On the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful and Technique
To say that art is not identical with the concept of beauty, but requires for its realization the concept of the ugly as its negation, is a platitude. Yet this does not amount to the annulment of the category of the ugly as a canon of prohibitions. This canon no longer forbids offenses against universal rules, but it debars violations of the work’s immanent consistency. The universality of this canon is nothing other than the primacy of the particular: There should no longer be anything that is not specific. The prohibition of the ugly has become an interdiction of whatever is not formed hic et nunc, of the incompletely formed, the raw. Dissonance is the technical term for the reception through art of what aesthetics as well as naïveté calls ugly. Whatever it may be, the ugly must constitute, or be able to constitute, an element of art; a work by the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz bears the title The Aesthetics of the Ugly.1 Archaic art and then traditional art, especially since the fauns and sileni of Hellenism, abound in the portrayal of subjects that were considered ugly. In modern art the weight of this element increased to such a degree that a new quality emerged. According to traditional aesthetics, the ugly is that element that opposes the work’s ruling law of form; it is integrated by that formal law and thereby confirms it, along with the power of subjective freedom in the artwork vis-à-vis the subject matter. This subject matter would indeed become beautiful in a higher sense through its function in the pictorial composition, for instance, or by its participation in the production of a dynamic equilibrium; for, according to a Hegelian topos, beauty is the result not of a simple equilibrium per se, but rather of the tension that results. Harmony that, as a mere result, denies the tensions that have entered into it, becomes something disturbing, false, and effectively dissonant. The harmonistic view of the ugly was voided in modern art, and something qualitatively new emerged. The anatomical horror in Rimbaud and Benn, the physically revolting and repellent in Beckett, the scatological traits of many contemporary dramas, have nothing in common with the rustic uncouthness of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings. Anal pleasure, and the pride of art at facilely being able to integrate it, abdicate; powerlessly the law of form capitulates to ugliness. That is how completely dynamic the category of the ugly is, and necessarily its counterimage, the category of the beautiful, is no less so. Both mock definitional fixation such as is imagined by that aesthetic whose norms are, however indirectly, oriented by these categories. The statement that a devastated industrial landscape or a face deformed by a painting is just plain ugly may answer spontaneously to the phenomenon but lacks the self-evidence it assumes. The impression of the ugliness of technology and industrial landscapes cannot be adequately explained in formal terms, and aesthetically well-integrated functional forms, in Adolf Loos’s sense, would probably leave the impression of ugliness unchanged. The impression of ugliness stems from the principle of violence and destruction. The aims posited are unreconciled with what nature, however mediated it may be, wants to say on its own. In technique, violence toward nature is not reflected through artistic portrayal, but it is immediately apparent. It could be transformed only by a reorientation of technical forces of production that would direct these forces not only according to desired aims but equally according to the nature that is to be technically formed. After the abolition of scarcity, the liberation of the forces of production could extend into other dimensions than exclusively that of the quantitative growth of production. There are intimations of this when functional buildings are adapted to the forms and contours of the landscape, as well as when building materials have originated from and been integrated into the surrounding landscape, as for instance with châteaux and castles. What is called a “cultural landscape” [Kulturlandschaft] is a beautiful model of this possibility. A rationality that embraced these motifs would be able to help heal the wounds that rationality inflicted. Even as bourgeois consciousness naïvely condemns the ugliness of a torn-up industrial landscape, a relation is established that reveals a glimpse of the domination of nature, where nature shows humans its facade of having yet to be mastered. This bourgeois indignation therefore is part of the ideology of domination. Ugliness would vanish if the relation of man to nature renounced its repressive character, which perpetuates—rather than being perpetuated by—the repression of man. The potential for this in a world laid waste by technique resides in a pacified technique, not in planned enclaves. There is nothing putatively ugly that would not be able through a transformation of its position in the work, freed from the culinary, to discard its ugliness. What appears ugly is in the first place what is historically older, what art rejected on its path toward autonomy, and what is therefore mediated in itself. The concept of the ugly may well have originated in the separation of art from its archaic phase: It marks the permanent return of the archaic, intertwined with the dialectic of enlightenment in which art participates. Archaic ugliness, the cannibalistically threatening cult masks and grimaces, was the substantive imitation of fear, which it disseminated around itself in expiation. As mythical fear diminished with the awakening of subjectivity, the traits of this fear fell subject to the taboo whose organon they were; they first became ugly vis-à-vis the idea of reconciliation, which comes into the world with the subject and his nascent freedom. But the old images of terror persist in history, which has yet to redeem the promise of freedom, and in which the subject—as the agent of unfreedom—perpetuates the mythical spell, against which he rebels and to which he is subordinate. Nietzsche’s dictum that all good things were once dreadful things, like Schellings’s insight into the terror of the beginning, may well have had their origins in the experience of art. The overthrown and recurrent content [Inhalt] is sublimated in imagination and form. Beauty is not the platonically pure beginning but rather something that originated in the renunciation of what was once feared, which only as a result of this renunciation—retrospectively, so to speak, according to its own telos—became the ugly. Beauty is the spell over the spell, which devolves upon it. The ambiguousness of the ugly results from the fact that the subject subsumes under the abstract and formal category of ugliness everything condemned by art: polymorphous sexuality as well as the violently mutilated and lethal. The perpetually recurring becomes that antithetical other without which art, according to its own concept, would not exist; appropriated through negation, this other—the antithesis to beauty, whose antithesis beauty was—gnaws away correctively on the affirmativeness of spiritualizing art. In the history of art, the dialectic of the ugly has drawn the category of the beautiful into itself as well; kitsch is, in this regard, the beautiful as the ugly, taboo in the name of that very beauty that it once was and that it now contradicts in the absence of its own opposite. That, however, only formal definition may be given to the concept of the ugly, as well as to its positive correlate, is internally related to art’s immanent process of enlightenment. For the more art is dominated throughout by subjectivity and must show itself to be irreconcilable with everything preestablished, the more that subjective reason—the formal principle itself—becomes the canon of aesthetics.2 This formal principle, obedient to subjective lawfulness regardless of what is other to it, and unshaken by its other, continues to give pleasure: In it subjectivity, unconscious of itself, enjoys the feeling of power. The aesthetic of pleasure, once free of crude materiality, coincides with mathematical relations in the artistic object, the most famous in the plastic arts being the golden mean, which has its musical correlative in the overtone relations of musical consonance. The appropriate caption for all aesthetics of pleasure is the paradoxical title of Max Frisch’s play about Don Juan: The Love of Geometry. The formalism inherent in the concept of the ugly and the beautiful, as is acknowledged by Kant’s aesthetics, a formalism against which artistic form is not immune, is the price art has to pay for raising itself above the domination of natural powers only in order to perpetuate them as domination over nature and human beings. Formalistic classicism commits an affront: Precisely the beauty that its concept glorifies is sullied by the manipulative, “composed” violence of its exemplary works. All that is imposed and added secretly gives the lie to the harmony that domination undertakes to produce: Bindingness that is decreed remains arbitrary. Although the formal character of the ugly and the beautiful cannot be retroactively annulled by any content aesthetics, its own content [Inhalt] can be determined. Precisely this is what gives it the weight that prevents the correction of the immanent abstractness of the beautiful by a clumsy surplus of material. Reconciliation as an act of violence, aesthetic formalism, and unreconciled life forms a triad.
The latent content [Inhalt] of the formal distinction between the ugly and the beautiful has its social aspect. The motive for the admission of the ugly was antifeudal: The peasants became a fit subject for art. Later, in Rimbaud, whose poems about mutilated corpses pursued this dimension even more relentlessly than did Baudelaire’s “Martyr,” the woman says, during the storming of the Tuileries: “I am scum,”3 that is: fourth estate, or lumpenproletariat. The repressed who sides with the revolution is, according to the standards of the beautiful life in an ugly society, uncouth and distorted by resentment, and he bears all the stigmas of degradation under the burden of unfree—moreover, manual—labor. Among the human rights of those who foot the bill for culture is one that is polemically directed against the affirmative, ideological totality: That the stigmas of degradation be dedicated to Mnemosyne in the form of an image. Art must take up the cause of what is proscribed as ugly, though no longer in order to integrate or mitigate it or to reconcile it with its own existence through humor that is more offensive than anything repulsive. Rather, in the ugly, art must denounce the world that creates and reproduces the ugly in its own image, even if in this too the possibility persists that sympathy with the degraded will reverse into concurrence with degradation. In the penchant of modern art for the nauseating and physically revolting—in objecting to which the apologists of the status quo can think of nothing more substantial than that the world is ugly enough as it is and art therefore should be responsible for idle beauty—the critical material motif shows through: In its autonomous forms art decries domination, even that which has been sublimated as a spiritual principle and stands witness for what domination represses and disavows. Even as semblance this materialistic motif’s form remains what it had been external to that form: critical. Powerful aesthetic valeurs are liberated by social ugliness, as in the previously unimaginable blackness of the first part of Hannele’s Ascension.4 The process is comparable to the introduction of negative magnitudes: They retain their negativity in the continuum of the work. The status quo, by contrast, can only deal with this same material by swallowing hard at graphics of starving working-class children and other extreme images as documents of that beneficent heart that beats even in the face of the worst, thereby promising that it is not the worst. Art struggles against this kind of collusion by excluding through its language of form that remainder of affirmation maintained by social realism: This is the social element in radical formalism. The infiltration of the aesthetic by the moral—as for example Kant sought external to artworks in the sublime—is defamed by cultural apologists as degenerate. Art has struggled hard over the course of its development to establish its boundaries and so rarely fully respected them when defined as those of amusement, that any indication of the frailty of these boundaries, anything hybrid, provokes the strongest rejection. The aesthetic condemnation of the ugly is dependent on the inclination, verified by social psychology, to equate, justly, the ugly with the expression of suffering and, by projecting it, to despise it. Hitler’s empire put this theorem to the test, as it put the whole of bourgeois ideology to the test: The more torture went on in the basement, the more insistently they made sure that the roof rested on columns. Doctrines of aesthetic invariance have the tendency to raise the reproach of degeneracy. Yet the counterconcept of degeneracy is precisely that nature that doctrines of aesthetic invariance defame as degenerate. Art need not defend itself against the rebuke that it is degenerate; art meets this rebuke by refusing to affirm the miserable course of the world as the iron law of nature. However, because art has the power to harbor its own opposite without slackening its longing, indeed because it changes its longing into this power, the element of the ugly is bound up with art’s spiritualization; George clear-sightedly recognized this in his preface to his translation of Flowers of Evil. This is alluded to by the subtitle “Spleen and Ideal”: Back of the word spleen is the obsession with what resists being formed, with the transformation of what is hostile to art into art’s own agent, which thus extends art’s concept beyond that of the ideal. The ugly serves this purpose in art. But ugliness and cruelty are not merely the subject matter of art. As Nietzsche knew, art’s own gesture is cruel. In aesthetic forms, cruelty becomes imagination: Something is excised from the living, from the body of language, from tones, from visual experience. The purer the form and the higher the autonomy of the works, the more cruel they are. Appeals for more humane art, for conformity to those who are its virtual public, regularly dilute the quality and weaken the law of form. What art in the broadest sense works with, it oppresses: This is the ritual of the domination of nature that lives on in play. It is the original sin of art as well as its permanent protest against morality, which revenges cruelty with cruelty. Yet those artworks succeed that rescue over into form something of the amorphous to which they ineluctably do violence. This alone is the reconciling aspect of form. The violence done to the material imitates the violence that issued from the material and that endures in its resistance to form. The subjective domination of the act of forming is not imposed on irrelevant materials but is read out of them; the cruelty of forming is mimesis of myth, with which it struggles. Greek genius expressed this idea, allegorizing it unconsciously: An early Doric relief from Selinunte, at the archaeological museum in Palermo, portrays Pegasus as having sprung from the blood of Medusa. If in modern artworks cruelty raises its head undisguised, it confirms the truth that in the face of the overwhelming force of reality art can no longer rely on its a priori ability to transform the dreadful into form. Cruelty is an element of art’s critical reflection on itself; art despairs over the claim to power that it fulfills in being reconciled. Cruelty steps forward unadorned from the artworks as soon as their own spell is broken. The mythical terror of beauty extends into artworks as their irresistibility, a trait once attributed to Aphrodite Peithon. Just as during the Olympian stage the amorphous power of myth was concentrated in a single deity who subordinated the all and the many and retained its destructiveness, great artworks, as destructive works, have also retained the power to destroy in the authority of their success. Their radiance is dark; the beautiful permeates negativity, which appears to have mastered it. As if they feared that immortality would draw out their life blood, even the most seemingly neutral objects that art has sought to eternalize as beautiful radiate—entirely out of their materials—hardness, unassimil-ability, indeed ugliness. The formal category of resistance, requisite of an artwork if it is not to sink to that level of empty play dismissed by Hegel, introduces the cruelty of method even into artworks of happy periods such as that of impressionism. Likewise, the sujets around which the movement developed its greatest works are rarely those of a strictly peaceful nature but have scattered throughout fragments of civilization that the peinture blissfully seeks to incorporate.
If one originated in the other, it is beauty that originated in the ugly, and not the reverse. However, putting the concept of beauty on the Index—as many psychologies have done with the concept of the soul and many sociologies with that of society—would amount to resignation on the part of aesthetics. The definition of aesthetics as the theory of the beautiful is so unfruitful because the formal character of the concept of beauty is inadequate to the full content [Inhalt] of the aesthetic. If aesthetics were nothing but a systematic catalogue of whatever is called beautiful, it would give no idea of the life that transpires in the concept of beauty. In terms of the intention of aesthetic reflection, the concept of beauty is but one element. The idea of beauty draws attention to something essential to art without, however, articulating it directly. If artifacts were not in various ways judged to be beautiful the interest in them would be incomprehensible and blind, and no one—neither artist nor beholder—would have reason to make that exodus from the sphere of practical aims, those of self-preservation and pleasure, that art requires by virtue of its constitution. Hegel arrests the aesthetic dialectic by his static definition of the beautiful as the sensual appearance of the idea. The beautiful is no more to be defined than its concept can be dispensed with, a strict antinomy. If it dispensed with categories, aesthetics would be no more than a hermetic historico-relativistic description of what beauty has signified in various societies and styles; any distillation of common characteristics would be no better than a parody and would be confounded by any new example. The fatal universality of the concept of beauty is, however, not contingent. The transition to the primacy of form codified by the category of the beautiful inherently tends toward that formalism—the convergence of the aesthetic object with the most universal subjective determinations—from which the concept of beauty suffers. Nothing would be achieved by setting up a material essence over and against formal beauty: The principle, as something that became what it is, must be grasped in terms of its dynamic, and to this extent substantively. The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature. The shudder in the face of this is rescued by beauty into itself by making itself impervious to the immediately existent; beauty establishes a sphere of untouchability; works become beautiful by the force of their opposition to what simply exists. Of that on which it was active the aesthetically forming spirit allowed entry only to what resembled it, what it understood, or what it hoped to make like itself. This was a process of formalization; therefore beauty is, in terms of its historical tendency, formal. The reduction that beauty imposes on the terrifying, over and out of which beauty raises itself and which it banishes from itself as from a sacred temple, has—in the face of the terrifying—something powerless about it. For the terrifying digs in on the perimeter like the enemy in front of the walls of the beleaguered city and starves it out. If beauty is not to fail its own telos, it must work against its enemy even if this struggle is contrary to its own tendency. The history of the Hellenic spirit discerned by Nietzsche is unforgettable because it followed through and presented the historical process between myth and genius. The archaic giants reclining in one of the temples of Agrigento are no more rudiments than are the demons of Attic drama. Form requires them if it is not to capitulate to myth, which persists in it so long as form merely rejects it. In all subsequent art of any import this counterelement to beauty is maintained and transformed. This occurred already in Euripedes’ dramas, where the horror of mythical violence redounds to the unblemished divinities, the Olympian consorts of beauty, who are in turn decried as demons; afterward Epicurean philosophy wanted to free consciousness from this horror of the gods. Since, however, the images of a terrifying nature have from the outset mollified those gods mimetically, the archaic grimaces, monsters, and minotaurs already assume a human likeness. Orderly reason already governs these mixed creatures; natural history did not allow their kind to survive. They are frightening because they warn of the fragility of human identity, but they are not chaotic because threat and order are intertwined in them. In the repetitive rhythms of primitive music the menacing aspect originates in the principle of order itself. In this principle the antithesis to the archaic is implicit as the play of forces of the beautiful single whole; the qualitative leap of art is a smallest transition.5 By virtue of this dialectic the image of the beautiful is metamorphosed into the movement of enlightenment as a whole. The law of the formalization of beauty was a moment of balance that was progressively destroyed by its relation to its contrary, which the identity of the beautiful hopelessly tries to hold at bay. Terror itself peers out of the eyes of beauty as the coercion that emanates from form; the concept of the blinding glare of beauty articulates this experience. The irresistibility of the beautiful, a sublimation of sexuality that extends into the highest artworks, is exerted by their purity, their distance from materiality and any concern with effect. This irresistibility becomes content [Inhalt]. With all the ambivalence of triumph, what subjugates expression—the formal character of beauty—is transformed into expression, in which what is menacing in the domination of nature is wed with a longing for the vanquished, a longing stirred by domination. But it is the expression of suffering under subjugation and subjugation’s vanishing point, death. The affinity of all beauty with death has its nexus in the idea of pure form that art imposes on the diversity of the living and that is extinguished in it. In serene beauty its recalcitrant other would be completely pacified, and such aesthetic reconciliation is fatal for the extra-aesthetic. That is the melancholy of art. It achieves an unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation. All that art can do is grieve for the sacrifice it makes, which, in its powerlessness, art itself is. Beauty not only speaks like a messenger of death—as does Wagner’s Valkyrie to Siegmund—but in its own process it assimilates itself to death. The course toward the artwork’s integration, identical with the development of its autonomy, is the death of the particular elements in the whole. What compels the artwork to go beyond itself, beyond its own particularity, seeks its own demise, the quintessence of which is the totality of the work. If the idea of artworks is eternal life, they can attain this only by annihilating everything living within their domain: This too inheres in their expression. It is the expression of the demise of the whole, just as the whole speaks of the demise of expression. In the impulse of every particular element of an artwork toward integration, the disintegrative impulse of nature secretly manifests itself. The more integrated artworks are, the more what constitutes them disintegrates in them. To this extent their success is their decomposition and that lends them their fathomlessness. Decomposition at the same time releases the immanent counterforce of art, its centrifugal force.——Ever less is the beautiful achieved in a particular, purified form; beauty is shifted to the dynamic totality of the work and thus, through heightened emancipation from the particularity, advances formalization at the same time that it melds particularity with the diffuse. By virtue of the fact that the reciprocal relations operative in art in the image actually break through the cycle of guilt and atonement in which art participates, that reciprocity reveals something of a condition beyond myth. The reciprocity transposes the cycle of guilt into the image, which reflects it and thereby transcends it. Loyalty to the image of beauty results in an idiosyncratic reaction against it. This loyalty demands tension and ultimately turns against its resolution. The loss of tension, an insignificance of the relation of parts to the whole, is the strongest objection to be made against much contemporary art. Yet the abstract demand for tension would itself be mediocre and artificial: The concept of tension applies to what is always under tension, namely form and its other, which is represented in the work by the particularities. Once however the beautiful, as homeostasis of tension, is transferred to the totality, beauty is drawn into the vortex. For totality, the coherence of the parts in a unity, requires or presupposes in some regard the substantiality of the elements and indeed to a degree greater than in older art, in which tension remained much more latent beneath established idioms. Because totality ultimately engorges tension and makes itself fit for ideology, homeostasis itself is annulled: This is the crisis of the beautiful and of art, and here the efforts of the last twenty years may converge. But even here the idea of the beautiful prevails, which must exclude everything heterogeneous to it, the conventionally established, all traces of reification. Indeed, it is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty: because it is no longer beautiful. What can only appear negatively mocks a resolution that it recognizes as false and which therefore debases the idea of the beautiful. Beauty’s aversion to the overly smooth, the pat mathematical solution, which has compromised art with the lie throughout its history, becomes an aversion to any resultant, without which art can be conceived no more than it can be without the tensions out of which it emerges. The prospect of the rejection of art for the sake of art is foreseeable. It is intimated by those artworks that fall silent or disappear. Even socially they are correct consciousness: Rather no art than socialist realism.
Art is a refuge for mimetic comportment. In art the subject exposes itself, at various levels of autonomy, to its other, separated from it and yet not altogether separated. Art’s disavowal of magical practices—its antecedents—implies participation in rationality. That art, something mimetic, is possible in the midst of rationality, and that it employs its means, is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an over-administered world. For the aim of all rationality—the quintessence of the means for dominating nature—would have to be something other than means, hence something not rational. Capitalist society hides and disavows precisely this irrationality, and in contrast to this, art represents truth in a double sense: It maintains the image of its aim, which has been obscured by rationality, and it convicts the status quo of its irrationality and absurdity. The relinquishment of the delusion of the unmediated intervention of spirit, which intermittently and insatiably recurs in the history of humanity, establishes a prohibition against recollection’s employing art to turn unmediatedly toward nature. Only separation can countermand separation. This at once strengthens and exculpates the rational element in art because it resists real domination, even though, as ideology, this element is ever and again bound up with domination. To speak of “the magic of art” is trite because art is allergic to any relapses into magic. Art is a stage in the process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world, and it is entwined with rationalization; this is the source of all of art’s means and methods of production; technique that disparages its ideology inheres in this ideology as much as it threatens it because art’s magical heritage stubbornly persisted throughout art’s transformations. Yet art mobilizes technique in an opposite direction than does domination. The sentimentality and debility of almost the whole tradition of aesthetic thought is that it has suppressed the dialectic of rationality and mimesis immanent to art. This persists in the astonishment over the technical work of art as if it had fallen from heaven: The two points of view are actually complementary. Nevertheless, the cliché about the magic of art has something true about it. The survival of mimesis, the nonconceptual affinity of the subjectively produced with its unposited other, defines art as a form of knowledge and to that extent as “rational.” For that to which the mimetic comportment responds is the telos of knowledge, which art simultaneously blocks with its own categories. Art completes knowledge with what is excluded from knowledge and thereby once again impairs its character as knowledge, its univocity. Art threatens to be pulled apart because magic, which art secularizes, actually refuses this process, while in the midst of secularization the essence of magic sinks to the level of a mythological vestige, to superstition. What today emerges as the crisis of art, as its new quality, is as old as art’s concept. How an artwork deals with this antinomy determines its possibility and quality. Art cannot fulfill its concept. This strikes each and every one of its works, even the highest, with an ineluctable imperfectness that repudiates the idea of perfection toward which artworks must aspire. Unreflected, perfectly logical enlightenment would have to discard art just as the prosaic pragmatist in fact does. The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated. The depth of the process, which every artwork is, is excavated by the unreconcilability of these elements; it must be imported into the idea of art as an image of reconciliation. Only because no artwork can succeed emphatically are its forces set free; only as a result of this does art catch a glimpse of reconciliation. Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it; art is not something prerational or irrational, which would peremptorily condemn it as untruth in the face of the entanglement of all human activity in the social totality. Rational and irrational theories of art are therefore equally faulty. If enlightenment principles are bluntly applied to art, the result is that philistine prosaism that made it easy for the Weimar classicists and their romantic contemporaries to drown in ridicule the meager sentiment of bourgeois revolutionary spirit in Germany; a philistinism that was admittedly surpassed one hundred and fifty years later by that of a narrow bourgeois religion of art. That form of rationalism that argues powerlessly against artworks, by applying extra-aesthetic logical and causal criteria to art, has not died off; it is provoked by the ideological misuse of art. If someone writing a realist novel after it had become outmoded objected about one of Eichendorff’s verses that clouds cannot be equated with dreams but that at best dreams might perhaps be equated with clouds, the verse itself, “Clouds pass by like heavy dreams,”6 would in its own sphere, where nature is transformed into a premonitory metaphor of inner life, be immune to such homegrown correctness. Whoever denies the expressive power of this verse—a prototype of sentimental poetry in the best sense—blunders and trips in the twilight of the work instead of entering it and responsively working out the valeurs of the words and their constellations. Rationality in the artwork is the unity-founding, organizing element, not unrelated to the rationality that governs externally, but it does not reflect its categorizing order. What empirical rationality takes to be the irrational characteristics of artworks is not a symptom of an irrational mind, not even a symptom of an irrational opinion among its viewers; opinion generally produces opinionated artworks that are, in a certain sense, rationalistic. Rather, the lyric poet’s désinvolture, his dispensation from the strictures of logic—which enter his sphere only as shadows—grants him the possibility of following the immanent lawfulness of his works. Artworks do not repress; through expression they help to make present to consciousness the diffuse and elusive without, as psychoanalysis insists, “rationalization.”——To accuse irrational art of irrationalism for playing a trick on the praxis-oriented rules of reason is in its own way no less ideological than the irrationality of official faith in art; it serves the needs of apparatchiks of every persuasion. Movements such as expressionism and surrealism, whose irrationality alienated, were an attack on violence, authority, and obscurantism. That various tributaries of German expressionism and French surrealism too converged in Fascism—for which spirit was merely the means to an end, which is why Fascism devoured everything—is insignificant with regard to the objective idea of those movements, and it has been deliberately blown out of proportion by Zhdanov and his followers for political purposes. It is one thing to manifest the irrationality of the psyche or the political order artistically, giving it form and thereby in a certain sense making it rational, but it is something else again to preach irrationality, as it has almost always been done under the auspices of a rationalism of aesthetic means, in crude, mathematically commensurable superficial connections. Benjamin’s theory of the artwork in the age of its technical reproduction may have failed to do full justice to this. The simple antithesis between the auratic and the mass-reproduced work, which for the sake of simplicity neglected the dialectic of the two types, became the booty of a view of art that takes photography as its model and is no less barbaric than the view of the artist as creator. It is of interest that initially, in his “Small History of Photography,” Benjamin in no way pronounced this antithesis as undialectically as he did five years later in his essay on reproduction.7 Whereas the later work adopted the definition of aura word for word from the earlier one, the early study praises the aura of early photographs, which they lost only with the critique of their commercial exploitation by Atget. This may come much closer to the actual situation than does the simplification that made the essay on reproduction so popular. What slips through the wide mesh of this theory, which tends toward copyrealism, is the element opposed to cultic contexts that motivated Benjamin to introduce the concept of aura in the first place, that is, that which moves into the distance and is critical of the ideological superficies of life. The condemnation of aura easily becomes the dismissal of qualitatively modern art that distances itself from the logic of familiar things; the critique of aura thereby cloaks the products of mass culture in which profit is hidden and whose trace they bear even in supposedly socialist countries. Brecht did in fact value Song-style above atonality and twelve-tone technique, which was for him suspiciously romantic in its expressiveness. From these perspectives the so-called irrational currents of spirit are summarily chalked up to Fascism, ignoring their voice of protest against bourgeois reification by which they nevertheless continue to provoke. In conformity with East-bloc politics, a blind eye is turned toward the relation between enlightenment and mass deception.8 Disenchanted technical procedures that dedicate themselves completely to appearances, as what they claim to be, function only too well for the transfiguration of these appearances. The failure of Benjamin’s grandly conceived theory of reproduction remains that its bipolar categories make it impossible to distinguish between a conception of art that is free of ideology to its core and the misuse of aesthetic rationality for mass exploitation and mass domination, a possibility he hardly touches upon. The single technique dealt with by Benjamin that goes beyond camera rationalism is montage, which reached its acme in surrealism and was quickly weakened in film. But montage disposes over the elements that make up the reality of an unchallenged common sense, either to transform their intention or, at best, to awaken their latent language. It is powerless, however, insofar as it is unable to explode the individual elements. It is precisely montage that is to be criticized for possessing the remains of a complaisant irrationalism, for adaptation to material that is delivered ready-made from outside the work.
Following an internal logic whose stages will need to be described by an aesthetic historiography that does not yet exist, the principle of montage therefore became that of construction. There is no denying that even in the principle of construction, in the dissolution of materials and their subordination to an imposed unity, once again something smooth, harmonistic, a quality of pure logicality, is conjured up that seeks to establish itself as ideology. It is the fatality of all contemporary art that it is contaminated by the untruth of the ruling totality. Still, construction is currently the only possible form that the rational element in the artwork can take, just as at the outset, in the Renaissance, the emancipation of art from cultic heteronomy was part of the discovery of construction, then called “composition.” In the artwork as monad, construction—its authority limited—is the plenipotentiary of logic and causality transferred to the artwork from the domain of objective knowledge. Construction is the synthesis of the diverse at the expense of the qualitative elements that it masters, and at the expense of the subject, which intends to extinguish itself as it carries out this synthesis. The affinity of construction with cognitive processes, or perhaps rather with their interpretation by the theory of knowledge, is no less evident than is their difference, which is that art does not make judgments and when it does, it shatters its own concept. What distinguishes construction from composition in the encompassing sense of pictorial composition, is the ruthless subordination not only of everything that originated from outside the artwork, but also of all partial elements immanent to the work. To this extent construction is the extension of subjective domination, which conceals itself all the more profoundly the further it is driven. Construction tears the elements of reality out of their primary context and transforms them to the point where they are once again capable of forming a unity, one that is no less imposed on them internally than was the heteronomous unity to which they were subjected externally. By means of construction, art desperately wants to escape from its nominalistic situation, to extricate itself by its own power from a sense of accidentalness and attain what is overarchingly binding or, if one will, universal. To this end art requires a reduction of its elements, which it threatens to enervate and degenerate into a victory over what is not present. The abstract transcendental and hidden subject of Kant’s theory of schematism becomes the aesthetic subject. Yet construction at the same time critically reduces aesthetic subjectivity, just as constructivist approaches such as Mondrian’s originally took a stand in opposition to those of expressionism. For if the synthesis of construction is to succeed, it must in spite of all aversion be read out of the elements themselves, and they never wholly accede in themselves to what is imposed on them; with complete justice construction countermands the organic as illusory. The subject in its quasi-logical universality is the functionary of this act, whereas the self-expression of the subject in the result becomes a matter of indifference. It counts among the most profound insights of Hegel’s aesthetics that long before constructivism it recognized this truly dialectical relation and located the subjective success of the artwork in the disappearance of the subject in the artwork. Only by way of this disappearance, not by cozying up to reality, does the artwork break through merely subjective reason. This is the utopia of construction; its fallibility, on the other hand, is that it necessarily has a penchant to destroy what it integrates and to arrest the process in which it exclusively has its life. The loss of tension in constructive art today is not only the product of subjective weakness but a consequence of the idea of construction itself, specifically with regard to its semblance. Pursuing its virtually irreversible course, which tolerates nothing external to itself, construction wants to make itself into something real sui generis, even though it borrows the very purity of its principles from external technical functional forms. Functionless, however, construction remains trapped in art. The purely constructed, strictly objective artwork, which ever since Adolf Loos has been the sworn enemy of everything artisanal, reverses into the artisanal by virtue of its mimesis of functional forms: Purposelessness without purpose becomes irony. To date the only alternative to this has been the polemical intervention of the subject in subjective reason by a surplus of the subject’s own manifestation beyond that in which it wants to negate itself. Only by carrying through this contradiction, and not by its false resolution, can art somehow still survive.
The need for objective art was not fulfilled in functional means and therefore encroached on autonomous means. It disavows art as the product of human labor, one that nevertheless does not want to be an object, a thing among other things. Art that is simply a thing is an oxymoron. Yet the development of this oxymoron is nevertheless the inner direction of contemporary art. Art is motivated by a conflict: Its enchantment, a vestige of its magical phase, is constantly repudiated as unmediated sensual immediacy by the progressive disenchantment of the world, yet without its ever being possible finally to obliterate this magical element. Only in it is art’s mimetic character preserved, and its truth is the critique that, by its sheer existence, it levels at a rationality that has become absolute. Emancipated from its claim to reality, the enchantment is itself part of enlightenment: Its semblance disenchants the disenchanted world. This is the dialectical ether in which art today takes place. The renunciation of any claim to truth by the preserved magical element marks out the terrain of aesthetic semblance and aesthetic truth. Art inherits a comportment of spirit once directed toward essence, and with it the chance of perceiving mediately that which is essential yet otherwise tabooed by the progress of rational knowledge. Though it will not acknowledge it, for the disenchanted world the fact of art is an outrage, an afterimage of enchantment, which it does not tolerate. If, however, art unflinchingly acquiesces in this and posits itself blindly as sorcery, it degrades itself to an act of illusion in opposition to its own claim to truth and undermines itself with a vengeance. In the midst of the disenchanted world even the most austere idea of art, divested of every consolation, sounds romantic. Hegel’s philosophical history of art, which construes romantic art as art’s final phase, is confirmed even by antiromantic art, though indeed it is only through its darkness that this art can outmaneuver the demystified world and cancel the spell that this world casts by the overwhelming force of its appearance, the fetish character of the commodity. By their very existence artworks postulate the existence of what does not exist and thereby come into conflict with the latter’s actual nonexistence. Yet this conflict is not to be conceived in the manner of jazz fans for whom what does not appeal to them is out of date because of its incongruity with the disenchanted world. For only what does not fit into this world is true. What is requisite of the artistic act no longer converges with the historical situation, which is not to say that they ever harmonized. This incongruity is not to be eliminated by adaptation: The truth, rather, is in carrying through their conflict. Conversely, the deaestheticization of art is immanent to art—whether it be art that unflinchingly pursues its autonomous order or art that sells itself off cheap—in accordance with the technological tendency of art, which is not to be halted by any appeal to a purportedly pure and unmediated inwardness. The concept of artistic technique emerged late: Even after the French Revolution, when the aesthetic domination of nature was becoming self-conscious, the concept was still lacking, though not its reality. Artistic technique is no cozy adaptation to an age that with foolish zeal labels itself technological, as if productive forces alone determined its structure, regardless of the relations of production that hold the former in check. As was not infrequently the case in modern movements after World War II, whenever aesthetic technology strove for the scientization of art rather than technical innovation, art was dazzled and went astray. Scientists, especially physicists, had no trouble pointing out many misunderstandings to artists who had become enraptured with the nomenclature, reminding them that the scientific terminology they used to name their technical procedures was being misattributed. The technologization of art is no less provoked by the subject—by the disillusioned consciousness and the mistrust of magic as a veil—than by the object: by the problem of how artworks may be bindingly organized. The possibility of the latter became problematic with the collapse of traditional procedures, however much their influence has extended into the current epoch. Only technology provided a solution; it promised to organize art completely in terms of that means-end relation that Kant had in general equated with the aesthetic. It is not that technique sprang out of the blue as a stopgap, although it is true that the history of art has known moments that are reminiscent of the technical revolution of material production. With the progressive sub-jectivization of artworks, free control over them ripened within the traditional procedures. Technologization established free control over the material as a principle. For its legitimation the development of technique can appeal to the fact that traditional masterworks since Palladio, though they relied only desultorily on knowledge of technical procedures, nevertheless gained their authenticity from their level of technical integration, until finally technology exploded the traditional procedures. In retrospect, even as a constituent element of the art of the past, technique can be recognized with incomparable clarity compared with what is conceded by cultural ideology, which portrays what it calls the technical age of art as the decline of a previous age of human spontaneity. Certainly it is possible in the case of Bach to show the gaps between the structure of his music and the technical means that were available for its completely adequate performance; for the critique of aesthetic historicism this is relevant. Yet insights of this sort do not suffice for the entire complex of issues. Bach’s experience led him to a highly developed compositional technique. On the other hand, in works that can be called archaic, expression is amalgamated with technique as well as with its absence or with what technique could not yet accomplish. It is in vain to try to decide what effects of pre-perspectival painting are due to expressive profundity or to some degree of technical insufficiency that itself becomes expression. Precisely for this reason archaic works, which are generally limited in their range of possibilities, always seem to have just enough available technique and no more than is required for the realization of the project. This imbues them with that deceptive authority that is misleading with regard to the technical aspect that is a condition of such authority. In the face of such works the effort to distinguish between what was wanted and what was still out of reach falls mute; in truth, this question is always misleading with regard to what is objectivated. Yet abandoning the question also has an element of obscurantism. Alois Riegl’s concept of artistic volition [Kunstwollen], much as it helped to free aesthetic experience from abstract timeless norms, can scarcely be maintained; it is hardly ever the case that what is decisive in a work is what the artist intended. The fierce rigidity of the Etruscan Apollo at the Villa Giulia is a constituent of the content, regardless whether it was intended or not. And yet at critical points in the history of art the function of technique has been fundamentally transformed. When fully developed, technique establishes the primacy in art of making, in contradistinction to a receptivity of production, however that is conceived. Technique is able to become the opponent of art insofar as art represents—at changing levels—the repressed unmakable. However, the technologization of art is not synonymous with feasibility either, as the superficiality of cultural conservatism would prefer. Technologization, the extended arm of the nature-dominating subject, purges artworks of their immediate language. Technological requirements drive out the contingency of the individual who produces the work. The same process that traditionalists scorn as the loss of soul is what makes the artwork in its greatest achievements eloquent rather than merely the testimony of something psychological or human, as the contemporary prattle goes. Radicalized, what is called reification probes for the language of things. It narrows the distance to the idea of that nature that extirpates the primacy of human meaning. Emphatically modern art breaks out of the sphere of the portrayal of emotions and is transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve. Paul Klee’s work is probably the best evidence of this from the recent past, and he was a member of the technologically minded Bauhaus.
If one teaches—as Adolf Loos did implicitly and technocrats since have happily reiterated—that real technical objects are beautiful, one predicates of them precisely that against which artistic Sachlichkeit, as an aesthetic innervation, is directed. Incidental beauty, measured in terms of opaque traditional categories such as formal harmony or even imposing grandeur, impinges on the real functionality in which functional works like bridges or industrial plants seek their law of form. It is apologetic to claim that functional works, by virtue of their fidelity to this law of form, are always beautiful; the aim is evidently to give consolation for what these works lack and assuage Sachlichkeit’s bad conscience. By contrast, the autonomous work, functionally exclusive in itself, wants to achieve through its own immanent teleology what was once called beauty. If in spite of their division, purposeful and purposeless art nevertheless share the innervation of Sachlichkeit, the beauty of the autonomous technological artwork becomes problematic, a beauty that its model—the functional work—renounces. The beauty of the work suffers from functionless functioning. Because its external terminus ad quem atrophies, its internal telos wastes away; functioning—as a for-something-else—becomes superfluous, an ornamental end in itself. This sabotages an element of functionality, that necessity that arises from the partial elements of the artwork in accord with what these elements want and with regard to their own self-direction. The equalization of tension that the objective artwork borrowed from the functional arts is profoundly impeded. What becomes obvious is the disparity between the functionally thoroughly formed artwork and its actual functionlessness. Still, aesthetic mimesis of functionality cannot be revoked through recourse to the subjectively unmediated: This would only mask how much the individual and his psychology have become ideological with regard to the supremacy of social objectivity, a supremacy of which Sachlichkeit is correctly conscious. The crisis of Sachlichkeit is not a signal to replace it with something humane, which would immediately degenerate into consolation, the correlative of the actual rise of inhumanity. Thought through to the bitter end, Sachlichkeit itself regresses to a preartistic barbarism. Even the highly cultivated aesthetic allergy to kitsch, ornament, the superfluous, and everything reminiscent of luxury has an aspect of barbarism, an aspect—according to Freud—of the destructive discontent with culture. The antinomies of Sachlichkeit confirm the dialectic of enlightenment: That progress and regression are entwined. The literal is barbaric. Totally objectified, by virtue of its rigorous legality, the artwork becomes a mere fact and is annulled as art. The alternative that opens up in this crisis is: Either to leave art behind or to transform its very concept.
Notes
1 Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Häßlichen (Königsberg, 1853).
2 See Max Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York, 1972).
3 See Arthur Rimbaud, “The Blacksmith,” from Poems 1870, in Complete Works, trans. Wallace Fowlie (Chicago, 1966), p. 23.
4 [Gerhart Hauptmann, Hannele’s Ascension, in Three Plays, trans. H. Frenz and M. Waggoner (New York, 1951), pp. 99–143.—trans.]
5 [“ein kleinster Übergang”: The smallest transition, is a fundamental aesthetico-theological motif in both Walter Benjamin’s and Adorno’s writings. See Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, 1991).—trans.]
6 “Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume,” from Joseph von Eichendorff’s “Zwielicht,” in Werke ed. W. Rasch (Munich, 1955), p. 11.
7 See Walter Benjamin, “A Small History of Photography,” in One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephott and Kingley Shorter (London, 1979), pp. 240ff., and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 217ff.
8 See Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120ff.