Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical. In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accommodate discursive thought, whose criteria they nevertheless regularly disappoint. They most resemble the form of a syllogism and its prototype in empirical thought. That in the temporal arts one moment is said to follow from another is hardly metaphorical; that one event is said to be caused by another at the very least allows the empirical causal relation to shimmer through. It is not only in the temporal arts that one moment is to issue from another; the visual arts have no less a need of logical consistency. The obligation of artworks to become self-alike, the tension into which this obligation brings them with the substratum of their immanent contract, and ultimately the traditional desideratum of homeostasis require the principle of logical consistency: This is the rational aspect of artworks. Without its immanent necessity no work would gain objectivation; this necessity is art’s antimimetic impulse, one borrowed externally, which unites the work as an interior. The logic of art, a paradox for extra-aesthetic logic, is a syllogism without concept or judgment. It draws consequences from phenomena that have already been spiritually mediated and to this extent made logical. Its logical process transpires in a sphere whose premises and givens are extralogical. The unity that artworks thereby achieve makes them analogous to the logic of experience, however much their technical procedures and their elements and the relation between them may distance them from those of practical empirical reality. The affiliation with mathematics that art established in the age of its dawning emancipation and that today, in the age of the dissolution of its idioms, once again emerges as predominant, marked art’s emergent self-consciousness from its dimension of logical consistency. Indeed, on the basis of its formalism, mathematics is itself aconceptual; its signs are not signs of something, and it no more formulates existential judgments than does art; its aesthetic quality has often been noted. Of course, art deceives itself when, encouraged or intimidated by science, it hypostatizes its dimension of logical consistency and directly equates its own forms with those of mathematics, unconcerned that its forms are always opposed to those of the latter. Still, it is art’s logicality that among its powers constitutes it most emphatically as second nature, as a being sui generis. It thwarts every effort to comprehend artworks on the basis of their effect: By way of their logical character, artworks are determined objectively in themselves without regard to their reception. Yet their logicality is not to be taken à la lettre. This is the point of Nietzsche’s comment—though admittedly it amateurishly underestimates the logicality of art—that in artworks everything only appears as if it must be as it is and could not be otherwise. The logic of artworks demonstrates that it cannot be taken literally, in that it grants every particular event and resolution an incomparably greater degree of latitude than logic otherwise does; it is impossible to ignore the compelling hint of a relation with the logic of dreams in which, comparably, a feeling of coercive logical consistency is bound up with an element of contingency. Through its retreat from empirical goals, logic in art acquires a shadowy quality of being at once binding and slack. Logic is all the less constrained the more obliquely preestablished styles provide the semblance of logicality and unburden the particular work of the need for its manufacture. Whereas logicality rules without the slightest misgiving in works commonly called classical, they nevertheless provide several, sometimes a plethora, of internal possibilities, just as thoroughbass music and commedia dell’arte and other preestablished forms permit improvisation more securely than do later fully organized and individualized works. Although superficially these individualized works are less logical and less transparently modeled according to quasi-conceptual schemata and formulas, internally they are far more severely concerned with logical consistency. However, while the logicality of artworks intensifies, while its claims become ever more literal—to the point of parody in totally determined works deduced from a minimum of basic material—the “as if” of this logicality is laid bare. What today seems absurd in art is the negative function of unbridled logical consistency. Art is thus made to pay for the fact that conclusions cannot be drawn without concept and judgment.
This figurative rather than real logic of art is difficult to distinguish from causality because in art there is no difference between purely logical forms and those that apply empirically; in art the archaic undifferentiatedness of logic and causality hibernates. Schopenhauer’s principia individuationis—space, time, and causality—make a second, refracted appearance in art, in the sphere of what is most individuated. Their defraction, a necessary implication of art’s illusoriness, endows art with its aspect of freedom. It is through this freedom, through the intervention of spirit, that the sequence and nexus of events is established. In the undifferentiatedness of spirit and blind necessity, art’s logic is reminiscent of the strict lawfulness that governs the succession of real events in history. Schoenberg was known to speak of music as the history of themes. Crude unmediated space, time, and causality no more exist in art than, in keeping with the idealist philosophem, as a sphere totally apart, art exists beyond their determinations; they play into art as from a distance and in it are immediately transformed into something other. Thus, for example, there is no mistaking time as such in music, yet it is so remote from empirical time that, when listening is concentrated, temporal events external to the musical continuum remain external to it and indeed scarcely touch it; if a musician interrupts a passage to repeat it or to pick it up at an earlier point, musical time remains indifferent, unaffected; in a certain fashion it stands still and only proceeds when the course of the music is continued. Empirical time disturbs musical time, if at all, only by dint of its heterogeneity, not because they flow together. All the same, the formative categories of art are not simply qualitatively distinct from those external to them but, in spite of the latters’ modification, incorporate their quality in a qualitatively other medium. If in external existence these forms are fundamental to the control of nature, in art they are themselves controlled and freely disposed over. Through the domination of the dominating, art revises the domination of nature to the core. In contrast to the semblance of inevitability that characterizes these forms in empirical reality, art’s control over them and over their relation to materials makes their arbitrariness in the empirical world evident. As a musical composition compresses time, and as a painting folds spaces into one another, so the possibility is concretized that the world could be other than it is. Space, time, and causality are maintained, their power is not denied, but they are divested of their compulsiveness. Paradoxically, it is precisely to the extent that art is released from the empirical world by its formal constituents that it is less illusory, less deluded by subjectively dictated lawfulness, than is empirical knowledge. That the logic of artworks is a derivative of discursive logic and not identical with it, is evident in that art’s logic—and here art converges with dialectical thought—suspends its own rigor and is ultimately able to make this suspension its idea; this is the aim of the many forms of disruption in modern art. Artworks that manifest a tendency toward integral construction disavow their logical rigor with what is heterogeneous to it: the indelible trace of mimesis, on which construction depends. The autonomous law of form of artworks protests against logicality even though logicality itself defines form as a principle. If art had absolutely nothing to do with logicality and causality, it would forfeit any relation to its other and would be an a priori empty activity; if art took them literally, it would succumb to the spell; only by its double character, which provokes permanent conflict, does art succeed at escaping the spell by even the slightest degree. Conclusions drawn without concept and judgment are from the outset divested of any apodicity and insist instead on a communication between objects that is easily masked by concept and judgment, whereas aesthetic consistency preserves this communication as the affinity of elements that remain unidentified. The oneness of aesthetic constituents with those of cognition is, however, the unity of spirit and thus the unity of reason; this Kant demonstrated in his theory of aesthetic purposefulness. If Schopenhauer’s thesis of art as an image of the world once over bears a kernel of truth, then it does so only insofar as this second world is composed out of elements that have been transposed out of the empirical world in accord with Jewish descriptions of the messianic order as an order just like the habitual order but changed in the slightest degree. This second world, however, is directed negatively against the first; it is the destruction of what is simulated by familiar senses rather than the assemblage of the membra disjecta of existence. There is nothing in art, not even in the most sublime, that does not derive from the world; nothing that remains untransformed. All aesthetic categories must be defined both in terms of their relation to the world and in terms of art’s repudiation of that world. In both, art is knowledge, not only as a result of the return of the mundane world and its categories, which is art’s bond to what is normally called an object of knowledge, but perhaps even more importantly as a result of the implicit critique of the nature-dominating ratio, whose rigid determinations art sets in movement by modifying them. It is not through the abstract negation of the ratio, nor through a mysterious, immediate eidetic vision of essences, that art seeks justice for the repressed, but rather by revoking the violent act of rationality by emancipating rationality from what it holds to be its inalienable material in the empirical world. Art is not synthesis, as convention holds; rather, it shreds synthesis by the same force that affects synthesis. What is transcendent in art has the same tendency as the second reflection of nature-dominating spirit.
The comportment of artworks reflects the violence and domination of empirical reality by more than analogy. The closure of artworks, as the unity of their multiplicity, directly transfers the nature-dominating comportment to something remote from its reality; this is perhaps because the principle of self-preservation points beyond the possibility of its realization in the external world, there sees itself confuted by death, and is unable to reconcile itself to that; autonomous art is a work of contrived immortality, utopia and hubris in one; scrutinized from another planet they would all seem Egyptian. The purposiveness of artworks, through which they assert themselves, is only a shadow of the purposiveness external to them. This they resemble only in their form, through which, from their perspective at least, they are protected from decomposition. Kant’s paradoxical formulation that the beautiful is what is purposive without a purpose, expresses—in the language of subjective transcendental philosophy—the heart of the matter with a fidelity that never ceases to distance the Kantian theorems from the methodological nexus in which they appear. For Kant artworks were purposive as dynamic totalities in which all particular elements exist for the sake of their purpose—the whole—just as the whole exists for the sake of its purpose, the fulfillment or redemption through the negation of its elements. At the same time, artworks were purposeless because they had stepped out of the means-ends relation of empirical reality. Remote from reality, the purposiveness of artworks has something chimerical about it. The relation of aesthetic to real purposiveness was historical: The immanent purposiveness of artworks was of external origin. In many instances, collectively fashioned aesthetic forms are once-purposive forms that have become purposeless. This is notably the case with ornaments, which drew heavily on mathematical-astronomical science. The course of this development was marked out by the origin of artworks in magic: They shared in a praxis meant to influence nature, separated from this praxis in the early history of rationality, and renounced the deception of any real influence. What is specific to artworks—their form—can never, as the sedimentation of content [Inhalt] fully disown its origin. Aesthetic success is essentially measured by whether the formed object is able to awaken the content [Inhalt] sedimented in the form. In general, then, the hermeneutics of artworks is the translation of their formal elements into content [Inhalt]. This content [Inhalt] does not, however, fall directly to art, as if this content only needed to be gleaned from reality. Rather, it is constituted by way of a countermovement. Content [Inhalt] makes its mark in those works that distance themselves from it. Artistic progress, to the degree that it can be cogently spoken of, is the epitome of this movement. Art gains its content [Inhalt] through the latter’s determinate negation. The more energetic the negation, the more artworks organize themselves according to an immanent purposiveness, and precisely thereby do they mold themselves progressively to what they negate. The Kantian conception of a teleology of art modeled on that of organisms was rooted in the unity of reason, ultimately in the unity of divine reason as it is manifest in things-in-themselves. This idea had to go. All the same, the teleological determination of art guards its truth beyond that trivial notion rejected in the course of artistic development that the artist’s fantasy and consciousness confer organic unity on his works. Art’s purposiveness, free of any practical purpose, is its similarity to language; its being “without a purpose” is its nonconceptuality, that which distinguishes art from significative language. Artworks move toward the idea of a language of things only by way of their own language, through the organization of their disparate elements; the more they are syntactically articulated in themselves, the more eloquent they become in all their elements. The aesthetic concept of teleology has its objectivity in the language of art. Traditional aesthetics misses the mark because, in keeping with a general parti pris, it prejudges the relation of the whole and the part in favor of the whole. In contrast, dialectics does not give any instructions for the treatment of art, but inheres in it. The reflective power of judgment—which cannot take the subordinating concept as its starting point nor, consequently, the artwork as a whole, for it is never “given,” and which follows the individual elements and goes beyond them by virtue of their own need—subjectively traces the movement of artworks in themselves. By the force of their dialectic, artworks escape myth, the blind and abstractly dominating nexus of nature.
Incontestably the quintessence of all elements of logicality, or, more broadly, coherence in artworks, is form. It is astonishing, however, how little aesthetics reflected on the category of form, how much it, the distinguishing aspect of art, has been assumed to be unproblematically given. The difficulty in getting a grasp on it is in part due to the entwinement of all aesthetic form with content [Inhalt]; form is not only to be conceived in opposition to content but through it if aesthetics is not to fall prey to an abstractness that habitually makes it the ally of reactionary art. Indeed, the concept of form has been the blind spot of aesthetics right up to Valéry, because everything about art is so inextricably tied up with it that the concept defies isolation. As little as art is to be defined by any other element, it is simply identical with form. Every other element can be negated in the concept of form, even aesthetic unity, the idea of form that first made the wholeness and autonomy of the artwork possible. In highly developed modern works, form tends to dissociate unity, either in the interest of expression or to criticize art’s affirmative character. Long before the ubiquitous crisis, open forms existed. In Mozart the unity of the work was occasionally playfully tested by its relaxation. By juxtaposing relatively disjointed or contrasting elements, Mozart, the composer who is praised above all others for the rigor of his form, masterfully juggles the concept of form itself. He is so sure of its strength that he effectively lets go the reins and, on the basis of the security of the construction itself, gives the lead to centrifugal forces. For Mozart, the heir of an older tradition, the idea of unity as form is still so unshaken that it is able to bear the utmost pressure, whereas for Beethoven, in whom unity lost its substantiality under the nominalist assault, there is a need to assert unity far more strictly; unity preforms the multiplicitous contents a priori and thus tames them all the more triumphantly. Today artists would like to do away with unity altogether, though with the irony that those works that are supposedly open and incomplete necessarily regain something comparable to unity insofar as this openness is planned. For the most part, theory equates form with symmetry or repetition. There is no reason to deny that, if one wanted to reduce the concept of form to invariants, equality and repetition could be lined up in opposition to inequality, that is, to contrast and development. But little would be gained by setting up such categories. Musical analyses, for example, show that even in those works most diffuse and hostile to repetition, similarities are involved, that many parts correspond with others in terms of shared, distinguishing characteristics, and that it is only through the relation to these elements of identity that the sought-after nonidentity is achieved; without sameness of any sort, chaos itself would prevail as something ever-same. Indeed, the distinction between repetition that is superficial, heteronomously decreed, and incompletely mediated by specific details and, on the other hand, the ineluctable determination of the unlike by a degree of sameness, is a distinction that decisively outweighs all invariance. If this distinction is ignored by a concept of form sympathetic with invariance, the result is an affinity for that bestial phraseology that indulges in expressions like “consummate form.” Because form is the central concept of aesthetics and is always presupposed by it in the givenness of art, aesthetics must gather all its forces to think the concept through. If aesthetics is not to be trapped in tautologies it must gain access to what is not simply immanent in the concept of form, yet the concept of form refuses to grant a voice to anything aesthetic that claims independence from it. An aesthetics of form is possible only if it breaks through aesthetics as the aesthetics of the totality of what stands under the spell of form. Whether art is in any way still possible depends precisely on this. The concept of form marks out art’s sharp antithesis to an empirical world in which art’s right to exist is uncertain. Art has precisely the same chance of survival as does form, no better. The participation of form in the crisis of art becomes evident in statements like those of Lukács, who said that in modern art the importance of form has been greatly overestimated.1 Evident in this philistine call to arms is a discontent with art of which Lukács the cultural conservative is unconscious, as well as a concept of form that is inadequate to art. To hit upon the idea that form has been overestimated in art, one must fail to recognize that form is essential to art, that it mediates content [Inhalt]. Form is the artifacts’ coherence, however self-antagonistic and refracted, through which each and every successful work separates itself from the merely existing. Lukács’s unreflected concept of form, with its hue and cry over formalism, sets form in opposition to the content of poems, compositions, and paintings as an organization that can simply be lifted off the work. Form is thereby conceived as something superimposed, subjectively dictated, whereas it is substantial only when it does no violence to what is formed and emerges from it. Indeed, what is formed, the content [Inhalt] does not amount to objects external to form; rather, the content is mimetic impulses that are drawn into the world of images that is form. The innumerable and pernicious equivocations of the concept of form can be traced to its ubiquity, which produces the temptation to call everything and anything that is artistic in art form. In any case, the concept of form is fruitless if nothing more is meant than the trivial generality that the artwork’s “material”—whether this means intentional objects or materials such as tones or colors—mediates instead of simply being present. It is just as inapt to define form as it is to define what is conferred by the subject and bears the stamp of that subject. What can rightly be called form in artworks fulfills the desiderata of that on which subjective activity takes place just as much as it is the product of subjective activity. In artworks, form is aesthetic essentially insofar as it is an objective determination. Its locus is precisely there where the work frees itself from being simply a product of subjectivity. Form is thus not to be sought in the arrangement of pregiven elements, as the theory of pictorial composition held it to be prior to being debunked by impressionism; that nevertheless so many artworks, including precisely those that are applauded as classical, prove under careful scrutiny to be just such an arrangement is a fatal objection to traditional art. There is absolutely no reducing the concept of form to mathematical relations, as was envisioned by aesthetics of Zeising’s era.2 Such relations—whether explicitly invoked as principles during the Renaissance or latently coupled with mystical ideas, as perhaps occasionally in Bach—play a role as technical procedures, yet they are not form itself but rather its vehicle, the means by which the newly liberated subject, dependent strictly on its own resources, preforms otherwise chaotic and undifferentiated material. Just how little mathematical organization and everything related to it coincides with aesthetic form is audible in the recent history of twelve-tone technique, which in fact preforms the material by the establishment of numerical relations of permutated rows in which no tone may occur before the other tone has preceded it. Immediately it became evident that this preformation did not constitute form in the fashion expected by Erwin Stein’s program, which not by accident carried the title New Principles of Form.3 Schoenberg himself distinguished almost mechanically between the preparation of twelve-tone material and composition, and on account of this distinction he had reason to regret his ingenious technique. The heightened logical consistency of the following generation, however, which obliterated the distinction between the preparation of the material and actual composition, not only exchanged integration for music’s self-alienation but incurred the loss of articulation, without which form is almost inconceivable. It is as if the immanent nexus of the work, when abandoned completely to itself without any interference, without the effort to hear the totality of form out of the heterogeneous, relapses into the raw and crude. In fact, the totally organized works of the serial phase have almost completely surrendered the means of differentiation in which they originated. Mathematization as a method for the immanent objectivation of form is chimerical. Its insufficiency can perhaps be clarified by the fact that artists resort to it during historical periods when the traditional self-evidence of forms dissolves and no objective canon is available. At these moments the artist has recourse to mathematics; it unifies the level of subjective reason attained by the artist with the semblance of an objectivity founded on categories such as universality and necessity; this is semblance because the organization, the relation of elements to each other that constitutes form, does not originate in the specific structure and fails when confronted with the particular. For this reason mathematization favors precisely those traditional forms that it at the same time denounces as irrational. Rather than embodying the abiding lawfulness of being, its own claim to legitimacy, the mathematical aspect of art despairingly strives to guarantee its possibility in a historical situation in which the objectivity of the conception of form is as requisite as it is inhibited by the level of consciousness.
Frequently the concept of form proves limited in that, depending on the circumstances, it locates form in one dimension regardless of others, as, for example, when musical form is located in temporal succession, as if simultaneity and polyphony do not contribute to form, or when in painting form is attributed to proportions of space and surface at the cost of the form-giving function of color. In contrast to this, aesthetic form is the objective organization within each artwork of what appears as bindingly eloquent. It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth. A posited unity, it constantly suspends itself as such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its other just as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere. In its relation to its other—whose foreignness it mollifies and yet maintains—form is what is antibarbaric in art; through form art participates in the civilization that it criticizes by its very existence. Form is the law of the transfiguration of the existing, counter to which it represents freedom. Form secularizes the theological model of the world as an image made in God’s likeness, though not as an act of creation but as the objectivation of the human comportment that imitates creation; not creatio ex nihilo but creation out of the created. The metaphorical expression is irresistible, that form in artworks is everything on which the hand has left its trace, everything over which it has passed. Form is the seal of social labor, fundamentally different from the empirical process of making. What artists directly perceive as form is best elucidated e contrario as an antipathy to the unfiltered in the artwork, to the grouping of color that is simply factual without being articulated or animated in itself; an antipathy to the rote musical sequence, the topos, the precritical. Form converges with critique. It is that through which artworks prove self-critical; what in the work rebels against any untransformed residue is really the bearer of form, and art is disavowed wherever support is given to the theodicy of the unformed, whether under the name of musicality or ham acting. By its critical implication, form annihilates practices and works of the past. Form repudiates the view that artworks are immediately given. If form is that in artworks by which they become artworks, it is equivalent with their mediatedness, their objective reflectedness into themselves. Form is mediation in that it is the relation of parts to each other and to the whole and as the elaboration of details. With regard to form, then, the much praised naïveté of artworks turns out to be hostile to art. What may appear intuitive and naïve in artworks, their constitution as something that presents itself as self-coherent, gapless, and therefore unmediated, derives from their mediatedness in themselves. It is only through this mediatedness that they become significative and their elements become signs. Everything in artworks that resembles language originates in form and is thus transformed into the antithesis of form, the mimetic impulse. Form seeks to bring the particular to speech through the whole. However, this is the melancholy of form, especially among artists in whose work form prevails. Form inevitably limits what is formed, for otherwise its concept would lose its specific difference to what is formed. This is confirmed by the artistic labor of forming, which is always a process of selecting, trimming, renouncing. Without rejection there is no form, and this prolongs guilty domination in artworks, of which they would like to be free; form is their amorality. They do injustice to what they form by following it. At least something of this was sensed by vitalism’s endlessly rehearsed assurance, ever since Nietzsche, of the antithesis between form and life. Art becomes entangled in the guilt context of the living, not only because its distance allows the guilt context to prevail but even more importantly because it makes incisions in the living in order to help it to language and thus mutilates it. The myth of Procrustes recounts the philosophical protohistory of art. Yet the total condemnation of art does not follow from this any more than it does elsewhere from partial guilt in the context of total guilt. Whoever rails against art’s putative formalism, against art being art, advocates the very inhumanity with which he charges formalism and does so in the name of cliques that, in order to retain better control of the oppressed, insist on adaptation to them. Whenever the inhumanity of spirit is indicted, it is a judgment passed against humanity; only that spirit does justice to humanity that, rather than serving it according to what it has become, immerses itself in that which unknown to humanity is its own. The campaign against formalism ignores the fact that form that befalls content [Inhalt] is itself sedimented content; this, and not regression to any pre-artistic emphasis on content, secures the primacy of the object in art. Aesthetic categories of form such as particularity, development and resolution of conflict, even the anticipation of reconciliation through homeostasis, are transparent with regard to their content even, and most of all, where they have separated themselves from the empirical objects. Precisely by distance from it art adopts its stance toward the empirical world in which conflicts appear immediate and as absolute cleavages; their mediation, implicitly contained in the empirical, becomes the for-itself of consciousness only by the act of stepping back from it, which is what art does. This stepping back is, as such, an act of knowledge. Those features of modern art on whose account it has been ostracized as formalistic derive without exception from the fact that in them content flickers incarnate, instead of having been peremptorily adjusted by an easily marketable harmony. Emancipated expression, in which all of modern art’s forms originated, was a protest against romantic expression by a depositional character that is antagonistic to the forms. This was the source of their substantiality; Kandinsky coined the term “cerebral acts.” The historicophilosophical significance of the emancipation of form is that it refuses to mollify alienation in the image, exclusively thereby incorporating the alienated; that it defines the alienated as such. The hermetic works bring more criticism to bear on the existing than do those that, in the interest of intelligible social criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory forms and silently acknowledge the flourishing culture industry. In the dialectic of form and content, the scale also tips toward form—against Hegel—because content, which his aesthetics wanted to salvage, degenerated to a positivistic given, a mold for the reification against which, according to Hegel’s theory, art protests. Thus the more deeply the content [Inhalt] is experienced and transformed unrecognizably into formal categories, the less the unsublimated materials are commensurable with the content [Gehalt] of artworks. Everything appearing in the artwork is virtually content [Inhalt] as much as it is form, whereas form remains that by which the appearing determines itself and content remains what is self-determining. To the extent that aesthetics achieved an energetic concept of form, it legitimately opposed the preartistic view of art by seeking what is specifically aesthetic exclusively in form by seeking out form’s transformations as such in the comportment of the aesthetic subject; this was axiomatic for the conception of art history as cultural history. But what promises to emancipate and thus strengthen the subject weakens it at the same time through its isolation. Hegel is right that all aesthetic processes are bound up with content [Inhalt], just as in the history of the plastic arts and literature new levels of the external world constantly become apparent and are discovered and assimilated, whereas others perish, lose their artistic potential, and no longer excite even the worst commercial painter to grant them a brief eternity on canvas. In this regard it is worth mentioning the studies of the Warburg Institute, many of which penetrated to the center of artistic content [Gehalt] through the analysis of motifs; in poetics Benjamin’s study of the German baroque shows an analogous tendency, motivated by the rejection of the confusion of subjective intentions with aesthetic content [Gehalt] and, ultimately, of the alliance of aesthetics and idealist philosophy. The elements bound up with content [Inhalt] undergird the substance [Gehalt] in opposition to the pressure of subjective intention.
The articulation, by which the artwork achieves its form, also always coincides in a certain sense with the defeat of form. If a gapless and unforced unity of form and the formed succeeded, as is intended by the idea of form, this would amount to the achievement of the identity of the identical and nonidentical. But it is vis-à-vis the fact that this has not been achieved that the artwork is motivated to wall itself up in the imaginary confines of an identity that is merely for-itself. The arrangement of a whole in accordance with the sum of its complexes, which is the idea of articulation, is never completely adequate, whether as the division of a lava mass into a multitude of small garden plots or whether it is because of an external residue remaining after the divergent has been unified. A prototypical instance of this is the suitelike, unmastered randomness of the succession of movements in an integrated symphony. What may be called a work’s level of form, a term employed in graphology ever since Ludwig Klages, depends on its degree of articulation. This concept calls a halt to the relativism of Riegl’s “artistic will.” There are types of art, as well as phases in its history, in which articulation was of little concern or was impeded by conventional procedures. Articulation’s adequacy to artistic will, to the objective-historical sense of form that it bears, does not make it any less inferior: Under the constraint of an encompassing “It shall not be” such works fail to carry out what they are obliged to fulfill according to their own logicality. Like desk-bound white-collar workers whose ancestors were artists of an inferior level of form, their unconscious whispers in their ears that the utmost is not possible for the little men that they are; yet the utmost is nevertheless the law of form of what they undertook to do. It is rarely noted, even in art criticism, that neither individual nor collective art wills its own concept, which develops from within; rather like people who laugh even when there is nothing funny. Many artworks are undertaken with tacit resignation; for their diminished claim they are rewarded by making art historians and the public happy. It would be worthwhile to analyze to what degree such aesthetic resignation has since antiquity contributed to the division of high and low art, a division whose decisive reason is obviously that culture proved unsuccessful for precisely those who produced it. In any case, even so apparently formal a category as that of articulation has its material aspect: that of intervention in the rudis indigestaque moles of what is sedimented in the artwork this side of its autonomy; even aesthetic forms tend historically toward becoming material of a second order. The means, without which there would be no form, undermine form. This aporia is dodged, not solved, by works that renounce partial wholes of any significant dimension in order to protect their unity: This is the key objection to Webern’s intensity without extension. Mediocre works, by contrast, leave the partial wholes unchallenged under the thin husk of their form, camouflaging them rather than melding them. It could almost be stated as a rule, one that testifies to the depth at which form and content [Inhalt] are mediated in each other, that the relation of the parts to the whole, an essential aspect of form, is constituted by way of detours. Artworks lose themselves in order to find themselves: The form category for this is the episode. In a collection of aphorisms from his expressionist phase published prior to World War I, Schoenberg noted that Ariadne provides no thread to follow through the interior of artworks.4 This however does not imply aesthetic irrationalism. Their form, their whole, and their logicality are hidden from artworks to the same degree as the elements, the content [Inhalt], desire the whole. Art that makes the highest claim compels itself beyond form as totality and into the fragmentary. The plight of form is most emphatically manifest in the difficulty of bringing temporal art forms to a conclusion; in music composers often speak of the problem of a finale, and in literature the problem of a denouement, which came to a head in Brecht. Once having shaken itself free of convention, no artwork was able to end convincingly, and the continued use of traditional endings only simulate the temporal convergence of the particular elements with the concluding instant as a totality of form. In many modern works that have attracted a large audience, the form was artfully held open because they wanted to demonstrate that the unity of form was no longer bestowed on them. Spurious infinity, the inability to close, becomes a freely chosen principle of method and expression. Beckett’s play, which, rather than stopping repeats itself word for word, is a reaction to this; almost fifty years ago, Schoenberg proceeded in similar fashion in the March of his Serenade: After the reprise had been abolished, it was resurrected out of desperation. What Lukács once called the “discharge of meaning” was the force that allowed the artwork, once it has confirmed its immanent determination, to end on the model of one who dies old, having led a full life. That this is denied artworks, that they can no more die than can the hunter Gracchus, is internalized by them directly as an expression of horror. The unity of artworks cannot be what it must be: the unity of the multiplicitous; in that unity synthesizes, it damages what is synthesized and thus the synthesis. Artworks suffer from their mediated totality no less than from their immediateness.
Against the philistine division of art into form and content it is necessary to insist on their unity; against the sentimental view of their indifference in the artwork it is necessary to insist that their difference endures even in their mediation. Not only is the perfect identity of the two chimerical, it would not redound to the success of the works: By analogy to Kant’s maxim, they would become empty or blind, self-sufficient play or raw empiria. With regard to content [Inhalt], the concept of material best does justice to the mediated distinction. According to an almost universally accepted terminology in all the arts, material is what is formed. It is not the same as content [Inhalt], even if Hegel fatefully confounded the two. This can be explicated with regard to music. Its content [Inhalt] is in any case what occurs—partial events, motifs, themes, and their elaboration: changing situations. Content is not external to musical time but essential to it, as time is essential to content; content is everything that transpires in time. Material, by contrast, is what artists work with: It is the sum of all that is available to them, including words, colors, sounds, associations of every sort and every technique ever developed. To this extent, forms too can become material; it is everything that artists encounter about which they must make a decision. The idea, widespread among unreflective artists, of the open eligibility of any and all material is problematic in that it ignores the constraint inherent in technical procedures and the progress of material, which is imposed by various materials as well as by the necessity to employ specific materials. The choice of the material, its use, and the limitations of that use, are an essential element of production. Even innovative expansion of the material into the unknown, going beyond the material’s given condition, is to a large extent a function of the material and its critique, which is defined by the material itself. The concept of material is presupposed by alternatives such as whether a composer works with sounds that are native to tonality and recognizable as its derivatives, or whether he radically eliminates them; analogous alternatives in painting are those between the representational and the nonrepresentational, the perspectival and the nonperspectival. The concept of material may first have taken conscious shape in the twenties, if one leaves aside the lingo of singers who, tortured by a sense of the dubiousness of their musicality, exult over their “material.” Since Hegel’s theory of the romantic artwork, the error has persisted that along with preestablished overarching forms even the bindingness of the materials with which the forms were concerned has disintegrated; the expansion of available materials, which scorns the old boundaries between the arts, is primarily the result of the historical emancipation of the concept of form in art. This expansion has been much overestimated by those external to it; it is offset by the renunciations demanded of the artist not only by taste but by the condition of the material. Of all the material that is abstractly employable, only the tiniest part does not collide with the condition of spirit and is as such concretely usable. Thus material is not natural material even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical. Its supposedly sovereign position is the result of the collapse of every ontology of art, which has in turn affected the materials. They are no less dependent on the transformation of technique than is technique on the materials that it manipulates. It is obvious how much a composer who, for instance, works with tonal material receives this material from tradition. If, however, he turns critically against tradition through the use of an autonomous material, one completely purged of concepts such as consonance, dissonance, triad, and diatonicism, the negated is nevertheless retained in the negation. Such works speak by virtue of the taboos they radiate; the falseness or, at the least, the shock of every triad that they permit makes this obvious enough, and this is the objective cause of the comfortably prescribed monotonousness of radically modern art. The rigorousness of the most recent developments in music and painting, which right into the smallest detail of the emancipated material ruthlessly eliminates all traces of the traditional and the negated, obeys all the more recklessly—under the illusion of the pure givenness of a material without any intrinsic quality—the historical tendency. Stripping the material of any qualitative dimension, which superficially connotes its dehistoricization, is itself the material’s historical propensity, the propensity of subjective reason. What defines its limits are that it leaves its historical determinations behind in the material.
What aesthetic terminology once called subject matter [Stoff] and Hegel the subject [Sujet] is not to be apodictically excluded from the concept of material. All the same, while the concept of subject matter remains a concern of art, in its immediacy, as a theme that can be lifted over from external reality and worked upon, it has, since Kandinsky, Proust, and Joyce, incontrovertibly declined. Parallel to the critique of the heterogeneously imposed, the aesthetically unassimilable, discontent has been growing with the so-called great themes to which Hegel as well as Kierkegaard, and more recently many Marxist theoreticians and playwrights attributed such eminence. The idea that works that occupy themselves with august events—whose sublimity is usually only the fruit of ideology and of respect for power and magnitude—are thereby augmented in their dignity was unmasked once van Gogh painted a stool or a few sunflowers in such a fashion that the images rage with the storm of all those emotions in the experience of which the individual of van Gogh’s epoch for the first time registered the historical catastrophe. This having become evident, it could be shown in earlier art too how little its authenticity depends on the trumped-up or even actual relevance of its objects. What is the importance of Delft in Vermeer? Does it not hold that—as Kraus wrote, a gutter well painted is of greater value than a badly painted palace: “Out of a loose sequence of events . . . a world of perspectives, moods, and shocks takes shape for the more pellucid eye, and trashy poetry becomes the poetry of trash, damnable only to that official idiocy that holds a badly painted palace preferable to a well-painted gutter.”5 Hegel’s aesthetics of content [Inhalt], an aesthetics of subject matter, in keeping with the spirit of many of his intentions, subscribes undialectically to the objectivation of art by way of a raw relation to objects. Essentially he excluded mimesis from his aesthetics. In German idealism the turn to the object was always coupled with philistinism, as is most crassly obvious in the comments on historical painting in the third book of the World as Will and Representation. In its relation to art, idealism’s eternity is unmasked as kitsch, to which he who clings to idealism’s inalienable categories is consigned. Brecht ignored this. In his essay “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit” (five difficulties in writing the truth) he concludes: “Thus, it is for example not untrue to say that chairs provide a place to sit and that rain falls from above. Many poets write truths of this kind. They are like painters who cover the walls of sinking ships with still lifes. For them even what we have called our first difficulty in writing the truth does not exist and yet they have a clear conscience. They produce their daubs undisturbed by the mighty or by the screams of the ravaged. The absurdity of what they do produces in them a ‘deep’ pessimism that they sell at a good price and that would actually better suit those who watch these masters and their sales. At the same time it is anything but easy to recognize that their truths are truths about chairs or the rain, since they usually sound completely different, as if they were truths about important things. For the process of artistic production is precisely that of according importance to something. Only by taking a close look does one perceive that they are only saying: ‘A chair is a chair’ and ‘Nobody can change the fact that rain falls from above.’”6 This is a blague. It justly provokes the official culture mentality, which has even succeeded in integrating van Gogh’s chair as a piece of furniture. Yet if one wanted to extract a norm out of this, it would be merely regressive. There is no point to making threats. A painted chair can actually be extremely significant, to the extent that one does not prefer to avoid this bloated word. Incomparably deeper and socially relevant experiences can be sedimented in the how of a painting than in faithful portraits of generals or revolutionary heros. All paintings of this sort retrospectively take their place in the Galerie des Glaces de Versailles of 1871, regardless whether the generals, eternalized in historical postures, were to have led red armies that occupy countries in which the revolution never took place. This problematic of thematic material whose relevance is directly borrowed from reality also befalls the intentions that are injected into the work. However spiritual these ideas may be in themselves, once introduced into the artwork they become no less subject matter than if they were Meier, the Basel mayor who promises to fetch the coal. As Hegel well knew, what artists can say they say only through the form [Gestaltung], not by letting that form deliver a message. Among the sources of error in the contemporary interpretation and critique of artworks the most disastrous is the confusion of the intention, what the artist supposedly wants to say, with the content [Gehalt] of the work. In reaction, the content of the artwork is increasingly lodged in what has not been cathected by the artist’s subjective intentions, whereas content is blocked in works in which intention, whether as fabula docet or as philosophical thesis, demands primacy. The objection that an artwork is too reflected is not only ideology but has its element of truth in the work’s being too little reflected: not reflected against the incursion of its own intention. The philological procedure, which imagines that it grasps securely the content of the work when it grasps its intention, passes judgment immanently on itself in that it tautologically extracts from artworks what was put into them earlier; the secondary literature on Thomas Mann is the most repellent example of this. Granted, this practice is fostered by a genuine tendency that has its source in literature; Naïve immediacy and its illusoriness has become threadbare for literature, which no longer disavows reflection and is thus compelled to strengthen the dimension of intention. This supplies an interpretive method alien to spirit with an easy surrogate for spirit. It is incumbent on artworks, just as occurred in modernism’s greatest achievements, to incorporate the reflexive element by its further reflexivity into the work itself rather than tolerating it in the form of residual subject matter.
However little the intention of artworks is their content [Gehalt]—if only because no intention, however neatly presented, is assured of being realized by the work—still only a stubborn rigorism would disqualify intention as an element of the work. Intentions have their locus in the dialectic between the mimetic pole of artworks and their methexis in enlightenment; intentions have their locus not only in being the subjectively moving and organizing force that is thereupon extinguished in the work but also in the objectivity of the work itself. Because the artwork is not simply inert, intentions are endowed with an independence as specific as that of any other element of the artwork; one would need to ignore the complexion of important artworks for the sake of a thema probandum to deny that, however variable historically, their importance stands in relation to intention. If material in the artwork is truly resistant to the artwork’s otherwise pure identity, the inner process of identity in artworks is essentially that between the material and intention. Without intention, without the immanent form of the principle of identity, form would not exist any more than it would without the mimetic impulse. The surplus of intentions reveals that the objectivity of artworks cannot be reduced simply to mimesis. The objective bearer of intentions, which synthesizes the individual intentions of artworks into a whole, is their meaning. It remains relevant in spite of everything problematic inherent to it and in spite of all the evidence that this is not all there is to artworks. The meaning of Goethe’s Iphigenie is humanity. If this idea were merely intended abstractly by the poetic subject, if it were in Hegel’s words simply a “maxim”—as indeed it is in Schiller—it would be irrelevant to the work. In that, however, by means of language, humanity itself becomes mimetic—is itself expressed in the nonconceptual without sacrificing its conceptual element—meaning achieves a fruitful tension to the work’s content [Gehalt], to what has been composed. The meaning of a poem such as Verlaine’s “Clair de lune” cannot be univocally established, yet this is not to say that its meaning does not reach beyond the incomparable resonance of the verses. The poem’s sensuality is itself an element of intention: Happiness and sadness, which accompany sexuality as soon as it descends into itself and negates spirit as ascetic, are the poem’s content [Gehalt]; the flawlessly presented idea of sensuality divorced from sensuousness is the meaning. This trait, central to the whole of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French art, including Debussy, contains the potential of radical modernism, and there is no lack of actual historical ties. Conversely, it is the starting point, though not the telos of criticism, whether the intention is objectivated in what is composed; the fault lines between intention and result, rarely missing from recent art, are no less ciphers of the work’s content than is the result. A higher level of critique, however, that of the truth or untruth of the content, often becomes immanent critique through the knowledge of the relation between intention and what has been written, painted, or composed. Intention does not always miscarry as the result of the inadequate form-giving powers of the subject. The untruth of intention interrupts the objective truth content. If what is supposed to be truth content is in itself untrue, that prohibits inner consistency. Such untruth tends to be mediated by the untruth of the intention, as is apparent at the highest level of form in Wagner’s music. For traditional aesthetics, and to a large extent for traditional art as well, the determination of the totality of the artwork is its determination as a nexus of meaning. The reciprocal relation of whole and parts is supposed to shape the work as something meaningful to such an extent that the quintes-sence of this meaning coincides with the metaphysical content. Because the nexus of meaning is constituted by the relation of elements—and not in atomistic fashion in something given that is sensual—what can justly be called the spirit of artworks should be comprehensible in that nexus. That the spirit of an artwork is the configuration of its elements is more than a seductive idea; it attains its truth in the face of all crude reification or materialization of the spirit and content of artworks. Directly or indirectly everything that appears in the work contributes to such meaning, though not all that appears is necessarily of equal importance. The establishment of relative importance was one of the most effective means for aesthetic articulation, as is obvious enough in the differentiation between thetic main events and transitions, and between the essential and accidental yet requisite elements. These differentiations in traditional art were largely determined schematically. With the critique of schematic organization, the differentiations become dubious: Art tends toward processes in which everything that occurs is equidistant to the midpoint; where everything accidental arouses the suspicion of being superfluously ornamental. This is one of the most imposing difficulties in the articulation of recent art. Art’s inexorable self-criticism, the requirement of drossless composition, underscores this difficulty and promotes chaos, the ever lurking precondition of all art. Even in works with the highest level of form, the crisis of differentiation has frequently resulted in a dimension of nondifferentiation. Efforts to defend against this have almost without exception, though often latently, had recourse to borrowings from the aesthetic resources that they oppose: Even here the total domination of the material and movement toward diffuseness converge.
That artworks, in accord with Kant’s magnificently paradoxical formula, are “purposeless,” that they are separated from empirical reality and serve no aim that is useful for self-preservation and life, precludes calling art’s meaning its purpose, despite meaning’s affinity to immanent teleology. Yet it becomes ever harder for artworks to cohere as a nexus of meaning. Ultimately they respond to this by rejecting the very concept of meaning. The more the emancipation of the subject demolished every idea of a preestablished order conferring meaning, the more dubious the concept of meaning became as the refuge of a fading theology. Even prior to Auschwitz it was an affirmative lie, given historical experience, to ascribe any positive meaning to existence. This has consequences that reach deep into aesthetic form. When artworks have nothing external to themselves to which they can cling without ideology, what they have lost cannot be restored by any subjective act. It was wiped out by their tendency toward subjectivization, which was no cultural-historical accident but conforms rather with the true state of things. Critical self-reflection, inherent in every artwork, sharpens the work’s sensitivity not only toward every element that strengthens traditional meaning but also against the work’s immanent meaning and those of its categories that provide meaning. For the meaning that is the synthesis of the artwork cannot merely be something that it has manufactured, its quintessence. At the same time the totality of the work presents meaning and produces it aesthetically, it reproduces it. Meaning is only legitimate in the artwork insofar as it is objectively more than the work’s own meaning. In that artworks relentlessly chip away at the nexus in which meaning is founded, they turn against this nexus and against meaning altogether. The unconscious labor of the artistic ingenium on the meaning of the work as on something substantial and enduring transcends this meaning. The advanced production of recent decades has become self-conscious of this issue, has made it thematic and translated it into the structure of artworks. It is easy to convict neodadaism of a lack of political import and dismiss it as meaningless and purposeless in every sense of the word. But to do so is to forget that its products ruthlessly demonstrate the fate of meaning without any regard to themselves as artworks. Beckett’s oeuvre already presupposes this experience of the destruction of meaning as self-evident, yet also pushes it beyond meaning’s abstract negation in that his plays force the traditional categories of art to undergo this experience, concretely suspend them, and extrapolate others out of the nothingness. The dialectical reversal that occurs is obviously not a derivative of theology, which always heaves a sigh of relief whenever its concerns are treated in any way, no matter what the verdict, as if at the end of the tunnel of metaphysical meaninglessness—the presentation of the world as hell—a light glimmers; Günther Anders was right to defend Beckett against those who make his works out to be affirmative.7 Beckett’s plays are absurd not because of the absence of any meaning, for then they would be simply irrelevant, but because they put meaning on trial; they unfold its history. His work is ruled as much by an obsession with positive nothingness as by the obsession with a meaninglessness that has developed historically and is thus in a sense merited, though this meritedness in no way allows any positive meaning to be reclaimed. Nevertheless the emancipation of artworks from their meaning becomes aesthetically meaningful once this emancipation is realized in the aesthetic material precisely because the aesthetic meaning is not immediately one with theological meaning. Artworks that divest themselves of any semblance of meaning do not thereby forfeit their similitude to language. They enunciate their meaninglessness with the same determinacy as traditional artworks enunciate their positive meaning. Today this is the capacity of art: Through the consistent negation of meaning it does justice to the postulates that once constituted the meaning of artworks. Works of the highest level of form that are meaningless or alien to meaning are therefore more than simply meaningless because they gain their content [Gehalt] through the negation of meaning. Artwork that rigorously negates meaning is by this very rigor bound to the same density and unity that was once requisite to the presence of meaning. Artworks become nexuses of meaning, even against their will, to the extent that they negate meaning. Although the crisis of meaning is rooted in a problematic common to all art, the failure in the face of rationality, reflection is unable to repress the question whether art does not perhaps, through the demolition of meaning, throw itself into the arms of precisely that which strikes ordinary consciousness as absurd, the positivistically reified consciousness. The dividing line between authentic art that takes on itself the crisis of meaning and a resigned art consisting literally and figuratively of protocol sentences is that in significant works the negation of meaning itself takes shape as a negative, whereas in the others the negation of meaning is stubbornly and positively replicated. Everything depends on this: whether meaning inheres in the negation of meaning in the artwork or if the negation conforms to the status quo; whether the crisis of meaning is reflected in the works or whether it remains immediate and therefore alien to the subject. Key events may include certain musical works such as Cage’s Piano Concerto, which impose on themselves a law of inexorable aleatoriness and thereby achieve a sort of meaning: the expression of horror. What governs Beckett’s work, certainly, is a parodic unity of time, place, and action, combined with artfully fitted and balanced episodes and a catastrophe that consists solely in the fact that it never takes place. Truly, one of the enigmas of art, and evidence of the force of its logicality, is that all radical consistency, even that called absurd, culminates in similitude to meaning. This, however, is not confirmation of metaphysical substantiality, to which every thoroughly formed work would lay claim as confirmation of its illusoriness: Ultimately, art is semblance in that, in the midst of meaninglessness, it is unable to escape the suggestion of meaning. Artworks, however, that negate meaning must also necessarily be disrupted in their unity; this is the function of montage, which disavows unity through the emerging disparateness of the parts at the same time that, as a principle of form, it reaffirms unity. The relation between the technique of montage and photography is familiar. Montage has its appropriate place in film. The sudden, discontinuous juxtaposition of sequences, editing employed as an artistic means, wants to serve intentions without damaging the intentionlessness of life as it is, which is the actual interest of film. On no account is the principle of montage a trick to integrate photography and its derivatives into art despite the limitations defined by their dependence on empirical reality. Rather, montage goes beyond photography immanently without infiltrating it with a facile sorcery, but also without sanctioning as a norm its status as a thing: It is photography’s self-correction. Montage originated in antithesis to mood-laden art, primarily impressionism. Impressionism dissolved objects—drawn primarily from the sphere of technical civilization or its amalgams with nature—into their smallest elements in order to synthesize them gaplessly into the dynamic continuum. It wanted aesthetically to redeem the alienated and heterogenous in the replica. The conception proved ever less adequate the more intense the superiority of the reified prosaic world over the living subject became: The subjectivization of objective reality relapsed into romanticism, as was soon blatantly obvious not only in Jugendstil but also in the later stages of authentic impressionism. It was against this that montage protested, which developed out of the pasted-in newspaper clippings and the like during the heroic years of cubism. The semblance provided by art, that through the fashioning of the heterogeneously empirical it was reconciled with it, was to be broken by the work admitting into itself literal, illusionless ruins of empirical reality, thereby acknowledging the fissure and transforming it for purposes of aesthetic effect. Art wants to admit its powerlessness vis-à-vis late-capitalist totality and to initiate its abrogation. Montage is the inner-aesthetic capitulation of art to what stands heterogeneously opposed to it. The negation of synthesis becomes a principle of form. In this, montage unconsciously takes its lead from a nominalistic utopia: one in which the pure facts are mediated by neither form nor concept and irremediably divest themselves of their facticity. The facts themselves are to be demonstrated in deictical fashion, as epistemology calls it. The artwork wants to make the facts eloquent by letting them speak for themselves. Art thereby begins the process of destroying the artwork as a nexus of meaning. For the first time in the development of art, affixed debris cleaves visible scars in the work’s meaning. This brings montage into a much broader context. All modern art after impressionism, probably including even the radical manifestations of expressionism, has abjured the semblance of a continuum grounded in the unity of subjective experience, in the “stream of lived experience.” The intertwinement, the organic commingling, is severed, the faith destroyed that one thing merges wholly with the other, unless the intertwinement becomes so dense and intricate as to obscure meaning completely. This is complemented by the aesthetic principle of construction, the blunt primacy of a planned whole over the details and their interconnection in the microstructure; in terms of this microstructure all modern art may be called montage. Whatever is unintegrated is compressed by the subordinating authority of the whole so that the totality compels the failing coherence of the parts and thus however once again asserts the semblance of meaning. This dictated unity corrects itself in accord with the tendencies of the details in modern art, the “instinctual life of sounds” or colors; in music, for example, in accord with the harmonic and melodic demand that complete use be made of the available tones of the chromatic scale. Certainly, this tendency in turn derives from the totality of the material, from the available spectrum, and is defined by the system rather than actually being spontaneous. The idea of montage and that of technological construction, which is inseparable from it, becomes irreconcilable with the idea of the radical, fully formed artwork with which it was once recognized as being identical. The principle of montage was conceived as an act against a surreptitiously achieved organic unity; it was meant to shock. Once this shock is neutralized, the assemblage once more becomes merely indifferent material; the technique no longer suffices to trigger communication between the aesthetic and the extra-aesthetic, and its interest dwindles to a cultural-historical curiosity. If, however, as in the commercial film, the intentions of montage are insisted upon, they are jarringly heavy-handed. Criticism of the principle of montage has implications for constructivism, in which montage has camouflaged itself, precisely because constructivist form succeeds only at the cost of the individual impulse, ultimately the mimetic element. As a result, constructivism is always in danger of rattling emptily. Sachlichkeit itself, as it is represented by constructivism within the bounds of nonfunctional art, is subject to the critique of semblance: What claims to be strictly adequate to its purpose fails because the work’s formative process interferes with the impulses of what is to be formed; an immanent purposefulness is claimed that is in fact none at all, in that the work lets the teleology of the particular elements atrophy. Sachlichkeit turns out to be ideology: The drossless unity to which Sachlichkeit or the technical artwork pretends is never achieved. In those—admittedly minimal—hollows that exist between all particular elements in constructivist works, what has been standardized and bound together breaks apart in just the same way as do suppressed individual interests under total administration. After the default of any higher, subordinating jurisdiction, the process between the whole and the particular has been turned back to a lower court, to the impulse of the details themselves, in accord with the nominalistic situation. At this point, art is conceivable only on the condition that any pregiven subordinating standard be excluded. The blemishes that indelibly mark purely expressive, organic works offer an analogy to the antiorganic praxis of montage. This brings an antinomy into focus. Artworks that are commensurable to aesthetic experience are meaningful insofar as they fulfill an aesthetic imperative: the requirement that everything be required. This ideal, however, is directly opposed by the development that it itself set in motion. Absolute determination—which stipulates that everything is important to an equal degree and that nothing may remain external to the inner nexus of the work—converges, as György Ligeti perceived, with absolute arbitrariness. This gnaws away retrospectively at aesthetic lawfulness. It always has an element of positedness, of game rules and contingency. Since the beginning of the modern age, most notably in seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the early English novel, art has absorbed contingent elements of landscape and fate that were not as such construable out of any overarching ordo or idea of life in order to be able to grant them meaning freely within the aesthetic continuum. Ultimately, however, the impossibility of any subjectively established objectivity of meaning, which was hidden over the long epochs of the rise of the bourgeoisie, abandoned the nexus of meaning itself to that very contingency whose mastery once defined form. The development toward the negation of meaning is what meaning deserved. However, though this development is inevitable and has its own truth, it is accompanied by a hostility to art that is, although not to the same extent, narrow-mindedly mechanistic and, in terms of its propensity, reprivatizing; this development is allied with the eradication of aesthetic subjectivity by virtue of its own logic. Subjectivity is made to pay the price for the production of the untruth of aesthetic semblance. Even so-called absurd literature participates in this dialectic in the work of its most important representatives, in that as a nexus of meaning organized teleologically in itself it expresses the absence of meaning and thus through determinate negation maintains the category of meaning; this is what makes its interpretation possible, indeed, demands it.
Categories such as unity, or even harmony, have not tracelessly vanished as a result of the critique of meaning. The determinate antithesis of individual artworks toward empirical reality furthers the coherence of those artworks. Otherwise the gaps in the work’s structure would be invaded, as occurs in montage, by the unwieldy material against which it protects itself. This is what is true in the traditional concept of harmony. What survives of this concept after the negation of the culinary has retracted to the category of the whole, even though the whole no longer takes precedence over the details. Although art revolts against its neutralization as an object of contemplation, insisting on the most extreme incoherence and dissonance, these elements are those of unity; without this unity they would not even be dissonant. Even when art unreservedly obeys the dictates of inspiration, the principle of harmony, metamorphosed to the point of unrecognizability, is at work, because inspiration, if it is to count, must gel; that tacitly presupposes an element of organization and coherence, at least as a vanishing point. Aesthetic experience, no less in fact than theoretical experience, is constantly made aware that inspirations and ideas that do not gel impotently dissipate. Art’s paratactical logicality consists in the equilibrium of what it coordinates, a homeostasis in which the concept of aesthetic harmony is sublimated as a last resort. With regard to its elements, such aesthetic harmony is negative and stands in a dissonant relation to them: They undergo something similar to what individual tones once underwent in the pure consonance of a triad. Thus aesthetic harmony qualifies in its own right as an element. The mistake of traditional aesthetics is that it exalts the relationship of the whole to the parts to one of entire wholeness, to totality, and hoists it in triumph over the heterogeneous as a banner of illusory positivity. The ideology of culture, in which unity, meaning, and positivity are synonyms, inevitably boils down to a laudatio temporis acti. As the sermon goes, society once enjoyed a blessed closure when every artwork had its place, function, and legitimation and therefore enjoyed its own closure, whereas today everything is constructed in emptiness and artworks are internally condemned to failure. However transparent the tenor of such ideas, which invariably maintain an all too secure distance from art and falsely imagine that they are superior to inner-aesthetic necessities, it is better to follow up what is insightful in them rather than to brush them aside on the basis of the role they play, since failure to investigate them might contribute to their preservation. On no account does an artwork require an a priori order in which it is received, protected, and accepted. If today nothing is harmonious, this is because harmony was false from the beginning. The closure of the aesthetic, ultimately of the extra-aesthetic, system of reference does not necessarily correspond to the dignity of the artwork. The dubiousness of the ideal of a closed society applies equally to that of the closed artwork. It is incontestable that artworks have, as die-hard reactionaries never cease to repeat, lost their social embeddedness. The transition from this security into the open has become, for them, a horror vacui; that they address an anonymous and ultimately nonexistent audience has not been just a blessing, not even immanently: not for their authenticity and not for their relevance. What ranks as problematic in the aesthetic sphere has its origin here; the remainder became the plunder of boredom. Every new artwork, if it is to be one, is exposed to the danger of complete failure. If in his own time Hermann Grab praised the preformation of style in the keyboard music of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries because it precluded anything obviously bad, it could be rejoined that this style just as certainly excluded the possibility of what is emphatically good. Bach was so incomparably superior to the music that preceded him and that of his epoch because he broke through this preformation. Even the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel had to admit that the artworks that came after the end of the supposedly meaning-filled age had gained infinitely in richness and depth.8 What speaks for the survival of the concept of harmony as an element is that artworks that remonstrate against the mathematical ideal of harmony and the requirement of symmetrical relations, striving rather for absolute asymmetry, fail to slough off all symmetry. In terms of its artistic value, asymmetry is only to be comprehended in its relation to symmetry; this has recently been confirmed by what Kahnweiler has called the phenomena of distortion in Picasso. Similarly, new music has shown reverence for the tonality that it abolished through the extreme sensitivity that it developed toward its rudiments. This is documented by Schoenberg’s ironic comment from the early years of atonality that the “Mondfleck” of Pierrot lunaire was composed according to the strict rules of counterpoint, which only permitted prepared consonants and then only on unaccented beats. The further real domination of nature progresses, the more painful it becomes for art to admit the necessity of that progress within itself. In the ideal of harmony, art senses acquiescence to the administered world, even though art’s opposition to this world continues, with steadily increasing autonomy, the domination of nature. Art concerns itself as much as it is contrary to itself. Just how much these innervations of art are bound up with its position in reality could be viscerally sensed in the bombed German cities of the postwar years. In the face of actual chaos the optical order that the aesthetic sensorium had long ago rejected once again became intensely alluring. However, rapidly advancing nature, the vegetation in the ruins, brought all vacation-minded romanticization of nature to a deserved end. For a brief historical moment what traditional aesthetics called “satisfying” harmonic and symmetrical relations returned. When traditional aesthetics, Hegel’s included, praised harmony in natural beauty, it projected the self-satisfaction of domination onto the dominated. What is qualitatively new in recent art may be that in an allergic reaction it wants to eliminate harmonizations even in their negated form, truly the negation of negation with its own fatality: the self-satisfied transition to a new positivity, to the absence of tension in so many paintings and compositions of the postwar decades. False positivity is the technological locus of the loss of meaning. What during the heroic years of modern art was perceived as its meaning maintained the ordering elements of traditional art as determinately negated; their liquidation results in a smoothly functioning but empty identity. Even artworks freed from harmonistic-symmetrical ideas are formally characterized by similarity and contrast, static and dynamic, exposition, transition, development, identity, and return. Works are unable to wipe out the difference between the first appearance of an element and its repetition, no matter how modified that may be. The capacity to sense and employ harmonic and symmetrical relations in their most abstract form has become progressively more subtle. Whereas in music a more or less tangible reprise was once required to establish symmetry, now a vague similarity of tone color at various points may suffice. Dynamic freed from every static reference and no longer discernible as such by its contrast to something fixed, is transformed into something that hovers and no longer has direction. In the manner of its appearance, Stockhausen’s Zeitmaße evokes a through-composed cadence, a fully presented yet static dominant. Yet today such invariants become what they are only in the context of change; whoever tries to distill them from the dynamic complexion of history or from the individual work thereby misrepresents them.
Because the concept of spiritual order is itself worthless, it cannot be transposed from cultural cogitations to art. Opposites are intermixed in the ideal of the closure of the artwork: The irrevocable compulsion toward coherence, the ever fragile utopia of reconciliation in the image, and the longing of the objectively weakened subject for a heteronomous order, a constant of German ideology. Temporarily deprived of any direct satisfaction, authoritarian instincts revel in the imago of an absolutely closed culture where meaning is guaranteed. Closure for its own sake, independent of truth content and what this closure is predicated on, is a category that in fact deserves the ominous charge of formalism. Certainly this does not mean that positive and affirmative artworks, virtually the whole store of traditional art, are to be dismissed or defended on the basis of the all too abstract argument that, given their abrupt opposition to empirical life, they too are critical and negative. The philosophical critique of unreflective nominalism prohibits any claim that the trajectory of progressive negativity, the negation of objectively binding meaning, is that of unqualified progress in art. However much a song by Webern is more thoroughly constructed, the universality of the language of Schubert’s Winterreise secures for it an element of superiority. Though it is nominalism that helped art achieve its language in the first place, still there is no language without the medium of a universality beyond pure particularization, however requisite the latter. This overarching universality necessarily bears a degree of affirmation: This can be sensed in the word understanding. Affirmation and authenticity are amalgamated to no small degree. Yet this is no argument against any individual work; at most it is an argument against the language of art as such. There is no art that is entirely devoid of affirmation, since by its very existence every work rises above the plight and degradation of daily existence. The more binding art is to itself, the richer, denser, and more unified its works, the more it tends toward affirmation—of whatever stamp—by suggesting that its own qualities are those of a world existing in itself beyond art. This apriority of the affirmative is art’s ideological dark side. It projects the reflection of possibility onto the existing even as the latter’s determinate negation. This element of affirmation withdraws from the immediacy of artworks and what they say and becomes the fact that they continue to speak at all.9 That the world spirit never made good on its promise has the effect of lending the affirmative works of the past a touching quality rather than ensuring that they remain truly ideological; today, indeed, what appears evil in consummate works is their own consummateness as a monument to force rather than a transfiguration that is too transparent to spur any opposition. According to cliché, great works are compelling. In being so, they cultivate coercion to the same extent that they neutralize it; their guilt is their guiltlessness. Modern art, with its vulnerability, blemishes, and fallibility, is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: It is the critique of success. It is predicated on the recognition of the inadequacy of what appears to be adequate; this is true not only with regard to its affirmative essence but also in that in its own terms it is not what it wants to be. Instances are the jigsaw-puzzle aspects of musical classicism—the mechanical moments in Bach’s technique, the top-down construction in the paintings of the masters—which reigned for centuries under the name composition before, as Valéry noted, suddenly becoming a matter of indifference with the rise of impressionism.
Art’s affirmative element and the affirmative element of the domination of nature are one in asserting that what was inflicted on nature was all for the good; by re-enacting it in the realm of imagination, art makes it its own and becomes a song of triumph. In this, no less than in its silliness, art sublimates the circus. In doing so, art finds itself in inextricable conflict with the idea of the redemption of suppressed nature. Even the most relaxed work is the result of a ruling tension that turns against the dominating spirit that is tamed in becoming the work. Prototypical of that is the concept of the classical. The experience of the model of all classicism—Greek sculpture—may retrospectively undermine confidence in it, as well as in later epochs. Classical art relinquished the distance to empirical existence that had been maintained by archaic images and carvings. According to traditional aesthetics, classical sculpture aimed at the identity of the universal and the particular—the idea and the individual—because already it could no longer depend on the sensual appearance of the idea. If the idea was to appear in sensual form, it would have to integrate the empirically individuated world of appearance with its principle of form. This sets a limit to full individuation, however, probably Greek classicism had not yet even experienced individuality; this occurred first, in concordance with the direction of social development, in Hellenic sculpture. The unity of the universal and the particular contrived by classicism was already beyond the reach of Attic art, let alone the art of later centuries. This is why classical sculptures stare with those empty eyes that alarm—archaically—instead of radiating that noble simplicity and quiet grandeur10 projected onto them by eighteenth-century sentimentalism. Today what is compelling in antiquity is fundamentally distinct from the correspondence that developed with European classicism in the era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, even in that of Baudelaire. Whoever does not, in the guise of the archaeologist or philologist, sign a covenant with antiquity—which certainly since the rise of humanism has ever and again shown itself not to be disdained—will not find the normative claim of antiquity compelling. Without protracted study, scarcely any of it speaks, and the quality of the works themselves is certainly not beyond question. What is overwhelming is the level of form. Scarcely anything vulgar or barbaric seems to have been passed down, not even from the imperial age, even though there the beginnings of mass production are unmistakable. The floor mosaics of the villas in Ostia, which were presumably meant to be rented, are based on a single model. Ever since Attic classicism, the real barbarism of antiquity—the slavery, genocide, and contempt for human life—left few traces in art; just how chaste it kept itself, even in “barbaric cultures,” does not redound to its credit. The formal immanence of antique art is probably to be explained by the fact that the sensual world had not yet been debased by sexual taboos, which would come to encompass a sphere reaching far beyond its own immediate area; Baudelaire’s classicist longing is precisely for that. In capitalism, what forces art against art into an alliance with the vulgar is not only a function of commercialism, which exploits a mutilated sexuality, but equally the dark side of Christian inwardness. The concrete transience of the classical, however, which Hegel and Marx did not experience, exposes the transience of its concept and the norms deriving from it. The dilemma between superficial classicism and the demand that a work be coherent is apparently not one that arises from contrasting true classicism with plaster frauds. But this contrast is no more fruitful than that between modern and modernistic. What is excluded in the name of a putative authenticity as its degenerate form is usually contained in the former as its ferment, the excision of which leaves it sterile and harmless. The concept of classicism stands in need of differentiation: It is worthless so long as in peaceful juxtaposition it lays out in state Goethe’s Iphigenie and Schiller’s Wallenstein. In popular usage, the concept of classicism means social authority, achieved for the most part through economic control mechanisms; it is fitting that Brecht was no stranger to this usage. Classicism of this sort should rather be held against artworks, yet it is so external to them that by way of all sorts of mediations even authentic works may be bestowed with the accolade. The classical also refers to a standard of style, without its being thereby possible to distinguish between the model, its legitimate appropriation, and fruitless imitation as conclusively as would suit that common sense that assumes it can knowingly play off the classical against classicism. Mozart would be inconceivable apart from the classicism of the last years of the eighteenth century, with its stylistic imitation of the ancients, yet the trace of these quoted norms in his music provides no basis for any convincing objection to the specific quality of the classical Mozart. Ultimately, to call a work classical refers to its immanent success, the uncoerced yet ever fragile reconciliation of the one and the multiplicitous. It has nothing to do with style and mentality, and everything to do with accomplishment; here Valéry’s comment applies that even a romantic artwork, successfully brought off, is by dint of its success classical.11 This concept of the classical is strung taut to the highest degree; it alone is worthy of critique. The critique of the classical, however, is more than the critique of those formal principles by which the classical has, for the most part, been manifest. The ideal of form, which is identified with classicism, is to be translated back into content [Inhalt]. The purity of form is modeled on the purity of the subject, constituting itself, becoming conscious of itself, and divesting itself of the nonidentical: It is a negative relation to the nonidentical. Yet it implies the distinction of form from content, a distinction concealed by the classical ideal. Form is constituted only through dissimilarity, only in that it is different from the nonidentical; in form’s own meaning, the dualism persists that form effaces. The counter-movement to myth—a countermovement that classicism shares with the acme of Greek philosophy—was turned directly against the mimetic impulse. Mimesis was displaced by objectifying imitation. This counter-movement thereby easily succeeded in subsuming art to Greek enlightenment and making taboo that by which art takes the side of the suppressed against the domination of the imposed concept or of what slips through domination’s narrow mesh. Though in classicism the subject stands aesthetically upright, violence is done to it, to that eloquent particular that opposes the mute universal. In the much admired universality of the classical work the pernicious universality of myth—the inescapability of the spell—is perpetuated as the norm of the process of formation. In classicism, where the autonomy of art originated, art renounces itself for the first time. It is no accident that since that moment all classicisms have made ready alliance with science. To this day, the scientific mentality has harbored an antipathy toward art that refuses voluntary subservience to categorial thought and the desiderata of clear-cut divisions. Whatever proceeds as if there is no antinomy is antinomic and degenerates into what bourgeois phraseology is always ready to dub “formal perfection,” about which nothing more need be said. It is not because of an irrational mentality that qualitatively modern movements frequently correspond, in Baudelaire’s sense, with archaic, preclassical movements. They are, admittedly, no less exposed to the reactionary than is classicism by the delusion that the attitude to reality manifest in archaic works, from which the emancipated subject wrested itself, is to be reasserted, regardless of what has historically transpired. The sympathy of the modern with the archaic is not repressively ideological only when that sympathy turns toward what classicism discarded along the course of its development and refuses to endorse the pernicious pressure from which classicism freed itself. But the one is rarely to be found without the other. In place of the identity of the universal and the particular, classical works provide its abstract logical radius, effectively a hollow form hopelessly awaiting specification. The fragility of the classical paradigm gives the lie to its paradigmatical status and thus to the classical ideal itself.
Notes
1 See Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London, 1962).
2 See Arnold Zeising, Aesthetische Forschungen (Frankfurt, 1885).
3 See Erwin Stein, “Neue Formprinzipien,” in Von neuer Musik (Cologne, 1925), pp. 59ff.
4 See Arnold Schoenberg, “Aphorismen,” in Die Musik, vol. 9 (1909–1910), pp.159ff.
5 Karl Kraus, Literatur und Lüge, ed. H. Fischer (Munich, 1958), p. 14.
6 Bertolt Brecht, “Fünf Schwierigkeiten beim Schreiben der Wahrheit,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 18 (Frankfurt, 1967), p. 225.
7 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich, 1956), pp. 213ff.
8 See Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Balarian (Cambridge, 1971).
9 Adorno, “Is Art Lighthearted?” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (New York, 1992), pp. 247ff.
10 [Joachim Winckelmann’s seminal characterization of Greek sculpture in “Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture” (1775).—trans.]
11 See Paul Valéry, Œuvres, ed. J. Hytier, vol. 2 (Paris, 1966), pp. 565ff.