No More Learning

Artworks lose themselves in order to find themselves: The form category for this is the episode. In a collection of aphorisms from his ex- pressionist phase published prior to World War I, Schoenberg noted that Ariadne provides no thread to follow through the interior of artworks . 4 This however does not imply aesthetic irrationalism. Their form, their whole, and their logicality are hidden from artworks to the same degree as the elements, the content [Inhalt], desire the whole. Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight of form is most emphatically mani- fest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art forms to a conclusion; in music com- posers often speak of the problem of a finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able to end convincingly, and the continued use of traditional endings only simulate the temporal convergence of the particular ele- ments with the concluding instant as a totality of form. In many modern works that have attracted a large audience, the form was artfully held open because they wanted to demonstrate that the unity of form was no longer bestowed on them. Spurious infinity, the inability to close, becomes a freely chosen principle of method and expression. Beckett's play, which, rather than stopping repeats itself word for word, is a reaction to this; almost fifty years ago, Schoenberg proceeded in similar fashion in the March of his Serenade: After the reprise had been abol- ished, it was resurrected out of desperation. What Lukacs once called the "dis- charge ofmeaning" was the force that allowed the artwork, once it has confirmed its immanent determination, to end on the model of one who dies old, having led a full life . That this is denied artworks , that they can no more die than can the hunter Gracchus, is internalized by them directly as an expression of horror. The unity of artworks cannot be what it must be: the unity of the multiplicitous; in that unity synthesizes, it damages what is synthesized and thus the synthesis. Artworks suf- fer from their mediated totality no less than from their immediateness.
Against the philistine division of art into form and content it is necessary to insist on their unity; against the sentimental view of their indifference in the artwork it is necessary to insist that their difference endures even in their mediation. Not only is the perfect identity ofthe two chimerical, it would not redound to the success of the works: By analogy to Kant's maxim, they would become empty or blind, self- sufficient play or raw empiria. With regard to content [Inhalt] , the concept of ma- terial best does justice to the mediated distinction. According to an almost univer- sally accepted terminology in all the arts, material is what is formed. It is not the same as content [Inhalt], even if Hegel fatefully confounded the two. This can be explicated with regard to music. Its content [Inhalt] is in any case what occurs- partial events, motifs, themes, and their elaboration: changing situations. Content
148 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
is not external to musical time but essential to it, as time is essential to content; content is everything that transpires in time. Material, by contrast, is what artists work with: It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colors, sound s , associations of every sort and every technique ever developed . To this ex- tent, forms too can become material; it is everything that artists encounter about which they must make a decision. The idea, widespread among unreflective artists, of the open eligibility of any and all material is problematic in that it ig- nores the constraint inherent in technical procedures and the progress of material, which is imposed by various materials as well as by the necessity to employ spe- cific materials. The choice of the material, its use, and the limitations of that use , are an essential element of production. Even innovative expansion of the material into the unknown, going beyond the material's given condition, is to a large extent a function of the material and its critique , which is defined by the material itself. The concept of material is presupposed by alternatives such as whether a com- poser works with sounds that are native to tonality and recognizable as its deriva- tives, or whether he radically eliminates them; analogous alternatives in painting are those between the representational and the nonrepresentational, the perspec- tival and the nonperspectival. The concept of material may first have taken con- scious shape in the twenties, if one leaves aside the lingo of singers who, tortured by a sense of the dubiousness of their musicality, exult over their "material. " Since Hegel's theory of the romantic artwork, the error has persisted that along with preestablished overarching forms even the bindingness of the materials with which the forms were concerned has disintegrated; the expansion of available ma- terials, which scorns the old boundaries between the arts, is primarily the result of the historical emancipation of the concept of form in art. This expansion has been much overestimated by those external to it; it is offset by the renunciations de- manded of the artist not only by taste but by the condition of the material. Of all the material that is abstractly employable, only the tiniest part does not collide with the condition of spirit and is as such concretely usable. Thus material is not natural material even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical . Its supposedly sovereign position is the result of the collapse of every ontology of art, which has in tum affected the materials. They are no less dependent on the transformation of technique than is technique on the materials that it manipulates . It is obvious how much a composer who, for instance , works with tonal material receives this material from tradition. If, however, he turns critically against tradi- tion through the use of an autonomous material, one completely purged of con- cepts such as consonance, dissonance, triad, and diatonicism, the negated is never- theless retained in the negation. Such works speak by virtue of the taboos they radiate; the falseness or, at the least, the shock of every triad that they permit makes this obvious enough, and this is the objective cause ofthe comfortably pre- scribed monotonousness of radically modem art. The rigorousness of the most recent developments in music and painting, which right into the smallest detail of
COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 149
the emancipated material ruthlessly eliminates all traces of the traditional and the negated, obeys all the more recklessly-under the illusion of the pure givenness of a material without any intrinsic quality-the historical tendency. Stripping the material of any qualitative dimension, which superficially connotes its dehistori- cization, is itself the material's historical propensity, the propensity of subjective reason. What defines its limits are that it leaves its historical determinations be- hind in the material.
What aesthetic terminology once called subject matter [Stoff] and Hegel the sub- ject [Sujet] is not to be apodictically excluded from the concept of material. All the same, while the concept of subject matter remains a concern of art, in its im- mediacy , as a theme that can be lifted over from external reality and worked upon, it has, since Kandinsky, Proust, and Joyce, incontrovertibly declined. Parallel to the critique of the heterogeneously imposed, the aesthetically unassimilable, dis- content has been growing with the so-called great themes to which Hegel as well as Kierkegaard, and more recently many Marxist theoreticians and playwrights attributed such eminence. The idea that works that occupy themselves with august events - whose sublimity is usually only the fruit of ideology and of respect for power and magnitude - are thereby augmented in their dignity was unmasked once van Gogh painted a stool or a few sunflowers in such a fashion that the images rage with the storm of all those emotions in the experience of which the individual of van Gogh's epochfor the first time registered the historical catastrophe. This having become evident , it could be shown in earlier art too how little its authentic- ity depends on the trumped-up or even actual relevance of its objects . What is the importance of Delft in Vermeer? Does it not hold that-as Kraus wrote, a gutter well painted is of greater value than a badly painted palace: "Out of a loose sequence of events . . . a world of perspectives , mood s , and shocks takes shape for the more pellucid eye, and trashy poetry becomes the poetry of trash, damnable only to that official idiocy that holds a badly painted palace preferable to a well- painted gutter. "5 Hegel's aesthetics of content [lnhalt], an aesthetics of subject matter, in keeping with the spirit of many of his intentions, subscribes undialecti- cally to the objectivation of art by way of a raw relation to objects . Essentially he excluded mimesis from his aesthetics. In German idealism the tum to the object was always coupled with philistinism, as is most crassly obvious in the comments on historical painting in the third book of the World as Will and Representation. In its relation to art, idealism's eternity is unmasked as kitsch, to which he who clings to idealism's inalienable categories is consigned. Brecht ignored this. In his essay "Funf Schwiengkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit" (five difficulties in writing the truth) he concludes: ''Thus, it is for example not untrue to say that chairs provide a place to sit and that rain fall s from above . Many poets write truths of this kind. They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes. For them even what we have called our first difficulty in writing the truth does not exist and yet they have a clear conscience. They produce their daubs
1 50 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
undisturbed by the mighty or by the screams of the ravaged. The absurdity of what they do produces in them a 'deep' pessimism that they sell at a good price and that would actually better suit those who watch these masters and their sales. At the same time it is anything but easy to recognize that their truths are truths about chairs or the rain, since they usually sound completely different, as if they were truths about important things. For the process of artistic production is pre- cisely that of according importance to something. Only by taking a close look does one perceive that they are only saying: 'A chair is a chair' and 'Nobody can change the fact that rain falls from above . ' " 6 This is a blague. It justly provokes the official culture mentality, which has even succeeded in integrating van Gogh's chair as a piece of furniture. Yet if one wanted to extract a norm out of this, it would be merely regressive. There is no point to making threats. A painted chair can actually be extremely significant, to the extent that one does not prefer to avoid this bloated word. Incomparably deeper and socially relevant experiences can be sedimented in the how of a painting than in faithful portraits of generals or revolutionary heros. All paintings of this sort retrospectively take their place in the Galerie des Glaces de Versailles of 1 8 71 , regardless whether the generals , eternalized in historical postures, were to have led red armies that occupy coun- tries in which the revolution never took place . This problematic of thematic mate- rial whose relevance is directly borrowed from reality also befalls the intentions that are injected into the work. However spiritual these ideas may be in them- selves , once introduced into the artwork they become no less subject matter than if they were Meier, the Basel mayor who promises to fetch the coal. As Hegel well knew , what artists can say they say only through the form [Gestaltung] , not by let- ting that form deliver a message . Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say , with the content [Gehalt] of the work. In reaction , the content of the artwork is increasingly lodged in what has not been cathected by the artist's subjective intentions, whereas content is blocked in works in which intention, whether as fabula docet or as philosophical thesis, de- mands primacy. The objection that an artwork is too reflected is not only ideology but has its element of truth in the work's being too little reflected: not reflected against the incursion of its own intention. The philological procedure, which imagines that it grasps securely the content of the work when it grasps its inten- tion, passes judgment immanently on itself in that it tautologically extracts from artworks what was put into them earlier; the secondary literature on Thomas Mann is the most repellent example of this. Granted, this practice is fostered by a genuine tendency that has its source in literature: NaIve immediacy and its illu- soriness has become threadbare for literature, which no longer disavows reflec- tion and is thus compelled to strengthen the dimension of intention. This supplies an interpretive method alien to spirit with an easy surrogate for spirit. It is in- cumbent on artworks, just as occurred in modernism's greatest achievements, to
? COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 151
incorporate the reflexive element by its further reflexivity into the work itself rather than tolerating it in the form of residual subject matter.
However little the intention of artworks is their content [Gehalt] - if only because no intention, however neatly presented, is assured of being realized by the work- still only a stubborn rigorism would disqualify intention as an element of the work. Intentions have their locus in the dialectic between the mimetic pole of art- works and their methexis in enlightenment; intentions have their locus not only in being the subjectively moving and organizing force that is thereupon extinguished in the work but also in the objectivity of the work itself. Because the artwork is not simply inert, intentions are endowed with an independence as specific as that of any other element of the artwork; one would need to ignore the complexion of im- portant artworks for the sake of a thema probandum to deny that, however vari- able historically, their importance stands in relation to intention. If material in the
artwork is truly resistant to the artwork's otherwise pure identity, the inner proc- ess of identity in artworks is essentially that between the material and intention. Without intention, without the immanent form of the principle of identity, form would not exist any more than it would without the mimetic impulse. The surplus of intentions reveals that the objectivity of artworks cannot be reduced simply to mimesis. The objective bearer of intentions, which synthesizes the individual in- tentions of artworks into a whole, is their meaning. It remains relevant in spite of everything problematic inherent to it and in spite of all the evidence that this is not all there is to artworks. The meaning of Goethe's /phigenie is humanity. If this idea were merely intended abstractly by the poetic subject, if it were in Hegel's words simply a "maxim" -as indeed it is in Schiller-it would be irrelevant to the work . In that, however, by means of language, humanity itself becomes mimetic - is itself expressed in the nonconceptual without sacrificing its conceptual ele- ment- meaning achieves a fruitful tension to the work ' s content [Gehalt] , to what has been composed. The meaning of a poem such as Verlaine's "Clair de lune" cannot be univocally established, yet this is not to say that its meaning does not reach beyond the incomparable resonance of the verses. The poem's sensuality is itself an element of intention: Happiness and sadness, which accompany sexuality as soon as it descends into itself and negates spirit as ascetic, are the poem's con- tent [Gehalt]; the flawlessly presented idea of sensuality divorced from sensuous- ness is the meaning. This trait, central to the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art, including Debussy, contains the potential of radical modernism, and there is no lack of actual historical ties . Conversely , it is the start- ing point, though not the telos of criticism, whether the intention is objectivated in what is composed; the fault lines between intention and result, rarely missing from recent art, are no less ciphers of the work's content than is the result. A higher level of critique , however, that of the truth or untruth of the content , often becomes immanent critique through the knowledge of the relation between inten- tion and what has been written, painted, or composed. Intention does not always
1 52 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
miscarry as the result of the inadequate form-giving powers of the subject. The untruth of intention interrupts the objective truth content. If what is supposed to be truth content is in itself untrue, that prohibits inner consistency. Such untruth tends to be mediated by the untruth of the intention, as is apparent at the highest level of form in Wagner's music. -For traditional aesthetics, and to a large ex- tent for traditional art as well, the determination of the totality of the artwork is its determination as a nexus of meaning . The reciprocal relation of whole and parts is supposed to shape the work as something meaningful to such an extent that the quintessence of this meaning coincides with the metaphysical content. Because the nexus of meaning is constituted by the relation of elements - and not in atom- istic fashion in something given that is sensual-what can justly be called the spirit of artworks should be comprehensible in that nexus . That the spirit of an art- work is the configuration of its elements is more than a seductive idea; it attains its truth in the face of all crude reification or materialization of the spirit and content of artworks . Directly or indirectly everything that appears in the work contributes to such meaning, though not all that appears is necessarily of equal importance. T h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f r e l a t i v e i m p o r t a n c e w a s o n e o f t h e m o s t e f fe c t i v e m e a n s f o r aesthetic articulation, as is obvious enough in the differentiation between thetic main events and transitions, and between the essential and accidental yet requi- site elements. These differentiations in traditional art were largely determined schematically. With the critique of schematic organization, the differentiations become dubious: Art tends toward processes in which everything that occurs is equidistant to the midpoint; where everything accidental arouses the suspicion of being superfluously ornamental. This is one of the most imposing difficulties in the articulation of recent art. Art's inexorable self-criticism, the requirement of drossless composition, underscores this difficulty and promotes chaos, the ever lurking precondition of all art. Even in works with the highest level of form, the crisis of differentiation has frequently resulted in a dimension of nondifferentia- tion . Efforts to defend against this have almost without exception, though often la- tently, had recourse to borrowings from the aesthetic resources that they oppose: Even here the total domination of the material and movement toward diffuseness converge .
That artworks, in accord with Kant's magnificently paradoxical formula, are "pur- poseless," that they are separated from empirical reality and serve no aim that is useful for self-preservation and life, precludes calling art's meaning its purpose, despite meaning's affinity to immanent teleology. Yet it becomes ever harder for artworks to cohere as a nexus of meaning. Ultimately they respond to this by rejecting the very concept of meaning. The more the emancipation of the subject demolished every idea of a preestablished order conferring meaning , the more du- bious the concept of meaning became as the refuge of a fading theology. Even prior to Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie, given historical experience, to ascribe any positive meaning to existence. This has consequences that reach deep into
COHERENCE AND MEANING 0 153
aesthetic fonn. When artworks have nothing external to themselves to which they can cling without ideology, what they have lost cannot be restored by any subjec- tive act. It was wiped out by their tendency toward subjectivization, which was no cultural-historical accident but confonns rather with the true state of things. Criti- cal self-reflection, inherent in every artwork, sharpens the work's sensitivity not only toward every element that strengthens traditional meaning but also against the work's immanent meaning and those of its categories that provide meaning. For the meaning that is the synthesis of the artwork cannot merely be something that it has manufactured, its quintessence. At the same time the totality of the work presents meaning and produces it aesthetically, it reproduces it. Meaning is only legitimate in the artwork insofar as it is objectively more than the work's own meaning. I n that artworks relentlessly chip away a t the nexus i n which mean- ing is founded, they tum against this nexus and against meaning altogether. The unconscious labor of the artistic ingenium on the meaning of the work as on some- thing substantial and enduring transcends this meaning . The advanced production of recent decades has become self-conscious of this issue, has made it thematic and translated it into the structure of artworks. It is easy to convict neodadaism of a lack of political import and dismiss it as meaningless and purposeless in every sense of the word . But to do so is to forget that its products ruthlessly demonstrate the fate of meaning without any regard to themselves as artworks. Beckett's oeuvre already presupposes this experience o f the destruction o f meaning a s self- evident, yet also pushes it beyond meaning's abstract negation in that his plays force the traditional categories of art to undergo this experience, concretely sus- pend them, and extrapolate others out of the nothingness. The dialectical reversal that occurs is obviously not a derivative of theology , which always heaves a sigh of relief whenever its concerns are treated in any way, no matter what the verdict, as if at the end of the tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness-the presentation of the world as hell-a light glimmers; Gunther Anders was right to defend Beckett against those who make his works out to be affinnative. 7 Beckett's plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning , for then they would be sim- ply irrelevant. but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history. His work is ruled as much by an obsession with positive nothingness as by the obses- sion with a meaninglessness that has developed historically and is thus in a sense merited. though this meritedness in no way allows any positive meaning to be re- claimed. Nevertheless the emancipation of artworks from their meaning becomes aesthetically meaningful once this emancipation is realized in the aesthetic mater-
ial precisely because the aesthetic meaning is not immediately one with theologi- cal meaning. Artworks that divest themselves of any semblance of meaning do not thereby forfeit their similitude to language . They enunciate their meaningless- ness with the same determinacy as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning. Today this is the capacity of art: Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulates that once constituted the meaning of art-
154 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
works . Works of the highest level of form that are meaningless or alien to mean- ing are therefore more than simply meaningless because they gain their content [Gehalt] through the negation of meaning . Artwork that rigorously negates mean- ing is by this very rigor bound to the same density and unity that was once req- uisite to the presence of meaning. Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning. Although the crisis of meaning is rooted in a problematic common to all art, the failure in the face ofra- tionality, reflection is unable to repress the question whether art does not perhaps, through the demolition of meaning, throw itself into the arms of precisely that which strikes ordinary consciousness as absurd, the positivistically reified con- sciousness. The dividing line between authentic art that takes on itselfthe crisis of meaning and a resigned art consisting literally and figuratively of protocol sen- tences is that in significant works the negation of meaning itself takes shape as a negative, whereas in the others the negation of meaning is stubbornly and posi- tively replicated. Everything depends on this: whether meaning inheres in the negation of meaning in the artwork or if the negation conforms to the status quo; whether the crisis of meaning is reflected in the works or whether it remains im- mediate and therefore alien to the subject. Key events may include certain musical works such as Cage's Piano Concerto, which impose on themselves a law of inex- orable aleatoriness and thereby achieve a sort of meaning: the expression of hor- ror. What governs Beckett's work, certainly, is a parodic unity of time, place, and action, combined with artfully fitted and balanced episodes and a catastrophe that consists solely in the fact that it never takes place. Truly, one of the enigmas of art, and evidence of the force ofits logicality, is that all radical consistency, even that called absurd, culminates in similitude to meaning. This, however, is not confir- mation of metaphysical substantiality, to which every thoroughly formed work would lay claim as confirmation of its illusoriness: Ultimately, art is semblance in that, in the midst of meaninglessness, it is unable to escape the suggestion of mean- ing. Artworks, however, that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their unity; this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity. The relation between the technique of montage and photography is familiar. Montage has its appropriate place in film. The sudden, discontinuous juxtaposition of sequences, editing employed as an artistic means, wants to serve intentions without damaging the intentionlessness of life as it is, which is the ac- tual interest of film. On no account is the principle of montage a trick to integrate photography and its derivatives into art despite the limitations defined by their dependence on empirical reality. Rather, montage goes beyond photography im- manently without infiltrating it with a facile sorcery, but also without sanctioning as a norm its status as a thing: It is photography's self-correction. Montage origi- nated in antithesis to mood-laden art, primarily impressionism. Impressionism dissolved objects - drawn primarily from the sphere of technical civilization or its
COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 155
amalgams with nature-into their smallest elements in order to synthesize them gaplessly into the dynamic continuum. It wanted aesthetically to redeem the alien- ated and heterogenous in the replica. The conception proved ever less adequate the more intense the superiority of the reified prosaic world over the living subject became: The subjectivization of objective reality relapsed into romanticism, as was soon blatantly obvious not only in lugendstil but also in the later stages of authentic impressionism. It was against this that montage protested, which devel- oped out of the pasted-in newspaper clippings and the like during the heroic years of cubism. The semblance provided by art, that through the fashioning of the hetero- geneously empirical it was reconciled with it, was to be broken by the work ad- mitting into itself literal, illusionless ruins of empirical reality, thereby acknowl- edging the fissure and transforming it for purposes of aesthetic effect. Art wants to admit its powerlessness vis-a-vis late-capitalist totality and to initiate its abro- gation. Montage is the inner-aesthetic capitulation of art to what stands hetero- geneously opposed to it. The negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form. In this, montage unconsciously takes its lead from a nominalistic utopia: one in which the pure facts are mediated by neither form nor concept and irremediably divest themselves of their facticity. The facts themselves are to be demonstrated in deictical fashion, as epistemology calls it. The artwork wants to make the facts eloquent by letting them speak for themselves . Art thereby begins the process of destroying the artwork as a nexus of meaning. For the first time in the develop- ment of art , affixed debris cleaves visible scars in the work ' s meaning . This brings montage into a much broader context. All modem art after impressionism, proba- bly including even the radical manifestations of expressionism, has abjured the semblance of a continuum grounded in the unity of subjective experience, in the "stream of lived experience. " The intertwinement, the organic commingling, is severed, the faith destroyed that one thing merges wholly with the other, unless the intertwinement becomes so dense and intricate as to obscure meaning com- pletely . This is complemented by the aesthetic principle of construction , the blunt primacy of a planned whole over the details and their interconnection in the microstructure; in terms of this microstructure all modem art may be called mon- tage. Whatever is unintegrated is compressed by the subordinating authority of the whole so that the totality compels the failing coherence of the parts and thus however once again asserts the semblance of meaning. This dictated unity cor- rects itself in accord with the tendencies of the details in modem art, the "instinc- tual life of sounds" or colors; in music, for example, in accord with the harmonic and melodic demand that complete use be made of the available tones of the chro- matic scale . Certainly , this tendency in tum derives from the totality of the mater- ial, from the available spectrum, and is defined by the system rather than actually being spontaneous. The idea of montage and that of technological construction, which is inseparable from it, becomes irreconcilable with the idea of the radical, fully formed artwork with which it was once recognized as being identical. The
156 0 COHERENCEAND MEANING
principle of montage was conceived as an act against a surreptitiously achieved organic unity; it was meant to shock. Once this shock is neutralized, the assem- blage once more becomes merely indifferent material; the technique no longer suffices to trigger communication between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic, and its interest dwindles to a cultural-historical curiosity. If, however, as in the commercial film, the intentions of montage are insisted upon, they are jarringly heavy-handed. Criticism of the principle of montage has implications for con- structivism, in which montage has camouflaged itself, precisely because construc- tivist form succeeds only at the cost of the individual impulse, ultimately the mimetic element. As a result, constructivism is always in danger of rattling emp- tily. Sachlichkeit itself, as it is represented by constructivism within the bounds of nonfunctional art, is subject to the critique of semblance: What claims to be strictly adequate to its purpose fails because the work's formative process inter- feres with the impulses of what is to be formed; an immanent purposefulness is claimed that is in fact none at all, in that the work lets the teleology of the particu- lar elements atrophy. Sachlichkeit turns out to be ideology: The drossless unity to which Sachlichkeit or the technical artwork pretends is never achieved. In those- admittedly minimal-hollows that exist between all particular elements in con- structivist works, what has been standardized and bound together breaks apart in just the same way as do suppressed individual interests under total administration. After the default of any higher, subordinating jurisdiction, the process between the whole and the particular has been turned back to a lower court, to the impulse of the details themselves, in accord with the nominalistic situation. At this point, art is conceivable only on the condition that any pregiven subordinating standard be excluded. The blemishes that indelibly mark purely expressive, organic works offer an analogy to the antiorganic praxis of montage. This brings an antinomy into focus. Artworks that are commensurable to aesthetic experience are meaning- ful insofar as they fulfill an aesthetic imperative: the requirement that everything be required. This ideal, however, is directly opposed by the development that it it- self set in motion. Absolute determination-which stipulates that everything is important to an equal degree and that nothing may remain external to the inner nexus of the work-converges, as Gyorgy Ligeti perceived, with absolute arbi- trariness. This gnaws away retrospectively at aesthetic lawfulness. It always has an element of positedness, of game rules and contingency. Since the beginning of the modem age, most notably in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the early English novel, art has absorbed contingent elements of landscape and fate that were not as such construable out of any overarching ordo or idea of life in order to be able to grant them meaning freely within the aesthetic continuum. Ultimately, h o w e v e r , t h e i m p o s s i b i l i t y o f a n y s u b j e c t i v e l y e s t a b l i s h e d o bj e c t i v i t y o f m e a n i n g , which was hidden over the long epochs of the rise of the bourgeoisie, abandoned the nexus of meaning itself to that very contingency whose mastery once defined form. The development toward the negation of meaning is what meaning de-
COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 157
served.
However, though this development is inevitable and has its own truth, it is accompanied by a hostility to art that is, although not to the same extent, narrow- mindedly mechanistic and, in terms of its propensity, reprivatizing; this develop- ment is allied with the eradication of aesthetic subjectivity by virtue of its own logic. Subjectivity is made to pay the price for the production of the untruth of aesthetic semblance. Even so-called absurd literature participates in this dialectic in the work of its most important representatives, in that as a nexus of meaning organized teleologically in itself it expresses the absence of meaning and thus through determinate negation maintains the category of meaning; this is what makes its interpretation possible, indeed, demands it.
Categories such as unity, or even harmony, have not tracelessly vanished as a re- sult of the critique of meaning . The determinate antithesis of individual artworks toward empirical reality furthers the coherence of those artworks. Otherwise the gaps in the work's structure would be invaded, as occurs in montage, by the un- wieldy material against which it protects itself. This is what is true in the tradi- tional concept of harmony. What survives of this concept after the negation of the culinary has retracted to the category of the whole, even though the whole no longer takes precedence over the details. Although art revolts against its neutral- ization as an object of contemplation, insisting on the most extreme incoherence and dissonance, these elements are those of unity; without this unity they would not even be dissonant. Even when art unreservedly obeys the dictates of inspira- tion , the principle of harmony , metamorphosed to the point of unrecognizability, is at work, because inspiration, if it is to count, must gel; that tacitly presupposes an element of organization and coherence, at least as a vanishing point. Aesthetic experience, no less in fact than theoretical experience, is constantly made aware that inspirations and ideas that do not gel impotently dissipate. Art's paratactical logicality consists in the equilibrium of what it coordinates, a homeostasis in which the concept of aesthetic harmony is sublimated as a last resort. With regard to its elements, such aesthetic harmony is negative and stands in a dissonant re- lation to them: They undergo something similar to what individual tones once underwent in the pure consonance of a triad. Thus aesthetic harmony qualifies in its own right as an element. The mistake of traditional aesthetics is that it exalts the relationship of the whole to the parts to one of entire wholeness, to totality, and hoists it in triumph over the heterogeneous as a banner of illusory positivity . The ideology of culture , in which unity , meaning, and positivity are synonyms, in- evitably boils down to a laudatio temporis actio As the sermon goes, society once enjoyed a blessed closure when every artwork had its place, function, and legiti- mation and therefore enjoyed its own closure, whereas today everything is con- structed in emptiness and artworks are internally condemned to failure. However transparent the tenor of such ideas , which invariably maintain an all too secure distance from art and falsely imagine that they are superior to inner-aesthetic necessities, it is better to follow up what is insightful in them rather than to brush
158 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
them aside on the basis of the role they play, since failure to investigate them might contribute to their preservation. On no account does an artwork require an a priori order in which it is received, protected, and accepted. If today nothing is harmonious, this is because harmony was false from the beginning. The closure of the aesthetic , ultimately of the extra-aesthetic , system of reference does not neces- sarily correspond to the dignity of the artwork. The dubiousness of the ideal of a closed society applies equally to that of the closed artwork . It is incontestable that artworks have, as die-hard reactionaries never cease to repeat, lost their social em- beddedness. The transition from this security into the open has become, for them, a horror vacui; that they address an anonymous and ultimately nonexistent audi- ence has not been just a blessing, not even immanently: not for their authenticity and not for their relevance. What ranks as problematic in the aesthetic sphere has its origin here; the remainder became the plunder of boredom. Every new art- work, if it is to be one, is exposed to the danger of complete failure. If in his own time Hermann Grab praised the preformation of styIe in the keyboard music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because it precluded anything obviously bad, it could be rejoined that this style just as certainly excluded the possibility of what is emphatically good. Bach was so incomparably superior to the music that preceded him and that of his epoch because he broke through this preformation. Even the Lukacs of The Theory of the Novel had to admit that the artworks that came after the end of the supposedly meaning-filled age had gained infinitely in richness and depth. S What speaks for the survival of the concept of harmony as an element is that artworks that remonstrate against the mathematical ideal of har- mony and the requirement of symmetrical relations, striving rather for absolute asymmetry, fail to slough off all symmetry. In terms of its artistic value, asymme- try is only to be comprehended in its relation to symmetry; this has recently been confirmed by what Kahnweiler has called the phenomena of distortion in Picasso. Similarly, new music has shown reverence for the tonality that it abolished through the extreme sensitivity that it developed toward its rudiments. This is documented by Schoenberg's ironic comment from the early years of atonality that the "Mondfteck" of Pierrot lunaire was composed according to the strict rules of counterpoint, which only permitted prepared consonants and then only on unaccented beats . The further real domination of nature progresses, the more painful it becomes for art to admit the necessity of that progress within itself. In the ideal of harmony, art senses acquiescence to the administered world , even though art's opposition to this world continues, with steadily increasing autonomy, the domination of nature. Art concerns itself as much as it is contrary to itself. Just how much these innervations of art are bound up with its position in reality could be viscerally sensed in the bombed German cities of the postwar years . In the face of actual chaos the optical order that the aesthetic sensorium had long ago rejected once again became intensely alluring. However, rapidly advancing nature, the
vegetation in the ruins , brought all vacation-minded romanticization of nature to a
COHERENCE AND MEANING 0 159
deserved end. For a brief historical moment what traditional aesthetics called "satisfying" harmonic and symmetrical relations returned. When traditional aes- thetics, Hegel's included, praised harmony in natural beauty, it projected the self- satisfaction of domination onto the dominated. What is qualitatively new in recent art may be that in an allergic reaction it wants to eliminate harmonizations even in their negated form, truly the negation of negation with its own fatality: the self- satisfied transition to a new positivity, to the absence of tension in so many paint- ings and compositions of the postwar decades. False positivity is the technologi- cal locus of the loss of meaning. What during the heroic years of modem art was perceived as its meaning maintained the ordering elements of traditional art as de- terminately negated; their liquidation results in a smoothly functioning but empty identity. Even artworks freed from harmonistic-symmetrical ideas are formally characterized by similarity and contrast, static and dynamic, exposition, transi- tion, development, identity, and return. Works are unable to wipe out the differ- ence between the first appearance of an element and its repetition , no matter how modified that may be. The capacity to sense and employ harmonic and symmetri- cal relations in their most abstract form has become progressively more subtle. Whereas in music a more or less tangible reprise was once required to establish symmetry, now a vague similarity of tone color at various points may suffice. Dynamic freed from every static reference and no longer discernible as such by its contrast to something fixed, is transformed into something that hovers and no longer has direction. In the manner of its appearance, Stockhausen's Zeitmaj3e evokes a through-composed cadence, a fully presented yet static dominant. Yet today such invariants become what they are only in the context of change; who- ever tries to distill them from the dynamic complexion of history or from the indi- vidual work thereby misrepresents them.
Because the concept of spiritual order is itself worthless, it cannot be transposed from cultural cogitations to art. Opposites are intermixed in the ideal of the clo- sure of the artwork: The irrevocable compulsion toward coherence, the ever fragile utopia of reconciliation in the image , and the longing of the objectively weakened subject for a heteronomous order, a constant of German ideology. Temporarily deprived of any direct satisfaction, authoritarian instincts revel in the imago of an absolutely closed culture where meaning is guaranteed. Closure for its own sake, independent of truth content and what this closure is predicated on, is a category that in fact deserves the ominous charge of formalism. Certainly this does not mean that positive and affirmative artworks, virtually the whole store of tradi- tional art, are to be dismissed or defended on the basis of the all too abstract argu- ment that, given their abrupt opposition to empirical life. they too are critical and negative . The philosophical critique of unreflective nominalism prohibits any claim that the trajectory of progressive negativity . the negation of objectively binding meaning, is that of unqualified progress in art. However much a song by Webern is more thoroughly constructed, the universality of the language of Schubert's
160 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
Winterreise secures for it an element of superiority. Though it is nominalism that helped art achieve its language in the first place, still there is no language without the medium of a universality beyond pure particularization , however requisite the latter. This overarching universality necessarily bears a degree of affirmation: This can be sensed in the word understanding. Affirmation and authenticity are amalgamated to no small degree. Yet this is no argument against any individual work; at most it is an argument against the language of art as such. There is no art that is entirely devoid of affirmation, since by its very existence every work rises above the plight and degradation of daily existence. The more binding art is to itself, the richer, denser, and more unified its works, the more it tends toward affir- mation-of whatever stamp-by suggesting that its own qualities are those of a world existing in itself beyond art. This apriority of the affirmative is art's ideo- logical dark side. It projects the reflection of possibility onto the existing even as the latter's determinate negation. This element of affirmation withdraws from the immediacy of artworks and what they say and becomes the fact that they continue to speak at allY That the world spirit never made good on its promise has the effect of lending the affirmative works of the past a touching quality rather than ensuring that they remain truly ideological; today, indeed, what appears evil in consummate works is their own consummateness as a monument to force rather than a transfiguration that is too transparent to spur any opposition. According to cliche, great works are compelling. In being so, they cultivate coercion to the same extent that they neutralize it; their gUilt is their guiltlessness. Modem art, with its vulnerability, blemishes, and fallibility, is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: It is the critique of suc- cess. It is predicated on the recognition of the inadequacy of what appears to be adequate; this is true not only with regard to its affirmative essence but also in that in its own terms it is not what it wants to be. Instances are the jigsaw-puzzle aspects ofmusical classicism-the mechanical moments in Bach's technique, the top-down construction in the paintings of the masters-which reigned for cen- turies under the name composition before , as Valery noted , suddenly becoming a matter of indifference with the rise of impressionism.
Art ' s affirmative element and the affirmative element of the domination of nature are one in asserting that what was inflicted on nature was all for the good; by re- enacting it in the realm of imagination, art makes it its own and becomes a song of triumph. In this, no less than in its silliness, art sublimates the circus. In doing so, art finds itself in inextricable conflict with the idea of the redemption of sup- pressed nature. Even the most relaxed work is the result of a ruling tension that turns against the dominating spirit that is tamed in becoming the work. Proto- typical of that is the concept of the classical. The experience of the model of all classicism-Greek sculpture-may retrospectively undermine confidence in it, as well as in later epochs. Classical art relinquished the distance to empirical exis- tence that had been maintained by archaic images and carvings. According to tra-
COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 161
ditional aesthetics, classical sculpture aimed at the identity of the universal and the particular-the idea and the individual-because already it could no longer depend on the sensual appearance of the idea. If the idea was to appear in sensual form, it would have to integrate the empirically individuated world of appearance with its principle of form. This sets a limit to full individuation, however; prob- ably Greek classicism had not yet even experienced individuality; this occurred first, in concordance with the direction of social development, in Hellenic sculp- ture . The unity of the universal and the particular contrived by classicism was al- ready beyond the reach of Attic art, let alone the art of later centuries . This is why classical sculptures stare with those empty eyes that alarm-archaically-instead of radiating that noble simplicity and quiet grandeurlO projected onto them by eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Today what is compelling in antiquity is fun- damentally distinct from the correspondence that developed with European classi- cism in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, even in that of Baudelaire . Whoever does not, in the guise of the archaeologist or philologist, sign a covenant with antiquity-which certainly since the rise of humanism has ever and again shown itself not to be disdained-will not find the normative claim of antiquity compelling. Without protracted study, scarcely any of it speaks, and the quality of the works themselves is certainly not beyond question. What is overwhelming is the level of form . Scarcely anything vulgar or barbaric seems to have been passed down, not even from the imperial age, even though there the beginnings of mass production are unmistakable. The floor mosaics of the villas in Ostia, which were presumably meant to be rented, are based on a single model. Ever since Attic clas-
sicism, the real barbarism of antiquity-the slavery, genocide, and contempt for human life-left few traces in art; just how chaste it kept itself, even in "barbaric cultures," does not redound to its credit. The formal immanence of antique art is probably to be explained by the fact that the sensual world had not yet been debased by sexual taboos, which would come to encompass a sphere reaching far beyond its own immediate area; Baudelaire's classicist longing is precisely for that. In capitalism, what forces art against art into an alliance with the vulgar is not only a function of commercialism, which exploits a mutilated sexuality, but equally the dark side of Christian inwardness. The concrete transience of the clas- sical, however, which Hegel and Marx did not experience, exposes the transience of its concept and the norms deriving from it. The dilemma between superficial classicism and the demand that a work be coherent is apparently not one that arises from contrasting true classicism with plaster frauds. But this contrast is no more fruitful than that between modem and modernistic. What is excluded in the name of a putative authenticity as its degenerate form is usually contained in the former as its ferment, the excision of which leaves it sterile and harmless. The concept of classicism stands in need of differentiation: It is worthless so long as in peaceful juxtaposition it lays out in state Goethe's /phigenie and Schiller's Wallenstein. In popular usage, the concept of classicism means social authority,
162 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
achieved for the most part through economic control mechanisms; it is fitting that Brecht was no stranger to this usage. Classicism of this sort should rather be held against artworks , yet it is so external to them that by way of all sorts of medi- ations even authentic works may be bestowed with the accolade. The classical also refers to a standard of style, without its being thereby possible to distinguish between the model, its legitimate appropriation, and fruitless imitation as con- clusively as would suit that common sense that assumes it can knowingly play off the classical against classicism. Mozart would be inconceivable apart from the classicism of the last years of the eighteenth century , with its stylistic imitation of the ancients, yet the trace of these quoted norms in his music provides no basis for any convincing objection to the specific quality of the classical Mozart. Ulti- mately, to call a work classical refers to its immanent success, the uncoerced yet ever fragile reconciliation of the one and the multiplicitous. It has nothing to do with style and mentality, and everything to do with accomplishment; here Valery ' s comment applies that even a romantic artwork , successfully brought off, is by dint of its success classical. ll This concept of the classical is strung taut to the highest degree; it alone is worthy of critique . The critique of the classi- cal, however, is more than the critique of those formal principles by which the classical has , for the most part, been manifest. The ideal of form, which is identi- fied with classicism, is to be translated back into content [Inhalt] . The purity of form is modeled on the purity of the subject, constituting itself, becoming con- scious of itself, and divesting itself of the nonidentical: It is a negative relation to the nonidentical . Yet it implies the distinction of form from content, a distinction concealed by the classical ideal. Form is constituted only through dissimilarity, only in that it is different from the nonidentical; in form's own meaning , the dualism persists that form effaces. The countermovement to myth-a countermovement that classicism shares with the acme of Greek philosophy-was turned directly against the mimetic impulse. Mimesis was displaced by objectifying imitation. This countermovement thereby easily succeeded in subsuming art to Greek en- lightenment and making taboo that by which art takes the side of the suppressed against the domination of the imposed concept or of what slips through domina- tion's narrow mesh. Though in classicism the subject stands aesthetically upright, violence is done to it, to that eloquent particular that opposes the mute universal. In the much admired universality of the classical work the pernicious universality of myth-the inescapability of the spell-is perpetuated as the norm of the proc- ess of formation. In classicism, where the autonomy of art originated, art renounces itself for the first time . It is no accident that since that moment all classicisms have made ready alliance with science. To this day, the scientific mentality has har- bored an antipathy toward art that refuses voluntary subservience to categorial thought and the desiderata of clear-cut divisions . Whatever proceeds as if there is no antinomy is antinomic and degenerates into what bourgeois phraseology is always ready to dub "formal perfection," about which nothing more need be said.
SUBJECT-OBJECT 0 163
It is not because of an irrational mentality that qualitatively modern movements frequently correspond, in Baudelaire's sense, with archaic, preclassical move- ments. They are, admittedly, no less exposed to the reactionary than is classicism by the delusion that the attitude to reality manifest in archaic works , from which the emancipated subject wrested itself, is to be reasserted, regardless of what has historically transpired. The sympathy of the modern with the archaic is not repres- sively ideological only when that sympathy turns toward what classicism dis- carded along the course of its development and refuses to endorse the pernicious pressure from which classicism freed itself. But the one is rarely to be found with- out the other. In place of the identity of the universal and the particular, classical works provide its abstract logical radius, effectively a hollow form hopelessly awaiting specification. The fragility of the classical paradigm gives the lie to its paradigmatical status and thus to the classical ideal itself.
Contemporary aesthetics is dominated by the controversy over whether it is sub- jective or objective. These terms, however, are equivocal. Variously the contro- versy may focus on the conclusion drawn from SUbjective reactions to artworks, in contrast to the intentio recta toward them, the intentio recta being considered precritical according to the current schema of epistemology . Or the two concepts could refer to the primacy of objective or subjective elements in the artworks
themselves, in keeping, for instance, with the distinction made in the history of ideas between classical and romantic . Or, lastly , the issue may be the objectivity of the aesthetic judgment of taste. These various meanings need to be distin- guished from each other. With regard to the first, the direction of Hegel ' s aesthet- ics was objective, whereas with regard to the second, his aesthetics probably em- phasized subjectivity more decisively than did that of his predecessors , for whom the participation of the subject in the effect on an observer was limited even in the case of an ideal or transcendental observer. For Hegel, the subject-object dialectic transpires in the object itself. The relation of subject and object in the artwork too must not be forgotten, insofar as it is concerned with objects. This relation changes historically yet persists even in nonrepresentational works, for they take up an attitude to the object by placing it under a taboo. Still, the starting point of the Critique ofJudgment was not simply inimical to an objective aesthetics. Its force was that, as throughout Kant's theories, it was not comfortably installed in any ofthe positions marked out by the system's strategies. Insofar as according to his theory aesthetics is constituted by the subjective judgment of taste, this judg- ment necessarily becomes not only a constituens of the objective work but rather bears in itself an objective necessity, however little this necessity can be reduced to universal concepts. Kant envisioned a subjectively mediated but objective aes- thetics . The Kantian concept of the judgment of taste , by its subjectively directed query, concerns the core of objective aesthetics: the question of quality-good
164 D SUBJECT-OBJECT
and bad, true and false-in the artwork. The subjective query is itself more aes- thetic than is the epistemological intentio obliqua because the objectivity of the artwork is mediated in a manner that is qualitatively different from the objectivity ofknowledge,beingmediatedmore specificallythroughthesubject. Itisvirtually tautological to claim that the determination whether an artwork is an artwork depends on the judgment whether it is, and that the mechanism of such judgments , far more than any investigation of the power ofjudgment as a psychic "ability ," is the theme of the work . "The definition of taste on which I am basing this analysis is that it is the ability tojudge the beautiful. But we have to analyze judgments of taste in order to discover what is required for calling an object beautiful. "1 The canon of the work is the objective validity of the judgment of taste that, while af- fording no guarantee, is nevertheless stringent. The situation of all nominalist art is thus prepared. Analogously with the critique of reason, Kant would like to ground aesthetic objectivity in the subject rather than to displace the former by the latter. Implicitly he holds that the element that unifies the objective and the sub- jective is reason, a subjective ability at the same time that, by virtue of its attrib- utes of necessity and universality, it is the exemplar of all objectivity. For Kant, even the aesthetic is subordinated to the primacy of discursive logic: "I have used the logical functions of judging to help me find the elements that judgment takes into consideration when it reflects (since even a judgment of taste still has refer- ence to the understanding) . I have examined the element of quality first, because an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned first with it. "2 The strongest buttress of subjective aesthetics , the concept of aesthetic feeling, derives from ob- jectivity , not the reverse . Aesthetic feeling says that something is thus , that some- thing is beautiful; Kant would have attributed such aesthetic feeling, as "taste," exclusively to one who was capable of discriminating in the object. Taste is not defined in Aristotelian fashion by sympathy and fear, the affects provoked in the viewer. The contamination of aesthetic feeling with unmediated psychological emotions by the concept of arousal misinterprets the modification of real experi- ence by artistic experience. It would otherwise be inexplicable why people expose themselves to aesthetic experience in the first place. Aesthetic feeling is not the feeling that is aroused: It is astonishment vis-a-vis what is beheld rather than vis- a-vis what it is about; it is a being overwhelmed by what is aconceptual and yet determinate , not the subjective affect released, that in the case of aesthetic experi- ence may be called feeling. It goes to the heart of the matter, is the feeling for it and not a reflex of the observer. The observing subjectivity is to be strictly distin- guished from the subjective element in the object, that is, from the object's ex- pression as well as from its subjectively mediated form. The question, however, of what is and what is not an artwork cannot in any way be separated from the fac- Ulty ofjudging, that is, from the question of quality, of good and bad. The idea of a bad artwork has something nonsensical about it: If it miscarries, if it fails to achieve its immanent constitution, it fails its own concept and sinks beneath the
SUBJECT-OBJECT 0 165
apriori ofart. In art,judgments ofrelative merit, appeals to fairness and toleration of the half-finished , all commonsense excuses and even that of humanity , are false; their indulgence damages the artwork by implicitly liquidating its claim to truth. As long as the boundary that art sets up against reality has not been washed away , tolerance for bad works-borrowed from reality-is a violation of art.
To be able to say with good reason why an artwork is beautiful, true, coherent, or legitimate does not mean reducing it to its universal concepts , even if this opera- tion-which Kant both desired and contested-were possible. In every artwork, and not only in the aporia of the faculty of reflective judgment, the universal and the particular are densely intertwined. Kant touches on this when he defines the beautiful as "that which pleases universally without requiring a concept. "3 This universality, in spite of Kant's desperate effort, cannot be divorced from neces- sity; that something "pleases universally" is equivalent to the judgment that it must please each and every person, for otherwise it would be merely an empirical statement. Yet universality and implicit necessity remain ineluctable concepts, and their unity, as Kant conceived it, in the act ofpleasing is external to the work. The requirement of the subsumption of particulars to the unifying concept trans- gresses against the idea of conceptualization from within that, by means of the concept of finality , was to correct in both parts of the Critique of Judgment the classificatory method of "theoretical," natural-scientific reason that emphatically rejects knowledge of the object from within. In this regard, Kant's aesthetics is a hybrid defenselessly exposed to Hegel's critique. His advance must be emanci- pated from absolute idealism; this is the task that today confronts aesthetics. The ambivalence ofKant's theory, however, is defined by his philosophy as a whole, in which the concept of purpose only extends the category into its regulative use and thus to this extent also circumscribes it. He knows what it is that art shares with discursive knowledge , but not that whereby art diverges qualitatively from it; the distinction becomes the quasi-mathematical one between the finite and the in- finite . No single rule by which the judgment of taste must subsume its objects, not even the totality of these rules, has anything to say about the dignity of an artwork. So long as the concept of necessity, as constitutive of aesthetic judgment, is not reflected into itself, it simply reproduces the deterministic mechanism of empiri- cal reality, that mechanism that itself only returns in artworks in a shadowy and modified form; yet the stipulation that beauty be universally pleasing presupposes a consent that is, though without admitting it, subordinate to social convention. If, however, these two elements are harnessed together in the intelligible realm then Kant's doctrine forfeits its content [Inhalt] . 1t is possible concretely to conceive of artworks that fulfill the Kantian judgment of taste and nevertheless miss the mark . Other works , indeed new art as a whole, contradict that judgment and are hardly universally pleasing, and yet they cannot thereby be objectively disqualified as art. Kant achieves his goal of the objectivity of aesthetics, just as he does that of the objectivity of ethics, by way of universally conceptual formalization. This formal-
? 166 0 SUBJECT-OBJECT
ization is, however, contrary to aesthetic phenomena as what is constitutively particular. What each artwork would need to be according to its pure concept is essential to none. Fonnalization, an act of sUbjective reason, forces art back into precisely that merely subjective sphere-ultimately that of contingency-from which Kant wanted to wrest it and which art itself resists. As contrary poles, sub- jective and objective aesthetics are equally exposed to the critique of a dialectical aesthetics: the fonner because it is either abstractly transcendental or arbitrary in its dependence on individual taste; the latter because it overlooks the objective mediatedness of art by the subject. In the artwork the subject is neither the ob- server nor the creator nor absolute spirit, but rather spirit bound up with, prefonned and mediated by the object.
For the artwork and thus for its theory , subject and object are its own proper ele- ments and they are dialectical in such a fashion that whatever the work is com- posed of-material, expression, and fonn-is always both. The materials are shaped by the hand from which the artwork received them; expression, objecti- vated in the work and objective in itself, enters as a subjective impulse; fonn , if it is not to have a mechanical relationship to what is fonned, must be produced sub- jectively according to the demands of the object. What confronts artists with the kind of objective impenetrability with which their material so often confronts them , an impenetrability analogous to the construction of the given in epistemol- ogy, is at the same time sedimented subject; it is expression, that which appears most subjective, but which is also objective in that it is what the artwork exhausts itself on and what it incorporates; finally , it is a subjective comportment in which objectivity leaves its imprint . But the reciprocity of subject and object in the work , which cannot be that of identity, maintains a precarious balance. The subjective process of the work's production is, with regard to its private dimension, a matter of indifference. Yet the process also has an objective dimension that is a condition for the realization of its immanent lawfulness. It is as labor, and not as communi- cation, that the subject in art comes into its own. It must be the artwork's in- eluctable ambition to achieve balance without ever being quite able to do so: This is an aspect of aesthetic semblance. The individual artist also functions as the ex- ecutor of this balance. It is hard to say whether, in the production process, he is faced with a self-imposed task; the marble block in which a sculpture waits, the
piano keys in which a composition waits to be released, are probably more than metaphors for the task. The tasks bear their objective solution in themselves, at least within a certain variational range, though they do not have the univocity of equations. The act carried out by the artist is minimal, that of mediating between the problem that confronts him and is already determined, and the solution, which is itself similarly lodged in the material as a potential. If the tool has been called the extension of an arm, the artist could be called the extension of a tool , a tool for the transition from potentiality to actuality.
Art's linguistic quality gives rise to reflection over what speaks in art; this is its
SUBJECf-OBJECT 0 167
veritable subject, not the individual who makes it or the one who receives it. This is masked by the lyrical "I ," which in confessing has over the centuries produced the semblance of the self-evidence of poetic subjectivity. But this subjectivity is on no account identical with the I that speaks in the poem.