On the lectern I find a question that resulted from a brief conversation I had with one of you after the previous lecture; it reads: ‘Why does art express only what has been destroyed in us?’ Naturally I would like to correct myself here – and it is the achievement of this question that it has led me to such a correction: I did not, of course, say that art expresses only what has been destroyed in us.1 I would say, however – and this perhaps induced me to use formulations that led to this question – that, in the current situation, the task of art as such is almost entirely to express what has been damaged, or – as Samuel Beckett said to me barely a week ago2 – to express the powerless and oppressed parts of humans, not the power and glory with which, at least on the surface, official and officially recognized art has usually occupied itself. But I do not, of course, mean that art should express only what has been destroyed in us. That would result in a narrow view of art as such that would, in its way, be no better than the narrow view roughly corresponding to the classicist or academic concept of beauty. I meant to say, and I would like to define this a little more precisely, only that there is really no art that does not have, as a substantial element, the aspect of giving a voice to what has been muted or suppressed – not necessarily destroyed – in the process of the progressive control of nature. It is only really through this perspective of the radically destroyed or damaged that art in our time proves it is worth taking seriously at all. And, to avoid any misunderstandings on this point, I would like to say and repeat what I attempted to expound to you in the last session, namely that art cannot be reduced undialectically to a catchphrase like ‘the voice of nature’. If, as I told you, art opposes the immediacy of nature largely through the constitution of its special area, then it always already contains the opposing force, that which controls nature – in a certain sense, the triumphant element. And if one is very sensitive to these matters, one may even suffer due to the fact that the might of lordly rule is greatest precisely in the most authentic works of art, namely the works that hold the greatest power over humans, and, in these so-called authentic works of art, this might turns into a certain suggestive force, a certain element of not letting one go, of coercion, that to some extent mirrors the coercion to which humans have subjected both external nature and internal nature – that is to say, themselves. I do, at any rate, think that, if one's eye or sensorium for the works is sufficiently developed, this aspect of giving a voice to the other, to the suppressed, will also reveal itself in what we call positive, authentic and suggestive works of art.
In the last session, the one among you who kindly reminded me to address this point once more today asked me about the nude figures mastered by classical sculpture. For these figures, he felt, showed no trace whatsoever of mutilation or suppression. My response to this is that, yes, naturally one does not see it directly – and it is generally one of the difficulties of productive aesthetic reflections that, on the one hand, they are of use only if they can lead into the concrete problems of art, but, on the other hand, they should never be taken too literally. In other words, what we are dealing with here – this aspect of helping to give the suppressed a voice – should not simply be imagined as something material, as if every work of art somehow expressed advocacy for something suppressed; rather, this aspect can potentially lie – and usually does, in fact – in the principles of artistic design, not in the immediate material substance. Indeed, it may even crawl away and entrench itself behind the choice of any objects at all. I would not presume to answer this question truly precisely in the context of classical sculpture, but it does seem to me that this sculpture, which, as you all know, flourished in the classical Athenian city-state, the polis of the fourth and fifth centuries bc, was connected to the urban citizens to the extent that it incorporated, one could say, the protest against – how shall I put it? – the harming of the human body within the civil process of life. It is certainly true that the free citizens of Athens at that time did not perform manual labour themselves, and that they consequently remained free of the bodily deformations that the work process so easily inflicts on other humans. At any rate, that was precisely the period in which the great philosophical movement of Sophism truly worked out the opposition between that which is settled, made, artificial, that which is θέσει, and that which is ϕύσει, that which is naturally meant to be. The whole of Sophism, after all, essentially rests on voicing the protest of this suppressed nature against the human rules imposed on it. There is certainly something of this assertion of physis against thesis in the restoration of the body that was aimed for in the great Greek sculptures, and then attempted time after time. I was asked how it is with situations like a battle: did people not fight naked too, and was such a situation not restored? I would say, that generally speaking, battle is not exactly the authentic situation in which suppressed nature receives its due; on the contrary, it tends to be damaged there in quite a literal sense. What is true, however – if I am correctly informed – is that the Spartans, the hoplites, namely the heavily armed Spartan soldiers, cast off their clothes during battle and fought naked. But, in doing so, they would have exposed themselves to considerable discomfort. Moreover, this was far more a kind of archaic ritual – one could say the symbolic restoration of a state preceding civil conditions – than an expression of the actual historical situation at the time of the Peloponnesian War, for example. So one could almost say that the Spartans, who did not especially distinguish themselves in matters of aesthetic sublimation, attempted to realize with their own bodies, if only symbolically, what the great art of the same period was trying to achieve in its representation of the naked body. I think that precisely the transition to a form of representation which faithfully captures the anatomy of the body is a function of suppression that this same body experienced in the conditions of the Greek city-state through civil conventions and clothes and everything connected to that; in other words, that the progress found in so-called realism, which one usually observes in the classical rather than the archaic period of Greek art, is on the one hand a progress of rationalization, of the more faithful and precise control of means, but on the other hand it also corresponds to a protest against the suppression of that very body whose voice is found here – whereas the function of representing the body, namely the body as the bearer of a divine purpose, or whatever else it might have been, was something completely different in the archaic period.
I would like to remind you of what I told you in the previous session: the opposition between the aspect of nature and the aspect of art, or the relationship between nature and art as both opposed and identical – this relationship should not be understood as a static one; it is not fixed and immutable once and for all, as if some form of treaty long ago had removed art from nature, and it could now settle down comfortably in its little garden until the end of time. Rather, I attempted to show you how it is a central feature of art that, at all stages, it keeps developing anew the tension which I have sought to describe. I think it is useful, and I like the idea of it, to give you now a concrete model if this kind of tension, to attempt to show you how, in a particular artistic development, the aspect of nature and that of the control of nature interlock and enter a form of dialectic. For this, I will go completely against academic customs and choose a model from the present – the most immediate present. Let me briefly justify this choice, because it so radically contradicts most of what you will learn if you read one of the philological tomes. For it is quite normal in the writing of these so-called aesthetic interpretations to stop at contemporary artistic products and more or less to assume that one cannot know exactly how things are with ‘modern’ works, while the view of older, traditional art, by contrast, has become clearer, and one can thus make value judgements about traditional art comfortably and with a […].3 In no way do I agree with this widespread view. If one holds the view – as I described to you somewhat dogmatically, but which I hope you have been able to develop much more concretely – that art is genuinely an unfolding of the truth, as Hegel states,4 then this naturally means that the truth content itself also unfolds; in other words, even the content of those works already created is not a static content, not something we gaze upon once and for all as a finished object, but rather something that transforms itself and even reaches a certain threshold at which we can no longer experience it at all. In this sense, I would say the notion that one can understand older works of art better than new ones either expresses a fear of overly exposing oneself in modern matters, and saying something that conflicts with the rules of the game, or simply points to an already reified relationship with art – that is, a relationship that only really includes those works that have already been codified and removed from any living connection. To put it in extreme terms, I hold the view that, in a deeper sense, even the most difficult and complex artworks of one's own time are easier to understand than relatively simple ones from a fairly remote past, as the latter always require a sort of detour of empathy, the construction of an inner state, the reconstruction of a historico-philosophical topos of which we are no longer capable. If it is true that the substance of Johann Sebastian Bach's work lies in a very particular constellation between well-ordered churchly devoutness and pietism, then a truly direct experience of this substance would require us to think ourselves back into such a thing, into such an inner state, as was believed in Romanticism, whose promotion of this view famously opened the doors to artistic syncretism. In reality, I would say, even people who are incapable of appreciating a very difficult modern piece, let us say by Boulez,5 in the way that they think they can appreciate a piece by Bach because of its relative simplicity, can nonetheless, simply by having the same historico-philosophical conditions – as the young Lukács would have said: the same ‘transcendental place’,6 meaning those a priori inner preconditions of any experience at all which it shares with such a modern work – grasp this work, which they believe they cannot understand, incomparably more accurately than the older one. Comprehending the older work, on the other hand, is burdened with never-ending problems, as shown by the fact that histories of literature attempt to ‘acknowledge’ famous works of the past – let us say the seventeenth century, think of a novel such as The Asian Banise7 – because one no longer has any use for them, because they have become unpalatable, crudely put, and to think that, in doing so, one can arrive via an educational detour at what, to use a highly questionable term, one calls ‘aesthetic pleasure’. I think that the entire view which is manifested in this attitude is fundamentally wrong. And I think that, if engagement with theoretical aesthetic questions is to have any purpose, and not simply to remain a professorial matter in the worst sense, then it must draw on the most immediate experiences of the most advanced art corresponding to one's own level of awareness – rather than spending its time measuring how exactly the Golden Section was applied to some or other Renaissance picture.
Now that I have said this, I shall address the dialectic of nature and art within art itself, as currently [revealed] in two [categories] for modern art – and I am taking music, the art closest to me, as a model – namely the categories of expression and construction.8 Let me first say a few words about the specific concept of expression with which we are dealing in this dialectic. Naturally, art has expression in infinitely many layers and at every possible stage. The gesture in a drawing by Manet can be as expressive as a phrase in a Beethoven quartet, or probably as much as some gesture in a Hellenistic sculpture. But if we speak of expression in the way that has truly become relevant and concrete in modern art, we are thinking first of all of the movement of expressionism. I would say, incidentally, that – in opposition to the widespread habit of inveighing against ‘isms’9 – I consider terms such as ‘expressionism’ quite good and useful, because they testify to the fact that even seemingly extraordinarily individual and specific manifestations of artistic consciousness have their own historical status; this means that they are in reality collective movements sustained by collective powers, however much they might stylize themselves as merely individual. If you think of the expressive ideal of expressionism – that is, the art which, especially in Germany, dominated painting and poetry, as well as music, almost exactly forty years ago, and which, I would say, is still more or less open to direct experience by us – then you will find that, here, expression always means exactly what I was referring to in the last session, when I said that, in a certain sense, art helps what is suppressed and suffering to find its voice. Expressionism consists first of all in the protest against hardened social and conventional forms, both the social hardenings in the fabric of the state, or even the apparatus of war, and the hardened forms of art itself, which were viewed as no longer binding in the face of the immediacy of human suffering. The attempt has been made to let suffering itself speak directly, as it were, without placing a third element between expression and artistic manifestation, without inserting a form of stylizing principle, a mitigating or surrounding factor. If I might take the liberty of a dialectical remark here, I am pointing – if I am not mistaken – quite precisely to the threshold between two artistic movements that also, from today's perspective, have far more in common than a superficial view would suggest, namely the threshold between Jugendstil and expressionism. For, in a sense, Jugendstil is also an art of expression, and suffering because of convention is infinitely strong in it. The attempt to assert the status of the free, autonomous human being, the ‘free noble man’, as Ibsen puts it,10 against conventions could be considered the innermost motif of Jugendstil; except that this motif of expression in Jugendstil remains tied to the notion of some supposedly universally binding, predetermined formal categories – precisely those categories which, after the expiry of the academic ones, people thought they could discern in the pure ornament. So, in other words, people thought at the time that, through pure will, they could discern something resembling a style for this expression of suffering, the emancipation of resistance to convention, while the shift from this movement to expressionism took place at the very moment when people discovered that, as a language of expression – as a word for what one suffers – even those formal elements far removed from prevailing conventions, for example the expressionist flower ornament, which seeks quite directly to emphasize suppressed nature in opposition to conventions, were no longer entirely viable. The specific aspect for the concept of expression in expressionism is an element that it now – if you think for a second of the problems of Jugendstil, and if you are not bothered too much by expression – shares with another, earlier movement, namely naturalism, to the extent that, as I just told you, the principium stilisationis is essentially discarded11 in favour of an attempt to derive something like aesthetic form purely from expression itself. In other words: the intention in expressionism is to arrive at an aesthetic form through expressive transcripts of a kind, by allowing expression to present itself as directly as possible, without mediation. […] The most authentic documents of expressionism are probably those which express this idea without anything intermediate, and which come closest to shaping form from expression itself, without drawing in any external categories. To the extent that it aims at producing documents, transcripts – the surrealists later spoke of ‘automatic writing’12 – of emotional states, expressionism strives for the ideal of a pure immediacy. In that sense, one can say that expressionism constitutes an extreme in the attempt to give suppressed nature – that one pole of which I spoke to you before – its due. And this, of course, is connected to the fact that, through the overall social dynamics, the notion of a secure bourgeois canon of forms in the social and aesthetic sense had come to an end with the close of the Edwardian and Wilhelmine eras.
But now [it transpires] – and that is the dialectic between this aspect, that which is ϕύσει and states once again: ‘Humans are good’, and that which is θέσει, the aspect of construction, if I might introduce the term here, the aspect of control over nature – between these two aspects one can already see, in pure and stringent expressionism, a very specific kind of tension. Here one can think of several problems in which this tension is manifested; first of all, in artistic work – for which, in modernity, it is central that it must not rest on its laurels, and which has become incredibly sensitive to any form of reification – it is constitutive that it remains itself only by changing. What I mean is this: for this type of sensitivity, which really forbids repetition and must modify itself, it transpires very quickly, very early on, that it is impossible to stay at the sheer point of expression. The pure ‘this-here’, the art that seeks to present the pure ‘this-here’, the pure moment of expression, the absolute sound, so to speak, as absolute nature – this art approaches in an almost literal sense, one could say, the threshold of silence. It cannot unfold in time or in space and cannot actually objectify itself at all. In fact, all it could do would be what Dada – which is rigorous on this point – utters in its name, namely to say ‘Da’ [there], really just to take a breath. For everything beyond that would be a kind of betrayal of this pure sound, and consequently the need is aroused – if one is not to fall silent entirely – to go beyond this pure ‘there’, a need that was felt as early as around 191213 among the most radical expressionist artists, for example Anton von Webern, and which – I am trying to be cautious – was probably also one of the impulses for what was termed synthetic cubism.14 But it is those artists, and precisely the most profound and important ones – and, when I speak of experiences, I always mean the compulsion exerted by the matter itself, not the psychological experiences of the individuals; I am completely uninterested in the psychology of art here – at any rate, in this objective sense, it is precisely the most rigorous and integrous artists who experience that this absolute immediacy they pursue in expressionism is a form of illusion. You can see that in a number of aspects. One of these is what I once tried to define using the term ‘dialectic of loneliness’,15 which actually already applies to Jugendstil: that the situation of loneliness so characteristic of this whole atomistic consciousness in the late bourgeois phase, that this situation of loneliness is itself a universal situation, that everyone is so lonely, and that what one considers the absolutely immediate – the individual person's being-only-for-themselves – that this is itself mediated, which means it is something that actually contains the law of a totality which presses for atomization.16 A further aspect of this kind is that – and it is one of the strangest aspects one can encounter in the experience of modern art, an aspect that gives the philosophy of art a great deal to think about – that this anti-conventional art, which expressionism was everywhere, must evidently produce something like certain conventions from within itself. At the moment when expression becomes art, where it is truly not just the immediate, living sound but strives in some way for objectification, it is evidently possible only through the development, the sedimentation of a language based on the agreement that certain colours, certain gestures and certain configurations are carriers of one expression and no other. It is very peculiar: one can examine this symbolism in detail – the literary historian Mautz has done so, for example17 – with reference to the colour symbolism of the great German expressionist poets Georg Heym and Georg Trakl; probably one could even trace it back to the forefather of modernity, to Arthur Rimbaud.18 One can equally show that, in radically expressionist music too, certain configurations have the tendency to keep returning, and that the anti-conventional, simply through the consistency with which it is used, with which it must be used in order to express at all what it is meant to express, and not to disintegrate into the insubstantial and completely indeterminate, itself contains [something] like a principium stilisationis. And, after all, the important artists of this particular expressionist phase experienced, likewise very early on, differently in the various countries – this aspect was more evident in France than in Germany or Austria – the aspect that I shall term ‘aesthetic contingency’. By this I mean the chance nature of such a pure expressive language that, precisely because it constitutes a kind of internal agreement that this or that gesture, colour or pitch sequence is meant to have this or that meaning, always has an element of arbitrariness to it, and could in a certain sense also be different; and that the matter itself therefore objectively contains the demand to be objectified, to be shaped in such a way that it realizes through itself what it is meant to realize, rather than leaving this aspect to chance and preference.
This situation which I have tried to describe to you based on the inner problematics or dialectic of expressionism is precisely the situation in which the concept of construction comes into play for modern art as a whole; it is the point at which construction is demanded. It is very important here for you to grasp correctly – and I think this is generally fundamental to comprehension in questions of modern art – that you understand correctly that construction, in the very strict sense in which I am using the term, has nothing to do with the conventional and philistine view of form. I mean that the key aspects of problematics of expressionism I have just elaborated for you cannot be solved by saying: one cannot remain on the mere point, one has to return to forms, for otherwise, if one does not return to forms, it does not amount to anything. Firstly, this is a reactionary tendency – that is, a tendency which would truly deny that element of protest against convention, the emancipatory element. At the same time, however, there is a historico-philosophical impossibility in this; for it is in the nature of artistic forms that they are only possible because of the historico-philosophical conditions of their period. And Hegel's view that, in modernity, which meant the Romantic phase of music, the artist was free in relation to their object in the sense that they had the choice to select any form that suited or pleased them – this view of Hegel's, I am sorry to say, is very much an inartistic one, very far removed from the inner laws of these things. So if you wish to understand correctly the concept of construction towards which I wish to guide you, you must realize that there is a power being exerted here over the material in order to articulate this material completely, and to do away with those dangers or problems that arose from expressionism; but not – and I think this is the decisive aspect here – a form of power that is inflicted on the material as something foreign, through recourse to constraints, through stylistic will or the like, but rather an articulation that grows from the matter itself – even from the logic of the material itself, if you will. This construction is necessary because the forms no longer dictate with naïve immediacy, because they are no longer what Hegel termed ‘substantial’ in his aesthetics with reference to what he considered the great times in art.19 The concept of construction, then, if I am to indulge in some very philosophically ambitious claims, essentially means nothing other than the effort to extract, purely from the matter and purely from the postulates of the matter – but through all efforts of the organizing artistic awareness – that objectivity which was once guaranteed by the established forms dictated to artists, whether truly or only supposedly, without borrowing from anywhere else. The term ‘construction’ – which means that the artist or the subject must by construction complete the organization of the material, in contrast to the concept of form, which dogmatically presupposes this act as already performed, one could say – points very clearly, if we examine this linguistic fact a little, to what I wish to express here. But the ‘result’ – if one can call it that – of expressionism, in fact, itself supplies the precondition for this transition to construction. For, on the one hand, expressionism cleansed the material, in a sense, of all merely conventional bonds. The material is now at the direct disposal of the subject. One can observe here what Heidegger called ‘destruction’20 – and Heidegger's philosophy in general, alongside many other things, also contains aspects of the expressionist legacy precisely in this meaning of destruction, namely the removal of some or other forms placed over it ϑέσει, leaving behind something like naked substances – although it then transpires, I would like to emphasize right here, that these purportedly naked, pure substances, which expressionism brought to light and which subsequently became available for construction in all the arts, are not naked or pure at all; rather, they always already contain an infinite number of mediations, philosophically put – that is to say, an infinite amount of spirit, of sedimented human elements. It is one of the strangest phenomena in modern art, one to which we may later return for a closer look, that this very aspect of linguistic character, this aspect of the human, which is still present in the apparent materials, resembles a vulnerable point that stimulates the artists, and that they actually remain utterly faithful to the expressionist impulse in this sense by attempting to eliminate ever more of this linguistic preformation of their material and the forms tied to this material, because the technically immanent state of procedures arrived at today no longer corresponds to this pre-dictated linguistic element.
In addition, expressionism supplied the preconditions for construction by carrying out that emancipation of the subject from predetermined forms which now permits it to control the material confidently and freely. Here you can really see quite precisely how seriously the concept of dialectic must be taken in aesthetic matters, that it is not some turn of phrase I use because I am accustomed from philosophy, alas, to thinking dialectically, but something that actually comes from the matter itself. In what can broadly be termed expressionist art, the subject attempted to express itself purely, without making art merely a semiotic language of its inwardness or its stirrings – it need not even be inwardness; one could almost say its nature – and, in so doing, to eliminate everything that heteronomously obstructed it. Thus, as I stated at the beginning of the lecture, one could say that it represented the cause of suppressed nature. By representing this cause, however, precisely by investigating this relationship with nature, by attempting to turn art directly into nature, namely the nature of the subject, it became autonomous in relation to its material and, through this autonomy – that is to say, by breaking down the heteronomous and everything standing in its way – gained a freedom or a new ability: the control over nature, the opposing aspect within the parallelogram of forces that works of art simply constitute, to highlight this opposing aspect all the more by reducing its material to the pure sound, the pure colour, the pure expressive value. By making it pure nature, [the artist] simultaneously turned it into the pure substance which they, as the artist, now have more or less at their disposal; hence the very fact that, in the expressionist movement, nature gained such a pure voice became the precondition, indeed the force, which demands and makes it possible for the opposing principle, namely the principle of construction, to take effect from within nature itself.