No More Learning

Just how little progress in art has been a phylogenetically un- broken course can be learned ontogenetically . Innovators rarely have more power over what is old than did their predecessors . No aesthetic progress without forget- ting; hence, all progress involves regression. Brecht made forgetting his program on cultural-critical grounds that are justly suspicious of cultural tradition as a golden chain of ideologies. Phases of forgetting and, complementarily, those of the reemergence of what has long been taboo-for example, the reprise of the di- dactic poem in Brecht-usually involve genres rather than individual works; this is also true of taboos such as that which has today fallen on subjective - and espe- cially erotic-poetry, which was once an expression of emancipation. In fact, the continuity of art can be construed only from a very great distance. Rather, the his- tory of art has nodal points. Although partial histories of genre have their legiti- macy-such as those of landscape painting, portraiture, the opera-they should not be overtaxed. This is strikingly corroborated by the history ofparody and con- trafactum in older music . In Bach's oeuvre it is his technique, the complexion and density of the composition, that is truly progressive and more to the point than whether he wrote secular or religious, vocal or instrumental music; to this extent nominalism retrospectively affects the knowledge of older music. The impossibil- ity of a univocal construction of the history of art and the fatality of all disquisi- tions on its progress-which exists and then again does not exist-originate in art's double character as being socially determined in its autonomy and at the same time social. When the social character of art overwhelms its autonomy, when its immanent structure explosively contradicts its social relations , autonomy is sacrificed and with it art's continuity; it is one of the weaknesses of the history of ideas that it idealistically ignores this. For the most part, when continuity shat- ters it is the relations of production that win out over the forces of production; there is no cause to chime in with such social triumph. Art develops by way of the social whole; that is to say, it is mediated by society'S ruling structure. Art's his- tory is not a string of individual causalities; no univocal necessities lead from one phenomenon to the next. Its history may be called necessary only with regard to the total social tendency, not in reference to its individual manifestations. Its pat construction from above is as false as faith in the incommensurable genius of indi- vidual works that transports them out of the realm of necessity. A noncontradic- tory theory of the history of art is not to be conceived: The essence of its history is contradictory in itself.
Undoubtedly , the historical materials and their dornination- technique - advance; discoveries such as those of perspective in painting and polyphony in music are the most obvious examples. Beyond this, progress is also undeniable in the logical development of established methodology, as is evident in the differentiation of
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harmonic consciousness between the age of thoroughbass composition and the threshold of new music, or in the transition from impressionism to pointillism. Such unmistakable progress is, however, not necessarily that of quality. Only blindness could deny the aesthetic means gained in painting from Giotto and Cimabue to Piero della Francesca; however, to conclude that Piero's paintings are therefore better than the frescos of Assisi would be schoolmarmish. Whereas with regard to a particular work the question of quality can be posed and decided, and whereas relations are thereby indeed implicit in the judgment of various works, such judgments become art-alien pedantry as soon as comparison is made under the heading of "better than": Such controversies are in no way immune from cul- tural nonsense. However much works are distinguished from each other by their quality, they are at the same time incommensurable. They communicate with each other exclusively by way of antitheses: "Every work is the mortal enemy of the other. "6 They become comparable only by annihilating themselves, by realizing their life through their mortality. It is difficult to distinguish-and if at all then only in concreto-which archaic and primitive traits result from technique and which from the objective idea of the work; the two can be separated only arbitrarily. Even flaws may become eloquent , whereas what is excellent may in the course of history narrow the truth content. The history of art is just that antinomical. The subcutaneous structure of Bach ' s most important instrumental works can only be brought out in performance by means of an orchestral palette that he did not have at his disposal; yet it would be ridiculous to wish for perspective in medieval paintings , which would rob them of their specific expression . - Progress can be surpassed by progress. The reduction, and ultimately the canceling, of perspective in modern painting produces correspondences with preperspectival works that raises in estimation the distant past above the more recent past; these correspon- dences become philistine , however, if primitive and superseded methods are em- ployed for modern works and progress in the mastery over the material is dispar- aged and revoked. Even progressive mastery over the material is sometimes paid for with a loss in the mastery over the material. The greater familiarity with exotic musics that had previously been dismissed as primitive suggests that Western music's polyphony and rationalization-which are inseparable and which opened up all its richness and depths -dulled the power of differentiation that is alive in the minimal rhythmic and melodic variations of monadic music; the rigidity-and, for European ears, the monotony-of exotic music was obviously the condition for this differentiation. Ritual pressure strengthened the capacity to differentiate in a narrow sphere, where it was tolerated, whereas European music, under less pressure, was less in need of such correctives. As a result, only Western music achieved full autonomy-the status of art-and the consciousness that is imma- nent to it cannot arbitrarily leave it in order to broaden itself in some fashion . Un- deniably, a finer capacity to differentiate, which is always an aspect of the aes- thetic mastery over material, is bound up with spiritualization; it is the subjective
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correlative of objective control, the capacity to sense what has become possible, as a result of which art becomes freer to its own task : the protest against the mas- tery over material itself. Volition within the involuntary is the paradoxical for- mula for the possible dissolution of the antinomy of aesthetic domination. The mastery over the material implies spiritualization, though this spiritualization, as the autonomy of spirit vis-a-vis its other, immediately endangers itself again. The sovereign aesthetic spirit has a tendency to communicate itself rather than to give voice to what is at stake, which alone would fulfill the idea of spiritualiza- tion. The prix duprogres is inherent in progress itself, and this is most apparent in the declining authenticity and bindingness of art and in the growing sense of acci- dentalness; this is directly identical with progress of the domination of the mater- ial, as seen in the intensification of the elaboration of the individual work. It is un- certain whether this loss is factual or merely semblance. For naIve consciousness, as for that of the musician, a song from Die Winterreise may seem more authentic than one by Webem, as ifthe former had hit upon something objective whereas in the latter the content is narrowed to merely individual experience. Yet this distinc- tion is dubious. In works with the dignity of Webem's music, differentiation- which to untutored ears damages the objectivity of the content - is of a piece with the developing capacity to shape the work more precisely, to purge it of all residue of the schematic, and precisely this is what is called objectivation. Intimate expe- rience of authentic modem art loses the feeling of contingency that arises as long as a language is perceived to be necessary that has not been demolished simply by the subjective need for expression but rather by this need in the process of objecti- vation. Clearly artworks themselves are not indifferent to the transformation of their binding element into monad . That they appear to become more indifferent is not simply the result of their diminishing social effect. There is reason to think that works, through the shift to pure immanence, forfeit their coefficient of fric- tion, an element of their essence; that they also become more indifferent in them- selves . However, that radically abstract images can be displayed in public spaces without irritating anyone does not justify any restoration of representational art, which is a priori comforting even when Che Guevara is chosen for the goal of rec- onciliation with the object. Finally, progress is not only that of the domination of material and spiritualization but also the progress of spirit in Hegel's sense of the consciousness of freedom. Whether the domination of the material in Beethoven goes beyond that in Bach can be disputed endlessly; with regard to various dimen- sions, each had superior mastery of the material. Although the question of whom to rank higher is idle, the same cannot be said of the insight that the voice of the maturity of the subject, the emancipation from and reconciliation with myth-that is, the truth content-reached a higher development in Beethoven than in Bach. This criterion surpasses all others.
The aesthetic name for mastery over material-technique, a borrowing from an- tiquity, which ranked the arts among artisanal activities-is ofrecent date in its
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present acceptation. It bears the traces of a phase in which, analogous to science, methods were considered to be independent of their object. In retrospect , all artis- tic procedures that form the material and allow themselves to be guided by it coa- lesce under the technological aspect, including those procedures that originated in the artisanal praxis ofthe medieval production ofgoods, a praxis from which art, resisting integration into capitalism, never completely diverged. In art the thresh- old between craft and technique is not, as in material production, a strict quantifi- cation of processes, which is incompatible with art's qualitative telos; nor is it the introduction of machines; rather, it is the predominance of conscious free control over the aesthetic means, in contrast to traditionalism, under the cover of which this control matured . Vis-a-vis content [Gehaltl , the technical aspect is only one aspect among many others; no artwork is nothing but the quintessence of its technical elements. That any view of artworks that perceives nothing but how they are made falls short of aesthetic experience is admittedly a standard apolo- getic topos proferred by cultural ideology, yet it nevertheless remains true in opposition to the functionalist view of art at the point where functionalism is for- saken. Technique is, however, constitutive of art, because in it is condensed the fact that each artwork is a human artifact and that what is artistic in it becomes a human product. Technique and content must be distinguished; what is ideological is the abstraction that extracts the supratechnical from what is purportedly merely technique, as if in important works technique and content did not produce each other reciprocally. Shakespeare' s nominalistic breakthrough into mortal and infi- nitely rich individuality-as content-is as much a function of an antitectonic, quasi-epic succession of short scenes as this episodic technique is under the con- trol of the content: a metaphysical experience that explodes the meaning-giving order of the old unities. In the priestly word "message" the dialectical relation of content and technique is reified as a simple dichotomy. Technique has key signifi- cance for the knowledge of art; it alone leads reflection to the interior of works, though of course only on condition that one speak their language. Because the content is not something made, technique does not circumscribe art as a whole, yet it is exclusively from its concretion that the content can be extrapolated. Tech- nique is the definable figure of the enigma in artworks , at once rational and con- ceptless. It authorizes judgment in a region that does not make judgments. Cer- tainly the technical questions of artworks become infinitely complex and cannot be solved on the basis of a single maxim. Yet in principle they can be immanently decided. Technique, as the measure of the "logic" of works, is also the measure of the suspension of logic. The surgical excision of technique would suit a vulgar mentality, but it would be false. For the technique of a work is constituted by its problems, by the aporetic task that it objectively poses to itself. It is only with regard to this problem that the technique of a work can be discerned and the ques- tion answered as to whether or not it suffices , just as inversely the objective prob- lem of the work must be inferred from its technical complexion. If no work can
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be understood without an understanding of its technique, technique conversely cannot be understood without an understanding of the work . The degree to which, beyond the specification of a particular work, a technique is universal or monado- logical varies historically, yet even in idolized eras, when style was binding, tech- nique had the responsibility of assuring that style did not abstractly rule the work but entered into the dialectic of the work's individuation. How much more signifi- cant technique is than art-alien irrationalism would like to admit is obvious in that, presupposing the capacity for the experience of art, experience unfolds all the more richly the more deeply consciousness penetrates the artwork's technical complexion. Understanding grows along with an understanding of the technical treatment of the work. That consciousness kills is a nursery tale; only false con- sciousness is fatal. Metier initially makes art commensurable to consciousness because for the most part it can be learned. What a teacher finds fault with in a student's work is the first model of a lack of metier; corrections are the model of metier itself. These models are preartistic insofar as they recapitulate preestab- lished patterns and rules; they take a step beyond this when they become the com- parison of technical means with the sought-after goal. At a primitive level of edu- cation, beyond which, admittedly, the usual study of composition rarely goes, the teacher finds fault with parallel fifths and in their place suggests better voiceleading ; but if he is not a pedant, he will demonstrate to the student that parallel fifths are legitimate artistic means for intended effects, as in Debussy, and that external to tonality the prohibition loses its meaning altogether. Metier ultimately sloughs off its provisional, limited shape. The experienced eye that surveys a score or a drawing ascertains, almost mimetically, before any analysis, whether the objet d'art has metier and innervates its level of form. Yet this does not suffice. An account is necessary of the work's metier, which appears as a breath-the aura of artworks - in strange contrast to the dilettante ' s image of artistic skill . The auratic element, paradoxically apparent and bound up with metier, is the memory of the hand that, tenderly , almost caressingly, passed over the contours of the work and, by articulating them, also mollified them. This relation of aura and metier can be brought out by analysis, which is itself lodged in metier. In contrast to the synthe- sizing function of artworks, which is familiar to all, the analytical element is strangely ignored. Its locus is the counterpole to synthesis, that is, it focuses on the economy of the elements out of which the work is composed; yet, no less than synthesis, it inheres objectively in the artwork. The conductor, who analyzes a work in order to perform it adequately rather than mimicking it, recapitulates a precondition of the possibility of the work itself. Analysis provides clues to a higher concept of metier: In music , for instance , the "flow" of a piece is concerned with whether it is thought in individual measures or in phrases that reach over and above them; or whether impulses are followed through and pursued rather than
being left to peter out in patchwork. This movement in the concept of technique provides the true gradus ad Pamassum. Only in the course of an aesthetic casu-
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istry , however, does this become completely evident. When Alban Berg answered in the negative the naIve question whether Strauss was not to be admired at least for his technique , he pointed up the arbitrariness of Strauss ' s method, which care- fully calculates a series of effects without seeing to it that, in purely musical terms, one event emerges from, or is made requisite by, another. This technical critique of highly technical works obviously disregards a conception of composi- tion that asserts the principle of shock as fundamental and actually transfers the unity of the composition into the irrational suspension of what traditional style called logicality, unity. It could be argued that this concept of technique ignores the immanence of the work and has external origins, specifically in the ideal of a school that, like Schoenberg ' s , anachronistically maintains the idea of developing variation, a vestige of traditional musical logic, in order to mobilize it against tradition. But this argument avoids the actual artistic issue. Berg's critique of Strauss's metier hits the mark because whoever refuses logic is incapable of the elaboration of the work that serves that metier to which Strauss himself was com- mitted. True, already in Berlioz the breaks and leaps of the imprevu were sought after; they at the same time disrupt the thrust of the music's course, which is re- placed by the thrusting gesture. Music organized in such temporal-dynamic fash- ion as that of Strauss is incompatible with a compositional method that does not coherently organize temporal succession. Ends and means are contradictory. The contradiction cannot be assuaged simply within the realm of means, but instead extends to the goal itself, the glorification of contingency, which celebrates as an unencumbered life something that is no more than the anarchy of commodity production and the brutality of those who control it. There is a false concept of continuity implicit in the view of artistic technique as a straight line of progress independent from content; movements espousing the liberation of technique are capable of being affected by the untruth of the content. Just how inwardly tech- nique and content-contrary to accepted opinion-are mutually defining was ex- pressed by Beethoven when he said that many of the effects that are commonly attributed to the natural genius of the composer are in truth due to the adroit use of the diminished seventh chord; the dignity of such sober assessment condemns all the chatter about creativity; Beethoven's objectivity was the first time justice was done equally to aesthetic illusion and the illusionless. The recognition of inconsis- tencies between technique-an artwork's intention, especially its expressive- mimetic dimension-and its truth content sometimes provokes revolts against technique. Self-emancipation at the price of its goal is endogenous to the concept of technique . It has a propensity to become an end-in-itself as a sort of contentless proficiency. Fauvism was a reaction against this in painting; the analogous reac- tion in music was the rise of Schoenberg's free atonality in opposition to the or- chestral brilliance of the neu-deutsch school . In his essay "Problems in Teaching Art;'7 Schoenberg-who, more than any other musician of his epoch, insisted on consistent craftsmanship-expressly attacked blind faith in technique. Reified
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technique sometimes provokes correctives that border on the "wild," the barbaric, the technically primitive and art-alien. What can truly be called modem art was hurled out by this primitive impulse, which, because it could not domesticate it- self, transformed itself at every point once again into technique. Yet this impulse was in no way regressive. Technique is not an abundance of means but rather the accumulated capacity to be suited to what the object itself demands. This idea of technique is sometimes better served by the reduction of means than by piling it up and exhausting the work. Schoenberg's economical Piano Pieces, op. 1 1 , with all the wonderful ungainliness of their innovativeness, are technically superior to the orchestration of Strauss's Heldenleben, of which only a part of the score is acoustically perceptible; here the means are no longer adequate even to their most immediate end, the sounding appearance of what is imagined. It is possible that the mature Schoenberg's second technique, the twelve-tone system, fell short of what was achieved by the earlier act of suspension involved in his first technique, atonality . But even the emancipation of technique , which draws technique into its particular dialectic, is not simply the original sin of routine, which is how it ap- pears to the unalloyed need for expression . Because of its close bond with content , technique has a legitimate life of its own. In the process of change, art habitually finds itself in need of those elements that it was previously obliged to renounce. This neither explains nor excuses the fact that to date, artistic revolutions have been reactionary, but it is certainly bound up with it. Prohibitions, including the prohibition on luxuriating plentitude and complexity, have a regressive aspect; this is one of the reasons why prohibition, however saturated it may be with re- fusal , ultimately collapses. This constitutes one of the dimensions in the process of objectivation. When, some ten years after World War II, composers had had enough of post-Webernian pointillism-a striking example of which is Boulez's Marteau sans maitre-the process repeated itself, this time as the critique of the
ideology of any absolute new beginning, of starting out with a clean slate. Four decades earlier the transition from Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon to synthetic cubism may have had a related meaning. The same historical experiences are expressed in the rise and fall of technical allergies as are expressed in the content; in this, content communicates with technique. -Kant's idea of purposefulness, which as he conceived it established the connection between art and the interior of nature, is most closely related to technique. Technique is that whereby artworks are organized as purposeful in a way that is denied to empirical existence; only through technique do they become purposeful . Because of its sobriety the empha- sis on technique in art alienates philistines: It makes art's provenance in prosaic praxis-of which art stands in horror-all too obvious. Nowhere does art make itself so guilty of illusoriness as in the irrevocable technical aspect of its sorcery, for only through technique, the medium of art's crystallization, does art distance itself from the prosaic. Technique insures that the artwork is more than an ag- glomeration of what is factually available, and this more is art's content.
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I n the language o f art, expressions like technique, metier, and craft are synonyms . This points up that anachronistic aspect of craft that Valery ' s melancholy did not overlook. It admixes something idyllic with art's existence in an age in which nothing true is any longer permitted to be harmless. On the other hand, however, whenever autonomous art has seriously set out to absorb industrial processes , they have remained external to it. Mass reproduction has in no way become its imma- nent law of form to the extent that identification with the aggressor would like to suggest. Even in film; industrial and aesthetic-craftsmanlike elements diverge under socioeconomic pressure. The radical industrialization of art, its undimin- ished adaptation to the achieved technical standards, collides with what in art re- sists integration. If technique strives for industrialization as its vanishing point, it does so at the cost of the immanent elaboration of the work and thus at the cost of technique itself. This instills into art an archaic element that compromises it. The fanatic predilection that generations of youth have had for jazz unconsciously protests against this and at the same time manifests the implicit contradiction, for production that adapts to industry or, at the least, acts as if it had done so, falls helplessly behind the artistic-compositional forces of production in terms of its own aesthetic complexion. The current tendency, evident in media of all kinds, to manipulate accident is probably an effort to avoid old-fashioned and effectively superfluous craftsmanlike methods in art without delivering art over to the instru- mental rationality of mass production. The suspicious question as to art in the age of technology, as unavoidable as it is a socially naIve slogan of the epoch, can be approached only by reflection on the relation of artworks to purposefulness. Cer- tainly artworks are defined by technique as something that is purposeful in itself. The work's terminus ad quem, however, has its locus exclusively in itself, not externally . Therefore the technique of its immanent purposefulness also remains "without a purpose," whereas technique itself constantly has extra-aesthetic tech- nique as its model. Kant's paradoxical formulation expresses an antinomical rela- tion, though the antinomist did not make it explicit: In the process of becoming in- creasingly technical, which irrevocably binds them to functional forms, artworks come into contradiction with their purposelessness. In applied arts, products are, for example , adapted to the streamlined form that serves to reduce air resistance , even though the chairs will not be meeting with this resistance. Applied arts are, however, a prophetic warning for art. Art's irrevocably rational element, which is concentrated as its technique, works against art. It is not that rationality kills the unconscious, the substance of art, or whatever; technique alone made art capable of admitting the unconscious into itself. But precisely by virtue of its absolute
autonomy the rational, purely elaborated artwork would annul its difference from empirical existence; without imitating it, the artwork would assimilate itself to its opposite, the commodity. It would be indistinguishable from completely func- tional works except that it would have no purpose, and this, admittedly, would speak against it. The totality of inner-aesthetic purposefulness develops into the
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problem of art's purposefulness beyond its own sphere, a problem for which it has no answer. The judgment holds that the strictly technical artwork comes to ruin , and those works that restrict their own technique are inconsequential. If technique is the quintessence of art's language, it at the same time inescapably liquidates its language . In art no less than in other domains the concept of the technical force of production cannot be fetishized. Otherwise it would become a reflex of that tech- nocracy that is a form of domination socially disguised under the semblance of rationality. Technical forces of production have no value in themselves. They receive their importance exclusively in relation to their purpose in the work, and ultimately in relation to the truth content of what has been written, composed, or painted. Of course, such purposefulness of technical means in art is not transpar- ent. Purpose often hides in technology without the latter's adequacy to the pur- pose being immediately ascertainable. Thus the discovery and rapid development of instrumental technique in the early nineteenth century bore the technocratic traces of Saint-Simonian technocracy . How this instrumental integration of works in all their dimensions was related to purpose only became evident at a later stage, and at that point once again qualitatively transformed orchestral technique. In art the entwinement of purpose and technical means is an admonition for the circum- spect invocation of categorial judgments on their quid pro quo. Likewise, it is uncertain whether adaptation to extra-aesthetic technique necessarily amounts, inner-aesthetically, to progress. This could hardly be claimed in the case of the Symphonie jantastique, a pendant to early world fairs, in comparison with the contemporaneous late work of Beethoven. Beginning in those years, the erosion of subjective mediation, which almost always accompanies technologization, took its toll on music, as is evident in the lack of real compositional elaboration in Berlioz's work; the technological artwork is by no means a priori more consistent than that which, in response to industrialization, turns inward, intent on producing the effect of an "effect without a cause. " What hits the mark in the various reflec- tions on art in what journalists call the technological age, which is just as much marked by the social relations of production as by the level of productive forces, is not so much the adequacy of art to technical development as the transformation of the experiential forms sedimented in artworks. The question is that of the aes- thetic world of imagery: Preindustrial imagery irretrievably had to collapse. The sentence with which Benjamin's reflections on surrealism began-HIt no longer feels right to dream about the blue flower"8 - gets to the heart of the matter. Art is mimesis of the world of imagery and at the same time its enlightenment through forms of control . The world of imagery , itself thoroughly historical , is done an in- justice by the fiction of a world of images that effaces the relations in which peo-
ple live. The utilization of available technical means in accord with the critical consciousness of art does not offer a solution to the problem whether and how art is possible that, as an uneducable innocence thinks of it, would be relevant in today ' s world; on the contrary , any solution demands the authenticity of a form of
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experience that does not lay claim to an immediacy it has lost. Today immediacy of aesthetic comportment is exclusively an immediate relationship to the univer- sally mediated. That today any walk in the woods, unless elaborate plans have been made to seek out the most remote forests , is accompanied by the sound ofjet engines overhead not only destroys the actuality of nature as, for instance, an ob- ject of poetic celebration. It affects the mimetic impulse. Nature poetry is anach- ronistic not only as a subject: Its truth content has vanished. This may help clarify the anorganic aspect of Beckett ' s as well as of Celan' s poetry . It yearns neither for nature nor for industry ; it is precisely the integration of the latter that leads to poeti- zation, which was already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its part to making peace with an unpeaceful world. Art, as an anticipatory form of reac- tion, is no longer able-if it ever was-to embody pristine nature or the industry that has scorched it; the impossibility of both is probably the hidden law of aes- thetic nonrepresentationalism. The images of the postindustrial world are those of a corpse; they want to avert atomic war by banning it, just as forty years ago sur- realism sought to save Paris through the image of cows grazing in the streets, the same cows after which the people of bombed-out Berlin rebaptized Kurfiirsten- damm as Kudamm. 9 In relation to its telos, all aesthetic technique falls under the shadow of irrationality , which is the opposite of that for which aesthetic irrational-
ism criticizes technique; and this shadow is anathema to technique. Of course, an element of universality cannot be eliminated from technique any more than from the movement of nominalism as a whole. Cubism and composition with twelve tones related only to one anotherlO are , in terms of their idea, universal procedures in the age of the negation of aesthetic universality. The tension between objecti- vating technique and the mimetic essence of artworks is fought out in the effort to save the fleeting, the ephemeral , the transitory in a form that is immune to reifica- tion and yet akin to it in being permanent. It is probably only in this Sisyphean struggle that the concept of artistic technique took shape; it is akin to the tour de force. This is the focal point of Valery ' s theory , a rational theory of aesthetic irra- tionality. Incidentally, art's impulse to objectivate the fleeting, not the permanent, may well run through the whole of its history . Hegel failed to recognize this and for this reason, in the midst of dialectics, failed to recognize the temporal core of art's truth content. The subjectivization of art throughout the nineteenth century, which at the same time unbound its technical forces of production, did not sacri- fice the objective idea of art but rather, by bringing it fully into time, set it in sharper, purer relief than any classicist purity ever achieved. Thus the greatest jus- tice that was done to the mimetic impulse becomes the greatest injustice, because permanence, objectivation, ultimately negates the mimetic impulse. Yet the guilt for this is borne not by art's putative decline but by the idea of art itself.
Aesthetic nominalism is a process that transpires in the form and that ultimately becomes form; even here the universal and the particular are mediated . The nomi- nalistic prohibitions on predefined forms are, as prescriptions, canonical. The cri-
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tique of forms is entwined with the critique of their formal adequacy.
Prototypical in this regard is the distinction between closed and open forms , which is relevant to all theory of form. Open forms are those universal genre categories that seek an equilibrium with the nominalistic critique of universality that is founded on the experience that the unity of the universal and the particular, which is claimed by artworks, fundamentally fails. No pregiven universal unprotestingly receives a particular that does not derive from a genre . The perpetuated universality of forms becomes incompatible with form ' s own meaning; the promise of something rounded, overarching, and balanced is not fulfilled. For this is a promise made to what is heterogeneous to the forms, which probably never tolerated identity with them. Forms that rattle on after their moment is past do the form itself injustice. Form that has become reified with regard to its other is no longer form. The se. nse of form in Bach, who in many regards opposed bourgeois nominalism, did not consist in showing respect for traditional forms but rather in keeping them in mo- tion, or better: in not letting them harden in the first place; Bach was nominalistic on the basis of his sense of form. A not unrancorous cliche praises the novel for its gift of form, yet the cliche has its justification not in the novel ' s happy manipula- tion of forms but in its capacity for maintaining the lability of forms to what is formed , of yielding to it out of sensual sympathy rather than simply taming it. The sense for forms instructs on their problematic : that the beginning and end of a mu- sical phrase, the balanced composition of a painting, stage rituals such as death or marriage of heroes are vain because they are arbitrary: What is shaped does not honor the form that shapes. If, however, the renunciation of ritual in the idea of an open genre - which is itself often conventional enough, like the rondo - is free of the lie of necessity, the idea of the genre becomes all the more exposed to contin- gency. The nominalistic artwork should become an artwork by being organized from below to above, not by having principles of organization foisted on it. But no artwork left blindly to itself possesses the power of organization that would set up binding boundaries for itself: Investing the work with such a power would in fact be fetishistic. Unchecked aesthetic nominalism liquidates-just as philosophical critique does with regard to Aristotle - all forms as a remnant of a spiritual being- in-itself. It terminates in a literal facticity, and this is irreconcilable with art. In an artist with the incomparable level of form of Mozart it would be possible to show how closely that artist's most daring and thus most authentic formal structures verge on nominalistic collapse. The artifactual character of the artwork is incom- patible with the postulate ofpure relinquishment to the material. By being some- thing made , artworks acquire that element of organization, of being something di- rected ' in the dramaturgical sense, that is anathema to the nominalistic sensibility. The historical aporia of aesthetic nominalism culminates in the insufficiency of open forms, a striking example ofwhich is Brecht's difficulty in writing convinc- ing conclusions to his plays. A qualitative leap in the general tendency to open form is, moreover, not to be overlooked. The older open forms were based on tra-
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ditional forms that they modified but from which they maintained more than just the external trappings. The classical Viennese sonata was a dynamic yet closed form, and this closure was precarious; the rondo, with the intentional freedom in the alternation of refrain and couplets, was a decidedly open form. All the same, in the fiber of what was composed, the difference was not so substantial. From Beethoven to Mahler, the sonata rondo was much employed, which transplanted the development section of the sonata to the rondo , thus balancing off the playful- ness of the open form with the bindingness of the closed form. This was possible because the rondo form was itself never literally pledged to contingency but rather, in the spirit of a nominalistic age and in recollection of the much older spirit of the rounded canon, the alternation between choir and soloist adapted to the demand for an absence of constraint in an established form. The rondo lent itself better to cheap standardization than did the dynamically developing sonata, whose dynamic, in spite of its closure, did not permit typification. The sense of form, which in the rondo at the very least gave the impression of contingency, required guarantees in order not to explode the genre. Antecedent forms in Bach, such as the Presto of his Italian concerto, were more flexible, less rigid, more complexly elaborated than were Mozart's rondos, which belonged to a later stage of nominalism. The qualitative reversal occurred when in place of the oxymoron of the open form a new procedure appeared that, indifferent to the genres, com- pletely followed the nominalistic commandment; paradoxically, the results had greater closure than their conciliatory predecessors; the nominalistic urge for authenticity resists the playful forms as descendants offeudal divertissement. The seriousness in Beethoven is bourgeois. Contingency impinged on form. Ultimately, contingency is a function of growing structuration. This explains apparently mar- ginal events such as the temporally contracting scope of musical compositions , as well as the miniature format of Klee's best works. Resignation vis-a-vis time and space gave ground to the crisis of nominalistic form until it was reduced to a mere point, effectively inert. Action painting, ['art informelle, and aleatorical works may have carried the element of resignation to its extreme: The aesthetic subject exempts itself of the burden of giving form to the contingent material it encoun- ters , despairing of the possibility of undergirding it, and instead shifts the respon- sibility for its organization back to the contingent material itself. The gain here is , however, dubious. Form purportedly distilled from the contingent and the hetero- geneous itself remains heterogenous and, for the artwork , arbitrary ; in its literal- ness it is alien to art. Statistics are used to console for the absence of traditional forms . This situation holds embedded in itself the figure of its own critique . Nom- inalistic artworks constantly require the intervention of the guiding hand they conceal in the service of their principle. The extremely objective critique of sem- blance incorporates an illusory element that is perhaps as irrevocable as the aes- thetic semblance of all artworks . Often in artistic products of chance a necessity is sensed to subordinate these works to, effectively, a stylizing procedure of selec-
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tion. Carriger Lafortune: This is the fateful writing on the wall of the nominalistic artwork. Itsfortune is nothing of the kind but rather that fateful spell from which artworks have tried to extricate themselves ever since art lodged its claim against myth in antiquity. Beethoven's music, which was no less affected by nominalism than was Hegel's philosophy, is incomparable in that the intervention enjoined by the problematic of form is permeated with autonomy, that is, with the freedom of the subject that is coming to self-consciousness. He legitimated what, from the standpoint of the artwork that was to be developed entirely on its own terms , must have seemed like an act of coercion on the basis of its own content . No artwork is worthy of its name that would hold at bay what is accidental in terms of its own law of form. For form is, according to its own concept, the form of something , and this something must not be permitted to become merely the tautology of form. But the necessity of this relation of form to its other undermines form; form cannot set itself up vis-a-vis the heterogeneous as that purity that as form it wants to be just as much as it requires the heterogeneous. The immanence of form in the hetero- geneous has its limits . Nevertheless the history of the whole of bourgeois art was not possible except as the effort if not to solve the antinomy of nominalism then at least to give it shape, to win form from its negation. In this the history of modern art is not merely analogous to the history of philosophy: It is the same history. What Hegel called the unfolding of truth occurred as the same process of unfold- ing both in art and philosophy.
The necessity of bringing about the objectivation of the nominalistic element, which this element at the same time resists, engenders the principle of construc- tion. Construction is the form of works that is no longer imposed on them ready- made yet does not arise directly out of them either, but rather originates in its reflection through subjective reason. Historically, the concept of construction originated in mathematics; it was applied to substantive concerns for the first time in Schelling's speculative philosophy, where it was to serve as the common de- nominator of the diffusely contingent and the need for form. The concept of con- struction in art comes close to this. Because art can no longer rely on any objectiv- ity of universals and yet by its own concept is none the less the objectivation of impulses, objectivation becomes functionalized. By demolishing the security of forms , nominalism made all artpLein air long before this became an unmetaphoric slogan. Thinking and art both became dynamic. It is hardly an unfair overgeneral- ization to say that nominalistic art has a chance of objectivation only through immanent development, through the processual character of every particular art- work. Dynamic objectivation, however, the determination of the work as existing in itself, involves a static element. In construction the dynamic reverses com- pletely into the static: The constructed work stands still. Nominalism's progress thus reaches its own limit. In literature the prototype of dynamization was in- trigue, in music the prototype was the development section. In Haydn's develop- ments a self-preoccupied busyness, opaque to itself in terms of its own purpose,
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became an objective determining basis of what is perceived as an expression of subjective humor. The individual activity of the motifs as they pursue their sepa- rate interests , all the while assured by a sort of residual ontology that through this activity they serve the harmony of the whole , is unmistakably reminiscent of the zealous, shrewd, and narrow-minded demeanor of intrigants, the descendants of the dumb devil; his dumbness infiltrates even the emphatic works of dynamic classicism, just as it lingers on in capitalism. The aesthetic function of such means was dynamically , through development , to confirm the process ignited by a unique element: The premises immediately posited by the work are fulfilled as its result. There is a kind of cunning of unreason that strips the intrigant of his narrow- mindedness; the tyrannical individual becomes the affirmation of the process. The reprise, peculiarly long-lived in the history of music , embodies to an equal degree affirmation and - as the repetition of what is essentially unrepeatable - limitation . Intrigue and development are not only subjective activity, temporal development for itself. They also represent unleashed, blind, and self-consuming life in the works. Against it, artworks are no longer a bulwark. Every intrigue, literally and figuratively, says: This is how things are, this is what it's like out there. In the por- trayal of this "Comment c ' est" the unwitting artwork is permeated by its other, its own essence, the movement toward objectivation, and is motivated by that hetero- geneous other. This is possible because intrigue and development, which are sub- jective aesthetic means, when transplanted into the work acquire that quality of subjective objectivation that they have in the external world, where they reproach social labor and its narrow-mindedness with its potential superfluity. This super- fluity is truly the point at which art coincides with the real world's business. To the extent to which a drama - itself a sonatalike product of the bourgeois era - is in musical terms "worked," that is, dissected into the smallest motifs and objecti- vated in their dynamic synthesis, to this extent, and right into the most sublime moments, the echo ofcommodity production can be heard. The common nexus of these art-technical procedures and material processes , which has developed in the course of industrialization, has yet to be clarified but is nevertheless strikingly evident. With the emergence of intrigue and development, however, commodity production not only migrates into artworks in the form of a heterogeneous life but indeed also as their own law: nominalistic artworks were unwitting tableaux economiques. This is the historicophilosophical origin of modern humor. Cer- tainly it is through external industry that life is reproduced. It is a means to an end. But it subordinates all ends until it itself becomes an end in itself and truly absurd . This is recapitulated in art in that the intrigues, plots, and developments, as well as the depravity and crime of detective novels, absorb all interest. By contrast, the conclusions to which they lead sink to the level of the stereotypical. Thus real in- dustry, which by its own definition is only a for-something, contradicts its own definition and becomes silly in itself and ridiculous for the artist. Through the form of his finales, Haydn, one of the greatest composers, showed the futility of
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the dynamics by which they are objectivated, and did so in a way that became paradigmatical for art; this is the locus of whatever may justly be called humor in Beethoven. However, the more intrigue and dynamics become ends in them- selves-intrigue already reached the level of thematic frenzy in Les liaisons dan- gereuses-the more comic do they become in art as well; and the more does the affect associated subjectively with this dynamic effectively become rage over the lost penny: It becomes the element of indifference in individuation. The dynamic principle, by means of which art was long and insistently justified in hoping for homeostasis between the universal and the particular, is rejected. Even its magic is shorn away by the sense for form; it begins to seem inept. This experience can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire, the apologist of form no less than the poet of the vie modeme, expressed this in the dedication of Le spleen de Paris when he wrote that he can break off where he pleases, and so may the reader, "for I have not strung his wayward will to the endless thread of some unneccessary plot. ") ) What was organized by nominalistic art by means of development is stigmatized as superfluous once the intention of its function is recognized, and this becomes an irritant. With this comment, the chief figure of the whole of l 'art pour l 'art effectively capitulates: His degout extends to the dynamic principle that engenders the work as autonomous in itself. Since that moment the law of all art has been its antilaw . Just as for the bourgeois nominalistic artwork the necessity of a static form decayed, here it is the aesthetic dynamic that decays in accord with the experience first formulated by Kiirnberger but flashing up in each line and stanza of Baudelaire, that life no longer exists. This has not changed in the situation in which contemporary art finds itself. Art's processual character has been overtaken by the critique of semblance, and not merely as the critique of aesthetic universality but rather as that of progress in the midst of what is ever-the-same. Process has been unmasked as repetition and has thus become an embarrassment to art. Enciphered in modern art is the postulate of an art that no longer conforms to the disjunction of the static and dynamic . Beckett, indifferent to the ruling cliche of development, views his task as that of moving in an infi- nitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point. This aesthetic principle of construction , as the principle of Ilfaut continuer, goes beyond stasis; and it goes beyond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treading water and, as such, a confession of the uselessness of the dynamic. In keeping with this, all constructivistic techniques tend toward stasis. The telos of the dy- namic of the ever-same is disaster; Beckett' s writings look this in the eye . Con- sciousness recognizes the limitedness of limitless self-sufficient progress as an illusion of the absolute subject, and social labor aesthetically mocks bourgeois pathos once the superfluity of real labor came into reach. The dynamic in artworks is brought to a halt by the hope of the abolition of labor and the threat of a glacial death; both are registered in the dynamic, which is unable to choose on its own. The potential of freedom manifest in it is at the same time denied by the social
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order, and therefore it is not substantial in arteither. Thatexplains the ambivalence of aesthetic construction. Construction is equally able to codify the resignation of the weakened subject and to make absolute alienation the sole concern of art- which once wanted the opposite - as it is able to anticipate a reconciled condition that would itself be situated beyond static and dynamic. The many interrelations with technocracy give reason to suspect that the principle of construction remains aesthetically obedient to the administered world; but it may terminate in a yet un- known aesthetic form, whose rational organization might point to the abolition of all categories of administration along with their reflexes in art.
Prior to the emancipation of the subject, art was undoubtedly in a certain sense more immediately social than it was afterward. Its autonomy, its growing inde- pendence from society , was a function of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that was itself bound up with the social structure. Prior to the emergence of this consciousness, art certainly stood in opposition to social domination and its mores, but not with an awareness of its own independence. There had been con- flicts between art and society desultorily ever since art was condemned in Plato's state, but the idea of a fundamentally oppositional art was inconceivable, and so- cial controls worked much more immediately than in the bourgeois era until the rise of totalitarian states. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie integrated art much more completely than any previous society had. Under the pressure of an inten- sifying nominalism, the ever present yet latent social character of art was made increasingly manifest; this social character is incomparably more evident in the
novel than it was in the highly stylized and remote epics of chivalry . The influx of experiences that are no longer forced into a priori genres , the requirement of con- stituting form out of these experiences, that is, from below: This is "realistic" in purely aesthetic terms , regardless of content [Inhalt] . No longer sublimated by the principle of stylization , the relation of content to the society from which it derives at first becomes much less refracted, and this is not only the case in literature. The so-called lower genres too held their distance from society , even when, like Attic comedy, they made bourgeois relations and the events of daily life thematic; the flight into no-man's-land is not just one of Aristophanes' antics but rather an es- sential element of his form. If, in one regard , as a product of the social labor of spirit, art is always implicitly afait social, in becoming bourgeois art its social aspect was made explicit. The object of bourgeois art is the relation of itself as artifact to empirical society; Don Quixote stands at the beginning of this develop- ment . Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production , in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than
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complying with existing social norms and qualifying as "socially useful," it criti- cizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which everything is heteronomously defined. Art's asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society . Cer- tainly through its refusal of society, which is equivalent to sublimation through the law of form, autonomous art makes itself a vehicle of ideology: The society at which it shudders is left in the distance, undisturbed. Yet this is more than ideol- ogy: Society is not only the negativity that the aesthetic law of form condemns but also, even in its most objectionable shape, the quintessence of self-producing and self-reproducing human life. Art was no more able to dispense with this element than with critique until that moment when the social process revealed itself as one of self-annihilation; and it is not in the power of art, which does not make judgments, to separate these two elements intentionally. A pure productive force such as that of the aesthetic , once freed from heteronomous control , is objectively the counterimage of enchained forces, but it is also the paradigm of fateful, self- interested doings. Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not commu- nication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced with- out being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art's immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared. Nothing social in art is immedi- ately social, not even when this is its aim. Not long ago even the socially commit- ted Brecht found that to give his political position artistic expression it was neces- sary to distance himself precisely from that social reality at which his works took aim. Jesuitical machinations were needed sufficiently to camouflage what he wrote as socialist realism to escape the inquisition. Music betrays all art. Just as in music society, its movement, and its contradictions appear only in shadowy fashion- speaking out of it, indeed, yet in need of identification - so it is with all other arts . Whenever art seems to copy society , it becomes all the more an "as-if. " For oppo- site reasons, Brecht's China in the Good Woman ofSetzuan is no less stylized than Schiller's Messina in The Bride ofMessina. All moral judgments on the charac- ters in novels or plays have been senseless even when these judgments have justly taken the empirical figures back of the work as their targets; discussions about whether a positive hero can have negative traits are as foolish as they sound to anyone who overhears them from so much as the slightest remove. Form works like a magnet that orders elements of the empirical world in such a fashion that they are estranged from their extra-aesthetic existence, and it is only as a result of this estrangement that they master the extra-aesthetic essence. Conversely, by ex- ploiting these elements the culture industry all the more successfully joins slavish
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respect for empirical detai l , the gapless semblance of photographic fidelity , with ideological manipulation. What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things. Insofar as a so- cial function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. Their enchantment is disen- chantment. Their social essence requires a double reflection on their being-for- themselves and on their relations to society. Their double character is manifest at every point; they change and contradict themselves. It was plausible that socially progressive critics should have accused the program of l 'art pour l 'art, which has often been in league with political reaction, of promoting a fetish with the concept of a pure, exclusively self-sufficient artwork. What is true in this accusation is that artworks, products of social labor that are subject to or produce their own law of form, seal themselves off from what they themselves are. To this extent, each art- work could be charged with false consciousness and chalked up to ideology. In formal terms , independent of what they say, they are ideology in that a priori they posit something spiritual as being independent from the conditions of its material production and therefore as being intrinsically superior and beyond the primordial guilt of the separation of physical and spiritual labor. What is exalted on the basis of this guilt is at the same time debased by it. This is why artworks with truth con- tent do not blend seamlessly with the concept of art; l 'art pour l 'art theorists, like Valery, have pointed this out. But the guilt they bear of fetishism does not dis- qualify art, any more so than it disqualifies anything culpable; for in the univer- sally, socially mediated world nothing stands external to its nexus of guilt. The truth content of artworks, which is indeed their social truth, is predicated on their fetish character . The principle of heteronomy , apparently the counterpart of fetish- ism, is the principle ofexchange, and in it domination is masked. Only what does not submit to that principle acts as the plenipotentiary of what is free from domi- nation; only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value. Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity. In the context of total semblance, art's sem- blance of being-in-itself is the mask of truth. Marx's scorn of the pittance Milton received for Paradise Lost, a work that did not appear to the market as socially useful labor,l is, as a denunciation of useful labor, the strongest defense of art against its bourgeois functionalization, which is perpetuated in art's undialectical social condemnation. A liberated society would be beyond the irrationality of its fauxfrais and beyond the ends-means-rationality of utility. This is enciphered in art and is the source of art's social explosiveness. Although the magic fetishes are
one of the historical roots of art, a fetishistic element remains admixed in artworks, an element that goes beyond commodity fetishism. Artworks can neither exclude nor deny this; even socially the emphatic element of semblance in artworks is , as a
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corrective , the organon of truth . Artworks that do not insist fetishistically on their coherence, as if they were the absolute that they are unable to be, are worthless from the start; but the survival of art becomes precarious as soon as it becomes conscious of its fetishism and, as has been the case since the middle of the nine- teenth century , insists obstinately on it. Art cannot advocate delusion by insisting that otherwise art would not exist. This forces art into an aporia . All that succeeds in going even minutely beyond it is insight into the rationality of its irrationality. Artworks that want to divest themselves of fetishism by real and extremely dubi- ous political commitment regularly enmesh themselves in false consciousness as the result of inevitable and vainly praised simplification. In the shortsighted praxis to which they blindly subscribe, their own blindness is prolonged.
The objectivation of art, which is what society from its external perspective takes to be art' s fetishism, is itself social in that it is the product of the division of labor. That is why the relation of art to society is not to be sought primarily in the sphere of reception . This relation is anterior to reception , in production . Interest in the so- cial decipherment of art must orient itself to production rather than being content with the study and classification of effects that for social reasons often totally diverge from the artworks and their objective social content. Since time immemo- rial, human reactions to artworks have been mediated to their utmost and do not refer immediately to the object; indeed, they are now mediated by society as a whole. The study of social effect neither comes close to understanding what is so- cial in art nor is it in any position to dictate norms for art, as it is inclined to do by positivist spirit. The heteronomy, which reception theory's normative interpreta- tion of phenomena foists on art, is an ideological fetter that exceeds everything ideological that may be inherent in art's fetishization. Art and society converge in the artwork's content [Gehalt], not in anything external to it. This applies also to the history of art. Collectivization of the individual takes place at the cost of the social force of production . In the history of art, real history returns by virtue of the life of the productive force that originates in real history and is then separated from it. This is the basis of art's recollection of transience. Art preserves it and makes it present by transforming it: This is the social explanation of its temporal nucleus. Abstaining from praxis, art becomes the schema of social praxis: Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary. However, whereas society reaches into art and disappears there by means of the identity of forces and relations , even the most advanced art has , conversely , the tendency toward social integration. Yet contrary to the cliche that touts the virtues of progress, this integration does not bring the blessings of justice in the form of retrospective confirmation. More often, reception wears away what constitutes the work's determinate negation of society. Works are usually critical in the era in which they appear; later they are neutralized, not least because of changed social relations. Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy. However, once artworks are entombed in the pantheon of cultural commodities , they themselves- their truth content - are
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also damaged. In the administered world neutralization is universal. Surrealism began as a protest against the fetishization of art as an isolated realm, yet as art, which after all surrealism also was, it was forced beyond the pure form of protest. Painters for whom the quality of peinture was not an issue, as it was for Andre Masson, struck a balance between scandal and social reception. Ultimately, Salvador Dali became an exalted society painter, the Laszlo or Van Dongen of a generation that liked to think of itself as being sophisticated on the basis of a vague sense of a crisis that had in any case been stabilized for decades. Thus the false afterlife of surrealism was established.