Aesthetic
form has its rationality even in poetic association.
Theoder-Adorno-Aesthetic-Theory
Duration of the transient, an element of art that at the same time perpetuates the mimetic heritage, is one of the categories that dates back to primeval times. In the judgment of many authors, the image itself, regardless of the level of differentia- tion of its content, is a phenomenon of regeneration. Frobenius reports of pygmies who "at the moment of sunrise drew the animal that they would later kill in order to resurrect it in a higher sense the following morning after the ritual smearing of the image with blood and hair . . . Thus the pictures of the animals represent their immortalization and apotheosis, effectively raising them into the firmament as eternal stars. "l0 Yet it is apparent that precisely in early history the achievement of duration was accompanied by consciousness of its futility, perhaps even that such duration - in the spirit of the prohibition on graven images - was tied up with a sense of guilt toward the living. According to Walther Resch, the most archaic period was dominated by "a marked fear of portraying human beings. "ll One could well suppose that early on the nonreplicatory aesthetic images were already filtered through a prohibition on images, a taboo: Even the antimagical element of art has a magical origin . This is indicated by the no less ancient "ritual destruction of the image": At the very least "the image should bear marks of destruction so that the animal would no longer 'roam about. '''12 This taboo originates in a fear of the dead, which was a motivation for embalming them in order- so to speak-to keep them alive. There is much to favor the speculation that the idea of aesthetic duration developed out of the process of mummification . This is substantiated by Felix Speiser's research on wood figurines of the New Hebrides,13 to which Fritz Krause refers: ''The line of development led from mummified figures to exact bodily replications in figure and skull statues, and from skulls mounted on poles to
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wooden and tree-fern statues. "14 Speiser interprets this shift as a "transition from the preservation and simulation of the bodily presence of the dead to the symbolic indication of their presence , and this constitutes the transition to the statue in the proper sense of the term. "15 This transition may well be that of the neolithic sepa- ration of material and form, the origin of "signification. " One of the models of art may be the corpse in its transfixed and imperishable form. In that case, the reifica- tion of the formerly living would date back to primordial times, as did the revolt against death as a magical nature-bound practice .
As semblance perishes in art, the culture industry has developed an insatiable illu- sionism, the ultimate form of which Huxley constructed in the "feelies" of his BraveNew World; the allergy to semblance runs in counterpoint to its commercial omnipotence . The elimination of semblance is the opposite of vulgar conceptions of realism, which in the culture industry is the exact complement of semblance.
Ever since the beginning of the modern age and the emergence of the self-reflecting diremption of subject and object, bourgeois reality - in spite of the limitations set by its incomprehensibility - has had a trace of unreality, of the illusory , just as in philosophy reality became a web of subjective determinations . The more irritating this illusoriness, the more obstinately did consciousness veil the reality of the real . Art, on the other hand, posited itself as semblance, far more emphatically than in previous periods, when it was not sharply distinguished from description and re- porting. To this extent it sabotages the false claim to reality of a world dominated by the subject, the world of the commodity. This is the crystallization of art's truth content; it sets reality into relief by the self-positing of semblance. Thus sem- blance serves truth.
Nietzsche called for "an antimetaphysical but artistic" philosophy,16 This would be a mix of Baudelaire's spleen with Jugendstil, with a subtle absurdity: as if art would obey the emphatic claim of this dictum if it were not the Hegelian unfold- ing of truth and itself a bit of the metaphysics Nietzsche condemned. There is noth- ing more anti-artistic than rigorous positivism. Nietzsche knew that well. That he allowed the contradiction to stand without developing it fits well with Baudelaire's cult of the lie and the chimerical, aerial concept of the beautiful i n Ibsen. Nietzsche, that most consistent figure of enlightenment, did not deceive himself that sheer consistency destroys the motivation and meaning of enlightenment. Rather than carrying out the self-reflection of enlightenment, he perpetrated one conceptual coup de main after the other. They express that truth itself, the idea of which kin- dles enlightenment, does not exist without semblance, which it nevertheless wants to extirpate for the sake of truth; with this element of truth art stands in solidarity .
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Art is directed toward truth, it is not itself immediate truth; to this extent truth is its content. By its relation to truth, art is knowledge ; art itself knows truth in that truth emerges through it. As knowledge, however, art is neither discursive nor is its truth the reflection of an object.
Shoulder-shrugging aesthetic relativism is itself reified consciousness; it is not so much a melancholy skepticism conscious of its own incapacity as resentment ofart's claim to truth, a claim that yet alone legitimated that greatness ofartworks without the fetishization of which the relativists would have nothing to discuss. Their comportment is reified in that it is passively external and modeled on con- sumption rather than that it enters into the movement of those artworks in which the question of their truth becomes conclusive. Relativism is the split-off self- reflection of the isolated subject and as such indifferent to the work . Even aesthet- ically it is hardly ever meant in earnest; earnestness is just what it finds unbear- able. Whoever says of an experimental new work that it is impossible to judge such a thing imagines that his incomprehension has effectively annihilated the work. That there are those who perpetually engage in aesthetic arguments, all the while indifferent as to the position they have taken, vis-a-vis aesthetics, is a more compelling refutation of relativism than any philosophical rebuttal: The idea of aesthetic truth finds justice for itself in spite of and in its problematic. However, the strongest support for the critique of aesthetic relativism is the definitiveness of technical questions. The automatically triggered response that technique may indeed permit categorical judgments, but that neither art nor its content do, dog- matically divides the latter from technique . However certain it is that artworks are more than the quintessence of their procedures, which is to say their "technique," it is just as certain that they have objective content only insofar as it appears in them, and this occurs solely by the strength of the quintessence of their technique . Its logic leads the way to aesthetic truth. Certainly no continuum stretches from aesthetic precepts learned in school to aesthetic jUdgment, yet even the disconti- nuity of this trajectory obeys a necessity: The highest questions of the truth of a work can be translated into categories of its coherence. J7 When this is not possi- ble, thought reaches one of the boundaries of human restrictedness beyond the limitation of the judgment of taste .
The immanent coherence of artworks and their meta-aesthetic truth converge in their truth content. This truth would be simply dropped from heaven in the same way as was Leibniz's preestablished harmony, which presupposes a transcendent creator, if it were not that the development of the immanent coherence of artworks serves truth, the image of an in-itself that they themselves cannot be. If artworks strive after an objective truth, it is mediated to them through the fulfillment of their own lawfulness. That artworks fulfill their truth better the more they fulfill themselves: This is the Ariadnian thread by which they feel their way through their
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inner darkness . But this is no self-deception. For their autarchy originated in what they themselves are not. The protohistory of artworks is the introduction of the categories of the real into their semblance. However, the movement of the cate- gories in the autonomy of the work is not defined solely by the laws of this sem- blance; rather, they preserve the directional constants that they received from the external world. The question posed by artworks is how the truth of reality can become their own truth. The canon of this transformation is untruth. Their pure existence criticizes the existence of a spirit that exclusively manipulates its other. What is socially untrue, flawed, and ideological is communicated to the structure of artworks as flawed, indeterminate, and inadequate. For the manner in which artworks react, their objective "attitude toward objectivity," remains an attitude toward reality. I8
An artwork is always itself and simultaneously the other of itself. Such otherness can lead astray, because the constitutive meta-aesthetic element volatilizes the instant one pulls it away from the aesthetic and imagines that one holds it isolated in one's hands.
The recent historical tendency to emphasize the work itself, in opposition to the subject-at least to the subject's manifestation in the work-further undermines the distinction of artworks from reality , in spite of the subjective origin of this ten- dency. Increasingly, works acquire a second-order existence that obscures what is human in them. Subjectivity disappears into artworks as the instrument of their objectivation. The subjective imagination, of which artworks as ever stand in need, becomes recognizable as the turning back of the objective onto the subject and of the necessity of guarding the line of demarcation around the artwork . Imag- ination is the capacity to do this. It shapes what reposes in itself rather than arbitrarily concocting forms, details, fables, or whatever. Indeed, the truth of art- works cannot be otherwise conceived than in that what is transsubjective becomes readable in the subjectively imagined in-itself. The mediation of the transsubjec- tive is the artwork.
The mediation between the content of artworks and their composition is subjec- tive mediation. It consists not only in the labor and struggle of objectivation . What goes beyond subjective intention and its arbitrariness has a correlative objectivity within the subject: in the form of that subject's experiences, insofar as their locus is situated beyond the conscious will. As their sedimentation, artworks are image- less images, and these experiences mock representational depiction. Their inner- vation and registration is the subjective path to truth content. The only adequate concept of realism, which no art today dare shun, would be an unflinching fidelity to these experiences. Provided they go deeply enough, they touch on historical constellations back of the facades of reality and'psychology. Just as the interpreta-
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tion of traditional philosophy must excavate the experiences that motivated the categorial apparatus and deductive sequences in the first place, the interpretation o f a r t w o r k s pe n e tr a t e s t o t h i s s u bj e c t i v e l y e x p e r i e n c e d k e rn e l o f e x p e r i e n c e , w h i c h goes beyond the subject; interpretation thereby obeys the convergence of philoso- phy and art in truth content. Whereas it is this truth content that artworks speak in themselves, beyond their meaning, it takes shape in that artworks sediment his- torical experiences in their configuration , and this is not possible except by way of the subject: The truth content is no abstract in-itself. The truth of important works of false consciousness is situated in the gesture with which they indicate the strength of this false consciousness as inescapable, not in immediately possessing as their content the theoretical truth, although indeed the unalloyed portrayal of false consciousness irresistibly makes the transition to true consciousness.
The claim that the metaphysical content of the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet op. 59, no. 1, must be true provokes the objection that what is true in it is the longing, but that that fades powerlessly into nothingness. If, in response, it were insisted that there is no yeaming expressed in that D-ftat passage, the asser- tion would have an obviously apologetic ring that could well be met by the objec- tion that precisely because it appears as if it were true it must be a work of long- ing, and art as a whole must be nothing but this. The rejoinder would be to reject the argument as drawn from the arsenal of vulgar subjective reason. The auto- matic reductio ad hominem is too pat, too easy, to be an adequate explanation of what objectively appears. It is cheap to present these too facile measures, simply because they have rigorous negativity on their side, as iIlusionless depth, whereas capitulation vis-a-vis evil implies identification with it. The power of the passage in Beethoven is precisely its distance from the subject; it is this that bestows on those measures the stamp of truth. What was once called the "authentic" [echt]19 in art-a word still used by Nietzsche though now unsalvageable-soughttoindi- cate this distance.
The spirit of artworks is not their meaning and not their intention, but rather their truth content, or, in other words, the truth that is revealed through them. The sec- ond theme of the Adagio of Beethoven' s D-minor Sonata, op. 3 1 , no. 2, is not simply a beautiful melody-there are certainly more buoyant, better formed, and even more original melodies than this one-nor is it distinguished by exceptional expressivity . Nevertheless , the introduction of this theme belongs to what is over- whelming in Beethoven's music and that could be called the spirit of his music: hope , with an authenticity [authentizitiit] that-as something that appears aesthet- ically-it bears even beyond aesthetic semblance. What is beyond the semblance of what appears is the aesthetic truth content: that aspect of semblance that is not semblance. The truth content is no more the factual reality of an artwork, no more one fact among others in an artwork, than it is independent from its appearance.
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The first thematic complex of that movement, which is of extraordinary, eloquent beauty , is a masterfully wrought mosaic of contrasting shapes that are motivically coherent even when they are registrally distant. The atmosphere of this thematic complex, which earlier would have been called mood, awaits-as indeed all mood probably does - an event that only becomes an event against the foil of this mood . The F-major theme follows with a rising thirty-second-note gesture . Against the dark, diffuse backdrop of what preceded, the accompanied upper voice that characterizes the second theme acquires its dual character of reconcilia- tion and promise. Nothing transcends without that which it transcends. The truth content is mediated by way of, not outside of, the configuration, but it is not im- manent to the configuration and its elements. This is probably what crystallized as the idea of all aesthetic mediation. It is that in artworks by which they participate in their truth content. The pathway of mediation is construable in the structure of artworks, that is, in their technique. Knowledge of this leads to the objectivity of the work itself, which is so to speak vouched for by the coherence of the work's configuration. This objectivity, however, can ultimately be nothing other than the truth content. It is the task of aesthetics to trace the topography of these elements. In the authentic artwork, what is dominated-which finds expression by way of the dominating principle - is the counterpoint to the domination of what is natural or material. This dialectical relationship results in the truth content of artworks.
The spirit o f artworks i s their objectivated mimetic comportment: I t i s opposed to mimesis and at the same time the form that mimesis takes in art.
As an aesthetic category, imitation cannot simply be accepted any more than it can simply be rejected. Art objectivates the mimetic impulse, holding it fast at the same time that it disposes of its immediacy and negates it. From this dialectic the imitation of reality draws the fatal consequence. Objectivated reality is the cor- relative of objectivated mimesis. The reaction to what is not-I becomes the imi- tation of the not-I. Mimesis itself conforms to objectivation, vainly hoping to close the rupture between objectivated consciousness and the object. By wanting to make itself like the objectivated other, the artwork becomes unlike that other. But it is only by way of its self-alienation through imitation that the subject so strengthens itself that it is able to shake off the spell of imitation. That in which artworks over millennia knew themselves to be images of something reveals itself in the course of history, their critic, as being inessential to them. There would have been no Joyce without Proust, nor Proust without Flaubert, on whom Proust looked down. It was by way of imitation, nOlby avoiding it, that art achieved its autonomy; in it art acquired the means to its freedom.
Art is not a replica any more than it is knowledge of an object; if it were it would be dragged down to the level of being a mere duplication, of which Husser! deliv-
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ered such a stringent critique in the sphere of discursive knowledge. On the con- trary , art reaches toward reality, only to recoil at the actual touch of it. The char- acters of its script are monuments to this movement. Their constellation in the artwork is a cryptogram of the historical essence of reality, not its copy. Such comportment is related to mimetic comportment. Even artworks that announce themselves as replicas are such only peripherally; by reacting to reality they be- come a second-order reality, subjective reflection, regardless whether the artists have reflected or not. Only artwork that makes itself imageless as something existing in itself [achieves the essence, and this requires a developed aesthetic domination of nature] . 20
If the precept held that artists are unknowing to the point of not knowing what an artwork is, this would collide with the ineluctable necessity today of reflection in art; it can hardly be conceived other than by way of the artists' consciousness. Such unknowingness in fact often becomes a blemish in the work of important artists, especially within cultural spheres where art still to some extent has a place; unknowingness, for instance in the form of a lack of taste, becomes an immanent deficiency. The point of indifference between unknowingness and necessary re- flection, however, is technique. It not only permits reflection but requires it, yet it does so without destroying the fruitful tenebrosity of works by taking recourse to the subordinating concept.
The artwork' s enigmaticalness is the shudder, not however in its living presence but as recollection.
The artwork of the past neither coincided with its cultic element nor stood in sim- ple opposition to it. Rather, art tore itself free from cult objects by a leap in which the cultic element was both transformed and preserved, and this structure is repro- duced on an expanding scale at every level of its history . All art contains elements by virtue of which it threatens to fail its laboriously won and precarious concept: The epic threatens to fail as rudimentary historiography, tragedy as the afterimage of a judicial proceeding, the most abstract work as an ornamental pattern , and the realistic novel as protosociology or reportage.
The enigmaticalness of artworks is intimately bound up with history. It was his- tory that once changed them into enigmas and continues to do so; conversely, it is history alone, which invested them with authority, that keeps from them the em- barrassing question oftheirraison d'etre.
Artworks are archaic in the age in which they are falling silent. But when they no longer speak, their muteness itself speaks.
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Not all advanced art bears the marks of the frightening; these marks are most evi- dent where not every relation of the peinture to the object has been severed, where not every relation of dissonance to the fulfilled and negated consonance has been broken off: Picasso's shocks were ignited by the principle of deformation. Many abstract and constructive works lack these shocks; it is an open question whether the force of still-unrealized reality free of fear is active in these works or if- and this may well be the case- the harmony of abstract works is deceptive just as was the social euphoria of the first decades after the European catastrophe; even aes- thetically, however, such harmony is apparently in decline.
Problems of perspective, which were once the decisive agent in the development of painting, may reemerge, this time emancipated from all functions of replica- tion. It is worth considering if it is possible to conceive of absolutely nonrepresen- tational art in the visual domain; if everything that appears, even when reduced to its utmost, does not bear traces of the world of objects; all such speculations become untrue as soon as they are exploited for the purposes of any sort of restoration. Knowledge has its subjective limits in the inability of the knower to resist the temptation of extrapolating the future from his own situation. The taboo on invariants is, however, also an interdiction on such extrapolation. The future indeed is no more to be positively depicted than invariants are to be posited; aes- thetics is concentrated in the postulates of the instant.
To the same extent that it cannot be defined what an artwork is, aesthetics is un- able to renounce the desire for such a definition if it is not to be guilty of making false promises. Artworks are images that do not contain replicas of anything, therefore they are imageless; they are essence as appearance. They do not fulfill the requirements of Platonic archetypes or reflections, especially in that they are not eternal but historical through and through. The pre-artistic comportment that approaches art most closely and ultimately leads to it is a comportment that trans- forms experience into the experience of images; as Kierkegaard expressed it: "My booty is images. " Artworks are the objectivations of images, objectivations of mimesis, schemata of experience that assimilate to themselves the subject that is experiencing.
Forms of the so-called lowbrow arts, such as the circus tableau, in which at the finale all the elephants kneel on their hind legs , while on each trunk stands a grace- fully posed, impassive ballerina, are unintentional archetypal images of what the philosophy of history deciphers in art; from its disdained forms much can be gleaned of art ' s secret which is so well hidden back of its current level of develop- ment, as if art had never been otherwise.
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Beauty is the exodus of what has objectivated itself in the realm of means and ends from this realm.
The idea of an objectivity that is nonobjectivated-and therefore an objectivity that cannot adequately be given in intentions-appears in aesthetic purposeful- ness as well as in the purposelessness of art. But art comes into possession of this idea only by way of the subject, only through that rationality from which purpose- fulness derives. Art is a polarization: Its spark connects a self-alienated subjectiv- ity turned in on itself with what is not organized by rationality; it connects the block that separates the subject with what philosophy once called the in-itself. Art is incommensurable with the realm between these poles , that of constituta .
Kant' s purposefulness without a purpose is a principle that emigrated out of em- pirical reality and the realm of the purposes of self-preservation and found its way into a remote realm, formerly that of the sacred. The purposefulness of artworks is dialectical as the critique of the practical positing of purposes. It takes sides with repressed nature, to which it owes the idea of a purposefulness that is other than that posited by humanity; an idea, obviously, that was undermined by the rise of natural science. Art is the rescue of nature-or of immediacy-through its nega- tion, that is, total mediation. It makes itself like what is free of domination by the limitless domination over its material; this is what is hidden back of Kant's oxymoron.
Art, the afterimage of human repression of nature, simultaneously negates this re- pression through reflection and draws close to nature. The subjectively instituted totality of artworks does not remain the totality imposed on the other, but rather, by its distance from this other, becomes the imaginative restitution of the other. Neutralized aesthetically, the domination of nature renounces its violence. In the semblance of the restoration of the mutilated other to its own form, art becomes the model of the nonmutilated. Aesthetic totality is the antithesis of the untrue whole. If art, as Valery once said, wants to be indebted only to itself, this is because art wants to make itself the likeness of an in-itself, of what is free of domination and disfigurement. Art is the spirit that negates itself by virtue of the constitution of its own proper realm.
Evidence that the domination of nature is no accident of art, no original sin result- ing from some subsequent amalgamation with the civilizing process, is given at the very least by the fact that the magical practices of aboriginal peoples bear in themselves undifferentiatedly the element of the domination of nature: "The pro- found effect produced by the image of animals is simply explained by the fact that the image, by its characteristic features, psychologically exercises the same effect as does the object itself, and so as a result of his psychological alteration the per-
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son believes that he has been touched by magic . On the other hand, from the fact that the motionless image is entirely subject to his own powers, he comes to be- lieve that the represented animal can be tracked and subdued; therefore the image appears to him as a means of power over the animal. "21 Magic is a rudimentary form of that causal thinking that ultimately liquidates magic .
Art is mimetic comportment that for the purpose of its objectivation disposes over the most advanced rationality for the control of its material and procedures. This contradiction is art's answer to the contradiction of the ratio itself. If the telos of reason is a fulfillment that is in-itself necessarily not rational-happiness is the enemy of rationality and purpose, of which it nevertheless stands in need-art makes this irrational telos its own concern. In this, art draws on an unrestrained rationality in its technical procedures, which are, in the supposedly "technical world," constrained by the relations of production and thus remain irrational. - In the age of technology , art i s spurious when it masks universal mediation as a social relation.
The rationality of artworks has as its aim opposition to empirical existence: The rational shaping of artworks effectively means their rigorous elaboration in- themselves. As a result they come into contrast with the world of the nature- dominating ratio, in which the aesthetic ratio originates, and become a work for- themselves. The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination . Even the immanently polemical attitude of artworks against the status quo internalizes the principle that underlies the status quo, and that reduces it to the status of what merely exists; aesthetic rationality wants to make good on the damage done by nature-dominating rationality.
The proscription of the element of willful domination in art is not aimed at domi- nation but at the expiation of domination, in that the subject places the control of itself and its other in the service of the nonidentical .
The category of formation [Gestaltung], which is embarrassing when it is cited as an autonomous ideal, must be supplemented by the concept of the work's struc- ture . Yet the quality of the work is all the higher, the work all the more formed , the less it is disposed over. Formation means nonformation.
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It is precisely the integrally constructed artworks of modernism that starkly illu- minate the fallibility of logicality and formal immanence; to fulfill their concept they must outfox it; this is documented in Klee ' s diary entries. One of the tasks of an artist who insistently seeks the extreme is both to realize the logic of "coming to the end"-Richard Strauss was in this regard strangely insensitive-and to interrupt this logic, to suspend it, so as to cancel its mechanical aspect, its flawed predictability. The requirement of becoming assimilated to the work is precisely that of intervening in it so that it does not become an infernal machine. Perhaps the gestures of intervention, with which Beethoven, as if by an act of will, pro- vided the later parts of his development sections , are early evidence of this experi- ence. The fertile instant of the artwork otherwise becomes lethal to itself.
The difference between aesthetic and discursive logicality can be demonstrated in Georg Trakl's poetry. The succession of images-"so beautiful how image fol- lows image"22-certainly does not constitute a nexus of meaning according to logical procedures and causality such as those that govern the apophantic realm, especially the realm of existential judgments. This is not contravened by Trakl's "it is," which the poet chose for its paradoxical force: I n this context "it is" means that "what is not, is. " In spite of the initial impression of a web of associations, his poetic textures are not those of a freely shifting order. Indirectly and obscurely logical categories play a part, as, for instance, in the musically rising or falling curves of the individual elements , the distribution of light and dark , the relations between beginning, continuation, and conclusion. The pictorial elements partici- pate in formal categories, but they are legitimated only by virtue of these rela- tions, which organize the poems and raise them above the contingency of mere conceits.
Aesthetic form has its rationality even in poetic association. In it, as one moment calls up the next , there is something of the force of stringency demanded by the conclusions in logic and music . In fact, in a letter in which he criticized an
irksome imitator, Trakl spoke of the aesthetic means he had acquired; none of them lacks an element of logicality .
Aesthetics ofForm andAesthetics ofContent [Inhalt]. -Ironically, in the con- test between the two, the aesthetics of content holds the upper hand by the fact that the content [Gehalt] of works and of art as a whole-its ultimate end-is not formal but concrete. Yet this content [Gehalt] becomes concrete only by virtue of aesthetic form. If form must be at the center of aesthetics, aesthetics develops its content by rendering forms eloquent.
The results of formal aesthetics cannot simply be rejected. However little they do justice to undiminished aesthetic experience, this experience is unthinkable with- out formal elements such as mathematical proportions and symmetry and dynamic formal categories such as tension and release. Without the functions these cate-
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gories fulfill, the great works ofthe past would be as incomprehensible as it would be impossible to hypostatize these elements as aesthetic criteria. They were always only elements and as such inseparable from the manifold elements of content; they never had immediate value except in relation to what they formed. They are para- digms of the dialectic . It is according to what is formed that they are modified ; with the emergence of radical modem art they were thoroughly transformed by nega- tion: Their effect is indirect as a result of being avoided and annulled; prototypical here-as Valery noted-is, since Manet, the relation of artists to the traditional rules of pictorial composition. Their authority makes itself felt in the opposition of specific works to them. A category such as that of an artwork's proportions is only meaningful to the extent that it also encompasses the overthrow ofproportions, in other words, their own dynamic. By way of such a dialectic, throughout mod- ernism, the formal categories have been reestablished at ever higher levels: The quintessence of the dissonant was harmony; the quintessence of dynamic tensions was equilibrium. This would be inconceivable if the formal categories had not themselves been suffused with content. The formal principle according to which artworks should be both tension and equilibrium registers the antagonistic content of aesthetic experience, that of an unreconciled reality that nevertheless wants reconciliation. Even static formal categories, such as that of the golden mean, are congealed content, that of reconciliation itself. In artworks it is only as a result that harmony has ever amounted to anything; when it was simply posited and asserted it was already ideology, which is what the newly won homeostasis also ultimately became. Conversely, and this is effectively an apriori of art, all mater- ial in art developed by way of a process of formation that was then abstracted as the categories of form. These categories were in turn transformed through their relation to the material . Forming means the adequate completion of this transfor- mation. This may explicate immanently the concept of the dialectic in art.
The formal analysis ofan artwork, and what can properly be called form in an art- work, only has meaning in relation to the work's concrete material. The construc- tion of the most impeccable diagonals, axes, and vanishing lines in a picture, the most stringent motivic economy in a musical composition , remains a matter of in- difference so long as the construction is not developed specifically out of that par- ticular picture or composition . No other use of the concept of construction in art is legitimate; otherwise the concept inevitably becomes a fetish. Many analyses contain everything except the reason why a painting or a piece of music is held to be beautiful or from what they derive their right to exist. Such analytical methods are in fact vulnerable to the critique of aesthetic formalism. But although it is not defensible simply to insist on the reciprocity of form and content-rather, this reciprocity needs to be demonstrated in detail-the formal elements, at every point referring back to content, preserve their tendency to become content. Crude materialism and a no less crude classicism agree in the mistaken belief that there
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is some sort of pure form. The official doctrine of materialism overlooks the dialectic even of the fetish character in art. Precisely when form appears emanci- pated from any preestablished content [Inhalt] , the forms themselves acquire their own expression and content [Inhalt] . Surrealism operated in this fashion in many of its works, and Klee did throughout: The contents [Inhalte] sedimented in the forms awake as they age. This is what befell lugendstil at the hands of surrealism, which polemically severed ties with it. Aesthetically, the solus ipse becomes aware of the world, which is his own, and that isolates him as solus ipse in the same instant that he jettisons the conventions of the world .
The concept of tension frees itself from the suspicion of being formalistic in that, by pointing up dissonant experiences or antinomical relations in the work, it names the element of "form" in which form gains its substance by virtue of its relation to its other. Through its inner tension, the work is defined as a force field even in the arrested moment of its objectivation . The work is at once the quintessence of rela- tions oftension and the attempt to dissolve them.
In opposition to mathematical theories of harmony, it must be asserted that aes- thetic phenomena cannot be mathematically conceived. In art, equal is not equal. This has become obvious in music . The return of analogous passages of the same length does not fulfill what the abstract concept of harmony promises: The repeti- tion is irksome rather than satisfying, or, in less subjective terms, it is too long for the form; Mendelssohn was probably one of the first composers to have acted upon this experience, which made itself felt right up until the serial school's self- critique of mechanical correspondences. This self-critique became more intense with the emerging dynamization of art and the soupron felt for all identity that does not become a nonidentity . The hypothesis may be risked that the well-known differences that distinguish the "artistic volition" of the visual arts of the baroque from those of the Renaissance were inspired by the same experience. All relations that appear natural, and are to this extent abstract invariables, undergo necessary modifications before they can function as aesthetic means; the modification of the natural overtone series by tempered tuning is the most striking example of this. Most often these modifications are ascribed to the subjective element, which sup- posedly finds the rigidity of a heteronomously imposed material order insupport- able. But this plausible interpretation remains all too remote from history. It is only late that art takes recourse to so-called natural materials and relations in revolt against incoherent and unbelievable traditionalism: This revolt, in a word, is bourgeois. The mathematization of strictly quantifiable artistic materials and of the technical procedures spun out of them is in fact itself an achievement of the emancipated subject, of "reflection" that then rebels against its emancipation. Primitive procedures have nothing of this. What passes for natural facts and nat- ural law in art is not primordially given but rather an inner-aesthetic development;
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it is mediated. Such nature in art is not the nature for which it longs; rather it has been projected upon art by the natural sciences, to compensate it for the loss of preestablished structures. What is striking in pictorial impressionism is the modernity of the physiologically perceivable, quasi-natural elements. Second re- flection therefore demands the critique of all reified natural elements; just as they once emerged, they will pass away. After World War II consciousness- in the illusion of being able to begin anew without the transformation of so- ciety-clung to allegedly primordial phenomena; these are as ideological as the forty German marks of new currency per person with which the economy was supposed to be rebuilt from the ground up. Clearcutting is a character mask of the status quo; what is different does not hide its historical dimension. This is not to say that in art there are no mathematical relations. But they can only be grasped in relation to a historically concrete configuration, they cannot be hypo- statized.
The concept of homeostasis, an equilibrium of tension that asserts itself only in the totality of an artwork, is probably bound up with that instant in which the art- work visibly makes itself independent: It is the instant when the homeostasis, if not immediately established, can be envisioned. The resulting shadow over the concept of homeostasis corresponds to the crisis of this idea in contemporary art. At precisely that point when the work comes into its own self-possession, be- comes sure of itself, when it suddenly "fits" together, it no longer fits because the fortunately achieved autonomy seals its reification and deprives it of the opennes s that is an aspect of its own idea. During the heroic age of expressionism, these reflections were not far from painters like Kandinsky who, for instance , observed that an artist who believes he has found his style has thereby already lost it. Yet the problem is not as subjectively psychological as that epoch held; rather it is grounded in the antinomy of art itself. The openness toward which it tends and the closure - the "perfection" -by which it approximates the idea of its being-in- itself, of being completely uncompromised, a being-in-itself that is the agent of openness, are incompatible.
That the artwork is a result means that, as one of its elements, it should bear no residue of the dead, unworked, unformed, and sensitivity to this is an equally definitive element of all art criticism; the quality of each and every work depends on this element just as much as this element atrophies everywhere that cultural- philosophical cogitation hovers freely above the works. The first look that glides over a musical score, the instinct that-in front of a painting-judges its dignity, is guided by a consciousness of the degree to which it is fully formed, its integral structuration, and by a sensitivity to what is crude, which often enough coincides with what convention imposes on artworks and what the philistine wherever pos- sible chalks up to its transsubjectivity . Even when artworks suspend the principle
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of their integral structuration and open themselves to the crude, they reflect the postulate of this principle . Those works are fully elaborated over which the form- ing hand has most delicately felt its way; this idea is exemplarily embodied in the French tradition. In good music not a measure is superfluous or rings hollow, not a measure is isolated from the phrase, just as no instrumental sound is introduced that-as musicians put it-has not truly been "heard," drawn by subjective sensi- bility from the specific character of the instrument before the passage is entrusted to it. The instrumental combination of a musical complex must be fully heard; it is the objective weakness of early music that only by exception did it achieve this mediation. The feudal dialectic of master and servant takes refuge in these art- works, whose very existence has a feudal quality.
That old and silly cabaret phrase, "Love, it's so erotic" provokes the variation: "Art, it's so aesthetic"; this is to be taken with deep seriousness as a memento of what has been repressed by its consumption. The quality that is at stake here reveals itself primarily in acts of reading, including the reading of musical scores: It is the quality of the trace that aesthetic forming leaves behind in what it forms without doing violence to it: It is the conciliatory element of culture in art that characterizes even its most violent protestation. It is implicit in the word metier, and it cannot simply be translated as craft [Handwerk] . The relevance of this ele- ment seems to have intensified in the history of modernism; in spite of Bach ' s op- timal level of form, it would be rather anachronistic to discuss his work in terms of metier; even for Mozart and Schubert, and certainly for Bruckner, it is not quite right; but it applies to Brahms, Wagner, and even Chopin. Today this quality is the difef rentia specifica of art in opposition to the deluge of philistinism, and at the same time it is a criterion of mastery. Nothing crude may remain, even the sim- plest must bear that civilizatory trace. That trace is what is redolent of art in the artwork .
Even the concept of ornament against which Sachlichkeit revolts has its dialectic . To point out that the baroque is decorative does not say everything about it. It is decorazione assoluta , as if it had emancipated itself from every purpose , even the theatrical, and developed its own law of form. It ceases to decorate anything and is, on the contrary, nothing but decoration; thus it eludes the critique of the deco- rative . With regard to baroque works of exalted dignity the objections to "plaster art" are misdirected: The pliant material perfectly fulfills the formal apriori of ab- solute decoration. In these works , through progressive sublimation, the great world theater, the theatrum mundi, became the theatrum dei, the sensual world became a spectacle for the gods.
If the artisanal bourgeois mind expected from the solidity of things that they, holding out against time, can be bequeathed, this idea of solidity has gone over to
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the rigorous working out of objets d'art. Nothing in the circumference of art should be left in its rawness; this intensifies the closure of artworks vis-a-vis em- pirical reality and is associated with the idea of protecting artworks from their transience. Paradoxically, aesthetic bourgeois virtues such as that of solidity have emigrated into antibourgeois avant-garde art.
In so plausible and apparently universally valid a demand as that of clarity-the articulation of every element in the artwork-it is possible to show how every invariant of aesthetics motivates its own dialectic. A second specifically artistic logic is able to surpass the first, that of the distinct. Artworks of high quality are able, for the sake of the densest possible relations, to neglect clarity and bring into proximity with one another complexes that, with regard to the requirement of clarity, would need to be strictly distinguished. The idea of many artworks that want to realize the experience of vagueness actually demands that the boundaries of their constitutive elements be effaced. But in such artworks the vague must be made distinct. Authentic works that defy the exigency of clarity all the same posit it implicitly in order to negate it; essential to these works is not an absence of clarity but rather negated clarity. Otherwise they would be simply amateurish.
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Hegel's dictum that the owl of Minerva begins its flight at dusk is confirmed in art. So long as the existence and function of artworks in society was self-evident and a sort of consensus ruled between the self-certainty of society and the place of artworks in it, no question of aesthetic meaningfulness arose: Its meaningfulness was a foregone conclusion. Aesthetic categories are first subjected to philosophi- cal reflection when art, in Hegel's language, is no longer substantial, no longer immediately present and obvious.
The crisis of meaning in art, immanently provoked by the unstoppable dynamism of nominalism, is linked with extra-aesthetic experience, for the inner-aesthetic nexus that constitutes meaning reflects the meaningfulness of the world and its course as the tacit and therefore all the more powerful apriori of artworks.
The artwork's nexus, as its immanent life, is the afterimage of empirical life on which the reflection of the artwork falls and bestows a reflection of meaning. However, the concept of a nexus of meaning thereby becomes dialectical. The process that immanently reduces the artwork to its own concept, without casting an eye on the universal, reveals itself in the history of art on a theoretical level only after the nexus of meaning itself, and thus its traditional concept, becomes uncertain .
In aesthetics . as in all other domains , rationalization of means necessarily implies their fetishization. The more directly they are disposed over, the more they tend objectively to become ends in themselves. It is this that is truly fatal in the most recent developments in art, not the rejection of any sort of anthropological invari- ants or the sentimentally bemoaned loss of naIvete. The ends, that is, the works, are replaced by their possibilities; vacuous schemata of works take the place of the works themselves; thus the works themselves become a matter of indifference. With the intensification of subjective reason in art, these schemata become sub- jective in the sense of being arbitrarily elaborated independently of the works. As is frequently indicated by the titles of these works, the means employed become ends in themselves, as do the materials employed. This is what is false in the loss of meaning. Just as true and false must be distinguished in the concept of mean- ing, there is also a false collapse of meaning. Its index is affirmation, the glorifica- tion of the status quo in a cult of pure materials and pure mastery; both are thereby falsely severed.
That today positivity is blocked amounts to a verdict over the positivity of the past, but not over the longing that first stirred within it.
Aesthetic splendor is not just affirmative ideology; it is also the reflected glimmer of life free of oppression: In its defiance of ruin it takes the side of hope . Splendor
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is not only the cheap tricks of the culture industry. The higher the quality of a work, the greater its brilliance, and this is most strikingly the case in the instance of those grey-on-grey works of modernism that eclipse Hollywood's technicolor.
Morike' s poem of the abandoned girl is profoundly sad in a way that goes far be- yond the theme itself. Verses such as "Suddenly I realized / unfaithful boy / that all night / I dreamt of you"23 express without any reserve dreadful experiences: here that of awakening from the sensed fragility of sleep's comfort directly into despair. Nevertheless, even this poem has its affirmative element. Despite the authenticity of feeling, this element is lodged in the form, even though that form defends itself against the consolation of secure symmetry through strophic meter. In the tender fiction of a folksong the girl speaks as one among many: Traditional aesthetics would praise the poem for its prototypical qualities. What has been lost since that time is the latent community in which all loneliness was embedded, a situation in which society whispers consolation to one who is as alone as in the earliest dawn. As the tears have run dry, this consolation has become inaudible.
As component parts of the encompassing whole , artworks are not simply things . They participate specifically in reification because their objectivation is modeled on the objectivation of things external to them; it is in this sense, if at all, and not as imitations of any particular reality, that artworks are to be understood as copies. The concept o f classicality , which cannot b e reduced exclusively t o ideology , ap- plies to those artworks that have largely succeeded in such objectivation and thus to those that are most reified. By disowning its own dynamic the objectivated art- work opposes its own concept. Therefore aesthetic objectivation is always also fetishism and provokes permanent rebellion. As Valery recognized, just as no art- work can escape the idea of its classicality, every authentic work must struggle against it; and in this antinomy, not least of all, art has its life . Under the compul- sion to objectivation, artworks tend toward petrification: It is immanent to the principle of their perfection. In that artworks seek to rest in themselves as what exists in-itself, they seal themselves in; yet it is only insofar as they are open that they go beyond the status of being mere entities. Because the process, which all artworks are, dies off in the course of their objectivation, all classicism progres- sively approximates mathematical relations. The rebellion against classicality is raised not only by the subject, who feels repressed, but by the truth claim of art- works, with which the ideal of classicality collides. Conventionalization is not ex- ternal to the objectivation of artworks, nor a result of their decline . Rather, it lurks within them; the overarching bindingness that artworks achieve through their ob- jectivation assimilates them to an ever dominating universality. The classicistic ideal of drossless perfection is no less illusory than the longing for a pure unco-
erced immediacy. Classicistic works lack validity and not just because the ancient models are too remote for imitation; the all-powerful principle of stylization is
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incompatible with the impulses with which it lays claim to unity, a claim on which its prerogative is founded: The achieved incontestability of any and all classicism has something underhanded about it. Beethoven's late works mark the revolt of one of the most powerful classicistic artists against the deception implicit in the principle of his own work . The rhythm of the periodic return of romantic and clas- sicist currents in art, to the extent that such movements can truly be discerned in the history of art, bears witness to the antinomical character of art itself as it is most palpably manifest in the relation of its metaphysical claim of being situated above and beyond time to its actual transience as a merely human work. Indeed, artworks become relative because they must assert themselves as absolute. The perfectly objectivated artwork would be a thing existing absolutely in-itself and no longer an artwork. If the work became nature, as idealism expects, it would be annulled. Ever since Plato , bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objec- tive antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is tom apart by it. The precariousness of classicism is that of the artwork in terms of its own concept. The qualitative leap-the leap by which art approaches the boundary that marks its ultimate muteness - is the consummation of its antinomy .
Valery so honed the concept of classicality that, elaborating on Baudelaire, he dubbed the successful romantic artwork classicaI. 24 This strains the idea of classi- cality to the breaking point. Modem art already registered this more than forty years ago. It is only in its relation to this, as to a disaster, that neoclassicism can be adequately understood. It is directly evident in surrealism. It toppled the images of antiquity from their Platonic heaven. In the paintings of Max Ernst they roam about as phantoms among the burghers of the late nineteenth century, for whom they have been neutralized as mere cultural goods and truly transformed into specters . Wherever the art movements that converged temporarily in Picasso and others external to the groupe took up the theme of antiquity, it led aesthetically directly to hell, just as it did theologically for Christianity. Antiquity's embodied epiphany in prosaic everyday life, which has a long prehistory, disenchants it. Formerly presented as an atemporal norm, antiquity now acquires a historical statu s , that of the bourgeois idea reduced to its bare contours and rendered power- less. Its form is deformation. Inflated interpretations of neoclassicism such as Cocteau's ordre apres Ie desordre, as well as the surrealist interpretation decades later of a romantic liberation of fantasy and association , falsify the phenomena to the point of harmlessness: Following Poe's lead, they summon up the shudder of the instant of disenchantment as enchantment. That this instant was not to be fixed for eternity damned the followers of these movements either to restoration or to a powerless ritual of revolutionary gesturing . Baudelaire proved to be correct: Em- phatic modem art does not thrive in Elysian fields beyond the commodity but is, rather, strengthened by way ofthe experience ofthe commodity, whereas classi-
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cality itself becomes a commodity, an exemplary daub. Brecht's mockery of the cultural treasure secured by its guardians in the form of plaster statues originates in the same context; that a positive concept of classicality worked its way into his thought later on, as it also did in the aesthetics of Stravinsky, whom Brecht scorned as a Tui intellectual, was as inevitable as it was revelatory of the rigidifi- cation of the Soviet Union into an authoritarian state. Hegel's attitude toward classicality was as ambivalent as the attitude of his philosophy toward the alterna- tive between ontology and dynamics . He glorified the art of the Greeks as eternal and unsurpassable and recognized that the classical artwork had been surpassed by what he called the romantic artwork . History , whose verdict he sanctioned, had itself decided against invariance. His sense of the obsolescence of art may well have been colored by a presentiment of such progress. In strictly Hegelian terms, classicism, along with its modem sublimated form, is responsible for its own fate. Immanent critique - its most magnificent model , on the most magnificent object, is Benjamin's study of the Elective tWJnities-pursues the fragility of canonical works into the depths of their truth content; the full potential of such critique still remains to be developed and discovered. Art indeed never embraced the ideal of classicality all that rigorously; to do so, it would have needed to be harder on itself than it in general has been, and when it was, then it really damaged itself and did itself injustice. The freedom of art vis-a-vis the Dira necessitas of the factual is incompatible with classicality in the sense ofperfect univocity, which is as much borrowed from the compulsion of inevitability as it is opposed to it by virtue of its transparent purity. Summum ius summa iniuria is an aesthetic maxim. The more art pursues the logic of classicism and seeks to become an incorruptible reality sui generis, the more indurately it prevaricates an impenetrable threshold between itself and empirical reality. There is some justice to the speculation that, in its relation between what it lays claim to and what it is, art becomes all the more problematic the more rigorously, the more objectively, indeed-if one will-the more classically it proceeds, though with the caveat that the situation of art is not in the least improved when it makes things easier for itself.
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When Benjamin criticized the application to art of the category of necessity,25 he was concerned with the cultural historian's subterfuge of claiming that one art- work or another was necessary for the course of art's development. In fact, this concept of necessity does fulfill the subaltern apologetic function of attesting that without some stale old works, of which there is nothing other to praise, there would have been no getting any further.
The other in art inheres in art's own concept and in every instant threatens to crush it just as neo-Gothic New York churches and Regensburg's medieval city center were destroyed when they became traffic impediments. Art is no fixed set of boundaries but rather a momentary and fragile balance, comparable to the dy- namic balance between the ego and the id in the psychological sphere. Bad art- works become bad only because they objectively raise the claim to being art, a claim they disavow subjectively, as Hedwig Courths-Mahler26 did in a notable letter. The critique that demonstrates how bad they are nevertheless honors them as artworks. They are artworks and then again they are not.
In the course of history, works that were not produced as art or were produced prior to the age of its autonomy are able to become art, and the same is possible in the case of contemporary works that challenge their own status as art. This obvi- ously does not happen, however, in the sense of constituting a putatively valuable preliminary step toward something worthwhile. On the contrary, as occurred in the instance of surrealism, specific aesthetic qualities may emerge that were re- jected by an anti-art deportment that never achieved its goal of becoming a politi- cal force; this is the shape of the careers of important surrealists such as Masson. Equally, what once was art may cease to be art. The availability of traditional art for its own depravation has retroactive power. Innumerable paintings and sculp- tures have been transformed in their own essence to mere decoration as a result of their own offspring. Anyone who would decide to paint cubistically in 1 970 would be providing posters useful for advertisements, and the originals, too, are not safe from being sold off cheap .
Tradition could be salvaged only by its separation from the spell of inwardness. Great artworks of the past were never identical with inwardness; most exploded it through externalization. Strictly speaking, every artwork is a critique of inward- ness in that it externalizes appearance and thus is contrary to the ideology of inwardness, which tradition equates with the hoarded-up treasure of subjective recollection.
The interpretation of art based on its origin is dubious across the board: from bio- graphical research on the study of cultural-historical influences to ontological sublimations of the concept of origin. All the same, origin is not radically external
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to the work . I t i s an implicit part of artworks that they are artifact s . The configura- tions sedimented in each address the context from which it issued. In each its like- ness to its origins is thrown into relief by what it became. This antithetic is essen- tial to its content. Its immanent dynamic crystallizes the dynamic external to it and indeed does so by virtue of its aporetic character. Regardless of their individual endowments and contrary to them, if artworks are unable to achieve their mon- adological unity, they succumb to real historical pressure; it becomes the force that inwardly dislocates them. This is not the least of the reasons why an artwork is adequately perceived only as a process. If however the individual work is a force field, a dynamic configuration of its elements , this holds no less for art itself as a whole . Therefore art cannot be understood all at once , but only in terms of its elements, in a mediated fashion . One of these elements is that by which artworks contrast with what is not art; their attitude to objectivity changes.
The historical tendency reaches profoundly into the aesthetic criteria.
