word.
The idea of making a sensation was always bound up with the effort to epater Ie bourgeois and was adapted to the bourgeois interest of turning everything to a profit .
However certain it is that the concept of the new is shot through with pernicious social characteristics-especially with that of nouveaute-on the market it is equally impossible,eversince Baudelaire, Manet, and Tristan, to dispense with it; efforts to do away with it, faced with its putative contingency and arbitrariness,
have only heightened both.
Ever and again the menacing category of the new radiates the allure of freedom, more compellingly than it radiates its inhibiting, leveling, sometimes sterile aspects.
The category of the new , as the abstract negation of the category of the permanent, converges with permanence: The invariance of the new is its weakness.
Modernism emerged as something qualitatively new, in opposition to exhausted given forms; for this reason it is not purely temporal; this helps to explain why on the one hand it acquired those invariable features for which its critics gladly indict it and why, on the other hand, the new cannot simply be dismissed as being obso-
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lete. In it the inner-aesthetic and the social interlock. The more art is compelled to oppose the standardized life stamped out by the structure of domination , the more it evokes chaos: Chaos forgotten becomes disaster. This explains the mendacity of the clamor about the putative spiritual terror of modern art, clamor that surpasses that terror of the world to which art stands opposed. The terror of a form of reac- tion that puts up with nothing but the new is salutary for the shame it casts on the banality of official culture . Those who embarrass themselves by blathering that art must not forget humanity , or when - in the face of bewildering works - they ask where the message is, will be reluctantly compelled, perhaps even without gen- uine conviction, to sacrifice cherished habits; shame can, however, inaugurate a process in which the external pervades the inner, a process that makes it impos- sible for the terrorized to go on bleating with the others.
It is impossible to consider the emphatic aesthetic idea of the new apart from the industrial procedures that increasingly dominate the material production of soci- ety; whether they are mediated by the exhibition of works, as Benjamin seems to have assumed, remains to be decided. 4 Industrial techniques, however, the repeti- tion of identical rhythms and the repetitive manufacture of an identical object based on a pattern, at the same time contain a principle antithetical to the new. This exerts itself as a force in the antinomy of the aesthetically new.
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Just as there is nothing that is simply ugly, per se, and just as anything ugly can become beautiful through its function, so there is nothing that is simply beautiful: It is trivial to note that the most beautiful sunset, the most beautiful girl , faithfully painted, can become repellent. And yet the element of immediacy in the beautiful, as in the ugly, is not to be suppressed: No lover capable of perceiving distinc- tions-and this capacity is the precondition oflove-will allow thebeauty ofthe beloved to perish. Beauty and ugliness are neither to be hypostatized nor rela- tivized; their relation is revealed in stages where one frequently becomes the op- posite of the other. Beauty is historical in itself as what wrests itself free. 5
Just how little empirical productive subjectivity and its unity converge with the constitutive aesthetic subject or, indeed, with objective aesthetic quality is at- tested by the beauty of many cities. Perugia and Assisi show the highest degree of form and coherence, probably without its ever having been intended or envi- sioned, although it is important not to underestimate the degree of planning even in a second nature that seems organic. This impression is favored by the gentle swell of a mountain, the reddish hue of stones, that is, by the extra-aesthetic that, as material of human labor , is itself one of the determinants of form . Here historical continuity acts as subject, truly an objective spirit that permits itself to be directed by the extra-aesthetic without requiring the individual architect to be conscious of it. This historical subject of beauty also largely directs the work of the individual artist. Although the beauty of these cities seems to be the result of strictly external factors, its source is internal. Immanent historicity becomes manifest, and with this manifestation aesthetic truth unfolds .
The identification of art with beauty is inadequate, and not just because it is too formal. In what art became, the category of the beautiful is only one element, one that has moreover undergone fundamental change: By absorbing the ugly, the concept of beauty has been transformed in itself, without, however, aesthetics being able to dispense with it. In the absorption of the ugly, beauty is strong enough to expand itself by its own opposite .
Hegel was the first to oppose aesthetic sentimentalism that seeks to discern the inherent content of the artwork not in the work itself but rather in its effect. This sentimentalism later became a concern with mood, a concept that has its own historical importance. For better or worse, nothing better defines Hegel's aes- thetics than its incompatibility with the element of an artwork's mood. He insists, as he does throughout his philosophy, on the sturdiness of the concept. This re- dounds to the objectivity of the artwork rather than to its effects or to its merely sensuous facade. The progress that Hegel thus achieved was, however, bought at the price of a certain art-alienness; the objectivity was bought at the cost of reification, an excess of materiality. This progress threatens to set aesthetics back
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to the pre-artistic, to the concrete comportment of the bourgeois, who wants to be able to find a fixed content [lnhalt] in a painting or a play that he can grasp as well as depend on. In Hegel the dialectic of art is limited to the genres and their history, and it is not sufficiently introduced into the theory ofthe individual work. That natural beauty rebuffs definition by spirit leads Hegel, in a short circuit, to disparage what in art is not spirit qua intention. The correlative of intention is reification. The correlative of absolute making is always the made as a fixed object. Hegel mistakes what is not thing-like in art, which is inseparable from the concept of art as being opposed to the empirical world of things. Polemically he attributes what is not thing-like in art to natural beauty as its encumbering indeter- minacy . But it is precisely in this element that natural beauty possesses something without which the artwork would revert back into a nonaesthetic facticity. Those who in experiencing nature are unable to distinguish it from objects to be acted upon- the distinction that constitutes the aesthetic - are incapable of artistic experience. Hegel's thesis, that art beauty originates in the negation of natural beauty , and thus in natural beauty , needs to be turned around: The act that initially gives rise to the consciousness of something beautiful must be carried out in the immediate experience if it is not already to postulate what it constitutes. The con- ception of natural beauty communicates with natural beauty : Both want to restore nature by renouncing its mere immediacy. In this context Benjamin'S concept of aura is important: "The concept of aura proposed above with reference to histori- cal objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones . We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance , however close it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon to let one's gaze follow a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow over one- that is to breathe the aura of those mountains, or of that branch. "6 Here what is called aura is known to artistic experience as the atmosphere of the artwork, that whereby the nexus ofthe artwork's elements points beyond this nexus and allows each individual element to point beyond itself. Precisely this constituent of art, for which the existential-ontological term "being attuned" provides only a dis- torted equivalent, is what in the artwork escapes its factual reality, what, fleeting and elusive-and this could hardly have been conceived in Hegel's time-can nevertheless be objectivated in the form of artistic technique. The reason why the auratic element does not deserve Hegel's ban is that a more insistent analysis can show that it is an objective determination of the artwork. That aspect of an artwork that points beyond itself is not just a part of its concept but can be rec- ognized in the specific configuration of every artwork. Even when artworks di- vest themselves of every atmospheric element-a development inaugurated by Baudelaire- it is conserved in them as a negated and shunned element. Precisely this auratic element has its model in nature, and the artwork is more deeply related to nature in this element than in any other factual similarity to nature. To perceive the aura in nature in the way Benjamin demands in his illustration of the concept
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requires recognizing in nature what it is that essentially makes an artwork an art- work. This, however, is that objective meaning that surpasses subjective inten- tion. An artwork opens its eyes under the gaze of the spectator when it emphati- cally articulates something objective, and this possibility of an objectivity that is not simply projected by the spectator is modeled on the expression of melancholy, or serenity, that can be found in nature when it is not seen as an object of action. The distancing that Benjamin stresses in the concept of aura is a rudimentary model of the distancing of natural objects-as potential means-from practical aims. The threshold between artistic and preartistic experience is precisely that between the domination of the mechanism of identification and the innervations of the objective language of objects. Just as the exemplary instance of the philis- tine is a reader who judges his relation to artworks on the basis of whether he can identify with the protagonists, so false identification with the immediately empiri- cal person is the index of complete obtuseness toward art. This false identification abolishes the distance at the same time that it isolates the consumption of aura as "something higher. " True, even an authentic relation to the artwork demands an act of identification: The object must be entered and participated in- as Benjamin says, it is necessary "to breathe its aura. " But the medium ofthis relationship is what Hegel called freedom toward the object: The spectator must not project what transpires in himself on to the artwork in order to find himself confirmed , uplifted, and satisfied in it, but must, on the contrary, relinquish himself to the artwork, assimilate himself to it, and fulfill the work in its own terms.