No More Learning

This is what is Egyptian in each. By wanting to give permanence to the transitory-to life-by wanting to save it from death, the works kill it. With good reason the power of artworks to reconcile is sought in their unity, in the fact that, in accord with the ancient topos , they heal the wound with the spear that inflicted it. Reason , which in artworks effects unity even where it intends disintegration, achieves a certain guiltlessness by renouncing intervention in reality, real domination; yet even in the greatest works of aesthetic unity the echo of social violence is to be heard; indeed, through the renunciation of domination spirit also incurs guilt. The act that binds and fixates the mimetic and diffuse in the artwork not only does harm to amorphous nature. The aesthetic image is a protest against nature's fear that it will dissipate into the chaotic. The aesthetic unity of the multiplicitous ap- pears as though it had done no violence but had been chosen by the multiplicitous itself. It is thus that unity - today as real as was ever the diremption - crosses over into reconciliation. In artworks the destructive power of myth is mollified through the particularization of the repetition that myth exercises in empirical reality, repe- tition that the artwork summons into particularization at the closest proximity. In artworks, spirit is no longer the old enemy of nature. Assuaged, spirit reconciles. Art is not reconciliation in the classicistic sense: Reconciliation is the comport- ment of artworks by which they become conscious of the nonidentical . Spirit does not identify the nonidentical: It identifies with it. By pursuing its own identity with itself, art assimilates itself with the nonidentical: This is the contemporary stage of development of art's mimetic essence. Today, reconciliation as the com- portment of the artwork is evinced precisely there where art countermands the idea of reconciliation in works whose form dictates intransigence. Yet even such irreconcilable reconciliation through form is predicated on the unreality of art. This unreality threatens art permanently with ideology. Art, however, does not sink to the level of ideology, nor is ideology the verdict that would ban each and every artwork from truth. On the basis of their truth, of the reconciliation that em- pirical reality spurns, art is complicitous with ideology in that it feigns the factual existence of reconciliation. By their own apriori, or, if one will, according to their idea, artworks become entangled in the nexus of guilt. Whereas each artwork that succeeds transcends this nexus, each must atone for this transcendence, and there- fore its language seeks to withdraw into silence: An artwork is, as Beckett wrote, a desecration ofsilence.
Art desires what has not yet been, though everything that art is has already been. It cannot escape the shadow of the past. But what has not yet been is the concrete. Nominalism is perhaps most deeply allied with ideology in that it takes concretion as a given that is incontestably available; it thus deceives itself and humanity by implying that the course of the world interferes with the peaceful determinacy of
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the existing , a determinacy that is simply usurped by the concept of the given and smitten with abstractness. Even by artworks the concrete is scarcely to be named other than negatively. It is only through the nonfungibility of its own existence and not through any special content [lnhalt] that the artwork suspends empirical reality as an abstract and universal functional nexus. Each artwork is utopia inso- far as through its form it anticipates what would finally be itself, and this con- verges with the demand for the abrogation of the spell of self-identity cast by the subject. No artwork cedes to another. This justifies the indispensable sensual ele- ment of artworks: It bears their hic et nunc in which, in spite of all mediation, a certain independence is maintained; naive consciousness, which always clings to this element, is not altogether false consciousness. The nonfungibility, ofcourse, takes over the function of strengthening the belief that mediation is not universal . But the artwork must absorb even its most fatal enemy-fungibility; rather than fleeing into concretion, the artwork must present through its own concretion the total nexus of abstraction and thereby resist it. Repetition in authentic new art- works is not always an accommodation to the archaic compulsion toward repeti- tion. Many artworks indite this compulsion and thereby take the part of what Karl Heinz Haag has called the unrepeatable; Beckett' s Play, with the spurious infinity of its reprise, presents the most accomplished example. The black and grey of recent art, its asceticism against color, is the negative apotheosis of color. If in the extraordinary biographical chapters of Selma Lagerlof's Marbacka, a stuffed bird of paradise- something never before seen-cures a paralyzed child, the ef- fect of this vision of utopia remains vibrant, but today nothing comparable would be possible: The tenebrous has become the plenipotentiary of that utopia. But be- cause for art, utopia-the yet-to-exist-is draped in black, it remains in all its me- diations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not-and may not ever-come to pass. Art's methexis in the tenebrous, its negativity, is implicit in its tense rela- tion to permanent catastrophe. No existing, appearing artwork holds any positive control over the nonexisting. This distinguishes artworks from religious symbols, which in their appearance lay claim to the transcendence of the immediately pre- sent. The nonexisting in artworks is a constellation of the existing. By their nega- tivity, even as total negation, artworks make a promise, just as the gesture with which narratives once began or the initial sound struck on a sitar promised what was yet to be heard, yet to be seen, even if it was the most fearsome; and the cover of every book between which the eye loses itself in the text is related to the promise of the camera obscura. The paradox of all modem art is that it seeks to achieve this by casting it away just as the opening of Proust's Recherche inge- niously slips into the book without the whirring of the camera obscura, the peep- show perspective of the omniscient narrator, renouncing the magic of the act and thereby realizing it in the only way possible. Aesthetic experience is that of some-
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thing that spirit may find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility
promised by its impossibility . Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.
Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical. In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accom- modate discursive thought, whose criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. They most resemble the form of a syllogism and its prototype in empirical thought. That in the temporal arts one moment is said to follow from another is hardly metaphorical; that one event is said to be caused by another at the very least allows the empirical causal relation to shimmer through. It is not only in the temporal arts that one moment is to issue from another; the visual arts have no less a need of logical consistency. The obligation of artworks to become self-alike, the tension into which this obligation brings them with the substratum of their imma- nent contract, and ultimately the traditional desideratum of homeostasis require the principle of logical consistency: This is the rational aspect of artworks . With- out its immanent necessity no work would gain objectivation; this necessity is art's antimimetic impulse, one borrowed externally, which unites the work as an interior. The logic of art, a paradox for extra-aesthetic logic, is a syllogism with- out concept or judgment. It draws consequences from phenomena that have al- ready been spiritually mediated and to this extent made logical. Its logical process transpires in a sphere whose premises and givens are extralogical. The unity that artworks thereby achieve makes them analogous to the logic of experience , how- ever much their technical procedures and their elements and the relation between them may distance them from those of practical empirical reality. The affiliation with mathematics that art established in the age of its dawning emancipation and that today , in the age of the dissolution of its idioms, once again emerges as pre- dominant, marked art's emergent self-consciousness from its dimension of logical consistency. Indeed, on the basis of its formalism, mathematics is itself aconcep- tual; its signs are not signs of something, and it no more formulates existential judgments than does art; its aesthetic quality has often been noted. Of course, art deceives itself when, encouraged or intimidated by science, it hypostatizes its di- mension of logical consistency and directly equates its own forms with those of mathematics , unconcerned that its forms are always opposed to those of the latter. Still, it is art's logicality that among its powers constitutes it most emphatically as second nature, as a being sui generis. It thwarts every effort to comprehend art- works on the basis of their effect: By way of their logical character, artworks are determined objectively in themselves without regard to their reception. Yet their logicality is not to be taken a La Lettre. This is the point of Nietzsche's comment- though admittedly it amateurishly underestimates the logicality of art -that in art- works everything only appears as if it must be as it is and could not be otherwise. The logic of artworks demonstrates that it cannot be taken literally, in that it grants
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every particular event and resolution an incomparably greater degree of latitude than logic otherwise does; it is impossible to ignore the compelling hint of a rela- tion with the logic of dreams in which, comparably, a feeling of coercive logical consistency is bound up with an element of contingency . Through its retreat from empirical goals, logic in art acquires a shadowy quality of being at once binding and slack. Logic is all the less constrained the more obliquely preestablished styles provide the semblance of logicality and unburden the particular work of the need for its manufacture . Whereas logicality rules without the slightest misgiving in works commonly called classical, they nevertheless provide several, sometimes a plethora, of internal possibilities, just as thoroughbass music and commedia dell'arte and other preestablished forms permit improvisation more securely than do later fully organized and individualized works. Although superficially these individualized works are less logical and less transparently modeled according to quasi-conceptual schemata and formulas, internally they are far more severely concerned with logical consistency. However, while the logicality of artworks in- tensifies, while its claims become ever more literal -to the point of parody in to- tally determined works deduced from a minimum of basic material- the "as if' of this logicality is laid bare. What today seems absurd in art is the negative function of unbridled logical consistency. Art is thus made to pay for the fact that conclu- sions cannot be drawn without concept andjudgment.
This figurative rather than real logic of art is difficult to distinguish from causality because in art there is no difference between purely logical forms and those that apply empirically; in art the archaic undifferentiatedness of logic and causality hi- bernates. Schopenbauer's principia individuationis-space, time, and causality- make a second, refracted appearance in art, in the sphere of what is most individu- ated. Their defraction, a necessary implication of art's illusoriness, endows art with its aspect of freedom. It is through this freedom, through the intervention of spirit, that the sequence and nexus ofevents is established. In the undifferentiated- ness of spirit and blind necessity, art's logic is reminiscent of the strict lawfulness that governs the succession of real events in history. Schoenberg was known to speak of music as the history of themes. Crude unmediated space, time, and causality no more exist in art than, in keeping with the idealist philosophem, as a sphere totally apart, art exists beyond their determinations; they play into art as from a distance and in it are immediately transformed into something other. Thus, for example , there is no mistaking time as such in music , yet it is so remote from empirical time that, when listening is concentrated, temporal events external to the musical continuum remain external to it and indeed scarcely touch it; if a mu- sician interrupts a passage to repeat it or to pick it up at an earlier point, musical time remains indifferent, unaffected; in a certain fashion it stands still and only proceeds when the course of the music is continued. Empirical time disturbs musical time, if at all, only by dint of its heterogeneity, not because they flow together. All the same, the formative categories of art are not simply qualitatively
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distinct from those external to them but, in spite of the latters ' modification, incor- porate their quality in a qualitatively other medium. If in external existence these forms are fundamental to the control of nature, in art they are themselves con- trolled and freely disposed over. Through the domination of the dominating, art revises the domination of nature to the core. In contrast to the semblance of in- evitability that characterizes these forms in empirical reality, art's control over them and over their relation to materials makes their arbitrariness in the empirical world evident. As a musical composition compresses time, and as a painting folds spaces into one another, so the possibility is concretized that the world could be other than it is. Space, time, and causality are maintained, their power is not de- nied, but they are divested of their compulsiveness. Paradoxically, it is precisely t o t h e e x t e n t t h a t a r t i s r e l e a s e d fr o m t h e e m p i r i c a l w o r l d b y i t s fo r m a l c o n s t i t u e n t s that it is less illusory, less deluded by subjectively dictated lawfulness, than is em- pirical knowledge. That the logic of artworks is a derivative of discursive logic and not identical with it, i s evident i n that art ' s logic - and here art converges with dialectical thought-suspends its own rigor and is ultimately able to make this suspension its idea; this is the aim of the many forms of disruption in modem art. Artworks that manifest a tendency toward integral construction disavow their logical rigor with what is heterogeneous to it: the indelible trace of mimesis , on which construction depends. The autonomous law of form of artworks protests against logicality even though logicality itself defines form as a principle. If art had absolutely nothing to do with logicality and causality, it would forfeit any re- lation to its other and would be an a priori empty activity; if art took them literally, it would succumb to the spell; only by its double character, which provokes per- manent conflict, does art succeed at escaping the spell by even the slightest degree. Conclusions drawn without concept and judgment are from the outset di- vested of any apodicity and insist instead on a communication between objects that is easily masked by concept and judgment, whereas aesthetic consistency pre-
serves this communication as the affinity of elements that remain unidentified. The oneness of aesthetic constituents with those of cognition is, however, the unity of spirit and thus the unity of reason; this Kant demonstrated in his theory of aesthetic purposefulness . If Schopenhauer' s thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is com- posed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order but changed in the slightest degree. This second world, however, is directed negatively against the first; it is the destruction of what is simulated by familiar senses rather than the assemblage of the membra disjecta of existence. There is nothing in art, not even in the most sublime , that does not derive from the world; nothing that remains untransformed. All aesthetic categories must be de- fined both in terms of their relation to the world and in terms of art's repUdiation of that world. In both, art is knowledge, not only as a result of the return of the
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mundane world and its categories, which is art' s bond to what is normally called an object of knowledge, but perhaps even more importantly as a result of the im- plicit critique of the nature-dominating ratio, whose rigid determinations art sets in movement by modifying them. It is not through the abstract negation of the ratio, nor through a mysterious, immediate eidetic vision of essences, that art seeks justice for the repressed, but rather by revoking the violent act of rationality by emancipating rationality from what it holds to be its inalienable material in the empirical world. Art is not synthesis, as convention holds; rather, it shreds synthe- sis by the same force that affects synthesis. What is transcendent in art has the same tendency as the second reflection of nature-dominating spirit.
The comportment of artworks reflects the violence and domination of empirical reality by more than analogy. The closure of artworks, as the unity of their multi- plicity, directly transfers the nature-dominating comportment to something remote from its reality; this is perhaps because the principle of self-preservation points beyond the possibility of its realization in the external world, there sees itself con- futed by death, and is unable to reconcile itself to that; autonomous art is a work of contrived immortality, utopia and hubris in one; scrutinized from another planet they would all seem Egyptian. The purposiveness of artworks, through which they assert themselves, is only a shadow of the purposiveness external to them. This they resemble only in their form, through which, from their perspective at least, they are protected from decomposition. Kant's paradoxical formulation that the beautiful is what is purposive without a purpose, expresses-in the language of subjective transcendental philosophy-the heart of the matter with a fidelity that never ceases to distance the Kantian theorems from the methodological nexus in which they appear. For Kant artworks were purposive as dynamic totalities in which all particular elements exist for the sake of their purpose - the whole -just as the whole exists for the sake of its purpose, the fulfillment or redemption through the negation of its elements . At the same time, artworks were purposeless because they had stepped out of the means-ends relation of empirical reality. Re- mote from reality, the purposiveness of artworks has something chimerical about
it. The relation of aesthetic to real purposiveness was historical: The immanent purposiveness of artworks was of external origin. In many instances, collectively fashioned aesthetic forms are once-purposive forms that have become purposeless . This is notably the case with ornaments, which drew heavily on mathematical- astronomical science. The course of this development was marked out by the origin of artworks in magic: They shared in a praxis meant to influence nature, separated from this praxis in the early history of rationality, and renounced the deception of any real influence. What is specific to artworks-their form-can never, as the sedimentation of content [Inhalt] fully disown its origin. Aesthetic success is essentially measured by whether the formed object is able to awaken the content [Inhalt] sedimented in the form. In general, then, the hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal elements into content [Inhalt] . This con-
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tent [Inhalt] does not, however, fall directly to art, as if this content only needed to be gleaned from reality. Rather, it is constituted by way of a countermovement. Content [Inhalt] makes its mark in those works that distance themselves from it. Artistic progress, to the degree that it can be cogently spoken of, is the epitome of this movement. Art gains its content [Inhalt] through the latter's determinate negation. The more energetic the negation, the more artworks organize them- selves according to an immanent purposiveness, and precisely thereby do they mold themselves progressively to what they negate. The Kantian conception of a teleology of art modeled on that of organisms was rooted in the unity of reason, ultimately in the unity of divine reason as it is manifest in things-in-themselves . This idea had to go. All the same , the teleological determination of art guards its truth beyond that trivial notion rejected in the course of artistic development that the artist's fantasy and consciousness confer organic unity on his works. Art's purposiveness, free of any practical purpose, is its similarity to language; its being "without a purpose" is its nonconceptuality, that which distinguishes art from significative language. Artworks move toward the idea of a language of things only by way of their own language, through the organization of their disparate elements; the more they are syntactically articulated in themselves, the more elo- quent they become in all their elements . The aesthetic concept of teleology has its objectivity in the language of art. Traditional aesthetics misses the mark because, in keeping with a general parti pris, it prejudges the relation of the whole and the part in favor of the whole. In contrast, dialectics does not give any instructions for the treatment of art, but inheres in it. The reflective power ofjudgment-which cannot take the subordinating concept as its starting point nor, consequently, the artwork as a whole, for it is never "given," and which follows the individual elements and goes beyond them by virtue of their own need - subjectively traces the movement of artworks in themselves. By the force of their dialectic, artworks escape myth, the blind and abstractly dominating nexus of nature.
Incontestably the quintessence of all elements of logicality, or, more broadly, coherence in artworks, is form. It is astonishing, however, how little aesthetics re- flected on the category of form, how much it, the distinguishing aspect of art, has been assumed to be unproblematically given. The difficulty in getting a grasp on it is in part due to the entwinement of all aesthetic form with content [Inhalt]; form is not only to be conceived in opposition to content but through it if aesthetics is not to fall prey to an abstractness that habitually makes it the ally of reactionary art. Indeed, the concept of form has been the blind spot of aesthetics right up to Valery, because everything about art is so inextricably tied up with it that the con- cept defies isolation. As little as art is to be defined by any other element, it is sim- ply identical with form. Every other element can be negated in the concept of form , even aesthetic unity , the idea of form that first made the wholeness and au- tonomy of the artwork possible. In highly developed modem works, form tends to dissociate unity, either in the interest ofexpression or to criticize art's affirmative
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character. Long before the ubiquitous crisis, open forms existed. In Mozart the unity of the work was occasionally playfully tested by its relaxation . By juxtapos- ing relatively disjointed or contrasting elements, Mozart, the composer who is praised above all others for the rigor ofhis form, masterfully juggles the concept of form itself. He is so sure of its strength that he effectively lets go the reins and, on the basis of the security of the construction itself, gives the lead to centrifugal forces. For Mozart, the heir of an older tradition, the idea of unity as form is still so unshaken that it is able to bear the utmost pressure , whereas for Beethoven , in whom unity lost its substantiality under the nominalist assault, there is a need to assert unity far more strictly; unity preforms the multiplicitous contents a priori and thus tames them all the more triumphantly. Today artists would like to do away with unity altogether, though with the irony that those works that are sup- posedly open and incomplete necessarily regain something comparable to unity insofar as this openness is planned. For the most part, theory equates form with symmetry or repetition. There is no reason to deny that, if one wanted to reduce the concept of form to invariants, equality and repetition could be lined up in opposition to inequality, that is, to contrast and development. But little would be gained by setting up such categories. Musical analyses, for example, show that even in those works most diffuse and hostile to repetition, similarities are in- volved, that many parts correspond with others in terms of shared, distinguishing characteristics, and that it is only through the relation to these elements of identity that the sought-after nonidentity is achieved; without sameness of any sort, chaos itself would prevail as something ever-same . Indeed , the distinction between repe- tition that is superficial, heteronomously decreed, and incompletely mediated by specific details and, on the other hand , the ineluctable determination of the unlike by a degree of sameness, is a distinction that decisively outweighs all invariance. If this distinction is ignored by a concept of form sympathetic with invariance, the result is an affinity for that bestial phraseology that indulges in expressions like "consummate form. " Because form is the central concept of aesthetics and is al- ways presupposed by it in the givenness of art , aesthetics must gather all its forces to think the concept through. If aesthetics is not to be trapped in tautologies it must gain access to what is not simply immanent in the concept of form, yet the concept of form refuses to grant a voice to anything aesthetic that claims indepen- dence from it. An aesthetics of form is possible only if it breaks through aesthetics as the aesthetics of the totality of what stands under the spell of form. Whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this. The concept of form marks out art's sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art's right to exist is un- certain. Art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form, no better. The participation of form in the crisis of art becomes evident in statements like those of Lukacs, who said that in modem art the importance of form has been greatly overestimated) Evident in this philistine call to arms is a discontent with art of which Lukacs the cultural conservative is unconscious , as well as a concept of form
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that is inadequate to art. To hit upon the idea that fonn has been overestimated in art, one must fail to recognize that fonn is essential to art, that it mediates content [Inhalt] . Fonn is the artifacts' coherence, however self-antagonistic and refracted, through which each and every successful work separates itself from the merely existing. Lukacs's unreflected concept of fonn, with its hue and cry over fonnal- ism, sets fonn in opposition to the content of poems, compositions, and paintings as an organization that can simply be lifted off the work. Fonn is thereby con- ceived as something superimposed, subjectively dictated, whereas it is substantial only when it does no violence to what is fonned and emerges from it. Indeed, what is fonned, the content [Inhalt] does not amount to objects external to fonn; rather, the content is mimetic impulses that are drawn into the world of images that is fonn. The innumerable and pernicious equivocations of the concept of fonn can be traced to its ubiquity, which produces the temptation to call every- thing and anything that is artistic in art fonn. In any case, the concept offonn is fruitless if nothing more is meant than the trivial generality that the artwork's "material"-whether this means intentional objects or materials such as tones or colors-mediates instead of simply being present. It is just as inapt to define fonn as it is to define what is conferred by the subject and bears the stamp of that sub- ject. What can rightly be called fonn in artworks fulfills the desiderata of that on which subjective activity takes place just as much as it is the product of subjective activity. In artworks, fonn is aesthetic essentially insofar as it is an objective determination. Its locus is precisely there where the work frees itself from being simply a product of subjectivity. Fonn is thus not to be sought in the arrangement of pregiven elements, as the theory of pictorial composition held it to be prior to being debunked by impressionism; that nevertheless so many artworks, including precisely those that are applauded as classical, prove under careful scrutiny to be just such an arrangement is a fatal objection to traditional art. There is absolutely no reducing the concept of fonn to mathematical relations , as was envisioned by aesthetics of Zeising ' s era. 2 Such relations - whether explicitly invoked as princi- ples during the Renaissance or latently coupled with mystical ideas, as perhaps occasionally in Bach-play a role as technical procedures, yet they are not fonn itselfbut rather its vehicle, the means by which the newly liberated subject, depen- dent strictly on its own resources, prefonns otherwise chaotic and undifferentiated material. Just how little mathematical organization and everything related to it coin- cides with aesthetic fonn is audible in the recent history of twelve-tone technique, which in fact preforms the material by the establishment ofnumericalrelations of permutated rows in which no tone may occur before the other tone has preceded it. Immediately it became evident that this prefonnation did not constitute fonn in the fashion expected by Erwin Stein's program, which not by accident carried the
title New Principles ofForm} Schoenberg himself distinguished almost mechani- cally between the preparation of twelve-tone material and composition, and on account of this distinction he had reason to regret his ingenious technique. The
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heightened logical consistency ofthe following generation, however, which oblit- erated the distinction between the preparation of the material and actual composi- tion, not only exchanged integration for music's self-alienation but incurred the loss of articulation, without which form is almost inconceivable. It is as if the im- manent nexus of the work, when abandoned completely to itself without any in- terference, without the effort to hear the totality of form out of the heterogeneous, relapses into the raw and crude. In fact, the totally organized works of the serial phase have almost completely surrendered the means of differentiation in which they originated. Mathematization as a method for the immanent objectivation of form is chimerical . Its insufficiency can perhaps be clarified by the fact that artists resort to it during historical periods when the traditional self-evidence of forms dissolves and no objective canon is available. At these moments the artist has recourse to mathematics; it unifies the level of subjective reason attained by the artist with the semblance of an objectivity founded on categories such as univer- sality and necessity; this is semblance because the organization, the relation of elements to each other that constitutes form, does not originate in the specific structure and fails when confronted with the particular. For this reason mathema- tization favors precisely those traditional forms that it at the same time denounces as irrational. Rather than embodying the abiding lawfulness of being, its own claim to legitimacy, the mathematical aspect of art despairingly strives to guaran- tee its possibility in a historical situation in which the objectivity of the concep- tion of form is as requisite as it is inhibited by the level of consciousness. Frequently the concept of form proves limited in that, depending on the circum-
stances, it locates form in one dimension regardless of others, as, for example, when musical form is located in temporal succession, as if simultaneity and polyphony do not contribute to form, or when in painting form is attributed to pro- portions of space and surface at the cost of the form-giving function of color. In contrast to this, aesthetic form is the objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent. It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth. A posited unity, it con- stantly suspends itself as such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its otherjust as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere. In its relation to its other-whose foreignness it mollifies and yet maintains-form is what is anti- barbaric in art; through form art participates in the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence. Form is the law of the transfiguration of the existing, counter to which it represents freedom. Form secularizes the theological model of the world as an image made in God's likeness, though not as an act ofcreation but as the ob- jectivation of the human comportment that imitates creation; not creatio ex nihilo but creation out of the created. The metaphorical expression is irresistible, that form in artworks is everything on which the hand has left its trace, everything over which it has passed. Form is the seal of social labor, fundamentally different
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from the empirical process of making. What artists directly perceive as form is best elucidated e contrario as an antipathy to the unfiltered in the artwork, to the grouping of color that is simply factual without being articulated or animated in itself; an antipathy to the rote musical sequence, the topos, the precritical. Form converges with critique. It is that through which artworks prove self-critical; what in the work rebels against any untransformed residue is really the bearer of form, and art is disavowed wherever support is given to the theodicy of the unformed, whether under the name of musicality or ham acting. By its critical implication, form annihilates practices and works of the past. Form repudiates the view that artworks are immediately given. If form is that in artworks by which they become artworks, it is equivalent with their mediatedness, their objective reflectedness into themselves . Form is mediation in that it is the relation of parts to each other and to the whole and as the elaboration of details. With regard to form, then, the much praised naIvete of artworks turns out to be hostile to art. What may appear intuitive and naIve in artworks, their constitution as something that presents itself as self-coherent, gapless, and therefore unmediated, derives from their mediated- ness in themselves.
It is only through this mediatedness that they become signi- ficative and their elements become signs. Everything in artworks that resembles language originates in form and is thus transformed into the antithesis of form, the mimetic impulse. Form seeks to bring the particular to speech through the whole. However, this is the melancholy of form, especially among artists in whose work form prevails. Form inevitably limits what is formed, for otherwise its concept would lose its specific difference to what is formed. This is confirmed by the artis- tic labor of forming, which is always a process of selecting, trimming, renounc- ing. Without rejection there is no form, and this prolongs guilty domination in artworks, of which they would like to be free; form is their amorality . They do in- justice to what they form by following it. At least something of this was sensed by vitalism's endlessly rehearsed assurance, ever since Nietzsche, of the antithesis between form and life . Art becomes entangled in the guilt context of the living, not only because its distance allows the guilt context to prevail but even more im- portantly because it makes incisions in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it. The myth of Procrustes recounts the philosophical proto- history of art. Yet the total condemnation of art does not follow from this any more than it does elsewhere from partial gUilt in the context of total guilt. Who- ever rails against art's putative formalism, against art being art, advocates the very inhumanity with which he charges formalism and does so in the name of cliques that , in order to retain better control of the oppressed, insist on adaptation to them. Whenever the inhumanity of spirit is indicted, it is ajudgment passed against hu- manity ; only that spirit doesjustice to humanity that, rather than serving it accord- ing to what it has become, immerses itself in that which unknown to humanity is its own. The campaign against formalism ignores the fact that form that befalls content [lnhalt] is itself sedimented content; this, and not regression to any pre-
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artistic emphasis on content, secures the primacy of the object in art. Aesthetic categories of fonn such as particularity, development and resolution of conflict, even the anticipation of reconciliation through homeostasis, are transparent with regard to their content even , and most of all, where they have separated them- selves from the empirical objects. Precisely by distance from it art adopts its stance toward the empirical world in which conflicts appear immediate and as ab- solute cleavages; their mediation, implicitly contained in the empirical, becomes the for-itself of consciousness only by the act of stepping back from it, which is what art does. This stepping back is, as such, an act ofknowledge. Those features of modern art on whose account it has been ostracized as fonnalistic derive with- out exception from the fact that in them content flickers incarnate , instead of hav- ing been peremptorily adjusted by an easily marketable harmony. Emancipated expression, in which all of modern art's fonns originated, was a protest against romantic expression by a depositional character that is antagonistic to the fonns. This was the source of their substantiality; Kandinsky coined the tenn "cerebral acts. " The historicophilosophical significance of the emancipation of fonn is that it refuses to mollify alienation in the image, exclusively thereby incorporating the alienated; that it defines the alienated as such. The hennetic works bring more criticism to bear on the existing than do those that, in the interest of intelligible so- cial criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory fonns and silently acknowledge the flourishing culture industry . In the dialectic of fonn and content , the scale also tips toward fonn-against Hegel-because content, which his aesthetics wanted to salvage, degenerated to a positivistic given, a mold for the reification against which, according to Hegel's theory, art protests. Thus the more deeply the content [Inhalt] is experienced and transfonned unrecognizably into fonnal categories, the less the unsublimated materials are commensurable with the content [Gehalt] of artworks . Everything appearing in the artwork is virtually content [Inhalt] as much as it is fonn, whereas fonn remains that by which the appearing determines itself and content remains what is self-determining. To the extent that aesthetics achieved an energetic concept of fonn , it legitimately opposed the preartistic view of art by seeking what is specifically aesthetic exclusively in form by seeking out form's transfonnations as such in the comportment of the aesthetic subject; this was axiomatic for the conception of art history as cultural history. But what promises to emancipate and thus strengthen the subject weakens it at the same time through its isolation. Hegel is right that all aesthetic processes are bound up with content [Inhalt] , just as in the history of the plastic arts and literature new levels of the external world constantly become apparent and are discovered and assimilated, whereas others perish, lose their artistic potential, and no longer ex- cite even the worst commercial painter to grant them a brief eternity on canvas . In this regard it is worth mentioning the studies of the Warburg Institute, many of which penetrated to the center of artistic content [Gehalt] through the analysis of motifs; in poetics Benjamin's study of the Gennan baroque shows an analogous
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tendency, motivated by the rejection of the confusion of subjective intentions with aesthetic content [Gehalt] and, ultimately, of the alliance of aesthetics and idealist philosophy . The elements bound up with content [Inhalt] undergird the substance [Gehalt] in opposition to the pressure of subjective intention.
The articulation, by which the artwork achieves its form, also always coincides in a certain sense with the defeat of form. If a gapless and unforced unity of form and the formed succeeded, as is intended by the idea ofform, this would amount to the achievement of the identity of the identical and nonidentical . But it is vis-a-vis the fact that this has not been achieved that the artwork is motivated to wall itself up in the imaginary confines of an identity that is merely for-itself. The arrangement of a whole in accordance with the sum of its complexes, which is the idea of articu- lation , is never completely adequate , whether as the division of a lava mass into a multitude of small garden plots or whether it is because of an external residue remaining after the divergent has been unified. A prototypical instance of this is the suitelike , unmastered randomness of the succession of movements in an inte- grated symphony. What may be called a work's level ofform, a term employed in graphology ever since Ludwig Klages , depends on its degree of articulation. This concept calls a halt to the relativism of Riegl's "artistic will. " There are types of art, as well as phases in its history, in which articulation was of little concern or was impeded by conventional procedures. Articulation's adequacy to artistic will, to the objective-historical sense of form that it bears , does not make it any less in- ferior: Under the constraint of an encompassing "It shall not be" such works fail to carry out what they are obliged to fulfill according to their own logicality. Like desk-bound white-collar workers whose ancestors were artists of an inferior level of form, their unconscious whispers in their ears that the utmost is not possible for the little men that they are; yet the utmost is nevertheless the law of form of what they undertook to do. It is rarely noted, even in art criticism, that neither individ- ual nor collective art wills its own concept, which develops from within; rather like people who laugh even when there is nothing funny. Many artworks are undertaken with tacit resignation; for their diminished claim they are rewarded by making art historians and the public happy. It would be worthwhile to analyze to what degree such aesthetic resignation has since antiquity contributed to the divi- sion of high and low art, a division whose decisive reason is obviously that culture proved unsuccessful for precisely those who produced it. In'any case, even so ap- parently formal a category as that of articulation has its material aspect: that of intervention in the rudis indigestaque moles of what is sedimented in the artwork this side of its autonomy; even aesthetic forms tend historically toward becoming material of a second order. The means, without which there would be no form, undermine form. This aporia is dodged, not solved, by works that renounce partial wholes of any significant dimension in order to protect their unity: This is the key objection to Webern's intensity without extension. Mediocre works, by contrast, leave the partial wholes unchallenged under the thin husk of their form, camou-
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6aging them rather than melding them. It could almost be stated as a rule , one that testifies to the depth at which form and content [Inhalt] are mediated in each other, that the relation ofthe parts to the whole, an essential aspect of form, is con- stituted by way of detours. Artworks lose themselves in order to find themselves: The form category for this is the episode. In a collection of aphorisms from his ex- pressionist phase published prior to World War I, Schoenberg noted that Ariadne provides no thread to follow through the interior of artworks . 4 This however does not imply aesthetic irrationalism. Their form, their whole, and their logicality are hidden from artworks to the same degree as the elements, the content [Inhalt], desire the whole. Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight of form is most emphatically mani- fest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art forms to a conclusion; in music com- posers often speak of the problem of a finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able to end convincingly, and the continued use of traditional endings only simulate the temporal convergence of the particular ele- ments with the concluding instant as a totality of form. In many modern works that have attracted a large audience, the form was artfully held open because they wanted to demonstrate that the unity of form was no longer bestowed on them. Spurious infinity, the inability to close, becomes a freely chosen principle of method and expression. Beckett's play, which, rather than stopping repeats itself word for word, is a reaction to this; almost fifty years ago, Schoenberg proceeded in similar fashion in the March of his Serenade: After the reprise had been abol- ished, it was resurrected out of desperation. What Lukacs once called the "dis- charge ofmeaning" was the force that allowed the artwork, once it has confirmed its immanent determination, to end on the model of one who dies old, having led a full life . That this is denied artworks , that they can no more die than can the hunter Gracchus, is internalized by them directly as an expression of horror. The unity of artworks cannot be what it must be: the unity of the multiplicitous; in that unity synthesizes, it damages what is synthesized and thus the synthesis. Artworks suf- fer from their mediated totality no less than from their immediateness.
Against the philistine division of art into form and content it is necessary to insist on their unity; against the sentimental view of their indifference in the artwork it is necessary to insist that their difference endures even in their mediation. Not only is the perfect identity ofthe two chimerical, it would not redound to the success of the works: By analogy to Kant's maxim, they would become empty or blind, self- sufficient play or raw empiria. With regard to content [Inhalt] , the concept of ma- terial best does justice to the mediated distinction. According to an almost univer- sally accepted terminology in all the arts, material is what is formed. It is not the same as content [Inhalt], even if Hegel fatefully confounded the two. This can be explicated with regard to music. Its content [Inhalt] is in any case what occurs- partial events, motifs, themes, and their elaboration: changing situations. Content
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is not external to musical time but essential to it, as time is essential to content; content is everything that transpires in time. Material, by contrast, is what artists work with: It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colors, sound s , associations of every sort and every technique ever developed . To this ex- tent, forms too can become material; it is everything that artists encounter about which they must make a decision. The idea, widespread among unreflective artists, of the open eligibility of any and all material is problematic in that it ig- nores the constraint inherent in technical procedures and the progress of material, which is imposed by various materials as well as by the necessity to employ spe- cific materials. The choice of the material, its use, and the limitations of that use , are an essential element of production. Even innovative expansion of the material into the unknown, going beyond the material's given condition, is to a large extent a function of the material and its critique , which is defined by the material itself. The concept of material is presupposed by alternatives such as whether a com- poser works with sounds that are native to tonality and recognizable as its deriva- tives, or whether he radically eliminates them; analogous alternatives in painting are those between the representational and the nonrepresentational, the perspec- tival and the nonperspectival. The concept of material may first have taken con- scious shape in the twenties, if one leaves aside the lingo of singers who, tortured by a sense of the dubiousness of their musicality, exult over their "material. " Since Hegel's theory of the romantic artwork, the error has persisted that along with preestablished overarching forms even the bindingness of the materials with which the forms were concerned has disintegrated; the expansion of available ma- terials, which scorns the old boundaries between the arts, is primarily the result of the historical emancipation of the concept of form in art. This expansion has been much overestimated by those external to it; it is offset by the renunciations de- manded of the artist not only by taste but by the condition of the material. Of all the material that is abstractly employable, only the tiniest part does not collide with the condition of spirit and is as such concretely usable. Thus material is not natural material even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical . Its supposedly sovereign position is the result of the collapse of every ontology of art, which has in tum affected the materials. They are no less dependent on the transformation of technique than is technique on the materials that it manipulates . It is obvious how much a composer who, for instance , works with tonal material receives this material from tradition. If, however, he turns critically against tradi- tion through the use of an autonomous material, one completely purged of con- cepts such as consonance, dissonance, triad, and diatonicism, the negated is never- theless retained in the negation. Such works speak by virtue of the taboos they radiate; the falseness or, at the least, the shock of every triad that they permit makes this obvious enough, and this is the objective cause ofthe comfortably pre- scribed monotonousness of radically modem art. The rigorousness of the most recent developments in music and painting, which right into the smallest detail of
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the emancipated material ruthlessly eliminates all traces of the traditional and the negated, obeys all the more recklessly-under the illusion of the pure givenness of a material without any intrinsic quality-the historical tendency. Stripping the material of any qualitative dimension, which superficially connotes its dehistori- cization, is itself the material's historical propensity, the propensity of subjective reason. What defines its limits are that it leaves its historical determinations be- hind in the material.
What aesthetic terminology once called subject matter [Stoff] and Hegel the sub- ject [Sujet] is not to be apodictically excluded from the concept of material. All the same, while the concept of subject matter remains a concern of art, in its im- mediacy , as a theme that can be lifted over from external reality and worked upon, it has, since Kandinsky, Proust, and Joyce, incontrovertibly declined. Parallel to the critique of the heterogeneously imposed, the aesthetically unassimilable, dis- content has been growing with the so-called great themes to which Hegel as well as Kierkegaard, and more recently many Marxist theoreticians and playwrights attributed such eminence. The idea that works that occupy themselves with august events - whose sublimity is usually only the fruit of ideology and of respect for power and magnitude - are thereby augmented in their dignity was unmasked once van Gogh painted a stool or a few sunflowers in such a fashion that the images rage with the storm of all those emotions in the experience of which the individual of van Gogh's epochfor the first time registered the historical catastrophe. This having become evident , it could be shown in earlier art too how little its authentic- ity depends on the trumped-up or even actual relevance of its objects . What is the importance of Delft in Vermeer? Does it not hold that-as Kraus wrote, a gutter well painted is of greater value than a badly painted palace: "Out of a loose sequence of events . . . a world of perspectives , mood s , and shocks takes shape for the more pellucid eye, and trashy poetry becomes the poetry of trash, damnable only to that official idiocy that holds a badly painted palace preferable to a well- painted gutter. "5 Hegel's aesthetics of content [lnhalt], an aesthetics of subject matter, in keeping with the spirit of many of his intentions, subscribes undialecti- cally to the objectivation of art by way of a raw relation to objects . Essentially he excluded mimesis from his aesthetics. In German idealism the tum to the object was always coupled with philistinism, as is most crassly obvious in the comments on historical painting in the third book of the World as Will and Representation. In its relation to art, idealism's eternity is unmasked as kitsch, to which he who clings to idealism's inalienable categories is consigned. Brecht ignored this. In his essay "Funf Schwiengkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit" (five difficulties in writing the truth) he concludes: ''Thus, it is for example not untrue to say that chairs provide a place to sit and that rain fall s from above . Many poets write truths of this kind. They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes. For them even what we have called our first difficulty in writing the truth does not exist and yet they have a clear conscience. They produce their daubs
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undisturbed by the mighty or by the screams of the ravaged. The absurdity of what they do produces in them a 'deep' pessimism that they sell at a good price and that would actually better suit those who watch these masters and their sales. At the same time it is anything but easy to recognize that their truths are truths about chairs or the rain, since they usually sound completely different, as if they were truths about important things. For the process of artistic production is pre- cisely that of according importance to something. Only by taking a close look does one perceive that they are only saying: 'A chair is a chair' and 'Nobody can change the fact that rain falls from above . ' " 6 This is a blague. It justly provokes the official culture mentality, which has even succeeded in integrating van Gogh's chair as a piece of furniture. Yet if one wanted to extract a norm out of this, it would be merely regressive. There is no point to making threats. A painted chair can actually be extremely significant, to the extent that one does not prefer to avoid this bloated word. Incomparably deeper and socially relevant experiences can be sedimented in the how of a painting than in faithful portraits of generals or revolutionary heros. All paintings of this sort retrospectively take their place in the Galerie des Glaces de Versailles of 1 8 71 , regardless whether the generals , eternalized in historical postures, were to have led red armies that occupy coun- tries in which the revolution never took place . This problematic of thematic mate- rial whose relevance is directly borrowed from reality also befalls the intentions that are injected into the work. However spiritual these ideas may be in them- selves , once introduced into the artwork they become no less subject matter than if they were Meier, the Basel mayor who promises to fetch the coal. As Hegel well knew , what artists can say they say only through the form [Gestaltung] , not by let- ting that form deliver a message . Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say , with the content [Gehalt] of the work. In reaction , the content of the artwork is increasingly lodged in what has not been cathected by the artist's subjective intentions, whereas content is blocked in works in which intention, whether as fabula docet or as philosophical thesis, de- mands primacy. The objection that an artwork is too reflected is not only ideology but has its element of truth in the work's being too little reflected: not reflected against the incursion of its own intention. The philological procedure, which imagines that it grasps securely the content of the work when it grasps its inten- tion, passes judgment immanently on itself in that it tautologically extracts from artworks what was put into them earlier; the secondary literature on Thomas Mann is the most repellent example of this. Granted, this practice is fostered by a genuine tendency that has its source in literature: NaIve immediacy and its illu- soriness has become threadbare for literature, which no longer disavows reflec- tion and is thus compelled to strengthen the dimension of intention. This supplies an interpretive method alien to spirit with an easy surrogate for spirit. It is in- cumbent on artworks, just as occurred in modernism's greatest achievements, to
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incorporate the reflexive element by its further reflexivity into the work itself rather than tolerating it in the form of residual subject matter.
However little the intention of artworks is their content [Gehalt] - if only because no intention, however neatly presented, is assured of being realized by the work- still only a stubborn rigorism would disqualify intention as an element of the work. Intentions have their locus in the dialectic between the mimetic pole of art- works and their methexis in enlightenment; intentions have their locus not only in being the subjectively moving and organizing force that is thereupon extinguished in the work but also in the objectivity of the work itself. Because the artwork is not simply inert, intentions are endowed with an independence as specific as that of any other element of the artwork; one would need to ignore the complexion of im- portant artworks for the sake of a thema probandum to deny that, however vari- able historically, their importance stands in relation to intention. If material in the
artwork is truly resistant to the artwork's otherwise pure identity, the inner proc- ess of identity in artworks is essentially that between the material and intention. Without intention, without the immanent form of the principle of identity, form would not exist any more than it would without the mimetic impulse. The surplus of intentions reveals that the objectivity of artworks cannot be reduced simply to mimesis. The objective bearer of intentions, which synthesizes the individual in- tentions of artworks into a whole, is their meaning. It remains relevant in spite of everything problematic inherent to it and in spite of all the evidence that this is not all there is to artworks. The meaning of Goethe's /phigenie is humanity. If this idea were merely intended abstractly by the poetic subject, if it were in Hegel's words simply a "maxim" -as indeed it is in Schiller-it would be irrelevant to the work . In that, however, by means of language, humanity itself becomes mimetic - is itself expressed in the nonconceptual without sacrificing its conceptual ele- ment- meaning achieves a fruitful tension to the work ' s content [Gehalt] , to what has been composed. The meaning of a poem such as Verlaine's "Clair de lune" cannot be univocally established, yet this is not to say that its meaning does not reach beyond the incomparable resonance of the verses. The poem's sensuality is itself an element of intention: Happiness and sadness, which accompany sexuality as soon as it descends into itself and negates spirit as ascetic, are the poem's con- tent [Gehalt]; the flawlessly presented idea of sensuality divorced from sensuous- ness is the meaning. This trait, central to the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art, including Debussy, contains the potential of radical modernism, and there is no lack of actual historical ties . Conversely , it is the start- ing point, though not the telos of criticism, whether the intention is objectivated in what is composed; the fault lines between intention and result, rarely missing from recent art, are no less ciphers of the work's content than is the result. A higher level of critique , however, that of the truth or untruth of the content , often becomes immanent critique through the knowledge of the relation between inten- tion and what has been written, painted, or composed. Intention does not always
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miscarry as the result of the inadequate form-giving powers of the subject. The untruth of intention interrupts the objective truth content. If what is supposed to be truth content is in itself untrue, that prohibits inner consistency. Such untruth tends to be mediated by the untruth of the intention, as is apparent at the highest level of form in Wagner's music. -For traditional aesthetics, and to a large ex- tent for traditional art as well, the determination of the totality of the artwork is its determination as a nexus of meaning . The reciprocal relation of whole and parts is supposed to shape the work as something meaningful to such an extent that the quintessence of this meaning coincides with the metaphysical content. Because the nexus of meaning is constituted by the relation of elements - and not in atom- istic fashion in something given that is sensual-what can justly be called the spirit of artworks should be comprehensible in that nexus . That the spirit of an art- work is the configuration of its elements is more than a seductive idea; it attains its truth in the face of all crude reification or materialization of the spirit and content of artworks . Directly or indirectly everything that appears in the work contributes to such meaning, though not all that appears is necessarily of equal importance. T h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f r e l a t i v e i m p o r t a n c e w a s o n e o f t h e m o s t e f fe c t i v e m e a n s f o r aesthetic articulation, as is obvious enough in the differentiation between thetic main events and transitions, and between the essential and accidental yet requi- site elements. These differentiations in traditional art were largely determined schematically. With the critique of schematic organization, the differentiations become dubious: Art tends toward processes in which everything that occurs is equidistant to the midpoint; where everything accidental arouses the suspicion of being superfluously ornamental. This is one of the most imposing difficulties in the articulation of recent art. Art's inexorable self-criticism, the requirement of drossless composition, underscores this difficulty and promotes chaos, the ever lurking precondition of all art. Even in works with the highest level of form, the crisis of differentiation has frequently resulted in a dimension of nondifferentia- tion . Efforts to defend against this have almost without exception, though often la- tently, had recourse to borrowings from the aesthetic resources that they oppose: Even here the total domination of the material and movement toward diffuseness converge .
That artworks, in accord with Kant's magnificently paradoxical formula, are "pur- poseless," that they are separated from empirical reality and serve no aim that is useful for self-preservation and life, precludes calling art's meaning its purpose, despite meaning's affinity to immanent teleology. Yet it becomes ever harder for artworks to cohere as a nexus of meaning. Ultimately they respond to this by rejecting the very concept of meaning. The more the emancipation of the subject demolished every idea of a preestablished order conferring meaning , the more du- bious the concept of meaning became as the refuge of a fading theology. Even prior to Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie, given historical experience, to ascribe any positive meaning to existence. This has consequences that reach deep into
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aesthetic fonn. When artworks have nothing external to themselves to which they can cling without ideology, what they have lost cannot be restored by any subjec- tive act. It was wiped out by their tendency toward subjectivization, which was no cultural-historical accident but confonns rather with the true state of things. Criti- cal self-reflection, inherent in every artwork, sharpens the work's sensitivity not only toward every element that strengthens traditional meaning but also against the work's immanent meaning and those of its categories that provide meaning. For the meaning that is the synthesis of the artwork cannot merely be something that it has manufactured, its quintessence. At the same time the totality of the work presents meaning and produces it aesthetically, it reproduces it. Meaning is only legitimate in the artwork insofar as it is objectively more than the work's own meaning. I n that artworks relentlessly chip away a t the nexus i n which mean- ing is founded, they tum against this nexus and against meaning altogether. The unconscious labor of the artistic ingenium on the meaning of the work as on some- thing substantial and enduring transcends this meaning . The advanced production of recent decades has become self-conscious of this issue, has made it thematic and translated it into the structure of artworks. It is easy to convict neodadaism of a lack of political import and dismiss it as meaningless and purposeless in every sense of the word . But to do so is to forget that its products ruthlessly demonstrate the fate of meaning without any regard to themselves as artworks. Beckett's oeuvre already presupposes this experience o f the destruction o f meaning a s self- evident, yet also pushes it beyond meaning's abstract negation in that his plays force the traditional categories of art to undergo this experience, concretely sus- pend them, and extrapolate others out of the nothingness. The dialectical reversal that occurs is obviously not a derivative of theology , which always heaves a sigh of relief whenever its concerns are treated in any way, no matter what the verdict, as if at the end of the tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness-the presentation of the world as hell-a light glimmers; Gunther Anders was right to defend Beckett against those who make his works out to be affinnative. 7 Beckett's plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning , for then they would be sim- ply irrelevant. but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history. His work is ruled as much by an obsession with positive nothingness as by the obses- sion with a meaninglessness that has developed historically and is thus in a sense merited. though this meritedness in no way allows any positive meaning to be re- claimed. Nevertheless the emancipation of artworks from their meaning becomes aesthetically meaningful once this emancipation is realized in the aesthetic mater-
ial precisely because the aesthetic meaning is not immediately one with theologi- cal meaning. Artworks that divest themselves of any semblance of meaning do not thereby forfeit their similitude to language . They enunciate their meaningless- ness with the same determinacy as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning. Today this is the capacity of art: Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulates that once constituted the meaning of art-
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works . Works of the highest level of form that are meaningless or alien to mean- ing are therefore more than simply meaningless because they gain their content [Gehalt] through the negation of meaning . Artwork that rigorously negates mean- ing is by this very rigor bound to the same density and unity that was once req- uisite to the presence of meaning. Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning. Although the crisis of meaning is rooted in a problematic common to all art, the failure in the face ofra- tionality, reflection is unable to repress the question whether art does not perhaps, through the demolition of meaning, throw itself into the arms of precisely that which strikes ordinary consciousness as absurd, the positivistically reified con- sciousness. The dividing line between authentic art that takes on itselfthe crisis of meaning and a resigned art consisting literally and figuratively of protocol sen- tences is that in significant works the negation of meaning itself takes shape as a negative, whereas in the others the negation of meaning is stubbornly and posi- tively replicated. Everything depends on this: whether meaning inheres in the negation of meaning in the artwork or if the negation conforms to the status quo; whether the crisis of meaning is reflected in the works or whether it remains im- mediate and therefore alien to the subject. Key events may include certain musical works such as Cage's Piano Concerto, which impose on themselves a law of inex- orable aleatoriness and thereby achieve a sort of meaning: the expression of hor- ror. What governs Beckett's work, certainly, is a parodic unity of time, place, and action, combined with artfully fitted and balanced episodes and a catastrophe that consists solely in the fact that it never takes place. Truly, one of the enigmas of art, and evidence of the force ofits logicality, is that all radical consistency, even that called absurd, culminates in similitude to meaning. This, however, is not confir- mation of metaphysical substantiality, to which every thoroughly formed work would lay claim as confirmation of its illusoriness: Ultimately, art is semblance in that, in the midst of meaninglessness, it is unable to escape the suggestion of mean- ing.