No More Learning

Baudelaire, the apologist of form no less than the poet of the vie modeme, expressed this in the dedication of Le spleen de Paris when he wrote that he can break off where he pleases, and so may the reader, "for I have not strung his wayward will to the endless thread of some unneccessary plot. ") ) What was organized by nominalistic art by means of development is stigmatized as superfluous once the intention of its function is recognized, and this becomes an irritant. With this comment, the chief figure of the whole of l 'art pour l 'art effectively capitulates: His degout extends to the dynamic principle that engenders the work as autonomous in itself. Since that moment the law of all art has been its antilaw . Just as for the bourgeois nominalistic artwork the necessity of a static form decayed, here it is the aesthetic dynamic that decays in accord with the experience first formulated by Kiirnberger but flashing up in each line and stanza of Baudelaire, that life no longer exists. This has not changed in the situation in which contemporary art finds itself. Art's processual character has been overtaken by the critique of semblance, and not merely as the critique of aesthetic universality but rather as that of progress in the midst of what is ever-the-same. Process has been unmasked as repetition and has thus become an embarrassment to art. Enciphered in modern art is the postulate of an art that no longer conforms to the disjunction of the static and dynamic . Beckett, indifferent to the ruling cliche of development, views his task as that of moving in an infi- nitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point. This aesthetic principle of construction , as the principle of Ilfaut continuer, goes beyond stasis; and it goes beyond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treading water and, as such, a confession of the uselessness of the dynamic. In keeping with this, all constructivistic techniques tend toward stasis. The telos of the dy- namic of the ever-same is disaster; Beckett' s writings look this in the eye . Con- sciousness recognizes the limitedness of limitless self-sufficient progress as an illusion of the absolute subject, and social labor aesthetically mocks bourgeois pathos once the superfluity of real labor came into reach. The dynamic in artworks is brought to a halt by the hope of the abolition of labor and the threat of a glacial death; both are registered in the dynamic, which is unable to choose on its own. The potential of freedom manifest in it is at the same time denied by the social
SOCIETY 0 225
order, and therefore it is not substantial in arteither. Thatexplains the ambivalence of aesthetic construction. Construction is equally able to codify the resignation of the weakened subject and to make absolute alienation the sole concern of art- which once wanted the opposite - as it is able to anticipate a reconciled condition that would itself be situated beyond static and dynamic. The many interrelations with technocracy give reason to suspect that the principle of construction remains aesthetically obedient to the administered world; but it may terminate in a yet un- known aesthetic form, whose rational organization might point to the abolition of all categories of administration along with their reflexes in art.
Prior to the emancipation of the subject, art was undoubtedly in a certain sense more immediately social than it was afterward. Its autonomy, its growing inde- pendence from society , was a function of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that was itself bound up with the social structure. Prior to the emergence of this consciousness, art certainly stood in opposition to social domination and its mores, but not with an awareness of its own independence. There had been con- flicts between art and society desultorily ever since art was condemned in Plato's state, but the idea of a fundamentally oppositional art was inconceivable, and so- cial controls worked much more immediately than in the bourgeois era until the rise of totalitarian states. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie integrated art much more completely than any previous society had. Under the pressure of an inten- sifying nominalism, the ever present yet latent social character of art was made increasingly manifest; this social character is incomparably more evident in the
novel than it was in the highly stylized and remote epics of chivalry . The influx of experiences that are no longer forced into a priori genres , the requirement of con- stituting form out of these experiences, that is, from below: This is "realistic" in purely aesthetic terms , regardless of content [Inhalt] . No longer sublimated by the principle of stylization , the relation of content to the society from which it derives at first becomes much less refracted, and this is not only the case in literature. The so-called lower genres too held their distance from society , even when, like Attic comedy, they made bourgeois relations and the events of daily life thematic; the flight into no-man's-land is not just one of Aristophanes' antics but rather an es- sential element of his form. If, in one regard , as a product of the social labor of spirit, art is always implicitly afait social, in becoming bourgeois art its social aspect was made explicit. The object of bourgeois art is the relation of itself as artifact to empirical society; Don Quixote stands at the beginning of this develop- ment . Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production , in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than
? 226 0 SOCIETY
complying with existing social norms and qualifying as "socially useful," it criti- cizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which everything is heteronomously defined. Art's asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society . Cer- tainly through its refusal of society, which is equivalent to sublimation through the law of form, autonomous art makes itself a vehicle of ideology: The society at which it shudders is left in the distance, undisturbed. Yet this is more than ideol- ogy: Society is not only the negativity that the aesthetic law of form condemns but also, even in its most objectionable shape, the quintessence of self-producing and self-reproducing human life. Art was no more able to dispense with this element than with critique until that moment when the social process revealed itself as one of self-annihilation; and it is not in the power of art, which does not make judgments, to separate these two elements intentionally. A pure productive force such as that of the aesthetic , once freed from heteronomous control , is objectively the counterimage of enchained forces, but it is also the paradigm of fateful, self- interested doings. Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not commu- nication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced with- out being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art's immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared. Nothing social in art is immedi- ately social, not even when this is its aim. Not long ago even the socially commit- ted Brecht found that to give his political position artistic expression it was neces- sary to distance himself precisely from that social reality at which his works took aim. Jesuitical machinations were needed sufficiently to camouflage what he wrote as socialist realism to escape the inquisition. Music betrays all art. Just as in music society, its movement, and its contradictions appear only in shadowy fashion- speaking out of it, indeed, yet in need of identification - so it is with all other arts . Whenever art seems to copy society , it becomes all the more an "as-if. " For oppo- site reasons, Brecht's China in the Good Woman ofSetzuan is no less stylized than Schiller's Messina in The Bride ofMessina. All moral judgments on the charac- ters in novels or plays have been senseless even when these judgments have justly taken the empirical figures back of the work as their targets; discussions about whether a positive hero can have negative traits are as foolish as they sound to anyone who overhears them from so much as the slightest remove. Form works like a magnet that orders elements of the empirical world in such a fashion that they are estranged from their extra-aesthetic existence, and it is only as a result of this estrangement that they master the extra-aesthetic essence. Conversely, by ex- ploiting these elements the culture industry all the more successfully joins slavish
SOCIETY 0 227
respect for empirical detai l , the gapless semblance of photographic fidelity , with ideological manipulation. What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things. Insofar as a so- cial function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. Their enchantment is disen- chantment. Their social essence requires a double reflection on their being-for- themselves and on their relations to society. Their double character is manifest at every point; they change and contradict themselves. It was plausible that socially progressive critics should have accused the program of l 'art pour l 'art, which has often been in league with political reaction, of promoting a fetish with the concept of a pure, exclusively self-sufficient artwork. What is true in this accusation is that artworks, products of social labor that are subject to or produce their own law of form, seal themselves off from what they themselves are. To this extent, each art- work could be charged with false consciousness and chalked up to ideology. In formal terms , independent of what they say, they are ideology in that a priori they posit something spiritual as being independent from the conditions of its material production and therefore as being intrinsically superior and beyond the primordial guilt of the separation of physical and spiritual labor. What is exalted on the basis of this guilt is at the same time debased by it. This is why artworks with truth con- tent do not blend seamlessly with the concept of art; l 'art pour l 'art theorists, like Valery, have pointed this out. But the guilt they bear of fetishism does not dis- qualify art, any more so than it disqualifies anything culpable; for in the univer- sally, socially mediated world nothing stands external to its nexus of guilt. The truth content of artworks, which is indeed their social truth, is predicated on their fetish character . The principle of heteronomy , apparently the counterpart of fetish- ism, is the principle ofexchange, and in it domination is masked. Only what does not submit to that principle acts as the plenipotentiary of what is free from domi- nation; only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value. Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity. In the context of total semblance, art's sem- blance of being-in-itself is the mask of truth. Marx's scorn of the pittance Milton received for Paradise Lost, a work that did not appear to the market as socially useful labor,l is, as a denunciation of useful labor, the strongest defense of art against its bourgeois functionalization, which is perpetuated in art's undialectical social condemnation. A liberated society would be beyond the irrationality of its fauxfrais and beyond the ends-means-rationality of utility. This is enciphered in art and is the source of art's social explosiveness. Although the magic fetishes are
one of the historical roots of art, a fetishistic element remains admixed in artworks, an element that goes beyond commodity fetishism. Artworks can neither exclude nor deny this; even socially the emphatic element of semblance in artworks is , as a
228 D SOCIETY
corrective , the organon of truth . Artworks that do not insist fetishistically on their coherence, as if they were the absolute that they are unable to be, are worthless from the start; but the survival of art becomes precarious as soon as it becomes conscious of its fetishism and, as has been the case since the middle of the nine- teenth century , insists obstinately on it. Art cannot advocate delusion by insisting that otherwise art would not exist. This forces art into an aporia . All that succeeds in going even minutely beyond it is insight into the rationality of its irrationality. Artworks that want to divest themselves of fetishism by real and extremely dubi- ous political commitment regularly enmesh themselves in false consciousness as the result of inevitable and vainly praised simplification. In the shortsighted praxis to which they blindly subscribe, their own blindness is prolonged.
The objectivation of art, which is what society from its external perspective takes to be art' s fetishism, is itself social in that it is the product of the division of labor. That is why the relation of art to society is not to be sought primarily in the sphere of reception . This relation is anterior to reception , in production . Interest in the so- cial decipherment of art must orient itself to production rather than being content with the study and classification of effects that for social reasons often totally diverge from the artworks and their objective social content. Since time immemo- rial, human reactions to artworks have been mediated to their utmost and do not refer immediately to the object; indeed, they are now mediated by society as a whole. The study of social effect neither comes close to understanding what is so- cial in art nor is it in any position to dictate norms for art, as it is inclined to do by positivist spirit. The heteronomy, which reception theory's normative interpreta- tion of phenomena foists on art, is an ideological fetter that exceeds everything ideological that may be inherent in art's fetishization. Art and society converge in the artwork's content [Gehalt], not in anything external to it. This applies also to the history of art. Collectivization of the individual takes place at the cost of the social force of production . In the history of art, real history returns by virtue of the life of the productive force that originates in real history and is then separated from it. This is the basis of art's recollection of transience. Art preserves it and makes it present by transforming it: This is the social explanation of its temporal nucleus. Abstaining from praxis, art becomes the schema of social praxis: Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary. However, whereas society reaches into art and disappears there by means of the identity of forces and relations , even the most advanced art has , conversely , the tendency toward social integration. Yet contrary to the cliche that touts the virtues of progress, this integration does not bring the blessings of justice in the form of retrospective confirmation. More often, reception wears away what constitutes the work's determinate negation of society. Works are usually critical in the era in which they appear; later they are neutralized, not least because of changed social relations. Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy. However, once artworks are entombed in the pantheon of cultural commodities , they themselves- their truth content - are
SOCIETY 0 229
also damaged. In the administered world neutralization is universal. Surrealism began as a protest against the fetishization of art as an isolated realm, yet as art, which after all surrealism also was, it was forced beyond the pure form of protest. Painters for whom the quality of peinture was not an issue, as it was for Andre Masson, struck a balance between scandal and social reception. Ultimately, Salvador Dali became an exalted society painter, the Laszlo or Van Dongen of a generation that liked to think of itself as being sophisticated on the basis of a vague sense of a crisis that had in any case been stabilized for decades. Thus the false afterlife of surrealism was established. Modem tendencies, in which irrupt- ing shock-laden contents [Inhalte] demolish the law of form, are predestined to make peace with the world, which gives a cozy reception to unsublimated mater- ial as soon as the thorn is removed. In the age of total neutralization, false recon- ciliation has of course also paved the way in the sphere of radically abstract art: Nonrepresentational art is suitable for decorating the walls of the newly prosper- ous . 1t is uncertain whether that also diminishes the immanent quality of artworks; the excitement with which reactionaries emphasize this danger speaks against its reality . It would be truly idealistic to locate the relation of art and society exclu- sively as mediated in problems of social structure. Art's double character- its au- tonomy andfait social-is expressed ever and again in the palpable dependencies and conflicts between the two spheres. Frequently there are direct socioeconomic interventions in artistic production, a contemporary instance of which is the long- term contracts between painters and art merchants who favor what is called work with a "personal touch," or more bluntly, a gimmick. That German expressionism vanished so quickly may have its artistic reasons in the conflict between the idea of an artwork, which remained its goal, and the specific idea of the absolute scream. Expressionist works could not totally succeed without betraying them- selves . Also important was that the genre became politically obsolete as its revo- lutionary impetus went unrealized and the Soviet Union began to prosecute radi- cal art. Nor should it be concealed that the authors of that movement, which went unreceived until forty or fifty years later, had to make a living and were com- pelled, as Americans say, to go commercial; this could be demonstrated in the case of most German expressionist writers who survived World War I. What is so- ciologically to be learned from the fate of the expressionists is the primacy of the
bourgeois profession over the need for expression that inspired the expressionists in however naive and diluted a fashion. In bourgeois society artists, like all who are intellectually productive, are compelled to keep at it once they have taken on the trade name of artist. Superannuated expressionists not unwillingly chose mar- ketably promising themes. The lack of any immanent necessity for production, coupled with the concurrent economic compulsion to continue, is apparent in the product as its objective insignificance.
Among the mediations of art and society the thematic, the open or covert treat- ment of social matters, is the most superficial and deceptive. The claim that the
230 0 SOCffiTY
sculpture of a coal miner a priori says more , socially , than a sculpture without pro- letarian hero , is by now echoed only where art is used for the purpose of "forming opinion ," in the wooden language of the peoples ' democracies of the Eastern bloc, and is subordinated to empirical aims, mostly as a means for improving produc- tion. Emile Meuniers' idealized coal miner and his realism dovetail with a bour- geois ideology that dealt with the then still visible proletariat by certifying that it too was beautiful humanity and noble nature. Even unvarnished naturalism is often of a part with a deformed bourgeois character structure, a suppressed- in psychoanalytic terms, anal-pleasure. It feeds on the suffering and decay it scourges; like Blut-und-Boden authors, Zola glorified fertility and employed anti- Semitic cliches . On the thematic level, in the language of indictment, no boundary can be drawn between aggressiveness and conformism. An agitprop chorus of the unemployed with the performance directive that it be performed in an "ugly" fashion, may have functioned around 1930 as a certificate of correct political opinion, though it hardly ever testified to progressive consciousness; but it was always uncertain if the artistic stance of growling and raw technique really denounced such things or identified with them. Real denunciation is probably only a capacity of form, which is overlooked by a social aesthetic that believes in themes. What is socially decisive in artworks is tl. te content [lnhalt] that becomes eloquent through the work's formal structures. Kafka, in whose work monopoly capitalism appears only distantly , codifies in the dregs of the administered world what becomes of people under the total social spell more faithfully and power- fully than do any novels about corrupt industrial trusts. The thesis that form is the locus of social content [Gehalt] can be concretely shown in Kafka' s language . Its objectivity, its Kleistian quality has often been remarked upon, and readers who measure up to Kafka have recognized the contradiction between that objectivity and events that become remote through the imaginary character of so sober a pre- sentation. However, this contrast becomes productive not only because the quasi- realistic description brings the impossible menacingly close. At the same time this critique of the realistic lineaments of Kafka's form, a critique that to socially com- mitted ears seems all too artistic, has its social aspect. Kafka is made acceptable by many of these realistic lineaments as an ideal of order, possibly of a simple life and modest activity in one's assigned station, an ideal that is itself a mask of social repression. The linguistic habitus of "the world is as it is" is the medium through which the social spell becomes aesthetic appearance. Kafka wisely guards against naming it, as if otherwise the spell would be broken whose insurmount- able omnipresence defines the arena of Kafka's work and which, as its apriori, cannot become thematic. His language is the instrument of that configuration of positivism and myth that has only now become obvious socially. Reified con-
sciousness, which presupposes and confirms the inevitability and immutableness of what exists, is-as the heritage of the ancient spell -the new form of the myth of the ever-same. Kafka's epic style is, in its archaism, mimesis of reification.
SOCIETY 0 231
Whereas his work must renounce any claim to transcending myth, it makes the social web of delusion knowable in myth through the how, through language. In his writing, absurdity is as self-evident as it has actually become in society. Those products are socially mute that do their duty by regurgitating tel queI whatever so- cial material they treat and count this metabolic exchange with second nature as the glory of art as social reflection . The artistic subject i s inherently social, not pri- vate. In no case does it become social through forced collectivization or the choice of subject matter. In the age of repressive collectivization, art has the power to resist the compact majority - a resistance that has become a criterion of the work and its social truth - in the lonely and exposed producer of art, while at the same time this does not exclude collective forms of production such as the composers' workshop that Schoenberg envisioned. By constantly admitting into the produc- tion of his work an element of negativity toward his own immediacy, the artist unconsciously obeys a social universal: In every successfully realized correction, watching over the artist's shoulder is a collective subject that has yet to be real- ized. The categories of artistic objectivity are unitary with social emancipation when the object, on the basis of its own impulse, liberates itself from social con- vention and controls. Yet artworks cannot be satisfied with vague and abstract universality such as that of classicism. Rather, they are predicated on fissuredness and thus on the concrete historical situation. Their social truth depends on their opening themselves to this content. The content becomes their subject, to which they mold themselves, to the same extent that their law of form does not ob- scure the fissure but rather, in demanding that it be shaped, makes it its own con- cern . - However profound and still largely obscure the part of science has been in the development of artistic forces of production , and however deeply , precisely through methods learned from science, society reaches into art, just so little is artistic production scientific, even when it is a work of integral constructivism. In art, all scientific discoveries lose their literal character: This is evident in the mod- ification of optical-perspectival laws in painting and in the natural overtone rela- tions in music. When art, intimidated by technique, tries to conserve its miniature terrain by proclaiming its transformation into science, it misconceives the status of the sciences in empirical reality. On the other hand, the aesthetic principle is not to be played out as sacrosanct-as would suit irrationalism-in opposition to the sciences. Art is not an arbitrary cultural complement to science but, rather, stands in critical tension to it. When, for instance , the cultural and human sciences are rightly accused of a lack of spirit, this is almost always at the same time a lack of aesthetic discernment. It is not without reason that the certified sciences de- mand furiously to be left in peace whenever art, whatever they attribute to it, inter- venes in their sphere; that someone can write is cause for suspicion on scientific grounds. Crudeness of thinking is the incapacity to differentiate within a topic, and differentiation is an aesthetic category as much as one of understanding. Sci- ence and art are not to be fused, but the categories that are valid in each are not
232 0 SOCIETY
absolutely different. Conformist consciousness prefers the opposite, partly be- cause it is incapable of distinguishing the two and partly because it refuses the insight that identical forces are active in nonidentical spheres. The same holds true with regard to morality . Brutality toward things is potentially brutality toward people. The raw-the subjective nucleus of evil-is a priori negated by art, from which the ideal of being fully formed is indispensable: This, and not the pro- nouncement of moral theses or the striving after moral effects, is art's participa- tion in the moral and makes it part of a more humanly worthy society .
Social struggles and the relations of classes are imprinted in the structure of art- works; by contrast, the political positions deliberately adopted by artworks are epiphenomena and usually impinge on the elaboration of works and thus, ulti- mately, on their social truth content. Political opinions count for little. It is possi- ble to argue over how much Attic tragedy , including those by Euripides , took part in the violent social conflicts of the epoch; however, the basic tendency of tragic form, in contrast to its mythical subjects, the dissolution of the spell of fate and the birth of subjectivity, bears witness as much to social emancipation from feudal- familial ties as, in the collision between mythical law and subjectivity, to the antagonism between fateful domination and a humanity awakening to maturity. That this antagonism, as well as the historicophilosophical tendency, became an apriori of form rather than being treated simply as thematic material, endowed tragedy with its social substantiality: Society appears in it all the more authenti- cally the less it is the intended object. Real partisanship, which is the virtue of art- works no less than of men and women , resides in the depths , where the social an- tinomies become the dialectic of forms: By leading them to language through the synthesis of the work, artists do their part socially; even Lukacs in his last years found himself compelled toward such considerations. Figuration, which articu- lates the wordless and mute contradictions, thereby has the lineaments of a praxis that is not simply flight from real praxis; figuration fulfills the concept of art itself as a comportment. It is a form of praxis and need not apologize that it does not act directly, which it could not do even if it wanted to; the political effect even of so-called committed art is highly uncertain. The social standpoint of artists may serve to interfere with conformist consciousness, but in the actual development of works they become insignificant. That he expressed abominable views when Voltaire died says nothing about the truth content of Mozart' s works . At the actual time when artworks appear there is certainly no abstracting from their intention; whoever would attempt an assessment of Brecht exclusively on the basis of the artistic merit of his works would fail him no less than one who judges his meaning according to his theses. The immanence of society in the artwork is the essential social relation of art, not the immanence of art in society. Because the social content of art is not located externally to its prjncipium individuationis but rather inheres in individuation, which is itself a social reality, art's social character is concealed and can only be grasped by its interpretation .
SOCIETY 0 233
Yet even in artworks that are to their very core ideological, truth content can as- sert itself. Ideology, socially necessary semblance, is by this same necessity also the distorted image of the true. A threshold that divides the social consciousness of aesthetics from the philistine is that aesthetics reflects the social critique of the ideological in artworks, rather than mechanically reiterating it. Stifter provides a model of the truth content of an oeuvre that is undoubtedly ideological in its inten- tions . Not only the conservative-restorative choice of thematic material and the fabula docet are ideological, but so is the objectivistic deportment of the form, which suggests a micrologically tender world, a meaningfully correct life that lends itself to narration. This is why Stifter became the idol of a retrospectively noble bourgeoisie. Yet the layers of his work that once provided him with his half- esoteric popularity have with time peeled away and vanished. This, however, is not the last word on Stifter, for the reconciling, conciliatory aspects, especially in his last works , are exaggerated. Here objectivity hardens into a mask and the life evoked becomes a defensive ritual. Shimmering through the eccentricity of the average is the secret and denied suffering of the alienated subject and an unrecon- ciled life. The light that falls over his mature prose is drained and bleak, as if it were allergic to the happiness of color; it i s , as it were , reduced to a pencil sketch by the exclusion of everything unruly and disturbing to a social reality that was as incompatible with the mentality of the poet as with the epic apriori that he took from Goethe and clung to. What transpires, in opposition to the wiII of his prose, through the discrepancy between its form and the already capitalist society de- volves upon its expression; ideological exaggeration endows his work mediately with its nonideological truth content, with its superiority over all consoling, assid- uously pastoral literature , and it won for it that authentic quality that Nietzsche ad- mired. Stifter is the paradigm ofhow little poetic intention, even that meaning that is directly embodied or represented in an artwork, approximates its objective con- tent; in his work the content is truly the negation of the meaning, yet this content would not exist if the meaning were not intended by the work and then canceled and transformed by the work's own complexion. Affirmation becomes the cipher of despair and the purest negativity of content contains, as in Stifter, a grain of affirmation. The iridescence that emanates from artworks, which today taboo all affirmation, is the appearance of the affirmative ineffabile, the emergence of the nonexisting as if it did exist. Its claim to existence flickers out in aesthetic sem- blance; yet what does not exist, by appearing, is promised. The constellation of the existing and nonexisting is the utopic figure of art. Although it is compelled toward absolute negativity, it is precisely by virtue of this negativity that it is not absolutely negative. By no means do artworks primarily develop this inwardly antinomial affirmative element as a result of their external attitude to what exists, that is, to society; rather, it develops immanently in them and immerses them in twilight. No beauty today can evade the question whether it is actually beautiful and not instead surreptitiously acquired by static affirmation.
The antipathy to-
234 0 SOCIETY
ward applied arts i s , indirectly , the bad conscience of art as a whole, which makes itself felt at the sound of every musical chord and at the sight of every color. There is no need for social criticism of art to investigate this externally: It emerges from the inner-aesthetic formations themselves. The heightened sensitivity of the aes- thetic sensorium converges asymptotically with the socially motivated irritability toward art . - In art, ideology and truth cannot be neatly distinguished from each other. Art cannot have one without the other, and this reciprocity in tum is an en- ticement toward the ideological misuse of art as much as it is an enticement toward summarily finishing it off. It is only a step from the utopia of the self-likeness of artworks to the stink of the heavenly roses that art scatters here below as do the women in Schiller's tirade. The more brazenly society is transformed into a total- ity in which it assigns everything, including art, to its place, the more completely does art polarize into ideology and protest; and this polarization is hardly to art's advantage. Absolute protest constrains it and carries over to its own raison d'etre; ideology thins out to an impoverished and authoritarian copy of reality .
In the culture resurrected after the catastrophe, art-regardless of its content and substance [Inhalt and Gehalt]-has even taken on an ideological aspect by its mere existence. In its disproportion to the horror that has transpired and threatens , i t i s condemned to cynicism; even where i t directly faces the horror, i t diverts at- tention from it. Its objectivation implies insensitivity to reality. This degrades art to an accomplice of the barbarism to which it succumbs no less when it renounces objectivation and directly plays along , even when this takes the form of polemical commitment. Every artwork today, the radical ones included, has its conservative aspect; its existence helps to secure the spheres of spirit and culture, whose real powerlessness and complicity with the principle of disaster becomes plainly evi- dent. But this conservative element- which, contrary to the trend toward social integration, is stronger in advanced works than in the more moderate ones-does not simply deserve oblivion. Only insofar as spirit, in its most advanced form, sur- vives and perseveres is any opposition to the total domination of the social totality possible . A humanity to which progressive spirit fails to bequeath what humanity is poised to liquidate would disappear in a barbarism that a reasonable social order should prevent. Art, even as something tolerated in the administered world, em- bodies what does not allow itself to be managed and what total management sup- presses. Greece's new tyrants knew why they banned Beckett's plays, in which there is not a single political word. Asociality becomes the social legitimation of art. For the sake of reconciliation, authentic works must blot out every trace of reconciliation in memory. All the same, the unity that even dissociative works do not escape is not without a trace of the old reconciliation. Artworks are, a priori, socially culpable, and each one that deserves its name seeks to expiate this guilt. Their possibility of surviving requires that their straining toward synthesis de- velop in the form of their irreconcilability. Without the synthesis, which confronts reality as the autonomous artwork, there would be nothing external to reality's
SOCIETY D 235
spell; the principle of the isolation of spirit, which casts a spell around itself, is also the principle thatbreaks through the spell by making it determinate.
That the nominalistic tendency of art toward the destruction of all preestablished categories of order has social implications is evident in the enemies of modem art, right up to Emil Staiger. Their sympathy for what they call a Leitbild, a guiding principle, is precisely their sympathy for social, particularly sexual, repression. The bond between a socially reactionary posture and hatred for the artistically modem , which the analysis of the obedient character makes apparent, is documented by new and old fascist propaganda, and it is also confirmed by empirical social re- search. 2 The rage against the purported destruction of sacrosanct cultural goods, which for that reason alone can no longer be experienced as such, serves to mask the real destructive wishes of the indignant. For the ruling consciousness, any con- sciousness that would have the world other than it is always seems chaotic because it deviates from a petrified reality. Inevitably those who rail loudest against the an- archy of modem art, which for the most part hardly exists, convince themselves of what they presume to be the nature of their enemy on the basis of crude errors at the simplest level ofinformation; indeed, there is no responding to them, because what they have decided in advance to reject they are not willing to experience in the first place . In this the division of labor incontestably bears part of the blame . The non- specialist will no more understand the most recent developments in nuclear physics than the lay person will straightaway grasp extremely complex new music or paint-
ing. Whereas, however, the incomprehensibility of physics is accepted on the assumption that in principle its rationality can be followed and its theorems under- stood by anyone, modem art's incomprehensibility is branded as schizoid arbi- trariness, even though the aesthetically incomprehensible gives way to experience no less than does the scientifically obscure . If art is capable of realizing its humane universality at all, then it is exclusively by means of the rigorous division of labor: Anything else is false consciousness. Works of quality, those that are fully formed in themselves, are objectively less chaotic than innumerable works that have or- derly facades somehow slapped on while underneath their own structure crumbles. Few are disturbed by this . Deep down and contrary to its better judgment, the bour- geois character tends to cling to what is inferior; it is fundamental to ideology that it is never fully believed and that it advances from self-disdain to self-destruction. The semi-educated consciousness insists on the "I like that," laughing with cynical embarrassment at the fact that cultural trash is expressly made to dupe the con- sumer: As a leisure-time occupation , art should be cozy and discretionary; people put up with the deception because they sense secretly that the principle of their own sane realism is the fraud ofequal exchange. It is within this false and at the same time art-alien consciousness that the fictional element of art, its illusoriness, devel- ops in bourgeois society: Mundus vult decipi is the categorical imperative of artis- tic consumption. This taints all supposedly na'ive artistic experience, and to this extent it is not naIve. The dominant consciousness is objectively led to this dank
236 0 SOCIETY
attitude because the administered must renounce the possibility of maturity, in- cluding aesthetic maturity, that is postulated by the order that they cling to as their own and at any price. The critical concept of society, which inheres in authentic artworks without needing to be added to them, is incompatible with what society must think of itself if it is to continue as it is; the ruling consciousness cannot free itself from its own ideology without endangering society's self-preservation. This confers social relevance on apparently derivative aesthetic controversies.
That society "appears" in artworks with polemical truth as well as ideologically , is conducive to historicophilosophical mystification. Speculation all too easily falls prey to the idea of a harmony between society and artworks that has been preestablished by the world spirit. But theory must not capitulate to that relation- ship. The process that transpires in artworks and is brought to a standstill in them, i s to be conceived as the same social process in which the artworks are embedded; according to Leibniz's formulation, they represent this process windowlessly. The elements of an artwork acquire their configuration as a whole in obedience to im- manent laws that are related to those of the society external to it. Social forces of production, as well as relations of production, return in artworks as mere forms divested of their facticity because artistic labor is social labor; moreover, they are always the product of this labor. In artworks , the forces of production are not in- themselves different from social productive forces except by their constitutive absenting from real society. Scarcely anything is done or produced in artworks that does not have its model, however latently, in social production. The binding force of artworks, beyond the jurisdiction of their immanence, originates in this affinity. If artworks are in fact absolute commodities in that they are a social prod- uct that has rejected every semblance of existing for society , a semblance to which commodities otherwise urgently cling, the determining relation of production, the commodity form, enters the artwork equally with the social force of production and the antagonism between the two. The absolute commodity would be free of the ideology inherent in the commodity form, which pretends to exist for-another, whereas ironically it is something merely for-itself: It exists for those who hold power. This reversal of ideology into truth is a reversal of aesthetic content, and not immediately a reversal of the attitude of art to society . Even the absolute com- modity remains salable and has become a "natural monopoly. " That artworks are offered for sale at the market-just as pots and statuettes once were - is not their misuse but rather the simple consequence of their participation in the relations of production. Thoroughly nonideological art is indeed probably completely impos- sible. Its mere antithesis to empirical reality does not suffice to make it so; Sartre3 rightly accented that the principle of l 'art pour l 'art, which has prevailed in France since Baudelaire, just as in Germany the aesthetic ideal of art prevailed as an in- stitution of moral reform, was taken up by the bourgeoisie as a means for the neutralization of art with the same willingness with which in Germany art was appropriated as a costumed ally of social control and order. What is ideological in
SOCIETY 0 237
the principle of I'art pour I'art does not have its locus in the energetic antithesis of art to the empirical world but rather in the abstractness and facile character of this antithesis. The idea of beauty advocated by I'artpour I'art, at least as it has devel- oped since Baudelaire , was not to be classical formalism, yet it did indeed exclude all content [/nhalt] as disruptive that did not, before undergoing the law of form and thus precisely anti-artistically, submit to a dogmatic canon of beauty: It is in this spirit that George in a letter excoriates Hofmannsthal for having allowed the painter in the Death of Titian to die of the plague . 4 L 'art pour l 'art' s concept of beauty becomes at once strangely empty and imprisoned by thematic material, a sort of lugendstil arrangement as revealed in Ibsen's formulaic descriptions of vine leaves entwined in locks of hair and of dying in beauty . Beauty , powerless to define itself and only able to gain its definition by way of its other, a sort of aerial root, becomes entangled in the fate of artificial ornamentation. This idea of beauty is limited because it sets itself up as directly antithetical to a society rejected as ugly rather than, as Baudelaire and Rimbaud did, extracting this antithesis from the content [Inhalt]-from the imagery of Paris, in Baudelaire's instance-and putting it to the test: Only in this fashion could sheer distance become the inter- vention of determinate negation. It is precisely the autarchy of neoromantic and symbolist beauty , its timidity vis-a-vis those social elements in which form exclu- sively becomes form, that accounts for its rapid transformation into something so easily consumable. This beauty deceives about the commodity world by setting it aside; this qualifies it as a commodity . Their latent commodity form has inner- artistically condemned the works of l 'art pour [ 'art to kitsch, as which they are today ridiculed. In Rimbaud it would be possible to show that bitterly sarcastic opposition to society cohabits uncritically with a submissiveness comparable to Rilke's rapture over cabaret songs and the fragrance of an old chest; ultimately it was affirmation that triumphed, and the principle of l'art pour l'art was not to be saved. It is for this reason that socially the situation of art is today aporetic. If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the machinations of the status quo; if art remains strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integration as one harm- less domain among others. The social totality appears in this aporia, swallowing whole whatever occurs. That works renounce communication is a necessary yet by no means sufficient condition of their unideological essence. The central crite- rion is the force of expression, through the tension of which artworks become elo- quent with wordless gesture. In expression they reveal themselves as the wounds of society; expression is the social ferment of their autonomous form. The princi- pal witness for this is Picasso's Guemica that, strictly incompatible with pre- scribed realism, precisely by means of inhumane construction , achieves a level of expression that sharpens it to social protest beyond all contemplative misunder- standing. The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts; where in their expression, historically determined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light. It is actually this against which the rage at art reacts.
238 0 SOCIETY
Artworks are able to appropriate their heterogeneous element, their entwinement with society, because they are themselves always at the same time something social. Nevertheless, art's autonomy, wrested painfully from society as well as so- cially derived in itself, has the potential of reversing into heteronomy; everything new is weaker than the accumulated ever-same , and it is ready to regress back into it. The We encapsuled in the objectivation of works is not radically other than the external We, however frequently it is the residue of a real We that is past. That is why collective appeal is not simply the original sin of artworks; rather, something in their law of form implies it. It is not out of obsession with politics that great Greek philosophy accorded aesthetic effect so much more weight than its objec- tive tenor would imply . Ever since art has come within the purview of theoretical reflection, the latter has been tempted-by raising itself above art-to sink be- neath art and surrender it to power relations. What is today called situating a work involves exiting from the aesthetic sphere; the cheap sovereignty that assigns art its social position, after dismissing its immanence of form as a vain and naIve self- delusion, tends to treat the work as if it were nothing but what its social function condemns it to. The good and bad marks Plato distributed to art according to whether or not it conformed to the military virtues of the community he confused with utopia, his totalitarian rancor against real or spitefully invented decadence, even his aversion to the lies of poets, which are after all nothing but art's sem- blance character, which Plato hoped to summon to the support of the status quo- all this taints the concept of art in the same moment in which it was first con- sciously reflected upon . The purging of the affects in Aristotle' s Poetics no longer makes equally frank admission of its devotion to ruling interests, yet it supports them all the same in that his ideal of sublimation entrusts art with the task of pro- viding aesthetic semblance as a substitute satisfaction for the bodily satisfaction of the targeted public ' s instincts and needs: Catharsis is a purging action directed against the affects and an ally of repression. Aristotelian catharsis is part of a super- annuated mythology of art and inadequate to the actual effects of art. In return, artworks have realized in themselves, by spiritualization, what the Greeks pro- jected on their external effect: They are, in the process they carry out between the law ofform and their material content, their own catharsis. Sublimation, even aesthetic sublimation , incontestably participates in civilatory progress and even in inner-artistic progress itself, but it also has its ideological side: Art, as a surrogate satisfaction, by virtue of the fact that it is spurious , robs sublimation of the dignity for which the whole of classicism made propaganda, a classicism that survived for more than two thousand years under the protection of Aristotle's authority. The doctrine of catharsis imputes to art the principle that ultimately the culture indus- try appropriates and administers. The index of its untruth is the well-founded doubt whether the salutary Aristotelian effect ever occurred; substitute satisfac- tion may well have spawned repressed instincts . - Even the category of the new, which in the artwork represents what has yet to exist and that whereby the work
SOCIETY 0 239
transcends the given, bears the scar of the ever-same underneath the constantly new. Consciousness, fettered to this day , has not gained mastery over the new, not even in the image: Consciousness dreams ofthe new but is not able to dream the new itself. If the emancipation of art was possible only through the appropriation of the commodity character, through which art gained the semblance of its being- in-itself, then in the course of that development the commodity character was dropped from the artworks; Jugendstilplayed no small role in this, with its ideol- ogy of the reintroduction of art into life as well as with the sensations of Wilde, d'Annunzio, and Maeterlinck, who served as preludes to the culture industry. Pro- gressive subjective differentiation, the heightening and expansion of the sphere of aesthetic stimuli, made these stimuli manipulable; they were able to be produced for the cultural marketplace. The attunement of art to the most fleeting individual reactions was bound up with the reification of these reactions; art's growing simi- larity to subjective physical existence distanced it-as far as the majority of artis- tic production was concerned-from its objectivity and at the same time com- mended it to the public; to this extent the watchword I 'art pour I 'art was the mask of its opposite. What is true in the uproar over decadence is that subjective differ- entiation has an aspect of ego-weakness, an aspect shared with the mentality of the culture industry'S customers and something the culture industry knew how to exploit. Kitsch is not, as those believers in erudite culture would like to imagine, the mere refuse of art, originating in disloyal accommodation to the enemy; rather, it lurks in art, awaiting ever recurring opportunities to spring forth. Although kitsch escapes, implike, from even a historical definition, one of its most tena- cious characteristics is the prevarication of feelings, fictional feelings in which no one is actually participating, and thus the neutralization of these feelings. Kitsch parodies catharsis. Ambitious art, however, produces the same fiction of feelings; indeed, this was essential to it: The documentation of actually existing feelings, the recapitulation of psychical raw material, is foreign to it. It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despair- ing efforts. The vulgar is related in a complementary fashion to the manufactured and bartered-off feeling, and indeed vulgarity is an aspect of every salable feeling. It is as hard to say what is vulgar in artworks as to answer Erwin Ratz's question5 how it is that art, whose a priori gesrure protests against vulgarity, is yet capable of being integrated with the vulgar. Only in a mutilated fashion does the vulgar represent the plebeian that is held at a distance by the so-called high arts . When art has allowed itself, without condescension, to be inspired by a plebeian element, art has gained in an authentic weightiness that is the opposite of the vulgar. Art becomes vulgar through condescension: when, especially by means of humor, it appeals to deformed consciousness and confirms it. It suits domination if what it has made out of the masses and what it drills into them can be chalked up to their own guilty desires. Art respects the masses by presenting itself to them as what
240 0 SOCIETY
they could be rather than by adapting itself to them in their degraded condition. Socially, the vulgar in art is the subjective identification with objectively repro- duced humiliation. In place of what is withheld from them, the masses reactively , resentfully, enjoy what i s produced b y renunciation and usurps the place o f what has been renounced. It is ideology that low art, entertainment, is socially legiti- mate and self-evident; it is solely that condition that expresses the omnipresence of repression. The model of aesthetic vulgarity is the child in the advertisement, taking a bite of chocolate with eyes half-closed, as if it were a sin. The repressed returns in the vulgar, bearing the marks of repression; it is the subjective expres- sion ofthe failure ofthat sublimation that art praises so overzealously as catharsis and for which it gives itself credit because it senses how little sublimation, like all culture, has actually turned out to date. In the age of total administration, culture no longer needs to humiliate the barbarians it has created; it suffices that by its rit- uals it strengthens the barbarism that has subjectively been sedimenting over cen- turies. That art stands as a reminder of what does not exist, prompts rage; this rage is transferred to the image of that otherness and befouls it. The archetypes of the vulgar that the art of the emancipatory bourgeoisie held in check, sometimes inge- niously-in its clowns, servants, and Papagenos-are the grinning advertisement beauties whose praise of toothpaste brands unites the billboards of all lands; those who know they are being cheated by so much feminine splendor blacken out the all too brilliant teeth of these archetypes and in total innocence make the truth visi- ble above the gleam of culture. This, at least, is perceived by the vulgar. Because aesthetic vulgarity undialectically imitates the invariants of social degradation, it has no history; its eternal return is celebrated by graffiti. No subject matter is ever to be taboo and excluded from art as vulgar; vulgarity is a relation to the material and to those to whom the appeal is made . The expansion of the vulgar to the total- ity has meanwhile swallowed up what once laid claim to the noble and sublime: This is one of the reasons for the liquidation of the tragic. It succumbed in the denouement of the second act of Budapest operettas. Today , everything that goes under the name of "light" art is to be rejected; that also applies, however, to what is noble, the abstract antithesis to reification and at the same time its booty. Ever since Baudelaire, the noble has been associated with political reaction, as if democracy as such, the quantitative category of masses, and not the perpetuation of oppression were the source of the vulgar. Fidelity to the noble in art should be maintained, just as the noble should reflect its own culpability, its complicity with privilege. Its refuge remains exclusively the unflinching power of resistance in the act of forrning. The noble becomes spurious and itself vulgar when it extols itself, for to this day there has not been anything noble . Contradiction gnaws at the noble ever since Holderlin's verse that nothing sacred is any longer fit for use,6 the same contradiction that an adolescent might have sensed who read a socialist journal with political sympathy and at the same time was put off by the language and mentality and the ideological undercurrent of a culture for all. What that paper in
SOCIETY 0 241
fact promoted , of course , was not the potential of a freed people but rather people as the complement of class society , the statically conceived universal of voters who must be reckoned with.
The counterconcept to aesthetic comportment is, quite simply, the concept of the philistine, which often overlaps with the vulgar yet remains distinct from it by its indifference or hatred, whereas vulgarity greedily smacks its lips . Socially impli- cated in the guilt ofthose who lay claim to aesthetic nobility, the philistine's dis- dain grants intellectual labor an immediately higher rank than manual labor. That art benefits from certain advantages becomes, for art's self-consciousness and for those who react aesthetically, something better in-itself. This ideological element in art stands in need of permanent self-correction. Art is capable of this because, as the negation of practical life, it is itself praxis, and indeed not simply on the basis of its genesis and the fact that, like every artifact, it is the result of activity. Just as its content is dynamic in itself and does not remain self-identical, in the course of their history the objectivated artworks themselves once again become practical comportments and tum toward reality. In this, art and theory are allied. Art recapitulates praxis in itself, modified and in a sense neutralized, and by doing so it takes up positions toward reality . Beethoven's symphonic language , which in its most secret chemistry is the bourgeois process of production as well as the ex- pression of capitalism's perennial disaster, at the same time becomes afait social by its gesture of tragic affirmation: Things are as they must and should be and are therefore good. At the same time, this music belongs to the revolutionary process of bourgeois emancipation, just as it anticipates its apologetics. The more deeply artworks are deciphered, the less their antithesis to praxis remains absolute; they themselves are something other than their origin, their fundament, that is, this very antithesis to praxis, and they unfold the mediation of this antithesis. They are less than praxis and more: less, because, as was codified once and for all in Tolstoy'S Kreutzer Sonata, they recoil before what must be done, perhaps even thwart it, although they are less capable of this than is suggested by Tolstoy'S renegade asceticism. Their truth content cannot be separated from the concept of humanity. Through every mediation , through all negativity, they are images of a transformed humanity and are unable to come to rest in themselves by any ab-
straction from this transformation. Art, however, is more than praxis because by its aversion to praxis it simultaneously denounces the naror w untruth of the prac- tical world. Immediate praxis wants to know nothing of this as long as the practi- cal organization of the world has yet to succeed. The critique exercised a priori by art is that of action as a cryptogram of domination. According to its sheer form, praxis tends toward that which, in terms of its own logic, it should abolish; vio- lence is immanent to it and is maintained in its sublimations, whereas artworks, even the most aggressive, stand for nonviolence. They are a constant indictment of the workaday bustle and the practical individual, back of which is concealed the barbaric appetite of the species , which is not human as long as it permits itself
242 0 SOCIETY
to be ruled by this appetite and is fused with domination. The dialectical relation of art to praxis is that of its social effect. That artworks intervene politically is doubtful; when it does happen, most often it is peripheral to the work; if they strive for it, they usually succumb to their own terms . Their true social effect is an extremely indirect participation in spirit that by way of subterranean processes contributes to social transformation and is concentrated in artworks; they only achieve such participation through their objectivation. The effect of artworks is not that they present a latent praxis that corresponds to a manifest one, for their autonomy has moved far beyond such immediacy; rather, their effect is that of recollection, which they evoke by their existence. If the historical genesis of art- works refers back to causal contexts, these do not disappear tracelessly in them; the process enacted internally by each and every artwork works back on society as the model of a possible praxis in which something on the order of a collective sub- ject is constituted. However little the external effect matters in art, and however important its form is, its intrinsic form nevertheless has an effect. Therefore the critical analysis of the effect of artworks has a great deal to say about what art- works, in their character as things, have sealed up in themselves; this could be demonstrated in the ideological effect of Wagner's music. It is not social reflec- tion on artworks and their inner chemistry that is false but rather the subordination of artworks to abstract social correlations determined from above that are indiffer- ent to the tension between the historical causal nexus and the content of the work . Just how far artworks intervene on a practical level is incidentally determined not only by them but far more importantly by the social moment. Beaumarchais's comedies were certainly not politically committed i n the style o f Brecht or Sartre , yet they in fact had a certain political effect because their tangible content [Inhalt] harmonized with a social movement that relished finding itself flattered in them. Because it is second-hand, the social effect ofart is obviously paradoxical; what is attributed to its spontaneity in fact depends on the general social tendency. Conversely, Brecht's work, which, beginning with SaintJoan o/the Stockyards, wanted to provoke social change, was probably socially powerless, and the astute Brecht by no means deceived himself on this score. Its effect is captured by the English expression of preaching to the saved. His theater of alienation intended to motivate the viewer to think. Brecht's postulate of a thinking comportment converges, strangely enough, with the objective discernment that autonomous art- works presuppose in the viewer, listener, or reader as being adequate to them. His didactic style , however, is intolerant of the ambiguity in which thought originates: It is authoritarian. This may have been Brecht's response to the ineffectuality of his didactic plays: As a virtuoso of manipulative technique, he wanted to coerce the desired effect just as he once planned to organize his rise to fame . Neverthe- less, it is not least of all due to Brecht that the artwork gained self-consciousness of itself as an element of political praxis and thus acquired a force opposed to its ideological blindness. Brecht's cult ofpracticality became an aesthetic constituent
SOCIETY 0 243
of his works and it is not to be eliminated from what in his work stands at a remove from the realm of causal contexts, namely their truth content. The acute reason today for the social inefficacy of artworks - those that do not surrender to crude propaganda - is that in order to resist the all-powerful system of communi- cation they must rid themselves of any communicative means that would perhaps make them accessible to the pUblic. Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness; in any case, agitative effects dissipate rapidly, presumably because even artworks of that type are perceived under the general category of irrational- ity: Their principle, of which they cannot rid themselves, stalls the immediate practical impulse. Aesthetic cultivation leads away from the preaesthetic contam- ination of art and reality. The distance acquired, which is its result, not only re- veals the objective character of the artwork. It also affects the SUbjective comport- ment, in that it severs primitive identifications and puts the recipient qua empirical psychological person out of action, which benefits his relation to the work. Sub- jectively, art requires self-exteriorization; this is what was meant by Brecht's cri- tique ofempathic aesthetics. This exteriorization is, however, practical insofar as it determines the person who experiences art and steps out of himself as a ? roov 1tOA. t'tlKOV, just as art itself is objectively praxis as the cultivation of conscious- ness; but it only becomes this by renouncing persuasion. Whoever takes up an ob- jective stance vis-a-vis the artwork will hardly allow himself to become enthused by it in the fashion prescribed by the idea of a direct appeal . This would be incom- patible with the comprehending attitude appropriate to the cognitive character of artworks. By the affront to reigning needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar, artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality. The moment they hope to achieve the effect under whose absence they suffer by adapting to existing needs they deprive people of precisely that which-to take the jargon of needs seriously and tum it against itself-they could "offer" them. Aesthetic needs are fairly vague and unarticulated; the practices of the culture in- dustry have not changed this as much as they would like the world to believe and, indeed, as much as many like to claim. That culture failed implies that there actu- ally are no subjective cultural needs independent of supply and the mechanisms of distribution. The need for art is itself largely ideological: Life would be possible without art, too, not only objectively but also with regard to the psychological econ- omy of consumers who in modified circumstances are easily moved to changing their taste , in that their taste follows the line of least resistance. In a society that has disaccustomed men and women from thinking beyond themselves, whatever sur- passes the mere reproduction of their life and those things they have been drilled to believe they cannot get along without, is superfluous. What is true in the most recent rebellion against art is that - in the face of the absurdly incessant scarcity , the expanding and self-reproducing barbarism, the ever present threat of total
244 D SOCIETY
catastrophe - phenomena that are not preoccupied with the maintenance of life take on a ridiculous aspect. Whereas artists can afford to be indifferent to a cultural mechanism that in any case swallows up everything and excludes nothing , not even what is relatively good, this mechanism nevertheless tinges everything that thrives within it with something of its objective indifference. What Marx was still able to presuppose, to some degree innocently, as cultural needs in the concept of a soci- ety ' s general level of achievement , has its dialectic in the fact that in the meantime one does culture a greater honor by forgoing it and not taking part in its festivals than by agreeing to be force-fed. Aesthetic motifs are no less critical of cultural needs than are empirically real ones. Artworks want to break up the eternal ex- change of need and satisfaction, instead of doing injustice to unfulfilled needs by supplying them with substitute satisfactions. Every aesthetic and sociological the- ory of need makes use of what bears the characteristically old-fashioned name of lived aesthetic experience. 7 Its insufficiency is evident in the constitution of lived artistic experiences themselves , if such exist. The supposition of lived artistic ex- periences is based on the assumption of an equivalence between the content of experience -put crudely, the emotional expression of works - and the subjective experience of the recipient. A listener is, in other words, to become excited when the music seems to do so, whereas to the extent that one understands anything, one should become emotionally all the more disinterested the pushier the work's ges- ticulations become . Science could hardly think up anything more alien to art than those experiments that presume to measure aesthetic effect and aesthetic experi- ence by recording the heartbeat. The fount ofany such equivalence remains murky. What purportedly is to be lived or relived in the work- according to popular as- sumption, the feelings ofthe author-is itselfonly a partial element in works and certainly not the decisive one. Works are not depositions of impulses-in any case such depositions are always much disliked by listeners and least likely to be empathically "reexperienced"; they are, rather, radically modified by the autono- mous nexus of the artwork. The interplay of the constructive and the mimetically expressive elements in art is simply suppressed or distorted by the theory of lived experience: The equivalence it posits is not an equivalence at all; rather, one par- ticular aspect is abstracted. This aspect, again removed from the aesthetic nexus of the work and translated back into the empirical world, for a second time be- comes an other of what in any case it is in the work . The shock aroused by impor- tant works is not employed to trigger personal, otherwise repressed emotions.