No More Learning

By contrast, Neue Sachlichkeit's polished extirpation of expression con- tributes to universal confonnism and subordinates antifunctional art to a principle
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that originates entirely in functionality. This form ofreaction fails to recognize in expression what is not metaphorical, not ornamental; the more unreservedly art- works open themselves to this, the more they become depositions of expression and effectively invert Sachlichkeit. At the very least it is evident that antiexpressive and, like Mondrian's, affirmatively mathematized artworks have by no means passed final judgment on expression. If the subject is no longer able to speak directly, then at least it should-in accord with a modernism that has not pledged itself to absolute construction - speak through things, through their alienated and mutilated form.
The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the ? ontemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be com- prehended. What is so resistlessly absorbed as a cliche by the watchword-the absurd-could only be recuperated by a theory that thinks its truth. It cannot sim- ply be divided off from the spiritualization of artworks as counterpoint to that spiritualization; this counterpoint is, in Hegel's words, the ether of artworks; it is spirit itself in its omnipresence and not the intention of the enigma. For in that it negates the spirit that dominates nature, the spirit of artworks does not appear as spirit. It ignites on what is opposed to it, on materiality. In no way is spirit most present in the most spiritual artworks. Art is redemptive in the act by which the spirit in it throws itself away. Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of artworks produces the shudder by exter- nalizing it in objects . Thus art participates in the actual movement of history in ac- cord with the law of enlightenment: By virtue of the self-reflection of genius, what once seemed to be reality emigrates into imagination, where it survives by becom- ing conscious of its own unreality . The historical trajectory of art as spiritualiza- tion is that of the critique of myth as well as that toward its redemption: The imag- ination confirms the possibilities of what it recollects. This double movement of spirit in art describes its protohistory, which is inscribed in its concept, rather than its empirical history . The uncheckable movement of spirit toward what has eluded it becomes in art the voice that speaks for what was lost in the most distantly archaic .
Mimesis in art is the prespiritual; it is contrary to spirit and yet also that on which spirit ignites. In artworks, spirit has become their principle of construction, al- though it fulfills its telos only when it emerges from what is to be constructed, from the mimetic impulses, by shaping itself to them rather than allowing itself to be imposed on them by sovereign rule. Form objectivates the particular impulses only when it follows them where they want to go of their own accord. This alone is the methexis of artworks in reconciliation . The rationality of artworks becomes spirit only when it is immersed in its polar opposite. The divergence of the con- structive and the mimetic , which no artwork can resolve and which is virtually the
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original sin of aesthetic spirit, has its correlative in that element of the ridiculous and clownish that even the most significant works bear and that, unconcealed, is inextricable from their significance. The inadequacy of classicism of any persua- sion originates in its repression of this element; a repression that art must mistrust. The progressive spiritualization of art in the name of maturity only accentuates the ridiculous all the more glaringly; the more the artwork's own organization assimilates itself to a logical order by virtue of its inner exactitude , the more obvi- ously the difference between the artwork's logicity and the logicity that governs empirically becomes the parody of the latter; the more reasonable the work be- comes in terms of its formal constitution, the more ridiculous it becomes accord- ing to the standard of empirical reason. Its ridiculousness is, however, also part of a condemnation of empirical rationality; it accuses the rationality of social praxis of having become an end in itself and as such the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends. The ridiculous in art, which philistines recognize better than do those who are naIvely at home in art, and the folly of a rationality made absolute indict one other reciprocally; incidentally, when viewed from the perspective of the praxis of self-preservation, happiness-sex-is equally ridiculous, as can be spitefully pointed out by anyone who is not driven by it. Ridiculousness is the resi- due of the mimetic in art, the price of its self-enclosure. In his condemnation of this element, the philistine always has an ignominious measure ofjustification. The ridiculous, as a barbaric residuum of something alien to form, misfires in art if art fails to reflect and shape it. If it remains on the level of the childish and is taken for such, it merges with the ca1culatedjUn of the culture industry . By its very concept, art implies kitsch , just as by the obligation it imposes of sublimating the ridiculous it presupposes educational privilege and class structure;fun is art's punishment for this. All the same, the ridiculous elements in artworks are most akin to their in- tentionless levels and therefore, in great works, also closest to their secret. Foolish subjects like those of The Magic Flute and Der Freischutz have more truth con- tent through the medium of the music than does the Ring, which gravely aims at the ultimate. In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the pri- mordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adultsdrive out ofthemjust as they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to recapture it and be flooded with joy; the lan- guage of little children and animals seems to be the same. In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up; the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.
As a thing that negates the world of things, every artwork is a priori helpless when it is called on to legitimate itself to this world; still, art cannot simply refuse the demand for legitimation by pointing to this apriority . It is hard to be astonished by art's enigmaticalness if it is taken neither as a source of pleasure, as it is for those
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alien to art, nor as an exceptional realm, as it is for the connoisseur, but as the sub- stance of personal experience; yet this substance demands that the elements of art not be abandoned but secured when art is fundamentally challenged by its experi- ence. An inkling of this is had when artworks are experienced in so-called cultural contexts that are alien or incommensurable to them. In these situations artworks are displayed naked to the test of their cui bono, a test from which they are pro- tected only by the leaky roof of their own familiar context. In such situations the disrespectful question, which ignores the taboo surrounding the aesthetic zone, often becomes fateful to the quality of a work; observed completely externally the artworks' dubiousness is uncovered as relentlessly as when they are observed completely internally. The enigmaticalness of artworks remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became an enigma; it is history that ever and again makes them such, and, conversely, it is history alone-which gave them their authority - that holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d'etre. The enigmaticalness of artworks is less their irrationality than their ratio- nality; the more methodically they are ruled, the more sharply their enigmatical- ness is thrown into relief. Through form, artworks gain their resemblance to lan- guage, seeming at every point to say just this and only this, and at the same time whatever it is slips away.
All artworks-and art altogether-are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art. That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language. This characteristic cavorts clownishly; if one is within the artwork, if one participates in its immanent completion, this enigmaticalness makes itself invisible; if one steps outside the work, breaking the contract with its immanent context, this enig- maticalness returns like a spirit. This gives further reason for the study of those who are alien to art: In their proximity the enigmaticalness of art becomes out- rageous to the point that art is completely negated, unwittingly the ultimate criti- cism of art and, in that it is a defective attitude, a confirmation of art's truth. It is impossible to explain art to those who have no feeling for it; they are not able to bring an intellectual understanding of it into their living experience. For them the reality principle is such an obsession that it places a taboo on aesthetic comport- ment as a whole; incited by the cultural approbation of art, alienness to art often changes into aggression, not the least of the causes of the contemporary deaes- theticization of art. Its enigmaticalness may in an elementary fashion confirm the so-called unmusical , who does not understand the " l anguage of music," hears noth- ing but nonsense, and wonders what all the noise is about; the difference between what this person hears and what the initiated hear defines art's enigmaticalness. This is ofcourse not restricted to music, whose aconceptuality makes it almost too obvious. Whoever refuses to reenact the work under the discipline it imposes falls under the empty gaze cast by a painting or poem, the same empty gaze that, in a sense, the art-alien encounter in music; and it is precisely the empty questioning
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gaze that the experience and interpretation o f artworks must assimilate if they are not to go astray; failing to perceive the abyss is no protection from it; however consciousness seeks to safeguard itself from losing its way is fateful. There is no answer that would convince someone who would ask such questions as "Why imi- tate something? " or "Why tell a story as if it were true when obviously the facts are otherwise and it just distorts reality? " Artworks fall helplessly mute before the question "What's it for? " and before the reproach that they are actually pointless. If, for instance, one responded that fictive narration can touch more deeply on the essence of historical reality than can factual reportage, a possible reply would be that precisely this is a matter of theory , and that theory has no need of fiction . This manifestation of the enigmaticalness of art as incomprehension in the face of questions of putatively grand principle is familiar in the broader context of the bluff inherent in the question as to the meaning of life . 1 The awkwardness prompted by such questions can easily be confused with their irrefutability; their level of ab- straction is so remote from what is effortlessly subsumed, that the actual question vanishes. Understanding art's enigmaticalness is not equivalent to understanding specific artworks, which requires an objective experiential reenactment from within in the same sense in which the interpretation of a musical work means its faithful performance. Understanding is itself a problematic category in the face of art's enigmaticalness. Whoever seeks to understand artworks exclusively through the immanence of consciousness within them by this very measure fails to understand them and as such understanding grows, so does the feeling of its insufficiency caught blindly in the spell of art, to which art's own truth content is opposed. If one who exits from this immanent context or was never in it registers the enigmati- calness with animosity, the enigmaticalness disappears deceptively into the artis- tic experience. The better an artwork is understood, the more it is unpuzzled on one level and the more obscure its constitutive enigmaticalness becomes. It only emerges demonstratively in the profoundest experience of art. If a work opens itself completely, it reveals itself as a question and demands reflection; then the work vanishes into the distance , only to return to those who thought they under- stood it, overwhelming them for a second time with the question "What is it? " Art's enigmaticalness can, however, be recognized as constitutive where it is ab- sent: Artworks that unfold to contemplation and thought without any remainder are not artworks . Enigma here is not a glib synonym for "problem," a concept that is only aesthetically significant in the strict sense of a task posed by the immanent composition of works. In no less strict terms, artworks are enigmas. They contain the potential for the solution; the solution is not objectively given. Every artwork is a picture puzzle, a puzzle to be solved, but this puzzle is constituted in such a fashion that it remains a vexation, the preestablished routing of its observer. The newspaper picture puzzle recapitulates playfully what artworks carry out in earn- est. Specifically, artworks are like picture puzzles in that what they hide-like Poe's letter-is visible and is, by being visible, hidden. The German language, in
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its protophilosophic description of aesthetic experience, rightly expresses that one understands something of art, not that one understands art. Connoisseurship of art is the combination of an adequate comprehension of the material and a narrow- minded incomprehension ofthe enigma; it is neutral to what is cloaked. Those who peruse art solely with comprehension make it into something straightforward, which is furthest from what it is. If one seeks to get a closer look at a rainbow, it disappears. Of all the arts, music is the prototypical example of this: It is at once completely enigmatic and totally evident. It cannot be solved, only its form can be deciphered, and precisely this is requisite for the philosophy of art. He alone would understand music who hears with all the alienness of the unmusical and with all of Siegfried ' s familiarity with the language of the birds . Understanding , however, does not extinguish the enigmaticalness of art. Even the felicitously interpreted work asks for further understanding, as if waiting for the redemptive word that would dissolve its constitutive darkening. Following artworks through in the imagina- tion is the most complete , most deceptive surrogate for understanding, though ob- viously also a step toward it. Those who can adequately imagine music without hearing it possess that connection with it required for its understanding. Under- standing in the highest sense-a solution of the enigma that at the same time maintains the enigma- depends on a spiritualization of art and artistic experience whose primary medium is the imagination. The spiritualization of art approaches its enigmaticalness not directly through conceptual elucidation, but rather by con- cretizing its enigmaticalness. The solution of the enigma amounts to giving the reason for its insolubility, which is the gaze artworks direct at the viewer. The de- mand of artworks that they be understood, that their content be grasped , is bound to their specific experience; but it can only be fulfilled by way of the theory that reflects this experience. What the enigmaticalness of artworks refers to can only be thought mediatedly. The objection to the phenomenology of art , as to any phe- nomenology that imagines it can lay its hands directly on the essence, is not that it is antiempirical but, on the contrary, that it brings thinking experience to a halt. The much derided incomprehensibility of hermetic artworks amounts to the ad- mission of the enigmaticalness of all art. Part of the rage against hermetic works is that they also shatter the comprehensibility of traditional works. It holds true in general that the works sanctioned by tradition and public opinion as being well understood withdraw behind their galvanized surface and become completely incomprehensible; those manifestly incomprehensible works that emphasize their enigmaticalness are potentially the most comprehensible. Art in the most em- phatic sense lacks the concept even when it employs concepts and adapts its facade to comprehension. No concept that enters an artwork remains what it is; each and
every concept is so transformed that its scope can be affected and its meaning refashioned. In Trakl's poems the word "sonata" acquires a unique importance by its sound and by the associations established by the poem; if one wanted to envi- sion a particular sonata on the basis of the diffuse sounds that are suggested, the
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sense of the word in the poem could be missed just as the conjunct image would be incongruous with such a sonata and the sonata form itself. At the same time this would be legitimate, because the word coalesces out of fragments and scraps of sonatas and its very name is reminiscent of the sound that is meant and awak- ened in the work. The term sonata describes works that are highly articulated, mo- tivically and thematically wrought, and internally dynamic; their unity is a clearly differentiated manifold, with development and reprise. The verse, "There are rooms filled with chords and sonatas"2 retains little of this but has, rather, the feel- ing of the childish naming of names; it has more to do with the spurious title Moonlight sonata than with the composition itself and yet i s no coincidence ; with- out the sonatas that his sister played there would not have been the isolated sounds in which the melancholy of the poet sought shelter. Something of this marks even the poem's simplest words, which are drawn from communicative language; that is why Brecht's critique of autonomous art, that it simply reiterates what some- thing is, misses the mark. Even Trakl's omnipresent "is" is alienated in the art- work from its conceptual sense: It expresses no existential judgment but rather its pale afterimage qualitatively transformed to the point of negation; the assertion that something is amounts to both more and less and includes the implication that something is not. When Brecht or William Carlos Williams sabotages the poetic and approximates an empirical report, the actual result is by no means such a report: By the polemical rejection of the exalted lyrical tone, the empirical sen- tences translated into the aesthetic monad acquire an altogether different quality. The antilyrical tone and the estrangement of the appropriated facts are two sides of the same coin. Judgment itself undergoes metamorphosis in the artwork. Art- works are, as synthesis, analogous to judgment; in artworks, however, synthesis does not result in judgment; of no artwork is it possible to determine its judgment or what its so-called message is. It is therefore questionable whether artworks can possibly be engage, even when they emphasize their engagement. What works amount to, that in which they are unified, cannot be formulated as ajudgment, not even as one that they state in words and sentences. Morike has a little poem entitled "Mousetrap Rhyme. " If one restricted interpretation to its discursive content, the poem would amount to no more than sadistic identification with what civilized custom has done to an animal disdained as a parasite:
Mousetrap Rhyme
The child circles the mousetrap three times and chants:
Little guest, little house.
Dearest tiny or grown-up mouse boldly pay us a visit tonight
when the moon shines bright!
But close the door back of you tight, you hear?
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And careful for your little tail ! After dinner we will sing After dinner we will spring And make a little dance: Swish, Swish!
My oid cat will probably be dancing with}
The child's taunt, "My oid cat will probably be dancing with"-if it really is a taunt and not the involuntarily friendly image of child, cat, and mouse dancing, the two animals on their hind legs - once appropriated by the poem, no longer has the last word. To reduce the poem to a taunt is to ignore its social content [Inhalt] along with its poetic content. The poem is the nonjUdgmental reflex of language on a miserable, socially conditioned ritual, and as such it transcends it by subordi- nating itself to it. The poem's gesture, which points to this ritual as if nothing else were possible, holds court over the gapless immanence of the ritual by turning the force of self-evidence into an indictment of that ritual . Art judges exclusively by abstaining from judgment; this is the defense of naturalism. Form, which shapes verse into the echo of a mythical epigram, negates its fatefulness. Echo reconciles. These processes, transpiring in the interior of artworks, make them truly infinite in themselves. It is not that artworks differ from significative language by the absence of meanings; rather, these meanings through their absorption become a matter of accident. The movements by which this absorption of meaning occurs are concretely prescribed by every aesthetically formed object.
Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being determinate and indeterminate . They are question marks , not univocal even through synthesis. Nevertheless their figure is so precise that it determines the point where the work breaks off. As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by the structure. This is the function of the work's immanent logic, of the lawfulness that transpires in it, and that is the theodicy of the concept of purpose in art. The aim of artworks is the determination of the indeterminate . Works are purposeful in themselves , without having any positive purpose beyond their own argran ement; their purposefulness , however, is legitimated as the figure of the answer to the enigma. Through organi- zation artworks become more than they are. In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of ecriture has become relevant , inspired probably by Klee's drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illumines the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writ- ing. If no artwork is ever a judgment, each artwork contains elements derived from judgment and bears an aspect of being correct and incorrect , true and false . Yet the silent and determinate answer of artworks does not reveal itself to inter- pretation with a single stroke, as a new immediacy , but only by way of all media-
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tions, those of the works' discipline as well as those of thought and philosophy. The enigmaticalness outlives the interpretation that arrives at the answer. If the enigmaticalness of artworks is not localized in what is experienced in them, in aesthetic understanding -if the enigmaticalness only bursts open in the distance- the experience that immerses itself in the artworks and is rewarded with corrobo- ration itself becomes enigmatic: the enigma that what is multivocally entwined can be univocally and compellingly understood as such. For the experience of art- works , whatever its starting point , is as Kant himself described it, necessarily im- manent and transparent right into its most sublime nuance. The musician who understands the score follows its most minute impulses, and yet in a certain sense he does not know what he plays; the situation is no different for the actor, and pre- cisely in this is the mimetic capacity made manifest most drastically in the praxis of artistic performance as the imitation of the dynamic curves of what is per- formed; it is the quintessence of understanding this side of the enigma. However, as soon as the experience of artworks flags, they present their enigma as a gri- mace. Incessantly the experience of artworks is threatened by their enigmatical- ness. If enigmaticalness disappears completely from the experience, if experience supposes that it has become completely immanent to the object, the enigma's gaze suddenly appears again; thus is preserved the artworks' seriousness, which stares out of archaic images and is masked in traditional art by their familiar language
until strengthened to the point of total alienation.
Ifthe process immanent to artworks constitutes the enigma, that is, what surpasses the meaning of all its particular elements , this process at the same time attenuates the enigma as soon as the artwork is no longer perceived as fixed and thereupon vainly interpreted but instead once again produced in its objective constitution. In performances that do not do this, that do not interpret, the in-itselfofthe artworks, which such asceticism claims to serve , becomes the booty of its muteness; every noninterpretive performance is meaningless. If some types of art, drama, and to a certain extent music , demand that they be played and interpreted so that they can become what they are - a norm from which no one is exempt who is at home in the theater or on the podium and knows the qualitative difference between what is required there and the texts and scores - these types actually do no more than illu- minate the comportment of an artwork, even those that do not want to be per- formed: This comportment is that each artwork is the recapitulation of itself. Art- works are self-likeness freed from the compulsion of identity. The Aristotelian dictum that only like can know like, which progressive rationality has reduced to a marginal value, divides the knowledge that is art from conceptual knowledge: What is essentially mimetic awaits mimetic comportment. If artworks do not make themselves like something else but only like themselves, then only those who imitate them understand them. Dramatic or musical texts should be regarded exclusively in this fashion and not as the quintessence of instructions for the per- formers: They are the congealed imitation of works, virtually of themselves, and
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to this extent constitutive although always permeated with significative elements. Whether or not they are performed is for them a matter of indifference; what is not, however, a matter of indifference is that their experience -which in terms of its ideal is inward and mute-imitates them. Such imitation reads the nexus of their meaning out of the signa of the artworks and follows this nexus just as imita- tion follows the curves in which the artwork appears. As laws of their imitation the divergent media find their unity, that of art. If in Kant discursive knowledge is to renounce the interior of things, then artworks are objects whose truth cannot be thought except as that of their interior. Imitation is the path that leads to this interior.
Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales : "If you want the absolute , you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it. " The truth of discursive knowl- edge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowl- edge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with art. Through the freedom of the subject in them, artworks are less subjective than is discursive knowledge. With unerring compass, Kant subordinated art to a concept of tele- ology whose positive application he did not concede to empirical understanding . However, the block that according to Kant's doctrine obstructs the in-itself to people, shapes that in-itself in artworks - the doctrine's proper domain, in which there is no longer to be any difference between what is in-itself and what is for- itself-as enigmatic figures: Precisely because they are blocked, artworks are im- ages of being-in-itself. Ultimately , what lives on in art's enigmaticalness, through which art most abruptly opposes the unquestionable existence of objects of action , i s the latter ' s own enigma. Art becomes an enigma because it appears to have solved what is enigmatical in existence, while the enigma in the merely existing is forgotten as a result of its own overwhelming ossification. The more densely people have spun a categorial web around what is other than subjective spirit, the more fundamentally have they disaccustomed themselves to the wonder of that other and deceived themselves with a growing familiarity with what is foreign. Art hopes to correct this, though feebly and with a quickly exhausted gesture. A priori , art causes people to wonder , just as Plato once demanded that philosophy do, which, however , decided for the opposite .
The enigma of artworks is their fracturedness. If transcendence were present in them, they would be mysteries, not enigmas; they are enigmas because, through their fracturedness, they deny what they would actually like to be. Only in the recent past-in Kafka's damaged parables-has the fracturedness of art become thematic. Retrospectively. all artworks are similar to those pitiful allegories in graveyards, the broken-off stelae. Whatever perfection they may lay claim to, art- works are lopped off; that what they mean is not their essence is evident in the fact that their meaning appears as if it were blocked. The analogy here to astrological superstition, which similarly depends on a purported relationship as much as it leaves this relationship obscure, is too insistently obvious to be dismissed lightly:
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Art's blemish is that it is bound up with superstition. Art all too happily, and irra- tionally, revalues this blemish as a merit. The much touted complexity of art is the falsely positive name for its enigmaticalness. This enigmaticalness, however, has an antiaesthetic aspect, which Kafka irrevocably unveiled. By their failure with regard to their own element of rationality , artworks threaten to relapse into myth, from which they have been precariously wrested. Art is mediated in spirit-the element of rationality - in that it produces its enigmas mimetically, just as spirit devises enigmas, but without being capable of providing the solution; it is in art's enigmaticalness, not in its meanings, that spirit is manifest. In fact, the praxis of important artists has an affinity with the making of puzzles, as is evident in the delight taken by composers over many centuries in enigmatic canons. Art's enig- matic image is the configuration of mimesis and rationality. This enigmatical- ness emerged out of a historical process. Art is what remains after the loss of what was supposed to exercise a magical, and later a cultic, function. Art's why-and- wherefore - its archaic rationality, to put it paradoxically - was forfeited and transformed into an element of its being-in-itself. Art thus became an enigma; if it no longer exists for the purpose that it infused with meaning, then what is it? Its enigmaticalness goads it to articulate itself immanently in such a fashion that it achieves meaning by forming its emphatic absence of meaning . To this extent , the enigmaticalness of artworks is not all there is to them; rather, every authentic work also suggests the solution to its unsolvable enigma.
Ultimately , artworks are enigmatic in terms not of their composition but of their truth content. The indefatigably recurring question that every work incites in who- ever traverses it-the "What is it all about? "-becomes "Is it true? "-the ques- tion of the absolute , to which every artwork responds by wresting itself free from the discursive form of answer. A taboo on any possible answer is all that discur- sive thought can offer. Art itself, which is the mimetic struggle against this taboo, seeks to impart the answer and yet, being nonjudging, does not impart it; thus art becomes as enigmatic as the terror born of the primordial world, which, though it metamorphoses, does not disappear; all art remains the seismogram of that terror. The key to art's enigma is missing, just as it has been lost for the writings of many peoples who have perished. The most extreme form in which the question posed by the enigmaticalness of art can be formulated is whether or not there is meaning.
For no artwork is without its own coherence, however much this coherence may be transformed into its own opposite. Through the objectivity of the work, this coherence posits the claim to the objectivity of meaning in-itself. This claim is not only nonnegotiable, it is contravened by experience. Enigmaticalness peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer that it requires-like that of the sphinx - were always the same, although only by way of the diversity , not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception-that is the enigma.
The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by
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each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth con- tent. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justifica- tion of aesthetics . Although no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determina- tions, as is the case with what art judges, each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless turns toward interpretive reason. No message is to be squeezed out of Hamlet; this in no way impinges on its truth con- tent. That great artists, the Goethe who wrote fairy tales no less than Beckett, want nothing to do with interpretations only underscores the difference ofthe truth con- tent from the consciousness and the intention of the author and does so by the strength of the author' s own self-consciousness. Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation. The claim that there is nothing to inter- pret in them, that they simply exist, would erase the demarcation line between art and nonart. Ultimately, perhaps, even carpets, ornaments, all nonfigural things longingly await interpretation. Grasping truth content postulates critique . Nothing is grasped whose truth or untruth is not grasped, and this is the concern of critique. The historical development of works through critique and the philosophical de- velopment of their truth content have a reciprocal relation. The theory of art must not situate itself beyond art but must rather entrust itself to its laws of movement while recognizing that artworks hermetically seal themselves off against the con- sciousness of these laws of movement. Artworks are enigmatic in that they are the physiognomy of an objective spirit that is never transparent to itself in the mo- ment in which it appears. The absurd, the category most refractory to interpreta- tion, inheres in that spirit that is requisite to the interpretation of artworks. At the same time, the need of artworks for interpretation, their need for the production of their truth content, is the stigma of their constitutive insufficiency. Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy be- tween the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma. They have truth content and they do not have it. Positive science and the philosophy de- rived from it do not attain it. It is neither the work's factual content nor its fragile and self-suspendable logicality. Nor-despite traditional philosophy-is art's truth content its idea, even if that idea is so broad as to include the tragic or the conflict between the finite and the infinite. Indeed, in its philosophical construc- tion such an idea rises above subjective intention. Yet, however applied, it re- mains external to the artwork and abstract. Even idealism's emphatic concept of the idea relegates artworks to examples of the idea as instances of what is ever- the-same. Thispasses sentenceontheruleoftheideainart,justasthisideacanno longer hold its ground to philosophical critique. The content [Gehalt] of art does not reduce without remainder into the idea, rather, this content is the extrapolation of what is irreducible; among academic aestheticians only Friedrich Theodor Vischer had an inkling of this . Just how little the truth content converges with the subjective idea, with the intention of the artist, is evident to the most rudimentary consideration. There are artworks in which the artist brought out clearly and sim-
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ply what he wanted, and the result, nothing more than an indication of what the artist wanted to say, is thereby reduced to an enciphered allegory. The work dies as soon as philologists have pumped out of it what the artist pumped in, a tauto- logical game whose schema is true also of many musical analyses . The difference between truth and intention in artworks becomes evident to critical consciousness when the object of the artist's intention is itself false, those usually eternal truths in which myth simply reiterates itself. Mythical inevitability usurps truth. Innu- merable artworks suffer from the fact that they lay claim to being a process of constant self-transformation and development and yet subsist as an atemporal se- quence of what is ever-the-same. It is at such points of fracture that technological critique becomes the critique of the untrue and thus allies itself with the truth con- tent. There are good reasons to hold that in artworks technical failure is indicated by the metaphysically false. Artworks have no truth without determinate nega- tion; developing this is the task of aesthetics today. The truth content of artworks cannot be immediately identified. Just as it is known only mediately, it is medi- ated in itself. What transcends the factual in the artwork, its spiritual content, can- not be pinned down to what is individually, sensually given but is, rather, consti- tuted by way of this empirical givenness. This defines the mediatedness of the truth content. The spiritual content does not hover above the work's facture; rather, artworks transcend their factuality through their facture, through the con- sistency of their elaboration. The breath that surrounds them, that which is most akin to their truth content and is at once factual and not factual, is fundamentally distinct from mood in whatever way artworks once expressed mood; on the con- trary, in the interest of the work's breath, mood is consumed by the forming process. In artworks, objectivity and truth are inseparable. Through the breath of objectivity and truth within themselves-composers are familiar with the idea of a composition's "breath"-artworks approach nature, but not by imitation, whose sphere encompasses mood. The more deeply works are formed, the more obsti- nate they become against any contrived semblance, and this obstinacy is the nega- tive appearance of their truth. Truth is antithetical to the phantasmagorical ele- ment of artworks; thoroughly formed artworks that are criticized as formalistic are the most realistic works insofar as they are realized in themselves and solely by means of this realization achieve their truth content, what is spiritual in them, rather than merely signifying this content. However, it is no guarantee of their truth that artworks transcend themselves through their realization. Many works of the highest quality are true as the expression of a consciousness that is false in itself. This is recognized only by transcendent criticism, such as Nietzsche's critique of Wagner. The failing of that kind of critique , however, i s not only that it judges the matter from on high rather than measuring itself by it. This criticism is also impeded by a narrow-minded notion of truth content, usually a culturall philosophical notion that neglects the immanently historical element of aesthetic truth. The separation of what is true in itself from the merely adequate expression
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of false consciousness is not to be maintained, for correct consciousness has not existed to this day, and no consciousness has the lofty vantage point from which this separation would be self-evident. The complete presentation of false con- sciousness is what names it and is itself truth content. It is for this reason that works unfold not only through interpretation and critique but also through their rescue , which aims at the truth of false consciousness in the aesthetic appearance. Great artworks are unable to lie. Even when their content is semblance, insofar as this content is necessary semblance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify; only failed works are untrue. By reenacting the spell of reality, by subli- mating it as an image , art at the same time liberates itself from it; sublimation and freedom mutually accord. The spell with which art through its unity encompasses the membra disjecta of reality is borrowed from reality and transforms art into the negative appearance of utopia. That by virtue of their organization artworks are more-not only as what is organized but also as the principle oforganization-for as what is organized they obtain the semblance ofbeing nonartifactual-determines them as spiritual. This determination, when recognized, becomes content. It is expressed by the artwork not only through its organization but equally through its disruption, which organization implies. This throws light on the contemporary predilection for the shabby and filthy as well as on the allergy to splendor and suaveness. Underlying this is the consciousness of the sordid aspects of culture hidden beneath its husk of self-contentment. Art that forswears the happy bril- liance that reality withholds from men and women and thus refuses every sensual trace of meaning, is spiritualized art; it is, in its unrelenting renunciation of child- ish happiness, the allegory of the illusionless actuality of happiness while bearing the fatal proviso of the chimerical : that this happiness does not exist.
Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept. With good reason , idealism historically - in Schelling- derived its own concept of truth from art. The closed yet internally dynamic totality of idealist systems was read out of artworks. However, because philosophy bears upon reality and in its works is not autarchically organized to the same degree as are artworks, the cloaked aes- thetic ideal of systems necessarily shattered. These systems are paid back in their own coin with the ignominious praise that they are philosophical artworks. The manifest untruth of idealism, however, has retrospectively compromised artworks. That in spite of their autarchy and by means of it they seek their other, what is external to their spell, drives the artwork beyond the identity with itself by which it is fundamentally determined. The disruption of its autonomy was not a fateful decline. Rather, it became art's obligation in the aftermath of the verdict over that in which philosophy was all too much like art. The truth content ofartworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical inter- pretation and coincides-with regard to the idea, in any case-with the idea of
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philosophical truth. For contemporary consciousness, fixated on the tangible and unmediated, the establishment of this relation to art obviously poses the greatest difficulties, yet without this relation art's truth content remains inaccessible: Aes- thetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy . - The condition for the possibility that philosophy and art converge is to be sought in the element of universality that art possesses through its specification as language sui generis. This universality is collective just as philosophical universality, for which the transcendental subject was once the signum, points back to the collective sub- ject. However, in aesthetic images precisely that is collective that withdraws from the I: Society inheres in the truth content. The appearing, whereby the artwork far surpasses the mere subject, is the eruption of the subject's collective essence. The trace of memory in mimesis, which every artwork seeks, is simultaneously always the anticipation of a condition beyond the diremption of the individual and the collective. This collective remembrance in artworks is, however, not Xropi? from the subject but rather takes place by way of the subject; in the subject's idiosyn- cratic impulse the collective form of reaction becomes manifest. For this reason , too , the philosophical interpretation of the truth content must unswervingly con- strue that truth content in the particular. By virtue of this content's subjectively mimetic expressive element, artworks gain their objectivity; they are neither pure impulse nor its form, but rather the congealed process that transpires between them, and this process is social.
Today the metaphysics of art revolves around the question of how something spiri- tual that is made, in philosophical terms something "merely posited," can be true. The issue is not the immediately existing artwork but its content [Gehalt]. The question of the truth of something made is indeed none other than the question of semblance and the rescue of semblance as the semblance of the true . Truth content cannot be something made. Every act of making in art is a singular effort to say what the artifact itself is not and what it does not know: precisely this is art's spiri t . This i s the locus o f the idea o f art a s the idea o f the restoration o f nature that has been repressed and drawn into the dynamic of history. Nature, to whose imago art is devoted, does not yet in any way exist; what is true in art is something nonexistent. What does not exist becomes incumbent on art in that other for which identity-positing reason, which reduced it to material, uses the word nature. This other is not concept and unity, but rather a multiplicity. Thus truth content pre- sents itself in art as a multiplicity , not as the concept that abstractly subordinates artworks. The bond of the truth content of art to its works and the multiplicity of what surpasses identification accord. Of all the paradoxes of art, no doubt the innermost one is that only through making, through the production of particular works specifically and completely formed in themselves, and never through any immediate vision, does art achieve what is not made, the truth. Artworks stand in the most extreme tension to their truth content. Although this truth content, con- ceptless, appears nowhere else than in what is made, it negates the made. Each art-
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work, as a structure, perishes in its truth content; through it the artwork sinks into irrelevance, something that is granted exclusively to the greatest artworks. The historical perspective that envisions the end of art is every work's idea. There is no artwork that does not promise that its truth content, to the extent that it appears in the artwork as something existing, realizes itself and leaves the artwork behind simply as a husk, as Mignon's prodigious verse prophesies. The seal of authentic artworks is that what they appear to be appears as if it could not be prevaricated, even though discursive judgment is unable to define it. If however it is indeed the truth , then along with the semblance truth abolishes the artwork . The definition of art is not fully encompassed by aesthetic semblance: Art has truth as the sem- blance of the illusionless. The experience of artworks has as its vanishing point the recognition that its truth content is not null; every artwork, and most of all works of absolute negativity, mutely say: non confundar. Artworks would be powerless if they were no more than longing, though there is no valid artwork without longing. That by which they transcend longing, however, is the neediness inscribed as a figure in the historically existing. By retracing this figure, they are not only more than what simply exists but participate in objective truth to the extent that what is in need summons its fulfillment and change. Not for-itself, with regard to consciousness, but in-itself, what is wants the other; the artwork is the language of this wanting, and the artwork's content [Gehalt] is as substantial as this wanting. The elements of this other are present in reality and they require only the most minute displacement into a new constellation to find their right position. Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality. Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense, re- ality should imitate the artworks. However, the fact that artworks exist signals the possibility of the nonexisting . The reality of artworks testifies to the possibility of the possible. The object of art's longing, the reality of what is not, is metamor- phosed in art as remembrance. In remembrance what is qua what was combines with the nonexisting because what was no longer is. Ever since Plato's doctrine of anamnesis the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance, which alone concretizes utopia without betraying it to existence. Remembrance remains bound up with semblance: for even in the past the dream was not reality. Yet art's imago is precisely what, according to Bergson's and Proust's thesis, seeks to awaken in- voluntary remembrance in the empirical, a thesis that proves them to be genuine idealists. They attribute to reality what they want to save and what inheres in art only at the price of its reality. They seek to escape the curse of aesthetic sem- blance by displacing its quality to reality. -The non confundar of artworks marks the boundary of their negativity , comparable to the boundary marked out in the novels of the Marquis de Sade where he has no other recourse than to call the most beautiful gitons du tableau "beaux comme des anges. " At this summit of art, where its truth transcends semblance, it is most mortally exposed. Unlike any- thing human, art lays claim to being unable to lie, and thus it is compelled to lie.
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Art does not have i t i n its power t o decide over the possibility that everything may indeed not come to anything more than nothing; it has its fictiveness in the asser- tion implicit in its existence that it has gone beyond the limit. The truth content of artworks, as the negation of their existence, is mediated by them though they do not in any way communicate it. That by which truth content is more than what is posited by artworks is their methexis in history and the determinate critique that they exercise through their form. History in artworks is not something made, and history alone frees the work from being merely something posited or manufac- tured: Truth content is not external to history but rather its crystallization in the works. Their unposited truth content is their name.
In artworks the name is, however, strictly negative. Artworks say what is more than the existing , and they do this exclusively by making a constellation of how it is, "Comment c'est. "4 The metaphysics of art requires its complete separation from the religion in which art originated . Artworks are not the absolute , nor is the absolute immediately present in them. For their methexis in the absolute they are punished with a blindness that in the same instant obscures their language, which is a language of truth: Artworks have the absolute and they do not have it. In their movement toward truth artworks are in need of that concept that for the sake of their truth they keep at a distance. It is not up to art to decide whether its negativ- ity is its limit or truth. Artworks are a priori negative by the law of their objectiva- tion: They kill what they objectify by tearing it away from the immediacy of its life. Their own life preys on death. This defines the qualitative threshold to mod- em art. Modem works relinquish themselves mimetically to reification , their prin- ciple of death. The effort to escape this element is art's illusory element which, since Baudelaire , art has wanted to discard without resigning itself to the status of a thing among things. Those heralds of modernism Baudelaire and Poe were as artists the first technocrats of art. Without the admixture of poison, virtually the negation of life, the opposition of art to civilizatory repression would amount to nothing more than impotent comfort. If since early modernism art has absorbed art-alien objects that have been received without being fully transformed by its law of form, this has led mimesis in art to captitulate-as in montage-to its an- tagonist. Art was compelled to this by social reality. Whereas art opposes society, it is nevertheless unable to take up a position beyond it; it achieves opposition only through identification with that against which it remonstrates. This was al- ready the content [Gehalt] of B audelaire ' s satanism, much more than the punctual critique of bourgeois morality which, outdone by reality, became childishly silly. If art tried directly to register an objection to the gapless web, it would become completely entangled; thus, as occurs in such exemplary fashion in Beckett's Endgame, art must either eliminate from itself the nature with which it is con- cerned, or attack it. The only parti pris left to it, that of death, is at once critical and metaphysical. Artworks derive from the world of things in their performed material as in their techniques; there is nothing in them that did not also belong to
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this world and nothing that could be wrenched away from this world at less than the price of its death . Only by the strength of its deadliness do artworks participate in reconciliation. But in this they at the same time remain obedient to myth. 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.