Contemporary aesthetics is dominated by the controversy over whether it is subjective or objective. These terms, however, are equivocal. Variously the controversy may focus on the conclusion drawn from subjective reactions to artworks, in contrast to the intentio recta toward them, the intentio recta being considered precritical according to the current schema of epistemology. Or the two concepts could refer to the primacy of objective or subjective elements in the artworks themselves, in keeping, for instance, with the distinction made in the history of ideas between classical and romantic. Or, lastly, the issue may be the objectivity of the aesthetic judgment of taste. These various meanings need to be distinguished from each other. With regard to the first, the direction of Hegel’s aesthetics was objective, whereas with regard to the second, his aesthetics probably emphasized subjectivity more decisively than did that of his predecessors, for whom the participation of the subject in the effect on an observer was limited even in the case of an ideal or transcendental observer. For Hegel, the subject-object dialectic transpires in the object itself. The relation of subject and object in the artwork too must not be forgotten, insofar as it is concerned with objects. This relation changes historically yet persists even in nonrepresentational works, for they take up an attitude to the object by placing it under a taboo. Still, the starting point of the Critique of Judgment was not simply inimical to an objective aesthetics. Its force was that, as throughout Kant’s theories, it was not comfortably installed in any of the positions marked out by the system’s strategies. Insofar as according to his theory aesthetics is constituted by the subjective judgment of taste, this judgment necessarily becomes not only a constituens of the objective work but rather bears in itself an objective necessity, however little this necessity can be reduced to universal concepts. Kant envisioned a subjectively mediated but objective aesthetics. The Kantian concept of the judgment of taste, by its subjectively directed query, concerns the core of objective aesthetics: the question of quality—good and bad, true and false—in the artwork. The subjective query is itself more aesthetic than is the epistemological intentio obliqua because the objectivity of the artwork is mediated in a manner that is qualitatively different from the objectivity of knowledge, being mediated more specifically through the subject. It is virtually tautological to claim that the determination whether an artwork is an artwork depends on the judgment whether it is, and that the mechanism of such judgments, far more than any investigation of the power of judgment as a psychic “ability,” is the theme of the work. “The definition of taste on which I am basing this analysis is that it is the ability to judge the beautiful. But we have to analyze judgments of taste in order to discover what is required for calling an object beautiful.”1 The canon of the work is the objective validity of the judgment of taste that, while affording no guarantee, is nevertheless stringent. The situation of all nominalist art is thus prepared. Analogously with the critique of reason, Kant would like to ground aesthetic objectivity in the subject rather than to displace the former by the latter. Implicitly he holds that the element that unifies the objective and the subjective is reason, a subjective ability at the same time that, by virtue of its attributes of necessity and universality, it is the exemplar of all objectivity. For Kant, even the aesthetic is subordinated to the primacy of discursive logic: “I have used the logical functions of judging to help me find the elements that judgment takes into consideration when it reflects (since even a judgment of taste still has reference to the understanding). I have examined the element of quality first, because an aesthetic judgment about the beautiful is concerned first with it.”2 The strongest buttress of subjective aesthetics, the concept of aesthetic feeling, derives from objectivity, not the reverse. Aesthetic feeling says that something is thus, that something is beautiful; Kant would have attributed such aesthetic feeling, as “taste,” exclusively to one who was capable of discriminating in the object. Taste is not defined in Aristotelian fashion by sympathy and fear, the affects provoked in the viewer. The contamination of aesthetic feeling with unmediated psychological emotions by the concept of arousal misinterprets the modification of real experience by artistic experience. It would otherwise be inexplicable why people expose themselves to aesthetic experience in the first place. Aesthetic feeling is not the feeling that is aroused: It is astonishment vis-à-vis what is beheld rather than vis-à-vis what it is about; it is a being overwhelmed by what is aconceptual and yet determinate, not the subjective affect released, that in the case of aesthetic experience may be called feeling. It goes to the heart of the matter, is the feeling for it and not a reflex of the observer. The observing subjectivity is to be strictly distinguished from the subjective element in the object, that is, from the object’s expression as well as from its subjectively mediated form. The question, however, of what is and what is not an artwork cannot in any way be separated from the faculty of judging, that is, from the question of quality, of good and bad. The idea of a bad artwork has something nonsensical about it: If it miscarries, if it fails to achieve its immanent constitution, it fails its own concept and sinks beneath the apriori of art. In art, judgments of relative merit, appeals to fairness and toleration of the half-finished, all commonsense excuses and even that of humanity, are false; their indulgence damages the artwork by implicitly liquidating its claim to truth. As long as the boundary that art sets up against reality has not been washed away, tolerance for bad works—borrowed from reality—is a violation of art.
To be able to say with good reason why an artwork is beautiful, true, coherent, or legitimate does not mean reducing it to its universal concepts, even if this operation—which Kant both desired and contested—were possible. In every artwork, and not only in the aporia of the faculty of reflective judgment, the universal and the particular are densely intertwined. Kant touches on this when he defines the beautiful as “that which pleases universally without requiring a concept.”3 This universality, in spite of Kant’s desperate effort, cannot be divorced from necessity; that something “pleases universally” is equivalent to the judgment that it must please each and every person, for otherwise it would be merely an empirical statement. Yet universality and implicit necessity remain ineluctable concepts, and their unity, as Kant conceived it, in the act of pleasing is external to the work. The requirement of the subsumption of particulars to the unifying concept transgresses against the idea of conceptualization from within that, by means of the concept of finality, was to correct in both parts of the Critique of Judgment the classificatory method of “theoretical,” natural-scientific reason that emphatically rejects knowledge of the object from within. In this regard, Kant’s aesthetics is a hybrid defenselessly exposed to Hegel’s critique. His advance must be emancipated from absolute idealism; this is the task that today confronts aesthetics. The ambivalence of Kant’s theory, however, is defined by his philosophy as a whole, in which the concept of purpose only extends the category into its regulative use and thus to this extent also circumscribes it. He knows what it is that art shares with discursive knowledge, but not that whereby art diverges qualitatively from it; the distinction becomes the quasi-mathematical one between the finite and the infinite. No single rule by which the judgment of taste must subsume its objects, not even the totality of these rules, has anything to say about the dignity of an artwork. So long as the concept of necessity, as constitutive of aesthetic judgment, is not reflected into itself, it simply reproduces the deterministic mechanism of empirical reality, that mechanism that itself only returns in artworks in a shadowy and modified form; yet the stipulation that beauty be universally pleasing presupposes a consent that is, though without admitting it, subordinate to social convention. If, however, these two elements are harnessed together in the intelligible realm then Kant’s doctrine forfeits its content [Inhalt]. It is possible concretely to conceive of artworks that fulfill the Kantian judgment of taste and nevertheless miss the mark. Other works, indeed new art as a whole, contradict that judgment and are hardly universally pleasing, and yet they cannot thereby be objectively disqualified as art. Kant achieves his goal of the objectivity of aesthetics, just as he does that of the objectivity of ethics, by way of universally conceptual formalization. This formalization is, however, contrary to aesthetic phenomena as what is constitutively particular. What each artwork would need to be according to its pure concept is essential to none. Formalization, an act of subjective reason, forces art back into precisely that merely subjective sphere—ultimately that of contingency—from which Kant wanted to wrest it and which art itself resists. As contrary poles, subjective and objective aesthetics are equally exposed to the critique of a dialectical aesthetics: the former because it is either abstractly transcendental or arbitrary in its dependence on individual taste; the latter because it overlooks the objective mediatedness of art by the subject. In the artwork the subject is neither the observer nor the creator nor absolute spirit, but rather spirit bound up with, preformed and mediated by the object.
For the artwork and thus for its theory, subject and object are its own proper elements and they are dialectical in such a fashion that whatever the work is composed of—material, expression, and form—is always both. The materials are shaped by the hand from which the artwork received them; expression, objectivated in the work and objective in itself, enters as a subjective impulse; form, if it is not to have a mechanical relationship to what is formed, must be produced subjectively according to the demands of the object. What confronts artists with the kind of objective impenetrability with which their material so often confronts them, an impenetrability analogous to the construction of the given in epistemology, is at the same time sedimented subject; it is expression, that which appears most subjective, but which is also objective in that it is what the artwork exhausts itself on and what it incorporates; finally, it is a subjective comportment in which objectivity leaves its imprint. But the reciprocity of subject and object in the work, which cannot be that of identity, maintains a precarious balance. The subjective process of the work’s production is, with regard to its private dimension, a matter of indifference. Yet the process also has an objective dimension that is a condition for the realization of its immanent lawfulness. It is as labor, and not as communication, that the subject in art comes into its own. It must be the artwork’s ineluctable ambition to achieve balance without ever being quite able to do so: This is an aspect of aesthetic semblance. The individual artist also functions as the executor of this balance. It is hard to say whether, in the production process, he is faced with a self-imposed task; the marble block in which a sculpture waits, the piano keys in which a composition waits to be released, are probably more than metaphors for the task. The tasks bear their objective solution in themselves, at least within a certain variational range, though they do not have the univocity of equations. The act carried out by the artist is minimal, that of mediating between the problem that confronts him and is already determined, and the solution, which is itself similarly lodged in the material as a potential. If the tool has been called the extension of an arm, the artist could be called the extension of a tool, a tool for the transition from potentiality to actuality.
Art’s linguistic quality gives rise to reflection over what speaks in art; this is its veritable subject, not the individual who makes it or the one who receives it. This is masked by the lyrical “I,” which in confessing has over the centuries produced the semblance of the self-evidence of poetic subjectivity. But this subjectivity is on no account identical with the I that speaks in the poem. This is not only because of the poetic fictional character of poetry and of music, in which subjective expression scarcely ever coincides immediately with the condition of the composer. Far more important is that the grammatical I of the poem is only posited by the I that speaks latently through the work; the empirical I is a function of the spiritual I, not the reverse. The part played by the empirical I is not, as the topos of sincerity would have it, the locus of authenticity. It remains undecided whether the latent I, the speaking I, is the same in the different genres of art and whether or not it changes; it may vary qualitatively according to the materials of the arts; their sub-sumption under the dubious subordinating concept of art obscures this. In any case, this latent I is immanently constituted in the work through the action of the work’s language; in relation to the work, the individual who produces it is an element of reality like others. The private person is not even decisive in the factual production of artworks. Implicitly the artwork demands the division of labor, and the individual functions accordingly. By entrusting itself fully to its material, production results in something universal born out of the utmost individuation. The force with which the private I is externalized in the work is the I’s collective essence; it constitutes the linguistic quality of works. The labor in the artwork becomes social by way of the individual, though the individual need not be conscious of society; perhaps this is all the more true the less the individual is conscious of society. The intervening individual subject is scarcely more than a limiting value, something minimal required by the artwork for its crystallization. The emancipation of the artwork from the artist is no l’art pour l’art delusion of grandeur but the simplest expression of the work’s constitution as the expression of a social relation that bears in itself the law of its own reification: Only as things do artworks become the antithesis of the reified monstrosity. Correspondingly, and this is key to art, even out of so-called individual works it is a We that speaks and not an I—indeed all the more so the less the artwork adapts externally to a We and its idiom. Here again music gives the most extreme expression to certain characteristics of the artistic, though this too by no means bestows any primacy on music. Music says We directly, regardless of its intentions. Even the depositional works of its expressionist phase register binding experiences, and the works’ bindingness, their formative force, depends on whether these experiences actually speak through the works. In Western music it would be possible to demonstrate how much its most important discovery, the harmonic depth dimension, as well as all counterpoint and polyphony, is the We of the choric ritual that has penetrated into the material. The We introduces its literalness transformed as an immanently acting force and yet maintains the quality of speech. Literary forms, by their direct and ultimately inescapable participation in communicative language, are related to a We; for the sake of their own eloquence they must strive to free themselves of all external communicativeness. But this process is not—as it appears to be or seems to itself to be—one of pure subjectivization. Through this process the subject forms itself to collective experience all the more intimately the more it hardens itself against linguistically reified expression. The plastic arts speak through the How of apperception. Their We is simply the sensorium according to its historical condition pursued to the point that it breaks the relation to representational objectivity that was modified by virtue of the development of its language of form. Images say: “Behold!”; they have their collective subject in what they point to, which is outward, not inward as with music. In the potentiation of its linguistic quality the history of art—which is equivalent to that of progressive individualization—is at the same time its opposite. That this We is, however, not socially univocal, that it is hardly that of a determinate class or social positions, has its origin perhaps in the fact that to this day art in the emphatic sense has only existed as bourgeois art; according to Trotsky’s thesis, no proletarian art is conceivable, only socialist art. The aesthetic We is a social whole on the horizon of a certain indeterminateness, though, granted, as determinate as the ruling productive forces and relations of an epoch. Although art is tempted to anticipate a nonexistent social whole, its non-existent subject, and is thereby more than ideology, it bears at the same time the mark of this subject’s non-existence. The antagonisms of society are nevertheless preserved in it. Art is true insofar as what speaks out of it—indeed, it itself—is conflicting and unreconciled, but this truth only becomes art’s own when it synthesizes what is fractured and thus makes its irreconcilability determinate. Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation; this is a possibility only for its nondiscursive language. Only in this process is its We concretized. What speaks out of it, however, is truly its subject insofar as it indeed speaks out of it rather than being something depicted by it. The title of the incomparable final piece of Schumann’s Scenes from Childhood, “The Poet Speaks,” one of the earliest models of expressionist music, takes cognizance of this. But the aesthetic subject is probably unrepresentable because, being socially mediated, it is no more empirical than the transcendental subject of philosophy. “The objectivation of the artwork takes place at the cost of the replication of the living. Artworks win life only when they renounce likeness to the human. ‘The expression of an unadulterated feeling is always banal. The more unadulterated, the more banal. Not to be banal requires effort.’”4
The artwork becomes objective as something made through and through, that is, by virtue of the subjective mediation of all of its elements. The insight of the critique of knowledge that subjectivity and reification are correlative receives unparalleled confirmation in aesthetics. The semblance character of artworks, the illusion of their being-in-itself, refers back to the fact that in the totality of their subjective mediatedness they take part in the universal delusional context of reification, and, that, in Marxian terms, they need to reflect a relation of living labor as if it were a thing. The inner consistency through which artworks participate in truth also involves their untruth; in its most unguarded manifestations art has always revolted against this, and today this revolt has become art’s own law of movement. The antinomy of the truth and untruth of art may have moved Hegel to foretell its end. Traditional aesthetics possessed the insight that the primacy of the whole over the parts has constitutive need of the diverse and that this primacy misfires when it is simply imposed from above. No less constitutive, however, is that no artwork has ever been fully adequate in this regard. Granted, the multiplicitous in the aesthetic continuum wants synthesis, yet at the same time, being determined extra-aesthetically, it withdraws from synthesis. The synthesis that is extrapolated out of multiplicity, which it has as a potential in itself, is unavoidably also the negation of this multiplicity. The equilibrium sought by form must misfire internally because externally, meta-aesthetically, it does not exist. Antagonisms that are unsolved in reality cannot be solved imaginatively either; they work their way into the imagination and are reproduced in imagination’s own inconsistency; in fact, this happens in proportion to the intensity with which they pursue their coherence. Artworks must act as if the impossible were for them possible; the idea of the perfection of works, with which none can dispense except at the cost of its own triviality, was dubious. Artists have a hard fate not only because of their always uncertain fate in the world but because through their own efforts they necessarily work against the aesthetic truth to which they devote themselves. Inasmuch as subject and object have become disjoint in historical reality, art is possible only in that it passed through the subject. For mimesis of what is not administered by the subject has no other locus than in the living subject. The objectivation of art through its immanent execution requires the historical subject. If the artwork hopes through its objectivation to achieve that truth that is hidden from the subject, then this is so because the subject is itself not ultimate. The relation of the objectivity of the artwork to the primacy of the object is fractured. This objectivity bears witness to the primacy of the object in a condition of universal thralldom that only in the subject provides a place of refuge for what is in-itself, while at the same time the form of the objectivity of this in-itself, which is a semblance effected by the subject, is a critique of objectivity. This objectivity grants entry exclusively to the membra disjecta of the world of objects, which only in a state of decomposition becomes commensurable to the law of form.
Subjectivity, however, though a necessary condition of the artwork, is not the aesthetic quality as such but becomes it only through objectivation; to this extent subjectivity in the artwork is self-alienated and concealed. This is not comprehended by Riegl’s concept of “artistic volition.” Yet this concept discerns an element essential to immanent critique: that nothing external adjudicates over the niveau of artworks. They, not their authors, are their own measure; in Wagner’s words, their self-posited law. The question of their own legitimation is not lodged beyond their fulfillment. No artwork is only what it aspires to be, but there is none that is more than this without aspiring to be something. This bears closely on spontaneity, although precisely it also involves the nonvolitional. Spontaneity manifests itself primarily in the conception of the work, through the design evident in it. But conception too is no ultimate category: It often transforms the self-realization of the artworks. It is virtually the seal of objectivation that under the pressure of its immanent logic the conception is displaced. This self-alien element that works contrary to the purported artistic volition is familiar, sometimes terrifyingly so, to artists as to critics; Nietzsche broached this issue at the end of Beyond Good and Evil. The element of self-alienness that occurs under the constraint of the material is indeed the seal of what was meant by “genius.” If anything is to be salvaged of this concept it must be stripped away from its crude equation with the creative subject, who through vain exuberance bewitches the artwork into a document of its maker and thus diminishes it. The objectivity of artworks—a thorn in the side of the inhabitants of a society based on barter because they mistakenly expect that art will mollify the alienation—is translated back into the person who stands behind the work, even though he is usually only the character mask of those who want to promote the work as an article of consumption. If one does not simply want to abolish the concept of genius as a romantic residue, it must be understood in terms of its historicophilosophical objectivity. The divergence of subject and individual, adumbrated in Kant’s antipsychologism and raised to the level of a principle in Fichte, takes its toll on art, too. Art’s authenticity—what is binding in it—and the freedom of the emancipated individual become remote from each other. The concept of genius represents the attempt to unite the two with a wave of the wand; to bestow the individual within the limited sphere of art with the immediate power of overarching authenticity. The experiential content of such mystification is that in art authenticity, the universal element, is no longer possible except by way of the principium individuationis, just as, conversely, universal bourgeois freedom is exclusively that of particularization and individuation. This relation, however, is treated blindly by the aesthetics of genius and displaced undialectically into an individual who is supposedly at the same time subject; the intellectus archetypus, which in the theory of knowledge is expressly the idea, is treated by the concept of genius as a fact of art. Genius is purported to be the individual whose spontaneity coincides with the action of the absolute subject. This is correct insofar as the individuation of artworks, mediated by spontaneity, is that in them by which they are objectivated. Yet the concept of genius is false because works are not creations and humans are not creators. This defines the untruth of any genius aesthetics that suppresses the element of finite making, the tέχνη in artworks, in favor of their absolute originality, virtually their natura naturans; it thus spawns the ideology of the organic and unconscious artwork, which flows into the murky current of irrationalism. From the start, the genius aesthetic shifted emphasis toward the individual—opposing a spurious universality—and away from society by absolutizing this individual. Yet whatever the misuse perpetrated by the concept of genius, it calls to mind that the subject in the artwork should not be reduced to its objectivation. In the Critique of Judgment the concept of genius became the refuge for everything of which hedonism had deprived Kant’s aesthetics. However, with incalculable consequences, Kant restricted geniality exclusively to the subject, indifferent to its egoalienness, which was later ideologically exploited by contrasting genius with scientific and philosophical rationality. The fetishization of the concept of genius that begins with Kant as the fetishization of dirempted, abstract subjectivity—to put it in Hegelian terms—already in Schiller’s votive offerings took on a quality of crass elitism. The concept of genius becomes the potential enemy of artworks; with a sidelong glance at Goethe, the person back of the work is purported to be more essential than the artworks themselves. In the concept of genius the idea of creation is transferred with idealistic hubris from the transcendental to the empirical subject, to the productive artist. This suits crude bourgeois consciousness as much because it implies a work ethic that glorifies pure human creativity regardless of its aim as because the viewer is relieved of taking any trouble with the object itself: The viewer is supposed to be satisfied with the personality—essentially a kitsch biography—of the artist. Those who produce important artworks are not demigods but fallible, often neurotic and damaged, individuals. An aesthetic mentality, however, that wholly swept away the idea of genius would degenerate into a desolate, pedantic arts-and-crafts mentality devoted to tracing out stencils. The element of truth in the concept of genius is to be sought in the object, in what is open, not in the repetition of the imprisoned. Incidentally, the concept of genius as it came in vogue in the late eighteenth century was in no way charismatic; in that epoch, any individual could become a genius to the extent that he expressed himself unconventionally as nature. Genius was an attitude to reality, “ingenious doings,” indeed almost a conviction or frame of mind; only later, perhaps given the insufficiency of mere conviction in artworks, did genius become a divine blessing. The experience of real unfreedom destroyed the exuberance of subjective freedom as freedom for all and reserved it as the exclusive domain of genius. It becomes ideology in inverse proportion to the world’s becoming a less human one and the more consciousness of this—spirit—is neutralized. Privileged genius becomes the proxy to whom reality promises what it denies humanity as a whole. What deserves to be salvaged in genius is what is instrumental to the work. The category of geniality can best be documented when a passage is described as being ingenious. Fantasy alone does not suffice for its definition. The genial is a dialectical knot: It is what has not been copied or repeated, it is free, yet at the same time bears the feeling of necessity; it is art’s paradoxical sleight of hand and one of its most dependable criteria. To be genial means to hit upon a constellation, subjectively to achieve the objective, it is the instant in which the methexis of the artwork in language allows convention to be discarded as accidental. The signature of the genial in art is that the new appears by virtue of its newness as if it had always been there; romanticism took note of this. The work of fantasy is less creatio ex nihilo, the belief of an art-alien religion of art, than the imagining of authentic solutions in the midst of the effectively preexisting nexus of works. Experienced artists may be overheard referring derisively to a passage: “Here he’s a genius.” They chastise the intrusion of fantasy into the logic of the work, an intrusion not subsequently integrated; instances of this are found not only in the work of self-promoting whiz kids but even at Schubert’s niveau. The genial remains paradoxical and precarious because the freely discovered and the necessary cannot actually ever be completely fused. Without the ever present possibility of failure there is nothing genial in artworks.
Because of its element of something that had not existed before, the genial was bound up with the concept of originality: thus the concept Originalgenie. As is well known, prior to the age of genius the idea of originality bore no authority. That in their new works composers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries made use of whole sections of their own earlier works and those of others, or that painters and architects entrusted their designs to students for completion, is easily misused to justify the stereotypical and routine and to denounce subjective freedom. Yet what this practice demonstrates is that originality had yet to become the object of critical reflection, by no means that there was no originality in artworks; one glance at the difference between Bach and his contemporaries suffices to make the point. Originality, the specificity of a determinate artwork, is not antithetical to the logicality of artworks, which implies a universal. Often originality emerges from a thoroughly consistent logical construction, of which mediocre talents are incapable. All the same, the question of the originality of older, archaic works is meaningless because the coercion exercised by collective consciousness, in which domination entrenches itself, was so extensive that originality, which presupposes something on the order of emancipated subjectivity, would be anachronistic. The concept of originality, as in Benjamin’s sense of the “originary,”5 does not so much summon up the primordial as the yet to be in works, their utopic trace. The original is the objective name of each work. If, however, originality arose historically, it is also enmeshed in historical injustice, in the predominance of bourgeois commodities that must touch up the ever-same as the ever-new in order to win customers. Yet with the growing autonomy of art, originality has turned against the market where it was never permitted to go beyond a certain limit. It withdrew into the artworks themselves, into the relentlessness of their integral organization. Originality remains touched by the historical fate of the category of individualness from which it was derived. Originality no longer obeys what it has been associated with ever since it began to be self-consciously reflected upon: a so-called individual style. Although the collapse of that style has meanwhile come to be decried by traditionalists, who are in fact defending conventional goods, in the most progressive works individual style, cunningly tricked out of the requirements of construction, takes on the quality of a blemish, a deficiency, or at the least a compromise. This is one of the most important reasons why advanced artistic production aims less at originality in a particular work than at the production of a new type. Originality is in the process of being transformed into the act of inventing types, a transformation in which originality is changed qualitatively without, however, disappearing in the process.
This transformation, which altogether severs originality from mere inspiration, the unique detail that once seemed to be the substance of originality, throws light on fantasy, its organon. Under the spell of the belief in the subject as the creator’s successor, fantasy effectively meant the capacity to bring forth something determinately artistic out of nothing. Its crude concept, that of absolute invention, is the exact correlate of the modern scientific ideal of the strict reproduction of what already exists; here the bourgeois division of labor has furrowed a trench that divides art from any mediation with reality, just as it divides knowledge from everything that in any way transcends reality. This concept of fantasy was never essential to important artworks; the invention, for instance, of fantastic beings in contemporary plastic arts is of minor significance, just as the sudden intervention of a musical motif, though hardly to be discounted, remains powerless so long as it does not surpass its own factuality through what develops out of it. If everything in artworks, including what is most sublime, is bound up with what exists, which they oppose, fantasy cannot be the mere capacity to escape the existing by positing the nonexisting as if it existed. On the contrary, fantasy shifts whatever artworks absorb of the existing into constellations through which they become the other of the existing, if only through its determinate negation. If the effort is made to envision a strictly nonexisting object through what epistemologists dubbed fantasizing fiction, nothing is achieved that cannot be reduced—in its parts and even in the elements that constitute its coherence—to what already exists. Only under the spell of the totally empirical does what is qualitatively opposed to it appear, though it does so exclusively as something on a second order of existence modeled on the first. Art transcends the nonexisting only by way of the existing; otherwise it becomes the helpless projection of what in any case already exists. Accordingly, fantasy in artworks cannot be restricted to the sudden vision. Although there is no conceiving of fantasy devoid of spontaneity, fantasy, despite being closest to the creatio ex nihilo, is by no means art’s one and all. Fantasy may be set in motion primarily by something concrete in the artwork, especially among those artists whose process of production works upward from below. Equally, however, fantasy is active in a dimension that a common prejudice holds to be abstract, namely in the dimension of the quasi-empty outline, which is then fleshed out and made good on through what prejudice considers the opposite of fantasy: “labor.” Even specifically technological fantasy is not a recent development, as is evident in the compositional style of the Adagio of Schubert’s string quintet as well as in the eddies of light in Turner’s seascapes. Fantasy is also, and essentially so, the unrestricted availability of potential solutions that crystallize within the artwork. It is lodged not only in what strikes one both as existing and as the residue of something existing, but perhaps even more in the transformation of the existing. The harmonic variant of the main theme in the coda of the first movement of the Appassionata, with the catastrophic effect of the diminished seventh chord, is no less a product of fantasy than is the triadic theme of the brooding idea that opens the movement; with regard to genesis it cannot be excluded that the variant that is decisive for the whole might in fact have been Beethoven’s initial idea, from which, retroactively as it were, the theme in its primary form was derived. It is no less of an achievement of fantasy that the later sections of the broadly cast development of the first movement of the Eroica give way to lapidary harmonic periods, as if suddenly there was no time for differentiation. The growing primacy of construction necessarily reduced the substantiality of the particular inspiration. Just how much labor and fantasy are implicated in each other—their divergence is invariably an index of failure—is supported by the experience of artists that fantasy is subject to command. They sense that the freedom to the involuntary is what distinguishes them from dilettantes. Even subjectively, the mediate and the immediate are in turn mediated in each other aesthetically and in knowledge. Not genetically, but in terms of its constitution, art is the most compelling argument against the epistemological division of sensuality and intellect. Reflection is fully capable of the act of fantasy in the form of the determinate consciousness of what an artwork at a certain point needs. The idea that consciousness kills, for which art supposedly provides unimpeachable testimony, is a foolish cliché in this context as anywhere else. Even its power to resolve objects into their components, its critical element, is fruitful for the self-reflection of the artwork: It excludes and modifies the inadequate, the unformed, and the incoherent. On the other hand, the category of aesthetic dumbness has its fundamentum in re as the lack of immanent reflection in works, which is evident, for instance, in the stupor of mechanical repetition. What is bad in artworks is a reflection that directs them externally, that forces them; where, however, they immanently want to go can only be followed by reflection, and the ability to do this is spontaneous. If each and every artwork involves a probably aporetic nexus of problems, this is the source of what is perhaps not the worst definition of fantasy. As the capacity to discover approaches and solutions in the artwork, fantasy may be defined as the differential of freedom in the midst of determination.
The objectivity of artworks is no more a residual determination than is any truth. Neoclassicism faltered because it deluded itself with the goal of achieving an ideal of objectivity, which appeared to it in apparently binding styles of the past, by way of a subjectively instituted procedure: It abstractly negated the subject in the work and formulated the imago of a subjectless in-itself, which the subject—itself no longer eliminable by any act of will—could throw into relief solely by means of injury to itself. A rigor that establishes restrictions by imitating long-past heteronomous forms obeys nothing other than that very subjective volition that is to be tamed. Valéry outlined the problem but did not solve it. Form that is merely chosen and posited, which Valéry himself sometimes defends, is as accidental as the chaotic “vitality” he despised. The aporia of art today is not to be cured through any willing subordination to authority. It remains an open question just how, without coercion, it would be possible, given an unmitigated nominalism, to achieve anything on the order of an objectivity of form; this is impeded by instituted closure. The tendency toward this instituted closure was synchronous with the rise of political fascism, whose ideology similarly feigned that a state freed from the desperation and insecurity of its subjects during the period of late liberalism could be hoped for only on the basis of the abdication of the subject. Of course, this abdication was prompted by more powerful subjects. Even in its fallibility and weakness, the subject who contemplates art is not expected simply to retreat from the claim to objectivity. Otherwise it would hold that those alien to art—the philistines devoid of any relation to art, who let it affect them as if they were a tabula rasa—would be the most qualified to understand and judge it, and the unmusical would be the best music critics. Like art itself, knowledge of it is consummated dialectically. The more the observer adds to the process, the greater the energy with which he penetrates the artwork, the more he then becomes aware of objectivity from within. He takes part in objectivity when his energy, even that of his misguided subjective “projection,” extinguishes itself in the artwork. The subjective detour may totally miss the mark, but without the detour no objectivity becomes evident. Every step toward the perfection of artworks is a step toward their self-alienation, and this dialectically produces ever anew those revolts that are too superficially characterized as subjectivity’s rebellion against formalism of whatever sort. The growing integration of artworks, their immanent exigency, is also their immanent contradiction. The artwork that carries through its immanent dialectic reflects it as resolved: This is what is aesthetically false in the aesthetic principle. The antinomy of aesthetic reification is also one between the ever fractured metaphysical claim of works to being exempted from time, and the transience of everything that establishes itself in time as enduring. Artworks become relative because they must assert themselves as absolute. Benjamin touched on this once in commenting that “there is no redemption for artworks.” The perennial revolt of art against art has its fundamentum in re. If it is essential to artworks that they be things, it is no less essential that they negate their own status as things, and thus art turns against art. The totally objectivated artwork would congeal into a mere thing, whereas if it altogether evaded objectivation it would regress to an impotently powerless subjective impulse and flounder in the empirical world.
Notes
1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 43.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 64.
4 Adorno, Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 2 (New York, 1992), p. 163. [Translation amended.—trans.]
5 [“Der Begriff des Ursprünglichen”: The reference to Benjamin has been interpolated here by the translator. See note 7 in “Semblance and Expression.”—trans.]