No More Learning

Positivism draws attention to the dialectical element that no
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artwork is ever pure . For many aesthetic forms , such as opera, the effect was con- stitutive; if the internal movement of the genre compels it to renounce the primacy of effect, then the genre essentially becomes impossible. Whoever naIvely takes the artwork for the pure in-itself, as which all the same it must be taken, becomes the naIve victim of the work as self-posited and takes semblance for a higher real- ity, blind to the constitutive element in art. Positivism is the bad consciousness of art: It reminds art that it is not unmediatedly true.
Whereas the thesis of the projective character of art ignores its objectivity - its quality and truth content- and is unable to conceive an emphatic concept of art, it is important as the expression of a historical tendency. What in philistine fashion it inflicts on artworks corresponds to the positivistic caricature of enlightenment, ofunfettered subjective reason. Reason's social superiority penetrates the works. This tendency , which would like to render artworks impossible through their de- aestheticization, cannot be arrested by insisting that art must exist: Nowhere is that chiseled in stone. The theory of art as a subjective projection ultimately termi- nates in the negation of art, and this must be kept in mind if the theory of projec- tion itself is not to be ignominiously neutralized according to the model of the cul- ture industry. But positivistic consciousness has, as false consciousness, its own difficulties: It needs art as an arena in which it may dispose of what does not have any place in its own suffocatingly narrow space. Moreover, positivism, ever cred- ulously devoted to the factually given, is obliged somehow to come to terms with art, simply because it exists. The positivists try to rescue themselves from this dilemma by taking art no more seriously than does a tired businessman. This al- lows them to be tolerant toward artworks, which, according to the positivist's own thought, no longer exist.
Just how little artworks are subsumed in their genesis, and how much, for this rea- son, philological methods do them an injustice, can be graphically demonstrated. Schikaneder had no need to dream up Bachofen. 3 The libretto of The Magic Flute amalgamates the most disparate sources without unifying them. Objectively, how- ever, the work reveals the conflict between matriarchy and patriarchy, between lunar and solar principle s . This explains the resilience of the text, long defamed as worse than mediocre by pedants. The libretto occupies a boundary line between banality and profundity, but is protected from the former because the coloratura role of the Queen of the Night is not presented as an "evil force . "
Aesthetic experience crystallizes in the individual work. Still, no particular aes- thetic experience occurs in isolation, independently of the continuity of experi- encing consciousness. The temporally sequestered and atomistic is as contrary to aesthetic experience as it is to all experience: In the relation to artworks as monads, the pent-up force of aesthetic consciousness constituted beyond the individual
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work must participate. It is in this sense that "understanding art" is meaningful. The continuity of aesthetic experience is colored by all other experience and by all knowledge , though , of course , it is only confirmed and corrected in the actual con- frontation with the phenomenon.
To intellectual reflection, to taste that considers itself able to judge the matter from above, Stravinsky's Renard may well seem a more suitable treatment of Wedekind's Lulu than does Berg's music. The musician knows, however, how far superior Berg's work is to Stravinsky's and in its favor it willingly sacrifices the sovereignty of the aesthetic standpoint; artistic experience is born out ofjust such conflicts.
The feelings provoked by artworks are real and to this extent extra-aesthetic. By contrast to these feelings, a cognitive posture that runs counter to the observing sub- ject is more applicable, more just to the aesthetic phenomenon , without confusing it with the empirical existence of the observing subject. In that, however, the artwork is not only aesthetic but sub- and supra-aesthetic; in that it originates in empirical layers of life , has the quality of being a thing , a/ait social, and ultimately converges with the meta-aesthetic in the idea of truth, it implies a critique of any chemically pure attitude to art. The experiencing subject, from which aesthetic experience distances itself, returns in aesthetic experience as a transaesthetic subject. The aesthetic shudder once again cancels the distance held by the subject. Although artworks offer themselves to observation, they at the same time disorient the ob- server who is held at the distance of a mere spectator; to him is revealed the truth of the work as if it must also be his own. The instant of this transition is art' s highest. It rescues subjectivity , even subjective aesthetics, by the negation of subjectivity . The subject, convulsed by art, has real experiences; by the strength of insight into the artwork as artwork, these experiences are those in which the SUbject's petrification in his own subjectivity dissolves and the narrowness of his self-positedness is re- vealed. If in artworks the subject finds his true happiness in the moment of being convulsed, this is a happiness that is counterposed to the subject and thus its instru- ment is tears , which also express the grief over one ' s own mortality . Kant sensed something of this in his aesthetic of the sublime , which he excluded from art .
An absence of nruvete-a reflective posture-toward art clearly also requires naIvete, insofar as aesthetic consciousness does not allow its experiences to be regulated by what is culturally approved but rather preserves the force of sponta- neous reaction toward even the most avant-garde movements. However much in- dividual and even artistic consciousness is mediated by society, by the prevailing objective spirit, it remains the geometric site of that spirit's self-reflection and broadens it. NaIvete toward art is a source of blindness; but whoever lacks it to- tally is truly naror w-minded and trapped in what is foisted upon him.
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The "isms" must be defended as watchwords, as witnesses to the universal state of reflection, and, insofar as they function in the formation of movements, as the successors of what tradition once performed. This arouses the rage of the dichoto- mous bourgeois mind. Although it insists on planning and willing everything, under its control art is supposed to be, like love, spontaneous, involuntary , and un- conscious. Historicophilosophically this is denied it. The taboo on watchwords is reactionary .
The concept of the new has inherited what once the individualistic concept of originality wanted to express and which in the meantime is opposed by those who do not want the new,who denounce it as unoriginal and all advanced forms as indistinguishable.
If recent art movements have made montage their principle, subcutaneously all artworks have always shared something of this principle; this could be demon- strated in detail in the puzzle technique of the great music of Viennese classicism, which nevertheless corresponds perfectly with the idea of organic development in that era's philosophy.
The distortion of the structure of history by the parti pris for real or putatively great events also affects the history of art. Indeed, history always crystallizes in the qualitatively new, but the antithesis must also be held in mind: that the sudden appearance of a new quality , the dialectical reversal, is virtually a non-entity . This enervates the myth of artistic creativity. The artist carries out a minimal transition, not the maximal creatio ex nihilo. The differential of the new is the locus of pro- ductivity. It is the infinitesimally small that is decisive and shows the individual artist to be the executor of a collective objectivity of spirit in contrast to which his own part vanishes. This was implicitly recognized in the idea of genius as recep- tive and passive, which opens a view to that in artworks that makes them more than their primary definition, more than artifacts. Their desire to be thus and not otherwise functions in opposition to the character of an artifact by driving it to its extreme; the sovereign artist would like to annul the hubris of creativity. Herein lies the morsel of truth to be found in the belief that everything is always possible. The keys of each and every piano hold the whole Appassionata; the composer need only draw it out, but this, obviously, required Beethoven.
In spite of the aversion to what in modernism is regarded as antiquated, the situa- tion of art vis-a-vis Jugendstil has in no way changed as radically as that aversion would like to suppose. This could explain both the aversion to Jugendstil and the undiminished actuality of Schoenberg's Pierrot, as well as of many works by Maeterlinck and Strindberg, which, though they are not identical with Jugendstil, can nevertheless be attributed to it. Jugendstil was the first collective effort to
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extract from art an otherwise absent meaning; the collapse of this effort paradig- matically circumscribes the contemporary aporia of art. This effort exploded in expressionism; functionalism and its counterparts in nonapplied arts were its ab- stract negation. The key to contemporary anti-art, with Beckett at its pinnacle, is perhaps the idea of concretizing this negation, of culling aesthetic meaning from the radical negation of metaphysical meaning. The aesthetic principle of form is in itself, through the synthesis of what is formed, the positing of meaning even when meaning is substantively rejected. To this extent, whatever it wills or states, art remains theology; its claim to truth and its affinity to untruth are one and the same. This emerged specifically in Jugendstil. The situation culminates in the question of whether, after the fall of theology and in its total absence, art is still possible. But if, as in Hegel-who was the first to express historicophilosophical doubts as to this possibility-this necessity subsists, art retains an oracular qual- ity; it is ambiguous whether the possibility of art is a genuine witness to what endures of theology or if it is the reflection of an enduring spell.
As is evident in its name, Jugendstil is a declaration of permanent puberty: It is a utopia that barters off its own unrealizability .
Hatred of the new originates in a concealed tenet of bourgeois ontology: that the transient should be transient, that death should have the last word.
The idea of making a sensation was always bound up with the effort to epater Ie bourgeois and was adapted to the bourgeois interest of turning everything to a profit .
However certain it is that the concept of the new is shot through with pernicious social characteristics-especially with that of nouveaute-on the market it is equally impossible,eversince Baudelaire, Manet, and Tristan, to dispense with it; efforts to do away with it, faced with its putative contingency and arbitrariness,
have only heightened both.
Ever and again the menacing category of the new radiates the allure of freedom, more compellingly than it radiates its inhibiting, leveling, sometimes sterile aspects.
The category of the new , as the abstract negation of the category of the permanent, converges with permanence: The invariance of the new is its weakness.
Modernism emerged as something qualitatively new, in opposition to exhausted given forms; for this reason it is not purely temporal; this helps to explain why on the one hand it acquired those invariable features for which its critics gladly indict it and why, on the other hand, the new cannot simply be dismissed as being obso-
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lete. In it the inner-aesthetic and the social interlock. The more art is compelled to oppose the standardized life stamped out by the structure of domination , the more it evokes chaos: Chaos forgotten becomes disaster. This explains the mendacity of the clamor about the putative spiritual terror of modern art, clamor that surpasses that terror of the world to which art stands opposed. The terror of a form of reac- tion that puts up with nothing but the new is salutary for the shame it casts on the banality of official culture . Those who embarrass themselves by blathering that art must not forget humanity , or when - in the face of bewildering works - they ask where the message is, will be reluctantly compelled, perhaps even without gen- uine conviction, to sacrifice cherished habits; shame can, however, inaugurate a process in which the external pervades the inner, a process that makes it impos- sible for the terrorized to go on bleating with the others.
It is impossible to consider the emphatic aesthetic idea of the new apart from the industrial procedures that increasingly dominate the material production of soci- ety; whether they are mediated by the exhibition of works, as Benjamin seems to have assumed, remains to be decided. 4 Industrial techniques, however, the repeti- tion of identical rhythms and the repetitive manufacture of an identical object based on a pattern, at the same time contain a principle antithetical to the new. This exerts itself as a force in the antinomy of the aesthetically new.
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Just as there is nothing that is simply ugly, per se, and just as anything ugly can become beautiful through its function, so there is nothing that is simply beautiful: It is trivial to note that the most beautiful sunset, the most beautiful girl , faithfully painted, can become repellent. And yet the element of immediacy in the beautiful, as in the ugly, is not to be suppressed: No lover capable of perceiving distinc- tions-and this capacity is the precondition oflove-will allow thebeauty ofthe beloved to perish. Beauty and ugliness are neither to be hypostatized nor rela- tivized; their relation is revealed in stages where one frequently becomes the op- posite of the other. Beauty is historical in itself as what wrests itself free. 5
Just how little empirical productive subjectivity and its unity converge with the constitutive aesthetic subject or, indeed, with objective aesthetic quality is at- tested by the beauty of many cities. Perugia and Assisi show the highest degree of form and coherence, probably without its ever having been intended or envi- sioned, although it is important not to underestimate the degree of planning even in a second nature that seems organic. This impression is favored by the gentle swell of a mountain, the reddish hue of stones, that is, by the extra-aesthetic that, as material of human labor , is itself one of the determinants of form . Here historical continuity acts as subject, truly an objective spirit that permits itself to be directed by the extra-aesthetic without requiring the individual architect to be conscious of it. This historical subject of beauty also largely directs the work of the individual artist. Although the beauty of these cities seems to be the result of strictly external factors, its source is internal. Immanent historicity becomes manifest, and with this manifestation aesthetic truth unfolds .
The identification of art with beauty is inadequate, and not just because it is too formal. In what art became, the category of the beautiful is only one element, one that has moreover undergone fundamental change: By absorbing the ugly, the concept of beauty has been transformed in itself, without, however, aesthetics being able to dispense with it. In the absorption of the ugly, beauty is strong enough to expand itself by its own opposite .
Hegel was the first to oppose aesthetic sentimentalism that seeks to discern the inherent content of the artwork not in the work itself but rather in its effect. This sentimentalism later became a concern with mood, a concept that has its own historical importance. For better or worse, nothing better defines Hegel's aes- thetics than its incompatibility with the element of an artwork's mood. He insists, as he does throughout his philosophy, on the sturdiness of the concept. This re- dounds to the objectivity of the artwork rather than to its effects or to its merely sensuous facade. The progress that Hegel thus achieved was, however, bought at the price of a certain art-alienness; the objectivity was bought at the cost of reification, an excess of materiality. This progress threatens to set aesthetics back
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to the pre-artistic, to the concrete comportment of the bourgeois, who wants to be able to find a fixed content [lnhalt] in a painting or a play that he can grasp as well as depend on. In Hegel the dialectic of art is limited to the genres and their history, and it is not sufficiently introduced into the theory ofthe individual work. That natural beauty rebuffs definition by spirit leads Hegel, in a short circuit, to disparage what in art is not spirit qua intention. The correlative of intention is reification. The correlative of absolute making is always the made as a fixed object. Hegel mistakes what is not thing-like in art, which is inseparable from the concept of art as being opposed to the empirical world of things. Polemically he attributes what is not thing-like in art to natural beauty as its encumbering indeter- minacy . But it is precisely in this element that natural beauty possesses something without which the artwork would revert back into a nonaesthetic facticity. Those who in experiencing nature are unable to distinguish it from objects to be acted upon- the distinction that constitutes the aesthetic - are incapable of artistic experience. Hegel's thesis, that art beauty originates in the negation of natural beauty , and thus in natural beauty , needs to be turned around: The act that initially gives rise to the consciousness of something beautiful must be carried out in the immediate experience if it is not already to postulate what it constitutes. The con- ception of natural beauty communicates with natural beauty : Both want to restore nature by renouncing its mere immediacy. In this context Benjamin'S concept of aura is important: "The concept of aura proposed above with reference to histori- cal objects may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones . We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance , however close it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon to let one's gaze follow a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow over one- that is to breathe the aura of those mountains, or of that branch. "6 Here what is called aura is known to artistic experience as the atmosphere of the artwork, that whereby the nexus ofthe artwork's elements points beyond this nexus and allows each individual element to point beyond itself. Precisely this constituent of art, for which the existential-ontological term "being attuned" provides only a dis- torted equivalent, is what in the artwork escapes its factual reality, what, fleeting and elusive-and this could hardly have been conceived in Hegel's time-can nevertheless be objectivated in the form of artistic technique. The reason why the auratic element does not deserve Hegel's ban is that a more insistent analysis can show that it is an objective determination of the artwork. That aspect of an artwork that points beyond itself is not just a part of its concept but can be rec- ognized in the specific configuration of every artwork. Even when artworks di- vest themselves of every atmospheric element-a development inaugurated by Baudelaire- it is conserved in them as a negated and shunned element. Precisely this auratic element has its model in nature, and the artwork is more deeply related to nature in this element than in any other factual similarity to nature. To perceive the aura in nature in the way Benjamin demands in his illustration of the concept
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requires recognizing in nature what it is that essentially makes an artwork an art- work. This, however, is that objective meaning that surpasses subjective inten- tion. An artwork opens its eyes under the gaze of the spectator when it emphati- cally articulates something objective, and this possibility of an objectivity that is not simply projected by the spectator is modeled on the expression of melancholy, or serenity, that can be found in nature when it is not seen as an object of action. The distancing that Benjamin stresses in the concept of aura is a rudimentary model of the distancing of natural objects-as potential means-from practical aims. The threshold between artistic and preartistic experience is precisely that between the domination of the mechanism of identification and the innervations of the objective language of objects. Just as the exemplary instance of the philis- tine is a reader who judges his relation to artworks on the basis of whether he can identify with the protagonists, so false identification with the immediately empiri- cal person is the index of complete obtuseness toward art. This false identification abolishes the distance at the same time that it isolates the consumption of aura as "something higher. " True, even an authentic relation to the artwork demands an act of identification: The object must be entered and participated in- as Benjamin says, it is necessary "to breathe its aura. " But the medium ofthis relationship is what Hegel called freedom toward the object: The spectator must not project what transpires in himself on to the artwork in order to find himself confirmed , uplifted, and satisfied in it, but must, on the contrary, relinquish himself to the artwork, assimilate himself to it, and fulfill the work in its own terms. In other words, he must submit to the discipline of the work rather than demand that the artwork give him something. The aesthetic comportment, however, that avoids this, thereby remaining blind to what in the artwork is more than factually the case, is unitary with the projective attitude, that of terre a terre, which characterizes the con- temporary epoch as a whole and deaestheticizes artworks. Correlatively, artworks
become on the one hand things among things and, on the other, containers for the psychology of the spectator. As mere things they no longer speak, which makes them adequate as receptacles for the spectator. The concept of mood, so opposed by Hegel's objective aesthetics, is therefore insufficient, because it is precisely mood that reverses what Hegel calls the truth in the artwork into its own opposite by translating it into what is merely subjective - a spectator' s mode of reaction-and represents it in the work itself according to the model of this sUbjectivity.
Mood in artworks once meant that in which the effect and the internal constitution of works formed a murky amalgam that went beyond their individual elements. As the semblance of sublimity, mood delivered the artwork over to the empirical. Although one ofthe limits ofHegel's aesthetics is its blindness to this elementof mood, it is at the same time its dignity that caused it to avoid the twilight between the aesthetic and the empirical subject.
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Rather than that, as Kant thought, spirit in the face of nature becomes aware of its own SUperiority, it becomes aware of its own natural essence. This is the mo- ment when the subject, vis-a-vis the sublime, is moved to tears. Recollection of nature breaks the arrogance of his self-positing: "My tears well up; earth, I am returning to you. "7 With that, the self exits, spiritually, from its imprisonment in itself. Something of freedom flashes up that philosophy, culpably mistaken, reserves for its opposite , the glorification of the subject. The spell that the subject casts over nature imprisons the subject as well: Freedom awakens in the con- sciousness of its affinity with nature. Because beauty is not subordinate to natural causality imposed by the subject on phenomena, its realm is that of a possible freedom.
No more than in any other social realm is the division of labor in art a plain evil. When art reflects the social coercion in which it is harnessed and by doing so opens up a perspective on reconciliation, it is spiritualization; this spiritualization, however, presupposes the division of manual and intellectual labor. Only through spiritualization, and not through stubborn rank natural growth, do artworks break through the net of the domination of nature and mold themselves to nature; only from within does one issue forth. Otherwise art becomes infantile. Even in spirit something of the mimetic impulse survives, that secularized mana, what moves and touches us.
In many works of the Victorian era, not only in England, the force of sexuality
and the sensuality related to it becomes even more palpable through its con-
cealment; this could be shown in many of Theodor Storm's novellas. In early Brahms, whose genius has not been sufficiently appreciated to this day, there are passages of an overwhelming tenderness, such as could be expressed only by one who was deprived of it. Once again, it is a gross simplification to equate ex- pression and subjectivity. What is subjectively expressed does not need to resem- ble the expressing subject. In many instances what is expressed will be precisely what the expressing subject is not; subjectively, all expression is mediated by longing.
Sensual satisfaction, punished at various times by an ascetic authoritarianism, has historically become directly antagonistic to art; mellifluous sounds, harmonious colors , and suaveness have become kitsch and trademarks of the culture industry . The sensual appeal of art continues to be legitimate only when, as in Berg's Lulu or in the work of Andre Masson, it is the bearer or a function of the content rather than an end in itself. One of the difficulties of new art is how to combine the desideratum of internal coherence, which always imports a certain degree of evi- dent polish into the work, with opposition to the culinary element . Sometimes the work requires the culinary, while paradoxically the sensorium balks at it.
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By defining art as something spiritual, however, the sensual element is not simply negated. Even the insight, hardly anathema to traditional aesthetics, that aestheti- cally only what is realized in sensual material counts, is superficial. What has been attributed to the highest artworks as metaphysical power has, over millennia, been fused with an element of sensuous happiness that autonomous formation has always opposed. It is only by grace of that element that art is intermittently able to become an image of bliss. The comforting motherly hand that strokes one's hair gives sensuous pleasure. Extreme spirituality reverses into the physical. In its parti pris for sensual appearance, traditional aesthetics sensed something that has since been lost, but took it too immediately. Without the harmonious sonority of a stringquartet,the D-flat-majorpassage ofthe slow movement ofBeethoven's op. 59, no. I , would not have the power of consolation: The promise that the content is real-which makes it truth content-is bound up with the sensual. Here art is as materialistic as is all metaphysical truth. That today this element is proscribed probably involves the true crisis of art . Without recollection of this element , how- ever, there would no longer be art, any more than if art abandoned itself entirely to the sensual.
Artworks are things that tend to slough off their reity. However, in artworks the aesthetic is not superimposed on the thing in such a fashion that, given a solid foundation, their spirit could emerge. Essential to artworks is that their thingly structure, by virtue of its constitution, makes them into what is not a thing; their reity is the medium of their own transcendence. The two are mediated in each other: The spirit ofartworks is constituted in their reity, and their reity, the exis- tence of works , originates in their spirit .
As regards form, artworks are things insofar as the objectivation that they give themselves resembles what is in-itself, what rests within itselfand determines itself; and this has its model in the empirical world of things, indeed by virtue of their unity through the synthesizing spirit; they become spiritualized only through their reifica- tion , just as their spiritual element and their reity are melded together; their spirit, by which they transcend themselves, is at the same time their lethality. This they have implicitly always borne in themselves , and ineluctable reflection has exposed it.
Narrow limits are set to the thing character of art. In the temporal arts especially, in spite of the objectivation of their texts , their non-thingly quality survives in the momentariness of their appearance. That a piece of music or a play is written down bears a contradiction that the sensorium recognizes in the frequency with which the speeches of actors on stage ring false because they are obliged to enun- ciate something as if it were spontaneous even though it is imposed by the text. But the objectivation of musical scores and dramatic texts cannot be summoned back to improvisation.
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The crisis of art, which has today reached the point of endangering its very possi- bility , affects both of its poles equally: On the one hand its meaning and thereby essentially its spiritual content; and on the other its expression and thereby its mimetic element. One depends on the other: There is no expression without mean- ing, without the medium of spiritualization; no meaning without the mimetic ele- ment: without art's eloquence,s which is now in the process of perishing.
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Aesthetic distance from nature is a movement toward nature; in this, idealism did not deceive itself. The telos of nature , the focal point toward which the force fields of art are organized, compels art toward semblance, to the concealment of what in it belongs to the external world of things .
Benjamin's dictum-that the paradox of an artwork is that it appears9-is by no means as enigmatic as it may sound. Every artwork is in fact an oxymoron. Its own reality is for it unreal, it is indifferent to what it essentially is, and at the same time it is its own precondition; in the context of reality it is all the more unreal and chimerical . The enemies of art have always understood this better than those of its apologists who have fruitlessly sought to deny its constitutive paradox . Aesthetics is powerless that seeks to dissolve the constitutive contradiction rather than con- ceiving of art by way of it. The reality and unreality of artworks are not layers superimposed on each other; rather, they interpenetrate everything in art to an equal degree. An artwork is real only to the extent that, as an artwork, it is unreal, self-sufficient, and differentiated from the empirical world, of which it neverthe- less remains a part. But its unreality-its determination as spirit-only exists to the extent that it has become real; nothing in an artwork counts that is not there in an individuated form . In aesthetic semblance the artwork takes up a stance toward reality, which it negates by becoming a reality sui generis. Art protests against reality by its own objectivation.
No matter where an interpreter enters his text, he always encounters a boundless profusion of desiderata that he must fulfill, although it is impossible to fulfill any one of them without causing another to suffer; he runs up against the incompati- bility of what the works themselves want in their own terms, and what they want of him; the compromises that result, however, are detrimental because of the indifference inherent in indecision. Fully adequate interpretation is a chimera. This is not the least of what grants primacy to the ideal reading over performing: for reading-and in this it is comparable to Locke's infamous universal triangle- tolerates the coexistence of opposites because it is at once sensuous and nonsen- suous intuition.
This paradox of an artwork becomes apparent in a gathering of devotees around an artist to whom a particular problem or difficulty has been naIvely pointed out in a work in progress, whereupon he turns to his interlocutor with a condescending, desperate smile and replies: "But that's just the trick! " He rebukes one who knows nothing of the constitutive impossibility under which he works, and mourns over the a priori futility of his effort. The fact that he tries it nevertheless is the dignity of all virtuosos despite all the exhibitionism and the straining after effect. Virtuosity should not confine itself to the reproduction of a work but should, rather, fully enter the facture, which it is compelled to do by its sublimation. Virtuosity makes the paradoxical essence of art, the possibility of the impossible, appear. Virtuosos are the martyrs of artworks; in many of their
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achievements, whether those of ballerinas or coloratura sopranos, something sadistic has become sedimented, some traces of the torture required to caryr it out. lt is no coincidence that the name "artist" is borne both by the circus performer and one who has most turned away from effect, who champions the audacious idea of art, to fulfill its pure concept. If the logicality of artworks is also always their enemy, the absurd constitutes the countertendency to logicality even in tradi- tional art, long before it became a philosophical program; this is proof that in art absolute logicality is empty. There is no net under authentic artworks that could
protect them in their fall.
If in an artwork a process of development is objectivated and brought to an equi- librium, this objectivation thereby negates the process and reduces it to a mere as-if; this is probably why in the wake of the contemporary rebellion of art against sem- blance the forms of aesthetic objectivation have been rejected and the attempt was made to replace a merely simulated process of development with an immediate, improvisational process of becoming, even though the power of art, its dynamic element, could not exist without such fixation and thus without its semblance.
Duration of the transient, an element of art that at the same time perpetuates the mimetic heritage, is one of the categories that dates back to primeval times. In the judgment of many authors, the image itself, regardless of the level of differentia- tion of its content, is a phenomenon of regeneration. Frobenius reports of pygmies who "at the moment of sunrise drew the animal that they would later kill in order to resurrect it in a higher sense the following morning after the ritual smearing of the image with blood and hair . . . Thus the pictures of the animals represent their immortalization and apotheosis, effectively raising them into the firmament as eternal stars. "l0 Yet it is apparent that precisely in early history the achievement of duration was accompanied by consciousness of its futility, perhaps even that such duration - in the spirit of the prohibition on graven images - was tied up with a sense of guilt toward the living. According to Walther Resch, the most archaic period was dominated by "a marked fear of portraying human beings. "ll One could well suppose that early on the nonreplicatory aesthetic images were already filtered through a prohibition on images, a taboo: Even the antimagical element of art has a magical origin . This is indicated by the no less ancient "ritual destruction of the image": At the very least "the image should bear marks of destruction so that the animal would no longer 'roam about. '''12 This taboo originates in a fear of the dead, which was a motivation for embalming them in order- so to speak-to keep them alive. There is much to favor the speculation that the idea of aesthetic duration developed out of the process of mummification . This is substantiated by Felix Speiser's research on wood figurines of the New Hebrides,13 to which Fritz Krause refers: ''The line of development led from mummified figures to exact bodily replications in figure and skull statues, and from skulls mounted on poles to
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wooden and tree-fern statues. "14 Speiser interprets this shift as a "transition from the preservation and simulation of the bodily presence of the dead to the symbolic indication of their presence , and this constitutes the transition to the statue in the proper sense of the term. "15 This transition may well be that of the neolithic sepa- ration of material and form, the origin of "signification. " One of the models of art may be the corpse in its transfixed and imperishable form. In that case, the reifica- tion of the formerly living would date back to primordial times, as did the revolt against death as a magical nature-bound practice .
As semblance perishes in art, the culture industry has developed an insatiable illu- sionism, the ultimate form of which Huxley constructed in the "feelies" of his BraveNew World; the allergy to semblance runs in counterpoint to its commercial omnipotence . The elimination of semblance is the opposite of vulgar conceptions of realism, which in the culture industry is the exact complement of semblance.
Ever since the beginning of the modern age and the emergence of the self-reflecting diremption of subject and object, bourgeois reality - in spite of the limitations set by its incomprehensibility - has had a trace of unreality, of the illusory , just as in philosophy reality became a web of subjective determinations . The more irritating this illusoriness, the more obstinately did consciousness veil the reality of the real . Art, on the other hand, posited itself as semblance, far more emphatically than in previous periods, when it was not sharply distinguished from description and re- porting. To this extent it sabotages the false claim to reality of a world dominated by the subject, the world of the commodity. This is the crystallization of art's truth content; it sets reality into relief by the self-positing of semblance. Thus sem- blance serves truth.
Nietzsche called for "an antimetaphysical but artistic" philosophy,16 This would be a mix of Baudelaire's spleen with Jugendstil, with a subtle absurdity: as if art would obey the emphatic claim of this dictum if it were not the Hegelian unfold- ing of truth and itself a bit of the metaphysics Nietzsche condemned. There is noth- ing more anti-artistic than rigorous positivism. Nietzsche knew that well. That he allowed the contradiction to stand without developing it fits well with Baudelaire's cult of the lie and the chimerical, aerial concept of the beautiful i n Ibsen. Nietzsche, that most consistent figure of enlightenment, did not deceive himself that sheer consistency destroys the motivation and meaning of enlightenment. Rather than carrying out the self-reflection of enlightenment, he perpetrated one conceptual coup de main after the other. They express that truth itself, the idea of which kin- dles enlightenment, does not exist without semblance, which it nevertheless wants to extirpate for the sake of truth; with this element of truth art stands in solidarity .
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Art is directed toward truth, it is not itself immediate truth; to this extent truth is its content. By its relation to truth, art is knowledge ; art itself knows truth in that truth emerges through it. As knowledge, however, art is neither discursive nor is its truth the reflection of an object.
Shoulder-shrugging aesthetic relativism is itself reified consciousness; it is not so much a melancholy skepticism conscious of its own incapacity as resentment ofart's claim to truth, a claim that yet alone legitimated that greatness ofartworks without the fetishization of which the relativists would have nothing to discuss. Their comportment is reified in that it is passively external and modeled on con- sumption rather than that it enters into the movement of those artworks in which the question of their truth becomes conclusive. Relativism is the split-off self- reflection of the isolated subject and as such indifferent to the work . Even aesthet- ically it is hardly ever meant in earnest; earnestness is just what it finds unbear- able. Whoever says of an experimental new work that it is impossible to judge such a thing imagines that his incomprehension has effectively annihilated the work. That there are those who perpetually engage in aesthetic arguments, all the while indifferent as to the position they have taken, vis-a-vis aesthetics, is a more compelling refutation of relativism than any philosophical rebuttal: The idea of aesthetic truth finds justice for itself in spite of and in its problematic. However, the strongest support for the critique of aesthetic relativism is the definitiveness of technical questions. The automatically triggered response that technique may indeed permit categorical judgments, but that neither art nor its content do, dog- matically divides the latter from technique . However certain it is that artworks are more than the quintessence of their procedures, which is to say their "technique," it is just as certain that they have objective content only insofar as it appears in them, and this occurs solely by the strength of the quintessence of their technique . Its logic leads the way to aesthetic truth. Certainly no continuum stretches from aesthetic precepts learned in school to aesthetic jUdgment, yet even the disconti- nuity of this trajectory obeys a necessity: The highest questions of the truth of a work can be translated into categories of its coherence. J7 When this is not possi- ble, thought reaches one of the boundaries of human restrictedness beyond the limitation of the judgment of taste .
The immanent coherence of artworks and their meta-aesthetic truth converge in their truth content. This truth would be simply dropped from heaven in the same way as was Leibniz's preestablished harmony, which presupposes a transcendent creator, if it were not that the development of the immanent coherence of artworks serves truth, the image of an in-itself that they themselves cannot be. If artworks strive after an objective truth, it is mediated to them through the fulfillment of their own lawfulness. That artworks fulfill their truth better the more they fulfill themselves: This is the Ariadnian thread by which they feel their way through their
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inner darkness . But this is no self-deception. For their autarchy originated in what they themselves are not. The protohistory of artworks is the introduction of the categories of the real into their semblance. However, the movement of the cate- gories in the autonomy of the work is not defined solely by the laws of this sem- blance; rather, they preserve the directional constants that they received from the external world. The question posed by artworks is how the truth of reality can become their own truth. The canon of this transformation is untruth. Their pure existence criticizes the existence of a spirit that exclusively manipulates its other. What is socially untrue, flawed, and ideological is communicated to the structure of artworks as flawed, indeterminate, and inadequate. For the manner in which artworks react, their objective "attitude toward objectivity," remains an attitude toward reality. I8
An artwork is always itself and simultaneously the other of itself. Such otherness can lead astray, because the constitutive meta-aesthetic element volatilizes the instant one pulls it away from the aesthetic and imagines that one holds it isolated in one's hands.
The recent historical tendency to emphasize the work itself, in opposition to the subject-at least to the subject's manifestation in the work-further undermines the distinction of artworks from reality , in spite of the subjective origin of this ten- dency. Increasingly, works acquire a second-order existence that obscures what is human in them. Subjectivity disappears into artworks as the instrument of their objectivation. The subjective imagination, of which artworks as ever stand in need, becomes recognizable as the turning back of the objective onto the subject and of the necessity of guarding the line of demarcation around the artwork . Imag- ination is the capacity to do this. It shapes what reposes in itself rather than arbitrarily concocting forms, details, fables, or whatever. Indeed, the truth of art- works cannot be otherwise conceived than in that what is transsubjective becomes readable in the subjectively imagined in-itself. The mediation of the transsubjec- tive is the artwork.
The mediation between the content of artworks and their composition is subjec- tive mediation. It consists not only in the labor and struggle of objectivation . What goes beyond subjective intention and its arbitrariness has a correlative objectivity within the subject: in the form of that subject's experiences, insofar as their locus is situated beyond the conscious will. As their sedimentation, artworks are image- less images, and these experiences mock representational depiction. Their inner- vation and registration is the subjective path to truth content. The only adequate concept of realism, which no art today dare shun, would be an unflinching fidelity to these experiences. Provided they go deeply enough, they touch on historical constellations back of the facades of reality and'psychology. Just as the interpreta-
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tion of traditional philosophy must excavate the experiences that motivated the categorial apparatus and deductive sequences in the first place, the interpretation o f a r t w o r k s pe n e tr a t e s t o t h i s s u bj e c t i v e l y e x p e r i e n c e d k e rn e l o f e x p e r i e n c e , w h i c h goes beyond the subject; interpretation thereby obeys the convergence of philoso- phy and art in truth content. Whereas it is this truth content that artworks speak in themselves, beyond their meaning, it takes shape in that artworks sediment his- torical experiences in their configuration , and this is not possible except by way of the subject: The truth content is no abstract in-itself. The truth of important works of false consciousness is situated in the gesture with which they indicate the strength of this false consciousness as inescapable, not in immediately possessing as their content the theoretical truth, although indeed the unalloyed portrayal of false consciousness irresistibly makes the transition to true consciousness.
The claim that the metaphysical content of the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet op. 59, no. 1, must be true provokes the objection that what is true in it is the longing, but that that fades powerlessly into nothingness. If, in response, it were insisted that there is no yeaming expressed in that D-ftat passage, the asser- tion would have an obviously apologetic ring that could well be met by the objec- tion that precisely because it appears as if it were true it must be a work of long- ing, and art as a whole must be nothing but this. The rejoinder would be to reject the argument as drawn from the arsenal of vulgar subjective reason. The auto- matic reductio ad hominem is too pat, too easy, to be an adequate explanation of what objectively appears. It is cheap to present these too facile measures, simply because they have rigorous negativity on their side, as iIlusionless depth, whereas capitulation vis-a-vis evil implies identification with it. The power of the passage in Beethoven is precisely its distance from the subject; it is this that bestows on those measures the stamp of truth. What was once called the "authentic" [echt]19 in art-a word still used by Nietzsche though now unsalvageable-soughttoindi- cate this distance.
The spirit of artworks is not their meaning and not their intention, but rather their truth content, or, in other words, the truth that is revealed through them. The sec- ond theme of the Adagio of Beethoven' s D-minor Sonata, op. 3 1 , no. 2, is not simply a beautiful melody-there are certainly more buoyant, better formed, and even more original melodies than this one-nor is it distinguished by exceptional expressivity . Nevertheless , the introduction of this theme belongs to what is over- whelming in Beethoven's music and that could be called the spirit of his music: hope , with an authenticity [authentizitiit] that-as something that appears aesthet- ically-it bears even beyond aesthetic semblance. What is beyond the semblance of what appears is the aesthetic truth content: that aspect of semblance that is not semblance. The truth content is no more the factual reality of an artwork, no more one fact among others in an artwork, than it is independent from its appearance.
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The first thematic complex of that movement, which is of extraordinary, eloquent beauty , is a masterfully wrought mosaic of contrasting shapes that are motivically coherent even when they are registrally distant. The atmosphere of this thematic complex, which earlier would have been called mood, awaits-as indeed all mood probably does - an event that only becomes an event against the foil of this mood . The F-major theme follows with a rising thirty-second-note gesture . Against the dark, diffuse backdrop of what preceded, the accompanied upper voice that characterizes the second theme acquires its dual character of reconcilia- tion and promise. Nothing transcends without that which it transcends. The truth content is mediated by way of, not outside of, the configuration, but it is not im- manent to the configuration and its elements. This is probably what crystallized as the idea of all aesthetic mediation. It is that in artworks by which they participate in their truth content. The pathway of mediation is construable in the structure of artworks, that is, in their technique. Knowledge of this leads to the objectivity of the work itself, which is so to speak vouched for by the coherence of the work's configuration. This objectivity, however, can ultimately be nothing other than the truth content. It is the task of aesthetics to trace the topography of these elements. In the authentic artwork, what is dominated-which finds expression by way of the dominating principle - is the counterpoint to the domination of what is natural or material. This dialectical relationship results in the truth content of artworks.
The spirit o f artworks i s their objectivated mimetic comportment: I t i s opposed to mimesis and at the same time the form that mimesis takes in art.
As an aesthetic category, imitation cannot simply be accepted any more than it can simply be rejected. Art objectivates the mimetic impulse, holding it fast at the same time that it disposes of its immediacy and negates it. From this dialectic the imitation of reality draws the fatal consequence. Objectivated reality is the cor- relative of objectivated mimesis. The reaction to what is not-I becomes the imi- tation of the not-I. Mimesis itself conforms to objectivation, vainly hoping to close the rupture between objectivated consciousness and the object. By wanting to make itself like the objectivated other, the artwork becomes unlike that other. But it is only by way of its self-alienation through imitation that the subject so strengthens itself that it is able to shake off the spell of imitation. That in which artworks over millennia knew themselves to be images of something reveals itself in the course of history, their critic, as being inessential to them. There would have been no Joyce without Proust, nor Proust without Flaubert, on whom Proust looked down. It was by way of imitation, nOlby avoiding it, that art achieved its autonomy; in it art acquired the means to its freedom.
Art is not a replica any more than it is knowledge of an object; if it were it would be dragged down to the level of being a mere duplication, of which Husser! deliv-
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ered such a stringent critique in the sphere of discursive knowledge. On the con- trary , art reaches toward reality, only to recoil at the actual touch of it. The char- acters of its script are monuments to this movement. Their constellation in the artwork is a cryptogram of the historical essence of reality, not its copy. Such comportment is related to mimetic comportment. Even artworks that announce themselves as replicas are such only peripherally; by reacting to reality they be- come a second-order reality, subjective reflection, regardless whether the artists have reflected or not. Only artwork that makes itself imageless as something existing in itself [achieves the essence, and this requires a developed aesthetic domination of nature] . 20
If the precept held that artists are unknowing to the point of not knowing what an artwork is, this would collide with the ineluctable necessity today of reflection in art; it can hardly be conceived other than by way of the artists' consciousness. Such unknowingness in fact often becomes a blemish in the work of important artists, especially within cultural spheres where art still to some extent has a place; unknowingness, for instance in the form of a lack of taste, becomes an immanent deficiency. The point of indifference between unknowingness and necessary re- flection, however, is technique. It not only permits reflection but requires it, yet it does so without destroying the fruitful tenebrosity of works by taking recourse to the subordinating concept.
The artwork' s enigmaticalness is the shudder, not however in its living presence but as recollection.
The artwork of the past neither coincided with its cultic element nor stood in sim- ple opposition to it. Rather, art tore itself free from cult objects by a leap in which the cultic element was both transformed and preserved, and this structure is repro- duced on an expanding scale at every level of its history . All art contains elements by virtue of which it threatens to fail its laboriously won and precarious concept: The epic threatens to fail as rudimentary historiography, tragedy as the afterimage of a judicial proceeding, the most abstract work as an ornamental pattern , and the realistic novel as protosociology or reportage.
The enigmaticalness of artworks is intimately bound up with history. It was his- tory that once changed them into enigmas and continues to do so; conversely, it is history alone, which invested them with authority, that keeps from them the em- barrassing question oftheirraison d'etre.
Artworks are archaic in the age in which they are falling silent. But when they no longer speak, their muteness itself speaks.
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Not all advanced art bears the marks of the frightening; these marks are most evi- dent where not every relation of the peinture to the object has been severed, where not every relation of dissonance to the fulfilled and negated consonance has been broken off: Picasso's shocks were ignited by the principle of deformation. Many abstract and constructive works lack these shocks; it is an open question whether the force of still-unrealized reality free of fear is active in these works or if- and this may well be the case- the harmony of abstract works is deceptive just as was the social euphoria of the first decades after the European catastrophe; even aes- thetically, however, such harmony is apparently in decline.
Problems of perspective, which were once the decisive agent in the development of painting, may reemerge, this time emancipated from all functions of replica- tion. It is worth considering if it is possible to conceive of absolutely nonrepresen- tational art in the visual domain; if everything that appears, even when reduced to its utmost, does not bear traces of the world of objects; all such speculations become untrue as soon as they are exploited for the purposes of any sort of restoration. Knowledge has its subjective limits in the inability of the knower to resist the temptation of extrapolating the future from his own situation. The taboo on invariants is, however, also an interdiction on such extrapolation. The future indeed is no more to be positively depicted than invariants are to be posited; aes- thetics is concentrated in the postulates of the instant.
To the same extent that it cannot be defined what an artwork is, aesthetics is un- able to renounce the desire for such a definition if it is not to be guilty of making false promises. Artworks are images that do not contain replicas of anything, therefore they are imageless; they are essence as appearance. They do not fulfill the requirements of Platonic archetypes or reflections, especially in that they are not eternal but historical through and through. The pre-artistic comportment that approaches art most closely and ultimately leads to it is a comportment that trans- forms experience into the experience of images; as Kierkegaard expressed it: "My booty is images. " Artworks are the objectivations of images, objectivations of mimesis, schemata of experience that assimilate to themselves the subject that is experiencing.
Forms of the so-called lowbrow arts, such as the circus tableau, in which at the finale all the elephants kneel on their hind legs , while on each trunk stands a grace- fully posed, impassive ballerina, are unintentional archetypal images of what the philosophy of history deciphers in art; from its disdained forms much can be gleaned of art ' s secret which is so well hidden back of its current level of develop- ment, as if art had never been otherwise.
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Beauty is the exodus of what has objectivated itself in the realm of means and ends from this realm.
The idea of an objectivity that is nonobjectivated-and therefore an objectivity that cannot adequately be given in intentions-appears in aesthetic purposeful- ness as well as in the purposelessness of art. But art comes into possession of this idea only by way of the subject, only through that rationality from which purpose- fulness derives. Art is a polarization: Its spark connects a self-alienated subjectiv- ity turned in on itself with what is not organized by rationality; it connects the block that separates the subject with what philosophy once called the in-itself. Art is incommensurable with the realm between these poles , that of constituta .
Kant' s purposefulness without a purpose is a principle that emigrated out of em- pirical reality and the realm of the purposes of self-preservation and found its way into a remote realm, formerly that of the sacred. The purposefulness of artworks is dialectical as the critique of the practical positing of purposes. It takes sides with repressed nature, to which it owes the idea of a purposefulness that is other than that posited by humanity; an idea, obviously, that was undermined by the rise of natural science. Art is the rescue of nature-or of immediacy-through its nega- tion, that is, total mediation. It makes itself like what is free of domination by the limitless domination over its material; this is what is hidden back of Kant's oxymoron.
Art, the afterimage of human repression of nature, simultaneously negates this re- pression through reflection and draws close to nature. The subjectively instituted totality of artworks does not remain the totality imposed on the other, but rather, by its distance from this other, becomes the imaginative restitution of the other. Neutralized aesthetically, the domination of nature renounces its violence. In the semblance of the restoration of the mutilated other to its own form, art becomes the model of the nonmutilated. Aesthetic totality is the antithesis of the untrue whole. If art, as Valery once said, wants to be indebted only to itself, this is because art wants to make itself the likeness of an in-itself, of what is free of domination and disfigurement. Art is the spirit that negates itself by virtue of the constitution of its own proper realm.
Evidence that the domination of nature is no accident of art, no original sin result- ing from some subsequent amalgamation with the civilizing process, is given at the very least by the fact that the magical practices of aboriginal peoples bear in themselves undifferentiatedly the element of the domination of nature: "The pro- found effect produced by the image of animals is simply explained by the fact that the image, by its characteristic features, psychologically exercises the same effect as does the object itself, and so as a result of his psychological alteration the per-
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son believes that he has been touched by magic . On the other hand, from the fact that the motionless image is entirely subject to his own powers, he comes to be- lieve that the represented animal can be tracked and subdued; therefore the image appears to him as a means of power over the animal. "21 Magic is a rudimentary form of that causal thinking that ultimately liquidates magic .
Art is mimetic comportment that for the purpose of its objectivation disposes over the most advanced rationality for the control of its material and procedures. This contradiction is art's answer to the contradiction of the ratio itself. If the telos of reason is a fulfillment that is in-itself necessarily not rational-happiness is the enemy of rationality and purpose, of which it nevertheless stands in need-art makes this irrational telos its own concern. In this, art draws on an unrestrained rationality in its technical procedures, which are, in the supposedly "technical world," constrained by the relations of production and thus remain irrational. - In the age of technology , art i s spurious when it masks universal mediation as a social relation.
The rationality of artworks has as its aim opposition to empirical existence: The rational shaping of artworks effectively means their rigorous elaboration in- themselves. As a result they come into contrast with the world of the nature- dominating ratio, in which the aesthetic ratio originates, and become a work for- themselves. The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination . Even the immanently polemical attitude of artworks against the status quo internalizes the principle that underlies the status quo, and that reduces it to the status of what merely exists; aesthetic rationality wants to make good on the damage done by nature-dominating rationality.
The proscription of the element of willful domination in art is not aimed at domi- nation but at the expiation of domination, in that the subject places the control of itself and its other in the service of the nonidentical .
The category of formation [Gestaltung], which is embarrassing when it is cited as an autonomous ideal, must be supplemented by the concept of the work's struc- ture . Yet the quality of the work is all the higher, the work all the more formed , the less it is disposed over. Formation means nonformation.
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It is precisely the integrally constructed artworks of modernism that starkly illu- minate the fallibility of logicality and formal immanence; to fulfill their concept they must outfox it; this is documented in Klee ' s diary entries. One of the tasks of an artist who insistently seeks the extreme is both to realize the logic of "coming to the end"-Richard Strauss was in this regard strangely insensitive-and to interrupt this logic, to suspend it, so as to cancel its mechanical aspect, its flawed predictability.