No More Learning

Inherent to the idea of aesthetics is the intention of freeing art, through theory, from its indura- tion, which it suffers as a result of the inescapable division of labor. Understand- ing artworks is not X(Opi? from their explanation; not from their genetic explana- tion but from that of their complexion and content, though this is not to say that explanation and understanding are identical. Understanding has as much need of the nonexplanatory level of the spontaneous fulfillment of the work as it does of the explanatory level; understanding goes beyond the art understanding of connoisseurs. Explanation ineluctably involves the tracing back of the new and the unknown to the known, even if what is best in the work struggles against it. Without such reduction, which violates the works, they could not survive. Their essence, what is uncomprehended in them, requires acts of identification and comprehension; it is thereby falsified as something familiar and old. To this extent the life of artworks is ultimately contradictory . Aesthetics must become conscious of this paradox and it must not act as if its opposition to tradition could dispense with rational means . Aesthetics moves within the medium of universal concepts even in the face of the radically nominalist situation of art and in spite of the utopia of the particular that aesthetics prizes along with art. This is not only the difficulty of aesthetics but also its fundamentum in reo If, in the experience of the real , it is
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the universal that is mediated, in art it is the particular that is mediated; just as nonaesthetic knowledge, in its Kantian formulation, poses the question ofthe pos- sibility of universal judgment, the question posed by every artwork is how, under the domination of the universal, a particular is in any way possible. This binds aesthetics-however little its method can amount to subsumption by the abstract concept-to concepts, though admittedly to those whose telos is the particular. If anywhere, Hegel's theory of the movement of the concept has its legitimacy in aesthetics; it is concerned with the dynamic relation of the universal and the par- ticular, which does not impute the universal to the particular externally but seeks it rather in the force fields of the particular itself. The universal is the stumbling block of art: By becoming what it is, art cannot be what it wants to become. In- dividuation, which is art's own law, has its boundaries set by the universal. Art leads beyond, and yet not beyond; the world it reflects remains what it is because it is merely reflected by art. Even dada, as the deictic gesture into which the word is transformed in the effort to shake off its conceptuality, was as universal as the childishly reiterated demonstrative word that dadaism took as its motto. Whereas art dreams the absolutely monadological, it is both happily and unhappily suf- fused with the universal . Art must contract to the geometrical point of the absolute -cOOE 'tt and go beyond it. This imposed the objective limit to expressionism; art would have been compelled to go beyond it even if the artists had been less ac- commodating: They regressed behind expressionism . Whenever artworks on their way toward concretion polemically eliminate the universal, whether as a genre, a type , an idiom, or a formula, the excluded is maintained in them through its nega-
tion; this state of affairs is constitutive of the modern .
Insight into the life of the universal in the midst of aesthetic particularization, however, drives universality beyond the semblance of that static being-in-itself that bears the primary responsibility for the sterility of aesthetic theory . The cri- tique of invariants does not aim at their exclusion but, rather, conceives them in their own variability. Aesthetics is not involved with its object as with a primor- dial phenomenon. Because phenomenology and its successors oppose conceptual procedures that move from the top down as well as those that move up from below, they are important to aesthetics, which shares in this opposition. As a phe- nomenology of art, phenomenology would like to develop art neither by deducing it from its philosophical concept nor by rising to it through comparative abstrac- tion; rather, phenomenology wants to say what art is. The essence it discerns is, for phenomenology, art' s origin and at the same time the criterion of art's truth and falsehood. But what phenomenology has conjured up in art as with a wave of the magic wand, remains extremely superficial and relatively fruitless when con- fronted with actual artworks. Whoever wants something more must engage a level of content that is incompatible with the phenomenological commandment of pure essentiality. The phenomenology of art comes to grief on the presupposition of the possibility of being without presupposition. Art mocks efforts to reduce it to
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pure essentiality. It is not what it was fated to have been from time immemorial but rather what it has become. It is no more fruitful to pursue the question of the individual origin of artworks in the face of their objectivity,-which subsumes the work's sUbjective elements, than it is to search out art's own origin. It is not an ac- cident but rather its law that art wrested itself free. Art never completely fulfilled the detenninations of its pure concept as it acquired them and indeed struggled against them; according to Valery, the purest artworks are on no account the high- est. If art were reduced to fundamental elements of artistic comportment, such as the instinct for imitation, the need for expression, or magical imagery, the results would be arbitrary and derivative. These elements play their part; they merge with art and survive in it; but not one of them is the whole of it. Aesthetics is not obliged to set off on the hopeless quest for the primal archetype of art, rather it must think such phenomena in historical constellations. No isolated particular category fully conceives the idea of art. It is a syndrome that is dynamic in itself. Highly mediated in itself, art stands in need of thinking mediation; this alone, and not the phenomenologist's purportedly originary intuition, leads to art's concrete concept . 20
Hegel's central aesthetic principle, that beauty is the sensuous semblance of the idea, presupposes the concept of the idea as the concept of absolute spirit. Only if the all-encompassing claim of absolute spirit is honored, only if philosophy is able to reduce the idea of the absolute to the concept, would Hegel's aesthetic principle be compelling. In a historical phase in which the view of reality as the fulfillment of reason amounts to bloody farce, Hegel's theory-in spite of the wealth of genuine insight that it unlocked - is reduced to a meager fonn of conso- lation. If his conception of philosophy carried out a fortunate mediation of history with truth, the truth of the philosophy itself is not to be isolated from the misfor- tune ofhistory. Certainly Hegel's critique ofKant holds good. Beauty that is to be more than symmetrically trimmed shrubbery is no mere fonnula reducible to sub- jective functions of intuition; rather, beauty's fundament is to be sought in the ob- ject. But Hegel's effort to do this was vitiated because it unjustly postulated the meta-aesthetical identity of subject and object in the whole. It is no accidental fail- ing on the part of individual thinkers but rather predicated on an objective aporia that today philosophical interpretations of literary works-especially when, as in Heidegger, poetic language is mythologically exalted-fail to penetrate the con- struction of the works to be int? rpreted and instead prefer to work them up as the arena for philosophical theses: Applied philosophy, a priori fatal, reads out of works that it has invested with an air of concretion nothing but its own theses . If aesthetic objectivity, in which the category of the beautiful is itself only one ele- ment, remains canonical for all convincing reflection, it no longer devolves upon a preestablished conceptual structure anterior to aesthetics and begins to hover, as incontestable as it is precarious. The locus of aesthetics has become exclusively the analysis of contexts, in the experience of which the force of philosophical
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speculation is drawn in without depending on any fixed starting positions. The aesthetic theories of philosophical speculation are not to be conserved as cultural monuments, but neither are they to be discarded, and least of all in favor of the pu- tative immediacy of artistic experience: Implicitly lodged in artistic experience is the consciousness of art, that is, philosophy, with which the naIve consideration of works imagines it has disposed. Art does not exist as the putative lived experience of the subject who encounters it as a tabula rasa but only within an already devel- oped language of art. Lived experiences are indispensable, but they are no final court of aesthetic knowledge . Precisely those elements of art that cannot be taken immediately in possession and are not reducible to the subject require conscious- ness and therefore philosophy. It inheres in all aesthetic experience to the extent that it is not barbarically alien to art. Art awaits its own explanation . It is achieved methodically through the confrontation of historical categories and elements of aesthetic theory with artistic experience, which correct one another reciprocally.
Hegel's aesthetics gives a true account of what needs to be accomplished. The de- ductive system, however, prevents that dedication to objects that is systematically postulated. Hegel's work places thought under an obligation, even though his own answers are no longer binding. If the most powerful aesthetics-Kant's and Hegel ' s - were the fruits of systematic thinking , the collapse of these systems has thrown them into confusion without, however, destroying them. Aesthetics does not proceed with the continuity of scientific thinking. The particular aesthetics of the various philosophies cannot be reduced to a common formulation as their truth; rather their truth is to be sought in their conflict. To do so, it is necessary to renounce the erudite illusion that an aesthetician inherits problems from others and is now supposed to go calmly to work on them. If the idea of objectivity re- mains the canon of all convincing aesthetic reflection, then its locus is the contra- diction of each and every aesthetic object in itself, as well as that of philosophical ideas in their mutual relation. That aesthetics, in its desire to be more than chatter, wants to find its way out into the open, entirely exposed, imposes on it the sacri- fice of each and every security that it has borrowed from the sciences; no one expressed this necessity with greater candor than the pragmatist John Dewey. Be- cause aesthetics is not supposed tojudge art from an external and superior vantage point, but rather to help its internal propensities to theoretical consciousness, it cannot settle into a zone of security to which every artwork that has in any way succeeded gives the lie. Artworks, right up to those of the highest level, know the lesson taught to the bungler whose fingers stumble on the piano keys or who sketches carelessly: The openness of artworks-their critical relation to the previ- ously established, on which their quality depends-implies the possibility of complete failure, and aesthetics alienates itself from its object the moment that by its own form it deceives on this score . That no artist knows with certainty whether anything will come of what he does, his happiness and his anxiety, which are totally foreign to the contemporary self-understanding of science, subjectively
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registers something objective: the vulnerability of all art. The insight that perfect artworks scarcely exist brings into view the vanishing point of this vulnerability. Aesthetics must unite this open vulnerability of its object with that object's claim to objectivity as well as with aesthetics' own claim to objectivity. If aesthetics is terrorized by the scientific ideal it recoils from this paradox; yet this paradox is aesthetics' vital element. The relation between determinacy and openness in aes- thetics is perhaps clarified by the fact that the ways available to experience and thought that lead into artworks are infinitely many, yet they converge in truth content. This is obvious to artistic praxis, and theory should follow it much more closely than it has. Thus at a rehearsal the first violinist of a string quartet told a musician who was helping out, though himselfnot actively playing, to contribute whatever critique and suggestions occurred to him; each of these remarks, to the extent that they were just, directed the progress of the work ultimately to the same point, to the correct performance. Even contradictory approaches are legitimate, such as those that concern the form and those that concern the relatively tangible thematic levels . Right up to the present, all transformations of aesthetic comport- ment, as transformations of the comportment of the subject, involved changes in the representational dimension; in every instance new layers emerged, were dis- covered by art and adapted to it, while others perished. Until that period when representational painting declined, even in cubism still, the work could be ap- proached from the representational side as well as from that of pure form. Aby Warburg ' s studies and those of his school are evidence of this . Motif studies , such as Benjamin ' s on Baudelaire , are able under certain conditions to be more produc- tive aesthetically, that is, with regard to specifically formal questions, than the offi- cial formal analysis that seems to have a closer relation to art. Formal analysis had, and indeed still has, much to recommend it over dogmatic historicism. However, by extracting and thus isolating the concept of form from its dialectic with its other, it in tum tends toward petrification. At the opposite extreme, Hegel too did not escape the danger of such ossification. What even his sworn enemy Kierkegaard so admired him for, the accent he put on content [Inhalt] vis-a-vis form, did not merely announce opposition to empty and indifferent play, that is, the relation of art to truth, which was his preeminent concern. Rather, at the same time it revealed an overestimation of the thematic content of artworks regardless of their dialectic with form. As a result, an art-alien and philistine element entered Hegel's aesthet- ics , which manifests its fatal character in the aesthetics of dialectical materialism, which in this regard had no more misgivings about Hegel than did Marx . Granted, pre-Hegelian and even Kant's aesthetics had no emphatic concept of the artwork and relegated it to the level of a sublimated means of pleasure. Still, Kant's em- phasis on the work's formal constituents, through which the work becomes art in the first place, does more honor to the truth content of art than Hegel does , who directly intended this but never developed it out of art itself. The elements of form, which are those of sublimation, are-compared to Hegel-still bound by
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the eighteenth century at the same time that they are more progressive and mod- em; formalism, which is justly attributed to Kant, two hundred years later became the virulent password of anti-intellectual reaction. All the same, a weakness is unmistakable in the fundamental approach of Kant's aesthetics, apart from the controversy between formal and so-called content aesthetics. This weakness con- cerns the relation of his approach to the specific contents of the critique of aes- thetic judgment. Parallel to his theory of knowledge, Kant seeks to establish-as if it were obvious-the subjective-transcendental foundation for what he called, in eighteenth-century fashion, the "feeling of the beautiful. " According to the Critique ofPure Reason, however, the artifacts would be constituta and thus fall within the sphere of objects, a sphere situated external to the transcendental prob- lematic . In this sphere , according to Kant, the theory of art was already potentially a theory of objects and at the same time a historical theory . The relation of subjec- tivity to art is not, as Kant has it, that of a form of reaction to artworks; rather, that relation is in the first place the element of art's own objectivity, through which art objects are distinguished from other things. The subject inheres in their form and content [Gehalt] and only secondarily, and in a radically contingent fashion, insofar as people respond to them. Admittedly, art points back to a condition in which there was no fixed dichotomy between the object and reaction to it; this was re- sponsible for mistaking forms of reaction that are themselves the correlative of reified objectification as a priori. If it is maintained that, just as in the life process of society, production rather than reception is primary in art and in aesthetics, this implies the critique of traditional, naive aesthetic subjectivism. Recourse is not to be had to lived experience, creative individuality, and the like; rather, art is to be conceived in accord with the objectively developing lawfulness of production. This is all the more to be insisted upon because the problematic-defined by Hegel- of the affects released by the artwork has been hugely magnified by their manipu- lation . The subjective contexts of reception are frequently turned, according to the will of the culture industry, against the object that is being reacted to. Yet art- works respond to this by withdrawing even more into their own structure and thus contribute to the contingency of the work's effects, whereas in other historical periods there existed, if not harmony, then at least a certain proportion between the work and the response it received. Artistic experience accordingly demands a comprehending rather than an emotional relation to the works; the subject inheres in them and in their movement as one of their elements; when the subject encoun- ters them from an external perspective and refuses to obey their discipline, it is alien to art and becomes the legitimate object of sociology .
Aesthetics today should go beyond the controversy between Kant and Hegel and not simply level it. Kant's concept of what is pleasing according to its form is retro- grade with regard to aesthetic experience and cannot be restored. Hegel's theory of content [Inhalt] is too crude. Music certainly has a determinate content-what transpires in it-and yet it nevertheless mockS the idea of content endorsed by
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Hegel. His subjectivism is so total, his idea of spirit so all-pervasive, that the differentiation of spirit from its other, and thus the determination of that other, does not come into play in his aesthetics. Because for him everything proves to be subject, what is specific to the subject-the spirit as an element of artworks- atrophies and capitulates to the thematic element, exempt from the dialectic. He is not to be spared the reproach that in his Aesthetics, in spite of magnificent insights, he became caught up in the philosophy of reflection against which he struggled. Contrary to his own thinking, he followed the primitive notion that content or material is formed or "worked over" by the aesthetic subject; in any case he liked to play off primitive notions against reflection by way of reflection. It is precisely in the artwork that, in Hegel's terms, content and material must always already be subject. It is only by way of this subjectivity that the work be- comes something objective, that is, other. For the subject is in itself objectively mediated; by virtue of its artistic figuration its own-latent-objective content [Gehalt] emerges. No other idea of the content [lnhalt] of art holds good; official Marxist aesthetics no more understood the dialectic than it understood aesthetics. Form is mediated in-itself through content-not however in such a fashion that form confronts what is simply heterogeneous to it-and content is mediated by form; while mediated the two must be distinguished, but the immanent content [Inhalt] of artworks, their material and its movement, is fundamentally distinct from content [Inhalt] as something detachable, such as a plot in a play or the sub- ject of a painting, which. Hegel in all innocence equated with content [Inhalt]. Hegel, like Kant, lagged behind the aesthetic phenomena: Hegel missed what is specifically aesthetic , and Kant missed its depth and richness. The content [Inhalt] of a picture is not simply what it portrays but rather all the elements of color, structures, and relations it contains; the content of music is, for instance, as Schoenberg put it, the history of a theme. The object portrayed may also count as an element of content; in literature, the action or the narar ted story may also count; content, however, is no less what all of this undergoes in the work, that whereby it is organized and whereby it is transformed. Form and content are not to be confused, but they should be freed from their rigid antithesis, which is insuf- ficient to both extremes. Bruno Liebruck's insight that Hegel's politics and phi- losophy of right inhere more in the Logic than in the lectures and writings devoted to these material disciplines holds true also for Hegel's aesthetics: It has yet to be raised to an undiminished dialectic. At the beginning of the second part, Hegel's Logic shows that the categories of reflection had their own origin and develop- ment and yet were all the same valid as such; in the same spirit Nietzsche in the Twilight ofthe Idols dismantled the myth that nothing that develops is able to be true . Aesthetics must make this insight its own. What sets itself up in aesthetics as an eternal norm is, in that it became what it is, transitory and obsolete by virtue of its own claim to immortality. By contrast, however, the contemporary exigencies and norms that issue from the dynamic of history are not accidental and arbitrary
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but, by virtue of their historical content [Gehalt] , objective; what is ephemeral in aesthetics is what is fixed, its skeleton. Aesthetics is under no obligation to deduce the objectivity of its historical content [Gehalt] in historicizing fashion, as being the inevitable result of the course of history; rather, this objectivity is to be grasped according to the form of that historical content. It is not, as the trivial par- adigm would have it, that aesthetics moves and is transformed in history: History is immanent to the truth content of aesthetics. For this reason it is the task of the historicophilosophical analysis of the situation to bring to light in a rigorous fash- ion what was formerly held to be the apriori of aesthetics. The slogans that were distilled out of the situation are more objective than the general norms according to which, as is philosophical custom, they are to justify themselves; certainly it needs to be shown that the truth content of great aesthetic manifestos and similar documents has taken the place once held by philosophical aesthetics . The aesthet- ics that is needed today would be the self-consciousness of the truth content of what is radically temporal. This clearly demands, as the counterpoint to the analy- sis of the situation, that traditional aesthetic categories be confronted with this analysis; it is exclusively this confrontation that brings the artistic movement and the movement of the concept into relation.
That today a general methodology cannot, as is customary, preface the effort of reconceiving aesthetics, is itself of a part with methodology. The gUilt for this is borne by the relation between the aesthetic object and aesthetic thought. The insistence on method cannot be stringently met by opposing another method to the one already approved. So long as the work is not entered-in keeping with Goethe's maxim-as a chapel would be entered, all the talk about objectivity in matters of aesthetics, whether it be the objectivity of artistic content or that of its knowledge, remains pure assertion. The chattering, automated objection that in- sists that claims to objectivity are only subjective opinions, or that the aesthetic content in which aesthetics that aims at objectivity terminates is nothing but pro- jection, can be met fully only by the proof of objective artistic content in artworks themselves . The fulfillment of this proof legitimates method at the same time that it precludes its supposition. If aesthetic objectivity were presupposed as the ab- stract universal principle of the fulfillment of the method, without support from any system, it would be at a disadvantage; the truth of this objectivity is consti- tuted by what comes later, in the process of its development, not by what is simply posited. The process has nothing but the development oftruth to oppose as a prin- ciple to the insufficiency of the principle. Certainly the fulfillment of aesthetic objectivity requires critical reflection on principles . This protects it from irrespon- sible conjecture. Spirit that understands artworks, however, wards off its hubris through the strength of objectivated spirit, which artworks actually already are in themselves. What spirit requires of SUbjective spirit is that spirit's own spon- taneity . The knowledge of art means to render objectified spirit once again fluid through the medium of reflection . Aesthetics must, however, take care not to be-
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lieve that it achieves its affinity to art by-as if with a pass of a magic wand and excluding conceptual detours-enunciating what art is. The mediatedness of thought is qualitatively different from that of artworks. What is mediated in art, that through which the artwork becomes something other than its mere factuality , must be mediated a second time by reflection : through the medium of the concept. This succeeds, however, not through the distancing of the concept from the artis- tic detail, but by thought's tum toward it. When, just before the close of the first movement of Beethoven's sonata Les Adieux, an evanescently fleeting associa- tion summons up in the course of three measures the sound of trotting horses, the swiftly vanishing passage, the sound of disappearance, which confounds any ef- fort to pin it down anywhere in the context of the phrase, says more of the hope of return than would any general reflection on the essence of the fleetingly enduring sound. Only a philosophy that could grasp such micrological figures in its inner- most construction of the aesthetic whole would make good on what it promises. For this, however, aesthetics must itself be internally developed, mediated thought. If aesthetics, nevertheless, wanted to conjure up the secret of art with primal words, it would receive for its trouble nullities, tautologies, or at best formal char- acteristics from which that very essence evaporates that is usurped by linguistic style and the "care" for origins. Philosophy is not as lucky as Oedipus , who irrev- ocably answered the puzzle posed to him, even if the hero's luck proved delu- sional . Because the enigmaticalness of art is articulated only in the constellation of each particular work, by virtue of its technical procedures, concepts are not only the difficulty inherent in their decipherment but also their chance for deci- pherment. According to its own essence, in its particularization, art is more than simply its particularity; it is mediated even in its immediacy, and to this extent it bears an elective affinity with concepts. Common sense justly demands that aes- thetics not envelop itself in a self-enclosing nominalism devoted strictly to the particular analyses of artworks, however indispensable the latter may be. Whereas it must not let its freedom to singularity atrophy, second reflection-whose hour, in aesthetics, has indeed come-moves in a medium removed from artworks. Without some trace ofresignation in the face ofits undiminished ideal, aesthetics would become the victim of the chimera of concreteness that is the concreteness of art - and even there is not beyond suspicion - but is in no way the concreteness of theory. As a protest against abstracting and classifying procedures, aesthetics all the same requires abstractions and indeed has as its object the classificatory genre s . Art' s genre s , however repressive they became , are not simply flatus vocis, even though the opposition to universal conceptuality is fundamental to art . Every artwork, even if it presents itself as a work of perfect harmony, is in itself the nexus of a problem. As such it participates in history and thus oversteps its own uniqueness. In the problem nexus of each and every artwork, what is external to the monad, and that whereby it is constituted, is sedimented in it. It is in the dimen- sion of history that the individual aesthetic object and its concept communicate.
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History is inherent to aesthetic theory. Its categories are radically historical; this endows its development with an element of coercion that, given its illusory as- pect, stands in need of criticism yet nevertheless has enough force to break the hold of an aesthetic relativism that inevitably portrays art as an arbitrary juxta- position of artworks. However dubious it is from the perspective of the theory of knowledge to say of an artwork, or indeed of art as a whole, that it is "neces- sary" -no artwork must unconditionally exist- their relation to each other is nevertheless mutually conditioning, and this is evident in their internal composition. The construction of such problem nexuses leads to what art has yet to become and that in which aesthetics would ultimately have its object. The concrete historical situation of art registers concrete demands. Aesthetics begins with reflection on them; only through them does a perspective open on what art is. For art and art- works are exclusively what they are able to become . In that no artwork is capable of resolving its immanent tension fully, and in that history ultimately attacks even the idea of such resolution, aesthetic theory cannot rest content with the interpre- tation of given artworks and their concept. By turning toward their truth content, aesthetics is compelled-as philosophy-beyond the works. The consciousness of the truth of artworks is, precisely as philosophical truth , in accord with the ap- parently most ephemeral form of aesthetic reflection, the manifesto. The principle of method here is that light should be cast on all art from the vantage point of the most recent artworks, rather than the reverse, following the custom of histori- cism and philology, which, bourgeois at heart, prefers that nothing ever change. If Valery ' s thesis is true that the best in the new corresponds to an old need , then the most authentic works are critiques of past works. Aesthetics becomes normative by articulating such criticism. This, however, has retroactive force, and from it alone is it possible to expect what general aesthetics offered merely as a hope and a sham.
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Editors' Afterword
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann
Adorno's metaphor for works ofart applies literally to the last philosophical text on which he worked: "The fragment is the intrusion of death into the work. While destroying it, it removes the stain of semblance. " The text of Aesthetic Theory, as it was in August 1969, which the editors present here as faithfully as possible, is the text of a work in progress; this is not the form in which Adorno would have published this book . Several days before his death he wrote in a letter that the final version "still needed a desperate effort" but that "basically it is now a matter of organization and hardly that of the substance of the book. " Of this substance, ac- cording to Adorno, "essentially everything is, as one says, all there. " The remain- ing final revision, which Adorno hoped to finish by the middle of 1970, would have involved much shifting of passages within the text as well as abbreviations of it; the insertion of the fragments collected here as the "Paralipomena" had been reserved for this final revision; and the "Draft Introduction" would have been replaced by another. Finally, Adorno would have improved many stylistic details. Thus the work as a whole remained a torso that, along with Negative Dialectics' and a volume planned on moral philosophy, "will show what I have to throw into the scale. "2 If the comment does injustice to Adorno's other books, from Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic3 to Alban Berg4-an injustice that
only the author could possibly possess the slightest right to inflict-it all the same gives a sense of what work was intruded upon, what work broken off. For even if the "fragmentary accrues as expression to the work"-the expression of the cri- tique of what is systematically fixed and closed in itself, the critique that most fun- damentally motivates Adorno ' s philosophy - and removes the stain of semblance
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in which, according to Adorno's insight, all spirit necessarily becomes ensnared, still this hardly counterbalances the destruction to which the text of Aesthetic The- ory testifies. Adorno employs the concept of the fragment in a double sense. He means on the one hand, something productive: that theories that bear a systematic intention must collapse in fragments in order to release their truth content. Noth- ing of the sort holds for the Aesthetic Theory. Its fragmentariness is the intrusion of death into a work before it had entirely realized its law of form. Essential to Adorno's philosophy as a whole is that no meaning be extracted from the ravages of death that would permit collusion with them. Two biographical fragments of comparable rank held eminent importance for Adorno: Right up to the end of his life he refused to acquiesce that Benjamin' s Arcades Project was beyond saving or that the instrumentation of Berg ' s Lulu had to remain incomplete . As little as an edition of Aesthetic Theory can disguise the fragmentary character of the work , or should even attempt to do so, it is just as impossible to be reconciled with it. There is no acquiescing in something that is incomplete merely because of contingency , and yet true fidelity , which Adorno himself practiced incomparably , prohibits that hands be laid on the fragmentary to complete it.
Adorno resumed his teaching at the University of Frankfurt in the winter semester of 1949-1950, and already in the summer term 1950 he held a seminar on aesthet- ics. In the following years he lectured four more times on the same topic, the final course extending over the summer and winter terms of 1967-1968, when large parts of the Aesthetic Theory were already written. Precisely when he conceived the plan for a book on aesthetics is not known; occasionally Adorno spoke of it as one of the projects that "I've been putting off my whole life. " He began making notes for the planned aesthetics in June 1956 at the latest. The wish of his friend Peter Suhrkamp, who died in 1959, to have an aesthetics from Adorno for his press, may have contributed to the concretization of the project. More important, obviously , was Adorno' s intention of integrating his ideas on aesthetics and to de- velop as a theory what until then he had notated in his many writings on music and literature . These ideas had often been taken to be, if not downright rhapsodic, then mere flashes of insight. The primacy of substantive thought in Adorno's philoso- phy may have blocked any view of the unity of his philosophical consciousness. For Adorno the material studies on art comprise not "applications but rather in- tegral elements of aesthetic theory itself. "-On May 4 , 1 96 1 , Adorno began to dictate the first version of Aesthetic Theory, which consisted of relatively short paragraphs. The work was soon broken off in favor of Negative Dialectics. After this was finished in the summer of 1966, Adorno undertook a new version of the aesthetics on October 25, 1966. The division into paragraphs gave way to one by chapters . He devoted great effort to the "schematization," a detailed disposition of the book. Already by the end of January 1967, approximately one fourth of the text had been completed in dictation. Dictation continued throughout 1967. More or less as an aside Adorno wrote studies such as the introduction to Durkheim5
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and the preface to the selection of Rudolf Borchardt's poems. 6 According to a diary note, "The rough dictation of Aesthetic Theory was finished" on December 25, 1967; the entry appears to have been premature, however, for on January 8 , 1968, he wrote in a letter, "The rough draft is almost complete," and on January 24 finally, "Meanwhile I have finished the first draft of my big book on aesthetics. "-The dictated version comprises, along with the introduction, seven chapters entitled: "Situation," "What Art Was, or On Primal History," "Materialism," "Nominal- ism," "Society," "Watchwords," and "Metaphysics. " With the exception of sev- eral paragraphs, the 1961 text was wholly subsumed in the new version. But even this new version is scarcely recognizable in the final draft that is published here. Adorno commented in a letter on the preparation of the final version in relation to the first draft: "Only then does the real task begin , that i s , the final revision; for me the second drafts are always the decisive effort, the first only assembles the raw material . . . : They are an organized self-deception by which I maneuver myself into the position of the critic of my own work, the position that is for me always the most productive. " In the critical revision of Aesthetic Theory, however, it turned out that this time the second draft was itself only a provisional version . After completion of the draft the work came to a halt. Adorno turned his atten- tion to sociological essays such as the keynote address for the 1 6th Congress of German Sociologists and the introduction to the Positivism Dispute in German Sociology;7 at the same time he wrote the book on Berg. Adorno always took these distractions from his "main task" as salutary correctives. In addition, how- ever, there were the discussions with the student protest movement and a growing involvement in university politics; from the former much originated that went into the "Marginalia to Theory and Practice,"S but the latter fruitlessly consumed time and energy . It was not until the beginning of September 1 968 that he was able to continue work on Aesthetic Theory. First he critically annotated the entire text as a preliminary to the actual revision. This consisted in a detailed, handwritten refor- mulation of the typescript of the dictated material, a reformulation in which no sentence remained unchanged and scarcely one remained where it stood; innu- merable passages were added and not a few, some of them lengthy, were rigor- ously deleted. In the course of this revision, which Adorno began on October 9, 1 968 , the division into chapters was relinquished. I t was superseded b y a continu- ous text that was to be articulated only spatially; the text was finished on March 5 ,
1969. Three chapters of the old version were left out of the main text; two of them-"Watchwords" and "Situation"-were both corrected in March; the revi- sion of the final chapter, "Metaphysics," was completed on May 1 4 . In the follow- ing weeks many additions were written that in the course of the third revision would have been incorporated in the main text and would to some extent have re- placed passages with which Adorno was still not satisfied. The last dated text was inscribed July 16, 1969.
The presentation ofthe book, which may appreciably burden its reception, is the
364 0 EDITORS' AFfERWORD
result not only of the fragmentary character of Aesthetic Theory. During work on the second draft Adorno found himself confronted with problems he had not an- ticipated. These concerned the organization of the text and above all the problem of the relation of the presentation to what is presented. Adorno gives an account of these issues in his correspondence: "It is interesting that in working there obtrudes from the content [Inhalt] various implications for the form that I long expected but that now indeed astonish me. It is simply that from my theorem that there is no philosophical first principle , it now also results that one cannot build an argumen- tative structure that follows the usual progressive succession of steps, but rather that one must assemble the whole out of a series of partial complexes that are , so to speak, of equal weight and concentrically arranged all on the same level; their constellation, not their succession, must yield the idea. " In another letter Adorno speaks of the difficulties in the presentation ofAesthetic Theory: "These difficul- ties consist . . . in this, that a book's almost ineluctable movement from antecedent to consequence proved so incompatible with the content that for this reason any organization in the traditional sense- which up until now I have continued to fol- low (even in Negative Dialectics)-proved impracticable. The book must, so to speak , be written in equally weighted , paratactical parts that are arranged around a midpoint that they express through their constellation. " The problems of a para- tactical form of presentation, such as they appear in the last version of Aesthetic Theory, with which Adorno would not have said he was content, are objectively determined: They are the expression of the attitude of thought to objectivity. Philosophical parataxis seeks to fulfill the promise of Hegel's program of a pure contemplation by not distorting things through the violence of preforming them subjectively, but rather by bringing their muteness, their nonidentity, to speech. Using Holderlin's work, Adorno presented the implications of a serializ- ing procedure, and he noted of his own method that it had the closest affinities with the aesthetic texts of the late Holderlin. A theory , however, that is sparked by the individuum ineffabile, that wants to make amends to the unrepeatable, the non- conceptual , for what identifying thought inflicts on it, necessarily comes into con- flict with the abstractness to which, as theory, it is compelled. By its philosophical content [Gehalt] , Adorno's aesthetic is driven to paratactical presentation, yet this form is aporetic; it demands the solution of a problem of whose ultimate insolu- bility, in the medium oftheory, Adorno had no doubt. At the same time, however, the bindingness of theory is bound to the obligation that labor and the effort of thought not renounce the effort to solve the insoluble. This paradoxy could also provide a model for the reception of this work. The difficulties that confront the 1tOPOC;, the direct access to the text of Aesthetic Theory, could not have been cleared away by further revision of the text, yet doubtlessly in such a fully articu- lated text these difficulties would have been articulated and thus minimized. - Adorno planned to work through Aesthetic Theory a third time , a revision i n which
EDITORS' AFTERWORD 0 365
the text would have taken its definitive form, as soon as he returned from his vaca-
tion, which turned out to be his last.
This volume, which makes no claim to being a critical-historical edition, contains the complete text of the final version. Only those passages of the initial dictated version that were not incorporated in the second revision were omitted; even when Adorno did not explicitly strike them out, they must be regarded as having been rejected by him. On the other hand, because of their pertinence a number of shorter, uncorrected fragments are collected in the "Paralipomena. " The corrected draft introduction, though it was discarded by Adorno, is appended to the text; its substantive importance prohibited its exclusion. -Idiosyncrasies of spelling have been maintained. The punctuation remains unchanged as well, although it still largely follows an oral rhythm; for publication Adorno would undoubtedly have adjusted it to standard practice. Because the handwritten corrections made the manuscript difficult for Adorno himself to read , occasional anacoluthic and el- liptical formulations remain; these were discreetly corrected. Beyond such gram- matical intrusions the editors felt under obligation to refrain wherever possible from conjecture, however frequently this was suggested by the repetitions, occa- sionally also by contradictions. Innumerable formulations and passages, which the editors were convinced Adorno would have changed, were incorporated un- changed. Conjectures were made only in instances where they were required to exclude misunderstandings of meaning .
The ordering of the book posed substantial difficulties. The corrected main text was the basic manuscript, into which the earlier mentioned, reworked but uninte- grated three chapters were inserted. The chapter entitled "Situation"-a philoso- phy of history of modernite , which was the first chapter of the original version - had to be placed relatively early: Central to Aesthetic Theory is the insight that only from the most advanced contemporary art is light cast on the work of the past. According to a note, Adorno intended to combine the chapters "Situation" and "Watchwords," and the editors proceeded accordingly. The insertion of the chapter "Metaphysics" at the end of the section on "Enigmatic Character" fol- lowed compellingly from that section ' s course of thought . - With regard to par- ticular passages, it was necessary to reorganize a number of them. In marginalia in the text Adorno himself had considered most of these shifts. In many instances, the shifts undertaken by the editors intended to accentuate the book's paratactical principle of presentation; they were not intended to sacrifice the book to a deduc- tive hierarchical structure of presentation . - Those fragments treated by the edi- tors as "Paralipomena" were in part later additions and in part "extracts": passages excised from the original text that Adorno intended to place elsewhere . The inte- gration of these fragments into the main text proved to be impracticable . Only sel- dom did Adorno mark the exact place where he wanted them, and almost always there were a number of possible places for their insertion . Furthermore , the inser-
366 D EDITORS' AFfERWORD
tion of these texts would have required the formulation of transitional phrases, which the editors did not feel authorized to undertake. The organization of the "Paralipomena" is the work of the editors. -The passage headings are also ad- ditions made by the editors, who were often enough able to draw on "headings," the descriptive keywords with which Adorno notated the majority of the manu- script pages.
A quotation from Friedrich Schlegel was to have served as a motto for Aesthetic Theory: "What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art. " Adorno had intended to dedicate the book to Samuel Beckett.
The editors want to thank Elfriede Olbrich, Adorno's secretary of many years, who undertook the decipherment and copying of the text .
July 1970
Notes
Translator's Introduction
1 . Bamett Newman, in Painters Painting: The New York An Scene, 1940-1970, directed by Emile de Antonio.
2. Adorno,Beethoven,ed. RolfTiedemann(Frankfurt,1993),p. 15.
3. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York, 1973), p. xx (translation amended) .
4. Adorno, "Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch;' in Gesammelte Schriften 10. 2 (Frankfurt, 1977), p. 693.
5. Ibid. ,p. 698.
6. Ibid.
7. Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York. 1984).
8. C. Lenhardt, "Response to Hullot-Kentor," Telos, no. 65 (Fall 1985): 153.
9. See Hullot-Kentor, "Aesthetic Theory: The Translation," Telos, no. 65 (Fall 1985): 147-152.
10. Adorno,Mahler:AMusicalPhysiognomy, trans. EdmundJephcott(Chicago,1992),p. 84. 11. SeetheAfterwordtothistranslation.
1 2 . See Jiirgen Habermas , "A Letter to Christa Wolf," from The Normalcy of a Berlin Republic,
trans . Michael Roloff (forthcoming).
13. Conversation with Rolf Tiedemann, October 15, 1995.
14. Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfun School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance,
trans. MichaelRobertson(Cambridge,Mass. : 1994);see,e. g. ,pp. 245,246,254,458,and510.
There are three levels ofnotes: Adorno's own, some ofwhich were addedby the German editors in accord with the author's sparse style ofannotation; thosefew additional comments contributed by the German editors, which are marked as such and are in square brackets; and those explanatory notes specific to this translation, also in square brackets and identified by trans. Citations are given exclu- sively in English except when German or French poetry is qudted in the text, in which case the original
367
368 0 NOTES TO PAGES xx-19
is provided in the note. In the several instances i n which n o English citation is givenfor translations of
poetry in the main text, the translations are my own.
Art, Society, Aesthetics
I . Helmut Kuhn, Schriften zur Aesthetik (Munich, 1 966), pp. 236ff.
2. [See "Excursus: Theories on the Origin of Art. "]
3. See Adorno, "Die Kunst und die Kiinste," in Ohne Leitbild, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10. 1
(Frankfurt, 1977), p. 432ff.
4. ["Stellung zur ObjektivitiH": The phrase is from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Science of
Logic,trans. WilliamWallace(Oxford, 1975),pp. 47-112,inwhichthree"attitudesofthoughttoob- jectivity" are e1ucidated. -trans. ]
5. [Although the direct reference is to Hegel, the phraseology at the same time quotes the title of Walter Benjamin's essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" ("The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction"), a title on which Adorno works re- peated variations, often in ways that cannot be matched with adequate compactness in translation. - trans. ]
6. ["II faut etre absolument moderne. "-trans. ]
7. [For the English "content" German has both "Inhalt" and "Gehalt," which, in aesthetic contexts , serve to distinguish the idea of thematic content or subject matter from that of content in the sense of import, essence, or substance of a work. This distinction, however, is not terminologically fixed in German or in Adorno's writings. One concept may well be used in place of the other. In some sections of Aesthetic Theory it is relatively easy to recognize which concept is at stake, as for instance in the lengthy development of the relation ofform and content, where content is obviously "Iohalt. " In these passages, the German is given when the concept is first introduced. At other points in the text, how- ever, differentiation becomes more difficult. Where it has been necessary to emphasize the distinction between the terms, the much less frequently used term "Inhalt" accompanies the English concept. At points, however, where there is an ongoing, explicit, contrasting discussion of the two concepts, or where confusion seemed likely, the German concepts accompany the single English concept. At one point it has been necessary to translate "Gehalt" as "substance"; in all other instances "substance" is the translation of "Substanz. " There are, furthermore, various circumstances in which other German concepts than those just mentioned are also best translated as "content. "-trans. ]
8. ["ZweckmaBigkeit": For Kantian terms I generally follow Werner S. Pluhar's translation of Critique ofJudgment (Indianapolis, 1987)-trans. ]
9. [Rene Laforgue, The Defeat ofBaudelaire (Folcroft, 1977). -trans. ] 10. See Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, section 2, pp. 45ff.
1 1 . Ibid. , p. 45.
1 2. Ibid. , p. 46.
13. Ibid. ,p. 45.
Situation
I . [Hugo von Hofmannstha1, The Lord Chandos Letter (Marlboro, 1986). -trans. ]
2. See Stefan George, "Darkness of Dream" ["Foliage and fruit of camelian and gold"], in The Works ofStefan George, trans. Marx and Merwitz (Chapel Hill, 1974),p. 270.
3.