No More Learning

Since Hegel conceives of spirit as what exists in and for itself, it is recognized in art as its substance and not as a thin, abstract layer hovering above it. This is implicit in the definition of beauty as the sensual semblance of the idea. Philosophical ideal- ism, however, was in no way as kindly disposed toward aesthetic spiritualization as the theoretical construction would perhaps indicate. On the contrary, idealism set itself up as the defender of precisely that sensuality that in its opinion was being impoverished by spiritualization; that doctrine of the beautiful as the sen- sual semblance of the idea was an apology for immediacy as something meaning- ful and, in Hegel's own words, affirmative. Radical spiritualization is antithetical to this. This progress had a high price, however, for the spiritual element of art is not what idealist aesthetics calls spirit; rather, it is the mimetic impulse fixated as totality . The sacrifice made by art for this emancipation, whose postulate has been consciously formulated ever since Kant's dubious theorem that "nothing sensu- ous is sublime," 12 is presumably already evident in modernity . With the elimina- tion of the principle of representation in painting and sculpture, and of the ex- ploitation of fragments in music, it became almost unavoidable that the elements set free-colors, sounds, absolute configurations of words-came to appear as if they already inherently expressed something. This is, however, illusory, for the el- ements become eloquent only through the context in which they occur. The super- stitious belief in the elementary and unmediated, to which expressionism paid homage and which worked its way down into arts and crafts as well as into philos- ophy , corresponds to capriciousness and accidentalness in the relation of material and expression in construction. To begin with, the claim that in itself red pos-
ARTBEAUTY 0 91
sesses an expressive value was an illusion, and the putative expressive values of complex, multitonal sounds were in fact predicated on the insistent negation of traditional sounds . Reduced to "natural material" all of this is empty, and theories that mystify it have no more substance than the charlatanism of Farbton experi- ments. It is only the most recent physicalism that, in music for instance, carries out a reduction literally to elements: This is spiritualization that progressively exorcises spirit. Here the self-destructive aspect of spiritualization becomes obvi- ous. While the metaphysics of spiritualization has become philosophically ques- tionable, the concept is at the same time too universal to do justice to spirit in art. Nevertheless, the artwork continues to assert itself as essentially spiritual even when spirit is for all intents and purposes no longer to be presupposed as a sub- stance. Hegel's aesthetics does not resolve the question of how it is possible to speak of spirit as a determination of the artwork without hypostatizing its objec- tivity as absolute identity. Thereby the controversy is in a sense referred back to the Kantian court ofjustice. In Hegel, the spirit of art was deducible from the sys- tem as one level of its manifestation and was, as it were, univocal in potentially each and every genre and artwork , but only by relinquishing the aesthetic attribute of ambiguity. Aesthetics is, however, not applied philosophy but rather in itself philosophical . Hegel ' s reflection that "the science of art has greater priority than does art itself"13 is the admittedly problematical product of his hierarchical view of the relation of the domains of spirit to each other. On the other hand, in the face of growing theoretical interest in art, Hegel's theorem of the primacy of science has its prophetic truth in art's need of philosophy for the unfolding of its own con- tent. Paradoxically, Hegel's metaphysics of spirit results in a certain reification of spirit in the artwork through the fixation of its idea. In Kant, however, the ambigu- ity between the feeling of necessity and the fact that this necessity is not a given but something unresolved is truer to aesthetic experience than is Hegel's much more modem ambition of knowing art from within rather than in terms of its sub- jective constitution from without. If this Hegelian philosophical tum is justified, it in no way follows from a systematic subordinating concept but rather from the sphere that is specific to art. Not everything that exists is spirit, yet art is an entity that through its configurations becomes something spiritual. If idealism was able to requisition art for its purposes by fiat, this was because through its own consti- tution art corresponds to the fundamental conception of idealism, which indeed without Schelling's model of art would never have developed into its objective form. Art cannot be conceived without this immanently idealistic element, that is, without the objective mediation of all art through spirit; this sets a limit to dull- minded doctrines of aesthetic realism just as those elements encompassed in the name of realism are a constant reminder that art is no twin of idealism.
In no artwork is the element of spirit something that exists; rather, it is something in a process of deVelopment and formation. Thus, as Hegel was the first to per- ceive , the spirit of artworks is integrated into an overarching process of spirituali-
92 0 ART BEAUTY
zation: that of the progress of consciousness. Precisely through its progressive spiritualization, through its division from nature , art wants to revoke this division from which it suffers and which inspires it. Spiritualization provided art anew with what had been excluded from it by artistic practice since Greek antiquity: the sensuously unpleasing , the repulsive; Baudelaire virtually made this development art's program . Hegel aimed at justifying the irresistibility of spiritualization in the theory of what he called the romantic artwork. 14 Since then, everything sensually pleasing in art, every charm of material, has been degraded to the level of the preartistic . Spiritualization, as the continuous expansion of the mimetic taboo on art, the indigenous domain of mimesis, works toward art's dissolution. But being also a mimetic force, spiritualization at the same time works toward the identity of the artwork with itself, thereby excluding the heterogeneous and strengthening its image character. Art is not infiltrated by spirit; rather, spirit follows artworks where they want to go, setting free their immanent language. Still, spiritualization cannot free itself of a shadow that demands its critique; the more substantial spiri- tualization became in art, the more energetically-in Benjamin's theory no less than in Beckett ' s literary praxis - did it renounce spirit , the idea. However, in that spiritualization is inextricable from the requirement that everything must become form, spiritualization becomes complicitous in the tendency that liquidates the tension between art and its other. Only radically spiritualized art is still possible , all other art is childish; inexorably, however, the childish seems to contaminate the whole existence of art. -The sensuously pleasing has come under a double at- tack. On the one hand, through the artwork's spiritualization the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly become the appearance of the inward . On the other hand, the absorption of resistant material and themes opposes the culinary consumption of art even if, given the general ideological tendency to integrate everything that resists integration, consumption undertakes to swallow everything up whole, however repulsive it might seem. In early impressionism, with Manet, the polemical edge of spiritualization was no less sharp than it was in Baudelaire . The further artworks distance themselves from the childish desire to please, the more what they are in themselves prevails over what they present to even the most ideal viewer, whose reflexes increasingly become a matter of indifference. In the sphere of natural beauty, Kant's theory of the sublime anticipates the spiritualiza- tion that art alone is able to achieve. For Kant, what is sublime in nature is nothing but the autonomy of the spirit in the face of the superior power of sensuous exis- tence, and this autonomy is achieved only in the spiritualized artwork. Admit- tedly, the spiritualization of art is not a pristine process. Whenever spiritualization is not fully carried out in the concretion of the aesthetic structure , the emancipated spiritual element is degraded to the level of subaltern thematic material . Opposed to the sensuous aspect, spiritualization frequently turns blindly against that as- pect's differentiation, itself something spiritual, and becomes abstract. In its early period, spiritualization is accompanied by a tendency to primitivism and, contrary
ARTBEAUTY 0 93
to sensuous culture , tends toward the barbaric: In their own name the fauvists made this their program. Regression shadows all opposition to affirmative culture. Spiri- tualization in art must prove its ability to rise above this threat of regression and to recover the suppressed differentiation; otherwise, art deteriorates into a violent act of spirit. All the same, spiritualization is legitimate as the critique of culture through art, which is part of culture and finds no satisfaction in its failure. The function of barbaric traits in modern art changes historically. The good souls who cross themselves in front of reproductions of the Demoiselles d 'Avignon or while listening to Schoenberg's early piano pieces, are without exception more barbaric than the barbarism they fear. As soon as new dimensions emerge in art, they refuse older ones and initially prefer impoverishment and the renunciation of false richness, even of highly developed forms of reaction. The process of spiritualiza- tion in art is never linear progress. Its criterion of success is the ability of art to ap- propriate into its language of form what bourgeois society has ostracized, thereby revealing in what has been stigmatized that nature whose suppression is what is truly evil. The perennial indignation, unchanged by the culture industry, over the ugliness of modern art is, despite the pompous ideals sounded, hostile to spirit; it interprets the ugliness? , and especially the unpleasing reproaches, literally rather than as a test of the power of spiritualization and as a cipher of the opposition in which this spiritualization proves itself. Rimbaud's postulate of the radically modern is that of an art that moves in the tension between spleen et ideal, between spiritualization and obsession with what is most distant from spirit. The primacy of spirit in art and the inroads made by what was previously taboo are two sides of the same coin. It is concerned with what has not yet been socially approved and preformed and thereby becomes a social condition of determinate negation. Spiri- tualization takes place not through ideas announced by art but by the force with which it penetrates layers that are intentionless and hostile to the conceptual. This is not the least of the reasons why the proscribed and forbidden tempt artistic sen- sibilities. Spiritualization in new art prohibits it from tarnishing itself any further with the topical preferences of philistine culture: the true, the beautiful, and the good. Into its innermost core what is usually called art's social critique or engage- ment, all that is critical or negative in art, has been fused with spirit, with art's law of form. That these elements are at present stubbornly played off against each other is a symptom of the regression of consciousness.
Theories that argue that art has the responsibility of bringing order-and, indeed, not a classificatory abstract order but one that is sensuously concrete-to the chaotic multiplicity of the appearing or of nature itself, suppress in idealistic fash- ion the telos of aesthetic spiritualization: to give the historical figures of the natural and repression of the natural their due. Accordingly, the relation of the process of spiritualization to the chaotic is historical . It has often been said, probably first by Karl Kraus, that in society as a whole it is art that should introduce chaos into order rather than the reverse. The chaotic aspects of qualitatively new art are
94 0 ARTBEAUTY
opposed to order- the spirit of order- only at first glance. They are the ciphers of a critique of a spurious second nature: Order is in truth this chaotic. The element of chaos and radical spiritualization converge in the rejection of sleekly polished images of life; in this regard art that has been spiritualized to the extreme, such as that beginning with Mallarme's, and the dream-chaos of surrealism are more closely related than their disciples realize; incidentally, there are cross-links be- tween the young Breton and symbolism, as well as between the early German ex- pressionists and George, whom they challenged. In its relation to the unmastered, spiritualization is antinomical. Because spiritualization always constrains the sen- suous elements, its spirit fatefully becomes a being sui generis and thus according to its own immanent tendency spiritualization also works against art. Art's crisis is accelerated by spiritualization, which opposes selling artworks off as objects of sensuous gratification. Spiritualization becomes a counterforce to the gypsy wagon of wandering actors and musicians, the socially outcast. Yet however deep the compulsion may lie that art divest itself of every trace of being a show, of its ancient deceitfulness in society , art no longer exists when that element has been totally eradicated and yet it is unable to provide any protected arena for that ele- ment. No sublimation succeeds that does not guard in itself what it sublimates. Whether or not the spiritualization of art is capable of this will decide if art sur- vives or if Hegel's prophecy of the end of art will indeed be fulfilled, a prophecy that, in the world such as it has become, amounts to the thoughtless and-in the detestable sense-realistic confirmation and reproduction of what is. In this re- gard, the rescue of art is eminently political, but it is also as uncertain in itself as it is threatened by the course of the world.
Insight into the growing spiritualization of art , by virtue of the development of its concept no less than by its relation to society, collides with a dogma that runs throughout bourgeois aesthetics: that of art's intuitability. l5 Already in Hegel spir- itualization and intuitability could no longer be reconciled, and the first somber prophecies on the future of art were the result . Kant had already formulated the norm of intuitability in section 9 of the Critique ofJudgment: "[T]he beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept. "16 The "without a concept" may be said to converge with the quality of art's pleasingness as dispensation from the labor and exertion imposed-and not only since Hegel's philosophy-by the con- cept. Whereas art long ago relegated the ideal of pleasingness to musty antiquity , the theory of art has not been able to renounce the concept of intuitability , a monu- ment to old-fashioned aesthetic hedonism, even though every modem artwork- by now even the older works-demands the labor of observation with which the doctrine of intuitability wanted to dispense. The advancement of intellective me- diation into the structure of artworks, where this mediation must to a large extent perform what was once the role of pregiven forms, constrains the sensuously unmediated whose quintessence was the pure intuitability of artworks . Yet bour- geois consciousness entrenches itself in the sensuously unmediated because it
ART BEAUTY 0 95
senses that only its intuitability reflects a gaplessness and roundedness of art- works that then , in whatever circuitous fashion , is attributed to the reality to which the artworks respond. If, however, art were totally without the element of intu- ition, it would be theory, whereas art is instead obviously impotent in itself when, emulating science, it ignores its own qualitative difference from the discursive concept; precisely art's spiritualization, as the primacy of its procedures , distances art from naive conceptuality and the commonsense idea of comprehensibility. Whereas the norm of intuitability accentuates the opposition of art to discursive thinking, it suppresses nonconceptual mediation, suppresses the nonsensuous in the sensuous structure, which by constituting the structure already fractures it and puts it beyond the intuitability in which it appears. The norm of intuitability, which denies what is implicitly categorial in artworks, reifies intuitability itself as opaque and impenetrable, makes it in terms of its pure form into a copy of the pet- rified world, always alert for anything that might disturb the harmony the work purportedly reflects. In actuality, the concretion of artworks, in the apparition that ripples disconcertingly through them , goes far beyond the intuitability that is habitually held up against the universality of the concept and that stands in accord with the ever-same. The more inexorably the world is ruled throughout, ever-the- same, by the universal, the more easily the rudiments of the particular are mis- taken for immediacy and confused with concretion, even though their contin- gency is in fact the stamp of abstract necessity. Artistic concretion is, however, neither pure existence, conceptless individualization, nor that form of mediation by the universal known as a type. In terms of its own determination, no authentic artwork is typical. Lukacs's thinking is art-alien when he contrasts typical, "nor- mal" works with atypical and therefore irrelevant ones . If he were right, artworks would be no more than a sort of anticipation of a science yet to be completed. The patently idealist assertion that the artwork of the present represents the unity of the universal and the particular is completely dogmatic. The assertion, a surrepti- tious borrowing of the theological doctrine of the symbol, is given the lie by the a priori fissure between the mediate and the immediate, from which no mature art- work has yet been able to escape; if this fissure is concealed rather than that the work immerses itself in it, the work is lost. It is precisely radical art that, while refusing the desideratum of realism, stands in a relation of tension to the symbol. It remains to be demonstrated that symbols or metaphors in modem art make themselves progressively independent of their symbolic function and thereby con- tribute to the constitution of a realm that is antithetical to the empirical world and its meanings. Art absorbs symbols in such a fashion that they are no longer sym- bolic; advanced artists have themselves carried out the critique of the character of the symbol. The ciphers and characters of modem art are signs that have forgotten themselves and become absolute. Their infiltration into the aesthetic medium and their refusal of intentionality are two aspects of the same process. The transforma- tion of dissonance into compositional "material" is to be interpreted analogously.
96 0 ARTBEAUTY
In literature, this transformation can be followed relatively early in the relation- ship between Strindberg and late Ibsen, where Strindberg is already anticipated. The increasing literalization of what was previously symbolic shockingly endows the spiritual element, which was emancipated through second reflection, with an independence that is mortally eloquent in the occult layer of Strindberg's work and becomes productive in the break from any form of replicability . That none of his works are a symbol points up that in none of them does the absolute reveal itself; otherwise art would be neither semblance nor play but rather something factually real. Given their constitutive refractedness, pure intuitability cannot be attributed to artworks. Art is preemptively mediated by its as-if character. If it were completely intuitable , it would become part of the empirical world that it re- sists. Its mediatedness, however, is not an abstract apriori but involves every con- crete aesthetic element; even the most sensuous elements are always unintuitable by virtue of their relation to the spirit of the work. No analysis of important works could possibly prove their pure intuitability , for they are all pervaded by the con- ceptual. This is literally true in language and indirectly true even in the noncon- ceptual medium of music, where regardless of a work's psychological genesis the stupid and the intelligent can be explicitly distinguished. The desideratum of intu- itability wants to conserve the mimetic element of art while remaining blind to the fact that this element survives only through its antithesis, the works' rational con- trol over everything heterogeneous to them. Shorn of its antithesis, intuitability would become a fetish. In the aesthetic domain the mimetic impulse affects even the mediation, the concept, that which is not present. The concept is as indispens- ably intermixed in art as it is in language , though in art the concept becomes quali- tatively other than collections of characteristics shared by empirical objects. The intermixture of concepts is not identical with asserting the conceptuality of art; art is no more concept than it is pure intuition, and it is precisely thereby that art protests against their separation. The intuitive element in art differs from sensuous perception because in art the intuitive element always refers to its spirit. Art is the intuition of what is not intuitable; it is akin to the conceptual without the concept. It is by way of concepts, however, that art sets free its mimetic, nonconceptual layer. Whether by reflection or unconsciously, modem art has undermined the dogma of intuitability. What remains true in the doctrine of intuitability is that it emphasizes the element of the incommensurable, that which in art is not exhausted by discursive logic, the sine qua non of all manifestations of art. Art militates against the concept as much as it does against domination, but for this opposition it, like philosophy, requires concepts. Art's so-called intuitability is an aporetic construction: With a pass of the magic wand it means to reduce to iden- tity what is internally disparate and in process in artworks, and therefore this construction glances off artworks, none of which result in such identity. The wordAnschaulichkeit [intuitabilityl,itselfborrowedfromthetheoryofdiscursive knowledge , where it stipulates a formed content, testifies to the rational element in
ART BEAUTY D 9?
art as much as it conceals that element by dividing off the phenomenal element and hypostatizing it. Evidence of the aporia of the concept of aesthetic intuition is provided by the Critique ofJudgment. The "Analytic of the Beautiful" concerns the "Elements of the Judgment of Taste . " Of these Kant says in a footnote to sec- tion 1 : "I have used the logical functions of judging to help me find the elements that judgment takes into consideration when it reflects (since even a judgment of taste still has reference to the understanding). I have examined the element of quality first, because an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned with it first. "! ? This flagrantly contradicts the thesis that beauty pleases universally without a concept. It is admirable that Kant's aesthetics let this contradiction stand and expressly reflected on it without explaining it away. On the one hand, Kant treats the judgment of taste as a logical function and thus attributes this func- tion to the aesthetic object to which the judgment would indeed need to be ade- quate; on the other hand, the artwork is said to present itself "without a concept," a mere intuition, as if it were simply extralogical. This contradiction, however, is in fact inherent in art itself, as the contradiction between its spiritual and mimetic constitution. The claim to truth, which involves something universal and which each artwork registers , is incompatible with pure intuitability . Just how fateful the insistence on the exclusively intuitable character of art has been is obvious from its consequences. In Hegel's terms, it serves the abstract separation of intuition and spirit. The more the work is said to be purely identical with its intuitability, the more its spirit is reified as an "idea," as an immutable content back of its appearance. The spiritual elements that are withdrawn from the structure of the phenomenon are hypostatized as its idea. The result usually is that intentions are
exalted as the work's content, while correlatively intuition is allotted to sensuous satisfaction. The official assertion of artworks' common unity could, however, be refuted in each of those so-called classical works on which the assertion is founded: Precisely in these works the semblance of unity is what has been con- ceptually mediated. The dominant model is philistine: Appearance is to be purely intuitable and the content purely conceptual , corresponding to the rigid dichotomy between freedom and labor. No ambivalence is tolerated. This is the polemical point of attack for the break from the ideal of intuitability. Because aesthetic appearance cannot be reduced to its intuition, the content of artworks cannot be reduced to the concept either. The false synthesis of spirit and sensuousness in aesthetic intuition conceals their no less false, rigid polarity; the aesthetics of intu- ition is founded on the model of a thing: In the synthesis of the artifact the tension , its essence, gives way to a fundamental repose .
Intuitability! 8 is no characteristica universalis of art. It is intermittent. Aestheti- cians have hardly taken notice of this; one of the rare exceptions is Theodor Meyer, now virtually forgotten. He showed that there is no sensuous intuition, no set of images, that corresponds to what literature says; on the contrary, its concre- tion consists in its linguistic form rather than in the highly problematic optical
98 0 ART BEAUTY
representation that it supposedly provokes. 19 Literature does not require comple- tion through sensuous representation; it is concrete in language and through it, it is suffused with the nonsensuous, in accordance with the oxymoron of non- sensuous intuition. Even in concept-alien art there is a nonsensuous element at work . Theories that deny this element for the sake of their thema probandum join forces with that philistinism that is always ready to dub the music it/finds cozy a "feast for the ears. " Precisely in its great and emphatic forms, music embodies complexes that can only be understood through what is sensuously not present, through memory or expectation, complexes that hold such categorical determina- tions embedded in their own structure. It is impossible,for instance, to interpret as a mere continuation the at times distant relations between the development of the first movement of the Eroica and the exposition , and the extreme contrast to this exposition established by the new theme: The work is intellective in itself, with- out in any way being embarrassed about it and without the integration of the work thereby impinging on its law of form. The arts seem to have moved so far in the direction of their unity in art that the situation is no different in the visual arts . The spiritual mediation of the artwork , by which it contrasts with the empirical world, cannot be realized without the inclusion of the discursive dimension. If the art- work were in a rigorous sense intuitable, it would be permanently relegated to the contingency of what exists sensuously and immediately, to which the artwork in fact opposes its own type of logicity . Its quality is determined by whether its con- cretion divests itself of its contingency by virtue of its integral elaboration. The puristic and to this extent rationalistic separation of intuition from the conceptual serves the dichotomy of rationality and sensuousness that society perpetrates and ideologically enjoins. Art would need rather to work in effigy against this di- chotomy through the critique that it objectively embodies; through art's restric- tion to sensuousness this dichotomy is only confirmed. The untruth attacked by art is not rationality but rationality's rigid opposition to the particular; if art separates out intuitability and bestows it with the crown of the particular, then art endorses that rigidification, valorizing the detritus of societal rationality and thereby serv- ing to distract from this rationality. The more gaplessly a work seeks to be intu- itable and thus fulfill aesthetic precept, the more its spiritual element is reified, Xropi<; from the appearance and isolated from the forming of apparition . Behind the cult of intuitability lurks the philistine convention ofthe body that lies stretched out on the sofa while the soul soars to the heights: Aesthetic appearance is to be effortless relaxation, the reproduction of labor power, and spirit is reduced hand- ily to what is called the work's "message. " Constitutively a protest against the claim of the discursive to totality, artworks therefore await answer and solution and inevitably summon forth concepts. No work has ever achieved the indiffer- ence of pure intuitability and binding universality that is presupposed a priori by traditional aesthetics. The doctrine of intuition is false because it phenomenologi- cally attributes to art what it does not fulfill. The criterion of artworks is not the
ART BEAUTY 0 99
purity of intuition but rather the profundity with which they carry out the tension with the intellective elements that inhere in them. Nevertheless, the taboo on the nonintuitive elements of artworks is not without justification. What is conceptual in artworks involves judgment, and to judge is contrary to the artwork. Although judgments may occur in it, the work itself does not make judgments, perhaps be- cause ever since Attic tragedy the work has been a hearing . If the discursive ele- ment takes primacy, the relation of the artwork to what is external to it becomes all too unmediated and the work accomodates itself even at those points where , as in Brecht, it takes pride in standing in opposition to reality: The work actually becomes positivistic. The artwork must absorb into its immanent nexus its discur- sive components in a movement that is contrary to the externally directed, apo- phantic movement that releases the discursive. The language of advanced lyrical poetry achieves this, and that is how it reveals its specific dialectic. It is evident that artworks can heal the wounds that abstraction inflicts on them only through the heightening of abstraction, which impedes the contamination of the concep- tual ferment with empirical reality: The concept becomes a "parameter. " Indeed, because art is essentially spiritual, it cannot be purely intuitive. It must also be thought: art itself thinks. The prevalence of the doctrine of intuition , which con- tradicts all experience of artworks, is a reflex to social reification. It amounts to the establishment of a special sphere of immediacy that is blind to the thing-like dimensions of artworks, which are constitutive of what in art goes beyond the thing as such. Not only do artworks, as Heidegger pointed out in opposition to ide- alism,19 have things that function as their bearers-their own objectivation makes them into things of a second order. What they have become in themselves-their inner structure, which follows the work's immanent logic-cannot be reached by pure intuition; in the work what is available to intuition is mediated by the struc- ture of the work, in contrast to which the intuitable is a matter of indifference. Every experience of artworks must go beyond what is intuitable in them. If they were nothing but intuitable they would be of subaltern importance, in Wagner's words: an effect without a cause. Reification is essential to artworks and contra- dicts their essence as that which appears; their quality of being a thing is no less dialectical than their intuitable element. But the objectivation of the artwork is not - as was thought by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who no longer entirely under- stood Hegel-unitary with its material; rather, its objectivation is the result ofthe play of forces in the work and related to its thing-character as an act of synthesis. There is some analogy here to the double character of the Kantian thing as the transcendent thing-in-itself and as an object subjectively constituted through the law of its phenomena. For artworks are things in space and time; whether this holds for hybrid musical forms such as improvisation, once extinct and now resuscitated , is hard to decide; in artworks the element that precedes their fixation as things constantly breaks through the thing-character. Yet even in improvisation much speaks for their status as a thing: their appearance in empirical time and,
100 0 ARTBEAUTY
even more important, the fact that they demonstrate objectivated, mostly conven- tional patterns. For insofar as artworks are works they are things in themselves, objectified by virtue of their particular law of form. That in drama not the text but the performance is taken to be what matters, just as in music not the score but the living sound is so regarded, testifies to the precariousness of the thing-character in art, which does not, however, thereby release the artwork from its participation in the world of things. For scores are not only almost always better than the perfor- mances, they are more than simply instructions for them; they are indeed the thing itself. Incidentally, both concepts of the artwork as thing are not necessarily dis- tinct. The realization of music was, at least until recently , the interlinear version of the score.
The fixation through print or scores is not external to the work; only through them does the work become autonomous from its genesis: That explains the primacy of the text over its performance. What is not fixated in art is -for the most part only illusorily-closer to the mimetic impulse but usually below-not above-the fixated, a vestige of an obsolete and usually regressive practice. The most recent rebellion against the fixation of artworks as reification, for instance the replacement of the mensural system with neumic-graphic imitations of musi- cal gestures, is by comparison still significative and simply reification of an older level. Of course this rebellion would not be as extensive if the artwork did not suf- fer from its immanent condition as a thing. Only a philistine and stubborn faith in artists could overlook the complicity of the artwork's thing-character with social reification and thus with its untruth: the fetishization of what is in itself a process as a relation between elements. The artwork is at once process and instant. Its ob- jectivation, a condition of aesthetic autonomy, is also rigidification. The more the social labor sedimented in the artwork is objectified and fully formed, the more the work echoes hollowly and becomes alien to itself.
The emancipation from the concept of harmony has revealed itself to be a revolt against semblance: Construction inheres tautologically in expression, which is its polar opposite. The rebellion against semblance did not, however, take place in favor of play, as Benjamin supposed, though there is no mistaking the playful quality of the permutations, for instance, that have replaced fictional develop- ments. The crisis of semblance may engulf play as well, for the harmlessness of play deserves the same fate as does harmony, which originates in semblance. Art that seeks to redeem itself from semblance through play becomes sport. A mea- sure of the intensity of the crisis of semblance is that it has befallen music, which prima vista is inimical to the illUSOry. In music, fictive elements wither away even in their sublimated form, which includes not only the expression of nonexistent feelings but even structural elements such as the fiction of a totality that is recog- nized as unrealizable. In great music such as Beethoven's-and probably this h o l d s tr u e far be y o n d t h e r a n g e o f t h e t e m p o r a l a r t s - t h e s o - c a l l e d p r i m a l e l e m e n t s
SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION 0 101
turned u p b y analysis are usually eminently insubstantial . Only insofar as these el- ements asymptotically approximate nothingness do they meld - as a pure process ofbecoming-into a whole. As differentiated partial elements, however, time and again they want to be something previously existent: a motif or a theme . The im- manent nothingness of its elementary determinations draws integral art down into the amorphous, whose gravitational pull increases the more thoroughly art is or- ganized. It is exclusively the amorphous that makes the integration of the artwork possible. Through the completion ofthe work, by setting unformed nature at a dis- tance, the natural element returns as what has yet to be formed, as the nonarticu- lated. When artworks are viewed under the closest scrutiny , the most objectivated paintings metamorphose into a swarming mass and texts splinter into words. As soon as one imagines having a firm grasp on the details of an artwork , it dissolves into the indeterminate and undifferentiated, so mediated is it. This is the mani- festation of aesthetic semblance in the structure of artworks. Under micrological study, the particular-the artwork's vital element-is volatilized; its concretion vanishes. The process, which in each work takes objective shape, is opposed to its fixation as something to point to, and dissolves back from whence it came. Art- works themselves destroy the claim to objectivation that they raise. This is a measure of the profundity with which illusion suffuses artworks, even the non- representational ones. The truth of artworks depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity what is not identical with the concept, what is according to that concept accidental. The purposefulness of artworks re- quires the purposeless , with the result that their own consistency is predicated on the illusory; semblance is indeed their logic. To exist, their purposefulness must be suspended through its other. Nietzsche touched on this with the obviously problematic dictum that in an artwork everything can just as well be different from the way it is; presumably this holds true, only within the confines of an
established idiom, within a "style" that guarantees some breadth of variation. If the immanent closure of artworks is not to be taken strictly, however, semblance overtakes them precisely at the point they imagine themselves best protected from it. They give the lie to the claim to closure by disavowing the objectivity they pro- duce. They themselves, not just the illusion they evoke, are the aesthetic sem- blance. The illusory quality of artworks is condensed in their claim to wholeness. Aesthetic nominalism culminates in the crisis of semblance insofar as the artwork wants to be emphatically substantial. The irritation with semblance has its locus in the object itself. Today every element of aesthetic semblance includes aesthetic inconsistency in the form of contradictions between what the work appears to be and what it is. Through its appearance it lays claim to substantiality; it honors this claim negatively even though the positivity of its actual appearance asserts the gesture of something more, a pathos that even the radically pathos-alien work is unable to slough off. If the question as to the future of art were not fruitless and suspiciously technocratic, it would come down to whether art can outlive sem-
102 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
blance . A typical instance of this crisis was the trivial revolt forty years ago against costumes in the theater: Hamlet in a suit, Lohengrin without a swan. This was per- haps not so much a revolt against the infringement of artworks on the prevailing realistic mentality as against their immanent imagerie, which they were no longer able to support. The beginning of Proust's Recherche is to be interpreted as the effort to outwit art's illusoriness: to steal imperceptively into the monad of the artwork without forcibly' positing its immanence of fonn and without feigning an omnipresent and omniscient narrator. The contemporary problem faced by all artworks, how to begin and how to close, indicates the possibility of a compre- hensive and material theory of aesthetic fonn that would also need to treat the categories ofcontinuity, contrast, transition, development, and the "knot," as well as, finally, whether today everything must be equally near the midpoint or can have different densities. During the nineteenth century aesthetic semblance was heightened to the point of phantasmagoria. Artworks effaced the traces of their production, probably because the victorious positivistic spirit penetrated art to the degree that art aspired to be a fact and was ashamed of whatever revealed its com- pact immediateness as mediated. ' Artworks obeyed this tendency well into late modernism. Art's illusoriness progressively became absolute; this is concealed behind Hegel' s tenn "art-religion," which was taken literally by the oeuvre of the Schopenhauerian Wagner. Modernism subsequently rebelled against the sem- blance of a semblance that denies it is such. Here the many efforts converge that are undisguisedly detennined to pierce the artwork's hennetic immanent nexus, to release the production in the product, and, within limits, to put the process of production in the place of its results - an intention, incidentally, that was hardly foreign to the great representatives of the idealist epoch. The phantasmagorical side of artworks, which made them irresistible, became suspicious to them not only in the so-called neo-objective movements, that is, in functionalism, but also in traditional fonns such as the novel. In the novel the illusion of peeping into a box and a world beyond, which is controlled by the fictive omnipresence of the narrator, joins forces with the claim to the reality of a factitious world that is at the same time, as fiction, unreal. Those antipodes, George and Karl Kraus, rejected the novel, but even the novelists Proust and Gide, who commented on the fonn's pure immanence by breaking through it, are testimony to the same malaise and not merely the often adduced antiromantic mood of the time. The phantasmagorical dimension, which strengthens the illusion of the being-in-itself of works technologically , could be better understood as the rival of the romantic artwork, which from the beginning sabotaged the phantasmagorical dimension through irony. Phantasmagoria became an embarrassment because the gapless being-in-itself, after which the pure artwork strives, is incompatible with its deter- mination as something humanly made and therefore as a thing in which the world of things is embedded a priori . The dialectic of modem art is largely that it wants to shake off its illusoriness like an animal trying to shake off its antlers . The apor-
SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION 0 103
ias in the historical development of art cast their shadows over its possibility as a whole. Even antirealist movements such as expressionism took part in the rebel- lion against semblance. At the same time that it opposed the replication of the external world , however, it sought the undisguised manifestation of real psychical states and approximated the psychograph. In the aftermath ofthat rebellion, how- ever, artworks are at the point of regressing to the status of a mere thing as if in punishment for the hubris of being more than art . The recent and for the most part childishly ignorant emulation of science is the most tangible symptom of this re- gression . Many works of contemporary music and painting, in spite of the absence of representational objectivity and expression, would rightly be subsumed by the concept of a second naturalism. Crudely physicalistic procedures in the material and calculable relations between parameters helplessly repress aesthetic sem- blance and thereby reveal the truth of their positedness. The disappearance of this positedness into their autonomous nexus left behind aura as a reflex of human self-objectivation. The allergy to aura, from which no art today is able to escape, is inseparable from the eruption of inhumanity. This renewed reification, the re- gression of artworks to the barbaric literalness of what is aesthetically the case,2 and phantasmagorical guilt are inextricably intertwined. As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses faith in its possibility and begins to display outwardly what cannot become art-canvas and mere tones-it becomes its own enemy, the direct and false continuation of purposeful rationality. This tendency culminates in the happening. There is no separating what is legitimate in the rebellion against semblance as illusion from what is illusory-the hope that aesthetic semblance could rescue itself from the morass in which it is sunk by pulling itself up by the scruff of its own neck. Clearly the immanent semblance character of artworks cannot be freed from some degree of external imitation of reality, however latent, and therefore cannot be freed from illusion either. For everything that artworks contain with regard to form and materials, spirit and sub- ject matter, has emigrated from reality into the artworks and in them has divested itself of its reality: Thus the artwork also becomes its afterimage. Even the purest aesthetic determination, appearance, is mediated to reality as its determinate negation. The difference of artworks from the empirical world, their semblance character, is constituted out of the empirical world and in opposition to it. If for the sake of their own concept artworks wanted absolutely to destroy this refer- ence back to the empirical world, they would wipe out their own premise. Art is indeed infinitely difficult in that it must transcend its concept in order to fulfill it; yet in this process where it comes to resemble realia it assimilates itself to that reification against which it protests: Today engagement inescapably becomes aes- thetic concession. The ineffability of illusion prevents the solution of the antin- omy of aesthetic semblance by means of a concept of absolute appearance . Sem- blance, which heralds the ineffable, does not literally make artworks epiphanies, however difficult it may be for genuine aesthetic experience not to trust that the
104 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
absolute is present in authentic artworks. It inheres in the grandeur of art to awaken this trust. That whereby art becomes an unfolding of truth is at the same time its cardinal sin, from which it cannot absolve itself. Art drags this sin along with it because it acts as if absolution had been bestowed on it. -That in spite of everything it remains an embarrassment for art to bear even the slightest trace of semblance cannot be separated from the fact that even those works that renounce semblance are cut offfrom real political effect, which was the original inspiration for the rejection of semblance by dadaism. Mimetic comportment-by which hermetic artworks criticize the bourgeois maxim that everything must be useful - itself becomes complicitous through the semblance of being purely in-itself, a semblance from which there is no escape even for art thatdestroys this semblance. If no idealist misunderstanding were to be feared, one could formulate the law of each and every work-and not miss by much naming art's inner lawfulness-as the obligation to resemble its own objective ideal and on no account that of the artist's. The mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves. Whether univocally or ambiguously, this law is posited by the initial act of each artwork; by virtue of its constitution each work is bound by it. It divides aesthetic from cul- tic images. By the autonomy of their form, artworks forbid the incorporation of the absolute as if they were symbols. Aesthetic images stand under the prohibition on graven images. To this extent aesthetic semblance, even its ultimate form in the hermetic artwork, is truth. Hermetic works do not assert what transcends them as though they were Being occupying an ultimate realm; rather, through their powerlessness and superfluity in the empirical world they emphasize the element of powerlessness in their own content. The ivory tower-in disdain for which those who are led in democratic countries and the Fuhrer of totalitarian countries are united-has in its unwavering mimetic impulse, which is an impulse toward self-likeness, an eminently enlightening aspect; its spleen is a truer consciousness than the doctrines of didactic or politically engage art, whose regressive character is, almost without exception, blatantly obvious in the trivial wisdom those doc- trines supposedly communicate. Therefore, in spite of the summary verdicts passed on it everywhere by those who are politically interested , radical modem art is progressive, and this is true not merely of the techniques it has developed but of its truth content. What makes existing artworks more than existence is not simply another existing thing, but their language. Authentic artworks are eloquent even when they refuse any form of semblance, from the phantasmagorical illusion to the faintest auratic breath. The effort to purge them of whatever contingent sub- jectivity may want to say through them involuntarily confers an ever more defined shape on their own language. In artworks the term expression refers to precisely this language. There is good reason that where this term has been technically employed longest and most emphatically, as the directive espressivo in musical scores, it demands nothing specifically expressed, no particular emotional con- tent. Otherwise espressivo could be replaced by terms for whatever specific thing
SEMBLANCEANDEXPRESSION 0 105
is to be expressed. The composer Artur Schnabel attempted to do just this, but without success.
No artwork is an undiminished unity; each must simulate it, and thus collides with itself. Confronted with an antagonistic reality, the aesthetic unity that is estab- lished in opposition to it immanently becomes a semblance. The integration of artworks culminates in the semblance that their life is precisely that of their ele- ments. However, the elements import the heterogeneous into artworks and their semblance becomes apocryphal. In fact, every penetrating analysis of an artwork turns up fictions in its claim to aesthetic unity, whether on the grounds that its parts do not spontaneously cohere and that unity is simply imposed on them, or that the elements are prefabricated to fit this unity and are not truly elements. The plurality in artworks is not what it was empirically but rather what it becomes as
soon as it enters their domain; this condemns aesthetic reconciliation as aestheti- cally specious. The artwork is semblance not only as the antithesis to existence but also in its own terms. It is beleaguered with inconsistencies. By virtue oftheir nexus of meaning, the organon of their semblance , artworks set themselves up as things that exist in themselves . By integrating them , meaning itself-that which creates unity-is asserted as being present in the work, even though it is not ac- tual. Meaning, which effects semblance, predominates in the semblance charac- ter. Yet the semblance of meaning does not exhaustively define meaning. For the meaning of an artwork is at the same time the essence that conceals itself in the factual; meaning summons into appearance what appearance otherwise obstructs. This is the purpose of the organization of an artwork, of bringing its elements to- gether into an eloquent relation. Yet it is difficult through critical examination to distinguish this aim from the affirmative semblance of the actuality of meaning in a fashion that would be definitive enough to satisfy the philosophical construction of concepts . Even while art indicts the concealed essence, which it summons into appearance, as monstrous, this negation at the same time posits as its own mea- sure an essence that is not present, that of possibility; meaning inheres even in the disavowal of meaning. Because meaning, whenever it is manifest in an artwork, remains bound up with semblance, all art is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely its successful unification suggests meaning, and the sadness is heightened by the feeling of "Oh, were it only so. " Melancholy is the shadow of what in all form is heterogenous, which form strives to ban- ish: mere existence. In happy artworks, melancholy anticipates the negation of meaning in those that are undermined, the reverse image of longing. What radi- ates wordlessly from artworks is that it is, thrown into relief by it-the unlocat- able grammatical subject-is not; it cannot be referred demonstratively to any- thing in the world that previously exists. In the utopia of its form; art bends under the burdensome weight of the empirical world from which, as art, it steps away. Otherwise, art's consummateness is hollow. The semblance of artworks is bound up with the progress of their integration, which they had to demand of themselves
106 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
and through which theircontent seems immediately present. The theological heri- tage of art is the secularization of revelation, which defines the ideal and limit of every work . The contamination of art with revelation would amount to the unre- flective repetition of its fetish character on the level of theory . The eradication of every trace of revelation from art would, however, degrade it to the undifferenti- atedrepetition ofthe statusquo. A coherence ofmeaning-unity-is;contrivedby art because it does not exist and because as artificial meaning it negates the being- in-itself for the sake of which the organization of meaning was undertaken, ulti- mately negating art itself. Every artifact works against itself. Those that are a tour de force, a balancing act, demonstrate something about art as a whole: They achieve the impossible. The impossibility of every artwork in truth defines even the simplest as a tour de force. The defamation of the virtuoso element by Hegel (who was nevertheless charmed by Rossini), which lives on in the rancor against Picasso, secretly makes common cause with an affirmative ideology that dis- guises the antinomical character of art and all its products: Works that satisfy this affirmative ideology are almost exclusively oriented to the topos challenged by the tourde force, that great works must be simple. It is hardly the worst criterion for the fruitfulness of aesthetic-technical analysis that it reveals why a work is a tour de force. The idea of art as a tour de force only appears fully in areas of artistic exe- cution extrinsic to the culturally recognized concept of art; this may have founded the sympathy that once existed between avant-garde and music hall or variety shows, a convergence of extremes in opposition to a middling domain of art that satisfies audiences with inwardness and that by its culturedness betrays what art should do. Art is made painfully aware of aesthetic semblance by the fundamental insolubility of its technical problems; this is most blatant in questions of artistic presentation: in the performance of music or drama. Adequate performance re- quires the formulation of the work as a problem, the recognition of the irreconcil- able demands , arising from the relation of the content [Gehalt] of the work to its appearance , that confront the performer. In uncovering the tour de force of an art- work, the performance must find the point of indifference where the possibility of the impossible is hidden. Since the work is antinomic, a fully adequate per- formance is actually not possible, for every performance necessarily represses a contrary element. The highest criterion of performance is if, without repression, it makes itself the arena of those conflicts that have been emphatic in the tour de force . - Works of art that are deliberately conceived as a tour de force are sem- blance because they must purport in essence to be what they in essence cannot be; they correct themselves by emphasizing their own impossibility: This is the legiti- mation of the virtuoso element in art that is disdained by a narrow-minded aes- thetics of inwardness. The proof of the tour de force, the realization of the unreal- izable, could be adduced from the most authentic works. Bach, whom a crude inwardness would like to claim, was a virtuoso in the unification of the irreconcil- able. What he composed is the synthesis of harmonic thoroughbass and poly-
SEMBLANCEANDEXPRESSION 0 107
phonic thinking. This synthesis is seamlessly integrated into the logic of chordal progression divested, however, of its heterogeneous weight because it is the pure result of voice leading; this endows Bach's work with its singularly floating qual- ity. With no less stringency the paradox of the tour de force in Beethoven's work could be presented: that out of nothing something develops, the aesthetically incarnate test of the first steps of Hegel ' s logic .
The semblance character of artworks is immanently mediated by their own objec- tivity. Once a text, a painting, a musical composition is fixed, the work is factually existent and merely feigns the becoming - the content- that it encompasses; even the most extreme developmental tensions in aesthetic time are fictive insofar as they are cast in the work in advance; actually, aesthetic time is to a degree indif- ferent to empirical time, which it neutralizes. Concealed in the paradox of the tour de force, of making the impossible possible, is the paradox of the aesthetic as a whole: How can making bring into appearance what is not the result of making; how can what according to its own concept is not true nevertheless be true? This is conceivable only if content is distinct from semblance; yet no artwork has content other than through semblance , through the form of that semblance. Central to aes- thetics therefore is the redemption of semblance; and the emphatic right of art, the legitimation of its truth, depends on this redemption. Aesthetic semblance seeks to salvage what the active spirit- which produced the artifactual bearers of sem- blance - eliminated from what it reduced to its material, to what is for-an-other . In the process, however, what is to be salvaged itselfbecomes something dominated, if not actually produced, by it; redemption through semblance is itself illusory, and the artwork accepts this powerlessness in the form of its own illusoriness. Semblance is not the characteristicaformalis of artworks but rather materialis, the trace of the damage artworks want to revoke . Only to the extent that its content is unmetaphorically true does art, the artifactual, discard the semblance produced by its artifactuality. However, ifon the basis of its tendency toward replication, art acts as if it is what it appears to be, it becomes the fraud of trompe l'oeil, a sacri- fice precisely to that element in it that it wants to conceal; what was formerly called Sachlichkeit is based on this. Its ideal was an artwork that, by refusing in any way to appear as other than it is, would become formed in such a way that what it appears to be and what it wants to be would potentially coincide. If the art- work were completely formed-and not by illusion or because the work was rat- tling hopelessly at the bars of its semblance character-that character would per- haps not have the last word. However, even Sachlichkeit's objectification of the artwork did not succeed in casting off the cloak of semblance. To the extent that the artwork's form is not simply identical with its adequacy to practical purposes, it remains semblance vis-a-vis that reality from which it differs through its mere determination as an artwork even when it completely hides its facture. By cancel- ing those elements of semblance that adhere to them , artworks actually strengthen the semblance that emanates from their existence , an existence that , by being inte-
108 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
grated, takes on the density of something in-itself even though, as something posited, an artwork cannot be something in-itself. The work is no longer to be the result of any pregiven form; flourishes, ornament, and all residual elements of an overarching formal character are to be renounced: The artwork is to be organized from below. There is nothing, however, that guarantees in advance that the art- work, once its immanent movement has blasted away the overarching form, will in any way cohere , that its membra disjecta will somehow unify . This uncertainty has motivated artistic procedures to preforming all individual elements back- stage-and the theatrical expression is pertinent-so that they will be capable of making the transition into a whole that the details, taken in their absolute contin- gency after the liquidation of all predetermined form, would otherwise refuse. Semblance thus prevails over its sworn enemies. The illusion is created that there is no illusion; that the diffuse and ego-alien harmonize with the posited totality, whereas the harmony itself is organized; that the process is presented from below to above, even though the traditional determination from above to below, without which the spiritual determination of the artwork cannot be conceived, persists. Usually the semblance character of artworks has been associated with their sensu- ous element, especially in Hegel's formulation of the sensuous semblance of the idea. This view of semblance stands in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition, which distinguished between the semblance of the sensuous world on the one hand and essence or pure spirit as authentic being on the other. The semblance of artworks originates, however, in their spiritual essence. Spirit as something separated from its other, making itself independent in opposition to it and intangible in this being- for-itself, is necessarily illusory; all spirit, Xropi<; from the corporeal, has in itself the aspect of raising what does not exist, what is abstract, to existence; this is the truth element of nominalism. Art carries out the test of the illusoriness of spirit as that of an essence sui generis by taking at its word spirit ' s claim to be an entity and placing it as such before the eyes. It is this, much more than the imitation of the sensual world by aesthetic sensuousness, that art has learned to renounce and that compels art to semblance. Spirit, however, is not only semblance but also truth; it is not only the imposture of something existing in-itself, but equally the negation of all false being-in-itself. Spirit ' s element of nonexistence and its negativity enter artworks , which do not sensualize spirit directly or make it a fixed thing but rather become spirit exclusively through the relation of their sensuous elements to each other. Therefore the semblance character of art is at the same time its methexis in truth. The flight of many contemporary manifestations of art into aleatory may be interpreted as a desperate answer to the ubiquity of semblance: The contingent is to pass into the whole without thepseudos of a prestabilized harmony . The result, however, is that on the one hand the artwork is subjected to a blind lawfulness, which can no longer be distinguished from total determination from above to below and, on the other hand, the whole is surrendered to accident and the dialectic of the particular and the whole is reduced to semblance in that no whole is actually
SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION 0 109
achieved. The complete absence of illusion regresses to chaotic regularity, in which accident and necessity renew their fatal pact . Art gains no power over sem- blance by its abolition. The semblance character of artworks sets their form of knowledge in opposition to the concept ofknowledge in Kant's first critique. Art- works are semblance in that they externalize their interior, spirit , and they are only known insofar as, contrary to the prohibition laid down by the chapter on amphi- boles, their interior is known. In Kant's critique of aesthetic judgment, which is so subjectively conceived that an interior of the aesthetic object is not even men- tioned, this interior is nevertheless implicitly presupposed by the concept of tele- ology. Kant subordinates artworks to the idea of something purposeful in and of itself, rather than consigning their unity exclusively to subjective synthesis through the knower. Artistic experience, immanently purposeful, does not amount to the categorial forming of the chaotic by the subject. Hegel's method, which was to give himself over to the complexion of aesthetic objects and to dismiss their sub- jective effects as accidental, puts Kant's thesis to the test: Objective teleology becomes the canon of aesthetic experience. The primacy of the object in art and the knowledge of its works from within are two sides of the same coin. In terms of the traditional distinction between thing and phenomenon, artworks-by virtue of their countertendency toward their status as a thing and ultimately toward reifica- tion altogether-have their locus on the side of appearances. But in artworks, ap- pearance is that of essence , toward which it is not indifferent; in artworks , appear- ance itself belongs to the side of essence. They are truly characterized by that thesis in Hegel in which realism and nominalism are mediated: Art's essence must appear, and its appearance is that of essence and not an appearance for-another but rather art's immanent determination. Accordingly, no work of art, regardless what its maker thinks of it, is directed toward an observer, not even toward a transcen- dental subject of apperception; no artwork is to be described or explained in terms of the categories of communication. Artworks are semblance in that they help what they themselves cannot be to a type of second-order, modified existence; they are appearance because by virtue of aesthetic realization the nonexistent in them, for whose sake they exist, achieves an existence, however refracted. Yet the identity of essence and appearance can no more be achieved by art than it can be by knowledge of the real . The essence that makes the transition to appearance and defines it also explodes it; in being the appearance of what appears , what appears is always also a husk. This was denied by the aesthetic concept of harmony and all its related categories. They envisioned an equilibrium of essence and appearance, virtually by means of tact; in the candid idiom of yesteryear this was called the "artist' s skillfulness. " What is achieved is never aesthetic harmony but rather pol- ish and balance; internal to everything in art that can justly be called harmonious there survives something desperate and mutually contradictory . 3 According to their internal constitution, artworks are to dissolve everything that is heterogeneous to their form even though they are form only in relation to what they would like to
1 10 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
make vanish. They impede what seeks to appear in them according to their own apriori. They must conceal it, a concealment that their idea of truth opposes until they reject harmony . Without the memento of contradiction and nonidentity , har- mony would be aesthetically irrelevant, just as according to the insight of Hegel ' s early work on the difference between Schelling's and Fichte's systems identity can only be conceived as identity with what is nonidentical. The more deeply art- works immerse themselves in the idea of harmony, of the appearing essence, the less they can be satisfied with that idea. From the perspective of the philosophy of history , it is hardly an improper generalization of what is all too divergent if one derives the antiharmonic gestures of Michelangelo , of the late Rembrandt , and of Beethoven's last works not from the subjective suffering of their development as artists but from the dynamic of the concept of harmony itself and ultimately from its insufficiency . Dissonance is the truth about harmony . If the ideal of harmony is taken strictly, it proves to be unreachable according to its own concept.