No More Learning

The ir- rationality of which practicality accuses art is the corrective of its own irrationality .
The relation of art and society has its locus in art itself and its development , not in immediate partisanship, in what today is called commitment. It is equally fruitless to seek to grasp this relation theoretically by constructing as an invariant the non- conformist attitudes of art throughout history and opposing it to affirmative atti- tudes . There is no dearth of artworks that could only with difficulty be forced into a nonconformist tradition- which is in any case thoroughly fissured - whose ob- jectivity nevertheless maintains a profoundly critical stance toward society .
The demise of art, which is today being proclaimed with as much glibness as re- sentment, would be false, a gesture of conformism. The desublimation, the immedi- ate and momentary gain of pleasure that is demanded of art, is inner-aesthetically beneath art; in real terms, however, that momentary pleasure is unable to grant what is expected of it. The recently adopted insistence on culturing uncultivation, the enthusiasm for the beauty of street battles, is a reprise of futurist and dadaist actions. The cheap aestheticism of short-winded politics is reciprocal with the faltering of aesthetic power. Recommending jazz and rock-and-roll instead of Beethoven does not demolish the affirmative lie of culture but rather furnishes
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barbarism and the profit interest of the culture industry with a subterfuge. The allegedly vital and uncorrupted nature of such products is synthetically processed by precisely those powers that are supposedly the target of the Great Refusal:44 These products are the truly corrupt.
The thesis that the end of art is imminent or has already occurred recurs through- out history, and especially since the beginning of the modem age; Hegel reflects this thesis philosophically, he did not invent it. Though today it poses as being anti-ideological , it was until recently the ideology of historically decadent groups who took their own end to be the end of all things . The shift is probably marked by the Communist ban on modern art, which suspended the immanent aesthetic movement in the name of social progress; the mentality of the apparatchiks, how- ever, who thought this up, was the old petit bourgeois consciousness. Inevitably the thesis of the end of art can be heard at dialectical nodal points where a new form suddenly emerges that is directed polemically against the established form. Since Hegel the prophecy of the imminent end of art has more often been a com- ponent of a cultural philosophy that pronounces its judgment from on high than an element of actual artistic experience; in decrees totalitarian measures were pre- pared. The situation has, however , always looked different from within art. The Beckettian zero point- the last straw for a howling philosophy of culture - is , like the atom, infinitely full. It is not inconceivable that humanity would no longer need a closed, immanent culture once it actually had been realized; today, how- ever, the threat is a false destruction of culture , a vehicle of barbarism. The "/lfaut continuer," the conclusion of Beckett's The Unnamable, condenses this antinomy to its essence: that externally art appears impossible while immanently it must be pursued. What is new is that art must incorporate its own decline; as the critique of the spirit of domination it is the spirit that is able to turn against itself. The self- reflection of art penetrates to its own foundation and concretizes itself in it. The political significance, however, which the thesis of the end of art had thirty years ago, as for instance indirectly in Benjamin's theory ofreproduction, is gone; inci- dentally, despite his desperate advocacy of mechanical reproduction,45 in conver- sation Benjamin refused to reject contemporary painting: Its tradition, he argued, must be preserved for times less somber than our own. Nevertheless, in the face of the threatened transformation into barbarism it is better for art to come to a silent halt rather than to desert to the enemy and aid a development that is tantamount to integration into the status quo for the sake of its superior power. The lie in the in- tellectuals' proclamation of the end of art resides in their question as to what the point is of art , what its legitimation is vis-a-vis contemporary praxis. But the func- tion of art in the totally functional world is its functionlessness; it is pure super- stition to believe that art could intervene directly or lead to an intervention. The instrumentalization of art sabotages its opposition to instrumentalization; only where art respects its own immanence does it convict practical reason of its lack
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of reason. Art opposes the hopelessly antiquated principle of I'artpour I'art not by ceding to external purposes but by renouncing the illusion of a pure realm of beauty that quickly reveals itself as kitsch. By determinate negation artworks absorb the membra disjecta of the empirical world and through their transforma- tion organize them into a reality that is a counterreality, a monstrosity; this was Baudelaire's interpretation of the watchword of ['art pour ['art when he used it. Just how little this is the time for the abolition of art is apparent in its concretely open yet untried possibilities, which languish as if under a spell. Even when art in protest works itself free it remains unfree, for even the protest is constrained. Clearly it would be miserable apologetics to claim that the end of art cannot be en- visioned. In response, art can do no better than close its eyes and grit its teeth.
Sealing art off from empirical reality became an explicit program in hermetic po- etry. In the face of all of its important works-those of Celan, for instance-it is justified to askto what extent they are indeed hermetic; as Peter Szondi points out, that they are self-contained does not mean that they are unintelligible . On the con- trary, hermetic poetry and social elements have a common nexus that must be acknowledged. Reified consciousness, which through the integration of highly industrialized society becomes integral to its members, fails to perceive what is essential to the poems, emphasizing instead their thematic content and putative informational value. Artistically people can only be reached any longer by the shock that imparts a blow to what pseudo-scientific ideology calls communica- tion; for its part art is integral only when it refuses to play along with communica- tion. Hermetic procedures are, however, motivated by the growing pressure to separate the poetry from the thematic material and from the intentions . This pres- sure has extended from reflection to poetry, which seeks to take under its own auspices its raison d'etre, and this effort is at the same time its immanent law of movement. Hermetic poetry-the idea of which originated in the period of lugendstil and has something in common with the then prevalent concept of the "will to style"-can be seen as poetry that sets out to produce, from itself, what otherwise only emerges historically: its essential content; this effort has a chi- merical aspect in that it requires the transformation of emphatic content into inten- tion. Hermetic poetry makes thematic and treats explicitly what earlier in art occurred without its having been aimed at: To this extent Valery ' s idea of a recip- rocal relation between artistic production and self-reflection in the course of po- etic production is already formulated in Mallarme. Out of his desire for a utopian art free of everything art-alien, Mallarme was apolitical and therefore extremely conservative. But by his rejection of the sort of unctuous message as preached by every conservative voice today, he converges with his political counterpole, dadaism; in literary history there is never a scarcity of intermediaries . In the more than eighty years since Mallarme, hermetic poetry has been transformed, partly in response to the social tendency: The cliche about the ivory tower no longer ap-
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plies to the windowless monadic works. The beginnings were not free of the small-mindedness and desperate rapture of an art religion that convinced itself that the world was created for the sake of a beautiful verse or a well-turned phrase . In the work of the most important contemporary representative of German her- metic poetry, Paul Celan, the experiential content of the hermetic was inverted. His poetry is permeated by the shame of art in the face of suffering that escapes both experience and sublimation. Celan's poems want to speak of the most ex- treme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes negative. They imitate a language beneath the helpless language of human beings , indeed beneath all organic language: It is that of the dead speaking of stones and stars. The last rudiments of the organic are liquidated; what Benjamin noted in Baudelaire, that his poetry is without aura, comes into its own in Celan's work. The infinite discre- tion with which his radicalism proceeds compounds his force. The language of the lifeless becomes the last possible comfort for a death that is deprived of all mean- ing. The passage into the inorganic is to be followed not only in thematic motifs; rather, the trajectory from horror to silence is to be reconstructed in the hermetic works . Distantly analogous to Kafka' s treatment of expressionist painting , Celan transposes into linguistic processes the increasing abstraction of landscape, pro- gressively approximating it to the inorganic.
By appearing as art, that which insists that it is realistic injects meaning into real- ity , which such art is pledged to copy without illusion . In the face of reality this is a priori ideological. Today the impossibility of realism is not to be concluded on inner-aesthetic grounds but equally on the basis of the historical constellation of art and reality.
Today the primacy of the object and aesthetic realism are almost absolutely op- posed to each other, and indeed when measured by the standard of realism: Beckett is more realistic than the socialist realists who counterfeit reality by their very principle. If they took reality seriously enough they would eventually realize what Lukacs condemned when during the days of his imprisonment in Romania he is reported to have said that he had finally realized that Kafka was a realist writer.
The primacy of the object is not to be confused with the various attempts to ex- tract art from its subjective mediation and to siphon objectivity into it from the outer world. Art puts the prohibition on positive negation to the test, showing that indeed negation of the negative is not the positive, that it does not accomplish the reconciliation with an object that is unreconciled with itself.
The thesis that the sum of taboos implies a canon of what is correct appears in- compatible with the philosophical critique of the concept that the negation of the negation is a positive,46 a concept that both in theory and in the social practice it
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implies signifies the sabotage of the negative labor of understanding [Verstand]. In the idealist model of dialectics, this negative labor of understanding is trans- formed into an antithesis that is constrained by the fact that its critique is to serve the legitimation of the thesis at a higher level. Granted, in this regard art and theory are not absolutely different. The moment idiosyncrasies, the aesthetic plenipotentiaries of negation, are raised to the level of positive rules, they freeze into anonymous abstractions vis-a-vis the particular artwork and artistic experi- ence, and they mechanically subsume the interrelatedness of the artwork's ele- ments at the expense of that interrelatedness. Through canonization, advanced artistic means easily acquire a restorative cast and become allied with structural elements against which the very same idiosyncrasies, themselves transformed into rules, once struggled. If in art everything is a question of nuance, this is no less true of the nuance between proscription and prescription. Speculative ideal- ism, which culminated in Hegel's doctrine of positive negation, may have been borrowed from the idea of the absolute identity of artworks . Given their immanent economic principle and their artifactuality, artworks can in fact in themselves be much more consistent-and in the logical sense of the term more positive-than is theory, which is directly concerned with empirical reality. It is only through the progres s of reflection that the principle of identity proves to be illusory even in the artwork, because its other is constitutive of its autonomy; to this extent artworks too are alien to positive negation.
With regard to the aesthetic object, the thesis of the primacy of the object means the primacy of the object itself, the artwork, over its maker as well as over its recipients . As Schoenberg said, "After all, I paint a picture , not a chair. " Through this immanent primacy, the primacy of the external world is aesthetically medi- ated; unmediatedly, as the primacy of whatever the artwork presents, the primacy of the object would amount to the circumvention of the double character of the artwork. In the artwork, the concept of positive negation gains a new meaning: Aesthetically it is possible to speak of such positivity to the extent that the canon of historically necessary prohibitions serves the primacy of the object, that is, its immanent coherence.
Artworks present the contradictions as a whole, the antagonistic situation as a totality. Only by mediation, not by taking sides, are artworks capable of tran- scending the antagonistic situation through expression. The objective contradic- tions fissure the subject; they are not posited by the subject or the manufacture of his consciousness. This is the true primacy of the object in the inner composition of artworks . The subject can be fruitfully extinguished in the aesthetic object only because the subject itself is mediated through the object and is simultaneously the suffering subject of expression. The antagonisms are articulated technically; that is, they are articulated in the immanent composition of the work, and it is
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this process of composition that makes interpretation permeable to the tensions external to it. The tensions are not copied but rather form the work ; this alone con- stitutes the aesthetic concept of form .
Even in a legendary better future , art could not disavow remembrance of accumu- lated horror; otherwise its form would be trivial .
Theories on the Origin of Art Excursus
The attempts to derive aesthetics from the origins of art as its essence are in- evitably disappointing) If the concept of origin is situated beyond history, the question takes on an ontological cast far removed from that solid ground that the prestigious concept of origin evokes; moreover, any invocation of the concept of origin that is divested of its temporal element transgresses against the simple meaning of the word, to which the philosophers of origin claim to be privy. Yet to reduce art historically to its prehistorical or early origins is prohibited by its char- acter, which is the result of historical development. The earliest surviving mani- festations of art are not the most authentic, nor do they in any way circumscribe art's range; and rather than best exemplifying what art is, they make it more ob- scure. It needs to be taken into account that the oldest surviving art, the cave paint- ings, belongs as a whole to the visual domain. Next to nothing is known of the music or poetry of the epoch; there are no indications of anything prehistoric that may have differed qualitatively from the optical works . Among aestheticians Croce was probably the first to condemn, in Hegelian spirit, the question ofthe historical origin of art as aesthetically irrelevant: "Since this 'spiritual' activity is its [his- tory ' s) object, the absurdity of propounding the historical problem of the origin of art becomes evident . . . If expression is a form of consciousness, how can one look for the historical origin of what is not a product of nature and is presupposed by human history? How can one assign a historical genesis to a thing that is a cate- gory by means of which all historical processes and facts are understood? "2 How- ever correct the intention may be not to confound what is oldest with the concept of the thing-itself, which only becomes what it is in the first place through its
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development, Croce's argumentation is dubious. By simply identifying art with expression, which is "presupposed by human history ," he once again defines art as what it should never be for the philosophy of history: a "category," an invariant form of consciousness, something that is static in form, even if Croce conceives it as pure activity or spontaneity. His idealism, no less than the Bergsonian streak in his aesthetics, keeps him from being able to perceive the constitutive relation of art to what it itself is not, to what is not the pure spontaneity of the subject; this fundamentally limits his critique of the question of origin. Still, the legion of em- pirical studies that have since been dedicated to the question hardly give cause to revise Croce's verdict. It would be too easy to blame this on the advancing posi- tivism that, out of fear of being contradicted by any next fact, no longer dares to undertake the construction of univocal theory and mobilizes the accumulation of facts in order to prove that genuine science can no longer put up with theory on a grand style. Ethnology, in particular, which according to the current division of labor has the responsibility of interpreting prehistoric findings , has let itself be in- timidated by the tendency stretching back to Frobenius to explicate everything ar- chaically puzzling in terms of religion , even when the findings themselves contra- dict such summary treatment . Nevertheless the scientific exclusion of the question of origin, which corresponds to the philosophical critique of origin, testifies to something more than the powerlessness of science and the terror of positivistic taboos . Melville J. Herskovits ' s study Man and His Work3 is characteristic of the interpretive pluralism that even a disillusioned science is unable to renounce. If contemporary science renounces any monistic answer to the question of the origin of art, the question of what art originally was and has remained ever since, it thereby discloses an element of truth. Art did not become a unified whole until a very late stage. There is reason to doubt whether such integration is not more that of the concept than that of what it claims to comprehend. The forced quality of the term Sprachkunstwerk-the linguistic artwork- now popular among German- ists, awakens suspicion by its unceremonial subsumption of poetry to art through the mediation of language , even though art unquestionably became unified in the course of the process of enlightenment. The most archaic artistic manifestations are so diffuse that it is as difficult as it is vain to try to decide what once did and did not count as art. In later ages as well, art consistently resisted the process of unification in which it was simultaneously caught up. Its own concept is not indif- ferent to this. What seems to grow hazy in the half-light of prehistory is vague not only because of its distance but because it guards something of the indeterminate , of what is inadequate to the concept, which progressive integration tirelessly men-
aces. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the oldest cave paintings, whose naturalism is always so readily affirmed, demonstrated the greatest fidelity to the portrayal of movement, as if they already aspired to what Valery ultimately demanded: the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate , of what has not been nailed down. 4 If so, the impulse of these paintings was not naturalistic imitation but, rather, from
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the beginning a protest against reification . Blame for ambiguity is not, or not only, to be ascribed to the limitedness of knowledge but is characteristic of prehistory itself. Univocity exists only since the emergence of sUbjectivity .
The so-called problem of origin echoes in the controversy over whether naturalis- tic depiction or symbolic-geometrical forms came first. Implicit in this question is the hope that it will provide what is needed to discern the primordial essence of a r t . T h i s h o p e i s d e c e p t i v e . Arn o l d H a u s e r o p e n s h i s S o c i a l H i s t o ry of A rt w i t h t h e thesis that during the Paleolithic age naturalism was older: "The monuments of primitive art . . . clearly suggest . . . that naturalism has the prior claim, so that it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain the theory of the primacy of an art remote from life and nature. "5 The polemical overtone against the neoromantic doctrine of the religious origin of art is unmistakable . Yet this important historian
straight away restricts the thesis of the priority of naturalism. Hauser, while still employing the two habitually contrasting theses, criticizes them as anachronistic: "The dualism of the visible and the invisible, of the seen and the merely known, remains absolutely foreign to Paleolithic art. "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.