No More Learning

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. Its desid- erata are satisfied only when such unreachableness appears as essence, which is how it appears in the late style of important artists. Far beyond any individual oeu- vre, this style has exemplary force: that of the historical suspension of aesthetic harmony altogether. The rejection of the ideal of classicism is not the result of the alternation of styles or, indeed, of an alleged historical temperament; it is, rather, the result of the coefficient of friction in harmony itself, which in corporeal form presents what is not reconciled as reconciled and thereby transgresses the very postulate of the appearing essence at which the ideal of harmony aims. The eman- cipation from this ideal is an aspect of the developing truth content of art .
The rebellion against semblance, art's dissatisfaction with itself, has been an in- termittent element of its claim to truth from time immemorial. Art, whatever its material, has always desired dissonance, a desire suppressed by the affirmative power of society with which aesthetic semblance has been bound up. Dissonance is effectively expression; the consonant and harmonious want to soften and elimi- nate it. Expression and semblance are fundamentally antithetical. If expression is scarcely to be conceived except as the expression of suffering-joy has proven inimical to expression, perhaps because it has yet to exist, and bliss would be beyond expression-expression is the element immanent to art through which, as one of its constituents, art defends itself against the immanence that it develops by its law of form. Artistic expression comports itself mimetically, just as the expres- sion of living creatures is that of pain. The lineaments of expression inscribed in artworks, if they are not to be mute, are demarcation lines against semblance. Yet, in that artworks as such remain semblance, the conflict between semblance- form in the broadest sense-and expression remains unresolved and fluctuates historically. Mimetic comportment-an attitude toward reality distinct from the fixated antithesis of subject and object-is seized in art-the organ of mimesis since the mimetic taboo-by semblance and, as the complement to the autonomy of form, becomes its bearer. The unfolding of art is that of a quid pro quo: Expres-
SEMBLANCEANDEXPRESSION 0 III
sion, through which nonaesthetic experience reaches most deeply into the work, becomes the archetype of everything fictive in art, as if at thejuncture where art is most permeable to real experience culture most rigorously stood guard that the border not be violated. The expressive values of artworks cease to be immediately those of something alive. Refracted and transformed, they become the expression oftheworkitself: Thetermmusicajictaistheearliestevidenceofthis. Thatquid pro quo not only neutralizes mimesis , it also derives from it. If mimetic comport- ment does not imitate something but rather makes itself like itself, this is precisely what artworks take it upon themselves to fulfill. In their expression, artworks do not imitate the impulses of individuals , nor in any way those of their authors; in cases where this is their essential determination, they fall as copies precisely to the mercy of that reification that the mimetic impulse opposes. At the same time ar- tistic expression enforces on itself history's judgment that mimesis is an archaic comportment, that as an immediate practice mimesis is not knowledge, that what makes itself like itself does not become truly alike, that mimetic intervention failed. Thus mimesis is banished to art that comports itself mimetically , just as art absorbs the critique of mimesis into itself by carrying out the objectivation of this impulse.
Although there has rarely been doubt that expression is an essential element of art-even the present hesitancy toward expression confirms its relevance and actually holds for art as a whole-its concept, like most key aesthetic concepts, is recalcitrant to the theory that wants to name it: What is qualitatively contrary to the concept per se can only with difficulty be brought within the bounds of its con- cept; the form in which something may be thought is not indifferent to what is thought. From the perspective of the philosophy of history , expression in art must be interpreted as a compromise.
Expression approaches the transsubjective; it is the form of knowledge that - having preceded the polarity of subject and object- does not recognize this polarity as definitive. Art is secular, however, in that it at- tempts to achieve such knowledge within the bounds of the polarity of subject and object, as an act of autonomous spirit. Aesthetic expression is the objectification of the non-objective , and in fact in such a fashion that through its objectification it becomes a second-order nonobjectivity: It becomes what speaks out of the artifact not as an imitation of the subject. Yet precisely the objectivation of expression, which coincides with art, requires the subject who makes it and-in bourgeois terms-makes use of his own mimetic impulses. Art is expressive when what is objective, subjectively mediated, speaks, whether this be sadness, energy, or long- ing. Expression is the suffering countenance of artworks. They tum this counte- nance only toward those who return its gaze, even when they are composed in happy tones or glorify the vie opportune of rococo . If expression were merely the doubling of the subjectively felt, it would be null and void; the artist who con- demns a work as being an impression rather than an invention knows this per- fectly well. Rather than such feelings, the model of expression is that of extra-
1 1 2 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
artistic things and situations. Historical processes and functions are already sedimented in them and speak out of them. Kafka is exemplary for the gesture of art when he carries out the retransformation of expression back into the actual occurrences enciphered in that expression-and from that he derives his irre- sistibility. Yet expression here becomes doubly puzzling because the sedimented, the expressed meaning, is once more meaningless; it is natural history that leads to nothing but what, impotently enough, it is able to express. Art is imitation exclusively as the imitation of an objective expression, remote from psychology, of which the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world and which now subsists only in artworks. Through expression art closes itself off to being- for-another, which always threatens to engulf it, and becomes eloquent in itself: This is art's mimetic consummation. Its expression is the antithesis of expressing something.
Such mimesis is the ideal ofart,not its practical procedure, nor is it an attitude di- rected toward expressive values. The contribution made to expression by the artist is the power of mimicry, which in him releases the expressed; if what is expressed becomes the tangible content [InhaltJ of the artist's soul, and the artwork a copy of this content, the work degenerates into a blurred photograph. Schubert' s resig- nation has its locus not in the purported mood of his music, nor in how he was feeling-as if the music could give a clue to this-but in the It is thus4 that it an- nounces with the gesture of letting oneself fall: This is its expression. Its quintes- sence is art ' s character of eloquence,s fundamentally distinct from language as its medium. It is worth speculating whether the former is incompatible with the lat- ter; that would in part explain the effort of prose since Joyce to put discursive lan- guage out of action, or at least to subordinate it to formal categories to the point that construction becomes unrecognizable: The new art tries to bring about the transformation of communicative into mimetic language. By virtue of its double character, language is a constituent of art and its mortal enemy . Etruscan vases in the Villa Giulia are eloquent in the highest degree and incommensurable with all communicative language. The true language of art is mute, and its muteness takes priority over poetry's significative element, which in music too is not altogether lacking. That aspect of the Etruscan vases that most resembles speech depends most likely on their Here I am or This is what I am, a selfhood not first excised by identificatory thought from the interdependence of entities. Thus the rhinoceros, that mute animal, seems to say: "I am a rhinoceros. " Rilke's line "for there is no place / without eyes to see you,"6 which Benjamin held in high esteem, codified the nonsignificative language of artworks in an incomparable fashion: Expression is the gaze of artworks. Compared to significative language, the language of ex- pression is older though unfulfilled: as if artworks, by molding themselves to the subject through their organization, recapitulated the way the subject originated, how it wrested itself free. 7 Artworks bear expression not where they communicate the subject, but rather where they reverberate with the protohistory of subjectivity,
SEMBLANCEANDEXPRESSION 0 113
ofensoulment, for which tremolo ofany sort is a miserable surrogate. This is the affinity of the artwork to the subject and it endures because this protohistory sur- vives in the subject and recommences in every moment of history. Only the sub- ject is an adequate instrument of expression however much, though it imagines itself unmediated, it is itself mediated. However much the expressed resembles the subject, however much the impulses are those of the subject, they are at the same time apersonal, participating in the integrative power of the ego without ever becoming identical with it. The expression of artworks is the nonsubjective in the subject; not so much that subject's expression as its copy; there is nothing so expressive as the eyes ofanimals-especially apes-which seem objectively to mourn that they are not human. By the transposition of impulses into artworks, which make them their own by virtue of their integration, these impulses remain the plenipotentiary in the aesthetic continuum of extra-aesthetic nature yet are no longer incarnate as its afterimage. This ambivalence is registered by every gen- uine aesthetic experience, and incomparably so in Kant's description of the feel- ing of the sublime as a trembling between nature and freedom. Such modification of mimesis is, without any reflection on the spiritual, the constitutive act of spiri- tualization in all art. Later art only develops this act, but it is already posited in the modification of mimesis through the work , provided that it does not occur through mimesis itself as, so to speak, the physiologically primordial form of spirit. The modification shares the guilt of the affirmative character of art because it mollifies the pain through imagination just as the spiritual totality in which this pain disap- pears makes it controllable and leaves it untransformed.
However much art is marked and potentiated by universal alienation, it is least alienated insofar as everything in it passes through spirit-is humanized-without force. Art oscillates between ideology and what Hegel confirmed as the native do- main of spirit, the truth of spirit's self-certainty. No matter how much spirit may exert domination in art, its objectivation frees it from the aims of domination. In that aesthetic structures create a continuum that is totally spirit, they become the semblance of a blocked being-in-itself in whose reality the intentions of the sub- ject would be fulfilled and extinguished. Art corrects conceptual knowledge be- cause,incompleteisolation,itcariresoutwhatconceptualknowledgeinvainawaits from the nonpictorial subject-object relation: that through a subjective act what is objective would be unveiled. Art does not postpone this act ad infinitum but de- mands it of its own finitude at the price of its illusoriness. Through spiritualization, the radical domination of nature - its own - art corrects the domination of nature as the domination of an other. What establishes itself in the artwork as an alien and rudimentary fetish that endures in opposition to the subject is the plenipo- tentiary of the nonalienated; by contrast, however, what comports itself in the world as though it were unidentical nature is reduced all the more surely to the material of the domination of nature, to a vehicle of social domination, and is thus truly alienated. Expression, by which nature seeps most deeply into art, is at the same
? 1 14 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
time what is not literally nature , a memento of what expression itself is not, of what could not have become concrete except through the how of that expression .
The mediation of expression in artworks through their spiritualization-which in expressionism's early period was evident to its most important exponents- implies the critique of that clumsy dualism of form and expression that orients traditional aesthetics as well as the consciousness of many genuine artists. 8 Not that this dichotomy is without any basis. The preponderance of expression at one point, and ofthe formal aspect at another, cannot be denied, especially in older art, which offered impulses a framework. Since then both elements have become inextricably mediated by each other. Where works are not fully integrated, not fully formed , they sacrifice precisely the expressivity for the sake of which they dispense with the labor and effort of form, and the supposedly pure form that dis- avows expression rattles mechanically. Expression is a phenomenon of inter- ference, a function of technical procedures no less than it is mimetic. Mimesis is itself summoned up by the density of the technical procedure, whose immanent rationality indeed seems to work in opposition to expression. The compulsion exerted by integral works is equivalent to their eloquence, to what speaks in them , and no merely suggestive effect; suggestion is , furthermore , itself related to mimetic processes. This leads to a subjective paradox of art: to produce what is b l i n d , e x p r e s s i o n , b y w a y o f r e f l e c t i o n , t h a t i s , t h r o u g h fo r m ; n o t t o r a t i o n a l i z e t h e blind but to produce it aesthetically, "To make things of which we do not know what they are. "9 This situation, which has today been sharpened to an antithesis, has a long prehistory. In speaking ofthe precipitate ofthe absurd, the incommen- surable, in every artwork, Goethe not only formulated the modern constellation of the conscious and unconscious but also envisioned the prospect that the sphere of art sheltered from consciousness as a preserve of the unconscious would become that spleen as which art understood itself to be in the second romanticism since Baudelaire: a virtually self-transcending preserve built into rationality. Pointing this out, however, does not dispatch art: Whoever argues against modernism in this fashion holds mechanically to the dualism of form and expression. What the- orists take for a strictly logical contradiction is familiar to artists and unfolds in their work as that control over the mimetic element that summons up, destroys, and redeems its spontaneity . Spontaneity amid the involuntary is the vital element of art, and this ability is a dependable criterion of artistic capacity, though it does not gloss over the fatality of this capacity . Artists are familiar with this capacity as their sense of form . It provides the mediating category to the Kantian problematic of how art, which Kant considered blatantly nonconceptual, subjectively bears that element of the universal and the necessary that, according to the critique of reason, is reserved exclusively for discursive knowledge. The sense of form is the reflection, at once blind and binding, of the work in itself on which that reflection must depend; it is an objectivity closed to itself that devolves upon the subjective mimetic capacity, which for its part gains its force through its antithesis, rational
SEMBLANCEANDEXPRESSION 0 115
construction. The blindness of the sense of form corresponds to the necessity in the object. The irrationality of the expressive element is for art the aim of all aes- thetic rationality. Its task is to divest itself, in opposition to all imposed order, both of hopeless natural necessity and chaotic contingency. Aesthetic necessity be- comes aware of its fictive element through the experience of contingency . But art does not seek to dojustice to contingency by its intentional, fictive incorporation in order thus to depotentiate its subjective mediations . Rather, art does justice to the contingent by probing in the darkness of the trajectory of its own necessity. The more truly art follows this trajectory, the less self-transparent art is. It makes itself dark. Its immanent process has the quality of following a divining rod. To follow where the hand is drawn: This is mimesis as the fulfillment of objectivity; examples of automatic writing, including the Schoenberg who wrote Erwartung, were inspired by this utopia, only to be compelled to discover that the tension between expression and objectivation does not issue in their identity. There is no middle position between the self-censorship of the need for expression and the concessiveness of construction. Objectivation traverses the extremes. When untamed by taste or artistic understanding the need for expression converges with the bluntness of rational objectivity . On the other hand, art ' s "thinking of itself," its noesis noeseos, is not to be restrained by any preordained irrationality. Aes- thetic rationality must plunge blindfolded into the making of the work rather than directing it extemally as an act of reflection over the artwork. Artworks are smart or foolish according to their procedures, not according to the thoughts their au- thor has about them. Such immanent understanding of the material assures that Beckett's work is at every point sealed tightly against superficial rationality. This is by no means the exclusive prerogative of modem art but equally evident in the abbreviations in late Beethoven, in the renunciation of superfluous and to this extent irrational ornamentation. Conversely, lesser artworks, facile music espe- cially, are marked by an immanent stupidity, to which modernism's ideal ofmatu- rity was a polemical reaction. The aporia of mimesis and construction compels artworks to unite radicalism with deliberation, without the aid of any apocryphal,
trumped-up hypotheses.
Deliberation , however, does not resolve the aporia. Historically, one of the roots of the rebellion against semblance is the allergy to expression; here, if anywhere in art, the relation between the generations plays a part. Expressionism became the father image. Empirically it has been confirmed that inhibited, conventional, and aggressive-reactionary individuals tend to reject "intraception"-self-awareness- in any form, and along with it expression as such, as being all too human. 1O They are the ones who, in a context of general estrangement from art, declare them- selves with particular resentment against modernism. Psychologically they obey defense mechanisms with which a weakly developed ego repudiates whatever dis- turbs its restricted functional capacity and may, above all, damage its narcissism. This psychological posture is that of an "intolerance to ambiguity, " an impa-
1 1 6 0 SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION
tience with what is ambivalent and not strictly definable; ultimately, it is the refusal of what is open, of what has not been predetermined by any jurisdiction, ultimately of experience itself. Immediately back of the mimetic taboo stands a sexual one: Nothing should be moist; art becomes hygienic. Many artistic direc- tions identify with this taboo and with the witch hunt against expression . The anti- psychologism of modernism has shifted its function. Once a prerogative of the avant-garde, which rebelled against lugendstil as well as against a realism pro- tracted by a tum toward inwardness, this antipsychologism was meanwhile socialized and made serviceable to the status quo. The category of inwardness, ac- cording to Max Weber's thesis, is to be dated back to Protestantism, which sub- ordinated works to faith. Although inwardness, even in Kant, implied a protest against a social order heteronomously imposed on its subjects, it was from the be- ginning marked by an indifference toward this order, a readiness to leave things as they are and to obey. This accorded with the origin of inwardness in the labor process: Inwardness served to cultivate an anthropological type that would duti- fully , quasi-voluntarily , perform the wage labor required by the new mode of pro- duction necessitated by the relations of production . With the growing powerless- ness of the autonomous subject, inwardness consequently became completely ideological , the mirage of an inner kingdom where the silent majority are indem- nified for what is denied them socially; inwardness thus becomes increasingly shadowy and empty, indeed contentless in itself. Art no longer wants to accom- modate itself to this situation . Yet art is scarcely imaginable without the element of inwardness. Benjamin once said that in his opinion inwardness could go fly a kite. This was directed against Kierkegaard and the "philosophy of inwardness" that claimed him as their founder, even though that term would have been as anti- pathetic to the theologian as the word ontology. Benjamin had in mind abstract subjectivity that powerlessly sets itself up as substance. But his comment is no more the whole truth than abstract subjectivity is. Spirit-certainly Benjamin's own-must enter itself if it is to be able to negate what is opaque. This could be demonstrated by the antithesis of Beethoven and jazz, a contrast to which many musicians' ears are already beginning to be deaf. Beethoven is, in modified yet determinable fashion , the full experience of external life returning inwardly, just as time-the medium of music-is the inward sense; popular music, in all of its many varieties does not undergo this sublimation and is, as such, a somatic stimu- lant and therefore regressive vis-a. -vis aesthetic autonomy. Even inwardness par- ticipates in dialectics, though not as Kierkegaard thought. The result of the liqui- dation of inwardness was by no means the surfacing of a type of person cured of ideology but rather one who never became an individual in the first place, the type David Riesmann termed "outer-directed. " This casts a reconciling light on the category of inwardness in art. In fact, the rabid denunciation of radically ex- pressive works as being examples of hyperbolic late romanticism has become the predictable babble of all those who favor a return to the pristine. Aesthetic self-
SEMBLANCE AND EXPRESSION 0 1 17
relinquishment in the artwork requires not a weak or confonnist ego but a forceful one. Only the autonomous self is able to tum critically against itself and break through its illusory imprisonment. This is not conceivable as long as the mimetic element is repressed by a rigid aesthetic superego rather than that the mimetic ele- ment disappears into and is maintained in the objectivation of the tension between itself and its antithesis. All the same, semblance is most strikingly obvious in expression because it makes its appearance as if it were illusionless even while subsuming itself to aesthetic semblance; major criticism of expression has been sparked by its perception as theatrics. In the fully administered world, the mimetic taboo-a keystone ofbourgeois ontology-encroached on the zone that had been tolerantly reserved for mimesis, whereby it beneficially revealed human immedi- acy to be a lie. Beyond this, however, the allergy to expression supports that ha- tred of the subject without which no critique of the commodity world would even be meaningful. The subject is abstractly negated. Indeed, the subject-which in compensation inflates itself the more powerless and functional it becomes-is false consciousness the moment it lays claim to expression by feigning a rele- vance that was withdrawn from it. Yet the emancipation of society from the supremacy of its relations of production has as its aim what these relations have to date impeded-the real establishment of the subject-and expression is not sim- ply the hubris of the subject but the lament over its miscarir age as a cipher of its possibility. Certainly. the allergy to expression may be most profoundly legiti- mated by the fact that something in expression tends toward mendacity, regard- less of any aesthetic manipulation. Expression is a priori imitation. Latently im- plicit in expression is the trust that by being spoken or screamed all will be made better: This is a rudiment of magic, faith in what Freud polemically called the "omnipotence of thought. " Yet expression is not altogether circumscribed by the magic spell. That it is spoken, that distance is thus won from the trapped immedi- acy of suffering, transfonns suffering just as screaming diminishes unbearable pain. Expression that has been objectivated as language endures; what has once been said never fades away completely, neither the evil nor the good, neither the slogan of "the final solution" nor the hope of reconciliation. What accedes to lan- guage enters the movement of a humanness that does not yet exist; it is compelled toward language and alive only by virtue of its helplessness. Stumbling along be- hind its reification , the subject limits that reification by means of the mimetic ves- tige, the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of mutilated life , which subverts the subject to ideology. The inextricability of reification and mimesis defines the aporia of artistic expression. There is no general test for deciding if an artist who wipes out expression altogether has become the mouthpiece of reified consciousness or of the speechless, expressionless expression that denounces it. Authentic art knows the expression of the expressionless, a kind of weeping with- out tears. By contrast, Neue Sachlichkeit's polished extirpation of expression con- tributes to universal confonnism and subordinates antifunctional art to a principle
118 0 ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS
that originates entirely in functionality. This form ofreaction fails to recognize in expression what is not metaphorical, not ornamental; the more unreservedly art- works open themselves to this, the more they become depositions of expression and effectively invert Sachlichkeit. At the very least it is evident that antiexpressive and, like Mondrian's, affirmatively mathematized artworks have by no means passed final judgment on expression. If the subject is no longer able to speak directly, then at least it should-in accord with a modernism that has not pledged itself to absolute construction - speak through things, through their alienated and mutilated form.
The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the ? ontemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be com- prehended. What is so resistlessly absorbed as a cliche by the watchword-the absurd-could only be recuperated by a theory that thinks its truth. It cannot sim- ply be divided off from the spiritualization of artworks as counterpoint to that spiritualization; this counterpoint is, in Hegel's words, the ether of artworks; it is spirit itself in its omnipresence and not the intention of the enigma. For in that it negates the spirit that dominates nature, the spirit of artworks does not appear as spirit. It ignites on what is opposed to it, on materiality. In no way is spirit most present in the most spiritual artworks. Art is redemptive in the act by which the spirit in it throws itself away. Art holds true to the shudder, but not by regression to it. Rather, art is its legacy. The spirit of artworks produces the shudder by exter- nalizing it in objects . Thus art participates in the actual movement of history in ac- cord with the law of enlightenment: By virtue of the self-reflection of genius, what once seemed to be reality emigrates into imagination, where it survives by becom- ing conscious of its own unreality . The historical trajectory of art as spiritualiza- tion is that of the critique of myth as well as that toward its redemption: The imag- ination confirms the possibilities of what it recollects. This double movement of spirit in art describes its protohistory, which is inscribed in its concept, rather than its empirical history . The uncheckable movement of spirit toward what has eluded it becomes in art the voice that speaks for what was lost in the most distantly archaic .
Mimesis in art is the prespiritual; it is contrary to spirit and yet also that on which spirit ignites. In artworks, spirit has become their principle of construction, al- though it fulfills its telos only when it emerges from what is to be constructed, from the mimetic impulses, by shaping itself to them rather than allowing itself to be imposed on them by sovereign rule. Form objectivates the particular impulses only when it follows them where they want to go of their own accord. This alone is the methexis of artworks in reconciliation . The rationality of artworks becomes spirit only when it is immersed in its polar opposite. The divergence of the con- structive and the mimetic , which no artwork can resolve and which is virtually the
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 119
original sin of aesthetic spirit, has its correlative in that element of the ridiculous and clownish that even the most significant works bear and that, unconcealed, is inextricable from their significance. The inadequacy of classicism of any persua- sion originates in its repression of this element; a repression that art must mistrust. The progressive spiritualization of art in the name of maturity only accentuates the ridiculous all the more glaringly; the more the artwork's own organization assimilates itself to a logical order by virtue of its inner exactitude , the more obvi- ously the difference between the artwork's logicity and the logicity that governs empirically becomes the parody of the latter; the more reasonable the work be- comes in terms of its formal constitution, the more ridiculous it becomes accord- ing to the standard of empirical reason. Its ridiculousness is, however, also part of a condemnation of empirical rationality; it accuses the rationality of social praxis of having become an end in itself and as such the irrational and mad reversal of means into ends. The ridiculous in art, which philistines recognize better than do those who are naIvely at home in art, and the folly of a rationality made absolute indict one other reciprocally; incidentally, when viewed from the perspective of the praxis of self-preservation, happiness-sex-is equally ridiculous, as can be spitefully pointed out by anyone who is not driven by it. Ridiculousness is the resi- due of the mimetic in art, the price of its self-enclosure. In his condemnation of this element, the philistine always has an ignominious measure ofjustification. The ridiculous, as a barbaric residuum of something alien to form, misfires in art if art fails to reflect and shape it. If it remains on the level of the childish and is taken for such, it merges with the ca1culatedjUn of the culture industry . By its very concept, art implies kitsch , just as by the obligation it imposes of sublimating the ridiculous it presupposes educational privilege and class structure;fun is art's punishment for this. All the same, the ridiculous elements in artworks are most akin to their in- tentionless levels and therefore, in great works, also closest to their secret. Foolish subjects like those of The Magic Flute and Der Freischutz have more truth con- tent through the medium of the music than does the Ring, which gravely aims at the ultimate. In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the pri- mordial world of animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adultsdrive out ofthemjust as they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings have not succeeded in so thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to recapture it and be flooded with joy; the lan- guage of little children and animals seems to be the same. In the similarity of clowns to animals the likeness of humans to apes flashes up; the constellation animal/fool/clown is a fundamental layer of art.
As a thing that negates the world of things, every artwork is a priori helpless when it is called on to legitimate itself to this world; still, art cannot simply refuse the demand for legitimation by pointing to this apriority . It is hard to be astonished by art's enigmaticalness if it is taken neither as a source of pleasure, as it is for those
120 0 ENIGMATICALNESS, TRUTH CONTENT, METAPHYSICS
alien to art, nor as an exceptional realm, as it is for the connoisseur, but as the sub- stance of personal experience; yet this substance demands that the elements of art not be abandoned but secured when art is fundamentally challenged by its experi- ence. An inkling of this is had when artworks are experienced in so-called cultural contexts that are alien or incommensurable to them. In these situations artworks are displayed naked to the test of their cui bono, a test from which they are pro- tected only by the leaky roof of their own familiar context. In such situations the disrespectful question, which ignores the taboo surrounding the aesthetic zone, often becomes fateful to the quality of a work; observed completely externally the artworks' dubiousness is uncovered as relentlessly as when they are observed completely internally. The enigmaticalness of artworks remains bound up with history. It was through history that they became an enigma; it is history that ever and again makes them such, and, conversely, it is history alone-which gave them their authority - that holds at a distance the embarrassing question of their raison d'etre. The enigmaticalness of artworks is less their irrationality than their ratio- nality; the more methodically they are ruled, the more sharply their enigmatical- ness is thrown into relief. Through form, artworks gain their resemblance to lan- guage, seeming at every point to say just this and only this, and at the same time whatever it is slips away.
All artworks-and art altogether-are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art. That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this enigmaticalness from the perspective of language. This characteristic cavorts clownishly; if one is within the artwork, if one participates in its immanent completion, this enigmaticalness makes itself invisible; if one steps outside the work, breaking the contract with its immanent context, this enig- maticalness returns like a spirit. This gives further reason for the study of those who are alien to art: In their proximity the enigmaticalness of art becomes out- rageous to the point that art is completely negated, unwittingly the ultimate criti- cism of art and, in that it is a defective attitude, a confirmation of art's truth. It is impossible to explain art to those who have no feeling for it; they are not able to bring an intellectual understanding of it into their living experience. For them the reality principle is such an obsession that it places a taboo on aesthetic comport- ment as a whole; incited by the cultural approbation of art, alienness to art often changes into aggression, not the least of the causes of the contemporary deaes- theticization of art. Its enigmaticalness may in an elementary fashion confirm the so-called unmusical , who does not understand the " l anguage of music," hears noth- ing but nonsense, and wonders what all the noise is about; the difference between what this person hears and what the initiated hear defines art's enigmaticalness. This is ofcourse not restricted to music, whose aconceptuality makes it almost too obvious. Whoever refuses to reenact the work under the discipline it imposes falls under the empty gaze cast by a painting or poem, the same empty gaze that, in a sense, the art-alien encounter in music; and it is precisely the empty questioning
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 121
gaze that the experience and interpretation o f artworks must assimilate if they are not to go astray; failing to perceive the abyss is no protection from it; however consciousness seeks to safeguard itself from losing its way is fateful. There is no answer that would convince someone who would ask such questions as "Why imi- tate something? " or "Why tell a story as if it were true when obviously the facts are otherwise and it just distorts reality? " Artworks fall helplessly mute before the question "What's it for? " and before the reproach that they are actually pointless. If, for instance, one responded that fictive narration can touch more deeply on the essence of historical reality than can factual reportage, a possible reply would be that precisely this is a matter of theory , and that theory has no need of fiction . This manifestation of the enigmaticalness of art as incomprehension in the face of questions of putatively grand principle is familiar in the broader context of the bluff inherent in the question as to the meaning of life . 1 The awkwardness prompted by such questions can easily be confused with their irrefutability; their level of ab- straction is so remote from what is effortlessly subsumed, that the actual question vanishes. Understanding art's enigmaticalness is not equivalent to understanding specific artworks, which requires an objective experiential reenactment from within in the same sense in which the interpretation of a musical work means its faithful performance.