No More Learning

Dearest tiny or grown-up mouse boldly pay us a visit tonight
when the moon shines bright!
But close the door back of you tight, you hear?
124 0 ENIGMATICALNESS, TRUTH CONTENT, METAPHYSICS
And careful for your little tail ! After dinner we will sing After dinner we will spring And make a little dance: Swish, Swish!
My oid cat will probably be dancing with}
The child's taunt, "My oid cat will probably be dancing with"-if it really is a taunt and not the involuntarily friendly image of child, cat, and mouse dancing, the two animals on their hind legs - once appropriated by the poem, no longer has the last word. To reduce the poem to a taunt is to ignore its social content [Inhalt] along with its poetic content. The poem is the nonjUdgmental reflex of language on a miserable, socially conditioned ritual, and as such it transcends it by subordi- nating itself to it. The poem's gesture, which points to this ritual as if nothing else were possible, holds court over the gapless immanence of the ritual by turning the force of self-evidence into an indictment of that ritual . Art judges exclusively by abstaining from judgment; this is the defense of naturalism. Form, which shapes verse into the echo of a mythical epigram, negates its fatefulness. Echo reconciles. These processes, transpiring in the interior of artworks, make them truly infinite in themselves. It is not that artworks differ from significative language by the absence of meanings; rather, these meanings through their absorption become a matter of accident. The movements by which this absorption of meaning occurs are concretely prescribed by every aesthetically formed object.
Artworks share with enigmas the duality of being determinate and indeterminate . They are question marks , not univocal even through synthesis. Nevertheless their figure is so precise that it determines the point where the work breaks off. As in enigmas, the answer is both hidden and demanded by the structure. This is the function of the work's immanent logic, of the lawfulness that transpires in it, and that is the theodicy of the concept of purpose in art. The aim of artworks is the determination of the indeterminate . Works are purposeful in themselves , without having any positive purpose beyond their own argran ement; their purposefulness , however, is legitimated as the figure of the answer to the enigma. Through organi- zation artworks become more than they are. In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of ecriture has become relevant , inspired probably by Klee's drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illumines the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writ- ing. If no artwork is ever a judgment, each artwork contains elements derived from judgment and bears an aspect of being correct and incorrect , true and false . Yet the silent and determinate answer of artworks does not reveal itself to inter- pretation with a single stroke, as a new immediacy , but only by way of all media-
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 125
tions, those of the works' discipline as well as those of thought and philosophy. The enigmaticalness outlives the interpretation that arrives at the answer. If the enigmaticalness of artworks is not localized in what is experienced in them, in aesthetic understanding -if the enigmaticalness only bursts open in the distance- the experience that immerses itself in the artworks and is rewarded with corrobo- ration itself becomes enigmatic: the enigma that what is multivocally entwined can be univocally and compellingly understood as such. For the experience of art- works , whatever its starting point , is as Kant himself described it, necessarily im- manent and transparent right into its most sublime nuance. The musician who understands the score follows its most minute impulses, and yet in a certain sense he does not know what he plays; the situation is no different for the actor, and pre- cisely in this is the mimetic capacity made manifest most drastically in the praxis of artistic performance as the imitation of the dynamic curves of what is per- formed; it is the quintessence of understanding this side of the enigma. However, as soon as the experience of artworks flags, they present their enigma as a gri- mace. Incessantly the experience of artworks is threatened by their enigmatical- ness. If enigmaticalness disappears completely from the experience, if experience supposes that it has become completely immanent to the object, the enigma's gaze suddenly appears again; thus is preserved the artworks' seriousness, which stares out of archaic images and is masked in traditional art by their familiar language
until strengthened to the point of total alienation.
Ifthe process immanent to artworks constitutes the enigma, that is, what surpasses the meaning of all its particular elements , this process at the same time attenuates the enigma as soon as the artwork is no longer perceived as fixed and thereupon vainly interpreted but instead once again produced in its objective constitution. In performances that do not do this, that do not interpret, the in-itselfofthe artworks, which such asceticism claims to serve , becomes the booty of its muteness; every noninterpretive performance is meaningless. If some types of art, drama, and to a certain extent music , demand that they be played and interpreted so that they can become what they are - a norm from which no one is exempt who is at home in the theater or on the podium and knows the qualitative difference between what is required there and the texts and scores - these types actually do no more than illu- minate the comportment of an artwork, even those that do not want to be per- formed: This comportment is that each artwork is the recapitulation of itself. Art- works are self-likeness freed from the compulsion of identity. The Aristotelian dictum that only like can know like, which progressive rationality has reduced to a marginal value, divides the knowledge that is art from conceptual knowledge: What is essentially mimetic awaits mimetic comportment. If artworks do not make themselves like something else but only like themselves, then only those who imitate them understand them. Dramatic or musical texts should be regarded exclusively in this fashion and not as the quintessence of instructions for the per- formers: They are the congealed imitation of works, virtually of themselves, and
126 0 ENIGMATICALNESS, TRUTH CONTENT, METAPHYSICS
to this extent constitutive although always permeated with significative elements. Whether or not they are performed is for them a matter of indifference; what is not, however, a matter of indifference is that their experience -which in terms of its ideal is inward and mute-imitates them. Such imitation reads the nexus of their meaning out of the signa of the artworks and follows this nexus just as imita- tion follows the curves in which the artwork appears. As laws of their imitation the divergent media find their unity, that of art. If in Kant discursive knowledge is to renounce the interior of things, then artworks are objects whose truth cannot be thought except as that of their interior. Imitation is the path that leads to this interior.
Artworks speak like elves in fairy tales : "If you want the absolute , you shall have it, but you will not recognize it when you see it. " The truth of discursive knowl- edge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowl- edge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with art. Through the freedom of the subject in them, artworks are less subjective than is discursive knowledge. With unerring compass, Kant subordinated art to a concept of tele- ology whose positive application he did not concede to empirical understanding . However, the block that according to Kant's doctrine obstructs the in-itself to people, shapes that in-itself in artworks - the doctrine's proper domain, in which there is no longer to be any difference between what is in-itself and what is for- itself-as enigmatic figures: Precisely because they are blocked, artworks are im- ages of being-in-itself. Ultimately , what lives on in art's enigmaticalness, through which art most abruptly opposes the unquestionable existence of objects of action , i s the latter ' s own enigma. Art becomes an enigma because it appears to have solved what is enigmatical in existence, while the enigma in the merely existing is forgotten as a result of its own overwhelming ossification. The more densely people have spun a categorial web around what is other than subjective spirit, the more fundamentally have they disaccustomed themselves to the wonder of that other and deceived themselves with a growing familiarity with what is foreign. Art hopes to correct this, though feebly and with a quickly exhausted gesture. A priori , art causes people to wonder , just as Plato once demanded that philosophy do, which, however , decided for the opposite .
The enigma of artworks is their fracturedness. If transcendence were present in them, they would be mysteries, not enigmas; they are enigmas because, through their fracturedness, they deny what they would actually like to be. Only in the recent past-in Kafka's damaged parables-has the fracturedness of art become thematic. Retrospectively. all artworks are similar to those pitiful allegories in graveyards, the broken-off stelae. Whatever perfection they may lay claim to, art- works are lopped off; that what they mean is not their essence is evident in the fact that their meaning appears as if it were blocked. The analogy here to astrological superstition, which similarly depends on a purported relationship as much as it leaves this relationship obscure, is too insistently obvious to be dismissed lightly:
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 127
Art's blemish is that it is bound up with superstition. Art all too happily, and irra- tionally, revalues this blemish as a merit. The much touted complexity of art is the falsely positive name for its enigmaticalness. This enigmaticalness, however, has an antiaesthetic aspect, which Kafka irrevocably unveiled. By their failure with regard to their own element of rationality , artworks threaten to relapse into myth, from which they have been precariously wrested. Art is mediated in spirit-the element of rationality - in that it produces its enigmas mimetically, just as spirit devises enigmas, but without being capable of providing the solution; it is in art's enigmaticalness, not in its meanings, that spirit is manifest. In fact, the praxis of important artists has an affinity with the making of puzzles, as is evident in the delight taken by composers over many centuries in enigmatic canons. Art's enig- matic image is the configuration of mimesis and rationality. This enigmatical- ness emerged out of a historical process. Art is what remains after the loss of what was supposed to exercise a magical, and later a cultic, function. Art's why-and- wherefore - its archaic rationality, to put it paradoxically - was forfeited and transformed into an element of its being-in-itself. Art thus became an enigma; if it no longer exists for the purpose that it infused with meaning, then what is it? Its enigmaticalness goads it to articulate itself immanently in such a fashion that it achieves meaning by forming its emphatic absence of meaning . To this extent , the enigmaticalness of artworks is not all there is to them; rather, every authentic work also suggests the solution to its unsolvable enigma.
Ultimately , artworks are enigmatic in terms not of their composition but of their truth content. The indefatigably recurring question that every work incites in who- ever traverses it-the "What is it all about? "-becomes "Is it true? "-the ques- tion of the absolute , to which every artwork responds by wresting itself free from the discursive form of answer. A taboo on any possible answer is all that discur- sive thought can offer. Art itself, which is the mimetic struggle against this taboo, seeks to impart the answer and yet, being nonjudging, does not impart it; thus art becomes as enigmatic as the terror born of the primordial world, which, though it metamorphoses, does not disappear; all art remains the seismogram of that terror. The key to art's enigma is missing, just as it has been lost for the writings of many peoples who have perished. The most extreme form in which the question posed by the enigmaticalness of art can be formulated is whether or not there is meaning. For no artwork is without its own coherence, however much this coherence may be transformed into its own opposite. Through the objectivity of the work, this coherence posits the claim to the objectivity of meaning in-itself. This claim is not only nonnegotiable, it is contravened by experience. Enigmaticalness peers out of every artwork with a different face but as if the answer that it requires-like that of the sphinx - were always the same, although only by way of the diversity , not the unity that the enigma, though perhaps deceptively, promises. Whether the promise is a deception-that is the enigma.
The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by
128 0 ENIGMATICALNESS, TRUTII CONTENT, METAPHYSICS
each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth con- tent. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justifica- tion of aesthetics . Although no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determina- tions, as is the case with what art judges, each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless turns toward interpretive reason. No message is to be squeezed out of Hamlet; this in no way impinges on its truth con- tent. That great artists, the Goethe who wrote fairy tales no less than Beckett, want nothing to do with interpretations only underscores the difference ofthe truth con- tent from the consciousness and the intention of the author and does so by the strength of the author' s own self-consciousness. Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation. The claim that there is nothing to inter- pret in them, that they simply exist, would erase the demarcation line between art and nonart. Ultimately, perhaps, even carpets, ornaments, all nonfigural things longingly await interpretation. Grasping truth content postulates critique . Nothing is grasped whose truth or untruth is not grasped, and this is the concern of critique. The historical development of works through critique and the philosophical de- velopment of their truth content have a reciprocal relation. The theory of art must not situate itself beyond art but must rather entrust itself to its laws of movement while recognizing that artworks hermetically seal themselves off against the con- sciousness of these laws of movement. Artworks are enigmatic in that they are the physiognomy of an objective spirit that is never transparent to itself in the mo- ment in which it appears. The absurd, the category most refractory to interpreta- tion, inheres in that spirit that is requisite to the interpretation of artworks. At the same time, the need of artworks for interpretation, their need for the production of their truth content, is the stigma of their constitutive insufficiency. Artworks do not achieve what is objectively sought in them. The zone of indeterminacy be- tween the unreachable and what has been realized constitutes their enigma. They have truth content and they do not have it. Positive science and the philosophy de- rived from it do not attain it. It is neither the work's factual content nor its fragile and self-suspendable logicality. Nor-despite traditional philosophy-is art's truth content its idea, even if that idea is so broad as to include the tragic or the conflict between the finite and the infinite. Indeed, in its philosophical construc- tion such an idea rises above subjective intention. Yet, however applied, it re- mains external to the artwork and abstract. Even idealism's emphatic concept of the idea relegates artworks to examples of the idea as instances of what is ever- the-same. Thispasses sentenceontheruleoftheideainart,justasthisideacanno longer hold its ground to philosophical critique. The content [Gehalt] of art does not reduce without remainder into the idea, rather, this content is the extrapolation of what is irreducible; among academic aestheticians only Friedrich Theodor Vischer had an inkling of this . Just how little the truth content converges with the subjective idea, with the intention of the artist, is evident to the most rudimentary consideration. There are artworks in which the artist brought out clearly and sim-
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 129
ply what he wanted, and the result, nothing more than an indication of what the artist wanted to say, is thereby reduced to an enciphered allegory. The work dies as soon as philologists have pumped out of it what the artist pumped in, a tauto- logical game whose schema is true also of many musical analyses . The difference between truth and intention in artworks becomes evident to critical consciousness when the object of the artist's intention is itself false, those usually eternal truths in which myth simply reiterates itself. Mythical inevitability usurps truth. Innu- merable artworks suffer from the fact that they lay claim to being a process of constant self-transformation and development and yet subsist as an atemporal se- quence of what is ever-the-same. It is at such points of fracture that technological critique becomes the critique of the untrue and thus allies itself with the truth con- tent. There are good reasons to hold that in artworks technical failure is indicated by the metaphysically false. Artworks have no truth without determinate nega- tion; developing this is the task of aesthetics today. The truth content of artworks cannot be immediately identified. Just as it is known only mediately, it is medi- ated in itself. What transcends the factual in the artwork, its spiritual content, can- not be pinned down to what is individually, sensually given but is, rather, consti- tuted by way of this empirical givenness. This defines the mediatedness of the truth content. The spiritual content does not hover above the work's facture; rather, artworks transcend their factuality through their facture, through the con- sistency of their elaboration. The breath that surrounds them, that which is most akin to their truth content and is at once factual and not factual, is fundamentally distinct from mood in whatever way artworks once expressed mood; on the con- trary, in the interest of the work's breath, mood is consumed by the forming process. In artworks, objectivity and truth are inseparable. Through the breath of objectivity and truth within themselves-composers are familiar with the idea of a composition's "breath"-artworks approach nature, but not by imitation, whose sphere encompasses mood. The more deeply works are formed, the more obsti- nate they become against any contrived semblance, and this obstinacy is the nega- tive appearance of their truth. Truth is antithetical to the phantasmagorical ele- ment of artworks; thoroughly formed artworks that are criticized as formalistic are the most realistic works insofar as they are realized in themselves and solely by means of this realization achieve their truth content, what is spiritual in them, rather than merely signifying this content. However, it is no guarantee of their truth that artworks transcend themselves through their realization. Many works of the highest quality are true as the expression of a consciousness that is false in itself. This is recognized only by transcendent criticism, such as Nietzsche's critique of Wagner. The failing of that kind of critique , however, i s not only that it judges the matter from on high rather than measuring itself by it. This criticism is also impeded by a narrow-minded notion of truth content, usually a culturall philosophical notion that neglects the immanently historical element of aesthetic truth. The separation of what is true in itself from the merely adequate expression
130 0 ENIGMATICALNESS, TRUTH CONTENT, METAPHYSICS
of false consciousness is not to be maintained, for correct consciousness has not existed to this day, and no consciousness has the lofty vantage point from which this separation would be self-evident. The complete presentation of false con- sciousness is what names it and is itself truth content. It is for this reason that works unfold not only through interpretation and critique but also through their rescue , which aims at the truth of false consciousness in the aesthetic appearance. Great artworks are unable to lie. Even when their content is semblance, insofar as this content is necessary semblance the content has truth, to which the artworks testify; only failed works are untrue. By reenacting the spell of reality, by subli- mating it as an image , art at the same time liberates itself from it; sublimation and freedom mutually accord. The spell with which art through its unity encompasses the membra disjecta of reality is borrowed from reality and transforms art into the negative appearance of utopia. That by virtue of their organization artworks are more-not only as what is organized but also as the principle oforganization-for as what is organized they obtain the semblance ofbeing nonartifactual-determines them as spiritual. This determination, when recognized, becomes content. It is expressed by the artwork not only through its organization but equally through its disruption, which organization implies. This throws light on the contemporary predilection for the shabby and filthy as well as on the allergy to splendor and suaveness. Underlying this is the consciousness of the sordid aspects of culture hidden beneath its husk of self-contentment. Art that forswears the happy bril- liance that reality withholds from men and women and thus refuses every sensual trace of meaning, is spiritualized art; it is, in its unrelenting renunciation of child- ish happiness, the allegory of the illusionless actuality of happiness while bearing the fatal proviso of the chimerical : that this happiness does not exist.
Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the philosophical concept. With good reason , idealism historically - in Schelling- derived its own concept of truth from art. The closed yet internally dynamic totality of idealist systems was read out of artworks. However, because philosophy bears upon reality and in its works is not autarchically organized to the same degree as are artworks, the cloaked aes- thetic ideal of systems necessarily shattered. These systems are paid back in their own coin with the ignominious praise that they are philosophical artworks. The manifest untruth of idealism, however, has retrospectively compromised artworks. That in spite of their autarchy and by means of it they seek their other, what is external to their spell, drives the artwork beyond the identity with itself by which it is fundamentally determined. The disruption of its autonomy was not a fateful decline. Rather, it became art's obligation in the aftermath of the verdict over that in which philosophy was all too much like art. The truth content ofartworks is not what they mean but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and only this truth of the work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical inter- pretation and coincides-with regard to the idea, in any case-with the idea of
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 131
philosophical truth. For contemporary consciousness, fixated on the tangible and unmediated, the establishment of this relation to art obviously poses the greatest difficulties, yet without this relation art's truth content remains inaccessible: Aes- thetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy . - The condition for the possibility that philosophy and art converge is to be sought in the element of universality that art possesses through its specification as language sui generis. This universality is collective just as philosophical universality, for which the transcendental subject was once the signum, points back to the collective sub- ject. However, in aesthetic images precisely that is collective that withdraws from the I: Society inheres in the truth content. The appearing, whereby the artwork far surpasses the mere subject, is the eruption of the subject's collective essence. The trace of memory in mimesis, which every artwork seeks, is simultaneously always the anticipation of a condition beyond the diremption of the individual and the collective. This collective remembrance in artworks is, however, not Xropi? from the subject but rather takes place by way of the subject; in the subject's idiosyn- cratic impulse the collective form of reaction becomes manifest. For this reason , too , the philosophical interpretation of the truth content must unswervingly con- strue that truth content in the particular. By virtue of this content's subjectively mimetic expressive element, artworks gain their objectivity; they are neither pure impulse nor its form, but rather the congealed process that transpires between them, and this process is social.
Today the metaphysics of art revolves around the question of how something spiri- tual that is made, in philosophical terms something "merely posited," can be true. The issue is not the immediately existing artwork but its content [Gehalt]. The question of the truth of something made is indeed none other than the question of semblance and the rescue of semblance as the semblance of the true . Truth content cannot be something made. Every act of making in art is a singular effort to say what the artifact itself is not and what it does not know: precisely this is art's spiri t . This i s the locus o f the idea o f art a s the idea o f the restoration o f nature that has been repressed and drawn into the dynamic of history. Nature, to whose imago art is devoted, does not yet in any way exist; what is true in art is something nonexistent. What does not exist becomes incumbent on art in that other for which identity-positing reason, which reduced it to material, uses the word nature. This other is not concept and unity, but rather a multiplicity. Thus truth content pre- sents itself in art as a multiplicity , not as the concept that abstractly subordinates artworks. The bond of the truth content of art to its works and the multiplicity of what surpasses identification accord. Of all the paradoxes of art, no doubt the innermost one is that only through making, through the production of particular works specifically and completely formed in themselves, and never through any immediate vision, does art achieve what is not made, the truth. Artworks stand in the most extreme tension to their truth content. Although this truth content, con- ceptless, appears nowhere else than in what is made, it negates the made. Each art-
132 0 ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS
work, as a structure, perishes in its truth content; through it the artwork sinks into irrelevance, something that is granted exclusively to the greatest artworks. The historical perspective that envisions the end of art is every work's idea. There is no artwork that does not promise that its truth content, to the extent that it appears in the artwork as something existing, realizes itself and leaves the artwork behind simply as a husk, as Mignon's prodigious verse prophesies. The seal of authentic artworks is that what they appear to be appears as if it could not be prevaricated, even though discursive judgment is unable to define it. If however it is indeed the truth , then along with the semblance truth abolishes the artwork . The definition of art is not fully encompassed by aesthetic semblance: Art has truth as the sem- blance of the illusionless. The experience of artworks has as its vanishing point the recognition that its truth content is not null; every artwork, and most of all works of absolute negativity, mutely say: non confundar. Artworks would be powerless if they were no more than longing, though there is no valid artwork without longing. That by which they transcend longing, however, is the neediness inscribed as a figure in the historically existing. By retracing this figure, they are not only more than what simply exists but participate in objective truth to the extent that what is in need summons its fulfillment and change. Not for-itself, with regard to consciousness, but in-itself, what is wants the other; the artwork is the language of this wanting, and the artwork's content [Gehalt] is as substantial as this wanting. The elements of this other are present in reality and they require only the most minute displacement into a new constellation to find their right position.
Rather than imitating reality, artworks demonstrate this displacement to reality. Ultimately, the doctrine of imitation should be reversed; in a sublimated sense, re- ality should imitate the artworks. However, the fact that artworks exist signals the possibility of the nonexisting . The reality of artworks testifies to the possibility of the possible. The object of art's longing, the reality of what is not, is metamor- phosed in art as remembrance. In remembrance what is qua what was combines with the nonexisting because what was no longer is. Ever since Plato's doctrine of anamnesis the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance, which alone concretizes utopia without betraying it to existence. Remembrance remains bound up with semblance: for even in the past the dream was not reality. Yet art's imago is precisely what, according to Bergson's and Proust's thesis, seeks to awaken in- voluntary remembrance in the empirical, a thesis that proves them to be genuine idealists. They attribute to reality what they want to save and what inheres in art only at the price of its reality. They seek to escape the curse of aesthetic sem- blance by displacing its quality to reality. -The non confundar of artworks marks the boundary of their negativity , comparable to the boundary marked out in the novels of the Marquis de Sade where he has no other recourse than to call the most beautiful gitons du tableau "beaux comme des anges. " At this summit of art, where its truth transcends semblance, it is most mortally exposed. Unlike any- thing human, art lays claim to being unable to lie, and thus it is compelled to lie.
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS D 133
Art does not have i t i n its power t o decide over the possibility that everything may indeed not come to anything more than nothing; it has its fictiveness in the asser- tion implicit in its existence that it has gone beyond the limit. The truth content of artworks, as the negation of their existence, is mediated by them though they do not in any way communicate it. That by which truth content is more than what is posited by artworks is their methexis in history and the determinate critique that they exercise through their form. History in artworks is not something made, and history alone frees the work from being merely something posited or manufac- tured: Truth content is not external to history but rather its crystallization in the works. Their unposited truth content is their name.
In artworks the name is, however, strictly negative. Artworks say what is more than the existing , and they do this exclusively by making a constellation of how it is, "Comment c'est. "4 The metaphysics of art requires its complete separation from the religion in which art originated . Artworks are not the absolute , nor is the absolute immediately present in them. For their methexis in the absolute they are punished with a blindness that in the same instant obscures their language, which is a language of truth: Artworks have the absolute and they do not have it. In their movement toward truth artworks are in need of that concept that for the sake of their truth they keep at a distance. It is not up to art to decide whether its negativ- ity is its limit or truth. Artworks are a priori negative by the law of their objectiva- tion: They kill what they objectify by tearing it away from the immediacy of its life. Their own life preys on death. This defines the qualitative threshold to mod- em art. Modem works relinquish themselves mimetically to reification , their prin- ciple of death. The effort to escape this element is art's illusory element which, since Baudelaire , art has wanted to discard without resigning itself to the status of a thing among things. Those heralds of modernism Baudelaire and Poe were as artists the first technocrats of art. Without the admixture of poison, virtually the negation of life, the opposition of art to civilizatory repression would amount to nothing more than impotent comfort. If since early modernism art has absorbed art-alien objects that have been received without being fully transformed by its law of form, this has led mimesis in art to captitulate-as in montage-to its an- tagonist. Art was compelled to this by social reality. Whereas art opposes society, it is nevertheless unable to take up a position beyond it; it achieves opposition only through identification with that against which it remonstrates. This was al- ready the content [Gehalt] of B audelaire ' s satanism, much more than the punctual critique of bourgeois morality which, outdone by reality, became childishly silly. If art tried directly to register an objection to the gapless web, it would become completely entangled; thus, as occurs in such exemplary fashion in Beckett's Endgame, art must either eliminate from itself the nature with which it is con- cerned, or attack it. The only parti pris left to it, that of death, is at once critical and metaphysical. Artworks derive from the world of things in their performed material as in their techniques; there is nothing in them that did not also belong to
1 34 0 ENIGMATICALNESS, TRUTH CONTENT, METAPHYSICS
this world and nothing that could be wrenched away from this world at less than the price of its death . Only by the strength of its deadliness do artworks participate in reconciliation. But in this they at the same time remain obedient to myth. This is what is Egyptian in each. By wanting to give permanence to the transitory-to life-by wanting to save it from death, the works kill it. With good reason the power of artworks to reconcile is sought in their unity, in the fact that, in accord with the ancient topos , they heal the wound with the spear that inflicted it. Reason , which in artworks effects unity even where it intends disintegration, achieves a certain guiltlessness by renouncing intervention in reality, real domination; yet even in the greatest works of aesthetic unity the echo of social violence is to be heard; indeed, through the renunciation of domination spirit also incurs guilt. The act that binds and fixates the mimetic and diffuse in the artwork not only does harm to amorphous nature. The aesthetic image is a protest against nature's fear that it will dissipate into the chaotic. The aesthetic unity of the multiplicitous ap- pears as though it had done no violence but had been chosen by the multiplicitous itself. It is thus that unity - today as real as was ever the diremption - crosses over into reconciliation. In artworks the destructive power of myth is mollified through the particularization of the repetition that myth exercises in empirical reality, repe- tition that the artwork summons into particularization at the closest proximity. In artworks, spirit is no longer the old enemy of nature. Assuaged, spirit reconciles. Art is not reconciliation in the classicistic sense: Reconciliation is the comport- ment of artworks by which they become conscious of the nonidentical . Spirit does not identify the nonidentical: It identifies with it. By pursuing its own identity with itself, art assimilates itself with the nonidentical: This is the contemporary stage of development of art's mimetic essence. Today, reconciliation as the com- portment of the artwork is evinced precisely there where art countermands the idea of reconciliation in works whose form dictates intransigence. Yet even such irreconcilable reconciliation through form is predicated on the unreality of art. This unreality threatens art permanently with ideology. Art, however, does not sink to the level of ideology, nor is ideology the verdict that would ban each and every artwork from truth. On the basis of their truth, of the reconciliation that em- pirical reality spurns, art is complicitous with ideology in that it feigns the factual existence of reconciliation. By their own apriori, or, if one will, according to their idea, artworks become entangled in the nexus of guilt. Whereas each artwork that succeeds transcends this nexus, each must atone for this transcendence, and there- fore its language seeks to withdraw into silence: An artwork is, as Beckett wrote, a desecration ofsilence.
Art desires what has not yet been, though everything that art is has already been. It cannot escape the shadow of the past. But what has not yet been is the concrete. Nominalism is perhaps most deeply allied with ideology in that it takes concretion as a given that is incontestably available; it thus deceives itself and humanity by implying that the course of the world interferes with the peaceful determinacy of
ENIGMATICALNESS,TRUTHCONTENT,METAPHYSICS 0 135
the existing , a determinacy that is simply usurped by the concept of the given and smitten with abstractness. Even by artworks the concrete is scarcely to be named other than negatively. It is only through the nonfungibility of its own existence and not through any special content [lnhalt] that the artwork suspends empirical reality as an abstract and universal functional nexus. Each artwork is utopia inso- far as through its form it anticipates what would finally be itself, and this con- verges with the demand for the abrogation of the spell of self-identity cast by the subject. No artwork cedes to another. This justifies the indispensable sensual ele- ment of artworks: It bears their hic et nunc in which, in spite of all mediation, a certain independence is maintained; naive consciousness, which always clings to this element, is not altogether false consciousness. The nonfungibility, ofcourse, takes over the function of strengthening the belief that mediation is not universal . But the artwork must absorb even its most fatal enemy-fungibility; rather than fleeing into concretion, the artwork must present through its own concretion the total nexus of abstraction and thereby resist it. Repetition in authentic new art- works is not always an accommodation to the archaic compulsion toward repeti- tion. Many artworks indite this compulsion and thereby take the part of what Karl Heinz Haag has called the unrepeatable; Beckett' s Play, with the spurious infinity of its reprise, presents the most accomplished example. The black and grey of recent art, its asceticism against color, is the negative apotheosis of color. If in the extraordinary biographical chapters of Selma Lagerlof's Marbacka, a stuffed bird of paradise- something never before seen-cures a paralyzed child, the ef- fect of this vision of utopia remains vibrant, but today nothing comparable would be possible: The tenebrous has become the plenipotentiary of that utopia. But be- cause for art, utopia-the yet-to-exist-is draped in black, it remains in all its me- diations recollection; recollection of the possible in opposition to the actual that suppresses it; it is the imaginary reparation of the catastrophe of world history; it is freedom, which under the spell of necessity did not-and may not ever-come to pass. Art's methexis in the tenebrous, its negativity, is implicit in its tense rela- tion to permanent catastrophe. No existing, appearing artwork holds any positive control over the nonexisting. This distinguishes artworks from religious symbols, which in their appearance lay claim to the transcendence of the immediately pre- sent. The nonexisting in artworks is a constellation of the existing. By their nega- tivity, even as total negation, artworks make a promise, just as the gesture with which narratives once began or the initial sound struck on a sitar promised what was yet to be heard, yet to be seen, even if it was the most fearsome; and the cover of every book between which the eye loses itself in the text is related to the promise of the camera obscura. The paradox of all modem art is that it seeks to achieve this by casting it away just as the opening of Proust's Recherche inge- niously slips into the book without the whirring of the camera obscura, the peep- show perspective of the omniscient narrator, renouncing the magic of the act and thereby realizing it in the only way possible. Aesthetic experience is that of some-
136 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
thing that spirit may find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility
promised by its impossibility . Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.
Although artworks are neither conceptual nor judgmental, they are logical. In them nothing would be enigmatic if their immanent logicality did not accom- modate 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 imma- nent contract, and ultimately the traditional desideratum of homeostasis require the principle of logical consistency: This is the rational aspect of artworks . With- out 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 with- out concept or judgment. It draws consequences from phenomena that have al- ready 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 , how- ever 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 pre- dominant, marked art's emergent self-consciousness from its dimension of logical consistency. Indeed, on the basis of its formalism, mathematics is itself aconcep- tual; 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 di- mension 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 art- works 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 a La Lettre. This is the point of Nietzsche's comment- though admittedly it amateurishly underestimates the logicality of art -that in art- works 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
COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 137
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 rela- tion 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 in- tensifies, while its claims become ever more literal -to the point of parody in to- tally 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 conclu- sions cannot be drawn without concept andjudgment.
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 hi- bernates. Schopenbauer's principia individuationis-space, time, and causality- make a second, refracted appearance in art, in the sphere of what is most individu- ated. 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 ofevents is established. In the undifferentiated- ness 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 mu- sician 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
1 38 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
distinct from those external to them but, in spite of the latters ' modification, incor- porate 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 con- trolled 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 in- evitability 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 de- nied, but they are divested of their compulsiveness. Paradoxically, it is precisely t o t h e e x t e n t t h a t a r t i s r e l e a s e d fr o m t h e e m p i r i c a l w o r l d b y i t s fo r m a l c o n s t i t u e n t s that it is less illusory, less deluded by subjectively dictated lawfulness, than is em- pirical knowledge. That the logic of artworks is a derivative of discursive logic and not identical with it, i s evident i n 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 modem 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 re- lation 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 per- manent conflict, does art succeed at escaping the spell by even the slightest degree. Conclusions drawn without concept and judgment are from the outset di- vested of any apodicity and insist instead on a communication between objects that is easily masked by concept and judgment, whereas aesthetic consistency pre-
serves 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 com- posed 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 de- fined 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
COHERENCEANDMEANING 0 139
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 im- plicit 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 synthe- sis 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 multi- plicity, 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 con- futed 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. Re- mote 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 con-
1 40 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
tent [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 them- selves 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 elo- quent 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 ofjudgment-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 re- flected 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 Valery, because everything about art is so inextricably tied up with it that the con- cept defies isolation. As little as art is to be defined by any other element, it is sim- ply 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 au- tonomy of the artwork possible. In highly developed modem works, form tends to dissociate unity, either in the interest ofexpression or to criticize art's affirmative
COHERENCE AND MEANING 0 141
character. Long before the ubiquitous crisis, open forms existed. In Mozart the unity of the work was occasionally playfully tested by its relaxation . By juxtapos- ing relatively disjointed or contrasting elements, Mozart, the composer who is praised above all others for the rigor ofhis 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 sup- posedly 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 in- volved, 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 repe- tition 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 al- ways 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 indepen- dence 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 un- certain. 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 Lukacs, who said that in modem art the importance of form has been greatly overestimated) Evident in this philistine call to arms is a discontent with art of which Lukacs the cultural conservative is unconscious , as well as a concept of form
142 0 COHERENCE AND MEANING
that is inadequate to art. To hit upon the idea that fonn has been overestimated in art, one must fail to recognize that fonn is essential to art, that it mediates content [Inhalt] .