No More Learning

Traditional aesthetics misses the mark because, in keeping with a general parti pris, it prejudges the relation of the whole and the part in favor of the whole. In contrast, dialectics does not give any instructions for the treatment of art, but inheres in it. The reflective power ofjudgment-which cannot take the subordinating concept as its starting point nor, consequently, the artwork as a whole, for it is never "given," and which follows the individual elements and goes beyond them by virtue of their own need - subjectively traces the movement of artworks in themselves. By the force of their dialectic, artworks escape myth, the blind and abstractly dominating nexus of nature.
Incontestably the quintessence of all elements of logicality, or, more broadly, coherence in artworks, is form. It is astonishing, however, how little aesthetics re- flected on the category of form, how much it, the distinguishing aspect of art, has been assumed to be unproblematically given. The difficulty in getting a grasp on it is in part due to the entwinement of all aesthetic form with content [Inhalt]; form is not only to be conceived in opposition to content but through it if aesthetics is not to fall prey to an abstractness that habitually makes it the ally of reactionary art. Indeed, the concept of form has been the blind spot of aesthetics right up to Valery, because everything about art is so inextricably tied up with it that the con- cept defies isolation. As little as art is to be defined by any other element, it is sim- ply identical with form. Every other element can be negated in the concept of form , even aesthetic unity , the idea of form that first made the wholeness and au- tonomy of the artwork possible. In highly developed modem works, form tends to dissociate unity, either in the interest ofexpression or to criticize art's affirmative
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character. Long before the ubiquitous crisis, open forms existed. In Mozart the unity of the work was occasionally playfully tested by its relaxation . By juxtapos- ing relatively disjointed or contrasting elements, Mozart, the composer who is praised above all others for the rigor ofhis form, masterfully juggles the concept of form itself. He is so sure of its strength that he effectively lets go the reins and, on the basis of the security of the construction itself, gives the lead to centrifugal forces. For Mozart, the heir of an older tradition, the idea of unity as form is still so unshaken that it is able to bear the utmost pressure , whereas for Beethoven , in whom unity lost its substantiality under the nominalist assault, there is a need to assert unity far more strictly; unity preforms the multiplicitous contents a priori and thus tames them all the more triumphantly. Today artists would like to do away with unity altogether, though with the irony that those works that are sup- posedly open and incomplete necessarily regain something comparable to unity insofar as this openness is planned. For the most part, theory equates form with symmetry or repetition. There is no reason to deny that, if one wanted to reduce the concept of form to invariants, equality and repetition could be lined up in opposition to inequality, that is, to contrast and development. But little would be gained by setting up such categories. Musical analyses, for example, show that even in those works most diffuse and hostile to repetition, similarities are in- volved, that many parts correspond with others in terms of shared, distinguishing characteristics, and that it is only through the relation to these elements of identity that the sought-after nonidentity is achieved; without sameness of any sort, chaos itself would prevail as something ever-same . Indeed , the distinction between repe- tition that is superficial, heteronomously decreed, and incompletely mediated by specific details and, on the other hand , the ineluctable determination of the unlike by a degree of sameness, is a distinction that decisively outweighs all invariance. If this distinction is ignored by a concept of form sympathetic with invariance, the result is an affinity for that bestial phraseology that indulges in expressions like "consummate form. " Because form is the central concept of aesthetics and is al- ways presupposed by it in the givenness of art , aesthetics must gather all its forces to think the concept through. If aesthetics is not to be trapped in tautologies it must gain access to what is not simply immanent in the concept of form, yet the concept of form refuses to grant a voice to anything aesthetic that claims indepen- dence from it. An aesthetics of form is possible only if it breaks through aesthetics as the aesthetics of the totality of what stands under the spell of form. Whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this. The concept of form marks out art's sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art's right to exist is un- certain. Art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form, no better. The participation of form in the crisis of art becomes evident in statements like those of Lukacs, who said that in modem art the importance of form has been greatly overestimated) Evident in this philistine call to arms is a discontent with art of which Lukacs the cultural conservative is unconscious , as well as a concept of form
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that is inadequate to art. To hit upon the idea that fonn has been overestimated in art, one must fail to recognize that fonn is essential to art, that it mediates content [Inhalt] . Fonn is the artifacts' coherence, however self-antagonistic and refracted, through which each and every successful work separates itself from the merely existing. Lukacs's unreflected concept of fonn, with its hue and cry over fonnal- ism, sets fonn in opposition to the content of poems, compositions, and paintings as an organization that can simply be lifted off the work. Fonn is thereby con- ceived as something superimposed, subjectively dictated, whereas it is substantial only when it does no violence to what is fonned and emerges from it. Indeed, what is fonned, the content [Inhalt] does not amount to objects external to fonn; rather, the content is mimetic impulses that are drawn into the world of images that is fonn. The innumerable and pernicious equivocations of the concept of fonn can be traced to its ubiquity, which produces the temptation to call every- thing and anything that is artistic in art fonn. In any case, the concept offonn is fruitless if nothing more is meant than the trivial generality that the artwork's "material"-whether this means intentional objects or materials such as tones or colors-mediates instead of simply being present. It is just as inapt to define fonn as it is to define what is conferred by the subject and bears the stamp of that sub- ject. What can rightly be called fonn in artworks fulfills the desiderata of that on which subjective activity takes place just as much as it is the product of subjective activity. In artworks, fonn is aesthetic essentially insofar as it is an objective determination. Its locus is precisely there where the work frees itself from being simply a product of subjectivity. Fonn is thus not to be sought in the arrangement of pregiven elements, as the theory of pictorial composition held it to be prior to being debunked by impressionism; that nevertheless so many artworks, including precisely those that are applauded as classical, prove under careful scrutiny to be just such an arrangement is a fatal objection to traditional art. There is absolutely no reducing the concept of fonn to mathematical relations , as was envisioned by aesthetics of Zeising ' s era. 2 Such relations - whether explicitly invoked as princi- ples during the Renaissance or latently coupled with mystical ideas, as perhaps occasionally in Bach-play a role as technical procedures, yet they are not fonn itselfbut rather its vehicle, the means by which the newly liberated subject, depen- dent strictly on its own resources, prefonns otherwise chaotic and undifferentiated material. Just how little mathematical organization and everything related to it coin- cides with aesthetic fonn is audible in the recent history of twelve-tone technique, which in fact preforms the material by the establishment ofnumericalrelations of permutated rows in which no tone may occur before the other tone has preceded it. Immediately it became evident that this prefonnation did not constitute fonn in the fashion expected by Erwin Stein's program, which not by accident carried the
title New Principles ofForm} Schoenberg himself distinguished almost mechani- cally between the preparation of twelve-tone material and composition, and on account of this distinction he had reason to regret his ingenious technique. The
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heightened logical consistency ofthe following generation, however, which oblit- erated the distinction between the preparation of the material and actual composi- tion, not only exchanged integration for music's self-alienation but incurred the loss of articulation, without which form is almost inconceivable. It is as if the im- manent nexus of the work, when abandoned completely to itself without any in- terference, without the effort to hear the totality of form out of the heterogeneous, relapses into the raw and crude. In fact, the totally organized works of the serial phase have almost completely surrendered the means of differentiation in which they originated. Mathematization as a method for the immanent objectivation of form is chimerical . Its insufficiency can perhaps be clarified by the fact that artists resort to it during historical periods when the traditional self-evidence of forms dissolves and no objective canon is available. At these moments the artist has recourse to mathematics; it unifies the level of subjective reason attained by the artist with the semblance of an objectivity founded on categories such as univer- sality and necessity; this is semblance because the organization, the relation of elements to each other that constitutes form, does not originate in the specific structure and fails when confronted with the particular. For this reason mathema- tization favors precisely those traditional forms that it at the same time denounces as irrational. Rather than embodying the abiding lawfulness of being, its own claim to legitimacy, the mathematical aspect of art despairingly strives to guaran- tee its possibility in a historical situation in which the objectivity of the concep- tion of form is as requisite as it is inhibited by the level of consciousness. Frequently the concept of form proves limited in that, depending on the circum-
stances, it locates form in one dimension regardless of others, as, for example, when musical form is located in temporal succession, as if simultaneity and polyphony do not contribute to form, or when in painting form is attributed to pro- portions of space and surface at the cost of the form-giving function of color. In contrast to this, aesthetic form is the objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent. It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth. A posited unity, it con- stantly suspends itself as such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its otherjust as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere. In its relation to its other-whose foreignness it mollifies and yet maintains-form is what is anti- barbaric in art; through form art participates in the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence. Form is the law of the transfiguration of the existing, counter to which it represents freedom. Form secularizes the theological model of the world as an image made in God's likeness, though not as an act ofcreation but as the ob- jectivation of the human comportment that imitates creation; not creatio ex nihilo but creation out of the created. The metaphorical expression is irresistible, that form in artworks is everything on which the hand has left its trace, everything over which it has passed. Form is the seal of social labor, fundamentally different
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from the empirical process of making. What artists directly perceive as form is best elucidated e contrario as an antipathy to the unfiltered in the artwork, to the grouping of color that is simply factual without being articulated or animated in itself; an antipathy to the rote musical sequence, the topos, the precritical. Form converges with critique. It is that through which artworks prove self-critical; what in the work rebels against any untransformed residue is really the bearer of form, and art is disavowed wherever support is given to the theodicy of the unformed, whether under the name of musicality or ham acting. By its critical implication, form annihilates practices and works of the past. Form repudiates the view that artworks are immediately given. If form is that in artworks by which they become artworks, it is equivalent with their mediatedness, their objective reflectedness into themselves . Form is mediation in that it is the relation of parts to each other and to the whole and as the elaboration of details. With regard to form, then, the much praised naIvete of artworks turns out to be hostile to art. What may appear intuitive and naIve in artworks, their constitution as something that presents itself as self-coherent, gapless, and therefore unmediated, derives from their mediated- ness in themselves. It is only through this mediatedness that they become signi- ficative and their elements become signs. Everything in artworks that resembles language originates in form and is thus transformed into the antithesis of form, the mimetic impulse. Form seeks to bring the particular to speech through the whole. However, this is the melancholy of form, especially among artists in whose work form prevails. Form inevitably limits what is formed, for otherwise its concept would lose its specific difference to what is formed. This is confirmed by the artis- tic labor of forming, which is always a process of selecting, trimming, renounc- ing. Without rejection there is no form, and this prolongs guilty domination in artworks, of which they would like to be free; form is their amorality . They do in- justice to what they form by following it. At least something of this was sensed by vitalism's endlessly rehearsed assurance, ever since Nietzsche, of the antithesis between form and life . Art becomes entangled in the guilt context of the living, not only because its distance allows the guilt context to prevail but even more im- portantly because it makes incisions in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it. The myth of Procrustes recounts the philosophical proto- history of art. Yet the total condemnation of art does not follow from this any more than it does elsewhere from partial gUilt in the context of total guilt. Who- ever rails against art's putative formalism, against art being art, advocates the very inhumanity with which he charges formalism and does so in the name of cliques that , in order to retain better control of the oppressed, insist on adaptation to them. Whenever the inhumanity of spirit is indicted, it is ajudgment passed against hu- manity ; only that spirit doesjustice to humanity that, rather than serving it accord- ing to what it has become, immerses itself in that which unknown to humanity is its own. The campaign against formalism ignores the fact that form that befalls content [lnhalt] is itself sedimented content; this, and not regression to any pre-
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artistic emphasis on content, secures the primacy of the object in art. Aesthetic categories of fonn such as particularity, development and resolution of conflict, even the anticipation of reconciliation through homeostasis, are transparent with regard to their content even , and most of all, where they have separated them- selves from the empirical objects. Precisely by distance from it art adopts its stance toward the empirical world in which conflicts appear immediate and as ab- solute cleavages; their mediation, implicitly contained in the empirical, becomes the for-itself of consciousness only by the act of stepping back from it, which is what art does. This stepping back is, as such, an act ofknowledge. Those features of modern art on whose account it has been ostracized as fonnalistic derive with- out exception from the fact that in them content flickers incarnate , instead of hav- ing been peremptorily adjusted by an easily marketable harmony. Emancipated expression, in which all of modern art's fonns originated, was a protest against romantic expression by a depositional character that is antagonistic to the fonns. This was the source of their substantiality; Kandinsky coined the tenn "cerebral acts. " The historicophilosophical significance of the emancipation of fonn is that it refuses to mollify alienation in the image, exclusively thereby incorporating the alienated; that it defines the alienated as such. The hennetic works bring more criticism to bear on the existing than do those that, in the interest of intelligible so- cial criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory fonns and silently acknowledge the flourishing culture industry . In the dialectic of fonn and content , the scale also tips toward fonn-against Hegel-because content, which his aesthetics wanted to salvage, degenerated to a positivistic given, a mold for the reification against which, according to Hegel's theory, art protests. Thus the more deeply the content [Inhalt] is experienced and transfonned unrecognizably into fonnal categories, the less the unsublimated materials are commensurable with the content [Gehalt] of artworks . Everything appearing in the artwork is virtually content [Inhalt] as much as it is fonn, whereas fonn remains that by which the appearing determines itself and content remains what is self-determining. To the extent that aesthetics achieved an energetic concept of fonn , it legitimately opposed the preartistic view of art by seeking what is specifically aesthetic exclusively in form by seeking out form's transfonnations as such in the comportment of the aesthetic subject; this was axiomatic for the conception of art history as cultural history. But what promises to emancipate and thus strengthen the subject weakens it at the same time through its isolation. Hegel is right that all aesthetic processes are bound up with content [Inhalt] , just as in the history of the plastic arts and literature new levels of the external world constantly become apparent and are discovered and assimilated, whereas others perish, lose their artistic potential, and no longer ex- cite even the worst commercial painter to grant them a brief eternity on canvas . In this regard it is worth mentioning the studies of the Warburg Institute, many of which penetrated to the center of artistic content [Gehalt] through the analysis of motifs; in poetics Benjamin's study of the Gennan baroque shows an analogous
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tendency, motivated by the rejection of the confusion of subjective intentions with aesthetic content [Gehalt] and, ultimately, of the alliance of aesthetics and idealist philosophy . The elements bound up with content [Inhalt] undergird the substance [Gehalt] in opposition to the pressure of subjective intention.
The articulation, by which the artwork achieves its form, also always coincides in a certain sense with the defeat of form. If a gapless and unforced unity of form and the formed succeeded, as is intended by the idea ofform, this would amount to the achievement of the identity of the identical and nonidentical . But it is vis-a-vis the fact that this has not been achieved that the artwork is motivated to wall itself up in the imaginary confines of an identity that is merely for-itself. The arrangement of a whole in accordance with the sum of its complexes, which is the idea of articu- lation , is never completely adequate , whether as the division of a lava mass into a multitude of small garden plots or whether it is because of an external residue remaining after the divergent has been unified. A prototypical instance of this is the suitelike , unmastered randomness of the succession of movements in an inte- grated symphony. What may be called a work's level ofform, a term employed in graphology ever since Ludwig Klages , depends on its degree of articulation. This concept calls a halt to the relativism of Riegl's "artistic will. " There are types of art, as well as phases in its history, in which articulation was of little concern or was impeded by conventional procedures. Articulation's adequacy to artistic will, to the objective-historical sense of form that it bears , does not make it any less in- ferior: Under the constraint of an encompassing "It shall not be" such works fail to carry out what they are obliged to fulfill according to their own logicality. Like desk-bound white-collar workers whose ancestors were artists of an inferior level of form, their unconscious whispers in their ears that the utmost is not possible for the little men that they are; yet the utmost is nevertheless the law of form of what they undertook to do. It is rarely noted, even in art criticism, that neither individ- ual nor collective art wills its own concept, which develops from within; rather like people who laugh even when there is nothing funny. Many artworks are undertaken with tacit resignation; for their diminished claim they are rewarded by making art historians and the public happy. It would be worthwhile to analyze to what degree such aesthetic resignation has since antiquity contributed to the divi- sion of high and low art, a division whose decisive reason is obviously that culture proved unsuccessful for precisely those who produced it. In'any case, even so ap- parently formal a category as that of articulation has its material aspect: that of intervention in the rudis indigestaque moles of what is sedimented in the artwork this side of its autonomy; even aesthetic forms tend historically toward becoming material of a second order. The means, without which there would be no form, undermine form. This aporia is dodged, not solved, by works that renounce partial wholes of any significant dimension in order to protect their unity: This is the key objection to Webern's intensity without extension. Mediocre works, by contrast, leave the partial wholes unchallenged under the thin husk of their form, camou-
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6aging them rather than melding them. It could almost be stated as a rule , one that testifies to the depth at which form and content [Inhalt] are mediated in each other, that the relation ofthe parts to the whole, an essential aspect of form, is con- stituted by way of detours. Artworks lose themselves in order to find themselves: The form category for this is the episode. In a collection of aphorisms from his ex- pressionist phase published prior to World War I, Schoenberg noted that Ariadne provides no thread to follow through the interior of artworks . 4 This however does not imply aesthetic irrationalism. Their form, their whole, and their logicality are hidden from artworks to the same degree as the elements, the content [Inhalt], desire the whole. Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight of form is most emphatically mani- fest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art forms to a conclusion; in music com- posers often speak of the problem of a finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able to end convincingly, and the continued use of traditional endings only simulate the temporal convergence of the particular ele- ments with the concluding instant as a totality of form. In many modern works that have attracted a large audience, the form was artfully held open because they wanted to demonstrate that the unity of form was no longer bestowed on them. Spurious infinity, the inability to close, becomes a freely chosen principle of method and expression. Beckett's play, which, rather than stopping repeats itself word for word, is a reaction to this; almost fifty years ago, Schoenberg proceeded in similar fashion in the March of his Serenade: After the reprise had been abol- ished, it was resurrected out of desperation. What Lukacs once called the "dis- charge ofmeaning" was the force that allowed the artwork, once it has confirmed its immanent determination, to end on the model of one who dies old, having led a full life . That this is denied artworks , that they can no more die than can the hunter Gracchus, is internalized by them directly as an expression of horror. The unity of artworks cannot be what it must be: the unity of the multiplicitous; in that unity synthesizes, it damages what is synthesized and thus the synthesis. Artworks suf- fer from their mediated totality no less than from their immediateness.
Against the philistine division of art into form and content it is necessary to insist on their unity; against the sentimental view of their indifference in the artwork it is necessary to insist that their difference endures even in their mediation. Not only is the perfect identity ofthe two chimerical, it would not redound to the success of the works: By analogy to Kant's maxim, they would become empty or blind, self- sufficient play or raw empiria. With regard to content [Inhalt] , the concept of ma- terial best does justice to the mediated distinction. According to an almost univer- sally accepted terminology in all the arts, material is what is formed. It is not the same as content [Inhalt], even if Hegel fatefully confounded the two. This can be explicated with regard to music. Its content [Inhalt] is in any case what occurs- partial events, motifs, themes, and their elaboration: changing situations. Content
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is not external to musical time but essential to it, as time is essential to content; content is everything that transpires in time. Material, by contrast, is what artists work with: It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colors, sound s , associations of every sort and every technique ever developed . To this ex- tent, forms too can become material; it is everything that artists encounter about which they must make a decision. The idea, widespread among unreflective artists, of the open eligibility of any and all material is problematic in that it ig- nores the constraint inherent in technical procedures and the progress of material, which is imposed by various materials as well as by the necessity to employ spe- cific materials. The choice of the material, its use, and the limitations of that use , are an essential element of production. Even innovative expansion of the material into the unknown, going beyond the material's given condition, is to a large extent a function of the material and its critique , which is defined by the material itself. The concept of material is presupposed by alternatives such as whether a com- poser works with sounds that are native to tonality and recognizable as its deriva- tives, or whether he radically eliminates them; analogous alternatives in painting are those between the representational and the nonrepresentational, the perspec- tival and the nonperspectival. The concept of material may first have taken con- scious shape in the twenties, if one leaves aside the lingo of singers who, tortured by a sense of the dubiousness of their musicality, exult over their "material. " Since Hegel's theory of the romantic artwork, the error has persisted that along with preestablished overarching forms even the bindingness of the materials with which the forms were concerned has disintegrated; the expansion of available ma- terials, which scorns the old boundaries between the arts, is primarily the result of the historical emancipation of the concept of form in art. This expansion has been much overestimated by those external to it; it is offset by the renunciations de- manded of the artist not only by taste but by the condition of the material. Of all the material that is abstractly employable, only the tiniest part does not collide with the condition of spirit and is as such concretely usable. Thus material is not natural material even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical . Its supposedly sovereign position is the result of the collapse of every ontology of art, which has in tum affected the materials. They are no less dependent on the transformation of technique than is technique on the materials that it manipulates . It is obvious how much a composer who, for instance , works with tonal material receives this material from tradition. If, however, he turns critically against tradi- tion through the use of an autonomous material, one completely purged of con- cepts such as consonance, dissonance, triad, and diatonicism, the negated is never- theless retained in the negation. Such works speak by virtue of the taboos they radiate; the falseness or, at the least, the shock of every triad that they permit makes this obvious enough, and this is the objective cause ofthe comfortably pre- scribed monotonousness of radically modem art. The rigorousness of the most recent developments in music and painting, which right into the smallest detail of
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the emancipated material ruthlessly eliminates all traces of the traditional and the negated, obeys all the more recklessly-under the illusion of the pure givenness of a material without any intrinsic quality-the historical tendency. Stripping the material of any qualitative dimension, which superficially connotes its dehistori- cization, is itself the material's historical propensity, the propensity of subjective reason. What defines its limits are that it leaves its historical determinations be- hind in the material.
What aesthetic terminology once called subject matter [Stoff] and Hegel the sub- ject [Sujet] is not to be apodictically excluded from the concept of material. All the same, while the concept of subject matter remains a concern of art, in its im- mediacy , as a theme that can be lifted over from external reality and worked upon, it has, since Kandinsky, Proust, and Joyce, incontrovertibly declined. Parallel to the critique of the heterogeneously imposed, the aesthetically unassimilable, dis- content has been growing with the so-called great themes to which Hegel as well as Kierkegaard, and more recently many Marxist theoreticians and playwrights attributed such eminence. The idea that works that occupy themselves with august events - whose sublimity is usually only the fruit of ideology and of respect for power and magnitude - are thereby augmented in their dignity was unmasked once van Gogh painted a stool or a few sunflowers in such a fashion that the images rage with the storm of all those emotions in the experience of which the individual of van Gogh's epochfor the first time registered the historical catastrophe. This having become evident , it could be shown in earlier art too how little its authentic- ity depends on the trumped-up or even actual relevance of its objects . What is the importance of Delft in Vermeer? Does it not hold that-as Kraus wrote, a gutter well painted is of greater value than a badly painted palace: "Out of a loose sequence of events . . . a world of perspectives , mood s , and shocks takes shape for the more pellucid eye, and trashy poetry becomes the poetry of trash, damnable only to that official idiocy that holds a badly painted palace preferable to a well- painted gutter. "5 Hegel's aesthetics of content [lnhalt], an aesthetics of subject matter, in keeping with the spirit of many of his intentions, subscribes undialecti- cally to the objectivation of art by way of a raw relation to objects . Essentially he excluded mimesis from his aesthetics. In German idealism the tum to the object was always coupled with philistinism, as is most crassly obvious in the comments on historical painting in the third book of the World as Will and Representation. In its relation to art, idealism's eternity is unmasked as kitsch, to which he who clings to idealism's inalienable categories is consigned. Brecht ignored this. In his essay "Funf Schwiengkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit" (five difficulties in writing the truth) he concludes: ''Thus, it is for example not untrue to say that chairs provide a place to sit and that rain fall s from above . Many poets write truths of this kind. They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes. For them even what we have called our first difficulty in writing the truth does not exist and yet they have a clear conscience. They produce their daubs
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undisturbed by the mighty or by the screams of the ravaged. The absurdity of what they do produces in them a 'deep' pessimism that they sell at a good price and that would actually better suit those who watch these masters and their sales. At the same time it is anything but easy to recognize that their truths are truths about chairs or the rain, since they usually sound completely different, as if they were truths about important things. For the process of artistic production is pre- cisely that of according importance to something. Only by taking a close look does one perceive that they are only saying: 'A chair is a chair' and 'Nobody can change the fact that rain falls from above . ' " 6 This is a blague. It justly provokes the official culture mentality, which has even succeeded in integrating van Gogh's chair as a piece of furniture. Yet if one wanted to extract a norm out of this, it would be merely regressive. There is no point to making threats. A painted chair can actually be extremely significant, to the extent that one does not prefer to avoid this bloated word. Incomparably deeper and socially relevant experiences can be sedimented in the how of a painting than in faithful portraits of generals or revolutionary heros. All paintings of this sort retrospectively take their place in the Galerie des Glaces de Versailles of 1 8 71 , regardless whether the generals , eternalized in historical postures, were to have led red armies that occupy coun- tries in which the revolution never took place . This problematic of thematic mate- rial whose relevance is directly borrowed from reality also befalls the intentions that are injected into the work. However spiritual these ideas may be in them- selves , once introduced into the artwork they become no less subject matter than if they were Meier, the Basel mayor who promises to fetch the coal. As Hegel well knew , what artists can say they say only through the form [Gestaltung] , not by let- ting that form deliver a message . Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say , with the content [Gehalt] of the work. In reaction , the content of the artwork is increasingly lodged in what has not been cathected by the artist's subjective intentions, whereas content is blocked in works in which intention, whether as fabula docet or as philosophical thesis, de- mands primacy. The objection that an artwork is too reflected is not only ideology but has its element of truth in the work's being too little reflected: not reflected against the incursion of its own intention. The philological procedure, which imagines that it grasps securely the content of the work when it grasps its inten- tion, passes judgment immanently on itself in that it tautologically extracts from artworks what was put into them earlier; the secondary literature on Thomas Mann is the most repellent example of this.
Granted, this practice is fostered by a genuine tendency that has its source in literature: NaIve immediacy and its illu- soriness has become threadbare for literature, which no longer disavows reflec- tion and is thus compelled to strengthen the dimension of intention. This supplies an interpretive method alien to spirit with an easy surrogate for spirit. It is in- cumbent on artworks, just as occurred in modernism's greatest achievements, to
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incorporate the reflexive element by its further reflexivity into the work itself rather than tolerating it in the form of residual subject matter.
However little the intention of artworks is their content [Gehalt] - if only because no intention, however neatly presented, is assured of being realized by the work- still only a stubborn rigorism would disqualify intention as an element of the work. Intentions have their locus in the dialectic between the mimetic pole of art- works and their methexis in enlightenment; intentions have their locus not only in being the subjectively moving and organizing force that is thereupon extinguished in the work but also in the objectivity of the work itself. Because the artwork is not simply inert, intentions are endowed with an independence as specific as that of any other element of the artwork; one would need to ignore the complexion of im- portant artworks for the sake of a thema probandum to deny that, however vari- able historically, their importance stands in relation to intention. If material in the
artwork is truly resistant to the artwork's otherwise pure identity, the inner proc- ess of identity in artworks is essentially that between the material and intention. Without intention, without the immanent form of the principle of identity, form would not exist any more than it would without the mimetic impulse. The surplus of intentions reveals that the objectivity of artworks cannot be reduced simply to mimesis. The objective bearer of intentions, which synthesizes the individual in- tentions of artworks into a whole, is their meaning. It remains relevant in spite of everything problematic inherent to it and in spite of all the evidence that this is not all there is to artworks. The meaning of Goethe's /phigenie is humanity. If this idea were merely intended abstractly by the poetic subject, if it were in Hegel's words simply a "maxim" -as indeed it is in Schiller-it would be irrelevant to the work . In that, however, by means of language, humanity itself becomes mimetic - is itself expressed in the nonconceptual without sacrificing its conceptual ele- ment- meaning achieves a fruitful tension to the work ' s content [Gehalt] , to what has been composed. The meaning of a poem such as Verlaine's "Clair de lune" cannot be univocally established, yet this is not to say that its meaning does not reach beyond the incomparable resonance of the verses. The poem's sensuality is itself an element of intention: Happiness and sadness, which accompany sexuality as soon as it descends into itself and negates spirit as ascetic, are the poem's con- tent [Gehalt]; the flawlessly presented idea of sensuality divorced from sensuous- ness is the meaning. This trait, central to the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art, including Debussy, contains the potential of radical modernism, and there is no lack of actual historical ties . Conversely , it is the start- ing point, though not the telos of criticism, whether the intention is objectivated in what is composed; the fault lines between intention and result, rarely missing from recent art, are no less ciphers of the work's content than is the result. A higher level of critique , however, that of the truth or untruth of the content , often becomes immanent critique through the knowledge of the relation between inten- tion and what has been written, painted, or composed. Intention does not always
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miscarry as the result of the inadequate form-giving powers of the subject. The untruth of intention interrupts the objective truth content. If what is supposed to be truth content is in itself untrue, that prohibits inner consistency. Such untruth tends to be mediated by the untruth of the intention, as is apparent at the highest level of form in Wagner's music. -For traditional aesthetics, and to a large ex- tent for traditional art as well, the determination of the totality of the artwork is its determination as a nexus of meaning . The reciprocal relation of whole and parts is supposed to shape the work as something meaningful to such an extent that the quintessence of this meaning coincides with the metaphysical content. Because the nexus of meaning is constituted by the relation of elements - and not in atom- istic fashion in something given that is sensual-what can justly be called the spirit of artworks should be comprehensible in that nexus . That the spirit of an art- work is the configuration of its elements is more than a seductive idea; it attains its truth in the face of all crude reification or materialization of the spirit and content of artworks . Directly or indirectly everything that appears in the work contributes to such meaning, though not all that appears is necessarily of equal importance. T h e e s t a b l i s h m e n t o f r e l a t i v e i m p o r t a n c e w a s o n e o f t h e m o s t e f fe c t i v e m e a n s f o r aesthetic articulation, as is obvious enough in the differentiation between thetic main events and transitions, and between the essential and accidental yet requi- site elements. These differentiations in traditional art were largely determined schematically. With the critique of schematic organization, the differentiations become dubious: Art tends toward processes in which everything that occurs is equidistant to the midpoint; where everything accidental arouses the suspicion of being superfluously ornamental. This is one of the most imposing difficulties in the articulation of recent art. Art's inexorable self-criticism, the requirement of drossless composition, underscores this difficulty and promotes chaos, the ever lurking precondition of all art. Even in works with the highest level of form, the crisis of differentiation has frequently resulted in a dimension of nondifferentia- tion . Efforts to defend against this have almost without exception, though often la- tently, had recourse to borrowings from the aesthetic resources that they oppose: Even here the total domination of the material and movement toward diffuseness converge .
That artworks, in accord with Kant's magnificently paradoxical formula, are "pur- poseless," that they are separated from empirical reality and serve no aim that is useful for self-preservation and life, precludes calling art's meaning its purpose, despite meaning's affinity to immanent teleology. Yet it becomes ever harder for artworks to cohere as a nexus of meaning. Ultimately they respond to this by rejecting the very concept of meaning. The more the emancipation of the subject demolished every idea of a preestablished order conferring meaning , the more du- bious the concept of meaning became as the refuge of a fading theology. Even prior to Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie, given historical experience, to ascribe any positive meaning to existence. This has consequences that reach deep into
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aesthetic fonn. When artworks have nothing external to themselves to which they can cling without ideology, what they have lost cannot be restored by any subjec- tive act. It was wiped out by their tendency toward subjectivization, which was no cultural-historical accident but confonns rather with the true state of things. Criti- cal self-reflection, inherent in every artwork, sharpens the work's sensitivity not only toward every element that strengthens traditional meaning but also against the work's immanent meaning and those of its categories that provide meaning. For the meaning that is the synthesis of the artwork cannot merely be something that it has manufactured, its quintessence. At the same time the totality of the work presents meaning and produces it aesthetically, it reproduces it. Meaning is only legitimate in the artwork insofar as it is objectively more than the work's own meaning. I n that artworks relentlessly chip away a t the nexus i n which mean- ing is founded, they tum against this nexus and against meaning altogether. The unconscious labor of the artistic ingenium on the meaning of the work as on some- thing substantial and enduring transcends this meaning . The advanced production of recent decades has become self-conscious of this issue, has made it thematic and translated it into the structure of artworks. It is easy to convict neodadaism of a lack of political import and dismiss it as meaningless and purposeless in every sense of the word . But to do so is to forget that its products ruthlessly demonstrate the fate of meaning without any regard to themselves as artworks. Beckett's oeuvre already presupposes this experience o f the destruction o f meaning a s self- evident, yet also pushes it beyond meaning's abstract negation in that his plays force the traditional categories of art to undergo this experience, concretely sus- pend them, and extrapolate others out of the nothingness. The dialectical reversal that occurs is obviously not a derivative of theology , which always heaves a sigh of relief whenever its concerns are treated in any way, no matter what the verdict, as if at the end of the tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness-the presentation of the world as hell-a light glimmers; Gunther Anders was right to defend Beckett against those who make his works out to be affinnative. 7 Beckett's plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning , for then they would be sim- ply irrelevant. but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history. His work is ruled as much by an obsession with positive nothingness as by the obses- sion with a meaninglessness that has developed historically and is thus in a sense merited. though this meritedness in no way allows any positive meaning to be re- claimed. Nevertheless the emancipation of artworks from their meaning becomes aesthetically meaningful once this emancipation is realized in the aesthetic mater-
ial precisely because the aesthetic meaning is not immediately one with theologi- cal meaning. Artworks that divest themselves of any semblance of meaning do not thereby forfeit their similitude to language . They enunciate their meaningless- ness with the same determinacy as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning. Today this is the capacity of art: Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulates that once constituted the meaning of art-
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works . Works of the highest level of form that are meaningless or alien to mean- ing are therefore more than simply meaningless because they gain their content [Gehalt] through the negation of meaning . Artwork that rigorously negates mean- ing is by this very rigor bound to the same density and unity that was once req- uisite to the presence of meaning. Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning. Although the crisis of meaning is rooted in a problematic common to all art, the failure in the face ofra- tionality, reflection is unable to repress the question whether art does not perhaps, through the demolition of meaning, throw itself into the arms of precisely that which strikes ordinary consciousness as absurd, the positivistically reified con- sciousness. The dividing line between authentic art that takes on itselfthe crisis of meaning and a resigned art consisting literally and figuratively of protocol sen- tences is that in significant works the negation of meaning itself takes shape as a negative, whereas in the others the negation of meaning is stubbornly and posi- tively replicated. Everything depends on this: whether meaning inheres in the negation of meaning in the artwork or if the negation conforms to the status quo; whether the crisis of meaning is reflected in the works or whether it remains im- mediate and therefore alien to the subject. Key events may include certain musical works such as Cage's Piano Concerto, which impose on themselves a law of inex- orable aleatoriness and thereby achieve a sort of meaning: the expression of hor- ror. What governs Beckett's work, certainly, is a parodic unity of time, place, and action, combined with artfully fitted and balanced episodes and a catastrophe that consists solely in the fact that it never takes place. Truly, one of the enigmas of art, and evidence of the force ofits logicality, is that all radical consistency, even that called absurd, culminates in similitude to meaning. This, however, is not confir- mation of metaphysical substantiality, to which every thoroughly formed work would lay claim as confirmation of its illusoriness: Ultimately, art is semblance in that, in the midst of meaninglessness, it is unable to escape the suggestion of mean- ing. Artworks, however, that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their unity; this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity. The relation between the technique of montage and photography is familiar. Montage has its appropriate place in film. The sudden, discontinuous juxtaposition of sequences, editing employed as an artistic means, wants to serve intentions without damaging the intentionlessness of life as it is, which is the ac- tual interest of film. On no account is the principle of montage a trick to integrate photography and its derivatives into art despite the limitations defined by their dependence on empirical reality. Rather, montage goes beyond photography im- manently without infiltrating it with a facile sorcery, but also without sanctioning as a norm its status as a thing: It is photography's self-correction. Montage origi- nated in antithesis to mood-laden art, primarily impressionism. Impressionism dissolved objects - drawn primarily from the sphere of technical civilization or its
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amalgams with nature-into their smallest elements in order to synthesize them gaplessly into the dynamic continuum. It wanted aesthetically to redeem the alien- ated and heterogenous in the replica. The conception proved ever less adequate the more intense the superiority of the reified prosaic world over the living subject became: The subjectivization of objective reality relapsed into romanticism, as was soon blatantly obvious not only in lugendstil but also in the later stages of authentic impressionism. It was against this that montage protested, which devel- oped out of the pasted-in newspaper clippings and the like during the heroic years of cubism. The semblance provided by art, that through the fashioning of the hetero- geneously empirical it was reconciled with it, was to be broken by the work ad- mitting into itself literal, illusionless ruins of empirical reality, thereby acknowl- edging the fissure and transforming it for purposes of aesthetic effect. Art wants to admit its powerlessness vis-a-vis late-capitalist totality and to initiate its abro- gation. Montage is the inner-aesthetic capitulation of art to what stands hetero- geneously opposed to it. The negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form. In this, montage unconsciously takes its lead from a nominalistic utopia: one in which the pure facts are mediated by neither form nor concept and irremediably divest themselves of their facticity. The facts themselves are to be demonstrated in deictical fashion, as epistemology calls it. The artwork wants to make the facts eloquent by letting them speak for themselves . Art thereby begins the process of destroying the artwork as a nexus of meaning. For the first time in the develop- ment of art , affixed debris cleaves visible scars in the work ' s meaning . This brings montage into a much broader context. All modem art after impressionism, proba- bly including even the radical manifestations of expressionism, has abjured the semblance of a continuum grounded in the unity of subjective experience, in the "stream of lived experience. " The intertwinement, the organic commingling, is severed, the faith destroyed that one thing merges wholly with the other, unless the intertwinement becomes so dense and intricate as to obscure meaning com- pletely . This is complemented by the aesthetic principle of construction , the blunt primacy of a planned whole over the details and their interconnection in the microstructure; in terms of this microstructure all modem art may be called mon- tage. Whatever is unintegrated is compressed by the subordinating authority of the whole so that the totality compels the failing coherence of the parts and thus however once again asserts the semblance of meaning. This dictated unity cor- rects itself in accord with the tendencies of the details in modem art, the "instinc- tual life of sounds" or colors; in music, for example, in accord with the harmonic and melodic demand that complete use be made of the available tones of the chro- matic scale . Certainly , this tendency in tum derives from the totality of the mater- ial, from the available spectrum, and is defined by the system rather than actually being spontaneous. The idea of montage and that of technological construction, which is inseparable from it, becomes irreconcilable with the idea of the radical, fully formed artwork with which it was once recognized as being identical. The
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principle of montage was conceived as an act against a surreptitiously achieved organic unity; it was meant to shock. Once this shock is neutralized, the assem- blage once more becomes merely indifferent material; the technique no longer suffices to trigger communication between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic, and its interest dwindles to a cultural-historical curiosity. If, however, as in the commercial film, the intentions of montage are insisted upon, they are jarringly heavy-handed. Criticism of the principle of montage has implications for con- structivism, in which montage has camouflaged itself, precisely because construc- tivist form succeeds only at the cost of the individual impulse, ultimately the mimetic element. As a result, constructivism is always in danger of rattling emp- tily. Sachlichkeit itself, as it is represented by constructivism within the bounds of nonfunctional art, is subject to the critique of semblance: What claims to be strictly adequate to its purpose fails because the work's formative process inter- feres with the impulses of what is to be formed; an immanent purposefulness is claimed that is in fact none at all, in that the work lets the teleology of the particu- lar elements atrophy. Sachlichkeit turns out to be ideology: The drossless unity to which Sachlichkeit or the technical artwork pretends is never achieved. In those- admittedly minimal-hollows that exist between all particular elements in con- structivist works, what has been standardized and bound together breaks apart in just the same way as do suppressed individual interests under total administration. After the default of any higher, subordinating jurisdiction, the process between the whole and the particular has been turned back to a lower court, to the impulse of the details themselves, in accord with the nominalistic situation. At this point, art is conceivable only on the condition that any pregiven subordinating standard be excluded. The blemishes that indelibly mark purely expressive, organic works offer an analogy to the antiorganic praxis of montage. This brings an antinomy into focus. Artworks that are commensurable to aesthetic experience are meaning- ful insofar as they fulfill an aesthetic imperative: the requirement that everything be required. This ideal, however, is directly opposed by the development that it it- self set in motion. Absolute determination-which stipulates that everything is important to an equal degree and that nothing may remain external to the inner nexus of the work-converges, as Gyorgy Ligeti perceived, with absolute arbi- trariness. This gnaws away retrospectively at aesthetic lawfulness. It always has an element of positedness, of game rules and contingency. Since the beginning of the modem age, most notably in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the early English novel, art has absorbed contingent elements of landscape and fate that were not as such construable out of any overarching ordo or idea of life in order to be able to grant them meaning freely within the aesthetic continuum. Ultimately, h o w e v e r , t h e i m p o s s i b i l i t y o f a n y s u b j e c t i v e l y e s t a b l i s h e d o bj e c t i v i t y o f m e a n i n g , which was hidden over the long epochs of the rise of the bourgeoisie, abandoned the nexus of meaning itself to that very contingency whose mastery once defined form. The development toward the negation of meaning is what meaning de-
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served. However, though this development is inevitable and has its own truth, it is accompanied by a hostility to art that is, although not to the same extent, narrow- mindedly mechanistic and, in terms of its propensity, reprivatizing; this develop- ment is allied with the eradication of aesthetic subjectivity by virtue of its own logic. Subjectivity is made to pay the price for the production of the untruth of aesthetic semblance. Even so-called absurd literature participates in this dialectic in the work of its most important representatives, in that as a nexus of meaning organized teleologically in itself it expresses the absence of meaning and thus through determinate negation maintains the category of meaning; this is what makes its interpretation possible, indeed, demands it.
Categories such as unity, or even harmony, have not tracelessly vanished as a re- sult of the critique of meaning . The determinate antithesis of individual artworks toward empirical reality furthers the coherence of those artworks. Otherwise the gaps in the work's structure would be invaded, as occurs in montage, by the un- wieldy material against which it protects itself. This is what is true in the tradi- tional concept of harmony. What survives of this concept after the negation of the culinary has retracted to the category of the whole, even though the whole no longer takes precedence over the details. Although art revolts against its neutral- ization as an object of contemplation, insisting on the most extreme incoherence and dissonance, these elements are those of unity; without this unity they would not even be dissonant. Even when art unreservedly obeys the dictates of inspira- tion , the principle of harmony , metamorphosed to the point of unrecognizability, is at work, because inspiration, if it is to count, must gel; that tacitly presupposes an element of organization and coherence, at least as a vanishing point. Aesthetic experience, no less in fact than theoretical experience, is constantly made aware that inspirations and ideas that do not gel impotently dissipate. Art's paratactical logicality consists in the equilibrium of what it coordinates, a homeostasis in which the concept of aesthetic harmony is sublimated as a last resort. With regard to its elements, such aesthetic harmony is negative and stands in a dissonant re- lation to them: They undergo something similar to what individual tones once underwent in the pure consonance of a triad. Thus aesthetic harmony qualifies in its own right as an element. The mistake of traditional aesthetics is that it exalts the relationship of the whole to the parts to one of entire wholeness, to totality, and hoists it in triumph over the heterogeneous as a banner of illusory positivity . The ideology of culture , in which unity , meaning, and positivity are synonyms, in- evitably boils down to a laudatio temporis actio As the sermon goes, society once enjoyed a blessed closure when every artwork had its place, function, and legiti- mation and therefore enjoyed its own closure, whereas today everything is con- structed in emptiness and artworks are internally condemned to failure. However transparent the tenor of such ideas , which invariably maintain an all too secure distance from art and falsely imagine that they are superior to inner-aesthetic necessities, it is better to follow up what is insightful in them rather than to brush
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them aside on the basis of the role they play, since failure to investigate them might contribute to their preservation. On no account does an artwork require an a priori order in which it is received, protected, and accepted. If today nothing is harmonious, this is because harmony was false from the beginning. The closure of the aesthetic , ultimately of the extra-aesthetic , system of reference does not neces- sarily correspond to the dignity of the artwork. The dubiousness of the ideal of a closed society applies equally to that of the closed artwork . It is incontestable that artworks have, as die-hard reactionaries never cease to repeat, lost their social em- beddedness. The transition from this security into the open has become, for them, a horror vacui; that they address an anonymous and ultimately nonexistent audi- ence has not been just a blessing, not even immanently: not for their authenticity and not for their relevance. What ranks as problematic in the aesthetic sphere has its origin here; the remainder became the plunder of boredom. Every new art- work, if it is to be one, is exposed to the danger of complete failure. If in his own time Hermann Grab praised the preformation of styIe in the keyboard music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because it precluded anything obviously bad, it could be rejoined that this style just as certainly excluded the possibility of what is emphatically good. Bach was so incomparably superior to the music that preceded him and that of his epoch because he broke through this preformation. Even the Lukacs of The Theory of the Novel had to admit that the artworks that came after the end of the supposedly meaning-filled age had gained infinitely in richness and depth. S What speaks for the survival of the concept of harmony as an element is that artworks that remonstrate against the mathematical ideal of har- mony and the requirement of symmetrical relations, striving rather for absolute asymmetry, fail to slough off all symmetry. In terms of its artistic value, asymme- try is only to be comprehended in its relation to symmetry; this has recently been confirmed by what Kahnweiler has called the phenomena of distortion in Picasso. Similarly, new music has shown reverence for the tonality that it abolished through the extreme sensitivity that it developed toward its rudiments. This is documented by Schoenberg's ironic comment from the early years of atonality that the "Mondfteck" of Pierrot lunaire was composed according to the strict rules of counterpoint, which only permitted prepared consonants and then only on unaccented beats . The further real domination of nature progresses, the more painful it becomes for art to admit the necessity of that progress within itself. In the ideal of harmony, art senses acquiescence to the administered world , even though art's opposition to this world continues, with steadily increasing autonomy, the domination of nature. Art concerns itself as much as it is contrary to itself. Just how much these innervations of art are bound up with its position in reality could be viscerally sensed in the bombed German cities of the postwar years . In the face of actual chaos the optical order that the aesthetic sensorium had long ago rejected once again became intensely alluring. However, rapidly advancing nature, the
vegetation in the ruins , brought all vacation-minded romanticization of nature to a
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deserved end. For a brief historical moment what traditional aesthetics called "satisfying" harmonic and symmetrical relations returned. When traditional aes- thetics, Hegel's included, praised harmony in natural beauty, it projected the self- satisfaction of domination onto the dominated. What is qualitatively new in recent art may be that in an allergic reaction it wants to eliminate harmonizations even in their negated form, truly the negation of negation with its own fatality: the self- satisfied transition to a new positivity, to the absence of tension in so many paint- ings and compositions of the postwar decades. False positivity is the technologi- cal locus of the loss of meaning. What during the heroic years of modem art was perceived as its meaning maintained the ordering elements of traditional art as de- terminately negated; their liquidation results in a smoothly functioning but empty identity. Even artworks freed from harmonistic-symmetrical ideas are formally characterized by similarity and contrast, static and dynamic, exposition, transi- tion, development, identity, and return. Works are unable to wipe out the differ- ence between the first appearance of an element and its repetition , no matter how modified that may be. The capacity to sense and employ harmonic and symmetri- cal relations in their most abstract form has become progressively more subtle. Whereas in music a more or less tangible reprise was once required to establish symmetry, now a vague similarity of tone color at various points may suffice. Dynamic freed from every static reference and no longer discernible as such by its contrast to something fixed, is transformed into something that hovers and no longer has direction. In the manner of its appearance, Stockhausen's Zeitmaj3e evokes a through-composed cadence, a fully presented yet static dominant. Yet today such invariants become what they are only in the context of change; who- ever tries to distill them from the dynamic complexion of history or from the indi- vidual work thereby misrepresents them.
Because the concept of spiritual order is itself worthless, it cannot be transposed from cultural cogitations to art. Opposites are intermixed in the ideal of the clo- sure of the artwork: The irrevocable compulsion toward coherence, the ever fragile utopia of reconciliation in the image , and the longing of the objectively weakened subject for a heteronomous order, a constant of German ideology. Temporarily deprived of any direct satisfaction, authoritarian instincts revel in the imago of an absolutely closed culture where meaning is guaranteed. Closure for its own sake, independent of truth content and what this closure is predicated on, is a category that in fact deserves the ominous charge of formalism. Certainly this does not mean that positive and affirmative artworks, virtually the whole store of tradi- tional art, are to be dismissed or defended on the basis of the all too abstract argu- ment that, given their abrupt opposition to empirical life. they too are critical and negative . The philosophical critique of unreflective nominalism prohibits any claim that the trajectory of progressive negativity . the negation of objectively binding meaning, is that of unqualified progress in art. However much a song by Webern is more thoroughly constructed, the universality of the language of Schubert's
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Winterreise secures for it an element of superiority. Though it is nominalism that helped art achieve its language in the first place, still there is no language without the medium of a universality beyond pure particularization , however requisite the latter. This overarching universality necessarily bears a degree of affirmation: This can be sensed in the word understanding. Affirmation and authenticity are amalgamated to no small degree. Yet this is no argument against any individual work; at most it is an argument against the language of art as such. There is no art that is entirely devoid of affirmation, since by its very existence every work rises above the plight and degradation of daily existence. The more binding art is to itself, the richer, denser, and more unified its works, the more it tends toward affir- mation-of whatever stamp-by suggesting that its own qualities are those of a world existing in itself beyond art. This apriority of the affirmative is art's ideo- logical dark side. It projects the reflection of possibility onto the existing even as the latter's determinate negation. This element of affirmation withdraws from the immediacy of artworks and what they say and becomes the fact that they continue to speak at allY That the world spirit never made good on its promise has the effect of lending the affirmative works of the past a touching quality rather than ensuring that they remain truly ideological; today, indeed, what appears evil in consummate works is their own consummateness as a monument to force rather than a transfiguration that is too transparent to spur any opposition. According to cliche, great works are compelling. In being so, they cultivate coercion to the same extent that they neutralize it; their gUilt is their guiltlessness. Modem art, with its vulnerability, blemishes, and fallibility, is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: It is the critique of suc- cess. It is predicated on the recognition of the inadequacy of what appears to be adequate; this is true not only with regard to its affirmative essence but also in that in its own terms it is not what it wants to be. Instances are the jigsaw-puzzle aspects ofmusical classicism-the mechanical moments in Bach's technique, the top-down construction in the paintings of the masters-which reigned for cen- turies under the name composition before , as Valery noted , suddenly becoming a matter of indifference with the rise of impressionism.
Art ' s affirmative element and the affirmative element of the domination of nature are one in asserting that what was inflicted on nature was all for the good; by re- enacting it in the realm of imagination, art makes it its own and becomes a song of triumph. In this, no less than in its silliness, art sublimates the circus. In doing so, art finds itself in inextricable conflict with the idea of the redemption of sup- pressed nature. Even the most relaxed work is the result of a ruling tension that turns against the dominating spirit that is tamed in becoming the work. Proto- typical of that is the concept of the classical. The experience of the model of all classicism-Greek sculpture-may retrospectively undermine confidence in it, as well as in later epochs. Classical art relinquished the distance to empirical exis- tence that had been maintained by archaic images and carvings.