Chapter 5
Art Beauty: Apparition, Spiritualization, Intuitability
Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is. To wrest this more from that more’s contingency, to gain control of its semblance, to determine it as semblance as well as to negate it as unreal: This is the idea of art. This artifactual more does not in itself guarantee the metaphysical substance of art. That substance could be totally null, and still the artworks could posit a more as what appears. Artworks become artworks in the production of this more; they produce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they once again become separated from transcendence. The actual arena of transcendence in artworks is the nexus of their elements. By straining toward, as well as adapting to, this nexus, they go beyond the appearance that they are, though this transcendence may be unreal. Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual. Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning. Although this transcendence is subjectively mediated, it is manifested objectively, yet all the more desultorily. Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality of being art. Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect. This implies an essential criterion of new art. Compositions fail as background music or as the mere presentation of material, just as those paintings fail in which the geometrical patterns to which they are reducible remain factually what they are; this is the reason for the relevance of divergences from mathematical forms in all those works that employ them. The striven-for shudder comes to nothing: It does not occur. One of the paradoxes of artworks is that what they posit they are actually not permitted to posit; this is the measure of their substantiality.
The more cannot be adequately described by the psychological definition of a gestalt, according to which a whole is more than its parts. For the more is not simply the nexus of the elements, but an other, mediated through this nexus and yet divided from it. The artistic elements suggest through their nexus what escapes it. Here one comes up against an antinomy of the philosophy of history. In his treatment of the theme of aura—a concept closely related to the concept of the appearance that by virtue of its internal unity points beyond itself—Benjamin showed that, beginning with Baudelaire, aura in the sense of “atmosphere” is taboo;1 already in Baudelaire the transcendence of the artistic appearance is at once effected and negated. From this perspective, the deaestheticization of art is not only a stage of art’s liquidation but also the direction of its development. All the same, the socialized rebellion since Baudelaire against aura and atmosphere has not meant the simple disappearance of the crackling noise in which the more of the phenomenon announces itself in opposition to this phenomenon. One need only compare good poems by Brecht that are styled as protocol sentences with bad poems by authors whose rebellion against being poetic recoils into the preaesthetic. In Brecht’s disenchanted poetry what is fundamentally distinct from what is simplistically stated constitutes the works’ eminent rank. Erich Kahler may have been the first to recognize this; and it is best confirmed by the poem “Two Cranes.”2 Aesthetic transcendence and disenchantment converge in the moment of falling mute: in Beckett’s oeuvre. A language remote from all meaning is not a speaking language and this is its affinity to muteness. Perhaps all expression, which is most akin to transcendence, is as close to falling mute as in great new music nothing is so full of expression as what flickers out—that tone that disengages itself starkly from the dense musical texture—where art by virtue of its own movement converges with its natural element.
The instant of expression in artworks is however not their reduction to the level of their materials as to something unmediated; rather, this instant is fully mediated. Artworks become appearances, in the pregnant sense of the term—that is, as the appearance of an other—when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone, and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary and sudden. This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed when faced with an important work. This immanent character of being an act establishes the similarity of all artworks, like that of natural beauty, to music, a similarity once evoked by the term muse. Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age of reification; the terror of that age is recapitulated vis-à-vis reified objects. The deeper the χωρισµός between the circumscribed, particular things and the paling essence, the more hollowly artworks gaze, the sole anamnesis of what could exist beyond the χωρισµός. Because the shudder is past and yet survives, artworks objectivate it as its afterimage. For if at one time human beings in their powerlessness against nature feared the shudder as something real, the fear is no less intense, no less justified, that the shudder will dissipate. All enlightenment is accompanied by the anxiety that what set enlightenment in motion in the first place and what enlightenment ever threatens to consume may disappear: truth. Thrown back on itself, enlightenment distances itself from that guileless objectivity that it would like to achieve; that is why, under the compulsion of its own ideal of truth, it is conjoined with the pressure to hold on to what it has condemned in the name of truth. Art is this mnemosyne. The instant of appearance in artworks is indeed the paradoxical unity or the balance between the vanishing and the preserved. Artworks are static as much as they are dynamic; art genres that fall below approved culture, such as circus tableaux and revues and probably mechanisms such as the water fountains of the seventeenth century, confess to what authentic3 artworks conceal in themselves as their secret apriori. Artworks remain enlightened because they would like to make commensurable to human beings the remembered shudder, which was incommensurable in the magical primordial world. This is touched upon by Hegel’s formulation of art as the effort to do away with foreignness.4 In the artifact the shudder is freed from the mythical deception of its being-in-itself, without however the work’s being reduced to subjective spirit. The increasing autonomy of artworks, their objectivation by human beings, presents the shudder as something unmollified and unprecedented. The act of alienation in this objectivation, which each artwork carries out, is corrective. Artworks are neutralized and thus qualitatively transformed epiphanies. If the deities of antiquity were said to appear fleetingly at their cult sites, or at least were to have appeared there in the primeval age, this act of appearing became the law of the permanence of artworks, but at the price of the living incarnation of what appears. The artwork as appearance is most closely resembled by the apparition,5 the heavenly vision. Artworks stand tacitly in accord with it as it rises above human beings and is carried beyond their intentions and the world of things. Artworks from which the apparition has been driven out without a trace are nothing more than husks, worse than what merely exists, because they are not even useful. Artworks are nowhere more reminiscent of mana than in their extreme opposition to it, in the subjectively posited construction of ineluctability. That instant—which is what artworks are—crystallized, at least in traditional works, at the point where out of their particular elements they became a totality. The pregnant moment6 of their objectivation is the moment that concentrates them as appearance, which is by no means just the expressive elements that are dispersed over the artworks. Artworks surpass the world of things by what is thing-like in them, their artificial objectivation. They become eloquent by the force of the kindling of thing and appearance. They are things whose power it is to appear. Their immanent process is externalized as their own act, not as what humans have done to them and not merely for humans.
The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks, though because of its fleetingness and status as empty entertainment it has scarcely been acknowledged by theoretical consideration; only Valéry pursued ideas that are at least related. Fireworks are apparition 
They appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning. The segregation of the aesthetic sphere by means of the complete afunctionality of what is thoroughly ephemeral is no formal definition of aesthetics. It is not through a higher perfection that artworks separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming actual, like fireworks, incandescently in an expressive appearance. They are not only the other of the empirical world: Everything in them becomes other. It is this to which the preartistic consciousness of artworks responds most intensely. This consciousness submits to the temptation that first led to art and that mediates between art and the empirical. Although the preartistic dimension becomes poisoned by its exploitation, to the point that artworks must eliminate it, it survives sublimated in them. It is not so much that artworks possess ideality as that by virtue of their spiritualization they promise a blocked or denied sensuality. That quality can be comprehended in those phenomena from which artistic experience emancipated itself, in the relics of an art-alien art, as it were, the justly or unjustly so-called lower arts such as the circus, to which in France the cubist painters and their theoreticians turned, and to which in Germany Wedekind turned. What Wedekind called “corporeal art” has not only remained beneath spiritualized art, not only remained just its complement: In its intentionlessness, however, it is the archetype of spiritualized art. By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated, conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only through the counter-tendency to it. The preartistic level of art is at the same time the memento of its anticultural character, its suspicion of its antithesis to the empirical world that leaves this world untouched. Important artworks nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer. When, suspected of being infantile, it is absent from art, when the last trace of the vagrant fiddler disappears from the spiritual chamber musician and the illusionless drama has lost the magic of the stage, art has capitulated. The curtain lifts expectantly even at the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame; plays and stagings that eliminate the curtain fumble with a shallow trick. The instant the curtain goes up is the expectation of the apparition. If Beckett’s plays, as crepuscularly grey as after sunset and the end of the world, want to exorcise circus colors, they yet remain true to them in that the plays are indeed performed on stage and it is well known how much their antiheros were inspired by clowns and slapstick cinema. Despite their austerity they in no way fully renounce costumes and sets: The servant Clov, who wishes in vain to break out, wears the laughably outmoded costume of a traveling Englishman; and the sandhill of Happy Days bears a similarity to geological formations of the American West; in general, the question remains whether in their material and visual organization even the most abstract paintings do not bear elements of a representationality that they hope to remove from circulation. Even artworks that incorruptibly refuse celebration and consolation do not wipe out radiance, and the greater their success, the more they gain it. Today this luster devolves precisely upon works that are inconsolable. Their distance from any purpose sympathizes, as from across the abyss of ages, with the superfluous vagrant who will not completely acquiesce to fixed property and settled civilization. Not least among the contemporary difficulties of art is that artworks are ashamed of apparition, though they are unable to shed it; no longer substantial in the Hegelian sense, having become self-transparent right into their constitutive semblance, which artworks find untrue in its transparentness, this transparentness gnaws away at their possibility. An inane Wilhelmian army joke tells of an orderly who one fine Sunday morning is sent by his superior to the zoo. He returns very worked up and declares: “Lieutenant! Animals like that do not exist!” This form of reaction is as requisite of aesthetic experience as it is alien to art. Artworks are eliminated along with the youthful ϑαυµάζειν; Klee’s Angelus Novus arouses this astonishment much as do the semihuman creatures of Indian mythology. In each genuine artwork something appears that does not exist. It is not dreamt up out of disparate elements of the existing. Out of these elements artworks arrange constellations that become ciphers, without, however, like fantasies, setting up the enciphered before the eyes as something immediately existing. The encipherment of the artwork, one facet of its apparition, is thus distinct from natural beauty in that while it too refuses the univocity of judgment, nevertheless in its own form, in the way in which it turns toward the hidden, the artwork achieves a greater determinacy. Artworks thus vie with the syntheses of significative thinking, their irreconcilable enemy.
The appearance of the nonexistent as if it existed motivates the question as to the truth of art. By its form alone art promises what is not; it registers objectively, however refractedly, the claim that because the nonexistent appears it must indeed be possible. The unstillable longing in the face of beauty, for which Plato found words fresh with its first experience, is the longing for the fulfillment of what was promised. Idealist aesthetics fails by its inability to do justice to art’s promesse du bonheur. It reduces the artwork to what it in theoretical terms symbolizes and thus trespasses against the spirit in that artwork. What spirit promises, not the sensual pleasure of the observer, is the locus of the sensual element in art.——Romanticism wanted to equate what appears in the apparition with the artistic. In doing so, it grasped something essential about art, yet narrowed it to a particular, to the praise of a specific and putatively inwardly infinite comportment of art; in this, romanticism imagined that through reflection and thematic content it could grasp art’s ether, whereas it is irresistible precisely because it refuses to let itself be nailed down either as an entity or as a universal concept. Its ether is bound up with particularization; it epitomizes the unsubsumable and as such challenges the prevailing principle of reality: that of exchangeability. What appears is not interchangeable because it does not remain a dull particular for which other particulars could be substituted, nor is it an empty universal that equates everything specific that it comprehends by abstracting the common characteristics. If in empirical reality everything has become fungible, art holds up to the world of everything-for-something-else images of what it itself would be if it were emancipated from the schemata of imposed identification. Yet art plays over into ideology in that, as the image of what is beyond exchange, it suggests that not everything in the world is exchangeable. On behalf of what cannot be exchanged, art must through its form bring the exchangeable to critical self-consciousness. The telos of artworks is a language whose words cannot be located on the spectrum; a language whose words are not imprisoned by a prestabilized universality. An important suspense novel by Leo Perutz concerns the color “drommet red”;7 subartistic genres such as science fiction credulously and therefore powerlessly make a fetish of such themes. Although the nonexisting emerges suddenly in artworks, they do not lay hold of it bodily as with the pass of a magic wand. The nonexisting is mediated to them through fragments of the existing, which they assemble into an apparition. It is not for art to decide by its existence if the nonexisting that appears indeed exists as something appearing or remains semblance. As figures of the existing, unable to summon into existence the nonexisting, artworks draw their authority from the reflection they compel on how they could be the overwhelming image of the nonexisting if it did not exist in itself. Precisely Plato’s ontology, more congenial to positivism than dialectic is, took offense at art’s semblance character, as if the promise made by art awakened doubt in the positive omnipresence of being and idea, for which Plato hoped to find surety in the concept. If the Platonic ideas were existence-in-itself, art would not be needed; the ontologists of antiquity mistrusted art and sought pragmatic control over it because in their innermost being they knew that the hypostatized universal concept is not what beauty promises. Plato’s critique of art is indeed not compelling, because art negates the literal reality of its thematic content, which Plato had indicted as a lie. The exaltation of the concept as idea is allied with the philistine blindness for the central element of art, its form. In spite of all this, however, the blemish of mendacity obviously cannot be rubbed off art; nothing guarantees that it will keep its objective promise. Therefore every theory of art must at the same time be the critique of art. Even radical art is a lie insofar as it fails to create the possible to which it gives rise as semblance. Artworks draw credit from a praxis that has yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their letters of credit.
Artworks are images as apparition, as appearance, and not as a copy. If through the demythologization of the world consciousness freed itself from the ancient shudder, that shudder is permanently reproduced in the historical antagonism of subject and object. The object became as incommensurable to experience, as foreign and frightening, as mana once was. This permeates the image character. It manifests foreignness at the same time that it seeks to make experiential what is thing-like and foreign. For artworks it is incumbent to grasp the universal—which dictates the nexus of the existing and is hidden by the existing—in the particular; it is not for art, through particularization, to disguise the ruling universality of the administered world. Totality is the grotesque heir of mana. The image character of artworks passed over into totality, which appears more truly in the individual than in the syntheses of singularities. By its relation to what in the constitution of reality is not directly accessible to discursive conceptualization and none the less objective, art in the age of enlightenment holds true to enlightenment while provoking it. What appears in art is no longer the ideal, no longer harmony; the locus of its power of resolution is now exclusively in the contradictory and dissonant. Enlightenment was always also the consciousness of the vanishing of what it wanted to seize without any residue of mystery; by penetrating the vanishing—the shudder—enlightenment not only is its critique but salvages it according to the measure of what provokes the shudder in reality itself. This paradox is appropriated by artworks. If it holds true that the subjective rationality of means and ends—which is particular and thus in its innermost irrational—requires spurious irrational enclaves and treats art as such, art is nevertheless the truth of society insofar as in its most authentic products the irrationality of the rational world order is expressed. In art, denunciation and anticipation are syncopated. If apparition illuminates and touches, the image is the paradoxical effort to transfix this most evanescent instant. In art something momentary transcends; objectivation makes the artwork into an instant. Pertinent here is Benjamin’s formulation of a dialectic at a standstill, which he developed in the context of his conception of a dialectical image. If, as images, artworks are the persistence of the transient, they are concentrated in appearance as something momentary. To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill; this may perhaps have nourished the central concept of Lessing’s aesthetics, that of the “pregnant moment.”
Artworks not only produce imagines as something that endures. They become artworks just as much through the destruction of their own imagerie; for this reason art is profoundly akin to explosion. When in Wedekind’s Spring Awakening Moritz Stiefel shoots himself dead with a water pistol and the curtain falls as he says: “Now I won’t ever be going home again,”8 in this instant, as dusk settles over the city in the far distance, the unspeakable melancholy of the river landscape is expressed. Not only are artworks allegories, they are the catastrophic fulfillment of allegories. The shocks inflicted by the most recent artworks are the explosion of their appearance. In them appearance, previously a self-evident apriori of art, dissolves in a catastrophe in which the essence of appearance is for the first time fully revealed: and nowhere perhaps more unequivocally than in Wols’s paintings.9 Even this volatilization of aesthetic transcendence becomes aesthetic, a measure of the degree to which artworks are mythically bound up with their antithesis. In the incineration of appearance, artworks break away in a glare from the empirical world and become the counterfigure of what lives there; art today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates the apocalypse. Closely observed, even tranquil works discharge not so much the pent-up emotions of their makers as the works’ own inwardly antagonistic forces. The result of these forces is bound up with the impossibility of bringing these forces to any equilibrium; their antinomies, like those of knowledge, are unsolvable in the unreconciled world. The instant in which these forces become image, the instant in which what is interior becomes exterior, the outer husk is exploded; their apparition, which makes them an image, always at the same time destroys them as image. In Benjamin’s interpretation, Baudelaire’s fable of the man who lost his aureole describes not just the demise of aura but aura itself; if artworks shine, the objectivation of aura is the path by which it perishes. As a result of its determination as appearance, art bears its own negation embedded in itself as its own telos; the sudden unfolding of appearance disclaims aesthetic semblance. Appearance, however, and its explosion in the artwork are essentially historical. The artwork in itself is not, as historicism would have it—as if its history accords simply with its position in real history—Being absolved from Becoming. Rather, as something that exists, the artwork has its own development. What appears in the artwork is its own inner time; the explosion of appearance blasts open the continuity of this inner temporality. The artwork is mediated to real history by its monadological nucleus. History is the content of artworks. To analyze artworks means no less than to become conscious of the history immanently sedimented in them.
The image character of works, at least in traditional art, is probably a function of the “pregnant moment.” This could be illustrated by Beethoven’s symphonies and above all in many of his sonata movements. Movement at a standstill is eternalized in the instant, and what has been made eternal is annihilated by its reduction to the instant. This marks the sharp difference of the image character of art from how Klages and Jung conceived it: If, after the separation of knowledge into image and sign, thought simply equates the image with truth, the untruth of the schism is in no way corrected but made all the worse, for the image is no less affected by the schism than is the concept. Aesthetic images are no more translatable into concepts than they are “real”; there is no imago without the imaginary; their reality is their historical content, and the images themselves, including the historical images, are not to be hypostatized.——Aesthetic images are not fixed, archaic invariants: Artworks become images in that the processes that have congealed in them as objectivity become eloquent. Bourgeois art-religion of Diltheyian provenance confuses the imagerie of art with its opposite: with the artist’s psychological repository of representations. But this repository is itself an element of the raw material forged into the artwork. The latent processes in artworks, which break through in the instant, are their inner historicity, sedimented external history. The binding character of their objectivation as well as the experiences from which they live are collective. The language of artworks is, like every language, constituted by a collective undercurrent, especially in the case of those works popularly stigmatized as lonely and walled up in the ivory tower; the eloquence of their collective substance originates in their image character and not in the “testimony”—as the cliché goes—that they supposedly wish to express directly to the collective. The specifically artistic achievement is an overarching binding character to be ensnared not thematically or by the manipulation of effects but rather by presenting what is beyond the monad through immersion in the experiences that are fundamental to this bindingness. The result of the work is as much the trajectory it traverses to its imago as it is the imago itself as the goal; it is at once static and dynamic. Subjective experience contributes images that are not images of something, and precisely they are essentially collective; thus and in no other way is art mediated to experience. By virtue of this experiential content,10 and not primarily as a result of fixation or forming as they are usually conceived, artworks diverge from empirical reality: empiria through empirical deformation. This is the affinity of artworks to the dream, however far removed they are from dreams by their law of form. This means nothing less than that the subjective element of artworks is mediated by their being-in-themselves. The latent collectivity of this subjectivity frees the monadological artwork from the accidentalness of its individuation. Society, the determinant of experience, constitutes artworks as their true subject; this is the needed response to the current reproach of subjectivism raised to art by both left and right. At every aesthetic level the antagonism between the unreality of the imago and the reality of the appearing historical content is renewed. The aesthetic images, however, emancipate themselves from mythical images by subordinating themselves to their own unreality; that is what the law of form means. This is the artworks’ methexis in enlightenment. The view of art as politically engaged or didactic regresses back of this stage of enlightenment. Unconcerned with the reality of aesthetic images, this view shuffles away the antithesis of art to reality and integrates art into the reality it opposes. Only those artworks are enlightened that, vigilantly distant from the empirical, evince true consciousness.
That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are: This is their spirit. The determination of artworks by spirit is akin to their determination as phenomenon,11 as something that appears, and not as blind appearance. What appears in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical with it—the nonfactual in their facticity—is their spirit. It makes artworks, things among things, something other than thing. Indeed, artworks are only able to become other than thing by becoming a thing, though not through their localization in space and time but only by an immanent process of reification that makes them self-same, self-identical. Otherwise one could not speak of their spirit, that is, of what is utterly unthinglike. Spirit is not simply spiritus, the breath that animates the work as a phenomenon; spirit is as much the force or the interior of works, the force of their objectivation; spirit participates in this force no less than in the phenomenality that is contrary to it. The spirit of artworks is their immanent mediation, which transforms their sensual moments and their objective arrangement; this is mediation in the strict sense that each and every element in the artwork becomes manifestly its own other. The aesthetic concept of spirit has been severely compromised not only by idealism but also by writings dating from the nascence of radical modernism, among them those of Kandinsky. In his justified revolt against sensualism, which even in Jugendstil accorded a preponderance to sensual satisfaction, Kandinsky abstractly isolated the contrary of this principle and reified it so that it became difficult to distinguish the “You should believe in spirit” from superstition and an arts-and-crafts enthusiasm for the exalted. The spirit in artworks transcends equally their status as a thing and the sensual phenomenon, and indeed only exists insofar as these are among its elements. Put negatively: In artworks nothing is literal, least of all their words; spirit is their ether, what speaks through them, or, more precisely, what makes artworks become script. Although nothing counts in artworks that does not originate in the configuration of their sensual elements—all other spirit in the artworks, particularly injected philosophical thematics and putatively expressed spirit, all discursive ingredients, are material like colors and tones—the sensual in artworks is artistic only if in itself mediated by spirit. Even the sensually most dazzling French works achieve their rank by the involuntary transformation of their sensual elements into bearers of a spirit whose experiential content is melancholic resignation to mortal, sensual existence; never do these works relish their suaveness to the full, for that suaveness is always curtailed by the sense of form. The spirit of artworks is objective, regardless of any philosophy of objective or subjective spirit; this spirit is their own content and it passes judgment over them: It is the spirit of the thing itself that appears through the appearance. Its objectivity has its measure in the power with which it infiltrates the appearance. Just how little the spirit of the work equals the spirit of the artist, which is at most one element of the former, is evident in the fact that spirit is evoked through the artifact, its problems, and its material. Not even the appearance of the artwork as a whole is its spirit, and least of all is it the appearance of the idea purportedly embodied or symbolized by the work; spirit cannot be fixated in immediate identity with its appearance. But neither does spirit constitute a level above or below appearance; such a supposition would be no less of a reification. The locus of spirit is the configuration of what appears. Spirit forms appearance just as appearance forms spirit; it is the luminous source through which the phenomenon radiates and becomes a phenomenon in the most pregnant sense of the word. The sensual exists in art only spiritualized and refracted. This can be elucidated by the category of “critical situation” in important artworks of the past, without the knowledge of which the analysis of works would be fruitless. Just before the beginning of the reprise of the first movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata, which Tolstoy defamed as sensuous, the secondary subdominant produces an immense effect. Anywhere outside of the Kreutzer sonata the same chord would be more or less insignificant. The passage only gains significance through its place and function in the movement. It becomes crucially significant in that through its hic et nunc it points beyond itself and imparts the feeling of a critical situation over what precedes and follows it. This feeling cannot be grasped as an isolated sensual quality, yet through the sensual constellation of two chords at a critical point it becomes as irrefutable as only something sensual can be. In its aesthetic manifestation, spirit is condemned to its locus in the phenomenon just as spirits were once thought to have been condemned to their haunts; if spirit does not appear, the artworks are as negligible as that spirit. Spirit is indifferent to the distinction drawn by the history of ideas between sensual and idealistic art. Insofar as there is sensual art, it is not simply sensual but embodies the spirit of sensuality; Wedekind’s concept of carnal spirit registered this. Spirit, art’s vital element, is bound up with art’s truth content, though without coinciding with it. The spirit of works can be untruth. For truth content postulates something real as its substance, and no spirit is immediately real. With an ever increasing ruthlessness, spirit determines and pulls everything merely sensual and factual in artworks into its own sphere. Artworks thereby become more secular, more opposed to mythology, to the illusion of spirit—even its own spirit—as real. Thus artworks radically mediated by spirit are compelled to consume themselves. Through the determinate negation of the reality of spirit, however, these artworks continue to refer to spirit: They do not feign spirit, rather the force they mobilize against it is spirit’s omnipresence. Spirit today is not imaginable in any other form; art offers its prototype. As tension between the elements of the artwork, and not as an existence sui generis, art’s spirit is a process and thus it is the work itself. To know an artwork means to apprehend this process. The spirit of artworks is not a concept, yet through spirit artworks become commensurable to the concept. By reading the spirit of artworks out of their configurations and confronting the elements with each other and with the spirit that appears in them, critique passes over into the truth of the spirit, which is located beyond the aesthetic configuration. This is why critique is necessary to the works. In the spirit of the works critique recognizes their truth content or distinguishes truth content from spirit. Only in this act, and not through any philosophy of art that would dictate to art what its spirit must be, do art and philosophy converge.
The strict immanence of the spirit of artworks is contradicted on the other hand by a countertendency that is no less immanent: the tendency of artworks to wrest themselves free of the internal unity of their own construction, to introduce within themselves caesuras that no longer permit the totality of the appearance. Because the spirit of the works is not identical with them, spirit breaks up the objective form through which it is constituted; this rupture is the instant of apparition. If the spirit of artworks were literally identical with their sensual elements and their organization, spirit would be nothing but the quintessence of the appearance: The repudiation of this thesis amounts to the rejection of idealism. If the spirit of artworks flashes up in their sensual appearance, it does so only as their negation: Unitary with the phenomenon, spirit is at the same time its other. The spirit of artworks is bound up with their form, but spirit is such only insofar as it points beyond that form. The claim that there is no difference between articulation and the articulated, between immanent form and content, is seductive especially as an apology for modern art, but it is scarcely tenable. This becomes evident in the realization that technological analysis does not grasp the spirit of a work even when this analysis is more than a crude reduction to elements and also emphasizes the artwork’s context and its coherence as well as its real or putative initial constituents; it requires further reflection to grasp that spirit. Only as spirit is art the antithesis of empirical reality as the determinate negation of the existing order of the world. Art is to be construed dialectically insofar as spirit inheres in it, without however art’s possessing spirit as an absolute or spirit’s serving to guarantee an absolute to art. Artworks, however much they may seem to be an entity, crystallize between this spirit and its other. In Hegel’s aesthetics the objectivity of the artwork was conceived as the truth of spirit that has gone over into its own otherness and become identical with this otherness. For Hegel, spirit is at one with totality, even with the aesthetic totality. Certainly spirit in artworks is not an intentional particular but an element like every particular constitutive of an artwork; true, spirit is that particular that makes an artifact art, though there is no spirit without its antithesis. In actual fact, history knows no artworks in which there is a pure identity of the spiritual and the nonspiritual. According to its own concept, spirit in artworks is not pure but rather a function of that out of which it arises. Those works that appear to embody such identity and are content with it are hardly ever the most important ones. Granted, that which in artworks is opposed to spirit is in no way the natural aspect of its materials and objects; rather, it is a limit. Materials and objects are as historically and socially preformed as are their methods; they are definitively transformed by what transpires in the works. What is heterogeneous in artworks is immanent to them: It is that in them that opposes unity and yet is needed by unity if it is to be more than a pyrrhic victory over the unresisting. That the spirit of artworks is not to be equated with their immanent nexus—the arrangement of their sensual elements—is evident in that they in no way constitute that gapless unity, that type of form to which aesthetic reflection has falsely reduced them. In terms of their own structure, they are not organisms; works of the highest rank are hostile to their organic aspect as illusory and affirmative. In all its genres, art is pervaded by intellective elements. It may suffice to note that without such elements, without listening ahead and thinking back, without expectation and memory, without the synthesis of the discrete and separate, great musical forms would never have existed. Whereas to a certain extent these functions may be attributed to sensual immediacy—that is, that particular complexes of elements incorporate qualities of what is antecedent and forthcoming—artworks nevertheless achieve a critical point where this immediacy ends; where they must be “thought,” not in external reflection but on their own terms; the intellective mediation belongs to their own sensual arrangement and determines their perception. If there is something like a common characteristic of great late works, it is to be sought in the breaking through of form by spirit. This is no aberration of art but rather its fatal corrective. Its highest products are condemned to a fragmentariness that is their confession that even they do not possess what is claimed by the immanence of their form.
Objective idealism was the first to stress vigorously the spiritual as against the sensual element of art. It thus equated art’s objectivity with spirit: In thoughtless accord with tradition, idealism identified the sensual with the accidental. Universality and necessity, which for Kant dictate the canon of aesthetic judgment even though they remain problematic, became construable for Hegel by means of the omnipotent category of spirit. The progress of this aesthetics beyond all previous thinking is evident; just as the conception of art was liberated from the last traces of feudal divertissement, its spiritual content, as its principal determination, was at least potentially wrested from the sphere of mere meaning, of intentions. Since Hegel conceives of spirit as what exists in and for itself, it is recognized in art as its substance and not as a thin, abstract layer hovering above it. This is implicit in the definition of beauty as the sensual semblance of the idea. Philosophical idealism, however, was in no way as kindly disposed toward aesthetic spiritualization as the theoretical construction would perhaps indicate. On the contrary, idealism set itself up as the defender of precisely that sensuality that in its opinion was being impoverished by spiritualization; that doctrine of the beautiful as the sensual semblance of the idea was an apology for immediacy as something meaningful and, in Hegel’s own words, affirmative. Radical spiritualization is antithetical to this. This progress had a high price, however, for the spiritual element of art is not what idealist aesthetics calls spirit; rather, it is the mimetic impulse fixated as totality. The sacrifice made by art for this emancipation, whose postulate has been consciously formulated ever since Kant’s dubious theorem that “nothing sensuous is sublime,”12 is presumably already evident in modernity. With the elimination of the principle of representation in painting and sculpture, and of the exploitation of fragments in music, it became almost unavoidable that the elements set free—colors, sounds, absolute configurations of words—came to appear as if they already inherently expressed something. This is, however, illusory, for the elements become eloquent only through the context in which they occur. The superstitious belief in the elementary and unmediated, to which expressionism paid homage and which worked its way down into arts and crafts as well as into philosophy, corresponds to capriciousness and accidentalness in the relation of material and expression in construction. To begin with, the claim that in itself red possesses an expressive value was an illusion, and the putative expressive values of complex, multitonal sounds were in fact predicated on the insistent negation of traditional sounds. Reduced to “natural material” all of this is empty, and theories that mystify it have no more substance than the charlatanism of Farbton experiments. It is only the most recent physicalism that, in music for instance, carries out a reduction literally to elements: This is spiritualization that progressively exorcises spirit. Here the self-destructive aspect of spiritualization becomes obvious. While the metaphysics of spiritualization has become philosophically questionable, the concept is at the same time too universal to do justice to spirit in art. Nevertheless, the artwork continues to assert itself as essentially spiritual even when spirit is for all intents and purposes no longer to be presupposed as a substance. Hegel’s aesthetics does not resolve the question of how it is possible to speak of spirit as a determination of the artwork without hypostatizing its objectivity as absolute identity. Thereby the controversy is in a sense referred back to the Kantian court of justice. In Hegel, the spirit of art was deducible from the system as one level of its manifestation and was, as it were, univocal in potentially each and every genre and artwork, but only by relinquishing the aesthetic attribute of ambiguity. Aesthetics is, however, not applied philosophy but rather in itself philosophical. Hegel’s reflection that “the science of art has greater priority than does art itself”13 is the admittedly problematical product of his hierarchical view of the relation of the domains of spirit to each other. On the other hand, in the face of growing theoretical interest in art, Hegel’s theorem of the primacy of science has its prophetic truth in art’s need of philosophy for the unfolding of its own content. Paradoxically, Hegel’s metaphysics of spirit results in a certain reification of spirit in the artwork through the fixation of its idea. In Kant, however, the ambiguity between the feeling of necessity and the fact that this necessity is not a given but something unresolved is truer to aesthetic experience than is Hegel’s much more modern ambition of knowing art from within rather than in terms of its subjective constitution from without. If this Hegelian philosophical turn is justified, it in no way follows from a systematic subordinating concept but rather from the sphere that is specific to art. Not everything that exists is spirit, yet art is an entity that through its configurations becomes something spiritual. If idealism was able to requisition art for its purposes by fiat, this was because through its own constitution art corresponds to the fundamental conception of idealism, which indeed without Schelling’s model of art would never have developed into its objective form. Art cannot be conceived without this immanently idealistic element, that is, without the objective mediation of all art through spirit; this sets a limit to dull-minded doctrines of aesthetic realism just as those elements encompassed in the name of realism are a constant reminder that art is no twin of idealism.
In no artwork is the element of spirit something that exists; rather, it is something in a process of development and formation. Thus, as Hegel was the first to perceive, the spirit of artworks is integrated into an overarching process of spiritualization: that of the progress of consciousness. Precisely through its progressive spiritualization, through its division from nature, art wants to revoke this division from which it suffers and which inspires it. Spiritualization provided art anew with what had been excluded from it by artistic practice since Greek antiquity: the sensuously unpleasing, the repulsive; Baudelaire virtually made this development art’s program. Hegel aimed at justifying the irresistibility of spiritualization in the theory of what he called the romantic artwork.14 Since then, everything sensually pleasing in art, every charm of material, has been degraded to the level of the preartistic. Spiritualization, as the continuous expansion of the mimetic taboo on art, the indigenous domain of mimesis, works toward art’s dissolution. But being also a mimetic force, spiritualization at the same time works toward the identity of the artwork with itself, thereby excluding the heterogeneous and strengthening its image character. Art is not infiltrated by spirit; rather, spirit follows artworks where they want to go, setting free their immanent language. Still, spiritualization cannot free itself of a shadow that demands its critique; the more substantial spiritualization became in art, the more energetically—in Benjamin’s theory no less than in Beckett’s literary praxis—did it renounce spirit, the idea. However, in that spiritualization is inextricable from the requirement that everything must become form, spiritualization becomes complicitous in the tendency that liquidates the tension between art and its other. Only radically spiritualized art is still possible, all other art is childish; inexorably, however, the childish seems to contaminate the whole existence of art. The sensuously pleasing has come under a double attack. On the one hand, through the artwork’s spiritualization the external must pass by way of spirit and has increasingly become the appearance of the inward. On the other hand, the absorption of resistant material and themes opposes the culinary consumption of art even if, given the general ideological tendency to integrate everything that resists integration, consumption undertakes to swallow everything up whole, however repulsive it might seem. In early impressionism, with Manet, the polemical edge of spiritualization was no less sharp than it was in Baudelaire. The further artworks distance themselves from the childish desire to please, the more what they are in themselves prevails over what they present to even the most ideal viewer, whose reflexes increasingly become a matter of indifference. In the sphere of natural beauty, Kant’s theory of the sublime anticipates the spiritualization that art alone is able to achieve. For Kant, what is sublime in nature is nothing but the autonomy of the spirit in the face of the superior power of sensuous existence, and this autonomy is achieved only in the spiritualized artwork. Admittedly, the spiritualization of art is not a pristine process. Whenever spiritualization is not fully carried out in the concretion of the aesthetic structure, the emancipated spiritual element is degraded to the level of subaltern thematic material. Opposed to the sensuous aspect, spiritualization frequently turns blindly against that aspect’s differentiation, itself something spiritual, and becomes abstract. In its early period, spiritualization is accompanied by a tendency to primitivism and, contrary to sensuous culture, tends toward the barbaric: In their own name the fauvists made this their program. Regression shadows all opposition to affirmative culture. Spiritualization in art must prove its ability to rise above this threat of regression and to recover the suppressed differentiation; otherwise, art deteriorates into a violent act of spirit. All the same, spiritualization is legitimate as the critique of culture through art, which is part of culture and finds no satisfaction in its failure. The function of barbaric traits in modern art changes historically. The good souls who cross themselves in front of reproductions of the Demoiselles d’Avignon or while listening to Schoenberg’s early piano pieces, are without exception more barbaric than the barbarism they fear. As soon as new dimensions emerge in art, they refuse older ones and initially prefer impoverishment and the renunciation of false richness, even of highly developed forms of reaction. The process of spiritualization in art is never linear progress. Its criterion of success is the ability of art to appropriate into its language of form what bourgeois society has ostracized, thereby revealing in what has been stigmatized that nature whose suppression is what is truly evil. The perennial indignation, unchanged by the culture industry, over the ugliness of modern art is, despite the pompous ideals sounded, hostile to spirit; it interprets the ugliness, and especially the unpleasing reproaches, literally rather than as a test of the power of spiritualization and as a cipher of the opposition in which this spiritualization proves itself. Rimbaud’s postulate of the radically modern is that of an art that moves in the tension between spleen et idéal, between spiritualization and obsession with what is most distant from spirit. The primacy of spirit in art and the inroads made by what was previously taboo are two sides of the same coin. It is concerned with what has not yet been socially approved and preformed and thereby becomes a social condition of determinate negation. Spiritualization takes place not through ideas announced by art but by the force with which it penetrates layers that are intentionless and hostile to the conceptual. This is not the least of the reasons why the proscribed and forbidden tempt artistic sensibilities. Spiritualization in new art prohibits it from tarnishing itself any further with the topical preferences of philistine culture: the true, the beautiful, and the good. Into its innermost core what is usually called art’s social critique or engagement, all that is critical or negative in art, has been fused with spirit, with art’s law of form. That these elements are at present stubbornly played off against each other is a symptom of the regression of consciousness.
Theories that argue that art has the responsibility of bringing order—and, indeed, not a classificatory abstract order but one that is sensuously concrete—to the chaotic multiplicity of the appearing or of nature itself, suppress in idealistic fashion the telos of aesthetic spiritualization: to give the historical figures of the natural and repression of the natural their due. Accordingly, the relation of the process of spiritualization to the chaotic is historical. It has often been said, probably first by Karl Kraus, that in society as a whole it is art that should introduce chaos into order rather than the reverse. The chaotic aspects of qualitatively new art are opposed to order—the spirit of order—only at first glance. They are the ciphers of a critique of a spurious second nature: Order is in truth this chaotic. The element of chaos and radical spiritualization converge in the rejection of sleekly polished images of life; in this regard art that has been spiritualized to the extreme, such as that beginning with Mallarmé‘s, and the dream-chaos of surrealism are more closely related than their disciples realize; incidentally, there are cross-links between the young Breton and symbolism, as well as between the early German expressionists and George, whom they challenged. In its relation to the unmastered, spiritualization is antinomical. Because spiritualization always constrains the sensuous elements, its spirit fatefully becomes a being sui generis and thus according to its own immanent tendency spiritualization also works against art. Art’s crisis is accelerated by spiritualization, which opposes selling artworks off as objects of sensuous gratification. Spiritualization becomes a counter-force to the gypsy wagon of wandering actors and musicians, the socially outcast. Yet however deep the compulsion may lie that art divest itself of every trace of being a show, of its ancient deceitfulness in society, art no longer exists when that element has been totally eradicated and yet it is unable to provide any protected arena for that element. No sublimation succeeds that does not guard in itself what it sublimates. Whether or not the spiritualization of art is capable of this will decide if art survives or if Hegel’s prophecy of the end of art will indeed be fulfilled, a prophecy that, in the world such as it has become, amounts to the thoughtless and—in the detestable sense—realistic confirmation and reproduction of what is. In this regard, the rescue of art is eminently political, but it is also as uncertain in itself as it is threatened by the course of the world.
Insight into the growing spiritualization of art, by virtue of the development of its concept no less than by its relation to society, collides with a dogma that runs throughout bourgeois aesthetics: that of art’s intuitability.15 Already in Hegel spiritualization and intuitability could no longer be reconciled, and the first somber prophecies on the future of art were the result. Kant had already formulated the norm of intuitability in section 9 of the Critique of Judgment: “[T]he beautiful is that which pleases universally without a concept.”16 The “without a concept” may be said to converge with the quality of art’s pleasingness as dispensation from the labor and exertion imposed—and not only since Hegel’s philosophy—by the concept. Whereas art long ago relegated the ideal of pleasingness to musty antiquity, the theory of art has not been able to renounce the concept of intuitability, a monument to old-fashioned aesthetic hedonism, even though every modern artwork—by now even the older works—demands the labor of observation with which the doctrine of intuitability wanted to dispense. The advancement of intellective mediation into the structure of artworks, where this mediation must to a large extent perform what was once the role of pregiven forms, constrains the sensuously unmediated whose quintessence was the pure intuitability of artworks. Yet bourgeois consciousness entrenches itself in the sensuously unmediated because it senses that only its intuitability reflects a gaplessness and roundedness of artworks that then, in whatever circuitous fashion, is attributed to the reality to which the artworks respond. If, however, art were totally without the element of intuition, it would be theory, whereas art is instead obviously impotent in itself when, emulating science, it ignores its own qualitative difference from the discursive concept; precisely art’s spiritualization, as the primacy of its procedures, distances art from naïve conceptuality and the commonsense idea of comprehensibility. Whereas the norm of intuitability accentuates the opposition of art to discursive thinking, it suppresses nonconceptual mediation, suppresses the nonsensuous in the sensuous structure, which by constituting the structure already fractures it and puts it beyond the intuitability in which it appears. The norm of intuitability, which denies what is implicitly categorial in artworks, reifies intuitability itself as opaque and impenetrable, makes it in terms of its pure form into a copy of the petrified world, always alert for anything that might disturb the harmony the work purportedly reflects. In actuality, the concretion of artworks, in the apparition that ripples disconcertingly through them, goes far beyond the intuitability that is habitually held up against the universality of the concept and that stands in accord with the ever-same. The more inexorably the world is ruled throughout, ever-the-same, by the universal, the more easily the rudiments of the particular are mistaken for immediacy and confused with concretion, even though their contingency is in fact the stamp of abstract necessity. Artistic concretion is, however, neither pure existence, conceptless individualization, nor that form of mediation by the universal known as a type. In terms of its own determination, no authentic artwork is typical. Lukács’s thinking is art-alien when he contrasts typical, “normal” works with atypical and therefore irrelevant ones. If he were right, artworks would be no more than a sort of anticipation of a science yet to be completed. The patently idealist assertion that the artwork of the present represents the unity of the universal and the particular is completely dogmatic. The assertion, a surreptitious borrowing of the theological doctrine of the symbol, is given the lie by the a priori fissure between the mediate and the immediate, from which no mature artwork has yet been able to escape; if this fissure is concealed rather than that the work immerses itself in it, the work is lost. It is precisely radical art that, while refusing the desideratum of realism, stands in a relation of tension to the symbol. It remains to be demonstrated that symbols or metaphors in modern art make themselves progressively independent of their symbolic function and thereby contribute to the constitution of a realm that is antithetical to the empirical world and its meanings. Art absorbs symbols in such a fashion that they are no longer symbolic; advanced artists have themselves carried out the critique of the character of the symbol. The ciphers and characters of modern art are signs that have forgotten themselves and become absolute. Their infiltration into the aesthetic medium and their refusal of intentionality are two aspects of the same process. The transformation of dissonance into compositional “material” is to be interpreted analogously. In literature, this transformation can be followed relatively early in the relationship between Strindberg and late Ibsen, where Strindberg is already anticipated. The increasing literalization of what was previously symbolic shockingly endows the spiritual element, which was emancipated through second reflection, with an independence that is mortally eloquent in the occult layer of Strindberg’s work and becomes productive in the break from any form of replicability. That none of his works are a symbol points up that in none of them does the absolute reveal itself; otherwise art would be neither semblance nor play but rather something factually real. Given their constitutive refractedness, pure intuitability cannot be attributed to artworks. Art is preemptively mediated by its as-if character. If it were completely intuitable, it would become part of the empirical world that it resists. Its mediatedness, however, is not an abstract apriori but involves every concrete aesthetic element; even the most sensuous elements are always unintuitable by virtue of their relation to the spirit of the work. No analysis of important works could possibly prove their pure intuitability, for they are all pervaded by the conceptual. This is literally true in language and indirectly true even in the non-conceptual medium of music, where regardless of a work’s psychological genesis the stupid and the intelligent can be explicitly distinguished. The desideratum of intuitability wants to conserve the mimetic element of art while remaining blind to the fact that this element survives only through its antithesis, the works’ rational control over everything heterogeneous to them. Shorn of its antithesis, intuitability would become a fetish. In the aesthetic domain the mimetic impulse affects even the mediation, the concept, that which is not present. The concept is as indispensably intermixed in art as it is in language, though in art the concept becomes qualitatively other than collections of characteristics shared by empirical objects. The intermixture of concepts is not identical with asserting the conceptuality of art; art is no more concept than it is pure intuition, and it is precisely thereby that art protests against their separation. The intuitive element in art differs from sensuous perception because in art the intuitive element always refers to its spirit. Art is the intuition of what is not intuitable; it is akin to the conceptual without the concept. It is by way of concepts, however, that art sets free its mimetic, nonconceptual layer. Whether by reflection or unconsciously, modern art has undermined the dogma of intuitability. What remains true in the doctrine of intuitability is that it emphasizes the element of the incommensurable, that which in art is not exhausted by discursive logic, the sine qua non of all manifestations of art. Art militates against the concept as much as it does against domination, but for this opposition it, like philosophy, requires concepts. Art’s so-called intuitability is an aporetic construction: With a pass of the magic wand it means to reduce to identity what is internally disparate and in process in artworks, and therefore this construction glances off artworks, none of which result in such identity. The word Anschaulichkeit [intuitability], itself borrowed from the theory of discursive knowledge, where it stipulates a formed content, testifies to the rational element in art as much as it conceals that element by dividing off the phenomenal element and hypostatizing it. Evidence of the aporia of the concept of aesthetic intuition is provided by the Critique of Judgment. The “Analytic of the Beautiful” concerns the “Elements of the Judgment of Taste.” Of these Kant says in a footnote to section 1: “I have used the logical functions of judging to help me find the elements that judgment takes into consideration when it reflects (since even a judgment of taste still has reference to the understanding). I have examined the element of quality first, because an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned with it first.”17 This flagrantly contradicts the thesis that beauty pleases universally without a concept. It is admirable that Kant’s aesthetics let this contradiction stand and expressly reflected on it without explaining it away. On the one hand, Kant treats the judgment of taste as a logical function and thus attributes this function to the aesthetic object to which the judgment would indeed need to be adequate; on the other hand, the artwork is said to present itself “without a concept,” a mere intuition, as if it were simply extralogical. This contradiction, however, is in fact inherent in art itself, as the contradiction between its spiritual and mimetic constitution. The claim to truth, which involves something universal and which each artwork registers, is incompatible with pure intuitability. Just how fateful the insistence on the exclusively intuitable character of art has been is obvious from its consequences. In Hegel’s terms, it serves the abstract separation of intuition and spirit. The more the work is said to be purely identical with its intuitability, the more its spirit is reified as an “idea,” as an immutable content back of its appearance. The spiritual elements that are withdrawn from the structure of the phenomenon are hypostatized as its idea. The result usually is that intentions are exalted as the work’s content, while correlatively intuition is allotted to sensuous satisfaction. The official assertion of artworks’ common unity could, however, be refuted in each of those so-called classical works on which the assertion is founded: Precisely in these works the semblance of unity is what has been conceptually mediated. The dominant model is philistine: Appearance is to be purely intuitable and the content purely conceptual, corresponding to the rigid dichotomy between freedom and labor. No ambivalence is tolerated. This is the polemical point of attack for the break from the ideal of intuitability. Because aesthetic appearance cannot be reduced to its intuition, the content of artworks cannot be reduced to the concept either. The false synthesis of spirit and sensuousness in aesthetic intuition conceals their no less false, rigid polarity; the aesthetics of intuition is founded on the model of a thing: In the synthesis of the artifact the tension, its essence, gives way to a fundamental repose.
Intuitability is no characteristica universalis of art. It is intermittent. Aestheticians have hardly taken notice of this; one of the rare exceptions is Theodor Meyer, now virtually forgotten. He showed that there is no sensuous intuition, no set of images, that corresponds to what literature says; on the contrary, its concretion consists in its linguistic form rather than in the highly problematic optical representation that it supposedly provokes.18 Literature does not require completion through sensuous representation; it is concrete in language and through it, it is suffused with the nonsensuous, in accordance with the oxymoron of nonsensuous intuition. Even in concept-alien art there is a nonsensuous element at work. Theories that deny this element for the sake of their thema probandum join forces with that philistinism that is always ready to dub the music it finds cozy a “feast for the ears.” Precisely in its great and emphatic forms, music embodies complexes that can only be understood through what is sensuously not present, through memory or expectation, complexes that hold such categorical determinations embedded in their own structure. It is impossible, for instance, to interpret as a mere continuation the at times distant relations between the development of the first movement of the Eroica and the exposition, and the extreme contrast to this exposition established by the new theme: The work is intellective in itself, without in any way being embarrassed about it and without the integration of the work thereby impinging on its law of form. The arts seem to have moved so far in the direction of their unity in art that the situation is no different in the visual arts. The spiritual mediation of the artwork, by which it contrasts with the empirical world, cannot be realized without the inclusion of the discursive dimension. If the artwork were in a rigorous sense intuitable, it would be permanently relegated to the contingency of what exists sensuously and immediately, to which the artwork in fact opposes its own type of logicity. Its quality is determined by whether its concretion divests itself of its contingency by virtue of its integral elaboration. The puristic and to this extent rationalistic separation of intuition from the conceptual serves the dichotomy of rationality and sensuousness that society perpetrates and ideologically enjoins. Art would need rather to work in effigy against this dichotomy through the critique that it objectively embodies; through art’s restriction to sensuousness this dichotomy is only confirmed. The untruth attacked by art is not rationality but rationality’s rigid opposition to the particular; if art separates out intuitability and bestows it with the crown of the particular, then art endorses that rigidification, valorizing the detritus of societal rationality and thereby serving to distract from this rationality. The more gaplessly a work seeks to be intuitable and thus fulfill aesthetic precept, the more its spiritual element is reified, χωρíς from the appearance and isolated from the forming of apparition. Behind the cult of intuitability lurks the philistine convention of the body that lies stretched out on the sofa while the soul soars to the heights: Aesthetic appearance is to be effortless relaxation, the reproduction of labor power, and spirit is reduced handily to what is called the work’s “message.” Constitutively a protest against the claim of the discursive to totality, artworks therefore await answer and solution and inevitably summon forth concepts. No work has ever achieved the indifference of pure intuitability and binding universality that is presupposed a priori by traditional aesthetics. The doctrine of intuition is false because it phenomenologically attributes to art what it does not fulfill. The criterion of artworks is not the purity of intuition but rather the profundity with which they carry out the tension with the intellective elements that inhere in them. Nevertheless, the taboo on the nonintuitive elements of artworks is not without justification. What is conceptual in artworks involves judgment, and to judge is contrary to the artwork. Although judgments may occur in it, the work itself does not make judgments, perhaps because ever since Attic tragedy the work has been a hearing. If the discursive element takes primacy, the relation of the artwork to what is external to it becomes all too unmediated and the work accommodates itself even at those points where, as in Brecht, it takes pride in standing in opposition to reality: The work actually becomes positivistic. The artwork must absorb into its immanent nexus its discursive components in a movement that is contrary to the externally directed, apophantic movement that releases the discursive. The language of advanced lyrical poetry achieves this, and that is how it reveals its specific dialectic. It is evident that artworks can heal the wounds that abstraction inflicts on them only through the heightening of abstraction, which impedes the contamination of the conceptual ferment with empirical reality: The concept becomes a “parameter.” Indeed, because art is essentially spiritual, it cannot be purely intuitive. It must also be thought: art itself thinks. The prevalence of the doctrine of intuition, which contradicts all experience of artworks, is a reflex to social reification. It amounts to the establishment of a special sphere of immediacy that is blind to the thing-like dimensions of artworks, which are constitutive of what in art goes beyond the thing as such. Not only do artworks, as Heidegger pointed out in opposition to idealism,19 have things that function as their bearers—their own objectivation makes them into things of a second order. What they have become in themselves—their inner structure, which follows the work’s immanent logic—cannot be reached by pure intuition; in the work what is available to intuition is mediated by the structure of the work, in contrast to which the intuitable is a matter of indifference. Every experience of artworks must go beyond what is intuitable in them. If they were nothing but intuitable they would be of subaltern importance, in Wagner’s words: an effect without a cause. Reification is essential to artworks and contradicts their essence as that which appears; their quality of being a thing is no less dialectical than their intuitable element. But the objectivation of the artwork is not—as was thought by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who no longer entirely understood Hegel—unitary with its material; rather, its objectivation is the result of the play of forces in the work and related to its thing-character as an act of synthesis. There is some analogy here to the double character of the Kantian thing as the transcendent thing-in-itself and as an object subjectively constituted through the law of its phenomena. For artworks are things in space and time; whether this holds for hybrid musical forms such as improvisation, once extinct and now resuscitated, is hard to decide; in artworks the element that precedes their fixation as things constantly breaks through the thing-character. Yet even in improvisation much speaks for their status as a thing: their appearance in empirical time and, even more important, the fact that they demonstrate objectivated, mostly conventional patterns. For insofar as artworks are works they are things in themselves, objectified by virtue of their particular law of form. That in drama not the text but the performance is taken to be what matters, just as in music not the score but the living sound is so regarded, testifies to the precariousness of the thing-character in art, which does not, however, thereby release the artwork from its participation in the world of things. For scores are not only almost always better than the performances, they are more than simply instructions for them; they are indeed the thing itself. Incidentally, both concepts of the artwork as thing are not necessarily distinct. The realization of music was, at least until recently, the interlinear version of the score. The fixation through print or scores is not external to the work; only through them does the work become autonomous from its genesis: That explains the primacy of the text over its performance. What is not fixated in art is—for the most part only illusorily—closer to the mimetic impulse but usually below—not above—the fixated, a vestige of an obsolete and usually regressive practice. The most recent rebellion against the fixation of artworks as reification, for instance the replacement of the mensural system with neumic-graphic imitations of musical gestures, is by comparison still significative and simply reification of an older level. Of course this rebellion would not be as extensive if the artwork did not suffer from its immanent condition as a thing. Only a philistine and stubborn faith in artists could overlook the complicity of the artwork’s thing-character with social reification and thus with its untruth: the fetishization of what is in itself a process as a relation between elements. The artwork is at once process and instant. Its objectivation, a condition of aesthetic autonomy, is also rigidification. The more the social labor sedimented in the artwork is objectified and fully formed, the more the work echoes hollowly and becomes alien to itself.
Notes
1 Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans.Harry Zohn (New York, 1968), pp. 155–200.
2 See Bertolt Brecht, “Die Liebenden,” in Gedichte II (Frankfurt, 1960), p. 210.
3 [“authentische Kunstwerke”: Whenever Adorno, the author of Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowsky and Frederic Will, Evanston, 1976) and archcritic of Heideggerian “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit), uses the concept of authenticity in a positive sense, he always employs the Greek/French loan word “Authentizität” rather than the German root word “Eigentlichkeit” or the adjective “edit.”—trans.]
4 See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), vol. 1, p. 31: “Man does this [that is, he transposes the external world on which he impresses the seal of his inferiority—trans.] in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of himself.”
5 [Although the word “apparition” exists in German as “Apparition,” Adorno throughout uses the French concept and makes this obvious in the German by not capitalizing the first letter.—trans.]
6 [“der fruchtbare Moment”: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s concept of the highest moment of aesthetic tension, which he developed in his interpretation of the Laocöon sculpture. See his Laocoön, trans. Edward McCormick (Baltimore, 1962)—trans.]
7 See Leo Perutz, Der Meister des jüngsten Tages (Munich, 1924), p. 199.
8 [See Frank Wedekind, Spring Awakening, trans. Tom Osborne (London, 1969), p. 52.—trans.]
9 [Wols is the pseudonym of Wolfgang Schulze (1913–1951), a German expatriot and a key figure of French art informelle.—trans.]
10 [“Erfahrungsgehalt”: This is a central concept of Adorno’s philosophy, and it iseasily lost track of in translation. See Adorno, “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber (Boston, 1993), pp. 53ff.—trans.]
11 [“Phänomen”; “Phenomenon” is here implicitly contrasted with noumenon.—trans.]
12 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 97.
13 Hermann Lotze, Geschichte der Aesthetik in Deutschland (Munich, 1868), p.190.
14 As in the whole of his philosophy, Hegel’s doctrine of the artwork as spiritual, which he justly conceived historically, is the reflexive fulfillment of Kant’s thought. Kant’s “disinterested satisfaction” implies recognition of the aesthetic as spiritual through the negation of its own opposite.
15 [“Anschaulichkeit,” the character of an object such that it is possible or necessary to enter into immediate, nonconceptual contact with it. Etymologically, this immediacy of relationship is modeled on vision. See M. Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (London, 1992).—trans.]
16 Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 61.
17 Ibid., p. 43.
18 See Theodor A. Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie (Leipzig, 1901).
19 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, and Thought (New York, 1971), pp. 15–88.