No More Learning

If one does not simply want to abolish the concept of genius as a romantic residue, it must be understood in terms of its historicophilosophical objectivity. The divergence of subject and individual , adumbrated in Kant's antipsychologism and raised to the level of a principle in Fichte, takes its toll on art, too. Art's authenticity-what is binding in it-and the freedom of the emancipated individual become remote from each other. The con- cept of genius represents the attempt to unite the two with a wave of the wand; to bestow the individual within the limited sphere of art with the immediate power of overarching authenticity. The experiential content of such mystification is that in art authenticity, the universal element, is no longer possible except by way of the principium individuationis, just as, conversely, universal bourgeois freedom is exclusively that of particularization and individuation. This relation, however, is treated blindly by the aesthetics of genius and displaced undialectically into an individual who is supposedly at the same time subject; the intellectus archetypus, which in the theory of knowledge is expressly the idea, is treated by the concept of genius as a fact of art. Genius is purported to be the individual whose spontaneity coincides with the action of the absolute subject. This is correct insofar as the in- dividuation of artworks, mediated by spontaneity, is that in them by which they are objectivated . Yet the concept of genius is false because works are not creations and humans are not creators. This defines the untruth of any genius aesthetics that suppresses the element of finite making, the 'tEXVll in artworks, in favor of their absolute originality , virtually their natura naturans; it thus spawns the ideology of the organic and unconscious artwork, which flows into the murky current of irra- tionalism. From the start, the genius aesthetic shifted emphasis toward the indi- vidual-opposing a spurious universality-and away from society by absolutizing this individual. Yet whatever the misuse perpetrated by the concept of genius, it
SUBJECT-OBJECf 0 171
calls to mind that the subject i n the artwork should not b e reduced to its objectiva- tion. In the Critique ofJudgment the concept of genius became the refuge for everything of which hedonism had deprived Kant' s aesthetics. However, with in- calculable consequences, Kant restricted geniality exclusively to the subject, in- different to its ego-alienness, which was later ideologically exploited by contrast- ing genius with scientific and philosophical rationality. The fetishization of the concept of genius that begins with Kant as the fetishization of dirempted, abstract subjectivity-to put it in Hegelian terms-already in Schiller's votive offerings took on a quality of crass elitism. The concept of genius becomes the potential enemy of artworks; with a sidelong glance at Goethe , the person back of the work is purported to be more essential than the artworks themselves. In the concept of genius the idea of creation is transferred with idealistic hubris from the transcen- dental to the empirical subject, to the productive artist. This suits crude bourgeois consciousness as much because it implies a work ethic that glorifies pure human creativity regardless of its aim as because the viewer is relieved of taking any trouble with the object itself: The viewer is supposed to be satisfied with the personality-essentially a kitsch biography-of the artist. Those who produce important artworks are not demigods but fallible, often neurotic and damaged, individuals. An aesthetic mentality, however, that wholly swept away the idea of genius would degenerate into a desolate, pedantic arts-and-crafts mentality devoted to tracing out stencils. The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not in the repetition ofthe imprisoned. In- cidentally, the concept of genius as it came in vogue in the late eighteenth century was in no way charismatic; in that epoch, any individual could become a genius to the extent that he expressed himself unconventionally as nature . Genius was an at- titude to reality , "ingenious doings," indeed almost a conviction or frame of mind; only later, perhaps given the insufficiency of mere conviction in artworks, did genius become a divine blessing. The experience of real unfreedom destroyed the exuberance of subjective freedom as freedom for all and reserved it as the exclu-
sive domain of genius. It becomes ideology in inverse proportion to the world's becoming a less human one and the more consciousness of this- spirit-is neu- tralized. Privileged genius becomes the proxy to whom reality promises what it denies humanity as a whole. What deserves to be salvaged in genius is what is in- strumental to the work. The category of geniality can best be documented when a passage is described as being ingenious. Fantasy alone does not suffice for its defi- nition. The genial is a dialectical knot: It is what has not been copied or repeated, it is free, yet at the same time bears the feeling of necessity; it is art's paradoxical sleight of hand and one of its most dependable criteria. To be genial means to hit upon a constellation, subjectively to achieve the objective, it is the instant in which the methexis of the artwork in language allows convention to be discarded as accidental. The signature of the genial in art is that the new appears by virtue of its newness as if it had always been there; romanticism took note of this. The work
172 0 SUBJECf-OBJECf
of fantasy is less creatio ex nihilo, the belief of an art-alien religion of art , than the imagining of authentic solutions in the midst of the effectively preexisting nexus of works. Experienced artists may be overheard referring derisively to a passage: "Here he's a genius. " They chastise the intrusion of fantasy into the logic of the work, an intrusion not subsequently integrated; instances of this are found not only in the work of self-promoting whiz kids but even at Schubert's niveau. The genial remains paradoxical and precarious because the freely discovered and the necessary cannot actually ever be completely fused. Without the ever present pos- sibility of failure there is nothing genial in artworks.
Because of its element of something that had not existed before, the genial was bound up with the concept of originality: thus the concept Originaigenie. As is well known, prior to the age of genius the idea of originality bore no authority. That in their new works composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth cen- turies made use of whole sections of their own earlier works and those of others , or that painters and architects entrusted their designs to students for completion, is easily misused to justify the stereotypical and routine and to denounce subjective freedom. Yet what this practice demonstrates is that originality had yet to become the object of critical reflection, by no means that there was no originality in art- works; one glance at the difference between Bach and his contemporaries suffices to make the point. Originality, the specificity of a determinate artwork, is not anti- thetical to the logicality of artworks, which implies a universal. Often originality emerges from a thoroughly consistent logical construction, of which mediocre talents are incapable . All the same , the question of the originality of older, archaic works is meaningless because the coercion exercised by collective consciousness, in which domination entrenches itself, was so extensive that originality, which presupposes something on the order of emancipated subjectivity , would be anach- ronistic. The concept of originality, as in Benjamin's sense of the "originary,"5 does not so much summon up the primordial as the yet to be in works , their utopic trace. The original is the objective name of each work. If, however, originality arose historically, it is also enmeshed in historical injustice, in the predominance of bourgeois commodities that must touch up the ever-same as the ever-new in order to win customers. Yet with the growing autonomy of art, originality has turned against the market where it was never permitted to go beyond a certain limit. It withdrew into the artworks themselves, into the relentlessness of their in- tegral organization. Originality remains touched by the historical fate of the cate- gory of individualness from which it was derived. Originality no longer obeys what it has been associated with ever since it began to be self-consciously re- flected upon: a so-called individual style . Although the collapse of that style has meanwhile come to be decried by traditionalists, who are in fact defending con- ventional goods, in the most progressive works individual style , cunningly tricked out of the requirements of construction, takes on the quality of a blemish, a defi- ciency, or at the least a compromise. This is one of the most important reasons
SUBJECT-OBJECT 0 173
why advanced artistic production aims less at originality in a particular work than at the production of a new type . Originality is in the process of being transformed into the act of inventing types , a transformation in which originality is changed qualitatively without, however, disappearing in the process.
This transformation, which altogether severs originality from mere inspiration, the unique detail that once seemed to be the substance of originality , throws light o n fa n t a s y , i t s o r g a n o n . U n d e r t h e s p e l l o f t h e b e l i e f i n t h e s u bj e c t a s t h e c r e a t o r ' s successor, fantasy effectively meant the capacity to bring forth something deter- minately artistic out of nothing. Its crude concept, that of absolute invention, is the exact correlate of the modem scientific ideal of the strict reproduction of what already exists; here the bourgeois division of labor has furrowed a trench that divides art from any mediation with reality, just as it divides knowledge from everything that in any way transcends reality . This concept of fantasy was never essential to important artworks; the invention, for instance, of fantastic beings in contemporary plastic arts is of minor significance , just as the sudden intervention of a musical motif, though hardly to be discounted, remains powerless so long as it does not surpass its own factuality through what develops out of it. If everything in artworks, including what is most sublime, is bound up with what exists, which they oppose, fantasy cannot be the mere capacity to escape the existing by posit- ing the nonexisting as if it existed. On the contrary, fantasy shifts whatever art- works absorb of the existing into constellations through which they become the other of the existing , if only through its determinate negation. If the effort is made to envision a strictly nonexisting object through what epistemologists dubbed fan- tasizing fiction, nothing is achieved that cannot be reduced-in its parts and even in the elements that constitute its coherence-to what already exists. Only under the spell of the totally empirical does what is qualitatively opposed to it appear, though it does so exclusively as something on a second order of existence mod- eled on the first. Art transcends the nonexisting only by way of the existing; other- wise it becomes the helpless projection of what in any case already exists. Ac- cordingly , fantasy in artworks cannot be restricted to the sudden vision. Although there is no conceiving of fantasy devoid of spontaneity, fantasy, despite being closest to the creatio ex nihilo, is by no means art's one and all. Fantasy may be set in motion primarily by something concrete in the artwork, especially among those artists whose process of production works upward from below. Equally, however, fantasy is active in a dimensionthat a common prejudice holds to be ab- stract, namely in the dimension of the quasi-empty outline, which is then fleshed out and made good on through what prejudice considers the opposite of fantasy: "labor. " Even specifically technological fantasy is not a recent development, as is evident in the compositional style of the Adagio of Schubert's string quintet as well as in the eddies oflight in Turner's seascapes. Fantasy is also, and essentially so, the unrestricted availability of potential solutions that crystallize within the artwork. It is lodged not only in what strikes one both as existing and as the
174 0 SUBJECT-OBJECT
residue of something existing, but perhaps even more in the transformation of the existing . The harmonic variant of the main theme in the coda of the first move- ment of the Appassionata, with the catastrophic effect of the diminished seventh chord , is no less a product of fantasy than is the triadic theme of the brooding idea that opens the movement; with regard to genesis it cannot be excluded that the variant that is decisive for the whole might in fact have been Beethoven's initial idea, from which, retroactively as it were, the theme in its primary form was derived. It is no less of an achievement of fantasy that the later sections of the broadly cast development of the first movement of the Eroica give way to lapi- dary harmonic periods, as if suddenly there was no time for differentiation. The growing primacy of construction necessarily reduced the substantiality of the particular inspiration. Just how much labor and fantasy are implicated in each other - their divergence is invariably an index of failure - is supported by the ex- perience of artists that fantasy is subject to command. They sense that the freedom to the involuntary is what distinguishes them from dilettantes. Even subjectively, the mediate and the immediate are in turn mediated in each other aesthetically and in knowledge. Not genetically, but in terms of its constitution, art is the most compelling argument against the epistemological division of sensuality and intel- lect. Reflection is fully capable of the act of fantasy in the form of the determinate consciousness of what an artwork at a certain point needs. The idea that con- sciousness kills , for which art supposedly provides unimpeachable testimony , is a foolish cliche in this context as anywhere else. Even its power to resolve objects into their components , its critical element, is fruitful for the self-reflection of the artwork: It excludes and modifies the inadequate, the unformed, and the incoher- ent. On the other hand, the category of aesthetic dumbness has itsfundamentum in re as the lack of immanent reflection in works, which is evident, for instance, in the stupor of mechanical repetition. What is bad in artworks is a reflection that directs them externally, that forces them; where, however, they immanently want to go can only be followed by reflection, and the ability to do this is spontaneous. If each and every artwork involves a probably aporetic nexus of problems, this is the source ofwhat is perhaps not the worst definition of fantasy . As the capacity to discover approaches and solutions in the artwork, fantasy may be defined as the differential of freedom in the midst of determination.
The objectivity of artworks is no more a residual determination than is any truth. Neoclassicism faltered because it deluded itself with the goal of achieving an ideal of objectivity, which appeared to it in apparently binding styles of the past, by way of a subjectively instituted procedure: It abstractly negated the subject in the work and formulated the imago of a subjectless in-itself, which the subject- itself no longer eliminable by any act of will-could throw into relief solely by means of injury to itself. A rigor that establishes restrictions by imitating long- past heteronomous forms obeys nothing other than that very SUbjective volition that is to be tamed. Valery outlined the problem but did not solve it. Form that is
SUBJECT-OBJECT 0 17S
merely chosen and posited, which Valery himself sometimes defends, is as acci- dental as the chaotic "vitality" he despised_ The aporia of art today is not to be cured through any willing subordination to authority. It remains an open question just how, without coercion, it would be possible, given an unmitigated nominal- ism, to achieve anything on the order of an objectivity of form; this is impeded by instituted closure. The tendency toward this instituted closure was synchronous with the rise of political fascism, whose ideology similarly feigned that a state freed from the desperation and insecurity of its subjects during the period of late liberalism could be hoped for only on the basis of the abdication of the subject. Of course, this abdication was prompted by more powerful subjects. Even in its falli- bility and weakness, the subject who contemplates art is not expected simply to retreat from the claim to objectivity. Otherwise it would hold that those alien to art-the philistines devoid of any relation to art, who let it affect them as if they were a tabula rasa- would be the most qualified to understand and judge it, and the unmusical would be the best music critics. Like art itself, knowledge of it is consummated dialectically. The more the observer adds to the process, the greater the energy with which he penetrates the artwork, the more he then becomes aware of objectivity from within . He takes part in objectivity when his energy , even that of his misguided subjective "projection," extinguishes itself in the artwork. The subjective detour may totally miss the mark, but without the detour no objectivity becomes evident. -Every step toward the perfection of artworks is a step to- ward their self-alienation, and this dialectically produces ever anew those revolts that are too superficially characterized as subjectivity ' s rebellion against formalism of whatever sort. The growing integration of artworks, their immanent exigency, is also their immanent contradiction. The artwork that carries through its imma- nent dialectic reflects it as resolved: This is what is aesthetically false in the aes- thetic principle . The antinomy of aesthetic reification is also one between the ever fractured metaphysical claim of works to being exempted from time , and the tran- sience of everything that establishes itself in time as enduring. Artworks become relative because they must assert themselves as absolute. Benjamin touched on this once in commenting that "there is no redemption for artworks. " The perennial revolt of art against art has itsfundamentum in re. If it is essential to artworks that they be things , it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things , and
thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an im- potently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world.
That the experience of artworks is adequate only as living experience is more than a statement about the relation of the observer to the observed, more than a state- ment about psychological cathexis as a condition of aesthetic perception. Aes- thetic experience becomes living experience only by way of its object, in that
1 76 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
instant in which artworks themselves become animate under its gaze. This is George's symbolist teaching in the poem "The Tapestry,"1 an artpohique that furnishes the title of a volume. Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. By speaking, it becomes something that moves in itself. Whatever in the artifact may be called the unity of its meaning is not static but processual, the enactment of antagonisms that each work necessarily has in itself. Analysis is therefore adequate to the work only if it grasps the rela- tion of its elements to each other processually rather than reducing them ana- lytically to purported fundamental elements. That artworks are not being but a process of becoming can be grasped technologically. Their continuity is de- manded teleologically by the particular elements. They are in need of continuity and capable of it by virtue of their incompleteness and, often, by their insignifi- cance. It is as a result of their own constitution that they go over into their other, find continuance in it, want to be extinguished in it, and in their demise determine what follows them. This immanent dynamic is, in a sense, a higher-order element of what artworks are. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic experience resem- bles sexual experience, indeed its culmination. The way the beloved image is trans- formed in this experience, the way rigidification is unified with what is most intensely alive, effectively makes the experience the incarnate prototype of aes- thetic experience. Yet it is not only the individual works that are immanently dynamic; so too is their relation to each other. Art is historical exclusively by way of individual works that have taken shape in themselves, not by their external association, not even through the influence that they purportedly exert over each other. This is why art mocks verbal definition. That whereby art's existence is constituted is itself dynamic as an attitude toward objectivity that both withdraws from and takes up a stance toward it and in this stance maintains objectivity trans- formed. Artworks synthesize ununifiable, nonidentical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and the nonidentical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole. The processual quality of artworks is constituted in such a fashion that as artifacts, as something humanly made , they have their place a pri- ori in the "native realm of spirit" but are , in order to become self-identical , in need of what is nonidentical, heterogeneous, and not already formed. The resistance to them of otherness, on which they are nevertheless dependent, compels them to ar- ticulate their own formal language , to leave not the smallest unformed particle as remnant. This reciprocity constitutes art's- dynamic; it is an irresolvable antithesis that is never brought to rest in the state of being. Artworks are such only in actu because their tension does not terminate in pure identity with either extreme . On the other hand, it is only as finished, molded objects that they become force fields
of their antagonisms; otherwise the encapsuled forces would simply run parallel to each other or dissipate. Artworks' paradoxical nature, stasis, negates itself. The movement of artworks must be at a standstill and thereby become visible. Their
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 177
immanent processual character-the legal process that they undertake against the merely existing world that is external to them-is objective prior to their alliance with any party. All artworks, even the affirmative, are a priori polemical. The idea of a conservative artwork is inherently absurd. By emphatically separating them- selves from the empirical world, their other, they bear witness that that world itself should be other than it is; they are the unconscious schemata of that world's transformation. Even for an artist like Mozart, who seems so unpolemical and who according to general agreement moves solely within the pure sphere of spirit, excepting the literary themes that he chose for his greatest operas, the polemical element is central in the power by which the music sets itself at a distance that mutely condemns the impoverishment and falsity of that from which it distances itself. In Mozart form acquires the power of that distancing as determinate nega- tion; the reconciliation that it realizes is painfully sweet because reality to date has refused it. The resoluteness of distance -as presumably that of all classicism that is forceful rather than vacantly playing with itself-concretizes the critique of what has been repulsed. What crackles in artworks is the sound of the friction of the antagonistic elements that the artwork seeks to unify; it is script not least because, as in linguistic signs, its processual element is enciphered in its objecti- vation. The processual character of artworks is nothing other than their temporal nucleus. If duration becomes their intention in such a fashion that they expel what they deem ephemeral and by their own hand eternalize themselves in pure im- pregnable forms or, worse, by the ominous claim to the universally human, they cut short their lives and assimilate themselves into the concept that-as the fixed circumference of shifting contents-by its form pursues precisely that temporal
stasis against which the drawn tension of the artwork defends itself. Artworks, mortal human objects, pass away all the more rapidly the more doggedly they stave it off. Although permanence cannot be excluded from the concept of their form, it is not their essence. Daringly exposed works that seem to be rushing toward their perdition have in general a better chance of survival than those that, subservient to the idol of security, hollow out their temporal nucleus and, in- wardly vacuous, fall victim to time: the curse of neoclassicism. Speculating on survival by adding something perishable is hardly helpful. Today it is conceivable and perhaps requisite that artworks immolate themselves through their temporal nucleus, devote their own life to the instant of the appearance of truth, and trace- lessly vanish without thereby diminishing themselves in the slightest. The nobil- ity of such comportment would not be unworthy of art now that its loftiness has decayed to attitude and ideology . The idea of the permanence of works is modeled on the category of property and is thus ephemeral in the bourgeois sense; it was alien to many periods and important productions. It is said that when Beethoven finished the Appassionata he commented that it would still be played ten years later. Stockhausen's concept of electronic works-which, since they are not no- tated in the traditional sense but immediately "realized" in their material, could be
178 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
extinguished along with this material-is a splendid one of an art that makes em- phatic claim yet is prepared to throw itself away . Like other constituents through which art once became what it is, even its temporal nucleus has been exteriorized and explodes its concept. The common declarations against fashion that equate the transient with the nugatory are not only allied with the counterimage of an inwardness that has been compromised politically as well as aesthetically by its incapacity for exteriorization and a stubborn limitation to individual quiddity . In spite ofits commercial manipulatability, fashion reaches deep into artworks; it does not simply exploit them. Such inventions as Picasso's rayonism are like transposi- tions from haute couture experiments, pinning dresses together around the body for an evening rather than tailoring them in a traditional manner. Fashion is one of the ways in which historical movement affects the sensorium and, through it, art- works, and this is so usually by way of minimal self-obtuse impulses.
The artwork is a process essentially in the relation ofits whole and parts. Without being reducible to one side or the other, it is the relation itself that is a process of becoming. Whatever may in the artwork be called totality is not a structure that integrates the sum of its parts. Even objectified the work remains a developing process by virtue of the propensities active in it. Conversely, the parts are not something given, as which analysis almost inevitably mistakes them: Rather, they are centers of energy that strain toward the whole on the basis of a necessity that they equally preform. The vortex of this dialectic ultimately consumes the con- cept of meaning. When according to history'S verdict the unity of process and result no longer succeeds; when, above all, the individual elements refuse to mold themselves to the ever latently preconceived totality, the gaping divergence tears meaning apart. If the artwork is nothing fixed and definitive in itself, but some- thing in motion, then its immanent temporality is communicated to its parts and whole in such a fashion that their relation develops in time and that they are capa- ble of canceling this relation . If artworks are alive in history by virtue of their own processual character, they are also able to perish in it. The indefeasibility of what is sketched on paper, painted on canvas , or carved in stone is no guarantee of the indefeasibility of what is essential to the artwork, its spirit, which is dynamic in itself. Artworks are on no account transformed exclusively by what reified con- sciousness takes to be the changing attitude of individuals toward works, which shifts according to the historical situation. Such change is external with regard to what transpires in the works themselves: the dissolution of their layers , one after the other, which was unforeseeable in the moment of the work's appearance; the determination of this transformation by their emerging and increasingly distinct law of form; the petrification of works that have become transparent, their de- crepitude, and their falling silent. Ultimately their development is the same as their process of collapse.
The concept of an artifact, from which "artwork" is etymologically derived, does not fully comprise what an artwork is. Knowing that an artwork is something
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 179
made does not amount to knowing that it is an artwork. The exaggerated accent on its fabrication, whether to lambast art as human deception or to denounce its artifi- ciality or preciousness in opposition to the delusion of art as unmediated nature, stands in sympathetic accord with philistinism. The idea of providing a simple definition of art was dared only by those all-disposing philosophical systems that reserved a niche for every phenomenon. Hegel did indeed define beauty, but not art, presumably because he recognized its unity with, and difference from, nature. In artthe difference between the thing made and its genesis-the making-is em- phatic: Artworks are something made that has become more than something sim- ply made. This was not contested until art began to experience itself as transient. The confounding of artworks with their genesis, as if genesis provided the univer- sal code for what has become, is the source of the alienness of art scholarship to art: for artworks obey their law of form by consuming their genesis. Specifically aesthetic experience, self-abandonment to artworks, is indifferent to their genesis. Knowledge of the genesis is as external to aesthetic experience as is the history of the dedication of the Eroica to what musically transpires in that symphony. The attitude of authentic artworks toward extra-aesthetic objectivity is not so much to be sought in how this objectivity affects the process of production, for the artwork is in-itself a comportment that reacts to that objectivity even while turn- ing away from it. Germane here is Kant' s discussion of the real and the imitated nightingale in Critique ofJudgment,2 the theme of Andersen's famous fairy tale that has so often been turned into opera. Kant's reflection on it substitutes the knowledge of the origin of the phenomenon for the experience of that phenome- non. If the fictitious youth was indeed able to so perfectly imitate the nightingale that no difference could be discerned, this would cancel any interest in the ques- tion of the authenticity or nonauthenticity of the phenomenon , though it would be necessary to concede to Kant that such knowledge colors aesthetic experience: One sees a painting differently if one knows the name of the painter. No art is pre- suppositionless , and its presuppositions can no more be eliminated than art could be deduced from them. Rather than the Kantian artificer, Andersen with good instinct dealt with a toy; Stravinsky ' s opera characterizes the sound of that toy as a mechanical piping. 3 The difference from a natural song is perceptible in the phenomenon: As soon as the artifact wants to prompt the illusion of the natural, it founder s .
The artwork is both the result o f the process and the process itself a t a standstill . It is what at its apogee rationalist metaphysics proclaimed as the principle of the universe, a monad: at once a force field and a thing. Artworks are closed to one another, blind, and yet in their hermeticism they represent what is external. Thus it is, in any case, that they present themselves to tradition as that living autarchy that Goethe was fond of calling entelechy, the synonym for monad. It is possible that the more problematic the concept of teleology becomes in organic nature the more intensively it condensed itself in artworks. As an element of an overarching con-
180 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
text of the spirit of an epoch, entwined with history and society, artworks go be- yond their monadic limit even though they lack windows . The interpretation of an artwork as an immanent, crystallized process at a standstill approximates the con- cept of the monad. The thesis of the monadological character of artworks is as true as it is problematic. Their stringency and internal structuration are borrowed from their intellectual domination of reality . To this extent what is transcendent to them is imported into them as that by which they in the first place become an immanent nexus. These categories are, however, so completely modified that only the shadow of bindingness remains . Irrevocably, aesthetics presupposes immersion in the par- ticular work. There is no denying the progress made even in academic art scholar- ship through the demand for immanent analysis and the renunciation of methods concerned with everything but the artwork.
At the same time, however, immanent analysis bears an aspect of self-deception . There is no determination of the particu- larity of an artwork that does not, as a universal , according to its form, go beyond the monad. It is delusive to claim the concept, which must be introduced exter- nally to the monad in order to open it up from within and thus to shatter it, has its source exclusively in the object. The monadological constitution of artworks in themselves points beyond itself. If it is made absolute, immanent analysis falls prey to ideology, against which it struggled when it wanted to devote itself to the artworks internally rather than deducing their worldviews. Today it is already evident that immanent analysis, which was once a weapon of artistic experience against philistinism, is being misused as a slogan to hold social reflection at a dis- tance from an absolutized art. Without social reflection, however, the artwork is not to be understood in relation to that of which it constitutes one element, nor is it to be deciphered in terms of its own content. The blindness of the artwork is not only a corrective of the nature-dominating universal, it is also its correlative; as always the blind and the empty belong together in their abstractness. No particular in the artwork is legitimate without also becoming universal through its particu- larization. True, as an investigative procedure subsumption never reveals aes- thetic content, but if subsumption is rejected altogether, no content would be thinkable; aesthetics would have to capitulate in front of the artwork as before a factum brutum. The aesthetically determined particular is to be referred to the ele- ment of its universality exclusively by way of its monadological closure. With a regularity that is indicative of something structural, immanent analyses-if their contact with what has been formed is close enough-lead to universal determina- tions that emerge directly from the most extreme specification. Certainly this is also due to the analytical method: Explanation amounts to the reduction to what is already known, whose synthesis with what is to be explained inescapably involves a universal. But the reversal of the particular into the universal is no less deter- mined by the individual object. Where it is concentrated in itself to an extreme, it executes tensions that originate in the genre. Exemplary here are Anton Webern's works, in which sonata movements shrink to aphorisms. Aesthetics is not obliged,
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 181
as under the spell of its object, to exorcise concepts. Rather, its responsibility is to free concepts from their externality to the particular object and to bring them within the work. If anywhere, then it is in aesthetics that Hegel's formulation of the movement of the concept has its locus. The reciprocal relation of the universal and the particular, which takes place unconsciously in artworks and which aes- thetics must bring to consciousness, is what truly necessitates a dialectical ap- proach. It could be objected that a residual dogmatic trust is operative here; exter- nal to the Hegelian system, it could be claimed, the movement of the concept has no sphere of legitimacy ; the object can only be grasped as the life of the concept if the totality of what is objective coincides with spirit. To that the reply is that the monads, which artworks are, lead by way of their own principle of particulariza- tion to the universal. The universal determinations of art are not simply an exi- gency of their conceptual reflection . They testify to the boundaries of the principle ofindividuation, which is nomore to be ontologized than is its opposite. Artworks get ever closer to these boundaries the more uncompromisingly they pursue the principium individuationis; the artwork that appears as something universal bears the accidental quality of being an example of its genre: It is spuriously individual . Even dada, the purely deictic gesture, was as universal as the demonstrative pro- noun; that expressionism was more powerful as an idea than in its works perhaps has its origins in the fact that its utopia of the pure 'too? ' n is itself a fragment of false consciousness. Yet the universal becomes substantial in artworks only by its self-transformation. Thus in Webern the universal musical form of the devel- opment becomes a "knot" and renounces its developmental function. Its place is taken by a succession of segments of differing levels of intensity. As a result the knot, like passages, become something wholly other, something more present and less relational than any development section ever was. Not only does the dialectic of the universal and particular descend into the depths of the universal in the midst of the particular. At the same time it destroys the invariance of the universal categories.
Just how little a universal concept of art suffices for artworks is demonstrated by the artworks themselves in that, as Valery noted, few fulfill the strict concept. Guilt for this is borne not only by the weakness of artists in the face of the formi- dable concept of their object, but also by the concept itself. The more single- mindedly artworks devote themselves to the emerging idea of art, the more pre- carious becomes the relation of artworks to their other, a relation that is itself demanded by the concept. But this relation can be conserved only at the price of precritical consciousness, desperate naivete: Today this is one of art's aporia. It is evident that supreme works are not the most pure, but tend to contain an extra- artistic surplus, especially an untransformed material element that burdens their immanent composition; however, it is no less evident that once the complete im- manent elaboration of artworks , unsupported by anything unreflected that is other than art, has taken shape as an aesthetic norm, it is not possible willfully to
182 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
reintroduce impure elements. The crisis of the pure artwork in the wake of the European catastrophes cannot be solved by breaking out of the pure work into an extra-aesthetic materiality whose moralistic pathos is pitched to obscure the fact that it is the easy way out; the line of least resistance is hardly suited to being established as the norm . The antinomy of pure versus impure art is subordinate to the more general antinomy that art is not the subordinating concept of its genres. These differ as much specifically as they diverge from one another. 4 The question beloved of traditionalist apologists of every stripe- "But is that still music? " - is fruitless; it is concrete, however, to analyze the deaesthetization of art as a praxis that, devoid of reflection and this side of art's own dialectic, progressively deliv- ers art over to the extra-aesthetic dialectic. By contrast, that stereotypical question wants to use art's abstract subordinating concept to constrain the movement of those discrete, mutually distinguishing elements in which art consists. Currently, however, art stirs most energetically where it decomposes its subordinating con- cept. In this decomposition, art is true to itself: It breaks the mimetic taboo on the impure as a hybrid. -The inadequacy of the concept of art is registered by the linguistic sensorium in the expression a Sprachkunstwerk, a literary artwork. Not without a certain legitimacy, a literary historian coined it as a synonym for poetry in the largest sense. But the concept also does damage to poetic works that are art- works and yet, because of their relatively autonomous discursive element, not only artworks or not artworks throughout. Art likewise is in no way simply equiva- lent with artworks, for artists are always also at work on art and not only on art- works. Art as such is independent even of the artworks' consciousness. Func- tional forms and cult objects may develop historically into artworks; to deny this implies making oneself dependent on art's self-understanding, whose dynamic development is lodged in its own concept. The distinction urged by Benjamin between the artwork and the document5 holds good insofar as it rejects works that are not in themselves determined by the law of form; many works, however, are objectively artworks even when they do not present themselves as art. The name of exhibitions entitled "Documenta," which provide an enormous service, glosses over this problem and thus abets a historicist aesthetic consciousness that they, being museums of the contemporary, want to oppose. Concepts of this sort, and especially those of the so-called classics of modernism, contribute all too well to the loss of tension in post-World War II art , much of which goes slack the moment it appears. They comfortably adapt to the model of an epoch that likes to call itself the atomic age.
The historical moment is constitutive of artworks; authentic works are those that surrender themselves to the historical substance of their age without reservation and without the presumption of being superior to it. They are the self-unconscious historiography of their epoch; this, not least of all, establishes their relation to knowledge. Precisely this makes them incommensurable with historicism, which, instead of following their own historical content, reduces them to their external
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 183
history. Artworks may be all the more truly experienced the more their historical substance is that of the one who experiences it. The bourgeois world of art is ideo- logically blind even in the supposition that artworks that lie far enough in the past can be better understood than those of their own time . The layers of experience borne by important contemporary artworks, that which wants to speak in them, are-as objective spirit-incomparably more commensurable to contemporaries than are works whose historico-philosophical presuppositions are alienated from actual consciousness. The more intensively one seeks to comprehend Bach, the more puzzling is the gaze he returns, charged as it is with all the power that is his. Unless corrupted by willful stylization, a living composer would hardly be able to write a fugue that is better than a conservatory exercise or a parody or a feeble imitation of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The most extreme shocks and gestures of alienation ofcontemporary art-seismograms ofa universal and inescapable form of reaction-are nearer than they appear to be by virtue of historical reification. What is considered to be intelligible to all is what has become unintelligible; what the manipulated repel as all too strange is what is secretly all too comprehen- sible, confirming Freud' s dictum that the uncanny is repulsed only because it is all too familiar. What is blessed on the other side of the Iron Curtain as cultural heri- tage and accepted on this side as western tradition is exclusively manipulable experiences that can be turned on and off at will. They are more than familiar to convention, whereas the familiar can scarcely be actualized any longer. These experiences die off in the same instant that they become immediately accessible; their tensionless accessibility seals their fate. This is to be demonstrated equally by the fact that obscure and doubtlessly uncomprehended works are laid out in state in the pantheon of the classics and stubbornly repeated,6 as by the fact that- except for a vanishing few that are reserved as exceptions for the most extreme avant-garde-the performances of traditional works tum out false and nonsensi- cal: objectively incomprehensible. To make this evident, opposition is needed to the semblance of comprehensibility that has grown like a patina over each of these works and their performances. The aesthetic consumer is allergic to having this demonstrated: With some justification he feels that he is being robbed of what he protects as his possession, though he does not know that he is already robbed of it as soon as he claims it as his own. Foreignness to the world is an element of art:
Whoever perceives it other than as foreign fail s to perceive it at all .
Spirit in artworks is posited by their structure, it is not something added from outside. This is responsible in no small way for the fetish character of artworks: Because their spirit emerges from their constitution, spirit necessarily appears as something-in-itself, and they are artworks only insofar as spirit appears to be such. Nevertheless artworks are, along with the objectivity of their spirit, some- thing made. Reflection must equally comprehend the fetish character, effectively sanction it as an expression of its objectivity, and critically dissolve it. To this extent an art-alien element, which art senses, is admixed to aesthetics. Artworks
184 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
organize what is not organized. They speak on its behalf and violate it; they col- lide with it by following their constitution as an artifact. The dynamic that each artwork encapsulates is what is eloquent in it. One of the paradoxes of artworks is that, though they are dynamic in themselves , they are fixated, whereas it is only by being fixated that they are objectivated. Thus it is that the more insistently they are observed the more paradoxical they become: Each artwork is a system of irrecon- cilables. Their process itself could not be presented without fixation; improvisa- tions are usually no more than juxtapositions, so to speak, marching in place . The written word and musical notation, if glimpsed for once strictly externally, are a disconcerting paradox of something existent that is in its own tenns a process of becoming. The mimetic impulses that motivate the artwork, that integrate them- selves in it and once again disintegrate it, are fragile, speechless expression. They only become language through their objectivation as art. Art, the rescue of nature, revolts against nature's transitoriness. Artworks become like language in the de- velopment of the bindingness of their elements , a wordless syntax even in linguis- tic works. What these works say is not what their words say. In art's intentionless language the mimetic impulses are bequeathed to the whole, which synthesizes them. In music an event or situation is able retroactively to shape a preceding de- velopment into something awesome even when it was not that in the first place. Such retroactive metamorphosis is exemplary as a metamorphosis by way of the spirit of the works . Artworks are distinguished from the gestalts on which psycho- logical theory is based in that in artworks the elements are not merely maintained in a sort of independence, as is indeed possible in gestalts . Insofar as artworks ap- pear, they are not-as psychical gestalts are purported to be-immediately given. By their spiritual mediation they enter into a contradictory relation with each other that appears in them at the same time that they strive to solve it. The ele- ments are not arranged in juxtaposition but rather grind away at each other or draw each other in; the one seeks or repulses the other. This alone constitutes the
nexus of the most demanding works. The dynamic of artworks is what speaks in them; through spiritualization the works attain the mimetic impulses that primar- ily their spirit subjugates. Romantic art hopes to conserve the mimetic element by refraining from mediating it through fonn; the whole is to say what the particular scarcely still has the capacity to say. Nevertheless, romantic art cannot simply ignore the compulsion toward objectivation. It degrades what objectively refuses synthesis to something that is disconnected. If it dissociates itself in details, it inclines nonetheless, contrary to its superficial qualities, to the abstractly fonnal. In one of the greatest composers, Robert Schumann, this quality is bound up es- sentially with the tendency toward disintegration . The purity with which his work shapes an unreconciled antagonism is what gives it its power and rank. Precisely because of the abstract being-for-itself of fonn, the romantic artwork regresses back of the classicist ideal, which it rejects as fonnalistic . In classicism the media- tion of the whole and part was far more emphatically sought, though admittedly
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 185
not without traces of resignation in the whole, which oriented itself to types , but in the particular as well, which was tailored to the whole. At every point the declin- ing forms of romanticism tend toward the academic. Under this aspect, a sturdy typology of artworks emerges unavoidably. One type moves from above, from the whole down; the other moves in the opposite direction. That both types have en- dured fairly distinctly is demonstrated by the antinomy that produces them and that is not to be resolved by any type: the irreconcilability of the universal and the particular. Rather than schematically extinguishing the particular, as was the pre- dominant praxis of the age preceding him, Beethoven, showing an elective affin- ity for the spirit of the mature bourgeois spirit of the natural sciences, faced the antinomy of the universal and the particular by qualitatively neutralizing the par- ticular. He thus did more than merely integrate music as a continuum of what is in the process of becoming , more than merely shield the form from the emerging threat of empty abstraction. In foundering, the particular elements dissolve into each other and determine the form through the process of their foundering. In Beethoven the particular is and is not an impulse toward the whole, something that only in the whole becomes what it is, yet in itself tends toward the relative in- determinateness of basic tonal relations and toward amorphousness. If one hears or reads his extremely articulated music closely enough, it resembles a contin- uum of nothing. The tour de force of each of his great works is literally Hegelian, in that the totality ofnothing determines itself as a totality of being, though it does so only as semblance and not with the claim of absolute truth. Yet this claim to absolute truth is at the very least suggested as the works' ultimate content by the composition's immanent stringency. The element of nature is represented by a polar opposition between the latently diffuse and ungraspable on the one hand, and the compelling force that constrains and shapes it on the other. The demon, the compositional subject that forges and hurls whole blocks, faces the undiffer- entiated smallest unities into which each and every movement is dissociated; ultimately there is no material at all but only the unadorned system of basic tonal relations. -Artworks are, however, again paradoxical in that not even their
dialectic is literal; it does not transpire as does history, their secret model. In accord with the concept of the artifact, their dialectic is reproduced in existing works, which is the opposite of the process that they at the same time are: This is paradigmatic of art's illusory element. It remains to be shown, extrapolating from Beethoven, that in terms of their technical praxis all authentic works are tours de force: Many artists of the late bourgeois era-Ravel, Valery-recognized this as their own task. Thus the once disdained concept of the "artiste" recovers its dig- nity. That trick is no primitive form of art and no aberration or degeneration but art's secret, a secret that it keeps only to give it away at the end. Thomas Mann alludes to this with his provocative comment that art is a higher form of prank. Technological as well as aesthetic analyses become fruitful when they compre- hend the tour de force in works . At the highest level of form the detested circus act
186 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
is reenacted: the defeat of gravity, the manifest absurdity of the circus-Why all the effort? -is in nuce the aesthetic enigma. This comes to bear on questions of artistic performance. To perform a play or a composition correctly means to for- mulate it correctly as a problem in such a fashion that the incompatible demands it makes on the performer are recognized . The task of a rendering that will do justice to a work is in principle infinite .
By its opposition to the empirical world each artwork programmatically, as it were , establishes its unity . What has passed by way of spirit determines itself in its oneness against the accidental and chaotic that are embedded in nature. Unity is more than merely formal: By its force artworks wrest themselves free from fatal disintegration. The unity of artworks is their caesura from myth. In themselves, and in accord with their immanent determination, they achieve a unity that is impressed upon the empirical objects of rational knowledge: Unity emerges from their own elements, from the multiplicity; thus they do not extirpate myth but mollify it. Turns of phrase such as that a certain painter well understood how to compose figures in a harmonious scene , or that the timing and placing of a pedal point in a Bach prelude have an especially felicitous effect-Goethe himself was on occasion not averse to formulations of this type-now have an archaic and provincial quality because they lag behind the concept of immanent unity and , ad- mittedly, at the same time avow the surplus of arbitrary will in every work. Such comments praise what is defective in innumerable works , even if it is a defect that is constitutive of art. The material unity of artworks is all the more illusory the more its forms and elements are topoi and do not emerge immediately from the complexion of the individual work. One aspect of the opposition of modern art to immanent semblance, its insistence on the real unity of the unreal, is that it no longer tolerates anything universal in the form of an unreflected immediacy in itself. That the unity of the work does not, however, completely originate in the work's individual impulses is not due simply to how these impulses are manipu- lated . Semblance is defined by these impulses as well. While gazing longingly and needingly toward the unity they could fulfill and reconcile, they always at the same time flee from it. The prejudice of the idealist tradition in favor of unity and synthesis has neglected this. Unity is motivated not least of all by the fact that according to their own propensity the individual elements seek to escape it. Dis- persed multiplicity does not offer itself neutrally to aesthetic synthesis as does epistemology's chaotic material, which, devoid of quality, neither anticipates nor eludes its forming. If the unity of artworks is also inescapably the violence done to multiplicity - symptomatic of which is the use in aesthetic criticism of expressions such as "mastery over the material"-multiplicity must, like the ephemeral and alluring images of nature in antiquity's myths, fear unity. The unity of logos, be- cause it mutilates, is enmeshed in the nexus of its guilt. Homer's tale of Penelope, who in the evening unraveled what she had accomplished during the day, is a self- unconscious allegory of art: What cunning Penelope inflicts on her artifacts, she
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK D 187
actually inflicts on herself. Ever since Homer's verses this episode is not the ad- dition or rudiment for which it is easily mistaken, but a constitutive category of art: Through this story, art takes into itself the impossibility of the identity of the one and the many as an element of its unity. Artworks, no less than reason, have their cunning. If the diffuseness and individual impulses of artworks were left to their own immediacy, to themselves, they would blow away without a trace. Art- works register what would otherwise vanish. Through unity the impulses forfeit their independence; it is only metaphorically that they are any longer sponta- neous . This compels criticism even of very great artworks . The idea of greatness as a rule is bound up with the element of unity, sometimes at the cost of its relation to the nonidentical; for this reason the concept of greatness itself is dubious in art. The authoritarian effect of great artworks, especially in architecture, both legiti- mates and indicts them. Integral form is inseparable from domination, though it sublimates it; the instinct against it is specifically French. Greatness is the guilt that works bear, but without this guilt they would remain insufficient. This is per- haps the reason for the superiority of major fragments, and the fragmentary char- acter of others that are more finished, over fully complete works. This has always been registered by various types of form that are not among the most highly re- garded. The quodlibet and medley in music, and in literature the apparently com- fortable epic suspension of the ideal of dynamic unity, testify to this need. In every instance the renunciation of unity as a principle of form itself remains unity sui generis, however mediocre the quality. Yet this unity is not binding, and an element of this absence of bindingness is probably binding in all artworks. As soon as unity becomes stable, it is already lost.
The degree to which unity and multiplicity are internal to each other in artworks can be grasped in terms of the question of their intensity . Intensity is the mimesis achieved through unity and ceded by the multiplicity to the totality , although this totality is not immediately present in such a fashion that it could be perceived as an intensive force; the power accumulated in the totality is, so to speak , restored to the detail. That in many of its elements the artwork becomes more intense, thick- ens, and explodes, gives the impression of being an end in itself; the great unities of composition and construction seem to exist only for the purpose of such inten- sity. Accordingly, contrary to current aesthetic views, the whole in truth exists only for the sake ofits parts-that is, its lca. tp6C;,the instant-and not the reverse; what works in opposition to mimesis ultimately seeks to serve it. One who reacts preartistically, who loves various passages of a composition or painting without considering the form, perhaps without noticing it, perceives something that is rightfully driven out by aesthetic cultivation yet remains essential to it. Whoever lacks an appreciation for beautiful passages-in painting, too, as with Proust's Bergotte, who, seconds before his death, is captivated by a small section of a yel- low wall in a Vermeer painting - is as alien to the artwork as one who is incapable of experiencing its unity. All the same, such details gain their luminosity only by
188 0 TOWARD A THEORY OF THE ARTWORK
virtue of the whole . Many measures in Beethoven sound like the sentence in Elec- tive Affinities: "Like a star hope fell from the heavens below"; this is true of the Adagio of the Sonata in D Minor, op. 31 , no. 2. It only requires playing the pas- sage first in context and then alone to be able to recognize how much its incom- mensurableness,radiating over the passage, owes to the work as a whole. The pas- sage becomes extraordinary because its expression is raised above what precedes it by the concentration of a lyrical, humanized melody. It is individuated in rela- tion to, and by way of, the totality; it is its product as well as its suspension. Even totality, the gapless fittedness of artworks, is no ultimate category. Although it is intransigent in the face of regressive-atomistic perception, it is relativized because its force is proved exclusively in the particular into which it radiates.
The concept ofan artwork implies that ofits success. Failed artworks are not art: Relative success is alien to art; the average is already the bad. The average is in- compatible with the medium of particularization. Middling artworks, the healthy soil of minor masters so appreciated by historians of a similar stamp, presuppose an ideal similar to what Lukacs had the audacity to defend as a "normal artwork. " However, being the negation of the spurious universal of the norm, art tolerates neither normal works nor middling ones that correspond to a norm or establish their meaning in terms of their distance to it. There is no scale for the ranking of artworks ; their self-identity mocks the dimension of "more or less. " For success, inner consistency is an essential element, but in no way the only one. That the art- work touch on something, the richness of the detail in the whole, the gesture of generosity even in the most brittle works: These are models of the demands that are present to art without their being reducible to the coordinates of inner con- sistency; their plenitude would probably elude general theoretical reflection. Yet they suffice for casting doubt not only on the concept of consistency but on that of success, which is in any case distorted by its association with the image of the straining model student. Yet the idea of success is all the same requisite if art is not to be abandoned to crude relativism; and the idea of success is active in the self-criticism that resides in each artwork and makes it one in the first place. Immanent to consistency is that it is not all there is to art; this distinguishes its emphatic concept from its academic correlative. What is only and thoroughly consistent, is not consistent. What is nothing but consistent, regardless of what is to be formed, ceases to be something in-itself and degenerates into something completely for-an-other: This defines academic polish. Academic works are bad because the elements their logicality should synthesize engender no counter- impulses and in fact do not exist. The work undertaken by their unity is superflu- ous, tautological, and, insofar as it appears as the unity of something, inconsistent. These works are dry, which is in general what results when mimesis withers; according to the doctrine of temperament, Schubert -the mimic par excellence- would be sanguine, moist. The mimetically diffuse can be art because art is in sympathy with diffuseness; this is not the case for unity, which strangles the dif-
TOWARDATHEORYOFTHEARTWORK 0 189
fuse element of art to honor art. An artwork whose form springs from its truth content, however, is emphatically successful. It is not obliged to erase the traces of the process by which it has come to be what it is, its artificiality; the phan- tasmagorical is its opposite in that through its appearance it portrays itself as achieved instead of carrying through the process whereby it might actually suc- ceed; this is the only moral of artworks.