Theories on the Origin of Art Excursus
The attempts to derive aesthetics from the origins of art as its essence are inevitably disappointing.1 If the concept of origin is situated beyond history, the question takes on an ontological cast far removed from that solid ground that the prestigious concept of origin evokes; moreover, any invocation of the concept of origin that is divested of its temporal element transgresses against the simple meaning of the word, to which the philosophers of origin claim to be privy. Yet to reduce art historically to its prehistorical or early origins is prohibited by its character, which is the result of historical development. The earliest surviving manifestations of art are not the most authentic, nor do they in any way circumscribe art’s range; and rather than best exemplifying what art is, they make it more obscure. It needs to be taken into account that the oldest surviving art, the cave paintings, belongs as a whole to the visual domain. Next to nothing is known of the music or poetry of the epoch; there are no indications of anything prehistoric that may have differed qualitatively from the optical works. Among aestheticians Croce was probably the first to condemn, in Hegelian spirit, the question of the historical origin of art as aesthetically irrelevant: “Since this ‘spiritual’ activity is its [history’s] object, the absurdity of propounding the historical problem of the origin of art becomes evident . . . If expression is a form of consciousness, how can one look for the historical origin of what is not a product of nature and is presupposed by human history? How can one assign a historical genesis to a thing that is a category by means of which all historical processes and facts are understood?”2 However correct the intention may be not to confound what is oldest with the concept of the thing-itself, which only becomes what it is in the first place through its development, Croce’s argumentation is dubious. By simply identifying art with expression, which is “presupposed by human history,” he once again defines art as what it should never be for the philosophy of history: a “category,” an invariant form of consciousness, something that is static in form, even if Croce conceives it as pure activity or spontaneity. His idealism, no less than the Bergsonian streak in his aesthetics, keeps him from being able to perceive the constitutive relation of art to what it itself is not, to what is not the pure spontaneity of the subject; this fundamentally limits his critique of the question of origin. Still, the legion of empirical studies that have since been dedicated to the question hardly give cause to revise Croce’s verdict. It would be too easy to blame this on the advancing positivism that, out of fear of being contradicted by any next fact, no longer dares to undertake the construction of univocal theory and mobilizes the accumulation of facts in order to prove that genuine science can no longer put up with theory on a grand style. Ethnology, in particular, which according to the current division of labor has the responsibility of interpreting prehistoric findings, has let itself be intimidated by the tendency stretching back to Frobenius to explicate everything archaically puzzling in terms of religion, even when the findings themselves contradict such summary treatment. Nevertheless the scientific exclusion of the question of origin, which corresponds to the philosophical critique of origin, testifies to something more than the powerlessness of science and the terror of positivistic taboos. Melville J. Herskovits’s study Man and His Work3 is characteristic of the interpretive pluralism that even a disillusioned science is unable to renounce. If contemporary science renounces any monistic answer to the question of the origin of art, the question of what art originally was and has remained ever since, it thereby discloses an element of truth. Art did not become a unified whole until a very late stage. There is reason to doubt whether such integration is not more that of the concept than that of what it claims to comprehend. The forced quality of the term Sprachkunstwerk—the linguistic artwork—now popular among Germanists, awakens suspicion by its unceremonial subsumption of poetry to art through the mediation of language, even though art unquestionably became unified in the course of the process of enlightenment. The most archaic artistic manifestations are so diffuse that it is as difficult as it is vain to try to decide what once did and did not count as art. In later ages as well, art consistently resisted the process of unification in which it was simultaneously caught up. Its own concept is not indifferent to this. What seems to grow hazy in the half-light of prehistory is vague not only because of its distance but because it guards something of the indeterminate, of what is inadequate to the concept, which progressive integration tirelessly menaces. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the oldest cave paintings, whose naturalism is always so readily affirmed, demonstrated the greatest fidelity to the portrayal of movement, as if they already aspired to what Valéry ultimately demanded: the painstaking imitation of the indeterminate, of what has not been nailed down.4 If so, the impulse of these paintings was not naturalistic imitation but, rather, from the beginning a protest against reification. Blame for ambiguity is not, or not only, to be ascribed to the limitedness of knowledge but is characteristic of prehistory itself. Univocity exists only since the emergence of subjectivity.
The so-called problem of origin echoes in the controversy over whether naturalistic depiction or symbolic-geometrical forms came first. Implicit in this question is the hope that it will provide what is needed to discern the primordial essence of art. This hope is deceptive. Arnold Hauser opens his Social History of Art with the thesis that during the Paleolithic age naturalism was older: “The monuments of primitive art . . . clearly suggest . . . that naturalism has the prior claim, so that it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain the theory of the primacy of an art remote from life and nature.”5 The polemical overtone against the neoromantic doctrine of the religious origin of art is unmistakable. Yet this important historian straight away restricts the thesis of the priority of naturalism. Hauser, while still employing the two habitually contrasting theses, criticizes them as anachronistic: “The dualism of the visible and the invisible, of the seen and the merely known, remains absolutely foreign to Paleolithic art.”6 He recognizes the element of undifferentiatedness from reality in the earliest art, as well as the undifferentiatedness from reality of the sphere of semblance.7 Hauser maintains something akin to the priority of naturalism on the basis of a theory of magic that asserts the “reciprocal dependence of the similar.”8 For him, similarity is effectively replicability, and it exercises practical magic. Accordingly, Hauser divides magic sharply from religion, the former exclusively serving to procure means of sustenance. This sharp division is obviously hard to reconcile with the theorem of a primordial undifferentiatedness. On the other hand, it helps to establish replication as fundamental, even though other scholars, such as Erik Holm, contest the hypothesis of the utilitarian-magical function of the replica.9 Hauser, by contrast, contends that “the Paleolithic hunter and painter thought he was in possession of the thing itself in the picture, thought he had won power over the portrayed by the portrayal.”10 With certain reservations, Resch also tends toward this position.11 On the other hand, Katesa Schlosser finds that the most striking characteristic of Paleolithic portrayal is the deviation from the natural image; this deviation, however, is not attributed to any “archaic irrationalism” but rather, following Lorenz and Gehlen,12 is interpreted as an expressive form of a biological ratio. Clearly, the thesis of magical utilitarianism and naturalism stands up in the face of the evidence no more than does Holm’s thesis of the religious origin of art. His explicit use of the concept of symbolization already postulates for the earliest period a dualism that Hauser first attributes to the Neolithic period. This dualism, according to Holm, serves a unitary organization of art just as within this dualism there appears the structure of an articulated and therefore necessarily hierarchical and institutionalized society—one in which production already plays a role. He argues that cult and a unitary canon of forms were established during the same period, and that art was thus divided into a sacred and a profane sphere, that is, into idol sculpture and decorative ceramics. This construction of the animistic phase is paralleled by the construction of preanimism or, as science today prefers to call it, the “nonempirical world view,” which is marked by the “essential unity of all life.” But the objective impenetrability of the oldest phenomena rebuffs this construction: A concept like the “essential unity of all life” already presupposes a division between form and material in the earliest phase or, at the least, oscillates between the idea of such a division and the idea of unity. The stumbling block here is the concept of unity. Its current use obscures everything, including the relation between the one and the many. In truth, unity should be conceived as it was reflected upon for the first time in Plato’s Parmenides: as the unity of the many. The undifferentiated character of prehistory is not a unity of this sort but falls rather on the other side of the dichotomy in which unity has meaning only as a polarity. As a result, such investigations as Fritz Krause’s “Masks and Ancestral Figures” also encounters difficulties. According to Krause, in the oldest nonanimistic representations “form is bound up with the material rather than being separable from it. Any change of the essence is possible only through a change of material and form, that is, through the complete transformation of the body. This explains the metamorphosis of essences into one another.”13 Krause rightly argues against the conventional concept of the symbol that the transformation that takes place in mask ceremonies is not symbolic but rather “formative magic,” a term borrowed from the developmental psychologist Heinz Werner.14 For the Indians, he claims, the mask is not simply the demon whose force is transferred to its bearer: Rather, the bearer himself becomes the incarnation of the demon and is extinguished as a self.15 There are grounds for doubting this: Every member of a tribe, the masked included, clearly recognizes the difference between his own face and the mask, a difference that according to the neoromantic construction should be imperceptible. Face and mask are no more one and the same than the bearer of the mask can be taken for the incarnation of the demon. Contrary to Krause’s claim, the element of dissimulation inheres in the phenomenon: Neither the often totally stylized form nor the fact that the bearer of the mask is only partially covered affects the interpretation of the “essential transformation of the bearer by the mask.”16 Something on the order of belief in real transformation is of course equally part of the phenomenon in just the same way that children playing do not distinguish sharply between themselves and the role played yet can at any moment be called back to reality. Even expression is hardly primordial; it too developed historically, perhaps from animism. When a clan member imitatively makes himself into a totemic animal or a fearful divinity, something other than the self-contained individual is expressed. Although expression is seemingly an aspect of subjectivity, in it—externalization—there dwells just as much that is not the self, that probably is the collective. In that the subject, awakening to expression, seeks collective sanction, expression is already evidence of a fissure. It is only with the stabilization of the subject in self-consciousness that expression becomes autonomous as the expression of the subject, while maintaining the gesture of making itself into something. Replication could be interpreted as the reification of this comportment, and it is thus the enemy of precisely that impulse that is rudimentarily objectivated as expression. At the same time such reification by means of replication is also emancipatory: It helps to free expression by placing it at the disposal of the subject. Once people were perhaps as expressionless as animals, who neither laugh nor cry, though their shapes are objectively expressive, something the animals probably do not sense. This is recalled first by gorillalike masks, later by artworks. Expression, art’s quasi-natural element, is as such already something other than pure nature.—The extremely heterogeneous interpretations are made possible by an objective ambiguity. Even the claim that heterogeneous elements are intermeshed in prehistoric artistic phenomena is anachronistic. It is more likely that division and unity arose under the pressure to be freed from the spell of the diffuse, accompanied by the emergence of a more secure social organization. In his conspectus Herskovits coherently argues that developmental theories that deduce art from a primarily symbolical or realistic “principle of validity” are untenable given the contradictory diversity of prehistoric and primitive art. The sharp contrast drawn between primitive conventionalism—in the sense of stylization—and Paleolithic realism isolates a single aspect. It is not possible to discern the general preponderance of one principle over another in earliest times any more than this could be done today among surviving primitive peoples. Paleolithic sculpture is said to be for the most part highly stylized, contrary to the contemporary “realistic” portrayals of the cave paintings; this realism, however, as Herskovits points out, is marked by heterogeneous elements, foreshortenings, for example, that cannot be interpreted as being either perspectival or symbolic. The art of primitive people today is just as complex; realistic elements have in no way suppressed fully stylized forms, least of all in sculpture. Immersion in art’s origins tantalizes aesthetic theory with various apparently typical procedures, but just as quickly they escape the firm grip that modern interpretational consciousness imagines it possesses.
Art anterior to the Paleolithic period is not known. But it is doubtless that art did not begin with works, whether they were primarily magical or already aesthetic. The cave drawings are stages of a process and in no way an early one. The first images must have been preceded by a mimetic comportment—the assimilation of the self to its other—that does not fully coincide with the superstition of direct magical influence; if in fact no differentiation between magic and mimesis had been prepared over a long period of time, the striking traces of autonomous elaboration in the cave paintings would be inexplicable. But once aesthetic comportment, prior to all objectivation, set itself off from magical practices, however rudimentarily, this distinction has since been carried along as a residue; it is as if the now functionless mimesis, which reaches back into the biological dimension, was vestigially maintained, foreshadowing the maxim that the superstructure is transformed more slowly than the infrastructure. In the traces of what has been overtaken by the general course of things, all art bears the suspicious burden of what did not make the grade, the regressive. But aesthetic comportment is not altogether rudimentary. An irrevocable necessity of art and preserved by it, aesthetic comportment contains what has been belligerently excised from civilization and repressed, as well as the human suffering under the loss, a suffering already expressed in the earliest forms of mimesis. This element should not be dismissed as irrational. Art is in its most ancient relics too deeply permeated with rationality. The obstinacy of aesthetic comportment, which was later ideologically glorified as the eternal natural power of the play drive, testifies rather that to this day no rationality has been fully rational, none has unrestrictedly benefited humanity, its potential, or even a “humanized nature.” What marks aesthetic comportment as irrational according to the criteria of dominant rationality is that art denounces the particular essence of a ratio that pursues means rather than ends. Art reminds us of the latter and of an objectivity freed from the categorial structure. This is the source of art’s rationality, its character as knowledge. Aesthetic comportment is the capacity to perceive more in things than they are; it is the gaze under which the given is transformed into an image. Whereas this comportment can be effortlessly impugned as inadequate by the status quo, the latter can indeed only be experienced through this comportment. A final intimation of the rationality in mimesis is imparted by Plato’s doctrine of enthusiasm as the precondition of philosophy and emphatic knowledge, which he not only demanded on a theoretical level but demonstrated at the decisive point in the Phaedrus. This Platonic doctrine has degenerated into a cultural commodity, yet without forfeiting its truth content. Aesthetic comportment is the unimpaired corrective of reified consciousness that has in the meantime burgeoned as totality. That which in aesthetic comportment propels itself toward the light and seeks to escape the spell manifests itself e contrario in those who do without it, the aesthetically insensible. To study them would be of inestimable value for the analysis of aesthetic comportment. Even in terms of the standards of the dominant rationality they are in no way the most progressive or developed; nor are they simply those who lack a particular expendable quality. On the contrary, their entire constitution is deformed to a pathological degree: They concretize. Those whose thought is no more than projection are fools, which artists must not be on any account; those, however, who do not project at all fail to grasp reality and instead repeat and falsify it by crushing out what glimmered however distantly to preanimistic consciousness: the communication of all dispersed particulars with each other. This consciousness is no more true than one that confused fantasy and reality. Comprehension occurs only when the concept transcends what it wants to grasp. Art puts this to the test; thinking that proscribes such comprehension becomes outright stupidity and misses the object because it subjugates it. Art legitimates itself within the confines of the spell in that rationality becomes powerless when aesthetic comportment is repressed or, under the pressure of socialization, no longer even constituted. As was already pointed out in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, strict positivism crosses over into the feeble-mindedness of the artistically insensible, the successfully castrated. The narrowminded wisdom that sorts out feeling from knowing and rubs its hands together when it finds the two balanced is—as trivialities sometimes are—the caricature of a situation that over the centuries of the division of labor has inscribed this division in subjectivity. Yet feeling and understanding are not absolutely different in the human disposition and remain dependent even in their dividedness. The forms of reaction that are subsumed under the concept of feeling become futile enclaves of sentimentality as soon as they seal themselves off from their relation to thought and turn a blind eye toward truth; thought, however, approaches tautology when it shrinks from the sublimation of the mimetic comportment. The fatal separation of the two came about historically and is revocable. Ratio without mimesis is self-negating. Ends, the raison d’être of raison, are qualitative, and mimetic power is effectively the power of qualitative distinction. The self-negation of reason clearly has its historical necessity: The world, which is objectively losing its openness, no longer has need of a spirit that is defined by its openness; indeed, it can scarcely put up with the traces of that spirit. With regard to its subjective side, the contemporary loss of experience may largely coincide with the bitter repression of mimesis that takes the place of its metamorphosis. What in various sectors of German ideology is still called an artistic sensibility is just this repression of mimesis raised to a principle, as which it is transformed into artistic insensibility. Aesthetic comportment, however, is neither immediately mimesis nor its repression but rather the process that mimesis sets in motion and in which, modified, mimesis is preserved. This process transpires equally in the relation of the individual to art as in the historical macrocosm; it congeals in the immanent movement of each and every artwork, in its tensions and in their possible resolution. Ultimately, aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder, as if goose bumps were the first aesthetic image. What later came to be called subjectivity, freeing itself from the blind anxiety of the shudder, is at the same time the shudder’s own development; life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. That shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other. Aesthetic comportment assimilates itself to that other rather than subordinating it. Such a constitutive relation of the subject to objectivity in aesthetic comportment joins eros and knowledge.
Notes
1 The author is grateful to Miss Renate Wieland, a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt, for her critical synopsis of the themes of this excursus.
2 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, trans. Douglas Ainslie (New York, 1956), p. 132.
3 See Melville J. Herskovits, Man and His Work (New York, 1948).
4 See Paul Valéry, Œuvres, vol. 2 (Paris, 1957), p. 681.
5 Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 1 (London, 1962), p. 1.
6 Ibid., p. 3.
7 Ibid., p. 5.
8 Ibid., p. 7. [Translation amended—trans.]
9 Erik Holm, “Felskunst im südlichen Afrika,” in Kunst der Welt: Die Steinzeit (Baden-Baden, 1960), p. 196.
10 Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 1, p. 4.
11 See Walther F. E. Resch, “Gedanken zur stilistischen Gliederung der Tierdarstellungen in der nordafrikanischen Felsbildkunst,” in Paideuma, Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, vol. 11 (1965), pp. 108ff.
12 See Konrad Lorenz, “Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung,” in Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, vol. 5, p. 258; Arnold Gehlen, “Über einige Kategorien des entlasteten, zumal des ästhetischen Verhaltens,” in Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie (Neuwied and Berlin, 1963), pp. 69ff.
13 See Fritz Krause, “Maske und Ahnenfigur: Das Motiv der Hülle und das Prinzip der Form,” in Kulturanthropologie, ed. W. E. Mühlmann and E. W. Müller (Cologne and Berlin, 1966), p. 231.
14 Heinz Werner, Einführung in die Entwicklungspsychologie (Leipzig, 1926), p. 269.
15 Krause, “Maske und Ahnenfigur,” pp. 223ff.
16 Ibid., p. 224.