It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident
anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right
to exist. The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or
unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new
possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as
contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910
revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of
adventure.
Instead, the process that was unleashed consumed the
categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken. More was constantly
pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo; everywhere artists rejoiced less
over the newly won realm of freedom than that they immediately sought once again
after ostensible yet scarcely adequate order. For absolute freedom in art, always
limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of
the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain. The autonomy it achieved,
after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished by
the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy
was shattered. Drawn from the ideal of humanity, art's constituent elements
withered by art's own law of movement. Yet art's autonomy remains irrevocable. All
efforts to restore art by giving it a social function—of which art is itself
uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty—are doomed. Indeed,
art's autonomy shows signs of blindness. Blindness was ever an aspect of art;
in the age of art's emancipation, however, this blindness has begun to
predominate in spite of, if not because of, art's lost naivete, which, as Hegel
already perceived, art cannot undo. This binds art to a naivete of a second
order: the uncertainty over what purpose it serves. It is uncertain whether art
is still possible; whether, with its complete emancipation, it did not sever
its own preconditions.
This question is kindled by art's own past. Artworks detach
themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed
to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity.
Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation.
The cliches of art's reconciling glow enfolding the world are repugnant not
only because they parody the emphatic concept of art with its bourgeois version
and class it among those Sunday institutions that provide solace. These cliches
rub against the wound that art itself bears. As a result of its inevitable
withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation,
a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned
to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that—shorn of any hope of
a world beyond—strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art
wants to free itself. The principle of autonomy is itself suspect of giving
consolation: By undertaking to posit totality out of itself, whole and
self-encompassing, this image is transferred to the world in which art exists
and that engenders it.
By virtue of its rejection of the empirical world—a
rejection that inheres in art's concept and thus is no mere escape, but a law
immanent to it—art sanctions the primacy of reality. In a work dedicated to the
praise of art, Helmut Kuhn warranted that art's each and every work is a paean.1
His thesis would be true, were it meant critically. In the face of the
abnormity into which reality is developing, art's inescapable affirmative
essence has become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in opposition to
its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost
fiber. Yet art is not to be dismissed simply by its abstract negation. By
attacking what seemed to be its foundation throughout the whole of its
tradition, art has been qualitatively transformed; it itself becomes
qualitatively other. It can do this because through the ages by means of its
form, art has turned against the status quo and what merely exists just as much
as it has come to its aid by giving form to its elements. Art can no more be
reduced to the general formula of consolation than to its opposite. The concept
of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements; it
refuses definition. Its essence cannot be deduced from its origin as if the
first work were a foundation on which everything that followed were constructed
and would collapse if shaken. The belief that the first artworks are the
highest and purest is warmed-over romanticism; with no less justification it
could be claimed that the earliest artistic works are dull and impure in that
they are not yet separated from magic, historical documentation, and such
pragmatic aims as communicating over great distances by means of calls or horn
sounds; the classical conception of art gladly made use of such arguments. In
bluntly historical terms, the facts blur. The effort to subsume the historical
genesis of art ontologically under an ultimate motif would necessarily flounder
in such disparate material that the theory would emerge empty-handed except for
the obviously relevant insight that the arts will not fit into any gapless
concept of art.
In those studies devoted to the aesthetic dp%ai,
positivistic sampling of material and such speculation as is otherwise disdained
by the sciences flourish wildly alongside each other; Bachofen is the best
example of this. If, nevertheless, one wanted in the usual philosophical fashion
categorically to distinguish the so-called question of origin—as that of art's
essence—from the question of art's historical origin, that would amount only to
turning the concept of origin arbitrarily against the usual sense of the word.
The definition of art is at every point indicated by what art once was, but it
is legitimated only by what art became with regard to what it wants to, and
perhaps can, become. Although art's difference from the merely empirical is to
be maintained, this difference is transformed in itself qualitatively; much
that was not art—cultic works, for instance—has over the course of history
metamorphosed into art; and much that was once art is that no longer. Posed
from on high, the question whether something such as film is or is no longer
art leads nowhere. Because art is what it has become, its concept refers to
what it does not contain. The tension between what motivates art and art's past
circumscribes the so-called questions of aesthetic constitution. Art can be
understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of
invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not. The specifically
artistic in art must be derived concretely from its other; that alone would
fulfill the demands of a materialistic-dialectical aesthetics. Art acquires its
specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of
movement is its law of form. It exists only in relation to its other; it is the
process that transpires with its other. Nietzsche's late insight, honed in
opposition to traditional philosophy, that even what has become can be true, is
axiomatic for a reoriented aesthetic. The traditional view, which he
demolished, is to be turned on its head: Truth exists exclusively as that which
has become. What appears in the artwork as its own lawfulness is the late
product of an inner-technical evolution as well as art's position within
progressive secularization; yet doubtless artworks became artworks only by
negating their origin. They are not to be called to account for the disgrace of
their ancient dependency on magic, their servitude to kings and amusement, as
if this were art's original sin, for art retroactively annihilated that from
which it emerged.
Dinner music is not inescapable for liberated music, nor was
dinner music honest service from which autonomous art outrageously withdrew. The
former's miserable mechanical clattering is on no account improved because the
overwhelming part of what now passes for art drowns out the echo of that
clatter. The Hegelian vision of the possible death of art accords with the fact
that art is a product of history. That Hegel considered art transitory while
all the same chalking it up to absolute spirit stands in harmony with the
double character of his system, yet it prompts a thought that would never have
occurred to him: that the substance of art, according to him its absoluteness,
is not identical with art's life and death. Rather, art's substance could be
its transitoriness. It is thinkable, and not merely an abstract possibility,
that great music—a late development—was possible only during a limited phase of
humanity. The revolt of art, Ideologically posited in its "attitude to
objectivity" toward the historical world, has become a revolt against art;
it is futile to prophesy whether art will survive it. What reactionary cultural
pessimism once vociferated against cannot be suppressed by the critique of
culture: that, as Hegel ruminated a hundred and fifty years ago, art may have
entered the age of its demise. Just as Rimbaud's stunning dictum one hundred
years ago divined definitively the history of new art, his later silence, his stepping
into line as an employee, anticipated art's decline. It is outside the purview
of aesthetics today whether it is to become art's necrology; yet it must not play
at delivering graveside sermons, certifying the end, savoring the past, and
abdicating in favor of one sort of barbarism that is no better than the culture
that has earned barbarism as recompense for its own monstrosity. Whether art is
abolished, perishes, or despairingly hangs on, it is not mandated that the
content [Gehalt] of past art perish. It could survive art in a society that had
freed itself of the barbarism of its culture. Not just aesthetic forms but
innumerable themes have already become extinct, adultery being one of them.
Although adultery filled Victorian and early-twentieth-century novels, it is
scarcely possible to empathize directly with this literature now, given the
dissolution of the high-bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy;
distorted and impoverished, this literature lives on only in illustrated
magazines. At the same time, however, what is authentic in Madame Bovary and
was once embedded in its thematic content has long since outstripped this
content and its deterioration. Obviously this is not grounds for
historicophilosophical optimism over the invincibility of spirit. It is equally
possible for the thematic material in its own demise to take with it that which
is more than merely thematic. Art and artworks are perishable, not simply because
by their heteronomy they are dependent, but because right into the smallest detail
of their autonomy, which sanctions the socially determined splitting off of
spirit by the division of labor, they are not only art but something foreign
and opposed to it. Admixed with art's own concept is the ferment of its own
abolition. There is no aesthetic refraction without something being refracted;
no imagination without something imagined. This holds true particularly in the
case of art's immanent purposiveness. In its relation to empirical reality art
sublimates the latter's governing principle of sese conservare as the ideal of
the self-identity of its works; as Schoenberg said, one paints a painting, not
what it represents. Inherently every artwork desires identity with itself, an
identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as
identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid
the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed by reality's compulsion to
identity. Only by virtue of separation from empirical reality, which sanctions
art to model the relation of the whole and the part according to the work's own
need, does the artwork achieve a heightened order of existence.
Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they
help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby
free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience.
Although the demarcation line between art and the empirical must not be
effaced, and least of all by the glorification of the artist, artworks
nevertheless have a life sui generis. This life is not just their external
fate. Important artworks constantly divulge new layers; they age, grow cold,
and die. It is a tautology to point out that as humanly manufactured artifacts
they do not live as do people. But the emphasis on the artifactual element in
art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner
constitution, regardless of how it came to be. Artworks are alive in that they
speak in a fashion that is denied to natural objects and the subjects who make
them. They speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in
them. Thus they come into contrast with the arbitrariness of what simply
exists. Yet it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labor, that
they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from
which they draw their content [Inhalt]. Art negates the categorial
determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is
empirically existing in its own substance. If art opposes the empirical through
the element of form—and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped
without their differentiation—the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of
aesthetic form as sedimented content. What are taken to be the purest forms
(e.g., traditional musical forms) can be traced back even in the smallest idiomatic
detail to content such as dance. In many instances ornaments in the visual arts
were once primarily cultic symbols. Tracing aesthetic forms back to contents,
such as the Warburg Institute undertook to do by following the afterlife of
classical antiquity, deserves to be more broadly undertaken.
The communication of artworks with what is external to them,
with the world from which they blissfully or unhappily seal themselves off,
occurs through noncommunication; precisely thereby they prove themselves
refracted. It is easy to imagine that art's autonomous realm has nothing in
common with the external world other than borrowed elements that have entered
into a fully changed context. Nevertheless, there is no contesting the cliche
of which cultural history is so fond, that the development of artistic
processes, usually classed under the heading of style, corresponds to social
development. Even the most sublime artwork takes up a determinate attitude to
empirical reality by stepping outside of the constraining spell it casts, not
once and for all, but rather ever and again, concretely, unconsciously polemical
toward this spell at each historical moment. That artworks as windowless monads
"represent" what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood except
in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature
and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to
them but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production
is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what
may be called aesthetic relations of production—all that in which the
productive force is embedded and in which it is active—are sedimentations or
imprintings of social relations of production. Art's double character as both
autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its
autonomy. It is by virtue of this relation to the empirical that artworks
recuperate, neutralized, what once was literally and directly experienced in
life and what was expulsed by spirit. Artworks participate in enlightenment
because they do not lie: They do not feign the literalness of what speaks out
of them. They are real as answers to the puzzle externally posed to them. Their
own tension is binding in relation to the tension external to them. The basic
levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world
from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks
as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines
the relation of art to society. The complex of tensions in artworks crystallizes
undisturbed in these problems of form and through emancipation from the
external world's factual facade converges with the real essence. Art, χωρίς from
the empirically existing, takes up a position to it in accord with Hegel's
argument against Kant: The moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped and
that against which the limit was established is absorbed. Only this, not
moralizing, is the critique of the principle of I'art pour I'art, which by
abstract negation posits the χωρίσμός of art as absolute. The freedom of artworks,
in which their self-consciousness glories and without which these works would
not exist, is the ruse of art's own reason. Each and every one of their
elements binds them to that over which, for their happiness, they must soar and
back into which at every moment they threaten once again to tumble.
In their relation to empirical reality, artworks recall the
theologumenon that in the redeemed world everything would be as it is and yet
wholly other. There is no mistaking the analogy with the tendency of the
profane to secularize the realm of the sacred to the point that only as
secularized does the latter endure; the realm of the sacred is objectified,
effectively staked off, because its own element of untruth at once awaits
secularization and through conjuration wards off the secular. Accordingly, the
pure concept of art could not define the fixed circumference of a sphere that
has been secured once and for all; rather, its closure is achieved only in an
intermittent and fragile balance that is more than just comparable to the
psychological balance between ego and id. The act of repulsion must be
constantly renewed. Every artwork is an instant; every successful work is a
cessation, a suspended moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the
unwavering eye. If artworks are answers to their own questions, they themselves
thereby truly become questions. The tendency to perceive art either in
extra-aesthetic or preaesthetic fashion, which to this day is undiminished by
an obviously failed education, is not only a barbaric residue or a danger of
regressive consciousness. Something in art calls for this response. Art perceived
strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Only when art's other
is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to
sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds, without the autonomy of the
artwork becoming a matter of indifference. Art is autonomous and it is not; without
what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it. The great epics, which have
survived even their own oblivion, were in their own age intermingled with historical
and geographical reportage; Valery the artist took note of how much of their material
had yet to be recast by the formal requirements of the Homeric, pagan-Germanic,
and Christian epics, without this reducing their rank vis-a-vis drossless
works.
Likewise tragedy, which may have been the origin of the idea
of aesthetic autonomy, was an afterimage of cultic acts that were intended to
have real effects. The history of art as that of its progressive autonomy never
succeeded in extirpating this element, and not just because the bonds were too
strong. At the height of its form, in the nineteenth century, the realistic
novel had something of what the theory of so-called socialist realism
rationally plotted for its debasement: reportage, the anticipation of what
social science would later ascertain. The fanatic linguistic perfection of Madame
Bovary is probably a symptom of precisely this contrary element; the unity of
both, of reportage and linguistic perfectionism, accounts for the book's
unfaded actuality. In artworks, the criterion of success is twofold: whether
they succeed in integrating thematic strata and details into their immanent law
of form and in this integration at the same time maintain what resists it and
the fissures that occur in the process of integration. Integration as such does
not assure quality; in the history of art, integration and quality have often
diverged. For no single select category, not even the aesthetically central
concept of the law of form, names the essence of art and suffices to judge its
products. Essential to art are defining characteristics that contradict its
fixed art-philosophical concept. Hegel's content-aesthetics [Inhaltsasthetik] recognized
that element of otherness immanent to art and thus superseded formal
aesthetics, which apparently operates with a so much purer concept of art and
of course liberated historical developments such as nonrepresentational
painting that are blocked by Hegel's and Kierkegaard's content-aesthetics. At
the same time, however, Hegel's idealist dialectic, which conceives form as
content, regresses to a crude, preaesthetic level. It confuses the
representational or discursive treatment of thematic material with the
otherness that is constitutive of art. Hegel transgresses against his own
dialectical conception of aesthetics, with consequences he did not foresee; he
in effect helped transform art into an ideology of domination. Conversely, what
is unreal and nonexistent in art is not independent of reality. It is not
arbitrarily posited, not invented, as is commonly thought; rather, it is
structured by proportions between what exists, proportions that are themselves
defined by what exists, its deficiency, distress, and contradictoriness as well
as its potentialities; even in these proportions real contexts resonate. Art is
related to its other as is a magnet to a field of iron filings. Not only art's
elements, but their constellation as well, that which is specifically aesthetic
and to which its spirit is usually chalked up, refer back to its other. The
identity of the artwork with existing reality is also that of the work's gravitational
force, which gathers around itself its membra disjecta, traces of the existing.
The artwork is related to the world by the principle that contrasts it with the
world, and that is the same principle by which spirit organized the world. The synthesis
achieved by means of the artwork is not simply forced on its elements; rather,
it recapitulates that in which these elements communicate with one another; thus
the synthesis is itself a product of otherness. Indeed, synthesis has its foundation
in the spirit-distant material dimension of works, in that in which synthesis is
active. This unites the aesthetic element of form with noncoercion.
By its difference from empirical reality the artwork
necessarily constitutes itself in relation to what it is not, and to what makes
it an artwork in the first place. The insistence on the nonintentional in
art—which is apparent in art's sympathy with its lower manifestations beginning
at a specific historical point with Wedekind's derision of the
"art-artist," with Apollinaire, and indeed with the beginnings of cubism—points
up art's unconscious self-consciousness in its participation in what is
contrary to it; this self-consciousness motivated art's culture-critical turn that
cast off the illusion of its purely spiritual being. Art is the social
antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it. The constitution of
art's sphere corresponds to the constitution of an inward space of men as the
space of their representation: A priori the constitution of this space
participates in sublimation. It is therefore plausible to conceive of
developing the definition of art out of a theory of psychic life. Skepticism
toward anthropological theories of human invariants recommends psychoanalytic
theory. But this theory is more productive psychologically than aesthetically.
For psychoanalysis considers artworks to be essentially unconscious projections
of those who have produced them, and, preoccupied with the hermeneutics of
thematic material, it forgets the categories of form and, so to speak,
transfers the pedantry of sensitive doctors to the most inappropriate objects,
such as Leonardo da Vinci or Baudelaire. The narrow-mindedness, in spite of all
the emphasis on sex, is revealed by the fact that as a result of these studies,
which are often offshoots of the biographical fad, artists whose work gave
uncensored shape to the negativity of life are dimissed as neurotics.
Laforgue's book actually in all seriousness accuses Baudelaire of having
suffered from a mother complex. The question is never once broached whether a
psychically sound Baudelaire would have been able to write The Flowers of Evil,
not to mention whether the poems turned out worse because of the neurosis. Psychological
normalcy is outrageously established as the criterion even, as in Baudelaire,
where aesthetic quality is bluntly predicated on the absence of mens sana. According
to the tone of psychoanalytic monographs, art should deal affirmatively with
the negativity of experience. The negative element is held to be nothing more
than the mark of that process of repression that obviously goes into the artwork.
For psychoanalysis, artworks are daydreams; it confuses them with documents and
displaces them into the mind of a dreamer, while on the other hand, as
compensation for the exclusion of the extramental sphere, it reduces artworks to
crude thematic material, falling strangely short of Freud's own theory of the
"dreamwork."
As with all positivists, the fictional element in artworks
is vastly overestimated by the presumed analogy with the dream. In the process
of production, what is projected is only one element in the artist's relation
to the artwork and hardly the definitive one; idiom and material have their own
importance, as does, above all, the product itself; this rarely if ever occurs
to the analysts. The psychoanalytic thesis, for instance, that music is a
defense against the threat of paranoia, does indeed for the most part hold true
clinically, yet it says nothing about the quality and content of a particular
composition. The psycho- analytic theory of art is superior to idealist
aesthetics in that it brings to light what is internal to art and not itself
artistic. It helps free art from the spell of absolute spirit. Whereas vulgar
idealism, rancorously opposed to knowledge of the artwork and especially
knowledge of its entwinement with instinct, would like to quarantine art in a
putatively higher sphere, psychoanalysis works in the opposite direction, in
the spirit of enlightenment. Where it deciphers the social character that speaks
from a work and in which on many occasions the character of its author is manifest,
psychoanalysis furnishes the concrete mediating links between the structure of
artworks and the social structure. But psychoanalysis too casts a spell related
to idealism, that of an absolutely subjective sign system denoting subjective instinctual
impulses. It unlocks phenomena, but falls short of the phenomenon of art.
Psychoanalysis treats artworks as nothing but facts, yet it neglects their own objectivity,
their inner consistency, their level of form, their critical impulse, their relation
to nonpsychical reality, and, finally, their idea of truth. When a painter, obeying
the pact of total frankness between analyst and patient, mocked the bad Viennese
engravings that defaced his walls, she was informed by the analyst that this
was nothing but aggression on her part. Artworks are incomparably less a copy
and possession of the artist than a doctor who knows the artist exclusively from
the couch can imagine.
Only dilettantes reduce everything in art to the
unconscious, repeating cliches. In artistic production, unconscious forces are
one sort of impulse, material among many others. They enter the work mediated
by the law of form; if this were not the case, the actual subject portrayed by
a work would be nothing but a copy. Artworks are not Thematic Apperception
Tests of their makers. Part of the responsibility for this philistinism is the
devotion of psychoanalysis to the reality principle: Whatever refuses to obey
this principle is always merely "escape"; adaptation to reality
becomes the summum bonum. Yet reality provides too many legitimate reasons for
fleeing it for the impulse to be met by the indignation of an ideology sworn to
harmony; on psychological grounds alone, art is more legitimate than psychology
acknowledges. True, imagination is escape, but not exclusively so: What
transcends the reality principle toward something superior is always also part
of what is beneath it; to point a taunting finger at it is malicious. The image
of the artist, as one of the tolerated, integrated as a neurotic in a society
sworn to the division of labor, is distorted. Among artists of the highest
rank, such as Beethoven or Rembrandt, the sharpest sense of reality was joined
with estrangement from reality; this, truly, would be a worthwhile object for
the psychology of art. It would need to decipher the artwork not just as being
like the artist but as being unlike as well, as labor on a reality resisting the
artist. If art has psychoanalytic roots, then they are the roots of fantasy in
the fantasy of omnipotence. This fantasy includes the wish to bring about a
better world. This frees the total dialectic, whereas the view of art as a merely
subjective language of the unconscious does not even touch it. Kant's
aesthetics is the antithesis of Freud's theory of art as wish fulfillment. Dis-
interested liking is the first element of the judgment of taste in the "Analytic
of the Beautiful." There interest is termed "the liking that we
combine with the representation of the existence of an object." It is not
clear, however, if what is meant by the "representation of the existence
of an object" is its content, the thematic material in the sense of the
object treated in the work, or the artwork itself; the pretty nude model or the
sweet resonance of a musical tone can be kitsch or it can be an integral
element of artistic quality. The accent on "representation" is a
consequence of Kant's subjectivistic approach, which in accord with the
rationalistic tradition, notably that of Moses Mendelssohn, tacitly seeks
aesthetic quality in the effect the artwork has on the observer. What is
revolutionary in the Critique of Judgment is that without leaving the circle of
the older effect-aesthetics Kant at the same time restricted it through
immanent criticism; this is in keeping with the whole of his subjectivism,
which plays a significant part in his objective effort to save objectivity
through the analysis of subjective elements. Disinterestedness sets itself at a
distance from the immediate effect that liking seeks to conserve, and this
initiates the fragmentation of the supremacy of liking. For, once shorn of what
Kant calls interest, satisfaction becomes so indeterminate that it no longer serves
to define beauty. The doctrine of disinterested satisfaction is impoverished vis-a-vis
the aesthetic; it reduces the phenomenon either to formal beauty, which when
isolated is highly dubious, or to the so-called sublime natural object.
The sublimation of the work to absolute form neglects the
spirit of the work in the interest of which sublimation was undertaken in the
first place. This is honestly and involuntarily attested by Kant's strained
footnote, in which he asserts that a judgment of an object of liking may indeed
be disinterested, yet interesting; that is, it may produce interest even when
it is not based on it. Kant divides aesthetic feeling—and thus, in accord with
the whole of his model, art itself—from the power of desire, to which the
"representation of the existence of an object" refers; the liking of
such a representation "always has reference to the power of desire." Kant
was the first to achieve the insight, never since forgotten, that aesthetic
comportment is free from immediate desire; he snatched art away from that
avaricious Philistinism that always wants to touch it and taste it.
Nevertheless, the Kantian motif is not altogether alien to psychoanalytic art
theory: Even for Freud artworks are not immediate wish fulfillments but
transform unsatisfied libido into a socially productive achievement, whereby
the social value of art is simply assumed, with uncritical respect for art's
public reputation. Although Kant emphasizes the difference between art and the
power of desire—and thereby between art and empirical reality—much more
energetically than does Freud, he does not simply idealize art: The separation
of the aesthetic sphere from the empirical constitutes art. Yet Kant
transcendentally arrested this constitution, which is a historical process, and
simplistically equated it with the essence of the artistic, unconcerned that
the subjective, instinctual components of art return metamorphosed even in
art's maturest form, which negates them. The dynamic character of the artistic
is much more fully grasped by Freud's theory of sublimation. But for this Freud
clearly had to pay no smaller a price than did Kant. If in the latter's case,
in spite of his preference for sensual intuition, the spiritual essence of the
artwork originates in the distinction between aesthetic and practical,
appetitive behavior, Freud's adaptation of the aesthetic to the theory of the
instincts seems to seal itself off from art's spiritual essence; for Freud,
artworks are indeed, even though sublimated, little more than plenipotentiaries
of sensual impulses, which they at best make unrecognizable through a sort of
dreamwork. The confrontation of these two heterogeneous thinkers—Kant not only
rejected philosophical psychologism but in his old age increasingly rejected
all psychology—is nevertheless permitted by a commonality that outweighs the
apparently absolute difference between the Kantian construction of the
transcendental subject, on the one hand, and the Freudian recourse to the
empirically psychological on the other: Both are in principle subjectively oriented
by the power of desire, whether it is interpreted negatively or positively. For
both, the artwork exists only in relation to its observer or maker.
By a mechanism to which his moral philosophy is subordinate,
even Kant is compelled to consider the existing individual, the ontic element,
more than is compatible with the idea of the transcendental subject. There is
no liking without a living person who would enjoy it. Though it is never made
explicit, the Critique of Judgment is as a whole devoted to the analysis of constituta.
Thus what was planned as a bridge between theoretical and practical pure reason
is vis-a-vis both an ocA,Xo yevo<;. Indeed, the taboo on art—and so far as
art is defined it obeys a taboo, for definitions are rational taboos—forbids
that one take an animalistic stance toward the object, that is, that one
dominate it by physically devouring it. But the power of the taboo corresponds
to the power that it prohibits. There is no art that does not contain in itself
as an element, negated, what it repulses. If it is more than mere indifference,
the Kantian "without interest" must be shadowed by the wildest interest,
and there is much to be said for the idea that the dignity of artworks depends on
the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested. Kant denies this in
favor of a concept of freedom that castigates as heteronomous whatever is not
born exclusively of the subject. His theory of art is distorted by the
insufficiency of the doctrine of practical reason. The idea of something
beautiful, which possesses or has acquired some degree of autonomy in the face
of the sovereign I, would, given the tenor of his philosophy, be disparaged as
wandering off into intelligible realms. But along with that from which art
antithetically originated, art is shorn of all content, and in its place he
posits something as formal as aesthetic satisfaction. For Kant, aesthetics
becomes paradoxically a castrated hedonism, desire without desire. An equal
injustice is done both to artistic experience, in which liking is by no means
the whole of it but plays a subordinate role, and to sensual interest, the
suppressed and unsatisfied needs that resonate in their aesthetic negation and
make artworks more than empty patterns. Aesthetic disinterestedness has
broadened interest beyond particularity. The interest in the aesthetic totality
wanted to be, objectively, an interest in a correct organization of the whole.
It aims not at the fulfillment of the particular but rather at unbound
possibility, though that would be no possibility at all without the
presupposition of the fulfillment of the particular. Correlative to the
weakness of Kant's aesthetics, Freud's is much more idealistic than it
suspects. When artworks are translated purely into psychical immanence, they
are deprived of their antithetic stance to the not-I, which remains
unchallenged by the thorniness of artworks. They are exhausted in the psychical
performance of gaining mastery over instinctual renunciation and, ultimately,
in the achievement of conformity. The psychologism of aesthetic interpretation
easily agrees with the philistine view of the artwork as harmoniously quieting
antagonisms, a dream image of a better life, unconcerned with the misery from
which this image is wrested. The conformist psychoanalytic endorsement of the
prevailing view of the artwork as a well-meaning cultural commodity corresponds
to an aesthetic hedonism that banishes art's negativity to the instinctual
conflicts of its genesis and suppresses any negativity in the finished work.
If successful sublimation and integration are made the
end-all and be-all of the artwork, it loses the force by which it exceeds the
given, which it renounces by its mere existence. The moment, however, the
artwork comports itself by retaining the negativity of reality and taking a
position to it, the concept of disinterestedness is also modified. Contrary to
the Kantian and Freudian interpretation of art, artworks imply in themselves a
relation between interest and its renunciation. Even the contemplative attitude
to artworks, wrested from objects of action, is felt as the announcement of an
immediate praxis and—to this extent itself practical—as a refusal to play
along. Only artworks that are to be sensed as a form of comportment have a
raison d'etre. Art is not only the plenipotentiary of a better praxis than that
which has to date predominated, but is equally the critique of praxis as the
rule of brutal self-preservation at the heart of the status quo and in its
service. It gives the lie to production for production's sake and opts for a
form of praxis beyond the spell of labor. Art's promesse du bonheur means not
only that hitherto praxis has blocked happiness but that happiness is beyond
praxis. The measure of the chasm separating praxis from happiness is taken by
the force of negativity in the artwork. Certainly Kafka does not awaken the
power of desire. Yet the real fear triggered by prose works like Metamorphosis or
The Penal Colony, that shock of revulsion and disgust that shakes the physis,
has, as defense, more to do with desire than with the old disinterestedness
canceled by Kafka and what followed him. As a response, disinterestedness would
be crudely inadequate to his writings. Ultimately disinterestedness debases art
to what Hegel mocked, a pleasant or useful plaything of Horace's Ars Poetica. It
is from this that the aesthetics of the idealist age, contemporaneously with
art itself, freed itself. Only once it is done with tasteful savoring does
artistic experience become autonomous. The route to aesthetic autonomy proceeds
by way of disinterestedness; the emancipation of art from cuisine or pornography
is irrevocable. Yet art does not come to rest in disinterestedness. For
disinterestedness immanently reproduces—and transforms—interest. In the false
world all f\6ovfi is false. For the sake of happiness, happiness is renounced.
It is thus that desire survives in art. Pleasure masquerades beyond recognition
in the Kantian disinterestedness. What popular consciousness and a complaisant
aesthetics regard as the taking pleasure in art, modeled on real enjoyment,
probably does not exist. The empirical subject has only a limited and modified
part in artistic experience tel quel, and this part may well be diminished the
higher the work's rank. Whoever concretely enjoys artworks is a philistine; he
is convicted by expressions like "a feast for the ears." Yet if the
last traces of pleasure were extirpated, the question of what artworks are for
would be an embarrassment. Actually, the more they are understood, the less they
are enjoyed. Formerly, even the traditional attitude to the artwork, if it was
to be absolutely relevant to the work, was that of admiration that the works
exist as they do in themselves and not for the sake of the observer. What
opened up to, and overpowered, the beholder was their truth, which as in works
of Kafka's type outweighs every other element.
They were not a higher order of amusement. The relation to
art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared
into the material; this is even more so in modern works that shoot toward the
viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film. Ask a musician if the music
is a pleasure, the reply is likely to be—as in the American joke of the
grimacing cellist under Toscanini—"I just hate music.''1 For him who has a
genuine relation to art, in which he himself vanishes, art is not an object;
deprivation of art would be unbearable for him, yet he does not consider
individual works sources of joy. Incontestably, no one would devote himself to
art without—as the bourgeois put it—getting something out of it; yet this is
not true in the sense that a balance sheet could be drawn up: "heard the
Ninth Symphony tonight, enjoyed myself so and so much" even though such
feeble-mindedness has by now established itself as common sense. The bourgeois
want art voluptuous and life ascetic; the reverse would be better. Reified
consciousness provides an ersatz for the sensual immediacy of which it deprives
people in a sphere that is not its abode. While the artwork's sensual appeal
seemingly brings it close to the consumer, it is alienated from him by being a
commodity that he possesses and the loss of which he must constantly fear. The
false relation to art is akin to anxiety over possession. The fetishistic idea
of the artwork as property that can be possessed and destroyed by reflection
has its exact correlative in the idea of exploitable property within the psychological
economy of the self. If according to its own concept art has become what it is,
this is no less the case with its classification as a source of pleasure;
indeed, as components of ritual praxis the magical and animistic predecessors
of art were not autonomous; yet precisely because they were sacred they were
not objects of enjoyment. The spiritualization of art incited the rancor of the
excluded and spawned consumer art as a genre, while conversely antipathy toward
consumer art compelled artists to ever more reckless spiritualization. No naked
Greek sculpture was a pin-up. The affinity of the modern for the distant past
and the exotic is explicable on the same grounds: Artists were drawn by the
abstraction from natural objects as desirable; incidentally, in the
construction of "symbolic art" Hegel did not overlook the unsensuous
element of the archaic.
The element of pleasure in art, a protest against the
universally mediated commodity character, is in its own fashion mediable:
Whoever disappears into the artwork thereby gains dispensation from the
impoverishment of a life that is always too little. This pleasure may mount to
an ecstasy for which the meager concept of enjoyment is hardly adequate, other
than to produce disgust for enjoying anything. It is striking, incidentally,
that an aesthetic that constantly insists on subjective feeling as the basis of
all beauty never seriously analyzed this feeling. Almost without exception its
descriptions were banausic, perhaps because from the beginning the subjective approach
made it impossible to recognize that something compelling can be grasped of
aesthetic experience only on the basis of a relation to the aesthetic object,
not by recurring to the fun of the art lover. The concept of artistic enjoyment
was a bad compromise between the social and the socially critical essence of
the artwork. If art is useless for the business of self-preservation—bourgeois society
never quite forgives that—it should at least demonstrate a sort of usevalue modeled
on sensual pleasure. This distorts art as well as the physical fulfillment that
art's aesthetic representatives do not dispense. That a person who is incapable
of sensual differentiation—who cannot distinguish a beautiful from a flat
sound, a brilliant from a dull color—is hardly capable of artistic experience,
is hypostatized. Aesthetic experience does indeed benefit from an intensified
sensual differentiation as a medium of giving form, yet the pleasure in this is
always indirect. The importance of the sensual in art has varied; after an age
of asceticism pleasure becomes an organ of liberation and vivaciousness, as it
did in the Renaissance and then again in the anti-Victorian impulse of
impressionism; at other moments creatural sadness has borne witness to a
metaphysical content by erotic excitement permeating the forms. Yet however
powerful, historically, the force of pleasure to return may be, whenever it
appears in art literally, undefracted, it has an infantile quality. Only in
memory and longing, not as a copy or as an immediate effect, is pleasure
absorbed by art. Ultimately, aversion to the crudely sensual alienates even
those periods in which pleasure and form could still communicate in a more
direct fashion; this not least of all may have motivated the rejection of impressionism.
Underlying the element of truth in aesthetic hedonism is the fact that in art
the means and the ends are not identical. In their dialectic, the former
constantly asserts a certain, and indeed mediated, independence. Through the
element of sensuous satisfaction the work's sine qua non, its appearance, is
constituted. As Alban Berg said, it is a prosaic matter to make sure that the
work shows no nails sticking out and that the glue does not stink; and in many
of Mozart's compositions the delicacy of expression evokes the sweetness of the
human voice. In important artworks the sensous illuminated by its art shines
forth as spiritual just as the abstract detail, however indifferent to
appearance it may be, gains sensuous luster from the spirit of the work.
Sometimes by virtue of their differentiated formal language, artworks that are
developed and articulated in themselves play over, secondarily, into the
sensuously pleasing. Even in its equivalents in the visual arts, dissonance,
the seal of everything modern, gives access to the alluringly sensuous by
transfiguring it into its antithesis, pain: an aesthetic archetype of
ambivalence. The source of the immense importance of all dissonance for new art
since Baudelaire and Tristan—veritably an invariant of the modern—is that the immanent
play of forces in the artwork converges with external reality: Its power over
the subject intensifies in parallel with the increasing autonomy of the work. Dissonance
elicits from within the work that which vulgar sociology calls its social alienation.
In the meantime, of course, artworks have set a taboo even on spiritually mediated
suavity as being too similar to its vulgar form.
This development may well lead to a sharpening of the taboo
on the sensual, although it is sometimes hard to distinguish to what extent
this taboo is grounded in the law of form and to what extent simply in the
failure of craft; a question, incidentally, that like many of its ilk becomes a
fruitless topic of aesthetic debate. The taboo on the sensual ultimately
encroaches on the opposite of pleasure because, even as the remotest echo,
pleasure is sensed in its specific negation. For this aesthetic sensorium dissonance
bears all too closely on its contrary, reconciliation; it rebuffs the semblance
of the human as an ideology of the inhuman and prefers to join forces with
reified consciousness. Dissonance congeals into an indifferent material;
indeed, it becomes a new form of immediacy, without any memory trace of what it
developed out of, and therefore gutted and anonymous. For a society in which
art no longer has a place and which is pathological in all its reactions to it,
art fragments on one hand into a reified, hardened cultural possession and on
the other into a source of pleasure that the customer pockets and that for the
most part has little to do with the object itself. Subjective pleasure in the
artwork would approximate a state of release from the empirical as from the
totality of heteronomous. Schopenhauer may have been the first to realize this.
The happiness gained from artworks is that of having suddenly escaped, not a
morsel of that from which art escaped; it is accidental and less essential to
art than the happiness in its knowledge; the concept of aesthetic pleasure as
constitutive of art is to be superseded. If in keeping with Hegel's insight all
feeling related to an aesthetic object has an accidental aspect, usually that
of psychological projection, then what the work demands from its beholder is
knowledge, and indeed, knowledge that does justice to it: The work wants its
truth and untruth to be grasped. Aesthetic hedonism is to be confronted with
the passage from Kant's doctrine of the sublime, which he timidly excluded from
art: Happiness in artworks would be the feeling they instill of standing firm.
This holds true for the aesthetic sphere as a whole more than for any
particular work.
Source: Aesthetic Theory - Theodor W. Adorno 1997 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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