No More Learning

Only this content could possibly bring rea- son's struggle for domination to its senses and direct its power to what would ac-
? xiv D TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
tually fulfill it. Thus Adorno organized Aesthetic Theory as a paratactical presen- tation of aesthetic concepts that, by eschewing subordinating structures, breaks them away from their systematic philosophical intention so that the self- relinquishment that is implicit in identity could be critically explicated as what is nonintentional in them: the primacy of the object.
Throughout his years in the United States, Adorno on many occasions met with the rejection of his work by publishers who saw his writings simply as disorga- nized. It was obvious to Adorno that what he was pursuing required his return to Germany if only because in the 1950s publishing was still less commercially uni- fied than in the United States and permitted writers greater control over their work than here. 4 One event did, however, finally prompt him to leave. When the editor- ial board at the Psychoanalytic Society of San Francisco finished with his essay "Psychoanalysis Revised," he found that "the entire text was disfigured beyond recognition, the basic intention could not be discerned. "5 As Adorno recounted, the head editor explained that the standards to which the essay had been adjusted, which made it look like every other essay in the journal, were those of the profes- sion: "I would only be standing in my own way"-Adorno was told-"if I passed up its advantages. I passed them up nevertheless. "6 Adorno moved back to Europe.
Adorno's sense that staying here would have impossibly burdened his work was confirmed long after the fact by the first English translation of Aesthetic Theory in 1984. 7 The publisher, partially against the will of the translator, dis- carded the book's form as a superstitiously imposed impediment that would only stymie the book's consumption. 8 Diametrically opposed to the course the book took in its various drafts in Adorno's own hands, a process that led in the final ver- sion to the rejection of the division of the book into chapters, the 1984 translation arrived on bookstore shelves divided into numbered chapters with main headings and subheadings inserted in the text. Paragraph indentations were distributed arbi- trarily throughout, completing the image of a monodirectional sequence of topic sentences that could be followed stepwise from chapter 1 through chapter 12. This subordinated the text's paratactical order to a semblance of progressive argumen- tation that offered to present the book's content conveniently. This device pro- vided a steady external grip on the book while causing it to collapse internally. For in lieu of any argumentative structure in the text itself, because it contains no homogeneous substance that can be followed from start to finish, the flaring clar- ity of paragraph indentations only produced a contrast by which the simulated paragraphs appeared murky in their refusal to parse into stages of thesis and evi- dence. And whereas the paratactical text demands that every sentence undertake to be the topic sentence and that the book be composed of long, complex phrases, each of which seems under the obligation to present the book as a whole, the 1984 translation carved up sentences in the image of declarative vehicles of content. The original paratactical text is concentrically arranged around a mute middle
? TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xv
point through which every word seeks to be refracted and that it must express. The text cannot refer forward or backward without disturbing this nexus through which the parts become binding on each other. The linear argumentative structure imposed on the text by the translation thus dismissed the text's middle point as a detour and severed its nexus. Compulsory unification serves only to fragment: the imposed structure set whole passages adrift whose suddenly evident isolation re- quired further apparatus to span them. Therefore, transitional phrases were inter- polated such as: "as we saw" or "as we said" or "let us remember. " The narrative persona that was projected into the text at these points and elsewhere was credible insofar as it seemed to substantiate an argumentative model of knowledge and its transmission. But this further contributed to muffling a text that, by its own stan- dards, succeeds only insofar as what is particular in it begins to speak for itself. The rejection of the work's form as a superstition was carried over to the treat- ment of the original's many Greek, Latin, and French concepts and phrases. They were rendered literally, in English, and without any marking, as if their content was clear enough once they had been freed from their alphabetical inconvenience. Thus, for instance, chorismos- the contrary of methexis- was translated as "sepa- ratism:' obfuscating the articulation of the problem of the participation of idea and object from Plato to Benjamin that is, so to speak, the topic of Aesthetic Theory and the whole of Adorno's writings. The many American phrases, which have such abrupt expressive power in the original, were likewise seamlessly absorbed into the scenery. Almost ingeniously the language of the 1984 text pulls away from the movement of thought that can still be sensed gesturing underneath, giving the book a disembodied quality, as if it were dubbed rather than translated. Subordi- nated to the principle of exchange by its coerced identity with the subject's form
of consumption, Aesthetische Theorie in translation became a model of what it protests against: the primacy of the constitutive subject. The irony is, of course, that by narrowing the distance of the book from its readers, ostensibly for their own good, but fundamentally to sell it to them, the work was put beyond them. 9
This volume is an entirely new translation of Aesthetische Theorie. The spatial or- ganization of the text is identical to the original. The major sections of the English text are divided only where the original divides. The sentence structure and phras- ing of the original were maintained wherever possible, given the tremendous dif- ferences of English syntax from the original. All words foreign to the original, including English words, occur here in italic. This translation, however, took its lead not so much from the aim to copy the appearance of the original, but rather from Adorno's description of the hearing implicit to Mahler's music: an "ampli- tude of a hearing encompassing the far distance, to which the most remote analo- gies and consequences are virtually present. "10 In Aesthetic Theory this amplitude occurs, however, not in the mimetic response of musical passages to each other but in the medium of concepts as their subterranean, dynamic relations.
xvi D TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
The coherence of these subterranean relations depends on the text's paratacti- cal form and survives only by a density of insight, not by external structure. This defines the text's-and its translation's-particular vulnerability: the slightest slackening of intensity threatens to dissolve the text into a miscellany. Nothing supports the text except the intensity with which it draws on and pushes against it- self. With few exceptions paratactical works are therefore short, fragmentary, and compacted by the crisis of their own abbreviation. Paratactical texts are intensive, almost to the denial of their quality of extension; and the more extensive the para- tactical work actually is-andAesthetic Theory is almost unparalleled in this-the greater the potential for its unraveling at each and every point. The text therefore requires a rhetoric that will heighten concentration and density and absorb the dozens of ways in which it is constantly exposed. Every reader will note the work's recurrence to abrupt, staccato, sometimes delphically abbreviated expression that heightens the push-pull of the text. Because it rejects certitude as a standard of truth in favor of exactness of insight, it necessarily tends toward the apodictic. Adorno is also able to produce concentration out of nowhere by beginning sen- tences with long-haul subordinate clauses that engage with a "That . . . " that grips cognition like the ratchet on a rollercoaster with a demand for cooperative anti- gravitational struggle to the top of the first slope so momentum can be discovered shooting down the main clause into any number of concluding subordinate sweeps. A paratactical text is inimical to exposition, and Adorno uses the most condensed gestures to invoke rather than propound relevant philosophical argu- ments: a single "sickness unto death" does the work of all of Kierkegaard, "posi- tive negation" all of Hegel and any phrasing that even subliminally hints at "in the age of" is expected to conjure the entire argument of Benjamin's "Artwork in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," to which the book is, as a whole, a response. Out of the same demand for density, Adorno refers wherever possible to artists and artworks in the familiar: Recherche is more than enough for Proust's title, the Marriage could not be anything but that of Figaro, and George is plenty for Stefan George .
Wherever parallel linguistic resources were available these and Adorno's many other techniques of condensation and heightening have been used to main- tain the density of this translation. In the case of some titles and authors , however, especially of German authors and works that have become progressively un- known in the aftermath of World War II, they are too improbably remote even to pretend they could be recognized and had to be provided with first names and full titles. And there is another technique of condensed reference, used constantly by Adorno, that could not be incorporated at all because it is uniquely a potential of the original vis-a-vis English. As is well known, German is able to refer by pro- nouns with specificity across any distance of text, long or short, and juggle many nouns with referential consistency. Adorno employs this linguistic resource to an extreme in order to avoid the repetition of nouns in a text that is allergic to even
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xvii
the few millimeters of slack such repetition would feed in. In some passages the weave of pronouns becomes so remote and tenuous that it seems it could only be followed by someone who would comprehend their referents anamnestically, as if known from eternity. They demand a level of concentration that inhabits the text completely. Since English has no comparable pronominal structure, this internal weave of reference could not possibly be matched in translation. It has, therefore, throughout been necessary to choose between potential glibness and precision of reference. Without exception the latter was preferred, however ungainly the re- sult. This is the recognition of an aporia of translation and its result is not entirely a betrayal of Adorno's text. For however difficult his writing may be, it is never vague or simply evocative.
This translation has not supposed that it is simply a failed replica of the perfec- tions of the original. The original has plenty of problems of its own that it imposes on the translation. Some of these problems are reciprocal with the capacities of the original. On one hand, for instance, this paratactical text provides unmatched free- dom: Since the text does not labor under schematic requirements it can and must take a decisively new breath for every line; those insights that authors of tradi- tional forms know to be some of the best of what they have thought but must con- stantly reject as structurally inapposite are what at every point motivate a paratac- tical text. But, on the other hand, this paratactical style is, by that same measure, unable-as mentioned-to refer backward or forward: Adorno never writes, "as mentioned. " Every transition must be a transition in the object itself if it is not to unhinge the text. Thus the text is deprived of a major technique for building on what has been, or of explicitly organizing itself toward what will be, developed elsewhere; and it cannot take the sting out of repetition by acknowledging it. In- stead, Adorno is constantly compelled to start anew saying what has already been said. The text produces a need for repetition that is its innermost antagonist. Thus Adorno throughout repeatedly restates major motifs: that the artwork is a monad, that it is a social microcosm, that society is most intensely active in an artwork where it is most remote from society. If Adorno is a master of thematic variation and able to use the dynamic energy of these repeated motifs not just to justify what is waiting to be said, but as a catapult for new insights, all the same, anyone who actually studies the book will rankle at a repetitiveness that really is as in- evitable as it comes to seem. The text is single-mindedly concerned with escaping jargon and developing what is potentially new in concepts that have become rigid- ified and obsolete, but the obligatory repetitiveness of its formulations courts jar- gon and makes the central motifs of the work vulnerable to facile trivialization by anyone who cares to do so. The paratactical capacity that prompts the text's pro- tean insights engenders repetition that becomes disorienting: all those markers that measure out space and time longitudinally in traditional forms are discarded and there is a constantly looming sense of being caught in a vortex, as if there is
xviii 0 lRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
no knowing whether one has been through a particular passage before, or if per- haps one has never left the spot. The virtual presence of the whole of the text at any one point is impeded by the form in which it is maintained.
This level of repetitiveness is damaging to the original and it takes its toll on the translation. More regrettable, however, because it does not derive from any capac- ity of the text, is the repetition that originates in the fact that it is an opus post- humous. Adorno completed Aesthetic Theory, but he did not finish it: every sec- tion that he intended to write for the book was written; the main body of the text was for the most part complete and composed at the highest level that Adorno achieved in any of his work. Yet Adorno did not live to carry out the final, crucial revision of the text. In this revision he would have rewritten a significant number of passages, inserted a group of passages that had accumulated in various ways external to the main text in the decade during which the book was written, and he would have written a new introduction to the book that would have replaced a draft with which he was dissatisfied)! After Adorno's death, this editing work could only partially be fulfilled by his longtime student and friend, Rolf Tiedemann, and by Adorno's widow, Gretel Adorno. They deciphered Adorno's handwriting in the main text, collected the fragments into the Paralipomena that in this edition comes after the main text, and appended the "Draft Introduction" and an excursus entitled "Theories on the Origin of Art. " At the end of this volume they have provided an afterword in which they describe in detail the state of the text at Adorno's death and how they constructed the present volume. As they point out, they could not rewrite passages even when the needed improvements were self- evident. And the intense philological pressures in a country whose Protestantism invented the discipline and where there are, for instance, left-wing and right-wing editions of HOlderlin, prohibited the exclusion of even obviously contradictory formulations. What weighs most on this text, weighs on it literally: there is much more here than is needed, by about one-fifth. In his final revision Adorno would have been able to discard a great deal. The repetitive discussions of classicism and genius, for instance, which now seem strewn around, could have been grouped and condensed. And had Adorno had the chance to definitively position three ex- tensive sections that were still external to the text at the time of his death, he would have been able to exclude duplicate passages that permit their integration at sev- eral different points. The editors combined and inserted these extensive sections in plausible ways, but there is no doubt that this has resulted in several overlong main parts that disturb the organization of the book. For instance-as Tiedemann and Gretel Adorno point out-various aspects of "Situation" are needed in the book's development from "Art, Society, Aesthetics" to "On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, and Technique. " But the sheer girth of "Situation" combines so much material that it diffusely interferes with the tightly wrought organization of the first five main parts. It is, furthermore, questionable whether the excursus,
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xix
"Theories on the Origin of Art," could have been included in the final version. Although it is obviously gennane to the problems Adorno treats throughout Aes- thetic Theory, it is a research essay and in majority stylistically at odds with the rest of the text; and it doesn't make sense to have an "excursus" in a text that is all paratactical divagation anyway. As a guess, however, it is easy to imagine how parts of the excursus could have been used in the new introduction that Adorno wanted to write.
Nothing is to be done about these layers of repetitiveness in the text. They bur- den the book at every point. But it is worth knowing that however overlong the book is, there is nothing to skim. There is, for instance, much in the Paralipomena that is not to be found anywhere else in the text. And if Adorno found the "Draft Introduction" inadequate, it may take some years of research to figure out why. It is in any case probably the best place to begin reading Aesthetic Theory. The paratactical organization of the book does not mean that it can be read equally well in any direction. It is not argumentative; it does not seek to convince; but it does present a logic of insight that has a distinct forward direction that develops concentrically, and, as indicated, this is best perceived by initially reading "Situa- tion" separate from the first five main parts.
The less finished main parts, such as "Situation," were often more difficult to translate than the more finished parts, though this was only a slight difference of degree. No reader will imagine the linguistic mayhem out of which this transla- tion is built. And the ditches, craters, and rubble over which each English sentence passes are more than crushed syntax. The historical breach on the other side of which Gennan now stands makes even this translator involuntarily prefer to say the "original" rather than the Gennan, and made it necessary to say, page by page, that it is, or was, a Jewish language, too. This translation is allied with Adorno's return to Gennany in that his need to return there to be able to write works such as Aesthetic Theory was inseparable from an impulse to pick up the severed threads of what was not fascist in Gennany's past and the value of which, however al- loyed, he never doubted. His enonnous importance in the postwar decades was that he succeeded in helping to reestablish Gennany's own relation to that past, not in the search of the primal or in alliance with any antihumanism, but-as in Aesthetic Theory-in defense of a modernism that would not betray the hopes of the past)2
This is not to say that Adorno returned to Gennany to fit in and help restore the nation to what it once was. What he wrote was completely unpalatable to the fonner-Nazi faculty, still in its prime, that controlled Frankfurt University after the war. They rejected writings such as Minima Moralia as unscholarly and the whole of Adorno's work as essayistic and fragmentary and saw to it that he was not offered a professorship. Only under coercion did they grudgingly bestow on him what became known as a Wiedergutmachungsstuhl, a faculty position made
? xx 0 TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION
not because he merited it as a philosopher, but in reparation to a Jew who had been deprived by the war of his property, his teaching post. 13 Barely two decades after his return, leftist students who had idolized him and embraced his works rioted in his seminars because he refused to lead them to the barricades. Adorno's freedom to teach was forcibly rescinded, as it had been in the thirties. In the summer recess following the student demonstrations of 1969, he died of a heart attack while try- ing to finish this book.
After Adorno's death, interest in his writings soon dissipated, and today, when he is studied in Germany, he is regarded mainly as a historical curiosity and more likely to be diminished than admired. For over a decade, the most thorough, widely read, and esteemed history of his work-Rolf Wiggershaus's The Franlifurt School-dismisses him as a bitter, hyperemotional complainer, monotonously prejudiced in his views, irresponsibly protean in his thought, and unable to formu- late testable hypotheses,14 Wiggerhaus's book, in that it embodies a generation'S rejection of Adorno echoed in dozens of similar works, points up the fact that
Aesthetic Theory is currently as obliquely remote to Germany as it is to the United States. And this remoteness is requisite to any plausible value it may have. For as Adorno wrote in constantly varied formulations, only what does not fit in can be true. He would not have been interested in seeing this book "received" here. Like all those works whose strands Adorno returned to Germany to pick up, when Aesthetic Theory is seen for what it is, it stands outside and looks in. Although the book does in many ways appear obsolete to us-today no one would try a dialec- tical reversal, now nothing seems precisely the opposite of anything else, and that shift of quantity into quality such as when water cooling becomes ice is no longer an inspiring mystery-this perspective that condescends from the vantage of being up-ta-date as to the odd cut of an old coat or dress reveals its delusiveness when instead it is wondered how we look to it. For even though students once complained that Adorno had no interest in praxis but was preoccupied only with art, from the book's perspective it will be noticed that the word has completely disappeared from contemporary language, whereas for this book on art, "Praxis would be the ensemble of means for minimizing material necessity, and as such it would be identical with pleasure, happiness, and that autonomy in which these means are sublimated. " Much of what catches the eye as obsolete in Aesthetic Theory is what would be new if it were not blocked; here what is perceived as old hat masks the disappointment of what can no longer be hoped for. Aesthetic Theory wants to be what is German that is not German, and if it finds real reso- nance here, it will be with what is American that is not American, none of which could be put on a list of national character traits.
What is hard about translation is not-as those who have never tried it imagine- finding the right word. The right word is always there, it just can't be used: in- evitably it starts with the same letter as the three words on either side of it and, in a
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION 0 xxi
translation, pulling four oranges says fake, not jackpot. Line by line, the wrong word is always, unbearably, coming to the rescue. The sureness with which trans- lation taps fate puts the I-Ching to shame: the word needed at any one point has somehow always just been used in the previous clause to cover for some other right word that would not fit. If translation were just pinning the tail on the donkey it would be easy, but the donkey is running and the translator is riding another beast, going in some other direction: each language, and each and every word, has its own momentary vector. So, for instance, even when the original wants to dictate the right word-e. g. , Programm-directly into English, with only a slight shift of spelling, it turns out that the English equivalent now instinctually sum- mons up computers-not the self-understood political sense of the original-with barely containable textual implications. Since the right word was always waiting, and had to be left waiting, this translation is made of whatever else was handy: a carrot for the nose, lightbulbs for eyes, some feathers for the mustache. Propped on a bench in the distance with its back to the sunset, perhaps it even looks alive. But it is not to be leaned against and neither will it bear all that much scrutiny. In German this book is almost too interesting to read; for those many passages in English where this is no longer the case, where it was just not possible to find any better way to do it, for the many sentences that were each finally accepted as not really but sort of what it means, I can only say, it was not for lack of trying.
? Thispage intentionally left blank
? Aesthetic Theory
? ? Thispage intentionally left blank
It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed con- sumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken. More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo; everywhere artists rejoiced less over the newly won realm of freedom than that they immediately sought once again after ostensible yet scarcely adequate order. For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfree- dom of the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain. The autonomy it achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nour- ished by the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered. Drawn from the ideal of humanity, art's constituent elements withered by art's own law of movement. Yet art's autonomy remains ir- revocable. All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function-of which art is itself uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty-are doomed. Indeed, art's autonomy shows signs of blindness. Blindness was ever an aspect of art; in the age of art's emancipation, however, this blindness has begun to pre- dominate in spite of, if not because of, art's lost naIvete, which, as Hegel already perceived, art cannot undo. This binds art to a naIvete of a second order: the un- certainty over what purpose it serves. It is uncertain whether art is still possible; whether, with its complete emancipation, it did not sever its own preconditions. This question is kindled by art's own past. Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation. The cliches of art's recon- ciling glow enfolding the world are repugnant not only because they parody the
? 2 D ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
emphatic concept of art with its bourgeois version and class it among those Sunday institutions that provide solace. These cliches rub against the wound that art itself bears. As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the un- qualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that-shorn of any hope of a world beyond-strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. The principle of auton- omy is itself suspect of giving consolation: By undertaking to posit totality out of itself, whole and self-encompassing, this image is transferred to the world in which art exists and that engenders it. By virtue of its rejection of the empirical world-a rejection that inheres in art's concept and thus is no mere escape, but a law immanent to it-art sanctions the primacy of reality. In a work dedicated to the praise of art, Helmut Kuhn warranted that art's each and every work is a paean. ! His thesis would be true, were it meant critically. In the face of the abnor- mity into which reality is developing, art's inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must tum against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fiber. Yet art is not to be dismissed simply by its abstract negation. By attacking what seemed to be its foundation throughout the whole of its tradition, art has been qualitatively trans- formed; it itself becomes qualitatively other. It can do this because through the ages by means of its form, art has turned against the status quo and what merely exists just as much as it has come to its aid by giving form to its elements. Art can no more be reduced to the general formula of consolation than to its opposite. The concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it refuses definition. Its essence cannot be deduced from its origin as if the first work were a foundation on which everything that followed were constructed and would collapse if shaken. The belief that the first artworks are the highest and purest is warmed-over romanticism; with no less justification it could be claimed that the earliest artistic works are dull and impure in that they are not yet separated from magic, historical documentation, and such pragmatic aims as communicat- ing over great distances by means of calls or hom sounds; the classical conception of art gladly made use of such arguments. In bluntly historical terms, the facts blur. 2 The effort to subsume the historical genesis of art ontologically under an ul- timate motif would necessarily flounder in such disparate material that the theory would emerge empty-handed except for the obviously relevant insight that the arts will not fit into any gapless concept of art. 3 In those studies devoted to the aes- thetic apxai, positivistic sampling of material and such speculation as is other- wise disdained by the sciences flourish wildly alongside each other; Bachofen is the best example of this. If, nevertheless, one wanted in the usual philosophical fashion categorically to distinguish the so-called question of origin-as that of art's essence-from the question of art's historical origin, that would amount only to turning the concept of origin arbitrarily against the usual sense of the word. The
ART,SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 3
definition of art is at every point indicated by what art once was, but it is legiti- mated only by what art became with regard to what it wants to, and perhaps can, become. Although art's difference from the merely empirical is to be maintained, this difference is transformed in itself qualitatively; much that was not art-cultic works, for instance-has over the course of history metamorphosed into art; and much that was once art is that no longer. Posed from on high, the question whether something such as film is or is no longer art leads nowhere. Because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain. The tension between what motivates art and art's past circumscribes the so-called questions of aes- thetic constitution. Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not ac- cording to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form. It exists only in relation to its other; it is the process that tran- spires with its other. Nietzsche's late insight, honed in opposition to traditional philosophy, that even what has become can be true, is axiomatic for a reoriented aesthetic.
The traditional view, which he demolished, is to be turned on its head: Truth exists exclusively as that which has become. What appears in the artwork as its own lawfulness is the late product of an inner-technical evolution as well as art's position within progressive secularization; yet doubtless artworks became artworks only by negating their origin. They are not to be called to account for the disgrace of their ancient dependency on magic, their servitude to kings and amusement, as if this were art's original sin, for art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged. Dinner music is not inescapable for liberated music, nor was dinner music honest service from which autonomous art outrageously with- drew. The former's miserable mechanical clattering is on no account improved because the overwhelming part of what now passes for art drowns out the echo of
that clatter.
The Hegelian vision of the possible death of art accords with the fact that art is a product of history. That Hegel considered art transitory while all the same chalk- ing it up to absolute spirit stands in harmony with the double character of his sys- tem, yet it prompts a thought that would never have occurred to him: that the sub- stance of art, according to him its absoluteness, is not identical with art's life and death. Rather, art's substance could be its transitoriness. It is thinkable, and not merely an abstract possibility, that great music-a late development-was possi- ble only during a limited phase of humanity. The revolt of art, teleologically posited in its "attitude to objectivity"4 toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art; it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it. What reac- tionary cultural pessimism once vociferated against cannot be suppressed by the critique of culture: that, as Hegel ruminated a hundred and fifty years ago, art may have entered the age of its demise. s Just as Rimbaud's stunning dictum6 one
4 D ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
hundred years ago divined definitively the history of new art, his later silence, his stepping into line as an employee, anticipated art's decline. It is outside the purview of aesthetics today whether it is to become art's necrology; yet it must not play at delivering graveside sermons, certifying the end, savoring the past, and ab- dicating in favor of one sort of barbarism that is no better than the culture that has earned barbarism as recompense for its own monstrosity. Whether art is abol- ished, perishes, or despairingly hangs on, it is not mandated that the content [GehaltF of past art perish. It could survive art in a society that had freed itself of the barbarism of its culture . Not just aesthetic forms but innumerable themes have already become extinct, adultery being one of them . Although adultery filled Vic- torian and early-twentieth-century novels, it is scarcely possible to empathize di- rectly with this literature now, given the dissolution of the high-bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy; distorted and impoverished, this litera- ture lives on only in illustrated magazines. At the same time, however, what is au- thentic in Madame Bovary and was once embedded in its thematic content has long since outstripped this content and its deterioration. Obviously this is not grounds for historicophilosophical optimism over the invincibility of spirit. It is equally possible for the thematic material in its own demise to take with it that which is more than merely thematic. Art and artworks are perishable, not simply because by their heteronomy they are dependent, but because right into the small- est detail of their autonomy, which sanctions the socially determined splitting off of spirit by the division of labor, they are not only art but something foreign and opposed to it. Admixed with art's own concept is the ferment of its own abolition.
There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted; no imagina- tion without something imagined. This holds true particularly in the case of art's immanent purposiveness. s In its relation to empirical reality art sublimates the lat- ter's governing principle of sese conservare as the ideal of the self-identity of its works; as Schoenberg said, one paints a painting, not what it represents. Inher- ently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by re- ality ' s compulsion to identity . Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality , which sanctions art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work's own need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence. Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience. Although the demarcation line between art and the empirical must not be effaced, and least of all by the glorifica- tion of the artist, artworks nevertheless have a life sui generis. This life is not just their external fate. Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow cold, and die. It is a tautology to point out that as humanly manufactured artifacts they do not live as do people. But the emphasis on the artifactual element
ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS 0 5
in art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution, regardless of how it came to be. Artworks are alive in that they speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make them. They speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them. Thus they come into contrast with the arbitrariness of what simply exists. Yet it is precisely as arti- facts, as products of social labor, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their content [Inhalt]. Art negates the categorial determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet har- bors what is empirically existing in its own substance. If art opposes the empirical through the element of form-and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation-the mediation is to be sought in the recog- nition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. What are taken to be the purest forms (e. g. , traditional musical forms) can be traced back even in the smallest idiomatic detail to content such as dance. In many instances ornaments in the visual arts were once primarily cultic symbols. Tracing aesthetic forms back to contents, such as the Warburg Institute undertook to do by following the afterlife of classical antiquity, deserves to be more broadly undertaken. The communica- tion of artworks with what is external to them, with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off, occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves refracted. It is easy to imagine that art's autonomous realm has nothing in common with the external world other than borrowed elements that have entered into a fully changed context. Nevertheless, there is no contesting the clicM of which cultural history is so fond, that the devel- opment of artistic processes, usually classed under the heading of style, corre- sponds to social development. Even the most sublime artwork takes up a determi- nate attitude to empirical reality by stepping outside of the constraining spell it casts, not once and for all, but rather ever and again, concretely, unconsciously polemical toward this spell at each historical moment . That artworks as window- less monads "represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production-all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active-are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. Art's double character as both autonomous and/ait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. It is by virtue of this rela- tion to the empirical that artworks recuperate, neutralized, what once was literally and directly experienced in life and what was expulsed by spirit. Artworks partici- pate in enlightenment because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out of them. They are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them.
6 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTIlETICS
The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objec- tive world from which they recoil . The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective ele- ments, defines the relation of art to society . The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the external world's factual facade converges with the real essence. Art, XO)pi? from the empirically existing, takes up a position to it in accord with Hegel's argument against Kant: The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not moral- izing, is the critique of the principle of [ 'art pour tart, which by abstract negation posits the XO)ptO'Il6? of art as absolute. The freedom of artworks, in which their self-consciousness glories and without which these works would not exist, is the ruse of art's own reason. Each and every one of their elements binds them to that over which, for their happiness, they must soar and back into which at every mo- ment they threaten once again to tumble. In their relation to empirical reality, art- works recall the theologumenon that in the redeemed world everything would be as it is and yet wholly other. There is no mistaking the analogy with the tendency of the profane to secularize the realm of the sacred to the point that only as secu- larized does the latter endure; the realm of the sacred is objectified, effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular. Accordingly, the pure concept of art could not define the fixed circumference of a sphere that has been secured once and for all; rather, its closure is achieved only in an intermittent and fragile bal- ance that is more than just comparable to the psychological balance between ego and id. The act of repulsion must be constantly renewed. Every artwork is an in- stant; every successful work is a cessation, a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the unwavering eye. If artworks are answers to their own questions, they themselves thereby truly become questions. The tendency to per- ceive art either in extra-aesthetic or preaesthetic fashion, which to this day is undiminished by an obviously failed education , is not only a barbaric residue or a danger of regressive consciousness. Something in art calls for this response. Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Only when art's other is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds , without the autonomy of the artwork becoming a matter of indifference. Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it. The great epics, which have survived even their own oblivion, were in their own age intermingled with historical and geographical reportage; Valery the artist took note of how much of their material had yet to be recast by the formal requirements of the Homeric, pagan-Germanic, and Christian epics, without this reducing their rank vis-a-vis drossless works . Likewise tragedy, which may have been the origin of the idea of aesthetic autonomy, was an afterimage of cultic acts that were intended to have
ART,SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 7
real effects. The history of art as that of its progressive autonomy never succeeded in extirpating this element , and not just because the bonds were too strong . At the height of its form, in the nineteenth century, the realistic novel had something of what the theory of so-called socialist realism rationally plotted for its debasement: reportage, the anticipation of what social science would later ascertain. The fa- natic linguistic perfection of Madame Bovary is probably a symptom of precisely this contrary element; the unity of both, of reportage and linguistic perfectionism, accounts for the book' s unfaded actuality . In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether they succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law of form and in this integration at the same time maintain what re- sists it and the fissures that occur in the process of integration. Integration as such does not assure quality; in the history of art, integration and quality have often di- verged. For no single select category, not even the aesthetically central concept of the law of form, names the essence of art and suffices to judge its products. Essen- tial to art are defining characteristics that contradict its fixed art-philosophical concept. Hegel's content-aesthetics [Inhaltsiisthetik] recognized that element of otherness immanent to art and thus superseded formal aesthetics, which appar- ently operates with a so much purer concept of art and of course liberated histori- cal developments such as nonrepresentational painting that are blocked by Hegel' s and Kierkegaard's content-aesthetics. At the same time, however, Hegel's idealist dialectic, which conceives form as content, regresses to a crude , preaesthetic level. It confuses the representational or discursive treatment of thematic material with the otherness that is constitutive of art. Hegel transgresses against his own dialec- tical conception of aesthetics, with consequences he did not foresee; he in effect helped transform art into an ideology of domination. Conversely, what is unreal and nonexistent in art is not independent of reality . It is not arbitrarily posited, not invented, as is commonly thought; rather, it is structured by proportions between what exists, proportions that are themselves defined by what exists, its deficiency , distress, and contradictoriness as well as its potentialities; even in these propor- tions real contexts resonate. Art is related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron filings. Not only art's elements, but their constellation as well, that which is specifically aesthetic and to which its spirit is usually chalked up, refer back to its other. The identity of the artwork with existing reality is also that of the work's gravitational force, which gathers around itself its membra disjecta, traces of the existing. The artwork is related to the world by the principle that contrasts it with the world, and that is the same principle by which spirit organized the world. The synthesis achieved by means of the artwork is not simply forced on its elements; rather, it recapitulates that in which these elements communicate with one an- other; thus the synthesis is itself a product of otherness. Indeed, synthesis has its foundation in the spirit-distant material dimension of works, in that in which syn- thesis is active. This unites the aesthetic element of form with noncoercion. By its difference from empirical reality the artwork necessarily constitutes itself in
8 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
relation to what it is not, and to what makes it an artwork in the first place. The insistence on the nonintentional in art-which is apparent in art's sympathy with its lower manifestations beginning at a specific historical point with Wedekind's derision of the "art-artist," with Apollinaire, and indeed with the beginnings of cubism-points up art's unconscious self-consciousness in its participation in what is contrary to it; this self-consciousness motivated art's culture-critical tum that cast off the illusion of its purely spiritual being.
Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. The constitu- tion of art's sphere corresponds to the constitution of an inward space of men as the space of their representation: A priori the constitution of this space partici- pates in sublimation. It is therefore plausible to conceive of developing the defini- tion of art out of a theory of psychic life . Skepticism toward anthropological theo- ries of human invariants recommends psychoanalytic theory. But this theory is more productive psychologically than aesthetically. For psychoanalysis considers artworks to be essentially unconscious projections of those who have produced them, and, preoccupied with the hermeneutics of thematic material, it forgets the categories of form and, so to speak, transfers the pedantry of sensitive doctors to the most inappropriate objects, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Baudelaire. The narrow-mindedness, in spite of all the emphasis on sex, is revealed by the fact that as a result of these studies, which are often offshoots of the biographical fad, artists whose work gave uncensored shape to the negativity of life are dimissed as neurotics. Laforgue's book9 actually in all seriousness accuses Baudelaire of having suffered from a mother complex. The question is never once broached whether a psychically sound Baudelaire would have been able to write The Flowers ofEvil, not to mention whether the poems turned out worse because of the neuro- sis. Psychological normalcy is outrageously established as the criterion even, as in Baudelaire , where aesthetic quality is bluntly predicated on the absence of mens sana. According to the tone of psychoanalytic monographs , art should deal affir- matively with the negativity of experience. The negative element is held to be nothing more than the mark of that process of repression that obviously goes into the artwork. For psychoanalysis, artworks are daydreams; it confuses them with documents and displaces them into the mind of a dreamer, while on the other hand, as compensation for the exclusion of the extramental sphere, it reduces art- works to crude thematic material , falling strangely short of Freud's own theory of the "dreamwork. " As with all positivists, the fictional element in artworks is vastly overestimated by the presumed analogy with the dream. In the process of production, what is projected is only one element in the artist's relation to the art- work and hardly the definitive one; idiom and material have their own impor- tance, as does, above all, the product itself; this rarely if ever occurs to the ana- lysts. The psychoanalytic thesis, for instance, that music is a defense against the threat of paranoia, does indeed for the most part hold true clinically, yet it says nothing about the quality and content of a particular composition. The psycho-
ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS 0 9
analytic theory of art is superior to idealist aesthetics in that it brings to light what is internal to art and not itself artistic. It helps free art from the spell of absolute spirit. Whereas vulgar idealism, rancorously opposed to knowledge of the artwork and especially knowledge of its entwinement with instinct, would like to quaran- tine art in a putatively higher sphere , psychoanalysis works in the opposite direc- tion, in the spirit of enlightenment. Where it deciphers the social character that speaks from a work and in which on many occasions the character of its author is manifest, psychoanalysis furnishes the concrete mediating links between the struc- ture of artworks and the social structure. But psychoanalysis too casts a spell re- lated to idealism, that of an absolutely subjective sign system denoting subjective instinctual impulses. It unlocks phenomena, but falls short of the phenomenon of art. Psychoanalysis treats artworks as nothing but facts, yet it neglects their own objectivity, their inner consistency, their level of form, their critical impulse, their relation to nonpsychical reality, and, finally, their idea of truth. When a painter, obeying the pact of total frankness between analyst and patient, mocked the bad Viennese engravings that defaced his walls, she was informed by the analyst that this was nothing but aggression on her part. Artworks are incomparably less a copy and possession of the artist than a doctor who knows the artist exclusively from the couch can imagine. Only dilettantes reduce everything in art to the un- conscious, repeating cliches. In artistic production, unconscious forces are one sort of impUlse, material among many others. They enter the work mediated by the law of form; if this were not the case, the actual subject portrayed by a work would be nothing but a copy. Artworks are not Thematic Apperception Tests of their makers. Part of the responsibility for this philistinism is the devotion of psychoanalysis to the reality principle: Whatever refuses to obey this principle is always merely "escape"; adaptation to reality becomes the summum bonum. Yet reality provides too many legitimate reasons for fleeing it for the impulse to be met by the indignation of an ideology sworn to harmony; on psychological grounds alone , art is more legitimate than psychology acknowledges . True , imag- ination is escape, but not exclusively so: What transcends the reality principle toward something superior is always also part of what is beneath it; to point a taunting finger at it is malicious. The image of the artist, as one of the tolerated, integrated as a neurotic in a society sworn to the division of labor, is distorted. Among artists of the highest rank, such as Beethoven or Rembrandt, the sharpest sense of reality was joined with estrangement from reality; this, truly, would be a worthwhile object for the psychology of art. It would need to decipher the artwork not just as being like the artist but as being unlike as well, as labor on a reality re- sisting the artist. If art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a bet- ter world. This frees the total dialectic, whereas the view of art as a merely subjec- tive language of the unconscious does not even touch it.
Kant's aesthetics is the antithesis ofFreud's theory ofartas wish fulfillment. Dis-
10 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
interested liking is the first element of the judgment of taste in the "Analytic of the Beautiful. "l0 There interest is termed "the liking that we combine with the repre- sentation of the existence of an object. "l l It is not clear, however, if what is meant by the "representation of the existence of an object" is its content, the thematic material in the sense of the object treated in the work, or the artwork itself; the pretty nude model or the sweet resonance of a musical tone can be kitsch or it can be an integral element of artistic quality . The accent on "representation" is a con- sequence of Kant's SUbjectivistic approach, which in accord with the rationalistic tradition, notably that of Moses Mendelssohn, tacitly seeks aesthetic quality in the effect the artwork has on the observer. What is revolutionary in the Critique of Judgment is that without leaving the circle of the older effect-aesthetics Kant at the same time restricted it through immanent criticism; this is in keeping with the whole of his subjectivism, which plays a significant part in his objective effort to save objectivity through the analysis of subjective elements. Disinterestedness sets itself at a distance from the immediate effect that liking seeks to conserve, and this initiates the fragmentation of the supremacy of liking. For, once shorn of what Kant calls interest, satisfaction becomes so indeterminate that it no longer serves to define beauty . The doctrine of disinterested satisfaction is impoverished vis-a-vis the aesthetic; it reduces the phenomenon either to formal beauty, which when isolated is highly dubious, or to the so-called sublime natural object. The sublimation of the work to absolute form neglects the spirit of the work in the in- terest of which sublimation was undertaken in the first place. This is honestly and involuntarily attested by Kant's strained footnote,12 in which he asserts that a judgment of an object of liking may indeed be disinterested, yet interesting; that is, it may produce interest even when it is not based on it. Kant divides aesthetic feeling-and thus, in accord with the whole of his model, art itself-from the power of desire , to which the "representation of the existence of an object" refers; the liking of such a representation "always has reference to the power of desire. "13 Kant was the first to achieve the insight, never since forgotten, that aesthetic com- portment is free from immediate desire; he snatched art away from that avaricious philistinism that always wants to touch it and taste it. Nevertheless, the Kantian motif is not altogether alien to psychoanalytic art theory : Even for Freud artworks are not immediate wish fulfillments but transform unsatisfied libido into a socially productive achievement, whereby the social value of art is simply assumed, with uncritical respect for art's public reputation. Although Kant emphasizes the dif- ference between art and the power of desire - and thereby between art and empiri- cal reality - much more energetically than does Freud, he does not simply idealize art: The separation of the aesthetic sphere from the empirical constitutes art. Yet Kant transcendentally arrested this constitution, which is a historical process, and simplistically equated it with the essence ofthe artistic, unconcerned that the sub? jective , instinctual components of art return metamorphosed even in art's maturest form, which negates them. The dynamic character of the artistic is much more
ART. SOCIETY,AESTHETICS 0 11
fully grasped by Freud's theory of sublimation. But for this Freud clearly had to pay no smaller a price than did Kant. If in the latter's case, in spite of his prefer- ence for sensual intuition, the spiritual essence of the artwork originates in the dis- tinction between aesthetic and practical, appetitive behavior, Freud's adaptation of the aesthetic to the theory of the instincts seems to seal itself off from art's spiri- tual essence; for Freud, artworks are indeed, even though sublimated, little more than plenipotentiaries of sensual impulses, which they at best make unrecogniz- able through a sort of dreamwork. The confrontation of these two heterogeneous thinkers-Kant not only rejected philosophical psychologism but in his old age increasingly rejected all psychology-is nevertheless permitted by a commonal- ity that outweighs the apparently absolute difference between the Kantian con- struction of the transcendental subject, on the one hand, and the Freudian recourse to the empirically psychological on the other: Both are in principle subjectively oriented by the power of desire , whether it is interpreted negatively or positively. For both , the artwork exists only in relation to its observer or maker. By a mecha- nism to which his moral philosophy is subordinate, even Kant is compelled to consider the existing individual, the ontic element, more than is compatible with the idea of the transcendental subject. There is no liking without a living person who would enjoy it. Though it is never made explicit, the Critique ofJudgment is as a whole devoted to the analysis of constituta. Thus what was planned as a bridge between theoretical and practical pure reason is vis-a-vis both an UAAO 'Y? vo? . Indeed, the taboo on art - and so far as art is defined it obeys a taboo, for definitions are rational taboos - forbids that one take an animalistic stance toward the object, that is, that one dominate it by physically devouring it. But the power of the taboo corresponds to the power that it prohibits. There is no art that does not contain in itself as an element, negated, what it repulses. If it is more than mere indifference, the Kantian "without interest" must be shadowed by the wildest interest, and there is much to be said for the idea that the dignity of artworks de- pends on the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested. Kant denies this in favor of a concept of freedom that castigates as heteronomous whatever is not born exclusively of the subject. His theory of art is distorted by the insuffi- ciency of the doctrine of practical reason. The idea of something beautiful, which possesses or has acquired some degree of autonomy in the face of the sovereign I, would, given the tenor of his philosophy, be disparaged as wandering off into in- telligible realms. But along with that from which art antithetically originated, art is shorn of all content, and in its place he posits something as formal as aesthetic satisfaction. For Kant, aesthetics becomes paradoxically a castrated hedonism, desire without desire. An equal injustice is done both to artistic experience, in which liking is by no means the whole of it but plays a subordinate role, and to sensual interest, the suppressed and unsatisfied needs that resonate in their aes- thetic negation and make artworks more than empty patterns. Aesthetic disinter- estedness has broadened interest beyond particularity. The interest in the aesthetic
1 2 0 ART, SOCIETY, AESTHETICS
totality wanted to be, objectively, an interest in a correct organization of the whole. It aims not at the fulfillment of the particular but rather at unbound possi- bility , though that would be no possibility at all without the presupposition of the fulfillment of the particular. Correlative to the weakness of Kant's aesthetics, Freud's is much more idealistic than it suspects. When artworks are translated purely into psychical immanence, they are deprived of their antithetic stance to the not-I, which remains unchallenged by the thorniness of artworks. They are exhausted in the psychical performance of gaining mastery over instinctual renun- ciation and, ultimately, in the achievement of conformity. The psychologism of aesthetic interpretation easily agrees with the philistine view of the artwork as harmoniously quieting antagonisms, a dream image of a better life, unconcerned with the misery from which this image is wrested. The conformist psychoanalytic endorsement of the prevailing view of the artwork as a well-meaning cultural commodity corresponds to an aesthetic hedonism that banishes art' s negativity to the instinctual conflicts of its genesis and suppresses any negativity in the finished work. If successful sublimation and integration are made the end-all and be-all of the artwork , it loses the force by which it exceeds the given , which it renounces by its mere existence. The moment, however, the artwork comports itselfby retaining the negativity ofreality and taking a position to it, the concept of disinterestedness is also modified. Contrary to the Kantian and Freudian interpretation of art, art- works imply in themselves a relation between interest and its renunciation. Even the contemplative attitude to artworks, wrested from objects of action, is felt as the announcement of an immediate praxis and-to this extent itself practical - as a refusal to play along. Only artworks that are to be sensed as a form of comport- ment have a raison d'etre. Art is not only the plenipotentiary of a better praxis than that which has to date predominated, but is equally the critique of praxis as the rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo and in its service . It gives the lie to production for production's sake and opts for a form of praxis beyond the spell of labor. Art's promesse du bonheur means not only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness but that happiness is beyond praxis. The measure of the chasm separating praxis from happiness is taken by the force of negativity in the artwork. Certainly Kafka does not awaken the power of desire. Yet the real fear triggered by prose works like Metamorphosis or The Penal Colony, that shock of revulsion and disgust that shakes the physis, has, as defense, more to do with desire than with the old disinterestedness canceled by Kafka and what fol- lowed him. As a response, disinterestedness would be crudely inadequate to his writings. Ultimately disinterestedness debases art to what Hegel mocked, a pleas- ant or useful plaything of Horace's Ars Poetica. It is from this that the aesthetics of the idealist age, contemporaneously with art itself, freed itself. Only once it is done with tasteful savoring does artistic experience become autonomous.