No More Learning

It was out of Cervantes' ephemeral
28 0 SITUATION
intention to parody the medieval romances that Don Quixote originated. The concept of duration has an implicitly Egyptian, archaic quality of mythical help- lessness; the thought of duration seems to have been remote during productive periods. Probably it becomes an acute concern only when duration becomes prob- lematic and artworks, sensing their latent powerlessness, cling to it. Confusion oc- curs between what a detestable nationalist exhortation once called the "permanent value of artworks"-everything dead, formal, and neutralized in them-and the hidden seed of their survival. Ever since the praise Horace bestowed on himself for a monument "more durable than bronze ," the category of the lasting resonates with an apologetic quality that is foreign to artworks not erected by grace of an Augustan exercise of mercy for the sake of an idea of authenticity that bears more than the trace of the authoritarian. "Beauty itself must die! ":12 This is more true than Schiller imagined. It holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hiero- glyphic, but for everything composed of beauty and of what according to its tradi- tional idea was meant to be unchangeable, the constituents of form. In this regard, the category of tragedy should be considered. It seems to be the aesthetic imprint of evil and death and as enduring as they are. Nevertheless it is no longer possible. All that by which aesthetic pedants once zealously distinguished the tragic from the mournful-the affirmation of death, the idea that the infinite glimmers through the demise of the finite, the meaning of suffering-all this now returns to pass judgment on tragedy. Wholly negative artworks now parody the tragic. Rather than being tragic, all art is mournful, especially those works that appear cheerful and harmonious. What lives on in the concept of aesthetic duration, as in much else , is prima philosophia, which takes refuge in isolated and absolutized deriva- tives after having been compelled to abdicate as totality. Obviously the duration to which artworks aspire is modeled on fixed, inheritable possession; the spiritual should, like material, become property, an outrage ineluctably committed by spirit against itself. As soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death: The veneer of inalienability that they draw over themselves at the same time suffocates them. Many artworks of the highest caliber effectively seek to lose themselves in time so as not to be- come its prey , entering thus into insoluble antimony with the necessity for objecti- vation. Ernst Schoen once praised the unsurpassable noblesse of fireworks as the only art that aspires not to duration but only to glow for an instant and fade away. It is ultimately in terms of this idea that the temporal arts of drama and music are to be interpreted, the counterpart of a reification without which they would not exist and yet that degrades them. In the face of the means of mechanical reproduc- tion, these considerations appear obsolete, yet the discontent with these means may nevertheless also be a discontent with the emerging omnipotence of the per- manence of art that runs parallel with the collapse of duration . If art were to free itself from the once perceived illusion of duration, were to internalize its own
? ? SITUATION 0 29
transience in sympathy with the ephemeral life, it would approximate an idea of truth conceived not as something abstractly enduring but in consciousness of its temporal essence. If all art is the secularization of transcendence, it participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed, without this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than that art must go beyond its own concept in order to re- main faithful to that concept. The idea of its abolition does it homage by honoring its claim to truth . Nevertheless , the survival of undermined art is not only an ex- pression of cultural lag, that ever sluggish revolution of the superstructure. The source of art's power ofresistance is that a realized materialism would at the same time be the abolition of materialism, the abolition of the domination of material interests. In its powerlessness, art anticipates a spirit that would only then step forth. To this corresponds an objective need, the neediness of the world, which is contrary to the subjective and now no more than ideological individual need for art. Art can find its continuation nowhere else than in this objective need.
In art what once took care of itself became a specific undertaking, and as a result integration increasingly binds the centrifugal counterforces. Like a whirlpool, in- tegration absorbs the manifold that once defined art. What is left is an abstract unity shorn of the antithetical element by virtue of which art becomes a unity in the first place. The more successful the integration, the more it becomes an empty spinning of gears; teleologically it tends toward infantile tinkering. The power of the aesthetic subject to integrate whatever it takes hold of is at the same time its weakness. It capitulates to a unity that is alienated by virtue of its abstractness and resignedly casts its lot with blind necessity. If the whole of modem art can be understood as the perpetual intervention of the subject, one that is at no point dis- posed to allow the unreftected governance of the traditional play of forces within the artwork, the permanent interventions of the ego are matched by a tendency of the ego to abdicate out of weakness. True to the age-old mechanical principle of the bourgeois spirit, this abdication takes the form of the reification of subjective achievements, effectively locating them exterior to the subject and mistaking the abdication of the subject for a guarantee of ironclad objectivity. Technique, the extended arm of the subject, also always leads away from that subject. The shadow of art's autarchic radicalism is its harmlessness: Absolute color compositions verge on wallpaper patterns. Now that American hotels are decorated with ab- stract paintings ii la maniere de . . . and aesthetic radicalism has shown itself to be socially affordable, radicalism itself must pay the price that it is no longer radical. Among the dangers faced by new art, the worst is the absence of danger. The more art expels the preestablished, the more it is thrown back on what purports to get by, as it were, without borrowing from what has become distant and foreign: Art is thrown back on the dimensionless point of pure subjectivity , strictly on its par- ticular and thus abstract subjectivity. This tendency was passionately anticipated by the radical wing of expressionism up to and including dada. The absence of
30 0 SITUATION
social resonance, however, was not alone to blame for the collapse of expression- ism: It was not possible to persevere within the bounds of a dimensionless point; the contraction of the accessible, the totality of the refusal , terminates in complete impoverishment: the scream or the destitute, powerless gesture, literally the sylla- bles "da-da. " This became an amusement for all concerned , the dadaists as well as the conformists they challenged, because it confessed the impossibility of artis- tic objectivation that is postulated by each and every artistic manifestation, whether intentionally or not; what after all is left to do but scream. The dadaists consistently tried to abrogate this postulate ; the program of their surrealist succes- sors rejected art, yet without being able to shake itself free of it. Their truth was that it would be better not to have art than to have a false one. But they fell to the mercy of the semblance of an absolute subjectivity existing purely for-itself and objectively mediated, yet without the ability to go beyond the position of being- for-itself. Surrealism expresses the foreignness of the alienated only by seeking recourse in itself. Mimesis ties art to individual human experience, which is now exclusively that of being-for-itself. That there is no persevering at this subjective point is by no means only because the artwork forfeits that otherness in which the aesthetic subject is exclusively able to objectivate itself. Clearly the concept of duration-as ineluctable as it is problematic-cannot be unified with the idea that the SUbjective point is also a temporal one. Not only did the expressionists make concessions as they became older and had to earn a living; not only did dadaists convert to Catholicism or enroll in the Communist Party: Artists with the integrity of Picasso and Schoenberg went beyond the subjective point. Their difficulties in this could be sensed and feared right from their first efforts to achieve a so-called new order. Since then these difficulties developed into the difficulties of art as such. To date, all requisite progress beyond the subjective point has been bought at the price of regression through assimilation to the past and by the arbitrariness of a self-posited order. In recent years it has been fashionable to accuse Samuel Beckett of simply repeating his basic idea; he exposed himself to this accusation in a provocative fashion. In this his consciousness was correct that the need for progress is inextricable from its impossibility. The gesture of walking in place at the end of Godot, which is the fundamental motif of the whole of his work, reacts precisely to this situation. Without exception his response is violent. His work is the extrapolation of a negative lctcx. p6C;. The fulfilled moment reverses into per- petual repetition that converges with desolation. His narratives, which he sardon- ically calls novels, no more offer objective descriptions of social reality than-as the widespread misunderstanding supposes - they present the reduction of life to basic human relationships, that minimum of existence that subsists in extremis. These novels do, however, touch on fundamental layers of experience hic et nunc, which are brought together into a paradoxical dynamic at a standstill. The narra- tives are marked as much by an objectively motivated loss of the object as by its correlative, the impoverishment of the subject. Beckett draws the lesson from
SITUATION 0 31
montage and documentation, from all the attempts to free oneself from the illu- sion of a subjectivity that bestows meaning. Even where reality finds entry into the narrative, precisely at those points at which reality threatens to suppress what the literary subject once performed, it is evident that there is something uncanny about this reality. Its disproportion to the powerless subject, which makes it incommensurable with experience, renders reality unreal with a vengeance. The surplus of reality amounts to its collapse; by striking the subject dead, reality itself becomes deathly; this transition is the artfulness of all antiart, and in Beckett it is pushed to the point of the manifest annihilation of reality . The more total society becomes, the more completely it contracts to a unanimous system, and all the more do the artworks in which this experience is sedimented become the other of this society . If one applies the concept of abstraction in the vaguest possible sense, it signals the retreat from a world of which nothing remains except its caput mor- tuum. New art is as abstract as social relations have in truth become. In like man- ner, the concepts of the realistic and the symbolic are put out of service . Because the spell of external reality over its subjects and their reactions has become ab- solute , the artwork can only oppose this spell by assimilating itself to it. At ground zero, however, where Beckett's plays unfold like forces in infinitesimal physics, a second world of images springs forth , both sad and rich , the concentrate of histori- cal experiences that otherwise, in their immediacy, fail to articulate the essential: the evisceration of subject and reality . This shabby , damaged world of images i s the negative imprint o f the administered world . T o th i s extent Beckett i s realisti c . Even in what passes vaguement under the name of abstract art, something sur- vives of the tradition it effaced; presumably it corresponds to what one already perceives in traditional painting insofar as one sees images and not copies of something . Art carries out the eclipse of concretion, an eclipse to which expres- sion is refused by a reality in which the concrete continues to exist only as a mask of the abstract and the determinate particular is nothing more than an exemplar of the universal that serves as its camouflage and is fundamentally identical with the ubiquity of monopoly. This critique of pseudoconcreteness directs its barbs retro- spectively at the whole of art as it has come down to the present. The tangents of the empirical world need only be slightly extended to see that they converge in the insight that the concrete serves for nothing better than that something , by being in some way distinct , can be identified, possessed, and sold. The marrow of experi- ence has been sucked out; there is none, not even that apparently set at a remove from commerce , that has not been gnawed away . At the heart of the economy is a process of concentration and centralization that has the power to absorb what is scattered. It leaves traces of independent existences only for professional statistics and permeates the most subtle spiritual innervations often without its being possi- ble to perceive the mediations. The mendacious personalization of politics and the blather about "man in the age of inhumanity" are appropriate to the objective pseudoindividualization; but this becomes an unbearable burden for art because
32 0 SITUATION
there is no art without individuation. In other words, the contemporary situation of art is hostile to what the jargon of authenticity calls the "message. " The question so insistently posed by East German dramaturgy, "What does he mean? " just barely suffices to frighten hectored authors but would be absurd if applied to any one of Brecht's plays, whose program actually was to set thought processes in motion, not to communicate maxims; otherwise the idea of dialectical theater would have been meaningless from the start. Brecht's efforts to destroy subjective nuances and halftones with a blunt objectivity, and to do this conceptually as well, are artistic means; in the best of his work they become a principle of stylization, not afabula docet. It is hard to determine just what the author of Galileo or The Good Woman of Setzuan himself meant, let alone broach the question of the ob- jectivity of these works, which does not coincide with the subjective intention. The allergy to nuanced expression, Brecht's preference for a linguistic quality that may have been the result of his misunderstanding of positivist protocol sentences, is itself a form of expression that is eloquent only as determinate negation of that expression. Just as art cannot be, and never was, a language of pure feeling, nor a language of the affirmation of the soul, neither is it for art to pursue the results of ordinary knowledge, as for instance in the form of social documentaries that are to function as down payments on empirical research yet to be done. The space between discursive barbarism and poetic euphemism that remains to artworks is scarcely larger than the point of indifference into which Beckett burrowed.
The relation to the new is modeled on a child at the piano searching for a chord never previously heard. This chord, however, was always there; the possible com- binations are limited and actually everything that can be played on it is implicitly given in the keyboard. The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what exists and is obedient to it. At the center of contemporary antin- omies is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functional order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation. If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art's temporal end. Hegel was the first to realize that the end of art is implicit in its concept. That his prophecy was not fulfilled is based, paradoxically, on his historical optimism. He betrayed utopia by construing the existing as if it were the utopia of the absolute idea. Hegel' s theory that the world spirit has sublated art as a form is contradicted by another theory of art to be found in his work, which subordinates art to an antagonistic existence that prevails against all affirmative philosophy. This is compelling in architecture: If out of disgust with functional forms and their inherent conformism it wanted to give free reign to fantasy, it would fall immediately into kitsch. Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatiVely. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. In this image of collapse all the stig-
SITUATION 0 33
mata of the repulsive and loathsome in modern art gather. Through the irreconcil- able renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled: This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia-that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise-converges with the possibility oftotal catastrophe. In the image of catastrophe, an image that is not a copy of the event but the cipher of its potential, the magical trace of art's most distant pre- history reappears under the total spell, as if art wanted to prevent the catastrophe by conjuring up its image . The taboo set on the historical telos is the single legiti- mation of that whereby the new compromises itself politically and practically: its claim to being an end in itself.
The shaft that art directs at society is itself social; it is counterpressure to the force exerted by the body social; like inner-aesthetic progress, which is progress in productive and, above all, technical forces, this counterpressure is bound up with progress of extra-aesthetic productive forces. There are historical moments in which forces of production emancipated in art represent a real emancipation that is impeded by the relations of production. Artworks organized by the subject are capable tant bien que mal of what a society not organized by a subject does not allow; city planning necessarily lags far behind the planning of a major, purpose- less, artwork. The antagonism in the concept of technique as something deter- mined inner-aesthetically and as something developed externally to artworks, should not be conceived as absolute. It originated historically and can pass. In electronics it is already possible to produce artistically by manipulating means that originated extra-aesthetically. There is an obvious qualitative leap between the hand that draws an animal on the wall of a cave and the camera that makes it possible for the same image to appear simultaneously at innumerable places. But the objectivation of the cave drawing vis-Ii-vis what is unmediatedly seen already contains the potential of the technical procedure that effects the separation of what is seen from the subjective act of seeing. Each work, insofar as it is intended for many, is already its own reproduction. That in his dichotomization of the auratic and the technological artwork, Benjamin suppressed this element common to both in favor of their difference, would be the dialectical critique of his theory. Cer- tainly the concept of the modern is to be placed chronologically long before the idea of the modern as a historicophilosophical category ; the modem , however, in the latter sense is not a chronological concept but the Rimbaudian postulate of an art ofthe most advanced consciousness, an art in which the most progressive and differentiated technical procedures are saturated with the most progressive and differentiated experiences. But these experiences, being social, are critical. Mod- em works in this sense must show themselves to be the equal of high industrial- ism, not simply make it a topic. Their own comportment and formal language must react spontaneously to the objective situation; the idea of a spontaneous re- action that is a norm defines a perennial paradox of art. Because there is nothing
34 0 SITUATION
that can avoid the experience of the situation, nothing counts that purports to have escaped it. In many authentic modem works industrial thematic material is strictly avoided out of mistrust of machine art as a pseudomorphism. But in that this material is negated by heightened construction and the reduction of the material tolerated, the industrial returns with a vengeance, as in the work of Paul Klee. This aspect of the modem has changed as little as has the fact of industrialization for the life process of human beings; for the time being, this grants the aesthetic concept of the modem its peculiar invariance. The recognition of this invariance, however, admits no less breadth to the historical dynamic than does the industrial mode of production itself, which during the last hundred years has been trans- formed from the nineteenth-century factory to mass production and automation. The substantive element of artistic modernism draws its power from the fact that the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate. In a manner scarcely analyzed yet by sociology , they radiate out into areas of life far removed from them , deep into the zones of subjective experience, which does not notice this and guards the sanctity of its reserves . Art is modem when, by its mode of experience and as the expres- sion of the crisis of experience, it absorbs what industrialization has developed under the given relations of production. This involves a negative canon, a set of prohibitions against what the modem has disavowed in experience and technique; and such determinate negation is virtually the canon of what is to be done. That this modernity is more than a vague Zeitgeist or being cleverly up to date depends on the liberation of the forces of production . Modem art is equally determined so- cially by the conflict with the conditions of production and inner-aesthetically by the exclusion of exhausted and obsolete procedure s . Modernity tends rather to op- pose the ruling Zeitgeist, and today it must do so; to confirmed culture consumers , radical modem art seems marked by an old-fashioned seriousness and for that rea-
son, among others, crazy. The historical essence of all art is nowhere expressed so emphatically as in the qualitative irresistibility of modem art; that the idea of in- ventions in material production comes to mind is not an accidental association . By an inherent tendency, important artworks annihilate everything of their own time that does not achieve their standard . Rancor is therefore one of the reasons why so many of the cultured oppose radical modem art: The murderous historical force of the modem is equated with the disintegration of all that to which the proprietors of culture despairingly cling. Modem art is questionable not when it goes too far-as the cliche runs-but when it does not go far enough, which is the point at which works falter out of a lack of internal consistency. Only works that expose themselves to every risk have the chance of living on, not those that out of fear of the ephemeral cast their lot with the past. Those renaissances of temperate mod- ernism, promoted by a restorative consciousness and its interested parties, fizzle even in the eyes and ears of a public that is hardly avant-garde.
In emphatic opposition to the illusion of the organic nature of art, the material
SITUATION 0 35
concept of the modem implies conscious control over its mean s . Even here mater- ial production and artistic production converge. The necessity of going to the ex- treme is the necessity for this particular rationality in relation to the material, and not the result of a pseudoscientific competition with the rationalization of the de- mystified world. This necessity categorically distinguishes the materially modem from traditionalism. Aesthetic rationality demands that all artistic means reach the utmost determinacy in themselves and according to their own function so as to be able to perform what traditional means can no longer fulfill. The extreme is demanded by artistic technology; it is not just the yearning of a rebellious attitude . The idea of a moderate modernism is self-contradictory because it restrains aes- thetic rationality. That every element in a work absolutely accomplish what it is supposed to accomplish coincides directly with the modem as desideratum: The moderate work evades this requirement because it receives its means from an available or fictitious tradition to which it attributes a power it no longer possesses. If moderate modernists pride themselves on their honesty, which sup- posedly protects them from getting carir ed away with every fad, this is dishonest given the ways in which moderation makes things easier for them . The purported immediacy of their artistic comportment is thoroughly mediated. The socially most advanced level of the productive forces, one of which is consciousness, is the level of the problem posed at the interior of the aesthetic monad . In their own figuration, artworks indicate the solution to this problem, which they are unable to provide on their own without intervention; this alone is legitimate tradition in art. Each and every important work of art leaves traces behind in its material and tech- nique, and following them defines the modem as what needs to be done, which is contrary to having a nose for what is in the air. Critique makes this definition con- crete. The traces to be found in the material and the technical procedures, from which every qualitatively new work takes its lead, are scars: They are the loci at which the preceding works misfired. By laboring on them, the new work turns against those that left these traces behind; this, not shifts in subjective feelings for life or in established styles, is the actual object of what historicism treated as the generational problem in art . The agon of Greek tragedy still gave evidence of this; only the pantheon of neutralized culture concealed it. The truth content of art- works is fused with their critical content. That is why works are also critics of one another. This, not the historical continuity of their dependencies, binds artworks to one another; "each artwork is the mortal enemy of the other"; 13 the unity of the history of art is the dialectical figure of determinate negation. Only in this way does art serve its idea of reconciliation. A meager and impure idea of this dialecti- cal unity is given by the way in which artists of a single genre perceive themselves to be working in a subterranean collective that is virtually independent of their individual products.
In empirical reality the negation of the negative is hardly ever affirmation , yet in the aesthetic sphere this dialectical maxim bears some truth: The power of imma-
36 0 SITUATION
nent negation is not shackled in subjective artistic production as it is externally. Artists with extreme sensitivity of taste, such as Stravinsky and Brecht, brushed taste against the grain on the basis of taste; dialectic lay hold of taste and drove it beyond itself, and this certainly is also its truth. By virtue of aesthetic elements under the facade, realistic artworks in the nineteenth century on occasion proved to be more substantial than those works that paid obeisance to the ideal of art's purity; Baudelaire extolled Manet and took Flaubert's side. In tenns ofpeinture pure, Manet towered incomparably over Puvis de Chavannes; comparing them is almost comical. The mistake of aestheticism was aesthetic: It confused its own guiding concept with the work accomplished. Idiosyncrasies of artists are sedi- mented in the canon of prohibitions, but they in tum become objectively binding so that in art the particular is literally the universal . For the idiosyncratic comport- ment, which is at first unconscious and hardly theoretically transparent to itself, is the sedimentation of a collective fonn of reaction. Kitsch is an idiosyncratic con- cept that is as binding as it is elusive to definition. That reflection is a requisite of art today means that it must become conscious of its idiosyncrasies and articulate them. As a consequence, art threatens to become allergic to itself; the quintes- sence of the determinate negation that art exercises is its own negation. Through correspondences with the past, what resurfaces becomes something qualitatively other. The defonnation of figures and human faces in modem sculpture and paint- ings are reminiscent prima vista of archaic works in which the cultic replication of people was either not intended or impossible to achieve with the techniques avail- able. But it makes a world of difference whether art, having once achieved the power of replication, negates it, as the word defonnation implies , or if this power has yet to be gained; for aesthetics the difference is greater than the similarity . It is hard to imagine that art, having once experienced the heteronomy of portrayal, would again forget it and return to what it detenninately and intentionally negated. Yet, admittedly, even prohibitions that originated historically are not to be hypostatized; otherwise they call up that favorite sleight of hand of mod- ernists of Cocteau ' s variety that consists of suddenly conjuring up what has been temporarily prohibited and presenting it as if it were altogether fresh, and of rel- ishing the violation of the modem taboo as itself something modem; in this fash- ion modernity has frequently been shunted into reaction. It is problems that return, not preproblematic categories and solutions. The older Schoenberg is reliably re- ported to have said that for the moment there was no discussing harmony . Clearly this was not a prophecy that some day one would again be able to compose with triads, which he by the expansion of the material had relegated to exhausted spe- cial circumstances . The question, however, remains open whether the dimension of simultaneity in music as a whole was not degraded to a mere result, an irrele- vance , something virtually accidental ; music lost one of its dimensions , that of the eloquent simultaneous combination of sound, and this was not the least of the reasons why the immeasurably enriched material was impoverished. Triads and
? SITUATION 0 37
other chords from the treasury of tonality are not to be restituted; it is conceivable , however, that if qualitative counterforces someday stir in opposition to the total quantification of music , the vertical dimension could once again become "a matter of discussion" in such a fashion as to allow the ear to listen for harmonies that had regained their specific value. An analogous prediction could be made for counter- point , which was similarly scuttled by blind integration . Of course the possibility of reactionary misuse cannot be disregarded; rediscovered harmony, however it is constituted, would accommodate itself to harmonic tendencies; one need only imagine how easily the equally well-founded longing for the reconstruction of monodic lines could be transformed into the false resurrection of what the ene- mies of new music miss so painfully as melody. The prohibitions are both gentle and strict. The thesis that homeostasis is only binding as the result of a play of forces and not as slack well-proportionedness, implies the weighty prohibition of those aesthetic phenomena that in The Spirit of Utopia Bloch called carpet motifs , a prohibition whose powers are expanding retrospectively, as if it were an invari- ant. Even though it is avoided and negated, however, the need for homeostasis persists. Rather then resolving antagonisms, art at times expresses overwhelming tensions negatively through extreme distance from them. Aesthetic norms, how- ever great their historical importance may be, lag behind the concrete life of art- works; yet all the same these norms participate in the latters' magnetic fields.
Nothing, however, is served by affixing a temporal index externally to these norms; the dialectic ofartworks takes place between these norms -more precisely, between the most advanced norms - and the works' specific form.
The need to take risks is actualized in the idea of the experimental, which-in op- position to the image of the artist's unconscious organic labor-simultaneously transfers from science to art the conscious control over materials. Currently offi- cial culture grants special funds to what it mistrustfully, half hoping for failure, calls artistic experimentation, thus neutralizing it. Actually, art is now scarcely possible unless it does experiment. The disproportion between established culture and the level of productive forces has become blatant: What is internally consis- tent appears to society at large as a bogus promissory note on the future, and art, socially dispossessed, is in no way sure that it has any binding force of its own. For the most part, experimentation takes shape as the testing of possibilities, usu- ally of types and species; it therefore tends to degrade the concrete work to a mere example: This is one of the reasons for the aging of new art. Certainly aesthetic means and ends cannot be separated, yet almost by its concept experimentation is primarily concerned with means and content to leave the world waiting in vain for the ends. What is more , during the last several decades the concept of the experi- ment has itself become equivocal . If even as late as 1930 experimentation referred to efforts filtered through critical consciousness in opposition to the continuation of unreflected aesthetic practices, in the meantime the concept has acquired the stipulation that a work should have contents that are not foreseeable in the process
38 0 SITUATION
of production, that, subjectively, the artist should be surprised by the work that results. In this transformation of the concept of experimentation, art becomes conscious of something that was always present in it and was pointed out by Mallarme. The artist's imagination scarcely ever completely encompassed what it brought forth. The combinatorial arts, ars nova, for instance, and later that of the Netherland School, infiltrated the music of the late Middle Ages with effects that probably surpassed the composers' subjective imagination. A combinatorial art that required ofthe artist-as alienated artist-the mediation of subjective imagi- nation , was essential to the development of artistic techniques . This magnified the risk that aesthetic products would deteriorate because of inadequate or feeble imagination. The risk is that of aesthetic regression. Artistic spirit raises itself above what merely exists at the point where the imagination does not capitulate to the mere existence of materials and techniques. Since the emancipation of the subject, the mediation of the work through it is not to be renounced without its reversion to the status of a thing. Music theoreticians of the sixteenth century already recognized this. On the other hand, only stubbornness could deny the productive function of many "surprise" elements in much modern art, in action painting and aleatoric art , that did not result from being passed through the imagi- nation. The solution to this contradiction is that all imagination has an arena of in- determinateness that is not, however, in rigid opposition to it. As long as Richard Strauss still wrote somewhat complex works, the virtuoso himself may have been unable to imagine each sound, each color, and each sounding combination precisely; it is well known that even composers with the best ears are usually as- tonished when they actually hear their orchestral works performed. This indeter- minateness, however-including the indeterminateness that results from the in- ability of the ear, as Stockhausen has noted, to distinguish, much less imagine, each tone of a tone cluster-is built into determinateness as an element of it rather than that it encompasses the whole . In the jargon of musicians: You have to know exactly if something sounds, and only to a certain extent how it sounds. This leaves room for surprises , those that are desired as well as those that require cor- rection; what made its precocious appearance as l 'imprevu in Berlioz is a surprise not only for the listener but objectively as well; and yet the ear can anticipate it. In the experiment, the ego-alien must be respected as well as subjectively mas- tered: Only as something mastered does it bear witness to what has been liberated. The real source of the risk taken by all artworks, however, is not located in their level of contingency but rather in the fact that each one must follow the whippoor- will of objectivity immanent to it, without any guarantee that the productive forces-the spirit of the artist and his procedures - will be equal to that objectiv- ity. If such a guarantee did exist it would block the possibility of the new, which itself contributes to the objectivity and coherence of the work . What can, without
stirring up the musty odors of idealism, justly be called serious in art is the pathos of an objectivity that confronts the individual with what is more and other than he
? SITUATION 0 39
is in his historically imperative insufficiency. The risk taken by artworks partici- pates in their seriousness; it is the image of death in their own sphere. This seri- ousness is relativized, however, in that aesthetic autonomy remains external to suffering , of which the work is an image and from which the work draws its seri- ousness. The artwork is not only the echo of suffering, it diminishes it; form, the organon of its seriousness, is at the same time the organon of the neutralization of suffering. Art thereby falls into an unsolvable aporia. The demand for complete responsibility on the part of artworks increases the burden of their guilt; therefore this demand is to be set in counterpoint with the antithetical demand for irrespon- sibility . The latter is reminiscent of the element of play, without which there is no more possibility of art than of theory. As play, art seeks to absolve itself of the guilt of its semblance. Art is in any case irresponsible as delusion, as spleen, and without it there is no art whatsoever. The art of absolute responsibility terminates in sterility, whose breath can be felt on almost all consistently developed art- works; absolute irresponsibility degrades art to fun; a synthesis of responsibility and irresponsibility is precluded by the concept itself. Any relation to what was once thought of as the dignity of art-what Holderlin called that "noble, grave genius"14-has become ambivalent. True, in the face of the culture industry art maintains that dignity; it enrobes two measures of a Beethoven quartet snatched up from between the murky stream of hit tunes while tuning the radio dial. By contrast, modern art that laid claim to dignity would be pitilessly ideological. To
act dignified it would have to put on airs, strike a pose, claim to be other than what it can be . It is precisely its seriousness that compels modern art to lay aside preten- sions long since hopelessly compromised by the Wagnerian art religion . A solemn tone would condemn artworks to ridiculousness, just as would the gestures of grandeur and might. Certainly, without the subjective form-giving power art is not thinkable, yet this capacity has nothing to do with an artwork's achieving ex- pressive strength through its form. Even subjectively this strength is heavily com- promised, for art partakes of weakness no less than of strength. In the artwork the unconditional surrender of dignity can become an organon of its strength. Consider the strength it took for the rich and brilliant bourgeois heir, Verlaine, to let himself go, to sink so drastically in the world, to turn himself into the passively tumbling instrument of his poetry . To accuse him, as did Stefan Zweig, of having been a weakling, is not only petty but obtuse with regard to the variety of produc- tive artistic comportments: Without his weakness Verlaine would no more have been able to write his most beautiful works than to write those miserable verses he later marketed as rate.
To survive reality at its most extreme and grim, artworks that do not want to sell themselves as consolation must equate themselves with that reality. Radical art today is synonymous with dark art; its primary color is black. Much contemporary production is irrelevant because it takes no note of this and childishly delights in color. The ideal of blackness with regard to content is one of the deepest impulses
40 0 SITUATION
of abstraction. It may well be that the current trifling with sound and color effects is a reaction to the impoverishment entailed by the ideal of black; perhaps art will one day be able to abolish this axiom without self-betrayal, which is what Brecht may have sensed when he wrote: "What times are these , when / to speak of trees is almost a crime / because it passes in silence over such infamy! "15 Art indicts superfluous poverty by voluntarily undergoing its own; but it indicts asceticism as well and cannot establish it as its own norm. Along with the impoverishment of means entailed by the ideal of blackness-if not by every sort of aesthetic Sachlichkeit-what is written, painted, and composed is also impoverished; the most advanced arts push this impoverishment to the brink of silence. That the world, which, as Baudelaire wrote,16 has lost its fragrance and since then its color, could have them restored by art strikes only the artless as possible. This further convulses the possibility of art, though without bringing it down . Incidentally , an early romantic artist, Schubert, who was later so widely exploited by the insis- tently happy, already felt compelled to ask if there were such a thing as happy music. The injustice committed by all cheerful art, especially by entertainment, is probably an injustice to the dead; to accumulated, speechless pain. Still, black art bears features that would, if they were definitive, set their seal on historical de- spair; to the extent that change is always still possible they too may be ephemeral. Theradically darkened art-established by the surrealists as black humor-which the aesthetic hedonism that survived the catastrophes defamed for the perversity of expecting that the dark should give something like pleasure, is in essence noth- ing but the postulate that art and a true consciousness of it can today find happi- ness only in the capacity of standing firm. This happiness illuminates the art- work's sensuous appearance from within. Just as in internally consistent artworks spirit is communicated even to the most recalcitrant phenomenon, effectively res- cuing it sensuously, ever since Baudelaire the dark has also offered sensuous en- ticement as the antithesis of the fraudulent sensuality of culture ' s facade . There is more joy in dissonance than in consonance: This metes outjustice, eye for eye, to hedonism. The caustic discordant moment, dynamically honed, is differentiated in itself as well as from the affirmative and becomes alluring; and this allure, scarcely less than revulsion for the imbecility of positive thinking draws modern art into a no-man's-land that is the plenipotentiary of a livable world. Schoenberg's Pierrot iunaire, that crystalline unity o f imaginary essence and a totality o f disso- nance, was the first to achieve this aspect of the modern. Negation may reverse into pleasure, not into affirmation.
Authentic art of the past that for the time being must remain veiled is not thereby sentenced. Great works wait. While their metaphysical meaning dissolves, some- thing of their truth content, however little it can be pinned down, does not; it is that whereby they remain eloquent. A liberated humanity would be able to inherit its historical legacy free of guilt. What was once true in an artwork and then dis- claimed by history is only able to disclose itself again when the conditions have
? SITUATION 0 41
changed on whose account that truth was invalidated: Aesthetic truth content and history are that deeply meshed. A reconciled reality and the restituted truth of the past could converge . What can still be experienced in the art of the past and is still attainable by interpretation is a directive toward this state. Nothing guarantees that it will ever be followed . Tradition is to be not abstractly negated but criticized without naIvete according to the current situation: Thus the present constitutes the past. Nothing is to be accepted unexamined just because it is available and was once held valuable; nor is anything to be dismissed because it belongs to the past; time alone provides no criterion. An incalculable store of what is past proves im- manently to be inadequate , though in its own time and for the consciousness of its own period this may not have been the case. It is the course of time that unmasks these deficiencies, yet they are objective in quality and not a matter of shifting taste. -Only the most advanced art of any period has any chance against the decay wrought by time. In the afterlife of works , however, qualitative differences become apparent that in no way coincide with the level of modernity achieved in their own periods. In the secret bellum omnium contra omnes that fills the history of art, the older modem may be victorious over the newer modem. This is not to say that someday what is par ordre du jour old-fashioned could prove superior and more enduring than the more advanced. Hopes for renaissances of Pfitzner and Sibelius, Carossa or Hans Thoma, say more about those who cherish the hope than about the enduring value of the works of such souls. But works can be actual- ized through historical development, through correspondance with later develop- ments: Names such as Gesualdo de Venosa, EI Greco, Turner, Buchner are all famous examples, not accidentally rediscovered after the break with continuous tradition. Even works that did not reach the technical standard of their periods, such as Mahler's early symphonies, communicate with later developments and indeed precisely by means of what separated them from their own time . Mahler's music is progressive just by its clumsy and at the same time objective refusal of the neo-romantic intoxication with sound, but this refusal was in its own time scan- dalous, modem perhaps in the same way as were the simplifications of van Gogh and the fauves vis-a-vis impressionism.
However true it is that art is no replica of the subject and that Hegel was right in his criticism of the popular idea that the artist must be more than his work-for not infrequently he is less, the empty husk ofwhat he objectivated in the work-it holds equally true that no artwork can succeed except to the degree that the sub- ject gives it shape from out of himself. It is not for the subject, as the organon of art, to overleap the process of divisive individuation that is imposed on him and not a matter of opinion or accidental consciousness. This situation therefore com- pels art-as something spiritual-to undergo subjective mediation in its objective constitution. The share of subjectivity in the artwork is itself a piece of objectiv- ity. Certainly the mimetic element that is indispensable to art i s , as regards its sub- stance , universal , but it cannot be reached other than by way of the inextinguish-
42 0 SITUATION
ably idiosyncratic particular subject. Although art in its innermost essence is a comportment, it cannot be isolated from expression, and there is no expression without a subject. The transition to the discursively recognized universal by which the politically reflecting particular subject hopes to escape atomization and powerlessness is in the aesthetic sphere a desertion to heteronomy . If the artist's work is to reach beyond his own contingency, then he must in return pay the price that he, in contrast to the discursively thinking person, cannot transcend himself and the objectively established boundaries. Even if one day the atomistic structure of society itself were changed, art would not have to sacrifice its social idea-in essence whether a particular is even possible-to the socially universal: As long as the particular and the universal diverge there is no freedom. Rather, freedom would secure for the subject the right that today manifests itself exclusively in the idiosyncratic compulsions that artists must obey. Whoever resists the overwhelm- ing collective force in order to insist on the passage of art through the subject, need on no account at the same time think underneath the veil of subjectivism. Aesthetic autonomy encompasses what is collectively most advanced, what has escaped the spell. By virtue of its mimetic preindividual elements , every idiosyn- crasy lives from collective forces of which it is unconscious. The critical reflec- tion of the subject, however isolated that subject, stands watch that these forces do not provoke regression. Social reflection on aesthetics habitually neglects the con- cept of productive force . Yet deeply embedded in the technological processes this force is the subject, the subject congealed as technology . Productions that avoid it, that effectively want to make themselves technically autonomous , are obliged to correct themselves by way of the subject.
The rebellion of art against its false-intentional-spiritualization, Wedekind's for example in his program of a corporeal art, is itself a rebellion of spirit that, though it is not perpetually negative, does indeed negate itself)? Indeed, in the contemporary social situation spirit is present only by virtue of the principium individuationis. Collective labor is conceivable in art; the extinguishing of its im- manent subjectivity is not. Any change in this would depend on the total social consciousness having reached a level where it no longer conflicts with the most progressive consciousness, which today is exclusively that of the individual. In spite of the most subtle modifications, bourgeois idealist philosophy has been unable epistemologically to break through solipsism. For normal bourgeois con- sciousness the epistemology modeled on it was of no consequence . For this con- sciousness art appears necessary and directly "intersubjective. " This relation of epistemology and art should be reversed. The former has the ability through criti- cal self-reflection to destroy the spell of solipsism, whereas the subjective point of reference in art remains that which solipsism has merely feigned in reality. Art is the historicophilosophical truth of a solipsism that is untrue in-itself. In art there is no possible willful overcoming of the situation that philosophy has unjustly hypo- statized. Aesthetic semblance is what solipsism extra-aesthetically confuses with
SITUATION D 43
truth. By participating in this confusion, Lukacs's attack on radical modem art to- tally misses the point. He contaminates art with real or alleged solipsistic currents in philosophy. What appears identical, however, can now and again be fundamen- tally opposite. -A critical element of the mimetic taboo is directed against a tepid warmth that is increasingly supposed to pass for expression. Expressive impulses produce a type of contact in which conformism rejoices . This is the men- tality that has absorbed Berg's Wozzeck and reactionarily played it off against the Schoenberg School, which not a single measure of the opera disavows. The paradox of the situation is concentrated in Schoenberg's preface to Webern's Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, a work at the extreme limit of expressivity: Schoenberg praises it because, in his own words, it spurns animal warmth. All the same, the warmth has by now also been attributed to those works that rejected it for the sake of authentic expression. Valid art today is polarized into, on the one
hand, an unassuaged and inconsolable expressivity that rejects every last trace of conciliation and becomes autonomous construction; and, on the other, the expres- sionlessness of construction that expresses the dawning powerlessness of expres- sion . - The discussion of the taboo that weighs on subject and expression touches on a dialectic of maturity. Its Kantian postulate, that of emancipation from the spell of the infantile, holds not only for reason but equally for art. The history of modem art is that of a straining toward maturity as the organized and heightened aversion toward the childish in art, which becomes childish in the first place by the measure of a pragmatically narrow rationality. No less, however, does art rebel against precisely this form of rationality , which, in the relation of means and ends, forgets the ends and fetishizes the means as an end in itself. This irrational- ity in the principle of reason is unmasked by the avowedly rational irrationality of art, evident in its technical procedures. Art brings to light what is infantile in the ideal of being grown up. Immaturity via maturity is the prototype of play.
In modem art, metier is fundamentally different from traditional artisanal methods. Its concept indicates the totum of capacities through which the artist does justice to the conception of the work and precisely thereby severs the umbilical cord of tradition. All the same, the artist's metier never originates wholly out of a single work. No artist approaches his work with nothing but the eyes, ears, or linguistic capacity forjust it. The realization of a specific work always presupposes qualities gained beyond the spell of the work ' s specification; only dilettantes confuse orig- inality with tabula rasa. Although it appears to be merely subjective, the totum of forces invested in the work is the potential presence of the collective according to the level of the available productive forces: Windowless, it contains the monad. This is most strikingly evident in the critical corrections made by artists. In every improvement to which he is compelled, often enough in conflict with what he con- siders his primary impulse, the artist works as social agent, indifferent to society's own consciousness. He embodies the social forces of production without neces- sarily being bound by the censorship dictated by the relations of production,
44 0 SITUATION
which he continually criticizes by following the rigors of his metier. In the many particular situations with which the work confronts its author there are always many available solutions, but the multiplicity of solutions is finite and surveyable as a whole. Metier sets boundaries against the bad infinity in works. It makes con- crete what, in the language of Hegel's Logic, might be called the abstract possi- bility of artworks. Therefore every authentic artist is obsessed with technical pro- cedures; the fetishism of means also has a legitimate aspect.
Art is not to be reduced to the unquestionable polarity of the mimetic and the con- structive, as if this were an invariant formula, for otherwise works of high quality would be obliged to strike a balance between the two principles. But what was fruitful in modern art was what gravitated toward one of the extremes , not what sought to mediate between them; those works that strove after both, in search of synthesis, were rewarded with a dubious consensus. The dialectic of these elements is similar to dialectical logic, in that each pole realizes itself only in the other, and not in some middle ground. Construction is not the corrective of ex- pression, nor does it serve as its guarantor by fulfilling the need for objectivation; rather, construction must conform to the mimetic impulses without planning , as it were; in this lies the superiority of Schoenberg'S Erwanung over a great many compositions that made that work into a principle that had for its part been one of construction; what survives of expressionism as something objective are those works that abstained from constructive organization. Similarly , construction can- not, as a form empty of human content, wait to be filled with expression. Rather, construction gains expression through coldness. Picasso's cubist works and their later transformations are, by virtue of asceticism against expression, far more ex- pressive than those works that were inspired by cubism but feared to lose expres- sion and became supplicant. This may lead the way beyond the debate over func- tionalism. The critique of Sachlichkeit as a form of reified consciousness must not smuggle in a laxness that would imagine that the reduction of the requirement of construction would result in the restoration of an allegedly free fantasy and thus of the element of expression. Functionalism today, prototypically in architecture, would need to push construction so far that it would win expression through the rejection of traditional and semitraditional forms. Great architecture gains its suprafunctional language when it works directly from its purposes, effectively an- nouncing them mimetically as the work's content. H. B. Scharoun's Philharmonic Hall in Berlin is beautiful because, in order to create the ideal spatial conditions for orchestral music, it assimilates itself to these conditions rather than borrowing from them. By expressing its purpose through the building, it transcends mere purposiveness though, incidentally, this transition is never guaranteed to purpo- sive forms. Neue Sachlichkeit's condemnation of expression and all mimesis as ornamental and superfluous, as arbitrary subjective garnishing, holds true only for construction provided with a veneer of expression, not for works of absolute ex- pression. Absolute expression would be objective, the object itself. The phenome-
SITUATION 0 45
non of aura, which Benjamin described at once nostalgically and critically, has become bad wherever it is instituted and simulated; wherever works that in their production and reproduction oppose the hie et nunc are, like the commercial film, provided with the semblance of this immediacy. To be sure, this also damages the individually produced work when, seeking to preserve aura, it concocts unique- ness and thus springs to the aid of an ideology that regales itself with the well- individuated, as if in the administered world such still existed. On the other hand, conceived nondialectically the theory of aura lends itself to misuse. It becomes a slogan of the deaestheticization of art that is under way in the age of the tech- nical reproducibility of the artwork. Aura is not only-as Benjamin claimed-the here and now of the artwork, it is whatever goes beyond its factual givenness, its content; one cannot abolish it and still want art. Even demystified artworks are more than what is literally the case. 18 The "exhibition value" that, according to Benjamin, supplants "cult value" is an imago of the exchange process. Art that de- votes itself to its exhibition value is ruled by the exchange process in just the same way as the categories of socialist realism accommodate themselves to the status quo of the culture industry. The refusal by artworks to compromise becomes a cri- tique even of the idea of their inner coherence, their drossless perfection and inte- gration. Inner coherence shatters on what is superior to it, the truth of the content, which no longer finds satisfaction in expression-for expression recompenses helpless individuality with a deceptive importance -or in construction, for coher- ence is more than a mere analogy of the administered world. The utmost inte- gration is utmost semblance and this causes the former's reversal: Ever since Beethoven's last works those artists who pushed integration to an extreme have mobilized disintegration. The truth content of art, whose organon was integration, turns against art and in this turn art has its emphatic moments. Artists discover the compulsion toward disintegration in their own works, in the surplus of organization and regimen; it moves them to set aside the magic wand as does Shakespeare's Prospero, who is the poet's own voice. However, the truth of such disintegration is achieved by way of nothing less than the triumph and guilt of integration. The category of the fragmentary-which has its locus here-is not to be confused with the category of contingent particularity: The fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.
To say that art is not identical with the concept of beauty, but requires for its real- ization the concept of the ugly as its negation, is a platitude. Yet this does not amount to the annulment of the category of the ugly as a canon of prohibitions. This canon no longer forbids offenses against universal rules, but it debars viola- tions of the work's immanent consistency. The universality of this canon is noth- ing other than the primacy of the particular: There should no longer be anything that is not specific. The prohibition of the ugly has become an interdiction of
? 46 0 THE VGLY, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND TECHNIQUE
whatever is not fonned hic et nunc, of the incompletely fonned, the raw. Disso- nance is the technical tenn for the reception through art of what aesthetics as well as naIvete calls ugly. Whatever it may be, the ugly must constitute, or be able to constitute, an element of art; a work by the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz bears the title The Aesthetics of the Ugly. l Archaic art and then traditional art, especially since the fauns and sileni of Hellenism, abound in the portrayal of subjects that were considered ugly. In modern art the weight of this element increased to such a degree that a new quality emerged. According to traditional aesthetics , the ugly is that element that opposes the work's ruling law of fonn; it is integrated by that fonnal law and thereby confinns it, along with the power of subjective freedom in the artworK vis-a-vis the subject matter. This subject matter would indeed become beautiful in a higher sense through its function in the pictorial composition, for instance, or by its participation in the production of a dynamic equilibrium; for, according to a Hegelian topos, beauty is the result not of a simple equilibrium per se, but rather of the tension that results . Harmony that, as a mere result , denies the tensions that have entered into it, becomes something disturbing, false, and effec- tively dissonant. The harmonistic view of the ugly was voided in modern art, and something qualitatively new emerged. The anatomical horror in Rimbaud and Benn, the physically revolting and repellent in Beckett, the scatological traits of many contemporary dramas, have nothing in common with the rustic uncouthness of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Anal pleasure, and the pride of art at facilely being able to integrate it, abdicate; powerlessly the law of fonn capitu- lates to ugliness. That is how completely dynamic the category of the ugly is, and necessarily its counterimage, the category of the beautiful, is no less so. Both mock definitional fixation such as is imagined by that aesthetic whose nonns are, however indirectly, oriented by these categories. The statement that a devastated industrial landscape or a face defonned by a painting is just plain ugly may an-
swer spontaneously to the phenomenon but lacks the self-evidence it assumes. The impression o f the ugliness o f technology and industrial landscapes cannot be adequately explained in fonnal tenns, and aesthetically well-integrated functional fonns, in Adolf Loos's sense, would probably leave the impression of ugliness unchanged. The impression of ugliness stems from the principle of violence and destruction. The aims posited are unreconciled with what nature, however medi- ated it may be, wants to say on its own.