No More Learning

The work's terminus ad quem, however, has its locus exclusively in itself, not externally . Therefore the technique of its immanent purposefulness also remains "without a purpose," whereas technique itself constantly has extra-aesthetic tech- nique as its model. Kant's paradoxical formulation expresses an antinomical rela- tion, though the antinomist did not make it explicit: In the process of becoming in- creasingly technical, which irrevocably binds them to functional forms, artworks come into contradiction with their purposelessness. In applied arts, products are, for example , adapted to the streamlined form that serves to reduce air resistance , even though the chairs will not be meeting with this resistance. Applied arts are, however, a prophetic warning for art. Art's irrevocably rational element, which is concentrated as its technique, works against art. It is not that rationality kills the unconscious, the substance of art, or whatever; technique alone made art capable of admitting the unconscious into itself. But precisely by virtue of its absolute
autonomy the rational, purely elaborated artwork would annul its difference from empirical existence; without imitating it, the artwork would assimilate itself to its opposite, the commodity. It would be indistinguishable from completely func- tional works except that it would have no purpose, and this, admittedly, would speak against it. The totality of inner-aesthetic purposefulness develops into the
218 0 UNIVERSALANDPARTICULAR
problem of art's purposefulness beyond its own sphere, a problem for which it has no answer. The judgment holds that the strictly technical artwork comes to ruin , and those works that restrict their own technique are inconsequential. If technique is the quintessence of art's language, it at the same time inescapably liquidates its language . In art no less than in other domains the concept of the technical force of production cannot be fetishized. Otherwise it would become a reflex of that tech- nocracy that is a form of domination socially disguised under the semblance of rationality. Technical forces of production have no value in themselves. They receive their importance exclusively in relation to their purpose in the work, and ultimately in relation to the truth content of what has been written, composed, or painted. Of course, such purposefulness of technical means in art is not transpar- ent. Purpose often hides in technology without the latter's adequacy to the pur- pose being immediately ascertainable. Thus the discovery and rapid development of instrumental technique in the early nineteenth century bore the technocratic traces of Saint-Simonian technocracy . How this instrumental integration of works in all their dimensions was related to purpose only became evident at a later stage, and at that point once again qualitatively transformed orchestral technique. In art the entwinement of purpose and technical means is an admonition for the circum- spect invocation of categorial judgments on their quid pro quo. Likewise, it is uncertain whether adaptation to extra-aesthetic technique necessarily amounts, inner-aesthetically, to progress. This could hardly be claimed in the case of the Symphonie jantastique, a pendant to early world fairs, in comparison with the contemporaneous late work of Beethoven. Beginning in those years, the erosion of subjective mediation, which almost always accompanies technologization, took its toll on music, as is evident in the lack of real compositional elaboration in Berlioz's work; the technological artwork is by no means a priori more consistent than that which, in response to industrialization, turns inward, intent on producing the effect of an "effect without a cause. " What hits the mark in the various reflec- tions on art in what journalists call the technological age, which is just as much marked by the social relations of production as by the level of productive forces, is not so much the adequacy of art to technical development as the transformation of the experiential forms sedimented in artworks. The question is that of the aes- thetic world of imagery: Preindustrial imagery irretrievably had to collapse. The sentence with which Benjamin's reflections on surrealism began-HIt no longer feels right to dream about the blue flower"8 - gets to the heart of the matter. Art is mimesis of the world of imagery and at the same time its enlightenment through forms of control . The world of imagery , itself thoroughly historical , is done an in- justice by the fiction of a world of images that effaces the relations in which peo-
ple live. The utilization of available technical means in accord with the critical consciousness of art does not offer a solution to the problem whether and how art is possible that, as an uneducable innocence thinks of it, would be relevant in today ' s world; on the contrary , any solution demands the authenticity of a form of
UNIVERSALANDPARTICULAR 0 219
experience that does not lay claim to an immediacy it has lost. Today immediacy of aesthetic comportment is exclusively an immediate relationship to the univer- sally mediated. That today any walk in the woods, unless elaborate plans have been made to seek out the most remote forests , is accompanied by the sound ofjet engines overhead not only destroys the actuality of nature as, for instance, an ob- ject of poetic celebration. It affects the mimetic impulse. Nature poetry is anach- ronistic not only as a subject: Its truth content has vanished. This may help clarify the anorganic aspect of Beckett ' s as well as of Celan' s poetry . It yearns neither for nature nor for industry ; it is precisely the integration of the latter that leads to poeti- zation, which was already a dimension of impressionism, and contributes its part to making peace with an unpeaceful world. Art, as an anticipatory form of reac- tion, is no longer able-if it ever was-to embody pristine nature or the industry that has scorched it; the impossibility of both is probably the hidden law of aes- thetic nonrepresentationalism. The images of the postindustrial world are those of a corpse; they want to avert atomic war by banning it, just as forty years ago sur- realism sought to save Paris through the image of cows grazing in the streets, the same cows after which the people of bombed-out Berlin rebaptized Kurfiirsten- damm as Kudamm. 9 In relation to its telos, all aesthetic technique falls under the shadow of irrationality , which is the opposite of that for which aesthetic irrational-
ism criticizes technique; and this shadow is anathema to technique. Of course, an element of universality cannot be eliminated from technique any more than from the movement of nominalism as a whole. Cubism and composition with twelve tones related only to one anotherlO are , in terms of their idea, universal procedures in the age of the negation of aesthetic universality. The tension between objecti- vating technique and the mimetic essence of artworks is fought out in the effort to save the fleeting, the ephemeral , the transitory in a form that is immune to reifica- tion and yet akin to it in being permanent. It is probably only in this Sisyphean struggle that the concept of artistic technique took shape; it is akin to the tour de force. This is the focal point of Valery ' s theory , a rational theory of aesthetic irra- tionality. Incidentally, art's impulse to objectivate the fleeting, not the permanent, may well run through the whole of its history . Hegel failed to recognize this and for this reason, in the midst of dialectics, failed to recognize the temporal core of art's truth content. The subjectivization of art throughout the nineteenth century, which at the same time unbound its technical forces of production, did not sacri- fice the objective idea of art but rather, by bringing it fully into time, set it in sharper, purer relief than any classicist purity ever achieved. Thus the greatest jus- tice that was done to the mimetic impulse becomes the greatest injustice, because permanence, objectivation, ultimately negates the mimetic impulse. Yet the guilt for this is borne not by art's putative decline but by the idea of art itself.
Aesthetic nominalism is a process that transpires in the form and that ultimately becomes form; even here the universal and the particular are mediated . The nomi- nalistic prohibitions on predefined forms are, as prescriptions, canonical. The cri-
? 220 0 UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR
tique of forms is entwined with the critique of their formal adequacy. Prototypical in this regard is the distinction between closed and open forms , which is relevant to all theory of form. Open forms are those universal genre categories that seek an equilibrium with the nominalistic critique of universality that is founded on the experience that the unity of the universal and the particular, which is claimed by artworks, fundamentally fails. No pregiven universal unprotestingly receives a particular that does not derive from a genre . The perpetuated universality of forms becomes incompatible with form ' s own meaning; the promise of something rounded, overarching, and balanced is not fulfilled. For this is a promise made to what is heterogeneous to the forms, which probably never tolerated identity with them. Forms that rattle on after their moment is past do the form itself injustice. Form that has become reified with regard to its other is no longer form. The se. nse of form in Bach, who in many regards opposed bourgeois nominalism, did not consist in showing respect for traditional forms but rather in keeping them in mo- tion, or better: in not letting them harden in the first place; Bach was nominalistic on the basis of his sense of form. A not unrancorous cliche praises the novel for its gift of form, yet the cliche has its justification not in the novel ' s happy manipula- tion of forms but in its capacity for maintaining the lability of forms to what is formed , of yielding to it out of sensual sympathy rather than simply taming it. The sense for forms instructs on their problematic : that the beginning and end of a mu- sical phrase, the balanced composition of a painting, stage rituals such as death or marriage of heroes are vain because they are arbitrary: What is shaped does not honor the form that shapes. If, however, the renunciation of ritual in the idea of an open genre - which is itself often conventional enough, like the rondo - is free of the lie of necessity, the idea of the genre becomes all the more exposed to contin- gency. The nominalistic artwork should become an artwork by being organized from below to above, not by having principles of organization foisted on it. But no artwork left blindly to itself possesses the power of organization that would set up binding boundaries for itself: Investing the work with such a power would in fact be fetishistic. Unchecked aesthetic nominalism liquidates-just as philosophical critique does with regard to Aristotle - all forms as a remnant of a spiritual being- in-itself. It terminates in a literal facticity, and this is irreconcilable with art. In an artist with the incomparable level of form of Mozart it would be possible to show how closely that artist's most daring and thus most authentic formal structures verge on nominalistic collapse. The artifactual character of the artwork is incom- patible with the postulate ofpure relinquishment to the material. By being some- thing made , artworks acquire that element of organization, of being something di- rected ' in the dramaturgical sense, that is anathema to the nominalistic sensibility. The historical aporia of aesthetic nominalism culminates in the insufficiency of open forms, a striking example ofwhich is Brecht's difficulty in writing convinc- ing conclusions to his plays. A qualitative leap in the general tendency to open form is, moreover, not to be overlooked. The older open forms were based on tra-
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR 0 221
ditional forms that they modified but from which they maintained more than just the external trappings. The classical Viennese sonata was a dynamic yet closed form, and this closure was precarious; the rondo, with the intentional freedom in the alternation of refrain and couplets, was a decidedly open form. All the same, in the fiber of what was composed, the difference was not so substantial. From Beethoven to Mahler, the sonata rondo was much employed, which transplanted the development section of the sonata to the rondo , thus balancing off the playful- ness of the open form with the bindingness of the closed form. This was possible because the rondo form was itself never literally pledged to contingency but rather, in the spirit of a nominalistic age and in recollection of the much older spirit of the rounded canon, the alternation between choir and soloist adapted to the demand for an absence of constraint in an established form. The rondo lent itself better to cheap standardization than did the dynamically developing sonata, whose dynamic, in spite of its closure, did not permit typification. The sense of form, which in the rondo at the very least gave the impression of contingency, required guarantees in order not to explode the genre. Antecedent forms in Bach, such as the Presto of his Italian concerto, were more flexible, less rigid, more complexly elaborated than were Mozart's rondos, which belonged to a later stage of nominalism. The qualitative reversal occurred when in place of the oxymoron of the open form a new procedure appeared that, indifferent to the genres, com- pletely followed the nominalistic commandment; paradoxically, the results had greater closure than their conciliatory predecessors; the nominalistic urge for authenticity resists the playful forms as descendants offeudal divertissement. The seriousness in Beethoven is bourgeois. Contingency impinged on form. Ultimately, contingency is a function of growing structuration. This explains apparently mar- ginal events such as the temporally contracting scope of musical compositions , as well as the miniature format of Klee's best works. Resignation vis-a-vis time and space gave ground to the crisis of nominalistic form until it was reduced to a mere point, effectively inert. Action painting, ['art informelle, and aleatorical works may have carried the element of resignation to its extreme: The aesthetic subject exempts itself of the burden of giving form to the contingent material it encoun- ters , despairing of the possibility of undergirding it, and instead shifts the respon- sibility for its organization back to the contingent material itself. The gain here is , however, dubious. Form purportedly distilled from the contingent and the hetero- geneous itself remains heterogenous and, for the artwork , arbitrary ; in its literal- ness it is alien to art. Statistics are used to console for the absence of traditional forms . This situation holds embedded in itself the figure of its own critique . Nom- inalistic artworks constantly require the intervention of the guiding hand they conceal in the service of their principle. The extremely objective critique of sem- blance incorporates an illusory element that is perhaps as irrevocable as the aes- thetic semblance of all artworks . Often in artistic products of chance a necessity is sensed to subordinate these works to, effectively, a stylizing procedure of selec-
222 D UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR
tion. Carriger Lafortune: This is the fateful writing on the wall of the nominalistic artwork. Itsfortune is nothing of the kind but rather that fateful spell from which artworks have tried to extricate themselves ever since art lodged its claim against myth in antiquity. Beethoven's music, which was no less affected by nominalism than was Hegel's philosophy, is incomparable in that the intervention enjoined by the problematic of form is permeated with autonomy, that is, with the freedom of the subject that is coming to self-consciousness. He legitimated what, from the standpoint of the artwork that was to be developed entirely on its own terms , must have seemed like an act of coercion on the basis of its own content . No artwork is worthy of its name that would hold at bay what is accidental in terms of its own law of form. For form is, according to its own concept, the form of something , and this something must not be permitted to become merely the tautology of form. But the necessity of this relation of form to its other undermines form; form cannot set itself up vis-a-vis the heterogeneous as that purity that as form it wants to be just as much as it requires the heterogeneous. The immanence of form in the hetero- geneous has its limits . Nevertheless the history of the whole of bourgeois art was not possible except as the effort if not to solve the antinomy of nominalism then at least to give it shape, to win form from its negation. In this the history of modern art is not merely analogous to the history of philosophy: It is the same history. What Hegel called the unfolding of truth occurred as the same process of unfold- ing both in art and philosophy.
The necessity of bringing about the objectivation of the nominalistic element, which this element at the same time resists, engenders the principle of construc- tion. Construction is the form of works that is no longer imposed on them ready- made yet does not arise directly out of them either, but rather originates in its reflection through subjective reason. Historically, the concept of construction originated in mathematics; it was applied to substantive concerns for the first time in Schelling's speculative philosophy, where it was to serve as the common de- nominator of the diffusely contingent and the need for form. The concept of con- struction in art comes close to this. Because art can no longer rely on any objectiv- ity of universals and yet by its own concept is none the less the objectivation of impulses, objectivation becomes functionalized. By demolishing the security of forms , nominalism made all artpLein air long before this became an unmetaphoric slogan. Thinking and art both became dynamic. It is hardly an unfair overgeneral- ization to say that nominalistic art has a chance of objectivation only through immanent development, through the processual character of every particular art- work. Dynamic objectivation, however, the determination of the work as existing in itself, involves a static element. In construction the dynamic reverses com- pletely into the static: The constructed work stands still. Nominalism's progress thus reaches its own limit. In literature the prototype of dynamization was in- trigue, in music the prototype was the development section. In Haydn's develop- ments a self-preoccupied busyness, opaque to itself in terms of its own purpose,
UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR 0 223
became an objective determining basis of what is perceived as an expression of subjective humor. The individual activity of the motifs as they pursue their sepa- rate interests , all the while assured by a sort of residual ontology that through this activity they serve the harmony of the whole , is unmistakably reminiscent of the zealous, shrewd, and narrow-minded demeanor of intrigants, the descendants of the dumb devil; his dumbness infiltrates even the emphatic works of dynamic classicism, just as it lingers on in capitalism. The aesthetic function of such means was dynamically , through development , to confirm the process ignited by a unique element: The premises immediately posited by the work are fulfilled as its result. There is a kind of cunning of unreason that strips the intrigant of his narrow- mindedness; the tyrannical individual becomes the affirmation of the process. The reprise, peculiarly long-lived in the history of music , embodies to an equal degree affirmation and - as the repetition of what is essentially unrepeatable - limitation . Intrigue and development are not only subjective activity, temporal development for itself. They also represent unleashed, blind, and self-consuming life in the works. Against it, artworks are no longer a bulwark. Every intrigue, literally and figuratively, says: This is how things are, this is what it's like out there. In the por- trayal of this "Comment c ' est" the unwitting artwork is permeated by its other, its own essence, the movement toward objectivation, and is motivated by that hetero- geneous other. This is possible because intrigue and development, which are sub- jective aesthetic means, when transplanted into the work acquire that quality of subjective objectivation that they have in the external world, where they reproach social labor and its narrow-mindedness with its potential superfluity. This super- fluity is truly the point at which art coincides with the real world's business. To the extent to which a drama - itself a sonatalike product of the bourgeois era - is in musical terms "worked," that is, dissected into the smallest motifs and objecti- vated in their dynamic synthesis, to this extent, and right into the most sublime moments, the echo ofcommodity production can be heard. The common nexus of these art-technical procedures and material processes , which has developed in the course of industrialization, has yet to be clarified but is nevertheless strikingly evident. With the emergence of intrigue and development, however, commodity production not only migrates into artworks in the form of a heterogeneous life but indeed also as their own law: nominalistic artworks were unwitting tableaux economiques. This is the historicophilosophical origin of modern humor. Cer- tainly it is through external industry that life is reproduced. It is a means to an end. But it subordinates all ends until it itself becomes an end in itself and truly absurd . This is recapitulated in art in that the intrigues, plots, and developments, as well as the depravity and crime of detective novels, absorb all interest. By contrast, the conclusions to which they lead sink to the level of the stereotypical. Thus real in- dustry, which by its own definition is only a for-something, contradicts its own definition and becomes silly in itself and ridiculous for the artist. Through the form of his finales, Haydn, one of the greatest composers, showed the futility of
224 0 UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR
the dynamics by which they are objectivated, and did so in a way that became paradigmatical for art; this is the locus of whatever may justly be called humor in Beethoven. However, the more intrigue and dynamics become ends in them- selves-intrigue already reached the level of thematic frenzy in Les liaisons dan- gereuses-the more comic do they become in art as well; and the more does the affect associated subjectively with this dynamic effectively become rage over the lost penny: It becomes the element of indifference in individuation. The dynamic principle, by means of which art was long and insistently justified in hoping for homeostasis between the universal and the particular, is rejected. Even its magic is shorn away by the sense for form; it begins to seem inept. This experience can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Baudelaire, the apologist of form no less than the poet of the vie modeme, expressed this in the dedication of Le spleen de Paris when he wrote that he can break off where he pleases, and so may the reader, "for I have not strung his wayward will to the endless thread of some unneccessary plot. ") ) What was organized by nominalistic art by means of development is stigmatized as superfluous once the intention of its function is recognized, and this becomes an irritant. With this comment, the chief figure of the whole of l 'art pour l 'art effectively capitulates: His degout extends to the dynamic principle that engenders the work as autonomous in itself. Since that moment the law of all art has been its antilaw . Just as for the bourgeois nominalistic artwork the necessity of a static form decayed, here it is the aesthetic dynamic that decays in accord with the experience first formulated by Kiirnberger but flashing up in each line and stanza of Baudelaire, that life no longer exists. This has not changed in the situation in which contemporary art finds itself. Art's processual character has been overtaken by the critique of semblance, and not merely as the critique of aesthetic universality but rather as that of progress in the midst of what is ever-the-same. Process has been unmasked as repetition and has thus become an embarrassment to art. Enciphered in modern art is the postulate of an art that no longer conforms to the disjunction of the static and dynamic . Beckett, indifferent to the ruling cliche of development, views his task as that of moving in an infi- nitely small space toward what is effectively a dimensionless point. This aesthetic principle of construction , as the principle of Ilfaut continuer, goes beyond stasis; and it goes beyond the dynamic in that it is at the same time a principle of treading water and, as such, a confession of the uselessness of the dynamic. In keeping with this, all constructivistic techniques tend toward stasis. The telos of the dy- namic of the ever-same is disaster; Beckett' s writings look this in the eye . Con- sciousness recognizes the limitedness of limitless self-sufficient progress as an illusion of the absolute subject, and social labor aesthetically mocks bourgeois pathos once the superfluity of real labor came into reach. The dynamic in artworks is brought to a halt by the hope of the abolition of labor and the threat of a glacial death; both are registered in the dynamic, which is unable to choose on its own. The potential of freedom manifest in it is at the same time denied by the social
SOCIETY 0 225
order, and therefore it is not substantial in arteither. Thatexplains the ambivalence of aesthetic construction. Construction is equally able to codify the resignation of the weakened subject and to make absolute alienation the sole concern of art- which once wanted the opposite - as it is able to anticipate a reconciled condition that would itself be situated beyond static and dynamic. The many interrelations with technocracy give reason to suspect that the principle of construction remains aesthetically obedient to the administered world; but it may terminate in a yet un- known aesthetic form, whose rational organization might point to the abolition of all categories of administration along with their reflexes in art.
Prior to the emancipation of the subject, art was undoubtedly in a certain sense more immediately social than it was afterward. Its autonomy, its growing inde- pendence from society , was a function of the bourgeois consciousness of freedom that was itself bound up with the social structure. Prior to the emergence of this consciousness, art certainly stood in opposition to social domination and its mores, but not with an awareness of its own independence. There had been con- flicts between art and society desultorily ever since art was condemned in Plato's state, but the idea of a fundamentally oppositional art was inconceivable, and so- cial controls worked much more immediately than in the bourgeois era until the rise of totalitarian states. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie integrated art much more completely than any previous society had. Under the pressure of an inten- sifying nominalism, the ever present yet latent social character of art was made increasingly manifest; this social character is incomparably more evident in the
novel than it was in the highly stylized and remote epics of chivalry . The influx of experiences that are no longer forced into a priori genres , the requirement of con- stituting form out of these experiences, that is, from below: This is "realistic" in purely aesthetic terms , regardless of content [Inhalt] . No longer sublimated by the principle of stylization , the relation of content to the society from which it derives at first becomes much less refracted, and this is not only the case in literature. The so-called lower genres too held their distance from society , even when, like Attic comedy, they made bourgeois relations and the events of daily life thematic; the flight into no-man's-land is not just one of Aristophanes' antics but rather an es- sential element of his form. If, in one regard , as a product of the social labor of spirit, art is always implicitly afait social, in becoming bourgeois art its social aspect was made explicit. The object of bourgeois art is the relation of itself as artifact to empirical society; Don Quixote stands at the beginning of this develop- ment . Art, however, is social not only because of its mode of production , in which the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is concentrated, nor simply because of the social derivation of its thematic material. Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as something unique to itself, rather than
? 226 0 SOCIETY
complying with existing social norms and qualifying as "socially useful," it criti- cizes society by merely existing, for which puritans of all stripes condemn it. There is nothing pure, nothing structured strictly according to its own immanent law, that does not implicitly criticize the debasement of a situation evolving in the direction of a total exchange society in which everything is heteronomously defined. Art's asociality is the determinate negation of a determinate society . Cer- tainly through its refusal of society, which is equivalent to sublimation through the law of form, autonomous art makes itself a vehicle of ideology: The society at which it shudders is left in the distance, undisturbed. Yet this is more than ideol- ogy: Society is not only the negativity that the aesthetic law of form condemns but also, even in its most objectionable shape, the quintessence of self-producing and self-reproducing human life. Art was no more able to dispense with this element than with critique until that moment when the social process revealed itself as one of self-annihilation; and it is not in the power of art, which does not make judgments, to separate these two elements intentionally. A pure productive force such as that of the aesthetic , once freed from heteronomous control , is objectively the counterimage of enchained forces, but it is also the paradigm of fateful, self- interested doings. Art keeps itself alive through its social force of resistance; unless it reifies itself, it becomes a commodity. Its contribution to society is not commu- nication with it but rather something extremely mediated: It is resistance in which, by virtue of inner-aesthetic development, social development is reproduced with- out being imitated. At the risk of its self-alienation, radical modernity preserves art's immanence by admitting society only in an obscured form, as in the dreams with which artworks have always been compared. Nothing social in art is immedi- ately social, not even when this is its aim. Not long ago even the socially commit- ted Brecht found that to give his political position artistic expression it was neces- sary to distance himself precisely from that social reality at which his works took aim. Jesuitical machinations were needed sufficiently to camouflage what he wrote as socialist realism to escape the inquisition. Music betrays all art. Just as in music society, its movement, and its contradictions appear only in shadowy fashion- speaking out of it, indeed, yet in need of identification - so it is with all other arts . Whenever art seems to copy society , it becomes all the more an "as-if. " For oppo- site reasons, Brecht's China in the Good Woman ofSetzuan is no less stylized than Schiller's Messina in The Bride ofMessina. All moral judgments on the charac- ters in novels or plays have been senseless even when these judgments have justly taken the empirical figures back of the work as their targets; discussions about whether a positive hero can have negative traits are as foolish as they sound to anyone who overhears them from so much as the slightest remove. Form works like a magnet that orders elements of the empirical world in such a fashion that they are estranged from their extra-aesthetic existence, and it is only as a result of this estrangement that they master the extra-aesthetic essence. Conversely, by ex- ploiting these elements the culture industry all the more successfully joins slavish
SOCIETY 0 227
respect for empirical detai l , the gapless semblance of photographic fidelity , with ideological manipulation. What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions.
Its historical gesture repels empirical reality, of which artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things. Insofar as a so- cial function can be predicated for artworks, it is their functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality, they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its rightful place, its own. Their enchantment is disen- chantment. Their social essence requires a double reflection on their being-for- themselves and on their relations to society. Their double character is manifest at every point; they change and contradict themselves. It was plausible that socially progressive critics should have accused the program of l 'art pour l 'art, which has often been in league with political reaction, of promoting a fetish with the concept of a pure, exclusively self-sufficient artwork. What is true in this accusation is that artworks, products of social labor that are subject to or produce their own law of form, seal themselves off from what they themselves are. To this extent, each art- work could be charged with false consciousness and chalked up to ideology. In formal terms , independent of what they say, they are ideology in that a priori they posit something spiritual as being independent from the conditions of its material production and therefore as being intrinsically superior and beyond the primordial guilt of the separation of physical and spiritual labor. What is exalted on the basis of this guilt is at the same time debased by it. This is why artworks with truth con- tent do not blend seamlessly with the concept of art; l 'art pour l 'art theorists, like Valery, have pointed this out. But the guilt they bear of fetishism does not dis- qualify art, any more so than it disqualifies anything culpable; for in the univer- sally, socially mediated world nothing stands external to its nexus of guilt. The truth content of artworks, which is indeed their social truth, is predicated on their fetish character . The principle of heteronomy , apparently the counterpart of fetish- ism, is the principle ofexchange, and in it domination is masked. Only what does not submit to that principle acts as the plenipotentiary of what is free from domi- nation; only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value. Artworks are plenipotentiaries of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity. In the context of total semblance, art's sem- blance of being-in-itself is the mask of truth. Marx's scorn of the pittance Milton received for Paradise Lost, a work that did not appear to the market as socially useful labor,l is, as a denunciation of useful labor, the strongest defense of art against its bourgeois functionalization, which is perpetuated in art's undialectical social condemnation. A liberated society would be beyond the irrationality of its fauxfrais and beyond the ends-means-rationality of utility. This is enciphered in art and is the source of art's social explosiveness. Although the magic fetishes are
one of the historical roots of art, a fetishistic element remains admixed in artworks, an element that goes beyond commodity fetishism. Artworks can neither exclude nor deny this; even socially the emphatic element of semblance in artworks is , as a
228 D SOCIETY
corrective , the organon of truth . Artworks that do not insist fetishistically on their coherence, as if they were the absolute that they are unable to be, are worthless from the start; but the survival of art becomes precarious as soon as it becomes conscious of its fetishism and, as has been the case since the middle of the nine- teenth century , insists obstinately on it. Art cannot advocate delusion by insisting that otherwise art would not exist. This forces art into an aporia . All that succeeds in going even minutely beyond it is insight into the rationality of its irrationality. Artworks that want to divest themselves of fetishism by real and extremely dubi- ous political commitment regularly enmesh themselves in false consciousness as the result of inevitable and vainly praised simplification. In the shortsighted praxis to which they blindly subscribe, their own blindness is prolonged.
The objectivation of art, which is what society from its external perspective takes to be art' s fetishism, is itself social in that it is the product of the division of labor. That is why the relation of art to society is not to be sought primarily in the sphere of reception . This relation is anterior to reception , in production . Interest in the so- cial decipherment of art must orient itself to production rather than being content with the study and classification of effects that for social reasons often totally diverge from the artworks and their objective social content. Since time immemo- rial, human reactions to artworks have been mediated to their utmost and do not refer immediately to the object; indeed, they are now mediated by society as a whole. The study of social effect neither comes close to understanding what is so- cial in art nor is it in any position to dictate norms for art, as it is inclined to do by positivist spirit. The heteronomy, which reception theory's normative interpreta- tion of phenomena foists on art, is an ideological fetter that exceeds everything ideological that may be inherent in art's fetishization. Art and society converge in the artwork's content [Gehalt], not in anything external to it. This applies also to the history of art. Collectivization of the individual takes place at the cost of the social force of production . In the history of art, real history returns by virtue of the life of the productive force that originates in real history and is then separated from it. This is the basis of art's recollection of transience. Art preserves it and makes it present by transforming it: This is the social explanation of its temporal nucleus. Abstaining from praxis, art becomes the schema of social praxis: Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary. However, whereas society reaches into art and disappears there by means of the identity of forces and relations , even the most advanced art has , conversely , the tendency toward social integration. Yet contrary to the cliche that touts the virtues of progress, this integration does not bring the blessings of justice in the form of retrospective confirmation. More often, reception wears away what constitutes the work's determinate negation of society. Works are usually critical in the era in which they appear; later they are neutralized, not least because of changed social relations. Neutralization is the social price of aesthetic autonomy. However, once artworks are entombed in the pantheon of cultural commodities , they themselves- their truth content - are
SOCIETY 0 229
also damaged. In the administered world neutralization is universal. Surrealism began as a protest against the fetishization of art as an isolated realm, yet as art, which after all surrealism also was, it was forced beyond the pure form of protest. Painters for whom the quality of peinture was not an issue, as it was for Andre Masson, struck a balance between scandal and social reception. Ultimately, Salvador Dali became an exalted society painter, the Laszlo or Van Dongen of a generation that liked to think of itself as being sophisticated on the basis of a vague sense of a crisis that had in any case been stabilized for decades. Thus the false afterlife of surrealism was established. Modem tendencies, in which irrupt- ing shock-laden contents [Inhalte] demolish the law of form, are predestined to make peace with the world, which gives a cozy reception to unsublimated mater- ial as soon as the thorn is removed. In the age of total neutralization, false recon- ciliation has of course also paved the way in the sphere of radically abstract art: Nonrepresentational art is suitable for decorating the walls of the newly prosper- ous . 1t is uncertain whether that also diminishes the immanent quality of artworks; the excitement with which reactionaries emphasize this danger speaks against its reality . It would be truly idealistic to locate the relation of art and society exclu- sively as mediated in problems of social structure. Art's double character- its au- tonomy andfait social-is expressed ever and again in the palpable dependencies and conflicts between the two spheres. Frequently there are direct socioeconomic interventions in artistic production, a contemporary instance of which is the long- term contracts between painters and art merchants who favor what is called work with a "personal touch," or more bluntly, a gimmick. That German expressionism vanished so quickly may have its artistic reasons in the conflict between the idea of an artwork, which remained its goal, and the specific idea of the absolute scream. Expressionist works could not totally succeed without betraying them- selves . Also important was that the genre became politically obsolete as its revo- lutionary impetus went unrealized and the Soviet Union began to prosecute radi- cal art. Nor should it be concealed that the authors of that movement, which went unreceived until forty or fifty years later, had to make a living and were com- pelled, as Americans say, to go commercial; this could be demonstrated in the case of most German expressionist writers who survived World War I. What is so- ciologically to be learned from the fate of the expressionists is the primacy of the
bourgeois profession over the need for expression that inspired the expressionists in however naive and diluted a fashion. In bourgeois society artists, like all who are intellectually productive, are compelled to keep at it once they have taken on the trade name of artist. Superannuated expressionists not unwillingly chose mar- ketably promising themes. The lack of any immanent necessity for production, coupled with the concurrent economic compulsion to continue, is apparent in the product as its objective insignificance.
Among the mediations of art and society the thematic, the open or covert treat- ment of social matters, is the most superficial and deceptive. The claim that the
230 0 SOCffiTY
sculpture of a coal miner a priori says more , socially , than a sculpture without pro- letarian hero , is by now echoed only where art is used for the purpose of "forming opinion ," in the wooden language of the peoples ' democracies of the Eastern bloc, and is subordinated to empirical aims, mostly as a means for improving produc- tion. Emile Meuniers' idealized coal miner and his realism dovetail with a bour- geois ideology that dealt with the then still visible proletariat by certifying that it too was beautiful humanity and noble nature. Even unvarnished naturalism is often of a part with a deformed bourgeois character structure, a suppressed- in psychoanalytic terms, anal-pleasure. It feeds on the suffering and decay it scourges; like Blut-und-Boden authors, Zola glorified fertility and employed anti- Semitic cliches . On the thematic level, in the language of indictment, no boundary can be drawn between aggressiveness and conformism. An agitprop chorus of the unemployed with the performance directive that it be performed in an "ugly" fashion, may have functioned around 1930 as a certificate of correct political opinion, though it hardly ever testified to progressive consciousness; but it was always uncertain if the artistic stance of growling and raw technique really denounced such things or identified with them. Real denunciation is probably only a capacity of form, which is overlooked by a social aesthetic that believes in themes. What is socially decisive in artworks is tl. te content [lnhalt] that becomes eloquent through the work's formal structures. Kafka, in whose work monopoly capitalism appears only distantly , codifies in the dregs of the administered world what becomes of people under the total social spell more faithfully and power- fully than do any novels about corrupt industrial trusts. The thesis that form is the locus of social content [Gehalt] can be concretely shown in Kafka' s language . Its objectivity, its Kleistian quality has often been remarked upon, and readers who measure up to Kafka have recognized the contradiction between that objectivity and events that become remote through the imaginary character of so sober a pre- sentation. However, this contrast becomes productive not only because the quasi- realistic description brings the impossible menacingly close. At the same time this critique of the realistic lineaments of Kafka's form, a critique that to socially com- mitted ears seems all too artistic, has its social aspect. Kafka is made acceptable by many of these realistic lineaments as an ideal of order, possibly of a simple life and modest activity in one's assigned station, an ideal that is itself a mask of social repression. The linguistic habitus of "the world is as it is" is the medium through which the social spell becomes aesthetic appearance. Kafka wisely guards against naming it, as if otherwise the spell would be broken whose insurmount- able omnipresence defines the arena of Kafka's work and which, as its apriori, cannot become thematic. His language is the instrument of that configuration of positivism and myth that has only now become obvious socially. Reified con-
sciousness, which presupposes and confirms the inevitability and immutableness of what exists, is-as the heritage of the ancient spell -the new form of the myth of the ever-same. Kafka's epic style is, in its archaism, mimesis of reification.
SOCIETY 0 231
Whereas his work must renounce any claim to transcending myth, it makes the social web of delusion knowable in myth through the how, through language. In his writing, absurdity is as self-evident as it has actually become in society. Those products are socially mute that do their duty by regurgitating tel queI whatever so- cial material they treat and count this metabolic exchange with second nature as the glory of art as social reflection . The artistic subject i s inherently social, not pri- vate. In no case does it become social through forced collectivization or the choice of subject matter. In the age of repressive collectivization, art has the power to resist the compact majority - a resistance that has become a criterion of the work and its social truth - in the lonely and exposed producer of art, while at the same time this does not exclude collective forms of production such as the composers' workshop that Schoenberg envisioned. By constantly admitting into the produc- tion of his work an element of negativity toward his own immediacy, the artist unconsciously obeys a social universal: In every successfully realized correction, watching over the artist's shoulder is a collective subject that has yet to be real- ized. The categories of artistic objectivity are unitary with social emancipation when the object, on the basis of its own impulse, liberates itself from social con- vention and controls. Yet artworks cannot be satisfied with vague and abstract universality such as that of classicism. Rather, they are predicated on fissuredness and thus on the concrete historical situation. Their social truth depends on their opening themselves to this content. The content becomes their subject, to which they mold themselves, to the same extent that their law of form does not ob- scure the fissure but rather, in demanding that it be shaped, makes it its own con- cern . - However profound and still largely obscure the part of science has been in the development of artistic forces of production , and however deeply , precisely through methods learned from science, society reaches into art, just so little is artistic production scientific, even when it is a work of integral constructivism. In art, all scientific discoveries lose their literal character: This is evident in the mod- ification of optical-perspectival laws in painting and in the natural overtone rela- tions in music. When art, intimidated by technique, tries to conserve its miniature terrain by proclaiming its transformation into science, it misconceives the status of the sciences in empirical reality. On the other hand, the aesthetic principle is not to be played out as sacrosanct-as would suit irrationalism-in opposition to the sciences. Art is not an arbitrary cultural complement to science but, rather, stands in critical tension to it. When, for instance , the cultural and human sciences are rightly accused of a lack of spirit, this is almost always at the same time a lack of aesthetic discernment. It is not without reason that the certified sciences de- mand furiously to be left in peace whenever art, whatever they attribute to it, inter- venes in their sphere; that someone can write is cause for suspicion on scientific grounds. Crudeness of thinking is the incapacity to differentiate within a topic, and differentiation is an aesthetic category as much as one of understanding. Sci- ence and art are not to be fused, but the categories that are valid in each are not
232 0 SOCIETY
absolutely different. Conformist consciousness prefers the opposite, partly be- cause it is incapable of distinguishing the two and partly because it refuses the insight that identical forces are active in nonidentical spheres. The same holds true with regard to morality . Brutality toward things is potentially brutality toward people. The raw-the subjective nucleus of evil-is a priori negated by art, from which the ideal of being fully formed is indispensable: This, and not the pro- nouncement of moral theses or the striving after moral effects, is art's participa- tion in the moral and makes it part of a more humanly worthy society .
Social struggles and the relations of classes are imprinted in the structure of art- works; by contrast, the political positions deliberately adopted by artworks are epiphenomena and usually impinge on the elaboration of works and thus, ulti- mately, on their social truth content. Political opinions count for little. It is possi- ble to argue over how much Attic tragedy , including those by Euripides , took part in the violent social conflicts of the epoch; however, the basic tendency of tragic form, in contrast to its mythical subjects, the dissolution of the spell of fate and the birth of subjectivity, bears witness as much to social emancipation from feudal- familial ties as, in the collision between mythical law and subjectivity, to the antagonism between fateful domination and a humanity awakening to maturity. That this antagonism, as well as the historicophilosophical tendency, became an apriori of form rather than being treated simply as thematic material, endowed tragedy with its social substantiality: Society appears in it all the more authenti- cally the less it is the intended object. Real partisanship, which is the virtue of art- works no less than of men and women , resides in the depths , where the social an- tinomies become the dialectic of forms: By leading them to language through the synthesis of the work, artists do their part socially; even Lukacs in his last years found himself compelled toward such considerations. Figuration, which articu- lates the wordless and mute contradictions, thereby has the lineaments of a praxis that is not simply flight from real praxis; figuration fulfills the concept of art itself as a comportment. It is a form of praxis and need not apologize that it does not act directly, which it could not do even if it wanted to; the political effect even of so-called committed art is highly uncertain. The social standpoint of artists may serve to interfere with conformist consciousness, but in the actual development of works they become insignificant. That he expressed abominable views when Voltaire died says nothing about the truth content of Mozart' s works . At the actual time when artworks appear there is certainly no abstracting from their intention; whoever would attempt an assessment of Brecht exclusively on the basis of the artistic merit of his works would fail him no less than one who judges his meaning according to his theses. The immanence of society in the artwork is the essential social relation of art, not the immanence of art in society. Because the social content of art is not located externally to its prjncipium individuationis but rather inheres in individuation, which is itself a social reality, art's social character is concealed and can only be grasped by its interpretation .
SOCIETY 0 233
Yet even in artworks that are to their very core ideological, truth content can as- sert itself. Ideology, socially necessary semblance, is by this same necessity also the distorted image of the true. A threshold that divides the social consciousness of aesthetics from the philistine is that aesthetics reflects the social critique of the ideological in artworks, rather than mechanically reiterating it. Stifter provides a model of the truth content of an oeuvre that is undoubtedly ideological in its inten- tions . Not only the conservative-restorative choice of thematic material and the fabula docet are ideological, but so is the objectivistic deportment of the form, which suggests a micrologically tender world, a meaningfully correct life that lends itself to narration. This is why Stifter became the idol of a retrospectively noble bourgeoisie. Yet the layers of his work that once provided him with his half- esoteric popularity have with time peeled away and vanished. This, however, is not the last word on Stifter, for the reconciling, conciliatory aspects, especially in his last works , are exaggerated. Here objectivity hardens into a mask and the life evoked becomes a defensive ritual. Shimmering through the eccentricity of the average is the secret and denied suffering of the alienated subject and an unrecon- ciled life. The light that falls over his mature prose is drained and bleak, as if it were allergic to the happiness of color; it i s , as it were , reduced to a pencil sketch by the exclusion of everything unruly and disturbing to a social reality that was as incompatible with the mentality of the poet as with the epic apriori that he took from Goethe and clung to. What transpires, in opposition to the wiII of his prose, through the discrepancy between its form and the already capitalist society de- volves upon its expression; ideological exaggeration endows his work mediately with its nonideological truth content, with its superiority over all consoling, assid- uously pastoral literature , and it won for it that authentic quality that Nietzsche ad- mired. Stifter is the paradigm ofhow little poetic intention, even that meaning that is directly embodied or represented in an artwork, approximates its objective con- tent; in his work the content is truly the negation of the meaning, yet this content would not exist if the meaning were not intended by the work and then canceled and transformed by the work's own complexion. Affirmation becomes the cipher of despair and the purest negativity of content contains, as in Stifter, a grain of affirmation. The iridescence that emanates from artworks, which today taboo all affirmation, is the appearance of the affirmative ineffabile, the emergence of the nonexisting as if it did exist. Its claim to existence flickers out in aesthetic sem- blance; yet what does not exist, by appearing, is promised. The constellation of the existing and nonexisting is the utopic figure of art. Although it is compelled toward absolute negativity, it is precisely by virtue of this negativity that it is not absolutely negative. By no means do artworks primarily develop this inwardly antinomial affirmative element as a result of their external attitude to what exists, that is, to society; rather, it develops immanently in them and immerses them in twilight. No beauty today can evade the question whether it is actually beautiful and not instead surreptitiously acquired by static affirmation. The antipathy to-
234 0 SOCIETY
ward applied arts i s , indirectly , the bad conscience of art as a whole, which makes itself felt at the sound of every musical chord and at the sight of every color. There is no need for social criticism of art to investigate this externally: It emerges from the inner-aesthetic formations themselves. The heightened sensitivity of the aes- thetic sensorium converges asymptotically with the socially motivated irritability toward art . - In art, ideology and truth cannot be neatly distinguished from each other. Art cannot have one without the other, and this reciprocity in tum is an en- ticement toward the ideological misuse of art as much as it is an enticement toward summarily finishing it off. It is only a step from the utopia of the self-likeness of artworks to the stink of the heavenly roses that art scatters here below as do the women in Schiller's tirade. The more brazenly society is transformed into a total- ity in which it assigns everything, including art, to its place, the more completely does art polarize into ideology and protest; and this polarization is hardly to art's advantage. Absolute protest constrains it and carries over to its own raison d'etre; ideology thins out to an impoverished and authoritarian copy of reality .
In the culture resurrected after the catastrophe, art-regardless of its content and substance [Inhalt and Gehalt]-has even taken on an ideological aspect by its mere existence. In its disproportion to the horror that has transpired and threatens , i t i s condemned to cynicism; even where i t directly faces the horror, i t diverts at- tention from it. Its objectivation implies insensitivity to reality. This degrades art to an accomplice of the barbarism to which it succumbs no less when it renounces objectivation and directly plays along , even when this takes the form of polemical commitment. Every artwork today, the radical ones included, has its conservative aspect; its existence helps to secure the spheres of spirit and culture, whose real powerlessness and complicity with the principle of disaster becomes plainly evi- dent. But this conservative element- which, contrary to the trend toward social integration, is stronger in advanced works than in the more moderate ones-does not simply deserve oblivion. Only insofar as spirit, in its most advanced form, sur- vives and perseveres is any opposition to the total domination of the social totality possible . A humanity to which progressive spirit fails to bequeath what humanity is poised to liquidate would disappear in a barbarism that a reasonable social order should prevent. Art, even as something tolerated in the administered world, em- bodies what does not allow itself to be managed and what total management sup- presses. Greece's new tyrants knew why they banned Beckett's plays, in which there is not a single political word. Asociality becomes the social legitimation of art. For the sake of reconciliation, authentic works must blot out every trace of reconciliation in memory. All the same, the unity that even dissociative works do not escape is not without a trace of the old reconciliation. Artworks are, a priori, socially culpable, and each one that deserves its name seeks to expiate this guilt. Their possibility of surviving requires that their straining toward synthesis de- velop in the form of their irreconcilability. Without the synthesis, which confronts reality as the autonomous artwork, there would be nothing external to reality's
SOCIETY D 235
spell; the principle of the isolation of spirit, which casts a spell around itself, is also the principle thatbreaks through the spell by making it determinate.
That the nominalistic tendency of art toward the destruction of all preestablished categories of order has social implications is evident in the enemies of modem art, right up to Emil Staiger. Their sympathy for what they call a Leitbild, a guiding principle, is precisely their sympathy for social, particularly sexual, repression. The bond between a socially reactionary posture and hatred for the artistically modem , which the analysis of the obedient character makes apparent, is documented by new and old fascist propaganda, and it is also confirmed by empirical social re- search. 2 The rage against the purported destruction of sacrosanct cultural goods, which for that reason alone can no longer be experienced as such, serves to mask the real destructive wishes of the indignant. For the ruling consciousness, any con- sciousness that would have the world other than it is always seems chaotic because it deviates from a petrified reality. Inevitably those who rail loudest against the an- archy of modem art, which for the most part hardly exists, convince themselves of what they presume to be the nature of their enemy on the basis of crude errors at the simplest level ofinformation; indeed, there is no responding to them, because what they have decided in advance to reject they are not willing to experience in the first place . In this the division of labor incontestably bears part of the blame . The non- specialist will no more understand the most recent developments in nuclear physics than the lay person will straightaway grasp extremely complex new music or paint-
ing. Whereas, however, the incomprehensibility of physics is accepted on the assumption that in principle its rationality can be followed and its theorems under- stood by anyone, modem art's incomprehensibility is branded as schizoid arbi- trariness, even though the aesthetically incomprehensible gives way to experience no less than does the scientifically obscure . If art is capable of realizing its humane universality at all, then it is exclusively by means of the rigorous division of labor: Anything else is false consciousness. Works of quality, those that are fully formed in themselves, are objectively less chaotic than innumerable works that have or- derly facades somehow slapped on while underneath their own structure crumbles. Few are disturbed by this . Deep down and contrary to its better judgment, the bour- geois character tends to cling to what is inferior; it is fundamental to ideology that it is never fully believed and that it advances from self-disdain to self-destruction. The semi-educated consciousness insists on the "I like that," laughing with cynical embarrassment at the fact that cultural trash is expressly made to dupe the con- sumer: As a leisure-time occupation , art should be cozy and discretionary; people put up with the deception because they sense secretly that the principle of their own sane realism is the fraud ofequal exchange. It is within this false and at the same time art-alien consciousness that the fictional element of art, its illusoriness, devel- ops in bourgeois society: Mundus vult decipi is the categorical imperative of artis- tic consumption. This taints all supposedly na'ive artistic experience, and to this extent it is not naIve. The dominant consciousness is objectively led to this dank
236 0 SOCIETY
attitude because the administered must renounce the possibility of maturity, in- cluding aesthetic maturity, that is postulated by the order that they cling to as their own and at any price. The critical concept of society, which inheres in authentic artworks without needing to be added to them, is incompatible with what society must think of itself if it is to continue as it is; the ruling consciousness cannot free itself from its own ideology without endangering society's self-preservation. This confers social relevance on apparently derivative aesthetic controversies.
That society "appears" in artworks with polemical truth as well as ideologically , is conducive to historicophilosophical mystification. Speculation all too easily falls prey to the idea of a harmony between society and artworks that has been preestablished by the world spirit. But theory must not capitulate to that relation- ship. The process that transpires in artworks and is brought to a standstill in them, i s to be conceived as the same social process in which the artworks are embedded; according to Leibniz's formulation, they represent this process windowlessly. The elements of an artwork acquire their configuration as a whole in obedience to im- manent laws that are related to those of the society external to it. Social forces of production, as well as relations of production, return in artworks as mere forms divested of their facticity because artistic labor is social labor; moreover, they are always the product of this labor. In artworks , the forces of production are not in- themselves different from social productive forces except by their constitutive absenting from real society. Scarcely anything is done or produced in artworks that does not have its model, however latently, in social production. The binding force of artworks, beyond the jurisdiction of their immanence, originates in this affinity. If artworks are in fact absolute commodities in that they are a social prod- uct that has rejected every semblance of existing for society , a semblance to which commodities otherwise urgently cling, the determining relation of production, the commodity form, enters the artwork equally with the social force of production and the antagonism between the two. The absolute commodity would be free of the ideology inherent in the commodity form, which pretends to exist for-another, whereas ironically it is something merely for-itself: It exists for those who hold power. This reversal of ideology into truth is a reversal of aesthetic content, and not immediately a reversal of the attitude of art to society .