No More Learning

"6 He recognizes the element of un- differentiatedness from reality in the earliest art, as well as the undifferentiated- ness from reality of the sphere of semblance. 7 Hauser maintains something akin to the priority of naturalism on the basis of a theory of magic that asserts the "recip- rocal dependence of the similar. "8 For him, similarity is effectively replicability, and it exercises practical magic. Accordingly , Hauser divides magic sharply from religion, the former exclusively serving to procure means of sustenance. This sharp division is obviously hard to reconcile with the theorem of a primordial un- differentiatedness. On the other hand, it helps to establish replication as funda- mental, even though other scholars, such as Erik Holm, contest the hypothesis of the utilitarian-magical function of the replica. 9 Hauser, by contrast, contends that "the Paleolithic hunter and painter thought he was in possession of the thing itself in the picture, thought he had won power over the portrayed by the portrayal. "l0 With certain reservations, Resch also tends toward this position. 11 On the other hand, Katesa Schlosser finds that the most striking characteristic of Paleolithic portrayal is the deviation from the natural image; this deviation, however, is not attributed to any "archaic irrationalism" but rather , following Lorenz and Gehlen ,1 2 is interpreted as an expressive form of a biological ratio. Clearly, the thesis of magical utilitarianism and naturalism stands up in the face of the evidence no more than does Holm' s thesis of the religious origin of art. His explicit use of the concept of symbolization already postulates for the earliest period a dualism that Hauser first attributes to the Neolithic period. This dualism, according to Holm, serves a unitary organization of art just as within this dualism there appears the structure of an articulated and therefore necessarily hierarchical and institutional- ized society-one in which production already plays a role. He argues that cult and a unitary canon of forms were established during the same period, and that art was thus divided into a sacred and a profane sphere, that is, into idol sculpture and
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decorative ceramics . This construction of the animistic phase is paralleled by the construction of preanimism or, as science today prefers to call it, the "nonempirical world view," which is marked by the "essential unity of all life. " But the objective impenetrability of the oldest phenomena rebuffs this construction: A concept like the "essential unity of all life" already presupposes a division between form and material in the earliest phase or, at the least, oscillates between the idea of such a division and the idea of unity . The stumbling block here is the concept of unity . Its current use obscures everything, including the relation between the one and the many. In truth, unity should be conceived as it was reflected upon for the first time in Plato's Parmenides: as the unity of the many. The undifferentiated character of prehistory is not a unity of this sort but falls rather on the other side of the dichotomy in which unity has meaning only as a polarity. As a result, such inves- tigations as Fritz Krause's "Masks and Ancestral Figures" also encounters diffi- culties. According to Krause, in the oldest nonanimistic representations "form is bound up with the material rather than being separable from it. Any change of the essence is possible only through a change of material and form, that is, through the complete transformation of the body. This explains the metamorphosis of essences into one another. "13 Krause rightly argues against the conventional con- cept of the symbol that the transformation that takes place in mask ceremonies is not symbolic but rather "formative magic," a term borrowed from the develop-
mental psychologist Heinz Werner. 14 For the Indians, he claims, the mask is not simply the demon whose force is transferred to its bearer: Rather, the bearer him- self becomes the incarnation of the demon and is extinguished as a self. IS There are grounds for doubting this: Every member of a tribe, the masked included, clearly recognizes the difference between his own face and the mask, a difference that according to the neoromantic construction should be imperceptible. Face and mask are no more one and the same than the bearer of the mask can be taken for the incarnation of the demon. Contrary to Krause's claim, the element of dissimu- lation inheres in the phenomenon: Neither the often totally stylized form nor the fact that the bearer of the mask is only partially covered affects the interpretation of the "essential transformation of the bearer by the mask. "16 Something on the order of belief in real transformation is of course equally part of the phenomenon in just the same way that children playing do not distinguish sharply between themselves and the role played yet can at any moment be called back to reality. Even expression is hardly primordial; it too developed historically , perhaps from animism. When a clan member imitatively makes himself into a totemic animal or a fearful divinity, something other than the self-contained individual is expressed. Although expression is seemingly an aspect of subjectivity, in it-externaliza- tion-there dwells just as much that is not the self, that probably is the collective. In that the subject, awakening to expression, seeks collective sanction, expression is already evidence of a fissure. It is only with the stabilization of the subject in self-consciousness that expression becomes autonomous as the expression of the
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subject, while maintaining the gesture of making itself into something. Replica- tion could be interpreted as the reification of this comportment, and it is thus the enemy of precisely that impulse that is rudimentarily objectivated as expression. At the same time such reification by means of replication is also emancipatory: It helps to free expression by placing it at the disposal of the subject. Once people were perhaps as expressionless as animals, who neither laugh nor cry, though their shapes are objectively expressive, something the animals probably do not sense. This is recalled first by gorillalike masks, later by artworks. Expression, art's quasi-natural element, is as such already something other than pure nature. - The extremely heterogeneous interpretations are made possible by an objective ambiguity. Even the claim that heterogeneous elements are intermeshed in pre- historic artistic phenomena is anachronistic. It is more likely that division and unity arose under the pressure to be freed from the spell of the diffuse, accom- panied by the emergence of a more secure social organization . In his conspectus Herskovits coherently argues that developmental theories that deduce art from a primarily symbolical or realistic "principle of validity" are untenable given the contradictory diversity of prehistoric and primitive art. The sharp contrast drawn between primitive conventionalism-in the sense of stylization-and Paleolithic realism isolates a single aspect. It is not possible to discern the general preponder- ance of one principle over another in earliest times any more than this could be done today among surviving primitive peoples. Paleolithic sculpture is said to be for the most part highly stylized, contrary to the contemporary "realistic" por- trayals of the cave paintings; this realism, however, as Herskovits points out, is marked by heterogeneous elements, foreshortenings, for example, that cannot be interpreted as being either perspectival or symbolic . The art of primitive people today is just as complex; realistic elements have in no way suppressed fully styl- ized forms, least of all in sculpture. Immersion in art's origins tantalizes aesthetic theory with various apparently typical procedures, but just as quickly they escape the firm grip that modem interpretational consciousness imagines it possesses. Art anterior to the Paleolithic period is not known. But it is doubtless that art did not begin with works, whether they were primarily magical or already aesthetic. The cave drawings are stages of a process and in no way an early one. The first images must have been preceded by a mimetic comportment-the assimilation of the self to its other-that does not fully coincide with the superstition of direct magical influence; if in fact no differentiation between magic and mimesis had been prepared over a long period of time , the striking traces of autonomous elabo- ration in the cave paintings would be inexplicable. But once aesthetic comport- ment, prior to all objectivation, set itself off from magical practices, however rudimentarily, this distinction has since been carried along as a residue; it is as if the now functionless mimesis, which reaches back into the biological dimension, was vestigially maintained, foreshadowing the maxim that the superstructure is transformed more slowly than the infrastructure. In the traces of what has been
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overtaken by the general course of things, all art bears the suspicious burden of what did not make the grade, the regressive. But aesthetic comportment is not altogether rudimentary . An irrevocable necessity of art and preserved by it, aes- thetic comportment contains what has been belligerently excised from civilization and repressed, as well as the human suffering under the loss, a suffering already expressed in the earliest forms of mimesis. This element should not be dismissed as irrational. Art is in its most ancient relics too deeply permeated with rationality. The obstinacy of aesthetic comportment, which was later ideologically glorified as the eternal natural power of the play drive, testifies rather that to this day no rationality has been fully rational, none has unrestrictedly benefited humanity, its potential, or even a "humanized nature. " What marks aesthetic comportment as irrational according to the criteria of dominant rationality is that art denounces the particular essence of a ratio that pursues means rather than ends. Art reminds us of the latter and of an objectivity freed from the categorial structure. This is the source of art's rationality, its character as knowledge. Aesthetic comportment is the capacity to perceive more in things than they are; it is the gaze under which the given is transformed into an image. Whereas this comportment can be effortlessly impugned as inadequate by the status quo, the latter can indeed only be experi- enced through this comportment. A final intimation of the rationality in mimesis is imparted by Plato's doctrine of enthusiasm as the precondition of philosophy and emphatic knowledge , which he not only demanded on a theoretical level but demonstrated at the decisive point in the Phaedrus. This Platonic doctrine has degenerated into a cultural commodity, yet without forfeiting its truth content. Aesthetic comportment is the unimpaired corrective of reified consciousness that has in the meantime burgeoned as totality. That which in aesthetic comportment propels itself toward the light and seeks to escape the spell manifests itself e con- trario in those who do without it, the aesthetically insensible. To study them would be of inestimable value for the analysis of aesthetic comportment. Even in terms of the standards of the dominant rationality they are in no way the most pro- gressive or developed; nor are they simply those who lack a particular expendable quality. On the contrary, their entire constitution is deformed to a pathological de- gree: They concretize. Those whose thought is no more than projection are fools, which artists must not be on any account; those , however, who do not project at all fail to grasp reality and instead repeat and falsify it by crushing out what glim- mered however distantly to preanimistic consciousness: the communication of all dispersed particulars with each other. This consciousness is no more true than one that confused fantasy and reality. Comprehension occurs only when the concept transcends what it wants to grasp. Art puts this to the test; thinking that proscribes such comprehension becomes outright stupidity and misses the object because it subjugates it. Art legitimates itself within the confines of the spell in that ratio- nality becomes powerless when aesthetic comportment is repressed or, under the pressure of socialization, no longer even constituted. As was already pointed out
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in the Dialectic ofEnlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeble- mindedness of the artistically insensible, the sucessfully castrated. The narrow- minded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is-as trivialities sometimes are-the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this divi- sion in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and tum a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable. Ratio without mimesis is self- negating. Ends, the raison d'etre of raison, are qualitative, and mimetic power is effectively the power of qualitative distinction . The self-negation of reason clearly has its historical necessity: The world, which is objectively losing its openness, no longer has need of a spirit that is defined by its openness; indeed, it can scarcely put up with the traces of that spirit. With regard to its subjective side, the contem- porary loss of experience may largely coincide with the bitter repression of mime- sis that takes the place of its metamorphosis. What in various sectors of German ideology is still called an artistic sensibility is just this repression of mimesis raised to a principle, as which it is transformed into artistic insensibility. Aesthetic comportment, however, is neither immediately mimesis nor its repression but rather the process that mimesis sets in motion and in which, modified, mimesis is preserved. This process transpires equally in the relation of the individual to art as in the historical macrocosm; it congeals in the immanent movement of each and every artwork, in its tensions and in their possible resolution. Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder's own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified con- sciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge .
Draft Introduction
The concept of philosophical aesthetics has an antiquated quality , as does the con- cept of a system or that of morals. This feeling is in no way restricted to artistic praxis and the public indifference to aesthetic theory. Even in academic circles, essays relevant to aesthetics have for decades now noticeably diminished. This point is made in a recent dictionary of philosophy: "There is scarcely another philosophical discipline that rests on such flimsy presuppositions as does aesthet- ics. Like a weather vane it is 'blown about by every philosophical, cultural, and scientific gust; at one moment it is metaphysical and in the next empirical; now normative, then descriptive; now defined by artists, then by connoisseurs; one day art is supposedly the center of aesthetics and natural beauty merely preliminary, the next day art beauty is merely second-hand natural beauty. ' Moritz Geiger's description of the dilemma of aesthetics has been true since the middle of the nineteenth century. There is a double reason for this pluralism of aesthetic theo- ries , which are often even left unfinished: It resides on the one hand in the funda- mental difficulty, indeed impossibility, of gaining general access to art by means of a system of philosophical categories, and on the other, in the fact that aesthetic statements have traditionally presupposed theories of knowledge. The problem- atic of theories of knowledge returns directly in aesthetics, because how aesthetics interprets its objects depends on the concept of the object held by the theory of knowledge. This traditional dependency, however, is defined by the subject matter itself and is already contained in the terminology. "l Although this well describes the situation, it does not sufficiently explain it; the other philosophical disciplines, including the theory ofknowledge and logic, are no less controversial
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and yet interest in them has not flagged to a similar extent. The unusual situation of aesthetics is discouraging. Croce introduced radical nominalism into aesthetic theory. Almost simultaneously, important thinking left behind the so-called fun- damental problems of aesthetics and became immersed in specific formal and material problems, as is the case with Lukacs's Theory ofthe Novel, Benjamin's critique of Elective Affinities, which developed into an emphatic treatise, and his Origin of German Tragic Drama. 2 If the last-named work cunningly defends Croce's nominalism, it at the same time takes into account a situation where con- sciousness no longer hopes that fundamental principles will lead to insight into the traditionally great questions of aesthetics, especially those of a metaphysical dimension, but instead seeks insight in spheres that formerly held the status of exempla. Philosophical aesthetics found itself confronted with the fatal alterna- tive between dumb and trivial universality on the one hand and, on the other, arbi- trary judgments usually derived from conventional opinions. Hegel's program, that thought should not proceed from above but rather relinquish itself to the phe- nomena, was first brought within reach in aesthetics by a nominalism in opposi- tion to which Hegel's own aesthetics, given its classicist components, preserved far more l/. bstract invariants than was coherent with dialectical method. This at the same time threw into question the possibility of aesthetic theory as a traditional theory. For the idea of the concrete, on which each and every artwork, indeed any experience ofbeauty, is fixed, prohibits- similarly as in the study of art-distanc- ing itself from determinate phenomena in the way that philosophical consensus had so long and falsely supposed possible in the spheres of the theory of knowl- edge or ethics. A general theory of the aesthetically concrete would necessarily let slip what interested it in the object in the first place. The reason for the obsoles- cence of aesthetics is that it scarcely ever confronted itself with its object. By its very form, aesthetics seems sworn to a universality that culminates in inadequacy to the artworks and, complementarily, in transitory eternal values. The academic mistrust of aesthetics is founded in the academicism immanent to it. The motive for the lack of interest in aesthetic questions is primarily the institutionalized scientific, scholarly anxiety vis-a-vis what is uncertain and contested, not fear of provincialism and of how backward the formulation of issues is with respect to the nature of those issues. The synoptical, contemplative perspective that science expects of aesthetics has meanwhile become incompatible with progressive art, which - as in Kafka- has lost patience with any contemplative attitude} Aesthetics today therefore begins by diverging from what it treats, having become suspicious of the passive, possibly even culinary, pleasures of spectators. As its standard, contemplative aesthetics presupposes that taste by which the observer disposes over the works from a distance. Taste, on account of its subjectivistic prejudice, itself stands in need of theoretical reflection not only as to why it fails in the face of the most recent modernism but why it may long have been inadequate to ad- vanced art. This critique was anticipated by Hegel's demand that the work itself
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take the place of the judgment of taste;4 yet in his own aesthetics the object did not extricate itself from the perspective - still matted together with taste -of the detached spectator. It was the system that enabled his thought to be fruitful even where it remained at all too great a distance from its objects . Hegel and Kant were the last who, to put it bluntly, were able to write major aesthetics without under- standing anything about art. That was possible so long as art itself was oriented to encompassing norms that were not questioned in individual works and were liqui- fied only in the work ' s immanent problematic . True , there has probably scarcely ever been a work that was important in any regard that did not, by virtue of its own form, mediate these norms and thus virtually transform them. Yet these norms were not simply liquidated; something of them towered over and above the indi- vidual works. The great philosophical aesthetics stood in concordance with art to the extent that they conceptualized what was evidently universal in it; this was in accordance with a stage in which philosophy and other forms of spirit, such as art, had not yet been tom apart. Because the same spirit ruled in philosophy and art, philosophy was able to treat art in a substantial fashion without surrendering itself to the works. Certainly artworks regularly succumbed to the effort-motivated by the nonidentity of art with its universal determinations - to conceive them in their specificity: This resulted in speculative idealism's most painfully mistaken judgments. Kant, who was not pledged to prove that a posteriori was the apriori, was precisely for this reason less fallible. Imprisoned by eighteenth-century art,5 which he would not have hesitated to call precritical-that is, preceding the full emancipation of the subject-he did not compromise himself to the same extent as Hegel by art-alien assertions. He even accorded more space to later radical modem possibilities than did Hegel,6 who confronted art so much more coura- geously. After them came the sensitive connoisseurs, who occupied the mediocre middle ground between the thing-itself as postulated by Hegel and the concept. They combined a culinary relation to art with an incapacity for philosophical con- struction. Georg Simmel was typical of such sensitivity, despite his decisive predilection for the aesthetically individual . The right medium for understanding art is either the unwavering asceticism of conceptualization, doggedly refusing to allow itself to be irritated by facts, or the unconscious consciousness in the midst of the work itself; art is never understood by the appreciative, snugly empathetic spectator; the capriciousness of such an attitude is from the beginning indifferent to what is essential to works, their binding force. Aesthetics was productive only so long as it undiminishedly respected the distance from the empirical and with windowless thoughts penetrated into the content of its other; or when, with a closeness bordering on embodiment, it judged the work from within, as some- times occurs in the scattered remarks of individual artists, which are important not as the expression of a personality that is hardly authoritative with regard to the work, but because often, without recurring to the subject, they document some- thing of the experiential force of the work. These reports are often constrained by
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the naIvete that society insists on finding in art. Artists either stubbornly resist aes- thetics with artisanal rancor, or the antidilettantes devise dilettantic theories that make do. If their comments are to convey anything to aesthetics, they require in- terpretation. Artisanal instruction that wants polemically to usurp the position of aesthetics ultimately develops into positivism, even when it includes sympathy with metaphysics. Advice on how best to compose a rondo is useless as soon as there are reasons-of which artisanal instruction is ignorant-why rondos can no longer be written. Its general rules are in need of philosophical development if they are to be more than a decoction of conventions . When they balk at this transi- tion, they almost inevitably seek succor in a murky Weltanschauung. After the demise of idealistic systems, the difficulty of an aesthetics that would be more than a desperately reanimated branch of philosophy is that of bringing the artist's closeness to the phenomena into conjunction with a conceptual capacity free of any subordinating concept, free of all decreed judgments; committed to the me- dium of concepts , such an aesthetics would go beyond a mere phenomenology of artworks. On the other hand, the effort, under the pressure of the nominalistic sit- uation, to make a transition to what has been called an empirical aesthetics, is in vain. If, for example, in compliance with the prescript of such scientization, one wanted to reach general aesthetic norms by abstracting from empirical descrip- tions and classifying them, the results would be incomparably meager when com- pared with the substantive and incisive categories of the speculative systems . Ap- plied to current artistic practice, such distillates would be no more appropriate than artistic ideals ever were. All aesthetic questions terminate in those of the truth content of artworks: Is the spirit that a work objectively bears in its specific form true? For empiricism this is, as superstition, anathema. For it, artworks are bundles of indeterminate stimuli. What they are in themselves is beyond judg- ment; any claim to know is a projection . Only subjective reactions to artworks can be observed, measured, and generalized. As a result, the actual object of aesthetics escapes study. It is replaced by what is at bottom a preaesthetic sphere that has proved to be socially that of the culture industry. Hegel's achievement is not criti- cized in the name of a purportedly greater scientific acumen but is instead forgot- ten in favor of vulgar adaptation. That empiricism recoils from art-of which in general it has hardly ever taken notice (with the exception of the unique and truly free John Dewey) other than insofar as it attributes all knowledge that does not agree with its rules of the game to be poetry - can be explained by the fact that art constitutively dismisses these rules of the game , because art is an entity that is not identical with its empiria. What is essential to art is that which in it is not the case,? that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure of all things. The com- pulsion to aesthetics is the need to think this empirical incommensurability.
The objective difficulties in this are compounded SUbjectively by broad resistance . For most people, aesthetics is superfluous. It disturbs the weekend pleasures to which art has been consigned as the complement? to bourgeois routine. In spite of
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far-reaching alienness to art, this subjective resistance helps give expression to something closely allied to art. For art allies itself with repressed and dominated nature in the progressively rationalized and integrated society? Yet industry makes even this resistance an institution and changes it into coin. It cultivates art as a natural reserve for irrationalism, from which thought is to be excluded. It thereby allies itself with the platitude-a bowdlerized theorem of aesthetics-that art must be a direct object of pleasure , whereas instead art at every point participates in concepts. This fundamentally confuses the ever problematic primacy of intu- ition in art with the enjoinder that art not be thought about because successful artists themselves supposedly never did so. The result of this mentality is a bloated concept of naIvete . In the domain of pure feeling - the phrase appears in the title of the aesthetics of a preeminent neo-Kantian8 - a taboo is placed on any- thing akin to logicality , in spite of the elements of stringency in the artwork, whose relation to extra-aesthetic logic and causality could be elucidated only by philo- sophical aesthetics. 9 Feeling thus becomes its own opposite: It is reified. Art is actually the world once over, as like it as it is unlike it. In the managed world of the culture industry, aesthetic naIvete has changed its function. What once was praised of artworks, when they were poised on the pedestal of their classicality, as their abiding quality - that of noble simplicity - has become an exploitable means for attracting customers. The consumers, whose naIvete is confirmed and drilled into them, are to be dissuaded from entertaining stupid ideas about what has been packed into the pills they are obliged to swallow down. The simplicity of times past is translated into the stupidity of the culture consumer who, gratefully and with a metaphysically clear conscience, buys up the industry's trash, which is in any case inescapable. As soon as naiVete is taken up as a point of view, it no longer exists. A genuine relation between art and consciousness ' s experience of it would consist in education , which schools opposition to art as a consumer product as much as it allows the recipient a substantial idea of what an artwork is. Art today, even among those who produce it, is largely cut off from such education. The price art pays for this is the permanent temptation of the subartistic , even in the range of the most refined techniques. The naIvete of artists has degenerated into naIve pliancy vis-a-vis the culture industry. NaIvete was never the natural essence of the artist but rather the self-evidence with which he conducted himself in an imposed social situation, that is, it was an aspect of conformism. The un- qualified acceptance of social forms was the real criterion of artistic naIvete. The justification of naIvete is bound up with the extent to which the subject assents to or resists these forms, the extent to which these forms can still lay claim to self-evidence. Ever since the surface of life, the immediacy it makes available to people, has become ideology, naIvete has reversed into its own opposite; it has be- come the reflex of reified consciousness to a reified world . Artistic production that refuses to relinquish the impulse against the ossification of life and is thus truly naIve, becomes what according to the game rules of conventional society is the
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opposite of naIvete; admittedly , it has stored up in it as much naIvete as the com- portment of art has of noncompliance with the reality principle , something of the childish and - according to social norms - the infantile. It is the opposite of estab- lished na'ivete, and it is condemned. Hegel, and even more perspicaciously, Karl Gustav Jochmann,lO knew this. Yet they were compelled to understand it in the context of their classicism and so attributed the end of art to it. Art's na'ive and re- flexive elements have, in truth, always been much more internal to each other than the longing that arose during the rise of industrial capitalism wanted to recognize . The history of art since Hegel has shown up what was mistaken in his premature eschatology of art. Its mistake was that it perpetuated the conventional ideal of na'ivete. Even Mozart, who played the role of the divinely gifted, capering prodigy in the bourgeois household, was-as every page of his correspondence with his father documents-incomparably more reflexive than the popular profile of him lets on; reflexive, however, not in the sense of a freely hovering abstract intel- ligence but in the compositional material itself. Just how much the work of another household divinity of pure intuition-Raphael-has reflection as its ob- jective condition is evident in the geometrical organization of his paintings. Art without reflection is the retrospective fantasy of a reflexive age. Theoretical con- siderations and scientific findings have at all times been amalgamated with art, often as its bellwether, and the most important artists were not those who hesi- tated. Well-known instances of this are Piero della Francesca's discovery of aerial perspective and the aesthetic speculations of the Florentine Camerata, in which opera originated.
The latter is paradigmatic of a form that, once it had become the darling of the public, was cloaked after the fact with the aura of na'ivete , whereas it originated in theory , literally in an invention . ! ! Similarly , it was only the introduc- tion of equal temperament in the seventeenth century that permitted modulation through the circle of fifths and, with it, Bach, who gratefully acknowledged this in the title of his great keyboard composition . Even in the nineteenth century , im- pressionist technique in painting was based on the rightly or wrongly interpreted scientific analysis of retinal processes. Of course the theoretical and reflexive ele- ments in art seldom went untransformed. At times, art misunderstood the sciences to which it appealed, as is perhaps the case most recently with electronic music . Yet the productive impulse was little harmed by the rationality that was brought to bear on it. The physiological theorems of the impressionists were probably foils for the in part fascinated, in part socially critical experiences of the metropolis and the dynamic of their paintings. By means of the discovery of a dynamic immanent to the reified world, they wanted to resist reification, which was most palpable in metropolitan life. In the nineteenth century, natural scientific explanations func- tioned as the self-unconscious agent of art. The basis of this affinity between art
and science was that the ratio to which the most progressive art of the epoch re- acted was none other than the ratio of the natural sciences . Whereas in the history of art, scientific theories tend to wither away, without them artistic practices would
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no more have developed than, inversely, these theorems can adequately explain such practices. This has consequences for reception: It is inadequate if it is less re- flexive than the object it receives. Not knowing what one sees or hears bestows no privileged direct relation to works but instead makes their perception impossible. Consciousness is not a layer in a hierarchy built over perception; rather, all ele- ments of aesthetic experience are reciprocal. No artwork consists in the super- imposition of layers; that is exclusively the result of the calcululation of the cul- ture industry, that is, a result ofreified consciousness. It can, for instance, be noted in extended, complex music that there is a constantly varying threshold between what is primarily perceived and what is determined by the reflexive perception of consciousness. The understanding of the meaning of a fleeting musical passage often depends on the intellective comprehension of its function in a whole that is not present; the purportedly immediate experience itself depends on what goes beyond pure immediacy. The ideal perception of artworks would be that in which what is mediated becomes immediate; nai:vete is the goal, not the origin.
Yet the flagging interest in aesthetics is not only predicated on aesthetics as a dis- cipline but equally, and indeed more so, on its object. Insofar as aesthetics con- cerns itself primarily with the how rather than with the fact of art, it seems silently to imply the possibility of art. This position has become uncertain. Aesthetics can no longer take the fact of art for granted in the way that Kant's theory of knowl- edge presupposed the mathematical natural sciences. Although traditional theory was in no way encumbered by such concerns, aesthetic theory cannot escape the reality that art that holds fast to its concept and refuses consumption becomes anti- art, and that art' s distress with itself following the real catastrophes and faced with the coming ones stands in moral disproportion to its continued existence. At its Hegelian zenith, philosophical aesthetics prognosticated the end of art. Although aesthetics later forgot this, art senses it all the more deeply. Even if art remained what it once was and can no longer remain, it would become something wholly dif- ferent in the society that is emerging and by virtue of its changed function in that society . Artistic consciousness rightly mistrusts reflection that by its very topic and by the style expected of it disports itself as if a firm foundation existed, whereas it is retrospectively dubious that any such solid foundation ever existed; it was and was not already that ideology into which the contemporary cultural bustle, along with its art department, is clearly being transformed. The question of the possibility of art is so relevant that it has taken a form that mocks its putatively more radical formulation of whether and how art is even possible at all . The question has instead become that of the concrete possibility of art today. The uneasiness with art is not only that of a stagnating social consciousness vis-a-vis the modem. At every point this uneasiness extends to what is essential to art, to its most advanced works. Art, for its part, seeks refuge in its own negation, hoping to survive through its death. Thus contemporary theater turns against the status of being a plaything, a peep- show with glitter; against imitating the world even with sets strung with barbed
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wire. The pure mimetic impulse-the happiness of producing the world once over-which animates art and has stood in age-old tension with its antimytho- logical, enlightening component, has become unbearable under the system of total functional rationality . Art and happiness both arouse the suspicion of infantilism, although the anxiety that such infantilism inspires is itself regression, the miscon- strual of the raison d'etre of all rationality; for the movement of the principle of self-preservation, to the extent that it is not fetishized, leads by its own force to the desideratum of happiness; nothing stronger speaks for art. In the contemporary novel the impulses against the fiction of the constant presence of the narrator par- ticipate in art's self-disgust. This has in large measure defined the history ofnarra- tion since Proust, though the genre has been unable to shake off completely the rubric "fiction," which stands at the head of the best-seller lists, however much aesthetic semblance has become social anathema. Music struggles to free itself of the element by which Benjamin, somewhat overgenerously, defined all art prior to the age of its technical reproducibility: aura, the sorcery that emanates from music, even if it were antimusic, whenever it commences to sound. Yet art does not labor on traits of this sort as it does on correctable residues of its past, for these traits seem inextricably grown together with art's own concept. The more, how- ever, art itself- in order not to barter away semblance for lies - is driven to reflect on its own presuppositions and when possible to absorb into its own form such reflection as if it were a counterpoison, the more skeptical it becomes toward the presumption of having self-consciousness imposed on it externally. Aesthetics is compelled to drag its concepts helplessly behind a situation of art in which art, in- different to what becomes of it, seeks to undermine those concepts without which it can hardly be conceived. No theory, aesthetic theory included, can dispense with the element of universality. This tempts aesthetics to take the side of invari- ants of precisely the sort that emphatic modem art must attack. The mania of cul- tural studies for reducing the new to the ever-same, as for example the claim that surrealism is a form of mannerism, the lack of any sense for the historical situa- tion of artistic phenomena as the index of their truth , corresponds to the tendency of philosophical aesthetics toward those abstract rules in which nothing is invari- ant other than that they are ever and again given the lie by spirit as it takes shape . What sets itself up as an eternal aesthetic norm is something that developed and is transient; the claim to imperishability has become obsolete. Even a university- certified schoolmaster would hesitate to apply to prose such as Kafka' s Metamor- phosis or The Penal Colony, in which the secure aesthetic distance to the object is shockingly undermined, a sanctioned criterion such as that of disinterested satis- faction; anyone who has experienced the greatness of Kafka's writing must sense how awkwardly inapplicable to it any talk of art is. The situation is no different
in the case of a priori genres such as the tragic or comic in contemporary drama, however much contemporary works may be marbled by them in the way that the enormous apartment building in Kafka's parabie is marbled with medieval ruins.
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Although Beckett ' s plays can no longer be taken for tragic or comic, they are not therefore, as would suit academic aesthetics, hybrids on the order of tragicomedy. On the contrary, Beckett's plays pass historical judgment over these categories as such, faithful to the historical innervation that there is no more laughing over the classics of comic theater except in a state of renewed barbarism. In accord with the tendency of modern art to make its own categories thematic through self- reflection, plays like Godot and Endgame - in the scene in which the protagonists decide to laugh-are more the tragic presentation of comedy's fate than they are comic; in the actors' forced laughter, the spectator's mirth vanishes. Early in the century already, Wedekind named a piece a clef, whose target was the publisher of Simpiicissimus,12 a "satire on satire. " Academic philosophers adopt a false superi- ority when they survey the history of art to procure for themselves the satisfaction of nil admirari and, living in the domestic company of eternal values, derive from the ever-sameness of things the profit of separating out what is truly different and endangers the status quo, in order to dismiss it as a rehashing of the classics. This attitude is in league with a sociopsychologically and institutionally reactionary at- titude . It is only in the process of critical self-consciousness that aesthetics is able once again to reach art, if it was ever capable of this in the first place.
Although art, frightened by the traces left by aesthetics, mistrusts it as something that had fallen far behind its own development, it must at the same time secretly fear that an aesthetics that was no longer anachronistic would sever the threads of life, which are already stretched to the limit. Such an aesthetics, it is feared, would lay claim to deciding if and how art should survive after the fall of metaphysics, to which art owes its existence and content. The metaphysics of art has become the court of judgment that rules over art's continued existence. The absence of theological meaning, however modified, culminates in art as the crisis of its own meaning. The more ruthlessly artworks draw the consequences from the contem- porary condition of consciousness, the more closely they themselves approximate meaninglessness. They thereby achieve a historically requisite truth, which, if art disowned it, would condemn art to doling out powerless consolation and to com- plicity with the status quo. At the same time, however, meaningless art has begun to forfeit its right to exist; in any case, there is no longer any art that has remained inviolable. To the question as to why it exists, art has no other response than what Goethe called the dregs of absurdity, which all art contains. This residue rises to the surface and denounces art. Just as it is rooted at least in part in fetishes, art, through its relentless progress, relapses back into fetishism and becomes a blind end in itself, revealing itself as untruth , a sort of collective delusion , as soon as its objective truth content, its meaning, begins to waver. If psychoanalysis followed its own principle to its culmination, it would-like all positivism-necessarily demand the end of art, just as it tends to analyze it away in the treatment of pa- tients. If art is sanctioned exclusively as sublimation, as a means for the mainte- nance of psychic economy, its truth content is contravened and art lingers on only
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as a pious deception. The truth of all artworks would, on the other hand, not exist without the fetishism that now verges on becoming art's untruth. The quality of artworks depends essentially on the degree of their fetishism, on the veneration that the process of production pays to what lays claim to being self-produced, to the seriousness that forgets the pleasure taken in it. Only through fetishism, the blinding of the artwork vis-a-vis the reality of which it is part, does the work tran- scend the spell of the reality principle as something spiritual .
From these perspectives, aesthetics proves to be not so much obsolete as neces- sary . Art does not stand in need of an aesthetics that will prescribe norms where it finds itself in difficulty, but rather of an aesthetics that will provide the capacity for reflection, which art on its own is hardly able to achieve. Words such as mate- rial , form, and formation, which flow all too easily from the pens of contemporary artists, ring trite; to cure contemporary language of this is one of the art-practical functions of aesthetics. Above all, however, aesthetics is demanded by the de- velopment of artworks. If they are not timelessly self-same, but rather become what they are because their own meaning is a process of becoming, they summon forth forms of spirit-commentary and critique, for example-through which this process is. fulfilled. These forms remain weak, however, so long as they do not reach the truth content of the works. They only become capable of this by being honed to aesthetics . The truth content of an artwork requires philosophy . It is only in this truth content that philosophy converges with art or extinguishes itself in it. The way toward this is defined by the reflected immanence of works, not by the external application of philosophems. The truth content of works must be rigor- ously distinguished from all philosophy that is pumped into them by authors or theorists; the difference between the two, it must be suspected, has for close to two hundred years been unbridgeable. 13 On the other hand, aesthetics brusquely repudiates the claim of philology - however useful it may be in other contexts - that it assures the truth content of artworks . In the age of the irreconcilability of traditional aesthetics and contemporary art, the philosophical theory of art has no choice but, varying a maxim of Nietzsche's, by determinate negation to think the categories that are in decline as categories of transition. The elucidated and con- crete dissolution of conventional aesthetic categories is the only remaining form that aesthetics can take ; it at the same time sets free the transformed truth of these categories . If artists are compelled to permanent reflection , that reflection needs to be wrested free of its accidentalness so that it does not degenerate into arbitrary, amateurish auxiliary hypotheses, homemade rationalizations, or into arbitrary declarations of intentions framed by a Weltanschauung, without any justification from what is actually achieved. No one should any longer entrust himself naIvely to the technological parti pris of contemporary art; otherwise this art would con- sign itselftotally to the substitution ofthe goal-that is, the work-by the means, the procedures by which it was produced. The propensity toward this harmonizes all too fundamentally with the general direction of society toward the apotheosis
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of means, production for the sake of production, total employment and all that is part of it, because the goals themselves - the rational organization of humanity - are blocked. Whereas in philosophy, aesthetics fell out of fashion, the most ad- vanced artists have sensed the need for it all the more strongly. It is clear that even Boulez is far from envisioning a normative aesthetics of the traditional sort but sees, rather , the necessity of a historicophilosophical theory of art. What he means by "orientation estbetique" could best be translated as the critical self awareness of the artist. l4 If, as Hegel thought, the hour of naIve art is past, art must embody reflection and take it to the point where it no longer remains external and foreign to it; this would be the role of aesthetics today. Boulez's central point is that he had been puzzled by the current opinion of avant-garde artists , who believe that annotated instructions for the employment of technical procedures already amount to an artwork; on the contrary, the only criterion-according to Boulez-is what the artist does, not how and with whatever advanced means he intended to make it. Boulez, too, realizes, with regard to the contemporary artistic process, that in- sight into the historical situation-through which the antithetical relation to tradi- tion is mediated-converges with binding implications for production. The dog- matic separation of craft and aesthetics, which Schoenberg decreed out of a then justified critique of a praxis-alien aesthetics, a separation that was self-evident to the artists of his generation as well as to those of the Bauhaus , is disavowed by Boulez in the name of craft and metier. Even Schoenberg'S Theory ofHarmony was only able to maintain this separation because he limited himself in this book to means that had long not been his own; had he discussed those he would have been irresistibly compelled to undertake aesthetic reflection, given that he lacked didactically communicable rules for the new craft. Such reflection responds to the fatal aging of the modern as a result of the tensionlessness of the totally technical artwork. This tensionlessness can hardly be dealt with in an exclusively inner-
technical fashion, even though in technical criticism something of the supratech- nical constantly registers . That significant contemporary art is a matter of indiffer- ence in a society that tolerates it, marks art itself as something indifferent that in spite of all its effort might equally well be something else or nothing at all. What currently passes for technical criteria in no way facilitates judgment on the level of artistic achievement and most often relegates it to the obsolete category of taste. As Boulez points out, many works, of which the question as to their value no longer makes sense, are beholden solely to their abstract opposition to the cul- ture industry , not to their content or the capacity to realize it. The critical decision they elude could only be the responsibility of an aesthetics that proves itself equal to the most advanced developments to the same extent that it matches and super- sedes the latter with its power of reflection . This aesthetics is obliged to renounce the concept of taste , in which the claim of art to truth is in danger of coming to a miserable end. The guilt lies with previous aesthetics that, by virtue of taking its starting point in the subjective judgment of taste, peremptorily deprived art of its
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claim to truth. Hegel, who took this claim seriously and emphasized art's opposi- tion to pleasurable or useful play, was for this reason the enemy of taste, without however being able to break through its contingency in the concrete analyses of his Aesthetics. It is to Kant's credit that he recognized the aporia of aesthetic ob- jectivity and the judgment of taste . He did indeed carry out an aesthetic analysis of the judgment of taste in terms of its elements, but he conceived them at the same time as latent, aconceptually objective elements. In so doing he pointed up the nominalistic threat to every emphatic theory-a threat that cannot be dismissed by any act of will-and at the same time perceived the elements in which theory goes beyond itself. By virtue of the intellective movement of his object, a move- ment that effectively closed its eyes to the object, Kant brought into thought the deepest impulses of an art that only developed in the one hundred fifty years after his death: an art that probed after its objectivity openly, without protection of any kind. What needs to be carir ed through is what in the theories of Kant and Hegel awaits redemption through second reflection. Terminating the tradition of philo- sophical aesthetics must amount to giving it its due .
The dilemma of aesthetics appears immanently in the fact that it can be consti- tuted neither from above nor from below, neither from concepts nor from acon- ceptual experience. The only possibility for aesthetics beyond this miserable al- ternative is the philosophical insight that fact and concept are not polar opposites but mediated reciprocally in one another. This must be appropriated by aesthetics, for art again stands in need of aesthetics now that criticism has shown itself to be so disoriented by false and arbitrary judgments that it fails vis-a-vis art. Yet if aes- thetics is to amount neither to art-alien prescriptions nor to the inconsequential classification of what it happens upon, then it is only conceivable as dialectical aesthetics; dialectical method is not unsuitably defined as the refusal to rest con- tent with the diremption of the deductive and inductive that dominates rigid, indurative thought, and this is expressly rejected by the earliest formulations of dialectics in German idealism, those of Fichte. 15 Aesthetics must no more lag behind art than behind philosophy. Although it abounds in the most important insights, Hegel's aesthetics no more satisfied the concept of dialectics in his main works than did other material parts of the system . This is not easy to correct. Aes- thetic dialectics is not to presuppose a metaphysics of spirit, which in Hegel as in Fichte was to guarantee that the individual, with which induction begins, and the universal, which provides the basis for deduction, are one. What was volatilized in emphatic philosophy cannot be revived by aesthetics, itself a philosophical discipline. Kant's theory is more apposite to the contemporary situation, for his aesthetics attempts to bind together consciousness of what is necessary with con- sciousness that what is necessary is itself blocked from consciousness. It follows its course, in effect, blindly. His aesthetics feels its way in the dark and yet is led by a compulsion toward what it seeks. This is the puzzle in which all aesthetic efforts today are bound up: Aesthetics, not entirely helpless, seeks to untangle the
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knot. For art is, or at any rate was until the most recent developments, under the impress of its semblance, what metaphysics, which is without semblance , always wanted to be. When Schelling declared art the organon of philosophy he involun- tarily admitted what great idealistic speculation either passed over in silence or denied in the interest of its self-preservation . Correspondingly, Schelling did not, as is well known, carry through the thesis of identity as relentlessly as did Hegel. The aesthetic contours of Hege l ' s philosophy, that of a gigantic "as if," were then recognized by Kierkegaard and could be demonstrated in detail in his Logic)6 Art is that-for the most part material-existent that is determined as spirit in pre- cisely the fashion that idealism simply asserted extra-aesthetic reality to be. Expe- rience is obscured by the naive cliche that depicts the artist as an idealist or, de- pending on taste, as a fool in the service of the purportedly absolute reason of his work . Artworks are , in terms of their own constitution, objective as well as - and not only because they have their genesis in spiritual processes-spiritual; other- wise they would be in principle indistinguishable from eating and drinking. The contemporary debates originating in Soviet aesthetics, which insist that the claim to the primacy of the law of form as the primacy of the spiritual is an idealistic view of social reality, are groundless. Only as spirit is art the opposite of empirical reality, which becomes the determinate negation of the existing world order. Art is to be dialectically construed insofar as spirit inheres in it, without art's possess- ing it or giving surety of it as something absolute. However much they seem to be entities, artworks are crystallizations of the process between spirit and its other. This implies the difference from Hegel's aesthetics. There the objectivity of the artwork is the truth of spirit: It is spirit that has gone over into its own otherness and become identical with itself. For Hegel, spirit is one with totality, also with the totality in art. After the collapse of the general thesis of Idealism, however, spirit is strictly one aspect of artworks; granted, it is that aspect that makes the artifact art, yet it is not in any way present without what is opposed to it. Spirit no more devours its opposite than history has known pure artworks that have achieved the identity of spirit and nonspirit. Constitutively, the spirit of artworks
is not pure. Those works that seem to embody such identity are not the most important. What in artworks opposes spirit is, however, on no account what is natural in their materials and objects; they constitute merely a limiting value in art- works. They bear what is opposed to them in themselves; their materials are his- torically and socially preformed as are their procedures, and their heterogeneous element is that in them that resists their unity and is needed by its unity for it to be more than a Pyrrhic victory over the unresisting. In this, aesthetic reflection is unanimous with the history of art, which irresistibly moved the dissonant into the center of the work until finally its difference from consonance was destroyed. Art thereby participates in the suffering that, by virtue of the unity of its process, finds its way to language rather than disappearing. It is because it recognizes this and allies art with the consciousness of need that Hegel ' s aesthetics , in spite of its har-
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monistic elements and its faith in the sensual appearance of the idea, is distin- guished from merely formal aesthetics. He who was first to envision the end of art named the most compelling reason for its continuation: the continuation of needs, mute in themselves, that await the expression that artworks fulfill by proxy. How- ever; if the element of spirit is immanent to artworks, this implies that this element is not identical with the spirit that produces them, not even with the collective spirit of the epoch. The determination of the spirit in artworks is the highest task of aesthetics; for this reason it is all the more pressing that aesthetics not let phi- losophy prescribe to it that category of spirit. Common sense, inclined to equate the spirit of artworks with what their makers infuse into them, must rapidly enough discover that artworks are so coconstructed by the opposition of the artis- tic material, by their own postulates, by historically contemporary models and procedures that are elemental to a spirit that may be called - in a condensed fash- ion that deviates from Hegel-objective, that their reduction to subjective spirit becomes absurd . This sets the question of the spirit of artworks at a distance from their genesis. The dynamic relation of material and labor, as Hegel developed it in the dialectic of the master and the slave, is pregnantly reproduced in art. If that chapter of the Phenomenology historically conjures up feudalism, art itself, its mere existence , bears an archaic quality . The reflection on this is inseparable from reflection on art's right to continue to exist. Today the neotroglodytes are more aware of this than is the naIvete of an unperturbed cultural consciousness. Aesthetic theory, wary of a priori construction and cautious of an increasing ab- stractness, has as its arena the experience of the aesthetic object. The artwork is not to be known simply externally but demands of theory that , at whatever level of abstraction, it be understood. Philosophically the concept of understanding and categories such as empathy have been compromised by Dilthey and his followers. If one sets aside such theorems and insists on an understanding of artworks that
would be knowledge determined strictly through their objectivity, difficulties amass. In advance it must be admitted that, if knowledge is anywhere achieved in layers , this is so in aesthetics . Any fixation of the starting point of this layering in experience would be arbitrary . It reaches back far behind aesthetic sublimation , where it is indivisible from lived perception. Experience remains related to such perception, while at the same time it only becomes what it is by distancing itself from immediacy, into which it stands permanently in danger of sinking back, as happens to those excluded from education who use the present rather than the past tense when narrating the events of a film or play; yet, without any trace of such immediacy, artistic experience is no less in vain than when it capitulates to imme- diacy. In Alexandrian fashion it circumvents the claim to an immediacy of exis- tence that is registered by every artwork, whether it wants to or not. Pre-artistic experience of the aesthetic is indeed false, in that it identifies and counteridentifies with artworks as in empirical life and, if possible, even to a heightened degree, and thus precisely by way of a comportment that subjectivism holds to be the
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instrument of aesthetic experience. By approaching the artwork aconceptually, this comportment remains trapped within the radius of taste , and its relation to the work is no less oblique than if it misused art to illustrate philosophical positions. The malleable, readily identifying sensibility collapses when faced with the se- verity of the artwork ; yet obdurate thought cheats itself of the element of receptiv- ity, without which it is no longer thought. Preartistic experience requires projec- tion,l7 yet aesthetic experience-precisely by virtue of the a priori primacy of subjectivity in it-is a countermovement to the subject. It demands something on the order of the self-denial of the observer, his capacity to address or recognize what aesthetic objects themselves enunciate and what they conceal. Aesthetic experience first of all places the observer at a distance from the object. This res- onates in the idea of disinterested observation . Philistines are those whose relation to artworks is ruled by whether and to what degree they can, for example, put themselves in the place of the actors as they come forth; this is what all parts of the culture industry are based on and they foster it insistently in their customers. The more artistic experience possesses its objects and the closer it approaches them in a certain sense, the farther it is at the same time shifted away from them; artistic enthusiasm is art-alien. It is thus that aesthetic experience, as Schopenhauer knew, breaks through the spell of obstinate self-preservation; it is the model of a stage of consciousness in which the I no longer has its happiness in its interests, or, ulti- mately, in its reproduction. -That, however, to follow the course of action in a novel or a drama and note the various motivations, or adequately to recognize the thematic content of a painting, does not amount to understanding the works is as obvious as that they cannot be understood apart from such aspects. There are exact scholarly descriptions of artworks, even analyses-thematic analyses of music, for example-that miss everything essential. A second layer of under-
standing is that of the intention of the work , that which the work itself states and what traditional aesthetics calls its idea, an example of which would be the guilti- ness of subjective morality in Ibsen's Wild Duck. The intention of the work is, however, not equivalent with its content, and thus its understanding remains pro- visional. The question remains at this level of understanding whether the intention is realized in the structure of the work; whether the form carries out the play of forces, the antagonisms, that objectively govern the work over and beyond its in- tention. Moreover, the understanding of the intention does not yet grasp the truth content of the work. For this reason the understanding of works is essentially a process, one apart from all biographical accidentalness and in no way comparable to that ominous lived experience [Erlebnis] that is supposed to deliver up all secrets with a wave of the magic wand and indeed provide a doorway into the ob- ject. Understanding has as its idea that one become conscious of the artwork's content by way of the full experience [Eifahrung] of it. This concerns the work's relation to its material, to its appearance and intention, as much as it concerns its own truth or falseness in terms of the artworks' specific logic, which instructs as
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to the differentiation between what is true and false in them. Artworks are under- stood only when their experience is brought to the level of distinguishing between true and not true or, as a preliminary stage, between correct and incorrect. Critique is not externally added into aesthetic experience but, rather, is immanent to it. The comprehension of an artwork as a complexion of truth brings the work into rela- tion with its untruth, for there is no artwork that does not participate in the untruth external to it, that of the historical moment. Aesthetics that does not move within the perspective of truth fail s its task; usually it is CUlinary . Because the element of truth is essential to artworks, they participate in knowledge, and this defines the only legitimate relation to them. Consigning them to irrationality profanes what is important in them under the pretext of what is putatively ultimate. The knowledge of artworks is guided by their own cognitive constitution: They are the form of knowledge that is not knowledge of an object. This paradox is also the paradox of artistic experience. Its medium is the obviousness of the incomprehensible. This is the comportment of artists; it is the objective reason back of their often apoc- ryphal and helpless theories. The task of a philosophy of art is not so much to ex- plain away the element of incomprehensibility , which speculative philosophy has almost invariably sought to do, but rather to understand the incomprehensibility itself. This incomprehensibility persists as the character of art, and it alone pro- tects the philosophy of art from doing violence to art . The question of comprehen- sibility becomes urgent to the extreme in the face of the contemporary production of art. For the category of comprehensibility, if it is not to be situated in the sub- ject and thus condemned to relativity, postulates something objectively compre- hensible in the artwork. If the artwork assumes the expression of incomprehensi- bility and in its name destroys its own internal comprehensibility, the traditional hierarchy of comprehension collapses. Its place is taken by reflection on art's enigmatic character. Yet, it is precisely the so-called literature of the absurd-a pastiche concept tacked onto such heterogeneous material that i t now serves only the misunderstanding of facile agreement- that proves that understanding, mean- ing, and content are not equivalents .