No More Learning

Beethoven's late works mark the revolt of one of the most powerful classicistic artists against the deception implicit in the principle of his own work . The rhythm of the periodic return of romantic and clas- sicist currents in art, to the extent that such movements can truly be discerned in the history of art, bears witness to the antinomical character of art itself as it is most palpably manifest in the relation of its metaphysical claim of being situated above and beyond time to its actual transience as a merely human work. Indeed, artworks become relative because they must assert themselves as absolute. The perfectly objectivated artwork would be a thing existing absolutely in-itself and no longer an artwork. If the work became nature, as idealism expects, it would be annulled. Ever since Plato , bourgeois consciousness has deceived itself that objec- tive antinomies could be mastered by steering a middle course between them, whereas the sought-out mean always conceals the antinomy and is tom apart by it. The precariousness of classicism is that of the artwork in terms of its own concept. The qualitative leap-the leap by which art approaches the boundary that marks its ultimate muteness - is the consummation of its antinomy .
Valery so honed the concept of classicality that, elaborating on Baudelaire, he dubbed the successful romantic artwork classicaI. 24 This strains the idea of classi- cality to the breaking point. Modem art already registered this more than forty years ago. It is only in its relation to this, as to a disaster, that neoclassicism can be adequately understood. It is directly evident in surrealism. It toppled the images of antiquity from their Platonic heaven. In the paintings of Max Ernst they roam about as phantoms among the burghers of the late nineteenth century, for whom they have been neutralized as mere cultural goods and truly transformed into specters . Wherever the art movements that converged temporarily in Picasso and others external to the groupe took up the theme of antiquity, it led aesthetically directly to hell, just as it did theologically for Christianity. Antiquity's embodied epiphany in prosaic everyday life, which has a long prehistory, disenchants it. Formerly presented as an atemporal norm, antiquity now acquires a historical statu s , that of the bourgeois idea reduced to its bare contours and rendered power- less. Its form is deformation. Inflated interpretations of neoclassicism such as Cocteau's ordre apres Ie desordre, as well as the surrealist interpretation decades later of a romantic liberation of fantasy and association , falsify the phenomena to the point of harmlessness: Following Poe's lead, they summon up the shudder of the instant of disenchantment as enchantment. That this instant was not to be fixed for eternity damned the followers of these movements either to restoration or to a powerless ritual of revolutionary gesturing . Baudelaire proved to be correct: Em- phatic modem art does not thrive in Elysian fields beyond the commodity but is, rather, strengthened by way ofthe experience ofthe commodity, whereas classi-
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cality itself becomes a commodity, an exemplary daub. Brecht's mockery of the cultural treasure secured by its guardians in the form of plaster statues originates in the same context; that a positive concept of classicality worked its way into his thought later on, as it also did in the aesthetics of Stravinsky, whom Brecht scorned as a Tui intellectual, was as inevitable as it was revelatory of the rigidifi- cation of the Soviet Union into an authoritarian state. Hegel's attitude toward classicality was as ambivalent as the attitude of his philosophy toward the alterna- tive between ontology and dynamics . He glorified the art of the Greeks as eternal and unsurpassable and recognized that the classical artwork had been surpassed by what he called the romantic artwork . History , whose verdict he sanctioned, had itself decided against invariance. His sense of the obsolescence of art may well have been colored by a presentiment of such progress. In strictly Hegelian terms, classicism, along with its modem sublimated form, is responsible for its own fate. Immanent critique - its most magnificent model , on the most magnificent object, is Benjamin's study of the Elective tWJnities-pursues the fragility of canonical works into the depths of their truth content; the full potential of such critique still remains to be developed and discovered. Art indeed never embraced the ideal of classicality all that rigorously; to do so, it would have needed to be harder on itself than it in general has been, and when it was, then it really damaged itself and did itself injustice. The freedom of art vis-a-vis the Dira necessitas of the factual is incompatible with classicality in the sense ofperfect univocity, which is as much borrowed from the compulsion of inevitability as it is opposed to it by virtue of its transparent purity. Summum ius summa iniuria is an aesthetic maxim. The more art pursues the logic of classicism and seeks to become an incorruptible reality sui generis, the more indurately it prevaricates an impenetrable threshold between itself and empirical reality. There is some justice to the speculation that, in its relation between what it lays claim to and what it is, art becomes all the more problematic the more rigorously, the more objectively, indeed-if one will-the more classically it proceeds, though with the caveat that the situation of art is not in the least improved when it makes things easier for itself.
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When Benjamin criticized the application to art of the category of necessity,25 he was concerned with the cultural historian's subterfuge of claiming that one art- work or another was necessary for the course of art's development. In fact, this concept of necessity does fulfill the subaltern apologetic function of attesting that without some stale old works, of which there is nothing other to praise, there would have been no getting any further.
The other in art inheres in art's own concept and in every instant threatens to crush it just as neo-Gothic New York churches and Regensburg's medieval city center were destroyed when they became traffic impediments. Art is no fixed set of boundaries but rather a momentary and fragile balance, comparable to the dy- namic balance between the ego and the id in the psychological sphere. Bad art- works become bad only because they objectively raise the claim to being art, a claim they disavow subjectively, as Hedwig Courths-Mahler26 did in a notable letter. The critique that demonstrates how bad they are nevertheless honors them as artworks. They are artworks and then again they are not.
In the course of history, works that were not produced as art or were produced prior to the age of its autonomy are able to become art, and the same is possible in the case of contemporary works that challenge their own status as art. This obvi- ously does not happen, however, in the sense of constituting a putatively valuable preliminary step toward something worthwhile. On the contrary, as occurred in the instance of surrealism, specific aesthetic qualities may emerge that were re- jected by an anti-art deportment that never achieved its goal of becoming a politi- cal force; this is the shape of the careers of important surrealists such as Masson. Equally, what once was art may cease to be art. The availability of traditional art for its own depravation has retroactive power. Innumerable paintings and sculp- tures have been transformed in their own essence to mere decoration as a result of their own offspring. Anyone who would decide to paint cubistically in 1 970 would be providing posters useful for advertisements, and the originals, too, are not safe from being sold off cheap .
Tradition could be salvaged only by its separation from the spell of inwardness. Great artworks of the past were never identical with inwardness; most exploded it through externalization. Strictly speaking, every artwork is a critique of inward- ness in that it externalizes appearance and thus is contrary to the ideology of inwardness, which tradition equates with the hoarded-up treasure of subjective recollection.
The interpretation of art based on its origin is dubious across the board: from bio- graphical research on the study of cultural-historical influences to ontological sublimations of the concept of origin. All the same, origin is not radically external
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to the work . I t i s an implicit part of artworks that they are artifact s . The configura- tions sedimented in each address the context from which it issued. In each its like- ness to its origins is thrown into relief by what it became. This antithetic is essen- tial to its content. Its immanent dynamic crystallizes the dynamic external to it and indeed does so by virtue of its aporetic character. Regardless of their individual endowments and contrary to them, if artworks are unable to achieve their mon- adological unity, they succumb to real historical pressure; it becomes the force that inwardly dislocates them. This is not the least of the reasons why an artwork is adequately perceived only as a process. If however the individual work is a force field, a dynamic configuration of its elements , this holds no less for art itself as a whole . Therefore art cannot be understood all at once , but only in terms of its elements, in a mediated fashion . One of these elements is that by which artworks contrast with what is not art; their attitude to objectivity changes.
The historical tendency reaches profoundly into the aesthetic criteria. It decides, for instance, whether someone is a mannerist. That is what Saint-Saens accused Debussy of being . Frequently the new appears as a sort of mannerism; whether the new is more than that can be discerned only by knowledge of the historical ten- dency. Yet the tendency is no arbiter either. In it true and false consciousness commingle; it too is open to criticism. For this reason the process that transpires between tendency and mannerism is never finished and requires tireless revision; mannerism is as much a protest against the historical tendency as that historical tendency unmasks what is merely contingent and arbitrary in a mannerism as the trademarks of the work.
Proust, and after him Kahnweiler, argued that painting had transformed vision and thus the objects . However authentic this experience may be, it may have been formulated too idealistically. The reverse might also be supposed: that the objects themselves were historically transformed, that the sensorium conformed to this, and that painting then found the ciphers for this transformation. Cubism could be interpreted as a form of reaction to a stage of the rationalization of the social world that undertook its geometrical organization; in these terms cubism was an attempt to bring within the bounds of experience what is otherwise contrary to it, just as impressionism had sought to do at an earlier and not yet fully planned stage of industrialization. By contrast, what is qualitatively new in cubism is that, whereas impressionism undertook to awaken and salvage a life that was becom- ing numb in the commodity world by the strength of its own dynamic, cubism de- spaired of any such possibility and accepted the heteronomous geometrization of the world as its new law, as its own order, and thus made itself the guarantor of the objectivity of aesthetic experience. Historically, cubism anticipated something real, the aerial photographs of bombed-out cities during World War II. It was through cubism that art for the first time documented that life no longer lives . This
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recognition was not free of ideology: Cubism substituted the rationalized order for what had become unexperienceable and thereby confirmed it. This probably drove Picasso and Braque beyond cubism, though their later works were not nec- essarily superior to it.
The attitude of artworks to history in turn varies historically. Lukacs declared in an interview about recent literature , especially Beckett: Just wait ten, fifteen years and you'll see what people will say then. He thus adopted the standpoint of a pa- ternalistic, far-seeing businessman who wants to dampen the enthusiasm of his son; implicitly he invokes for art durability and ultimately the category of posses- sion. Still, artworks are not indifferent to the dubious judgment of history. At times quality has historically asserted itself against precisely those works that were simply content to swim with the tides of the Zeitgeist. It is rare that works that have won great renown have not in some way deserved it. The development of legitimate renown, however, necessarily coincided with the unfolding of the inner law of those artworks through interpretation, commentary, and critique. This quality is not directly produced by the communis opinio, least of all by that manipulated by the culture industry, a public judgment whose relation to the work is questionable. It is a disgraceful superstition that fifteen years after the fact the judgment of an anti-intellectual journalist or a musicologist of the good old school should be held to be more significant than what is perceived in the instant of the work's appearance.
The afterlife of artworks , their reception as an aspect of their own history , transpires between a do-not-Iet-yourself-be-understood and a wanting-to-be-understood ; this tension is the atmosphere inhabited by art.
Many early works of new music , beginning with the those of Schoenberg ' s middle period and with Webern's works , have a character of untouchability, a refractori- ness that rebuffs the listener by the strength of their objectivation, which becomes a life of its own; it is as if recognizing the priority of such works already does them an injustice.
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The philosophical construction of the unequivocal primacy of the whole over the part is as alien to art as it is epistemologically untenable. In important works , de- tails never merge tracelessly into the totality . Certainly the autonomization of the details, when they become indifferent to the nexus of the work and reduce it to a subordinating schema, is accompanied by the regression of the work to the preartistic. Yet artworks distinguish themselves productively from the merely schematic exclusively by the element of the autonomy of their details; every au- thentic work is the result of centripetal and centrifugal forces . Anyone who listens to music seeking out the beautiful passages is a dilettante; but whoever is unable to perceive beautiful passages, the varying density of invention and texture in a work, is deaf. Until the most recent developments in art, differentiation between the intensive and the secondary within a whole was an accepted artistic means; the negation of the whole through partial wholes is itself demanded by the whole. If today this possibility is disappearing, this is not only the triumph of a structuration that at every instant wants to be equally near the midpoint without falling slack; it is also the result of the lethal potential inherent in the contraction of the means of articulation. Art cannot be radically separated from the instant of being touched, of enchantment, that instant of elevation, without being confounded in the indif- ferent. This instant, however much it is also a function of the whole, is never- theless essentially particular: The whole never offers itself to aesthetic experience in that immediacy without which aesthetic experience cannot be constituted. Aesthetic asceticism toward the detail and the atomistic comportment of the re- cipient indeed has an aspect of renunciation and threatens to deprive art of its very ferment.
That autonomous details are essential to the whole is confirmed by the repulsive quality of aesthetically concrete details that bear the trace of being prescribed from above, of in truth being heteronomous. When Schiller in Wallenstein's Camp27 rhymes the words "Potz Blitz" with "Gustel von Blasewitz" he outstrips in abstractness the most pallid classicism; this aspect renders plays like Wallen- stein insupportable.
At present, the details of artworks tend to be submerged in the whole through inte- gration: not, however, under the pressure of planning but rather because they are themselves drawn to their own annihilation. What gives details meaning, cachet, and distinguishes them from the indifferent is that by which they seek to go be- yond themselves, the precondition immanent to them of their synthesis. It is their death drive that permits the integration of the details. Their tendency to dissocia- tion and their tendency to unification are not radically opposed to each other: In that it is posited and therefore insufficient, the detail is inevitably relativized. Dis- integration inheres in the depth of integration and shimmers through it. Indeed the whole, the more detail it absorbs, itself effectively becomes a detail , one element
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among others, a singularity. The craving of the detail for its own annihilation becomes the demand of the whole . And indeed precisely because it- the whole - extinguishes the detail . If they have truly disappeared into the whole, if the whole becomes an aesthetic particular, its rationality loses its rationality, which was nothing other than the relation of the particulars to the whole, to the aim that defined them as means. If the synthesis is no longer a synthesis of something, it becomes null. The vacuity of the technically integrated structure is a symptom of its disintegration through tautological indifference . In the opacity of the perfectly unspontaneous work, a work that has totally rejected subjective inspiration, func- tionless functioning transforms the element of opacity into the fatality that art always bore in itself as its mimetic inheritance. This can be explicated in the musi- cal category of inspiration. Schoenberg, Berg, and even Webem refused to give it up; they criticized Krenek and Steuermann. Actually, constructivism no longer grants any role to inspiration, which is unplanned arbitrariness. Schoenberg's in- spirations, which-as he confirmed-also underlay his twelve-tone compositions, are simply indebted to the limits set by his constructive procedures, limits that others chalked up to a lack of consequentiality. But if the element of inspiration were fully liquidated, if composers were not permitted to be inspired by forms as a whole, which would instead be predetermined exclusively by the material, the result would lose its objective interest and fall mute. By contrast, the plausible demand for the restitution of inspiration suffers from powerlessness: In art one can hardly postulate a countervailing force to the programmatic programam ti- cally. Compositions that, out of disgust with their own abstractness, strive for moments of inspiration, protean subsidiary forms and their endowment with char- acter, expose themselves to the objection of being retrospective; as if in these works second aesthetic reflection - out of fear of the fatality inherent to rational- ization - simply ignored the constraints of rationalization on the basis of a subjec- tive decision. Kafka's obsessively varied situation-whatever one does, it is done wrong - has become the situation of art itself. Art that rigorously bans inspiration is condemned to indifference; but if inspiration is fetched back, it pales to a shadow, almost to a fiction. Already in Schoenberg's authentic works, such as his Pierrot lunaire, inspirations were ingeniously unauthentic, fractured, and shrunken to a sort of minimum existence. The question of the weight of details in new art- works is indeed so relevant because no less than in the totality of new artworks - the sublimation of organized society-society is also embodied in the details: Society is the fertile soil that sublimates aesthetic form. The details of artworks behave just as do individuals in society who, by their own interests largely op- posed to society , are not only faits sociaux but society itself, reproduced by and reproducing it and therefore asserting themselves against it. Art is the appearance of the social dialectic of the universal and the individual mediated by the subjec-
tive spirit. It goes beyond this dialectic insofar as it does not simply carry out this dialectic but reflects it through form. Figuratively, its particularization makes
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good on the perpetuated injustice of society to the individuals. What hinders it in this restitution is that it is unable to perfonn anything that it cannot extract as a concrete possibility from the society in which it has its locus. Contemporary society is altogether remote from any structural transfonnation that would give individuals their due and thus dissipate the spell of individuation .
On the Dialectic of Construction and Expression-That each element dialecti- cally reverses into the other is a maxim of contemporary art: Its structures must no longer endeavor to find some compromise between construction and expression but seek, rather, the extremes, so that in them, through them, an equivalent can be found for what an older aesthetics called synthesis. This is fundamental to the qualitative definition of modem art. The plurality of possibilities that was avail- able up to the threshold of modem art, and which had grown extraordinarily dur- ing the nineteenth century, has been displaced by polarization. The polarization socially requisite is manifest in artistic polarization. 28 Where organization is nec- essary, in structuring material life and in the human relations that depend on it, there is too little organization, too much is ceded to an anarchistic private sphere. Art has a latitude of play in which models of planning can be developed that would not be tolerated by the social relations of production. On the other hand, the irrational administration of the world has been heightened to the virtual liquida- tion of the ever precarious existence of the particular . Where it survives it is made to serve a complementary ideology of the omnipotence of the universal. Individ- ual interest that refuses this universal converges with the interest of universal, realized rationality. Rationality would become rational only once it no longer repressed the individuated in whose unfolding rationality has its right to exist. Yet the emancipation of the individual could succeed only to the extent that the individual grasps the universal on which individuals depend. Even socially, a reasonable order of the public world could be achieved only if, at the other ex- treme, opposition to the overly complex as well as inadequate organization were to suffuse individual consciousness. If the individual sphere in a certain sense lags behind the organized world, organization should nevertheless exist for the sake of the individual . The irrationality of organization still provides a measure of freedom to individuals. Their vestigiality becomes the last resort of what would go beyond progressive domination. This dynamic of what is out-of-date endows taboo expression aesthetically with the right of a resistance that lays its finger directly on the untruth of the whole. In spite of its ideological distortedness, the division of public and private in art is a given in such a fashion that art is unable to carry out any sort of transfonnation without establishing some relation to the givenness of this division. What in social reality would amount to powerless con- solation has far more concrete chances as a plenipotentiary within the sphere of aesthetics .
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In themselves, artworks ineluctably pursue nature-dominating reason by virtue of their element of unity, which organizes the whole. But through the disavowal of real domination this principle returns transformed, truncated, in a shadowy fashion, to put it metaphorically, which is perhaps the only way to describe it. Reason in artworks is reason as gesture: They synthesize like reason, but not with concepts , propositions, and syllogisms - where these forms occur in art they do so only as subordinated means - rather, they do so by way of what transpires in the artworks. Their synthetic function is immanent; it is the unity of their self, without immediate relation to anything external given or determined in some way or other; it is directed to the dispersed, the aconceptual, quasi-fragmentary material with which in their interior space artworks are occupied. Through this reception, as well as through the modification of synthesizing reason, artworks participate in the dialectic of enlightenment. Even in its aesthetically neutralized form, how- ever, nature-dominating reason has something of the dynamic that once inhered in its external form. However much it is separated from this dynamic, the identity of the principle of reason effects a development internally and externally that is simi- lar to the external dialectic: Windowless, artworks participate in civilization. That by which artworks distinguish themselves from the diffuse coincides with the achievements of reason qua reality principle. In artworks this reality principle is as active as its counterpart. Art carries out the correction of self-preserving rea- son, but not by simply setting itself in opposition to it; rather, the correction of reason is carried out by the reason immanent to artworks themselves. Whereas the unity of artworks derives from the violence that reason does to things , this unity is at the same time the source of the reconciliation of the elements of artworks .
It can hardly be contested that Mozart provided the prototype for the balance between form and the formed, that which is fleeting and centrifugal. This balance, however, is only as authentic as it is in his music because its thematic and motivic cells, the monads out of which it is composed-however much they are conceived with an eye to contrast and precise difference-seek to pull apart even while the tactful hand binds them together. The absence of violence in Mozart's music has its source in the fact that within an overarching balance the qualitative thusness of the details is not allowed to atrophy, and what can rightfully be called his genius of form is not his mastery of forms - which was for him in any case a given -but his capacity to employ them without an element of domination, using them to bind the diffuse without restraint. Form in Mozart is the equilibrium found in centrifu- gal forces, not their subjugation. This is most evident in the large operatic forms, a s in the finale of the second act of Figaro, a form that is neither composed nor a synthesis-unlike instrumental music it is not obliged to refer to schemas that are legitimated by the synthesis of what they subsume-but rather a pure configura- tion of adjoined parts whose character is won from the shifting dramaturgical situa- tion. Such works, no less than many of his most audacious instrumental move-
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ments , such as several of his violin concertos, tend as profoundly , if not as obvi- ously, toward disintegration as do Beethoven ' s last quartets . Mozart ' s classicality is immune to the charge of classicism only because it is situated on the boundary of a disintegration that in Beethoven's late work-which is so much more the work of subjective synthesis - was surpassed in the critique of this synthesis. Dis- integration is the truth of integral art.
Mozart, whom a harmonistic aesthetics to all appearances plausibly claims as its foundation, towers over its norms by virtue of what is itself, in the contemporary idiom, a formal dimension: his capacity to unify the ununifiable by doing justice to what the divergent musical characters require without dissolving it into an obligatory continuum. In this regard, Mozart is the composer of Viennese classi- cism who is most remote from the established classical ideal and thereby achieves a higher ideal, what might be called authenticity [Authentizitiit]. It is this element by which, even in music, in spite of its nonrepresentationality , the distinction can be made between formalism as an empty game and that for which there is no other term than the disreputable one of profundity .
The formal law of an artwork is that all its elements and its unity must be orga- nized in conformity with their own specific character.
Because artworks are not the unity of a multiplicity but rather the unity of the one and the many, they do not coincide with phenomenality.
Unity is semblance,just as the semblance of artworks is constituted by theirunity.
The monadological character of artworks would not have formed without the guilt of the monstrous monadological character of society , but only by its means do art- works achieve that objectivity that transcends solipsism.
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Art has no universal laws, though in each of its phases there certainly are objec- tively binding taboos. They radiate from canonical works. Their very existence defines what forthwith is no longer possible.
So long as forms were available with a certain immediacy, works could be con- cretized within them; their concretion could, in Hegel's language, be termed the substantiality of the forms. In the course of the total nominalistic movement, the more this substantiality was vitiated - from a critical perspective, justly so- the more its nevertheless continuing existence became a fetter for concrete works. What was once objectivated productive force was transformed into aesthetic relations of production and collided with the forces of production . Forms , that by which artworks seek to become artworks, themselves require autonomous production. This at the same time threatens them: The concentration on forms as a means of aesthetic objectivity distances them from what is to be objectivated. It is for this reason that currently models, the ideas of the possibility of artworks, so often overshadow the works themselves. In the substitution of means for ends it is possible to recognize the expression of a total social movement as well as the cri- sis of the artwork . Relentless reflection gravitates toward the annihilation of what is reflected. There is complicity between reflection, to the extent that it does not reflect on itself, and the merely posited form that is indifferent to what it forms. On their own, even the most exacting formal principles are worthless if the au- thentic works, for the sake of which the principles were sought, fail to materialize; aesthetic nominalism has today culminated in this simple antinomy.
So long as genres were givens, the new flourished within them. Increasingly, how- ever, newness has shifted to the genres, because they are scarce. Important artists have responded to the nominalistic situation less through new works than through models of their possibility, through types; this contributes further to the under- mining of the traditional category of artwork .
The problematic of style is strikingly apparent in works of the highly stylized do- main ofearly modernism such as Debussy's Pelleas. Without making the slightest concession , with exemplary purity , this lyrical drama pursues its principium stili- sationis. The inconsistencies that result are in no way the fault of that supposed thin-bloodedness that is criticized by those who are no longer able to follow the work's principle of stylization. The monotony of the piece is striking and well known. The rigor of the work's refusals prohibits the formation of contrasts as cheap and banal or reduces them to mere intimations. This damages the articula- tion, the organization of form by subsidiary structures , that is so indispensable to a work whose ultimate criterion is unity of form; here stylization ignores the recog- nition that a unity of style must be the unity of a mUltiplicity. The uninterrupted psalmody, particularly of the vocal line, lacks what older musical terminology
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called Abgesang, a concluding phrase or section: redemption, fulfillment, pouring forth . Its sacrifice in the interest of a feeling for a past that is eons distant causes a rupture in the work, as if what had been promised had not been redeemed . Taste , raised to the level of totality, rebels against the dramatic gesture of the music , and at the same time the work cannot do without its staging.
The work's consummate- ness also leads to the impoverishment of the technical means, the persevering homophony becomes meager, and the orchestration, though devoted to the ex- ploitation of tone color, becomes grey on grey. These problems of stylization point to problems in the relation of art and culture . Any classificatory schema that subsumes art as a branch of culture is inadequate . Incontestably Pelleas is culture without any desire to denounce it. This is of a part with the speechlessly mythical hermeticism of the subject matter, which precisely thereby neglects what the sub- ject seeks. Artworks require transcendence of culture if they are to satisfy culture; this is a powerful motivation of radical modernism.
Light is thrown on the dialectic of the universal and particular by a remark of Arnold Gehlen. Picking up on Konrad Lorenz, he interprets the specifically aes- thetic foqns, those of natural beauty as well as that of the ornament, as "releasing devices" [Ausloserqualitiiten] that serve to relieve overstimulated human beings. According t o Lorenz all means of release share improbability paired with simplic- ity . Gehlen transposes this idea to art on the assumption that "our pleasure in pure sounds (' spectral sounds') and their integral harmonies . . . is an exact analogy, on the acoustic level, to the releasing effect of 'improbability. "'29 "Artistic imagina- t i o n i s i n e x h a u s t i b l e i n t h e ' s t y l i z a t i o n ' o f n a t u r a l fo r m s , t h a t i s , i n t h e i r s y m m e tr i - cal and simplified rendering, in the interest of the optimal extraction of releasing effects. "30 If such simplification indeed constitutes what may specifically be called form , then through its link to improbability the abstractive element simulta- neously becomes the opposite of universality and thus the element of particular- ization. In the idea of the particular, on which art depends-as is most obviously the case in narration, which intends to be the report of a particular, rather than a quotidian , event- the same improbability is contained that is evident in the appar- ently universal, in the geometrically pure forms of ornament and stylization. The improbable, as the secularization of mana, would be at once universal and particu- lar, aesthetic regularity as an improbable regularity turned against the status quo; spirit is not simply the contrary of particularization, it is also, by virtue of the im- probable, its precondition. In all art, spirit was always what dialectical reflection only later showed it to be: concretion, and not abstract.
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Art's social fate is not simply imposed on it externally, but is equally the unfold-
ing of art's own concept.
Art is not indifferent to its double character. Its pure immanence becomes for it an immanent burden. Art seeks autarchy, which at the same time threatens it with sterility . Wedekind recognized this in Maeterlinck and mocked him and his kind as "artistic artists"; Wagner made the same controversy thematic in the Meis- tersinger; and the same motif, with anti-intellectual overtones, is unmistakable in Brecht. Escape from art's domain of immanence easily turns demagogical in the name of the people; what the "artistic artist" mocks, ogles the barbaric . Yet art , for the sake of its own self-preservation, desperately seeks to escape its sphere. For art is not only social by virtue of its own movement, as a priori opposition to a heteronomous society. Society itself, in its concrete form, always reaches into art. The question of what is possible, of productive formal approaches , is immediately determined by the situation of society. Insofar as art is constituted by subjective experience, social content penetrates to its core, though not literally, but rather in a modified, fragmentary, and shadowy fashion. This, not psychology, is the true affinity of artworks to dreams.
Culture is refuse, yet art-one ofits sectors-is nevertheless serious as the appear- ance of truth . This is implicit in the double character of fetishism.
Art is bewitched in that the ruling criterion of its being-for-other is semblance- the exchange relation that has been established as the measure of all things- whereas, however, the other, the in-itself of the work, becomes ideology as soon asitpositsitselfassuch. Thealternative,thatbetween: "WhatdoIgetoutofit? " and "To be German means doing something for its own sake ,"31 is detestable . The untruth of the for-other has become obvious in that what is supposedly done for the self only compounds self-betrayal; the thesis of being-in-itself is fused with elitist narcissism and thus also serves what is base.
Because artworks register and objectivate levels of experience that are fundamental to the relation to reality yet are almost always concealed by reification, aesthetic experience is socially as well as metaphysically compelling.
The distance of the aesthetic realm from that of practical aims appears inner- aesthetically as the distance of aesthetic objects from the observing subject; just as artworks cannot intervene, the subject cannot intervene in them; distance is the primary condition for any closeness to the content of works. This is implicit in Kant's concept of absence of interest, which demands of aesthetic comportment that it not grasp at the object, not devour it. Benjamin ' s definition of aura32 touched on this inner-aesthetic element, though it relegated it to a past stage and declared it
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invalid for the contemporary age of technical reproducibility. Identifying with the aggressor, he all too promptly allied himself with the historical tendency that remands art to the empirical domain of practical ends. As a phenomenon, distance is what in artworks transcends their mere existence ; their absolute nearness would be their absolute integration.
Compared with authentic art, degraded, dishonored, and administered art is by no means without aura: The opposition between these antagonistic spheres must al- ways be conceived as the mediation of one through the other. In the contemporary situation, those works honor the auratic element that abstain from it; its destruc- tive conservation - its mobilization for the production of effects in the interest of creating mood-has its locus in amusement. Entertainment artadulterates on the one hand the real layer of the aesthetic , which is divested of its mediation and re- duced to mere facticity, to information and reportage; on the other hand, it rips the auratic element out of the nexus of the work, cultivates it as such, and makes it consumable. Every close-up in commercial film mocks aura by contriving to ex- ploit the contrived nearness of the distant, cut offfrom the work as a whole. Aura is gulped down along with the sensual stimuli; it is the uniform sauce that the cul- ture industry pours over the whole of its manufacture .
Stendhal's dictum of art as the promesse du bonheur implies that art does its part for existence by accentuating what in it prefigures utopia. But this utopic ele- ment is constantly decreasing, while existence increasingly becomes merely self- equivalent. For this reason art is ever less able to make itself like existence. Be- cause all happiness found in the status quo is an ersatz and false, art must break its promise in order to stay true to it. But the consciousness of people, especially that of the masses who in an antagonistic society are separated by cultural privilege from consciousness of such a dialectic, hold fast to the promise of happiness; rightfully so, but in its immediate, material form. This provides the opening for the culture industry, which plans for and exploits the need for happiness. The cul- ture industry has its element of truth in its fulfillment of a need that originates in the ever increasing renunciation demanded by society; but the sort of concessions it provides renders it absolutely false.
In the midst of a world dominated by utility, art indeed has a utopic aspect as the other of this world, as exempt from the mechanism of the social process of pro- duction and reproduction: It always has something of the feeling of the moment when the Thespian cart rolls into town in Smetana's The Banered Bride. But even to see the tight-rope walkers costs something. What is other is swallowed up by the ever-same and yet survives in it as semblance: semblance even in the material- ist sense. Art must distill all its elements, spirit included, from an unvarying uni- formity and must transform them all. By its bare difference from the uniform, art
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is a priori the critic of the uniform, even when it accommodates itself to what it criticizes and effectively moves within its presuppositions. Unconsciously every artwork must ask itself if and how it can exist as utopia: always only through the constellation of its elements . The artwork transcends not by the bare and abstract difference from the unvarying but rather by taking the unvarying into itself, taking it apart, and putting it back together again; such composition is what is usually called aesthetic creativity. Accordingly, the truth content of artworks is to be judged in terms of the extent to which they are able to reconfigure the other out of the unvarying.
The spirit in the artwork and in the reflection on it becomes suspect because it can affect the commodity character of the work and its commercial value; to this the collective unconscious is exceedingly sensitive. Granted, this widespread suspi- ciousness is fueied by a deep mistrust of official culture, its goods, and the dili- gently advertised assurance that people are participating in all this through plea- sure . The greater the precision with which the ambivalent inner self realizes that it is being cheated by official culture of what is promised-the promise of which in any case constitutes the debasement of culture-the more stubbornly it fixes its teeth ideologically in what in no way exists even in the mass experience of art. This is colored by the detritus of vitalism's wisdom: that consciousness kills .
When it is a matter of art, the bourgeois habit of attaching itself fiercely and with cowardly cynicism to something once it has seen through it as false and untrue be- comes an insistence that: "What I like may be bad, a fraud, and fabricated to dupe people, but I don't want to be reminded ofthat and in my free time I don't want to exert myself or get upset. " The element of semblance in art develops historically into this subjective obstinacy, which, in the age of the culture industry, integrates art into empirical reality as a synthetic dream and excludes reflection on art as well as the reflection immanent to art. Ultimately what underlies this is the fact that the perpetuation of existing society is incompatible with consciousness of it- self, and art is punished for every trace of such consciousness. From this perspec- tive as well, ideology-false consciousness-is socially necessary. Nevertheless, in the reflection of the observer, the authentic artwork gains rather than being di- minished. If one were to take the art consumer at his word , it would be necessary to demonstrate to him that it is through full knowledge of the work and not from the first sensual impression that he would, to use a phrase he uses so lightly, get more out of the work . The experience of art becomes incomparably richer through undistracted knowledge of it. The intellectual study of a work reflects back on its sensual perception. Such subjective reflection is legitimate in that it, so to speak, recapitulates the immanent process of reflection that objectively transpires in the aesthetic object, a process of which the artist need by no means necessarily be conscious .
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For art, "good enough" is never good enough. The idea of minor and middling masters is one of the treasured notions of the history of art and especially of music; it is the projection of a consciousness that is obtuse to the life of the work in itself. No continuum leads from bad by way of the middling to the good; what does not succeed is a priori bad because the idea of success and coherence is inherent to the idea of art; this is what motivates the incessant disputes over the quality of artworks , however sterile these disputes generally are . Art, according to Hegel the appearance of truth, is objectively intolerant, even of the socially dic- tated pluralism of peacefully coexisting spheres, which ever and again provides ideologues with excuses. Especially intolerable is the term "satisfying entertain- ment," which is glibly used by committees that would like to vindicate the com- modity character of art in the eyes of their infirm consciences. A daily newspaper explained why Colette is treated as entertainment in Germany whereas in France she enjoys the highest regard: It is because there people do not distinguish be- tween entertainment and serious art but only between good and bad. In fact, on the other side of the Rhine Colette plays the role of a sacred cow . In Germany, on the other hand, the rigid dichotomy of high and low art serves as fortifications for a petit bourgeois faith in the merits of cultural erudition. Artists who by official cri- teria belong to the lower sphere, but who show more talent than many of those who fulfill long-decayed standards, are robbed of their due. In the well-turned phrase of the social critic Willy Haas , there is good bad literature and bad good lit- erature; the case in music is no different. All the same, the distinction between entertainment and autonomous art, to the extent that it does not close its eyes to the untenability of the concept of standards or ignore the unregimented stirrings below, has its substance in the qualities of the works . Certainly the distinction re- quires the most extreme differentiation; moreover, even in the nineteenth century these spheres were not so unreconcilably split as they are today in the age of cul- tural monopoly. There is no dearth of works that, on account of gratuitous formu- lations that range from the sketchy to the stereotypical- works that have subordi- nated their own coherence to the calculation of their effect and have their locus in the subaltern sphere of aesthetic circulation-yet nevertheless go beyond it by virtue of subtle qualities . When and if their value as amusement evaporates , they may be able to become more than they were to start with. Even the relation of lower to higher art has its historical dynamic . What was once tailored to consumer taste may later, in the face of totally rationalized and administered consumption, appear as an afterimage of humanity. Even works that are not fully worked through, not fully executed, cannot invariably be rejected by these criteria but are legitimate where works correct themselves by the expedient of establishing their own level of form and not setting themselves up to be more than they are. Thus Puccini ' s extraordinary talent was expressed far more convincingly in unpreten- tious early works like Manon Lescaut and La Boheme than in the later, more am- bitious works that degenerate into kitsch because of the disproportion between
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substance and presentation . None of the categories of theoretical aesthetic s can be employed rigidly, as unshakable criteria. Whereas aesthetic objectivity can only be grasped in the immanent critique of individual works, the necessary abstract- ness of categories becomes a source of error. It is up to aesthetic theory, which is unable to progress to immanent critique, at least to delineate models of its self-correction through the second reflection of its categories. In this context, Offenbach and Johann Strauss are relevant; antipathy toward official culture and its taste for classical knock-offs motivated Karl Kraus to a particular insistence on such phenomena, as well as on such literary phenomena as Nestroy)3 Obviously it is necessary to be wary of the ideology of those who, because they are incapable of the discipline of authentic works, provide salable excuses. Yet the division of the spheres, objective in that it is a historical sedimentation, is not absolute. Lodged even in the highest work is an element that is for-other, a mortal remnant of seeking applause. Perfection, beauty itself, asks: "Am I not beautiful? " and thus sins against itself. Conversely, the most lamentable kitsch, which yet neces- sarily appears as art, cannot help raising a claim to what it disdains, the element of being in-itself, which it betrays. Colette was talented. She succeeded in making something as graceful as the small novel Mitsou and something as enigimatic as the heroine's attempted escape in The Innocent Libertine. Altogether she was a refined and linguistically cultivated version of Vicky Baum. 34 She provided un- bearably heart-warming pseudonature and did not balk in the face of intolerable scenes such as the end of the novel in which to general approbation the frigid heroine finally finds pleasure in the arms of her legitimate spouse. Colette de- lighted her audience with family novels set in a milieu of high-class prostitution . The most significant objection to French art, which nourished the whole of mod- ernism, is that the French have no word for kitsch, precisely that which is a source of pride in Germany. The truce between the domains of entertainment and serious art bears witness to the neutralization of culture: Because no spirit is binding for culture's spirit, culture offers its wares in a selection for highbrows, middlebrows, and lowbrows. The social need for amusement and what is called relaxation is ex- ploited by a society whose involuntary members would otherwise hardly put up with the burden and monotony of their life and who in their allotted and adminis- tered leisure time are hardly capable of taking in anything but what is forced on them by the culture industry , and that in truth includes the pseudo-individualization of novels a la Colette. But the need for entertainment does not improve it; it barters off and dulls the dregs of serious art and comes up with meager, abstractly
standardized, and incoherent results. Entertainment, including its more exalted products and especially those that seek a touch of nobility, has become vulgar ever since the exchange society caught hold of artistic production and made it too a commodity. Art is vulgar when it degrades people by cancelling its distance from an already degraded humanity; it confirms what the world has made of them rather than that its gesture revolts against it. Insofar as they embody the identifica-
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tion of people with their own debasement, the grinning cultural commodities are vulgar. No direct relation exists between social need and aesthetic quality, not even in the sphere of so-called functional art. The need to construct buildings in Germany in the decades after World War II was probably more pressing than it had been for centuries. Yet postwar German architecture is pitiful. Voltaire's equation of vrai besoin and vrai plaisir does not hold aesthetically; the quality of artworks can be meaningfully brought into relation with social need only when mediated by a theory of society as a whole, not on the basis of what a people need at any given time, which can for that reason be all the more easily imposed on them.
One of the defining elements of kitsch may well be the simulation of nonexisting feelings and thus their neutralization along with the neutralization of the aesthetic phenomenon. Kitsch is art that cannot be or does not want to be taken seriously and yet through its appearance postulates aesthetic seriousness. But, however illu- minating this may be, it is not adequate, and this applies not only to that broad range of base and unsentimental kitsch. Emotion is simulated; but whose emo- tion? The author's? But the author's emotion cannot be reconstructed, nor is any correlation to it a criterion of art. All aesthetic objectivation diverges from the immediate impulse. Or is it the emotion of those to whom the author ascribes it? Then these emotions would be as fictional as the dramatis personae themselves. If the definition of kitsch is to be meaningful, the expression of the artwork must be considered in itself an index veri etfalsi; but to judge the expressive authenticity of a work leads to such endless complications-one of which is the historical transformation of the truth content of the means of expression-that they could only be solved casuistically and even then not definitively. Kitsch is qualitatively distinct both from art and from its proliferation, as is predetermined by the contra- diction that autonomous art must dispose over the mimetic impulses that are themselves opposed to such control. Through the artwork the mimetic impulses already undergo the injustice that culminates in the abolition of art and its substi- tution by the schemata of fiction. The critique of kitsch must be vigilant, though it takes its toll on art as well. The revolt of art against its a priori affinity with kitsch was one of the essential laws of development in its recent history , and it partici- pates in the destruction of works. What once was art can later become kitsch. Per- haps this history of collapse is the history of the correction of art, its true progress.
In the face of the obvious dependency of fashion on the profit motive and its embeddedness in capitalist industry - which, for instance in the art market , which finances painters but overtly or covertly demands in exchange that they furnish whatever style of work the market expects of them, extends into so-called artistic fashions and directly undermines autonomy-fashion in art is no less corruptible than the zeal of ideological art agents who transform every apology into advertise-
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ment. What makes it worth salvaging, however, is that though it hardly denies its complicity with the profit system, it is itself disdained by that system. By suspend- ing aesthetic values such as those of inwardness, timelessness, and profundity, fashion makes it possible to recognize the degree to which the relation of art to these qualities, which are by no means above suspicion, has become a pretext. Fashion is art's permanent confession that it is not what it claims to be. For its indiscreet betrayals fashion is as hated as it is a powerful force in the system; its double character is a blatant symptom of its antinomy. Fashion cannot be sepa- rated from art as neatly as would suit bourgeois art religion. Ever since the aes- thetic subject polemically distanced itself from society and its prevailing spirit , art communicates with this objective spirit, however untrue it is, through fashion. Fashion is certainly no longer characterized by that spontaneity and simple origi- nality that was earlier, and probably wrongly, attributed to it: It is entirely manipu- lated and in no way a direct adaptation to the demands of the marketplace , even if these demands are sedimented in it and the consensus of the marketplace is still requisite for fashion to succeed. Because, however, manipUlation in the age of monopoly capitalism is itself the prototype of ruling social relations of produc- tion, fashion's octroi itself represents a socially objective power. If, in one of the most remarkable passages of his Aesthetics, Hegel defined the task of art as the appropriation of the alien ,35 fashion - doubtful of any possibility of such spiritual reconciliation - appropriates alienation itself. For fashion, alienation becomes the living model of a social being-thus-and-not-otherwise [So-und-nicht-anders-Sein] , to which it surrenders as if in ecstasy. If it is not to betray itself, art must resist fashion, but it must also innervate fashion in order not to make itself blind to the world, to its own substance. In his poetic work and in his essays, Baudelaire was the first to practice this double relation toward fashion. Of this his eulogy for Constantin Guys36 is the most compelling evidence. For Baudelaire, the artist de la vie moderne is he who remains in self-control while abandoning himself to what is completely ephemeral. Even the first artist of the highest importance who rejected communication did not shut out fashion: Much of Rimbaud's poetry resonates with the tone of Parisian literary cabarets. Radically oppositional art, which ruthlessly renounced everything heterogeneous to it, in its ruthlessness also attacked the fiction of a subject existing purely for-itself, the disastrous illusion of a strictly self-engaging integrity that usually functions to hide a provincial phari- saism. In the age of the growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis-a-vis social objectivity, fashion registers the alien excess of objectivity in subjective spirit, which is painful yet all the same a corrective of the illusion that subjective spirit exists purely within itself. Against its detractors, fashion's most powerful re- sponse is that it participates in the individual impulse, which is saturated with his- tory; it did so paradigmatically in Jugendstil, in the paradoxical universality of loneliness as a style. The disdain of fashion, however, is provoked by its erotic element, in which fashion reminds art of what it never fully succeeded in subli-
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mating. Through fashion, art sleeps with what it must renounce and from this draws the strength that otherwise must atrophy under the renunciation on which art is predicated. If art, as semblance, is the clothing of an invisible body, fashion is clothing as the absolute. As such, they stand in accord with each other. The con- cept of the "latest mode" is a wretched one-linguistically, mode is allied with modernism-for it serves to defame in art what usually contains more truth than what claims to be unaffected by all the excitement and thus manifests a lack of sensitivity that disqualifies it artistically.
In the concept of art, play is the element by which art immediately raises itself above the immediacy of praxis and its purposes . Yet it is at the same time oriented toward the past, toward childhood, if not animality. In play, art-through its re- nunciation of functional rationality - at the same time regresses back of rational- ity. The historical compulsion for art to mature functions in opposition to its playfulness, though it does not cast it off altogether; any straightforward recourse to playful forms, on the other hand, inevitably stands in the service of restorative or archaizing social tendencies. Playful forms are without exception forms of repetitioQ. When they are employed affirmatively they are joined with the repeti- tion compulsion, to which they adapt and which they sanction as normative. In blunt opposition to Schillerian ideology, art allies itself with unfreedom in the specific character of play . Thereby art incorporates an element alien to it; the most recent deaestheticization of art covertly exploits the element of play at the cost of all others. When Schiller celebrates the play drive as quintessentially human because it is free of purpose, he, being the loyal bourgeois he was, interpreted the opposite of freedom as freedom, in accord with the philosophy of his age . The relationship of play to praxis is more complex than Schiller ' s Aesthetic Education makes it appear. Whereas all art sublimates practical elements, play in art-by its neutralization of praxis-becomes bound up specifically with its spell, the compulsion toward the ever-same , and, in psychological dependence on the death instinct, interprets obedience as happiness. In art, play is from the outset disci- plinary; it fulfills the taboo on expression that inheres in the ritual of imitation; when art exclusively plays, nothing remains of expression. Secretly, play is in complicity with fate, a plenipotentiary of the weight of the mythical, which art would like to throw off; the repressive aspect is obvious in such phrases as that of the rhythm of the blood, with which the formal playfulness of dance is so readily invoked. If games of chance are the opposite of art, as forms of play they never- theless extend into art. The putative play drive has ever been fused with the pri- macy of blind collectivity . Only when play becomes aware of its own terror, as in Beckett, does it in any way share in art's power of reconciliation . Art that is totally without play is no more thinkable than if it were totally without repetition, yet art is nevertheless able to define the remainder of horror within itself as being negative.
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Huizinga's much celebrated Homo Ludens has reintroduced the category of play as central to aesthetics, and not only there: Culture, he argues, originates as play. "To speak ofthe 'play element in culture' . . . is not to imply that among the various activities of civilized life an important place is reserved for play, nor that civiliza- tion has arisen out of play by some evolutionary process, in the sense that some- thing that was originally play passed into something that was no longer play and could henceforth be called culture. Rather, I wish to show that . . . culture is ini- tially played. "37 Huizinga's thesis succumbs to the critique ofthe definition of art by its origin . All the same , his thesis has its truth and its untruth . If one grasps the concept of play as abstractly as he does, it is clear that he is defining not some- thing specific but merely forms of comportment, which somehow distance them- selves from the praxis of self-preservation. He fails to realize how much the ele- ment of play is itself an afterimage of praxis rather than of semblance. In all play, action has fundamentally divested itselfof any relation to purpose, but in terms of its form and execution the relation to praxis is maintained. The element of repeti- tion in play is the afterimage of unfree labor, just as sports - the dominant extra- aesthetic form of play - is reminiscent of practical activities and continually ful- fills the function of habituating people to the demands of praxis, above all by the reactive transformation of physical displeasure into secondary pleasure, without their noticing that the contraband of praxis has slipped into it. Huizinga's thesis not only that human beings play with language but that language itself originates in play, sovereignly ignores the practical necessities contained in language, of which language frees itself only eventually, if ever. There is, furthermore, an ap- parent convergence of Huizinga's theory of language with Wittgenstein's; he, too, fails to grasp the constitutive relation of language to the extralinguistic . Neverthe- less, Huizinga's theory of play leads him to insights that are closed to the magical and religious-metaphysical reductions of art. He recognized that from the per- spective of the subject, aesthetic comportments that he comprehends under the name of play are at once true and untrue. This helps him to reach a remarkably compelling idea of humor: "One would like . . . to ask whether the primitive ' s be- lief in his holiest myths is not, even from the beginning , tinged with a certain ele- ment of humor. "38 "A half-joking element verging on make-believe is inseparable from true myth . "39 The religious festivals of primitive peoples are not those "of a complete ecstasy and illusion . .