The Appeal of Art in Modernity 2019043736, 2019043737, 9780815377689, 9781351233941

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The Appeal of Art in Modernity

This book explores the place of art in the modern world, but instead of asking what art is, it begins with the question of art’s appeal in modernity. Why is the appellation ‘art’ so desired for movies, food, and fashion, for example? Why is there the assumption of esteem when someone calls themselves an ‘artist’? On the other hand, why is modern art so often seen as, at best, difficult and, at worst, not, in fact, art? Engaging with a broad range of theory, the author draws on the thought of Max Weber to offer an account of art’s widespread appeal in terms of its constituting a self-contained value-sphere of meaning, which provides a feeling of tremendous salvation from the senseless routines of modern life. In this way, major theories on aesthetics in philosophy and sociology – including those of Kant, Hegel, Adorno and Bourdieu – are critically recast and incorporated into an overall explanation, and fundamental questions concerning the relation of art to politics and ethics are given innovative answers. A fresh examination of the development of the aesthetic sphere that shows how art came to be regarded as one of the last bastions of freedom and the highest human achievement, and, also, how it became increasingly isolated from the rest of society, The Appeal of Art in Modernity will appeal to scholars of philosophy, social theory, and sociology with interests in art, modernity, and Weber. Michael Symonds is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Sociology in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Max Weber’s Theory of Modernity and the co-author of Home, Displacement, Belonging.

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Series Editor Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA Titles in this series From the Peaceable to the Barbaric Thorstein Veblen and the Charro Cowboy Beatriz Aldana Marquez Morality Made Visible Edward Westermarck’s Moral and Social Theory Otto Pipatti Critical and Cultural Interactionism Insights from Sociology and Criminology Michael Hviid Jacobsen The Unmasking Style in Social Theory Peter Baehr Writing the Body Politic A John O’Neill Reader Thomas Kemple and Mark Featherstone Emotions through Literature Fictional Narratives, Society and the Emotional Self Mariano Longo The Appeal of Art in Modernity Michael Symonds For more information about this series, please visit​:http​s://w​ww.ro​utled​ge.co​m/ soc​iolog​y/ser​ies/A​SHSER​1383

The Appeal of Art in Modernity

Michael Symonds

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Michael Symonds The right of Michael Symonds to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Symonds, Michael John, author. Title: The appeal of art in modernity / Michael Symonds. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019043736 (print) | LCCN 2019043737 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815377689 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351233941 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Modern–20th century. | Art–Philosophy. | Aesthetics, Modern–20th century. Classification: LCC N6490 .S915 2020 (print) | LCC N6490 (ebook) | DDC 701–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043736 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043737 ISBN: 978-0-8153-7768-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-23394-1 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Jack, on the island …

Contents

1

Weber: The value-sphere of art

1

2

Kant: The inner workings of the sphere of art

21

3

Hegel: Art and the end of history

56

4

Adorno I: Truth, beauty, and utopia

85

5

Adorno II: Purpose, disenchantment, and suffering

111

6

Bourdieu: Distinction and the game of art

139

6a Addendum: Labour

166

7 Conclusion

168

Bibliography 179 Index 182

1

Weber The value-sphere of art

Introduction This is a long argument to answer an apparently simple question: why is it that so many want what they do to be called ‘art’? Or, from a slightly different angle, to say that something is art is almost certainly not just a matter of praising it, but of bestowing the highest possible praise. Look around and this appeal of art seems ubiquitous, with ready examples to be found in fashion, food, video games, graffiti, sport, cartoons, tattoos – the list here really does go on and on. The task, then, is to try to uncover the workings of this widespread assumption of the age that the appellation ‘art’ is necessarily a good thing – even, perhaps, a judgement of ultimate, unqualified worth. However, a few wrinkles are clearly visible on this well-known face of artistic appeal. When someone calls themselves an ‘artist’ a great deal of the same status is unsurprisingly apparent, but not quite all; there is at least the whiff of putting oneself above and against the rest, and this sense of superiority often generates quite open hostility. Also, it is often the case that modern art, as exhibited in galleries and museums, is regarded as unlikable, incomprehensible, or, perhaps, not really ‘art’; and this antagonistic attitude might well be taken up by the very people who want their own work, of whatever kind, to be regarded as art. How are we to make sense of these qualities of art and the artist? Firstly, we cannot be satisfied with restricting ourselves to the commonly asked question ‘what is art?’ – a much favoured topic in philosophical aesthetics. Rather, we are drawn into the social context of art and so into the vexed nature of modernity itself. And immediately the theoretical implications have increased enormously: what is art in modern life, or what has art become to give it both such appeal and disaffection? The philosophical answers to the ‘what is art’ question are still going to provide some necessary insights, but the task before us is to join such philosophy with a sociological theory of modernity, and to form these twin strands of thought into some sort of workable whole. The disciplinary institutionalisation of the academy militates against such cross-fertilisation, but the questions themselves would seem to demand such practice. Not surprisingly, for the philosophy we will turn to Kant and Hegel, who still sustain a central place in academic aesthetics. But where do we find our theory of

2 Weber modernity, especially when we remember that the dominant sociological theory of our day is so very hostile to philosophy, and especially to the very philosophy of art we will have to employ1? The approach to be taken here – and this is certainly not to be regarded as the only fruitful route possible2 – is to begin with a theory of art and modernity that can be found in perhaps the most unlikely of places: the sociology of Max Weber.

Weber There are good reasons why Weber is not the most obvious choice to best inform us on art in modernity: his discussions of art are relatively slight; his lasting legacy has been based on his theorisation of the rationalised forces of modernity, particularly with regard to the economy and bureaucracy – so, areas opposed to the seeming irrational, subjective nature of art; and in the commentary, while there is some obligatory mention of his theories in surveys of the sociology of art (Harrington, 2004; Tanner, 2003) and in accounts of his value-sphere theory of modernity (e.g., Scaff, 1991; Brubaker, 1984), his contribution to this area of study is usually ignored both in the sociology of art (e.g., Hanquinet and Savage, 2016) and in the overviews of Weber’s work (too numerous to mention). However, two broad points can be made in favour of adopting Weber as our starting point. Firstly, Weber’s theory of the place of art in modernity is that art’s appeal arises because it is so fundamentally opposed to the rationalised structures of the economy, politics/law, and science. On this basis, it is precisely because of the strength of Weber’s account of the hard, rational modern world beyond art that he can be so useful in our understanding of art. Secondly, in addition to this negative determination of art by rationalised modernity, Weber also provides us with a conceptualisation of the aesthetic component of modern life in relation to religion: he will theorise the allure of art in modernity in terms of religious meaning. Now there have been numerous everyday and theoretical proclamations that art has been able to sustain some kind of religious sensibility (and that here lies some of its appeal within the secular West),3 but Weber’s particular understanding here is part of his substantial, foundational sociology of religion. Art in modernity, then, is quite strictly located by Weber within these two, closely interwoven areas of his work, i.e. as part of his vast and complex theory of rationalised modernity, as well as within his equally extensive work on religious belief. The attraction of Weber’s arguments, it is hoped, is starting to become apparent. Weber’s major writing on art appears within his sociology of religion, and predominantly in the much vaunted and, inevitably, much scrutinised Zwischenbetrachtung4 (which we will here render into English as the ‘Intermediary Reflection’). In this essay, his understanding of religion and his understanding of what we have come to term ‘modernity’ are brought together within the theory of the value-spheres; that is, the value-sphere structure is how Weber theorises modernity in terms of his sociology of religion. How can this work? Two points need to be stated initially. Firstly, this view of modernity is underpinned by a philosophical anthropology where Weber assumes that humans are

Weber  3 engaged in a constant search for meaning, with religion, in all its wondrous permutations, being the obvious expression of this need. Weber’s theory rests, then, on the assumption that humanity’s quest for ‘meaning’ emerges from the metaphysical needs of the human mind as it is driven to reflect on ethical and religious questions, driven not by material need but by an inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take a stand towards it. (Weber, 1978: 499, emphasis added; see also 1948d: 281, 1948b: 353, 1949: 81)5 The questions of meaning are, most basically, just what Weber voices in ‘Science as a Vocation’ through the words of Tolstoy: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ (Weber, 1948c: 143). However, in Western Christianity, such an ordering of ‘life’s realities’ (Weber, 1948b: 353) to provide such meaning will tend to consider, in various ways and with different degrees of emphasis, the questions of death and unjust suffering in the world (the problem of theodicy) (see, especially, Weber, 1948d: 275). Moreover, it befalls ‘the strata of intellectuals’ to develop this ‘metaphysical need’ rationally into the ‘meaningful cosmos’ exhibited in religion (Weber, 1948d: 281). Secondly, religion in modernity has been displaced from the dominant structures of the economy, law/the state, and the intellectual sphere. Religion is not of course absent from modernity as a whole, and is still a determining factor of these very structures, but it no longer has the legitimation of old. Legitimation in modernity arises from the rational-legal domain. Sometimes Weber is said to be advocating a ‘secularisation’ thesis, in the sense that religion and magical/spiritual belief will simply fade away, or at least be subject to continuous decline; but, on the contrary, Weber did not preclude strong religious belief in both traditional and novel forms from not just existing, but even flourishing, in modern times. What is precluded for him is just what is stated above: the economy, law/the state, and academic intellectual life cannot be legitimated by religion in a dominant way. In fact, as I write these very words, the strength of Weber’s thesis here is manifest: even if I had wanted to, the very arguments of this book cannot be given authority, or legitimated, by reference to some sacred text or religious belief – they can only be judged on their rational qualities. Of course, Weber knows that some might desire this to change, think that it has changed, and will write books and articles that mix religious belief into the rational domains. But, for Weber, this overall fate of the rationalised world is not therefore altered. There will be some traditional acknowledgements at times, and rational discourse might well be rationally shown to be far from rational in its determination by irrational factors, but this does not alter the dominant form of legitimation and the consequences of this for meaning. So, initially it can be seen that the value-sphere theory arises for Weber because modernity is partly shaped by these two basic factors: a fundamental shift away from the role religion has usually played in society; and the ongoing human search for meaning that has usually been met by religion.

4 Weber Perhaps the strongest sense of what is at stake here for Weber in terms of this overarching concern with meaning can be appreciated through consideration of the concept of disenchantment (a term which has inevitably been much discussed in the commentary.) In varying degrees, magic is stripped from the world in all intellectualised urban cultures, usually in combination with increasingly rationalised theologies. But, for Weber, one of the key aspects of Western disenchantment is the way this much-repeated tendency becomes so radically complete. With Protestantism, particularly in some of its most extreme forms, the world is left without enchanted means of reaching the divine; and with Western science any trace of divine meaning is necessarily ruled out of its calculations. The road to Protestant disenchantment begins, for Weber, with ancient Judaism, and when its logical extreme is reached some severe implications can be witnessed. That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here to its logical conclusion. The genuine Puritan even rejected all signs of religious ceremony at the grave and buried his nearest and dearest without song or ritual in order that no superstition, no trust in the effects of magical and sacramental forces on salvation, should creep in. (Weber, 1958a: 105) More generally, the invocation to work dutifully on this mundane earth that God has provided, rather than seek access to the divine through some magical intermediary (like representations of saints, or priests), is a basic way that disenchantment fits into Weber’s hugely disputed theory on the relation between Protestantism and capitalism. But, if Christianity takes disenchantment to this level, God still has a divine plan which includes salvation from death, even if such knowledge lies beyond human access of any kind. For Weber, it is only with Western science that all meaning is finally eliminated from the universe. The increasing intellectualisation and rationalisation do not, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. (Weber, 1948c: 139, Weber’s emphasis)

Weber  5 Again, this is not to deny that magical religious beliefs of multiple kinds (including that of the Catholic Church) continue to flourish in modernity, nor that scientists might feel some great thrilling sense of wonder, or even meaning, when some new discovery or innovative success is achieved (and the emotional level of such discovery appears to be one of ecstasy at times – an uncomfortable sight for those outside the intellectual value-sphere). However, for Weber these are just distractions from the fundamental point of Western intellectualisation: science has finally brought in the well-known shift from cosmos to universe. Or to put it in Weber’s terms here, it is the fate of modernity for the world to have become fully disenchanted. The fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ (Weber, 1948c: 155) The implications for modern culture of this fully disenchanted world are devastating for Weber in terms of meaning. In both ‘Science as a Vocation’ and the ‘Intermediary Reflection,’ this point is developed when Weber writes of death and science in the somewhat wider context of modern culture: You will find this question raised in the most principled form in the works of Leo Tolstoi. He came to raise the question in a peculiar way. All his broodings increasingly revolved around the problem of whether or not death is a meaningful phenomenon. And his answer was: for the civilised person death has no meaning. It has none because the individual life of civilised man, placed into an infinite ‘progress,’ according to its own imminent meaning should never come to an end; for there is always a further step ahead of one who stands in the march of progress. And no person who comes to die stands upon the peak which lies in infinity. Abraham, or some peasant of the past, died ‘old and satiated with life’ because he stood in the organic cycle of life; because his life, in terms of its meaning and on the eve of his days, had given to him what life had to offer; because for him there remained no puzzles he might wish to solve; and therefore he could have had ‘enough’ of life. Whereas civilised man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas, knowledge, and problems, may become ‘tired of life’ but not ‘satiated with life.’ He catches only the most minute part of what the life of the spirit brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not definitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because death is meaningless, civilised life as such is meaningless; by its very ‘progressiveness’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness. (Weber, 1948c: 139–40; see also Weber, 1948b: 356–7) Death is meaningless for ‘civilised man’ and for intellectual cultivation (Weber, 1948b: 356) because of the endlessness of modern culture. A cosmos of older

6 Weber meaning could sustain ‘organic cycles of life,’ as opposed to the patterns of modern intellectual culture where such a sense of ‘satiation’ must be denied: the modern striving for ‘self-perfection, in the sense of acquiring or creating “cultural values”’ (Weber, 1948b: 356) is never-ending. The advancement of cultural values, however, seems to become a senseless hustle in the service of worthless, moreover self-contradictory, and mutually antagonistic ends. (Weber, 1948b: 357) Values, such as perfection in the cultivation of the self, truth/reason in science, or beauty in art, are sought but are necessarily separate, incomplete, and provisional. There can be no completion in modernity, only ‘devastating senselessness’ with ‘culture’s every step forward’ (Weber, 1948b: 357). In this way, Weber’s concept of ‘disenchantment’ reveals the full and fateful character of the basic senselessness of modern life, especially in terms of the meaning of death. This is the condition that promoted the growth of the value-sphere structure of modernity. Before the value-spheres – and the sphere of the aesthetic in particular – are discussed in detail, a note might be made here to allay some fears that Weber’s problem and subsequent theory might appear out-of-date in seemingly being wedded to a sense of cultural and existential crisis that beset so much late 19th-century and early 20th-century intellectual life in Europe. Although it is hard to take the temperature of such attitudes, these days the keenness of such meaninglessness seems somewhat blunted, if standardly acknowledged; with existential nihilism – a staple of late 19th-century European intellectual culture, at least as Nietzsche tells it – now regarded as a dated, even faintly ridiculous, extreme. So, if the senselessness of modernity no longer reaches the pitch of being as ‘devastating’ as Weber describes, there arises the problem of why it is no longer experienced at this level of profound importance, given that the basic disenchanted, rationalised world of Weber’s account appears impregnably intact. Perhaps surprisingly, Weber’s theory of modernity itself furnishes us with some reasons for this development. For, even if the full force of this senselessness was freshly felt in Weber’s lifetime, as the quotes here indicate, his theory of modernity, by showing how mechanisms meet and dissipate this problem of meaning, provides an explanation for the subsequent decline in the potency of this ‘crisis.’ This theory is his conception of the value-sphere structure of modernity, with art perhaps the most likely of all the sites within the overall meaninglessness of the modern life of the West where some compensatory meaning might be found.

The value-spheres Disenchantment removes the overall cosmic meaning of the world: only in Western modernity would there come to be a dominant understanding that the physical universe does not include a central, or even minor, place for the fulfilment of human life, and perhaps, the overcoming of death. Without such cosmic

Weber  7 unity as the underlying basis of human meaning, modernity provides a series of internal spheres where comparatively small amounts of meaning might be temporarily gained. Weber lists five such value-spheres: the economic, political, intellectual, erotic, and aesthetic. And he gives depictions of how meaning is maximally achieved in each of these spheres: with some sense of vocational labour in the economy, with elected politicians in the political sphere, the academic in the intellectual, romantic lovers in the erotic, and the artist or connoisseur of high artistic taste in the sphere of art. Weber also allows the possibility of adding to this list, and he specifically mentions, but does not develop, the sphere of the family.6 With reference back to the classical world, this array of value-spheres is called a ‘polytheism’ (Weber, 1948c: 147–8) by Weber, which helps us understand how he regards these structures in modernity as not only concerned with meaning but also as able to be increased in number. We all move between at least some of these spheres in our everyday lives, and we are compelled to follow the value structure of each sphere once it is entered. The three spheres that must be engaged are the economic, political/legal, and the intellectual. These three are, in Weber’s terms, the most heavily rationalised; non-traditional rational forces are so forcefully present that it is from these three spheres that the cold severity of the capitalist, bureaucratic, scientific world of modernity that has so often been associated with Weber, has arisen. However, despite great pressures, entering the two other spheres – the erotic and aesthetic – is optional; and these two spheres are regarded by Weber as basically irrational and in direct opposition to the three rationalised spheres. If there is this basic division between the rationalised and irrational spheres7 in Weber’s theory of modernity, it should be stressed that this is not an absolute division and Weber will emphasise the important presence of a range of irrational factors in the rationalised spheres; and, conversely, will argue for the presence of rationalised forces such as intellectual theory in the more irrational areas.8 How does meaning work in these spheres? When we enter one of the rationalised spheres it might be in a role where meaning will be minimal or absent, such as buying groceries in the economic sphere, or applying for a driver’s licence in the realm of the law/state. But Weber has three famous works where what meaning is available is laid out in its fullest sense: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for the economic value-sphere; ‘Science as a Vocation’ for the intellectual sphere; and ‘Politics as a Vocation’ for the realm of the state. As is usual for writings by Weber, this is not all that these works are doing, and they have all been subject to multiple interpretations, often with a high degree of hostility evident, especially, and famously, with regard to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The key concept for meaning in these spheres is the concept of ‘vocation.’ Much will have to be left unsaid here,9 since this is not the topic of the present argument, but Weber is at pains to show how a Protestant sense of vocational meaning can be present in all these spheres. In the economic it is usually a minimal force of meaning for those at work in this sphere – often labour in capitalism is felt as simply senseless routine. But some will clearly get a great sense of

8 Weber vocational meaning in their work in the economy and, for Weber, even in the most seemingly soul-destroying paid labour certain traces of the greatest religious meaning are still present. It is to be remembered that for the Puritan, dedicated work in the mundane world was the means of salvation from death, and in some famous words at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber arguably asserts that some sense of that vocation, or calling, is still present, even if heavily diluted and inescapably enforced: The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. (Weber, 1958a: 181) In the intellectual sphere, this labour theory of meaning is added to by continued, irrational assumptions concerning the meaning that reason once provided in its various pre-modern, particularly religious, forms. That is, the intellectual task was once tied to understanding the meaning of the world, and its sense of importance largely followed from this achievement. But if intellectual reason’s brilliant, scientific theories about the disenchanted nature of the world have had to leave these very questions of meaning behind, the assumption that such reason is vitally worthwhile is still extant; science/intellectual reason can no longer give answers to the great questions of meaning, but some of the self-importance of what was once possible continues to be pre-supposed. Today one usually speaks of science as ‘free from presuppositions.’ Is there such a thing? It depends upon what one understands thereby. All scientific work presupposes that the rules of logic and method are valid; these are the general foundations of our orientation in the world; and, at least for our special question, these presuppositions are the least problematic aspect of science. Science further presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is ‘worth being known.’ In this, obviously, are contained all our problems. For this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means. It can only be interpreted with reference to its ultimate meaning, which we must reject or accept according to our ultimate position towards life. (Weber, 1948c: 143) ‘Science as a Vocation’ offers prospective academics entrance to a tension-filled intellectual sphere where the senseless disenchanted universe of science is mixed with a sense of irrational, multi-layered vocational importance. The conclusions of science decisively help fix modernity in its current state of meaninglessness,

Weber  9 but the pursuit of such conclusions can call on both the Protestant heritage of vocational labour as well as the intellectual past, when such rational pursuit was tied to ultimate human meaning. And on the continued presence of these elements some sense of meaning can still be built. ‘Politics as a Vocation’ seemingly shows how a new sense of vocational meaning is possible in the modern, democratic state. For the elected politician, the ‘cause’ that motivates each candidate into a life of public service can add to the Protestant heritage and provide a strong sense of purpose within the overall senselessness of modernity. Hence the politician nourishes his inner balance and self-feeling by the consciousness that his life has meaning in the service of a ‘cause.’ (Weber, 1948a: 84, Weber’s emphasis) However, the necessities of the state – particularly violence, power, and, increasingly, bureaucracy – will undermine the realisation of the ‘cause,’ of whatever kind. But, in the face of this inevitable loss of meaning, faith in the initial purpose must be maintained if some sense of vocation is to be preserved. The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. This is fundamental to all history, a point not to be proved in detail here. But because of this fact, the serving of a cause must not be absent if action is to have inner strength. Exactly what the cause, in the service of which the politician strives for power and uses power, looks like is a matter of faith. The politician may serve national, humanitarian, social, ethical, cultural, worldly, or religious ends. The politician may be sustained by a strong belief in ‘progress’ – no matter in which sense – or he may coolly reject this kind of belief. He may claim to stand in the service of an ‘idea’ or, rejecting this in principle, he may want to serve external ends of everyday life. However, some kind of faith must always exist. (Weber, 1948a: 117, Weber’s emphasis) So, in these ways each of the three rationalised value-spheres offers a measure of meaning. However, as mentioned, they are also the source of the overall meaninglessness of Weber’s famous view of modernity – after all, it is the capitalist economy, the disenchanted scientific universe and the bureaucratic state that fatefully combine to produce Weber’s famous vision of modern life as grim and hard. This sketch of the rationalised value-spheres was needed to allow a more fully developed depiction of the irrational sphere of art. For Weber, since we all must submit to the values of the rationalised spheres, then we cannot escape the fate of our times – the disenchanted world of modernity. How we deal with this fate is the question that Weber puts to us. At the end of ‘Science as a Vocation’ Weber famously offers three options: go back to religion, but for the scientist this must entail a degree of ‘intellectual

10 Weber sacrifice,’ if fully embraced; wait for a new prophet to arise; or, heroically, accept this fate and take up what limited meaning is on offer in the vocational possibilities of modern life. However, this is not all that is in fact on offer in Weber’s schema, even for the intellectual pursuing a vocation within the academy. Irrational possibilities for finding meaning abound in modernity, and Weber is sympathetic to, at least, the young when such options are taken up. In ‘Science as a Vocation,’ Weber tells of the never-ending quest for ‘experience’ that is needed to try to refill the insatiable demands of the modern subject. Such experiential content might come from, for example, religion or romanticism, but this drive to experience for the inner subject derives its importance from being a reaction to the structures of rationalised modernity, such as intellectual reason and its institutions of legitimation. It works only as a rejection of the disenchanted world. And today? ‘Science as the way to nature’ would sound like blasphemy to youth. Today, youth proclaims the opposite: redemption from the intellectualism of science in order to return to one’s own nature and therewith to nature in general … And finally, science as a way ‘to God’? Science, this specifically irreligious power? That science today is irreligious no one will doubt in his innermost being, even if he will not admit it to himself. Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine. This, or something similar in meaning, is one of the fundamental watchwords one hears among German youth, whose feelings are attuned to religion or who crave religious experiences. They crave not only religious experience but experience as such. The only thing that is strange is the method that is now followed: the spheres of the irrational [Sphären des Irrationalen10], the only spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched. (Weber, 1948c: 142–3, emphasis added) These days, the emphasis on experience is commonplace, and the capitalist market provides a bountiful number of such ‘escapes.’ But Weber seeks to capture these seemingly formless, reactive pursuits within his value-sphere structure of modernity. So, as this quote reveals, it is the irrational value-spheres of modernity that provide the sociological site for this craving for meaningful experience. The two irrational spheres that Weber takes up, and whose tremendous status in modernity he seeks to explain, are the erotic and aesthetic. The spheres of aesthetic and erotic life … are ‘this-worldly’ life-forces, whose character is essentially non-rational or basically anti-rational. (Weber, 1948b: 341) It is through the value-sphere theory that Weber seeks an answer to how these kinds of experience can have such appeal in modern life.

Weber  11

Art as a value-sphere The aesthetic and erotic value-spheres are considered together by Weber and we must first account for their common properties before concentrating on art exclusively. A number of points need to be made here. Firstly, since this value-sphere theory occurs within his sociology of religion, Weber is considering what happens to the questions of meaning in modernity in relation to religion – in terms of both comparison with religion and determination by religion. Secondly, as mentioned, participation in these irrational spheres is not mandatory and depends on the fact that the compulsorily experienced rationalised spheres are fatefully determinate of disenchanted modernity. That is, to use Weber’s polytheistic comparison, the ‘gods of [the] city’ (Weber, 1948c: 148; also, 1948a: 123) – the economy, the state, and the intellectualised world – have to be given homage, however disbelieving the supplicant might be.11 But the other ‘gods’ of art and the erotic, who will have many passionate devotees, are relatively minor deities and exist in contrast to, and are dependent on, the more powerful divinities in the modern pantheon of Weber’s account. Thirdly, in contrast to the limited meaning available in the rationalised spheres which is understood in term of the ‘vocation’ by Weber (albeit with added elements in science and politics), the irrational spheres are given a much stronger religious frame of reference when they are described by Weber as each having a kind of internal structure of meaning, that in the case of art, Weber terms an inner ‘cosmos.’ The development of intellectualism and the rationalisation of life change this situation.12 For under these conditions, art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right. (Weber, 1948b: 342, emphasis added) Plainly Weber is contrasting the interiority of these value-spheres with the senseless universe of the rationalised world of modernity – somehow, to enter these spheres as the artist or romantic lover is to regain entry into a cosmos of meaning that Weber charges modernity as a whole with having lost, as we have seen. However, it has to be noted here that, on the face of it, this sounds confused. The very culture of continual renewal in modernity that Weber pinpoints as indicative of this shift in overall meaning (‘there is always a further step ahead’) would seem to be exactly how art itself works – the constant pursuit of the new and original is more manifest in art than perhaps anywhere else, even the capitalist economy. However, the value-sphere of art is also said to be this site of a renewed manifestation of the cosmos with, presumably, an attendant sense of meaning. How can the aesthetic sphere’s constant renewal of culture somehow regain the meaning of the cosmos which was marked by the satiation of an organic life-cycle within a traditional world before the advent of the disenchanted universe? We will have to return to this problem of the inner ‘cosmos’ of art.

12 Weber Fourthly, and most importantly, the irrational spheres of art and the erotic are said by Weber to possess a religion-rivalling experience of ‘salvation.’ Art takes over the function of a this-worldly salvation, no matter how this may be interpreted. It provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism. (Weber, 1948b: 342, Weber’s emphasis) In the case of the erotic value-sphere: The last accentuation of the erotical sphere occurred in terms of intellectualist cultures. It occurred where this sphere collided with the unavoidably ascetic trait of the vocational specialist type of man … A tremendous value emphasis on the specific sensation of an inner-worldly salvation from rationalisation thus resulted. (Weber, 1948b: 346, emphasis added) But from what are the artist and romantic lover saved? Here is where the valuesphere structure of modernity takes a different turn, for art and the erotic spheres provide salvation from the rationalised world itself, as these quotes begin to reveal. In fact, Weber gives numerous examples of this effect, and a list can be compiled of what Weber says the irrational spheres provide salvation from13: ‘intellectual constructions of science [as] an unreal realm of artificial abstractions’ (Weber, 1948c: 140); ‘the rationalism and intellectualism of science’ (Weber, 1948c: 142); ‘rational endeavour,’ ‘rational orders,’ ‘the banality of everyday routine’ (Weber, 1948b: 347); ‘routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism’ (Weber, 1948b: 342); ‘the unavoidably ascetic trait of the vocational specialist type of man’ and ‘rationalisation’ (Weber, 1948b: 346); ‘purposive–rational conduct’ (Weber, 1948b: 341); ‘mechanics of rationalisation’ (Weber, 1948b: 345); and just plain ‘rationality’ (Weber, 1948b: 346). Even more strongly, this rationalised world is cast as a kind of ‘death.’ In ‘Science as a Vocation’ Weber compares the positive ancient Greek view of intellectual reason with attitudes to science in 1917. Well, who today views science in such a manner? Today youth feels rather the reverse: the intellectual constructions of science constitute an unreal realm of artificial abstractions, which with their bony hands seek to grasp the blood-and-the-sap of true life without ever catching up with it.14 (Weber, 1948c: 140–1) Also, in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ the salvation of the erotic sphere throws up a similar image: The lover realises himself to be rooted in the kernel of the truly living, which is eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavour. He knows himself to be

Weber  13 freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine.15 (Weber, 1948b: 347) In these quotes the impersonal, rationalised world constitutes a sort of death – the repeated image is of lifeless, skeletal hands – as opposed to the ‘kernel of the truly living’ or ‘true life.’ Of course death itself is not addressed or made meaningful, but a kind of substitute death is created in modernity; and irrational experience, particularly in the aesthetic and erotic value-spheres, is offered as a means of salvation from this unavoidable fact of modern human existence. Weber seems to be saying that even if death is now meaningless, the very social structures of modernity partially form around the continued pursuit of such a meaning. Indeed, the Western religious answers to this problem still have a faint echo within the secular structure of the modern world. Weber appears to be arguing that Christian salvation from the ‘wages of sin,’ and the promise of eternal life, have not been completely subtracted from the seemingly irreligious heart of modernity, since there is this transmogrified experience of salvation from the ersatz death available in the erotic and aesthetic value-spheres. The Christian tradition of salvation is sustained by art in this facsimile form. It is hard to imagine what could be more appealing than to rival religion in this fundamental way, even if death itself has not been faced. The fifth point to make on the value-spheres in the context of the sociology of religion concerns the other central problem, besides death, that has concerned most of the great religions of the world: unjust suffering, or the problem of theodicy.16 For Weber, there is a kind of trade-off between the small fragments of meaning that all the value-spheres offer and the Christian tradition of an ethic of suffering – an ethic which still fundamentally marks modernity. That is, the meaning that can be gained in the value-spheres is associated with death and salvation (so with various kinds of vocation in the rationalised spheres, and with this mock death in the aesthetic and erotic), but Weber is at pains to demonstrate in the ‘Intermediary Reflection’ that to follow the values of every value-sphere – irrational and rationalised – is to act in a way that is inimical to the ethic of brotherliness,17 at least in its ideal Christian form. This brotherly ethic of love is the Christian response to the problem of theodicy – all who suffer, even your enemy, should be personally cared for and loved. Weber goes through each of the value-spheres to show how they must follow this unethical logic, and concludes that the whole of modern culture it thereby subject to a profound ‘guilt.’ Especially culpable are the values of intellect and aesthetic taste: These values have borne the stigma of a deadly sin, of an unavoidable and specific burden of guilt. They have proved to be bound to the charisma of the mind or of taste. Their cultivation has seemed inevitably to presuppose modes of existence which run counter to the demand for brotherliness and which could only be adapted to this demand by self-deception. The barriers of education and of aesthetic cultivation are the most intimate and the most insuperable of all status differences. Religious guilt could now appear not

14 Weber only as an occasional concomitant, but as an integral part of all culture, of all conduct in a civilised world, and finally, of all structured life in general. And thereby the ultimate values which this world offered have seemed burdened with the greatest guilt. (Weber, 1948b: 354, emphasis added) This link between Christian brotherliness, art, and modernity will be seen to be important as we come to consider the ethical appeal of art, especially in Kant and Adorno. Basically, as a value-sphere, art must be fundamentally anti-ethical, despite many arguments and assumptions to the contrary. It might be hoped that a picture of how the irrational spheres function in modernity for Weber is starting to emerge. We can now focus in on the sphere of the aesthetic in isolation. In some brief, dense passages from the Intermediary Reflection and Economy and Society religion and art are distinguished from each other on the grounds of meaning. In fact, rival kinds of salvation are said to be at stake. Weber writes: Indeed, religion violently rejects as sinful the type of salvation within the world that art qua art claims to provide. (Weber, 1978: 608) The aesthetic value-sphere achieved this capacity for meaning ‘within the world’ based on a new set of three values: taste, the creative subject, and form. It is through the endless pursuit of these values that the inner cosmos of art can be constantly recreated. Firstly, judgement becomes based on taste as opposed to ethics. As a matter of fact, the refusal of modern men to assume responsibility for moral judgments tends to transform judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste (‘in poor taste’ instead of ‘reprehensible’). (Weber, 1948b: 342; also, Weber, 1978: 608) Secondly, the artist, and those who are aesthetically receptive, have an inner subjectivity – ‘subjectivist needs’ (Weber, 1948b: 342; also, Weber, 1978: 608) – that must reject all other norms as restrictive of their creative originality and sensitivities: To the creative artist, however, as well as to the aesthetically excited and receptive mind, the ethical norm as such may easily appear as a coercion of their genuine creativeness and innermost selves. (Weber, 1948b: 342; also, Weber, 1978: 608) Thirdly, within the value-sphere of art, form, or style triumphs over content (with form having a long history of tension with religious meaning):

Weber  15 The sublimation of the religious ethic and the quest for salvation, on the one hand, and the evolution of the inherent logic of art, on the other, have tended to form an increasingly tense relation. All sublimated religions of salvation have focused upon the meaning alone, not upon the form, of the things and actions relevant for salvation. Salvation religions have devalued form as contingent, as something creaturely and distracting from meaning. (Weber, 1948b: 141; also, Weber, 1978: 610) Weber contrasts the inner world of artistic form with religious, particularly mystic, experience: The most irrational form of religious behaviour, the mystic experience, is in its innermost being not only alien but hostile to all form. Form is unfortunate and inexpressible to the mystic because he believes precisely in the experience of exploding all forms, and hopes by this to be absorbed into the ‘Alloneness’ which lies beyond any kind of determination and form. For him the indubitable psychological affinity of profoundly shaking experiences in art and religion can only be a symptom of the diabolical nature of art. Especially music, the most ‘inward’ of all the arts, can appear in its purest form of instrumental music as an irresponsible Ersatz for primary religious experience. The internal logic of instrumental music as a realm not living ‘within’ appears as a deceptive pretension to religious experience … Art becomes an ‘idolatry,’ a competing power, and a deceptive bedazzlement … (Weber, 1948b: 342–3) This comparison with religion is indicative of the salvation value of art in modernity and the opposition here is between the ‘internal’ or ‘inherent logic’ of artistic form over the content of salvation religions.18 In sum, the irrational escape from the rationalised world creates the separate aesthetic sphere in terms of the values of taste, subjective originality, and form. For Weber, religion-rivalling meaning is gained through these values. They enable this separate sphere to exist in the midst of disenchanted modernity, and it exists by being explicitly opposed to the dominant rationalised value-spheres that have created and sustain the impersonal senselessness of modern life. There is a new kind of ‘salvation’ and the recreation of a new kind of cosmos within the overarching truth of the scientific universe. We can now start to appreciate, perhaps, how this inner cosmos works as opposed to the traditional pre-scientific cosmos. As a value-sphere there is the sense of being part of greater body that is shaped by what it is opposed. Art is what has been poured into a kind of permanent mould that is constituted by rationalised modernity and its dominant spheres – the aesthetic value-sphere is sited within an oppositional space caught within modern senselessness, and cannot exist outside this confinement. And the material of the mould must not taint the art content within – art has to maintain a level of purity (even if trace elements of the rationalised external structures are inevitably present). But for art to exist

16 Weber the mould cannot be broken19; art has no possible substantial existence outside modernity. As mentioned, however, there is a problem here about the religion-rivalling meaning to be found in the aesthetic value-sphere, and especially with the idea of the ‘inner cosmos’ which forms against the modern understanding of the universe. As we have seen, Weber stigmatises modernity with a terrible endlessness: culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness. (Weber, 1948b: 357, partly quoted above) Marx’s famous phrase ‘All that is solid melts into air’ seems particularly apt. Art is necessarily part of this cultural endlessness and might be regarded as the exemplar of this process, given its devotion to taste, the original development of form and the underlying affirmation of the inner subject. If this is the case, there arises the question of how such aesthetic activity could form something that can be called a ‘cosmos,’ if this term is referring back to the traditional, Christian cosmos, with its ‘satiation’ of life and the meaningful place of death. How could ‘cosmos’ justifiably be applied in both of these seemingly contrary cases? Remarkably, when we piece together Weber’s various comments on this topic, we find that it is precisely because its cultural endlessness is so very extreme, that art can be granted the status of ‘cosmos.’ In the traditional cosmos of Weber’s account there is an ending to life in the sense of completing a pattern of existence that has been inscribed in the very make-up of the world. In comparison, death is meaningless in modernity when there always seems something more to do – there can be no satiation for the cultural voyager within a disenchanted universe. Art, as the greatest manifestation of this cultural practice, cannot give a meaning to death – once the value-sphere of art is entered the traditional cosmos is as far away as possible, since it is only the new that counts for the aesthetic values of taste, form, and subjectivity. Originality is always demanded. But it is precisely here, where death is so ultimately senseless, that a new meaning of ‘death’ can be found: the endless creativity of art provides salvation from the ‘death’ of rationalised routine. In fact, for the individual artist to stop such production of the new would be to succumb to this death, and this point indicates how the artistic value of labour is different to that in all the other spheres. Here, in the aesthetic value-sphere, the Protestant model of vocational labour is imitated in a way that defies its stunted presence elsewhere in modernity. This is the case because only in art can labour once again become the means to the end of salvation from ‘death.’ There might not be the Puritan’s unswerving devotion to work in the mundane world, but the work of the artist, which sometimes does approach Protestant levels of dedication, provides a quality of meaning unrivalled in modernity because of this experience of salvation from rationalised senselessness. Elsewhere, the Protestant sense of vocational labour can provide some measure of meaning, but almost always the religious end of salvation has been forgotten and labour has become much more

Weber  17 an end in itself, rather than a means to a meaningful end (this is the much spoken of Protestant work ethic). Certainly there are other ends in the various rationalised spheres, like making money in the economic sphere or pursuing reason and truth in the Academy or taking up the cause in politics; but there is no sense of death and salvation attached to these ends, and, usually, these ‘ends’ were once only the means to the greater end of meaning. In modernity, then, it is only in art that there is a reconnection between labour and salvation. The overall conclusion about art for Weber is that it offers the greatest degree of meaning available in modernity (outside religious belief itself). For our present purposes, Weber displays a powerful reason why art is so appealing in modernity, as well as setting up the theoretical framework for more reasons to be added. More clarity might be obtained if Weber’s argument is summarised as follows. Firstly, there is a universal human need to try to find meaning in the world, with religion the obvious way that need has been met. However, the religious answers to such questions of meaning, especially around death and theodicy, have been relegated to the hinterland of modernity, despite the fact that religion remains important in many people’s lives. The dominant structures of the economy, politics, and science and their attendant cultures must, according to Weber, find legitimation that is not based on religion and which is essentially senseless. Secondly, the value-sphere structure of modernity, as part of Weber’s sociology of religion, is primarily concerned with what measure of meaning can still be found in modernity, after the long logic of disenchantment has fatefully been completed. That is, this theory of modernity is concerned with the pursuit of meaning within the meaningless universe of the rationalised West. Thirdly, there are two groups of value-sphere: the rationalised and irrational. Each sphere will develop its own inner structure of limited meaning within the overall meaninglessness of the modern world, with the religious history of the West still a determining factor of such meaning. Fourthly, the rationalised spheres – the economic, scientific, and political – all sustain some level of vocational meaning from the Protestant origins. However, in the economic such meaning is usually very low – it is just work without any further ends; but in the other two spheres there are additional factors that raise the level of vocational meaning – the irrational assumptions of the worth of rational inquiry in the scientific/intellectual realm and the ‘cause’ of the elected politician. Fifthly, however, the irrational spheres of the erotic and aesthetic provide a much higher degree of religion-rivalling meaning because they can give a sense of salvation from the dominant, rationalised side of modernity These two irrational value-spheres (and more could be added to the pantheon of spheres here) provide a new idea of an inner, self-enclosed ‘cosmos’ cut off from ordinary routines of rationalised life. Such a ‘cosmos’ recalls the total cosmos of a traditional, religious worldview where death had a place within the ethical structure of the universe. Sixth and lastly, when we can compare the erotic and aesthetic spheres themselves we find that although the ecstasies of erotic, romantic love are perhaps unrivalled in terms of short-term intensity, art offers a life of salvation. The inner cosmos of the aesthetic sphere is completely opposed to the satiation of the traditional cosmos, on Weber’s account, and so, like all modernity, can give

18 Weber no meaning to death itself. However, the constant aesthetic quest for the production of the new has the consequences that: the rationalised spheres are kept at bay; an inner cosmos is sustained by such never-ending activity; and labour in the form of this artistic production of the artwork provides a new model of the Protestant relation between work in the mundane world and salvation from ‘death.’ This might all be captured in the way that art, in being this life-long task, can be said to provide a better way of at least dealing with the fact of death than any other sphere. That is, the familiar pattern of retirement from paid work and awaiting a meaningless death20 is, arguably, circumvented more often by the artist than by any other occupation. Of course, in numerous fields many will keep on working as long as they can, but the extreme lack of satiation in art and the salvation quality of such labour mean that such a life allows a sense of meaningful fulfilment and a possible postponement of the final confrontation with actual death until that life itself has ended. Or, in other words, the constant presence of the fake ‘death’ and the resultant labour and sense of salvation within the cosmos of the value-sphere of art, are able to give an imitation of the meaning of the traditional cosmos, even when produced within the modern worldview that is fatefully marked by the senselessness of the disenchanted universe and the endlessness of the pursuit of cultural values.

Some implications for the coming argument To see art as a value-sphere allows us to explore the worth of other theories of aesthetics in the modern world. This can happen in a number of ways. The idea of art being somehow ‘autonomous’ or semi-autonomous is recast by Weber’s theory of modernity. What Weber shows is how art as a value-sphere has an inner and outer existence. As we have seen, an internal ‘cosmic’ order is determined by the combination of the values of taste, inner subjectivity and form; and the power of meaning within this sphere is possible in the way this inner cosmos is kept relatively intact in opposition to the external, more highly rationalised world of the value-spheres of the economy, politics, and intellectual, academic reason. Weber provides a great deal to an understanding of our question on the appeal of art, but what is equally important is how this model of inner and outer existence for art allows other theories to be freshly appreciated. So, we can return to the great aesthetic philosophies of Kant and Hegel. Writing before the value-sphere of art crystallised, we can assess how much of these philosophies can aid our understanding of what art was to become. Many of Kant’s concepts of the aesthetic would not be sustained in the art sphere, but he provides tremendous insight into the inner world of art nevertheless. Hegel will, mainly, be shown to help us theorise the external, contrasting conditions of the value-sphere of art – what he terms the ‘prosaic’ life of modernity. And it is in the very idea of Hegel’s ‘end of art’ – where art becomes cut off from the most important movements of history – that will reveal some of the most profound ways that art has become both historically irrelevant and tremendously appealing. Vitally, through consideration of this older philosophy, we will be able to grapple with the appeal of art in terms of the concept of freedom.

Weber  19 Later, post-Weber theorists can also be critically appropriated. Particularly valuable will be theorists with a Marxist affiliation of kinds, such as Adorno and Bourdieu. The way Adorno tries to negotiate the inner/outer existence of art via Kant and Hegel will be shown to be fatally flawed from the Weberian perspective. Importantly, however, Adorno’s dialectical arguments on freedom, beauty, and disenchantment will considerably boost our understanding of art’s allure. As for Bourdieu, his sociological research has much to add to our understanding of the internal and external workings of art; but this ‘scientific,’ class view of art also manages to cut itself off from the insights that Weber and his philosophical allies have to offer and, on these grounds, will have to be challenged.

Notes 1 The reference here mainly has Bourdieu in mind. This hostility will be directly confronted in the chapter on Bourdieu to come. 2 Daniel Bell (1976) provides one such alternative argument. His stress is on the way the artist became the model for a new cultural orthodoxy of hedonistic self-fulfilment that overtakes the foundational, small-town capitalist culture of Protestant work and Puritan temper. Developments within the capitalist economy itself are held to be the major cause of this ‘cultural contradiction.’ Weber plays a surprisingly small role in this account; and, notably and erroneously, Weber is said to view art as simply part of the rationalisation of modernity, with only Weber’s Rational and Social Foundations of Music cited (Bell, 1976: 36–7). 3 This is an everyday occurrence but also finds expression in a range of theorists from Schopenhauer to Arthur Danto, and even, as we will see, in the work of Bourdieu. 4 The final, 1920 published version of this piece appears in the first volume of Weber’s Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, and is a kind of overview, linking essay that sits in the same volume as the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, follows the long study of the Religion of China, and immediately precedes the Religion of India that comes in the next volume. A variant of the ideas here on art is also found in the ‘Sociology of Religion’ section of Economy and Society (unpublished in Weber’s lifetime). 5 The philosophical anthropology – this human need for meaning – is given a different, crucial conceptualisation by Weber in terms of ‘ideal interests’ (see, for example, Weber, 1948d: 270, 271, 277, 288; and Weber, 1948b: 353). As opposed to material interests (e.g., food, shelter), the notion of ideal interests captures the common human concern with how to live in the world, and usually such interests will, in varying measures, be directed to the facts of human death and suffering. All humans, for Weber, will be engaged in following ideal as well as material interests – with religion the obvious fulfilment of this ‘ideal’ relation to the world. 6 See Weber, 1948b: 328–30. It might have been better to see this sphere as the ‘home,’ but work is needed to develop this aspect of Weber’s thought. Other spheres could also be added, following Weber’s theory here, but beyond what Weber could have designated at the time, e.g., sport, cinema, and, perhaps, areas of consumer culture. 7 To call these spheres the ‘rationalised’ and ‘irrational’ does go against some of the most important secondary accounts of the value-sphere structure of modernity, but it is more in keeping with Weber’s own terminology than the proffered alternatives. I have discussed this problem in more detail elsewhere (Symonds, 2015). 8 See, especially, his study of rationalisation within Western musical harmony (Weber, 1958b). Weber stresses both the extent and limits of this specific form of the rationalisation process.

20 Weber 9 Although I dislike the self-referential posting of an author’s own works, unfortunately, in this instance, the reader is again referred to my 2015 book on Weber. 10 The original language will only be included when the argument benefits from such a clarification of terms, and when, at crucial points, it is thought to be of interest to the reader. 11 Weber makes many comparisons between the modern and classical worlds, and this allusion to the ‘city-gods’ of modernity makes reference to the way that the rites of certain specific gods of the Greek polis had to be performed by all, even though many in ancient Athens did not believe in the existence of these gods and argued such a position publically. 12 This refers to art and religion still being tied together. 13 Some of these examples have already been given in the quotations above. 14 ‘Ja, wer steht heute so zur Wissenschaft? Heute ist die Empfindung gerade der Jugend wohl eher die umgekehrte: Die Gedankengebilde der Wissenschaft sind ein hinterweltliches Reich von künstlichen Abstraktionen, die mit ihren dürren Händen Blut und Saft des wirklichen Lebens einzufangen trachten, ohne es doch je zu erhaschen’ (Weber, 1992: 89) 15 ‘weiß sich der Liebende in den jedem rationalen Bemühen ewig unzugänglichen Kern des wahrhaft Lebendigen eingepflanzt, den kalten Skeletthänden rationaler Ordnungen ebenso völlig entronnen wie der Stumpfheit des Alltages’ (Weber, 1920: 561). 16 Often put as the problem of evil – a depiction that tends to lose Weber’s central moral point. 17 Again, see my book on Weber, where Weber’s understanding of the ethic of brotherliness is laid out in detail. 18 There has long been a tension between art/the erotic and religion, which Weber describes in the ‘Intermediary Reflection.’ However, the point is that it is only in modernity that these irrational forces become competing spheres of meaning with religion. 19 And for Weber, there is no foreseeable way that this will happen, although part of the makeup of modernity has been the self-consciousness that such change is possible. 20 Witnessed in the brutal circumstances of old-age ‘homes,’ or qualified with bouts of experience-seeking and/or unpaid work. The point is that retirement from work entails some level of confrontation with death which is no longer located within a traditional pattern of human existence written into the very nature of the world. The result is an array of endless activities addressed to the old, that modernity – and, especially, capitalism – displays as desirable. There are always exceptions, but art would seem to offer the most complete way of putting off this final confrontation through its particular combination of endlessness, ‘death’ and cosmos, as discussed above.

2

Kant The inner workings of the sphere of art

Introduction Archaeologists and tomb-raiders Kant’s theory of aesthetics is being brought into play in order to expand our understanding of how the inner cosmos of the value-sphere of art actually works. The basic task is to identify those elements of Kant’s account that are still applicable and show why other elements have to be discarded. So, with Weber’s understanding of the aesthetic value-sphere in mind, we will focus our attention on what Kant has to say on taste, the irrational, and subjectivity. Kant was able to grasp some of the ways that these fundamental values manifest themselves as the logic of art in modernity through concepts like ‘subjective universal,’ ‘purposiveness without purpose,’ aesthetic ‘communicability,’ and ‘genius,’ amongst others. What has proved to be less enduring are Kant’s ideas on nature, beauty, the sublime, and the moral dimension of the aesthetic. However, to Kant’s enormous credit, it is largely through his conceptualisation of what would prove to be the ongoing elements of art that we can in fact understand how other factors in the Critique of Judgement have themselves come to be displaced from the valuesphere of the aesthetic. A cautionary comment now needs to be stated. To take on Kant in this way – and the same will apply, in slightly varying degrees, with the theorists to follow – is to come face to face with a vast secondary literature that has been exponentially expanding of late in line with the growth of the university sector and its insatiable demands for publication. How are we to deal with this mass of material and not stand petrified in the face of such man-made mountains of research, much of which has resulted from many lifetimes of devoted scholarship? A first step might be to indulge in a comparison with another discipline and roughly divide the secondary interpretations into two overlapping camps: the archaeologists and the tomb-raiders. This comparison between archaeology/tomb-raiding and philosophy/social theory cannot be pushed too far, but the archaeologists are those careful scholars who will, perhaps, spend their academic lives in the painstaking excavation of the primary works, with detailed analysis of each term and the documentation of its use through the theorist’s oeuvre and, possibly, its place in

22 Kant debates of the time and succeeding ages. The tomb-raiders, on the other hand, enter the great structures of ideas and take the things they wish to use without too much regard for the theoretical and historical context. For the purposes of the current argument, we are about to raid the tombs of Kant and Hegel1 and hope for an illuminating yield. Some archaeological diligence will be needed, but only these primary theories are going to be used to build up an understanding of how art works its appeal in modernity. We will not be engaged, therefore, in the reconstruction of Kant and Hegel’s extensive theories – just a few precious items will be extracted; and most of the scholarly, interpretative tradition will be ignored. As far as possible, the authors will be allowed to speak for themselves, but it has to be acknowledged that in not directly engaging with the secondary debates there is the danger that errors and misinterpretations might creep in, and/or some views might simply be out of date. This would seem to be the risk that has to be taken for something like the current project to be feasible. A starting point A fundamental point needs to be stressed before the argument engages with the detail of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Simply, we will begin with the assumption that art exists only in modernity; or, to put it more strongly, there is no art without modernity and no modernity without art. In brief, Kant lays out the terms of this new cultural phenomenon and Hegel recognises its historical (in)significance. Kant stands at the start of modernity so that his claims about art necessarily take up the 18th-century perspective on aesthetics. The basic terms of the 18thcentury debate are: taste, subjectivity, beauty, the sublime, nature, and the resultant problematic relation between art and morality. Much of this debate, with Kant at the centre, still persists. In essence, Kant begins to describe art in terms that are purely aesthetic in the sense that he tries to differentiate art from all other human values. What is so remarkable in this 18th-century stage of emerging modernity, as Hegel would come to realise so clearly, is that, arguably, ‘art’ in fact comes into being for the very first time in human history. In other words, with Kant providing the pre-eminent description of this new cultural phenomenon, art is something that is able to be considered as separate from the rest of society, with its own values and ends. Now, of course, the opposing idea that ‘art’ is a universal human cultural expression is assumed in numerous histories, philosophies and psychologies of art, and Kant himself talks of art in universalist terms. But what he is also doing is pinpointing this new, increasingly self-sufficient position, which could have only arisen as part of the advent of modernity. To make this point perhaps more confusing is that Hegel refers to this separation of art from the rest of society and history – this new invention of ‘art’ – as the ‘end of art.’ We will have to return to Hegel in the next chapter to make greater sense of this claim, but the ‘end of art’ in effect means that art does lose contact with the ‘spirit’ of Hegel’s teleological history. In this sense, the ‘end of art’ equates with the rise of art as we know it and as Kant describes it.

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For the purposes of our argument, the power and appeal of art in modernity fundamentally resides in the way it has managed to form a separate, selfcontained value-sphere that is cut off from the movements of history in politics and the economy. So art has ended in the Hegelian sense in that it is no longer bound into the overall social and cosmic order of the world; but, as we will see, the tremendous status of art is achieved precisely because of this relative historical irrelevance. Approaching the Critique of Judgement In keeping with our tomb-raider guise, we will only concentrate on that famous part of the Critique of Judgement2 that contains Kant’s theory of aesthetics. Although others in the 18th century had developed the ideas Kant will use, as the standard histories of aesthetics will document, it is Kant who will most directly confront some of the most extraordinary implications of the new aesthetic regime. And, although we will not be attempting to understand how Kant’s arguments on aesthetics link into his overall system, it has to be acknowledged that Kant’s formidable work in the Critique of Pure Reason and in his Practical Philosophy laid the necessary groundwork for his understanding of aesthetics. Before looking at some of the details of Kant’s argument let us remind ourselves how close his view is to Weber’s. On one level such a similarity is unsurprising given that Kant is the founder of the understanding of art that is Weber’s explicit, German, intellectual inheritance. Nevertheless, the commonality is rather strikingly strong. The starting place for Kant is to make sense of the following combination of elements: subjectivity, anti-rationality and, especially, taste, all in isolation from other influences. This is not too far from Weber’s internal structure of the value-sphere of art in modernity. (Although what is still present in the Kantian formula is beauty, with form mainly absent, but we’ll see how Kant himself describes the very logic that will cause these two elements to be transposed). First we will examine those elements in Kant that continued into the aesthetic value-sphere of modernity, and then reflect on what has been left behind.

What continues on from Kant Without interest The First Moment of Kant’s account of the judgement of taste immediately provides us with a sense of both distance and familiarity. The distance lies in the assumption that the aesthetic is primarily associated with the absolute value of beauty. And with this assumption the appeal of art is easy to understand – beauty, in its purest form, is a measure of the highest human aspiration, and has been necessarily linked, as witnessed for example in Plato with truth, goodness, and the divine nature of the cosmos. But, if these were the associations of beauty in the past, Kant wants to break with all that and, at least initially, isolate aesthetic beauty from every possible other value, and it is here that we start to enter familiar

24 Kant ground. To put it crudely, Kant wants to preserve the appeal of beauty as an absolute value, but rescind all its past associations, the very associations that were once held to provide its pre-eminence. Initially, the whole stress is put on beauty as being subjective and related to feelings, as opposed to being objective and bound to logical, cognitive concepts. For beauty, in its highest quality, to be regarded as aesthetic is to raise art up to a level where it has access to this absolute value, and at the same time subjective feeling is given an extraordinary weight of importance as the site of this capability. This interdependent relation of subjectivity, beauty, and art depends on any other associations being stripped away as impurities or distractions; and the ability to make these purified connections is to have ‘taste.’ This revelation of the beauty of art is what Kant means by aesthetic judgement being ‘without interest.’ The two forms of interest that Kant wishes to separate out from the aesthetic concern the sensory delight, or agreeableness of an object, and the good. The agreeable covers sensory satisfactions (like eating) that Kant will have to show fall short of those inspired by beauty; and the good has to enter into reason and leave irrational subjectivity behind. The good can be either a kind of usefulness (good for something), or a moral kind of goodness, but it is up to reason to determine how something is usefully or morally good. In all these cases there is an interest in the existence of the object (the food that gives sensory delight, the building that gives useful shelter, and, arguably, the law that gives justice) that is absent in the aesthetic. Now it might seem odd for Kant to claim that the aesthetic appreciation of beauty had no interest in the existence of the actual object that might be providing that beauty, but his point is to stress that such aesthetic feeling of pleasure depends on being able to shut out any other concerns; an interest in whether the object of beauty exists or not would lead into reason and away from the aesthetic pleasure itself. Further, with the agreeable and the good, the subject is bound to either the approval of the senses or to reason – there is an interest in gaining this approval. ‘Interest’ then is a kind of external determination, even though it includes one’s own senses and reason, which aesthetic taste escapes. Kant wants to isolate an aesthetic subjectivity from any introduced impurity in this way, and, notably, this is understood as being free. One can say that among all these three kinds of satisfaction only that of the taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, neither that of the senses nor that of reason, extorts approval … An object of inclination and one that is imposed upon us by a law of reason for the sake of desire leave us no freedom to make anything into an object of pleasure ourselves. All interest presupposes a need or produces one; and as a determining ground of approval it no longer leaves the judgment on the object free. (Kant, 2000: 95, Kant’s emphasis) Kant has stripped away all these interests – desire, the senses, reason – which impose some kind of determining need, and what remains is an aesthetic

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judgement which is therefore free. Beauty can be appreciated when subjectivity has been emptied of all these everyday determinants of human life. We are left with a kind of irrational subjectivity that has been stripped bare – without interest, in fact. So, in general terms, we can see how the argument of the First Moment is leading to the famous conclusion: Taste is the faculty for judging an object or a kind of representation through a satisfaction or dissatisfaction without any interest. The object of such a satisfaction is called beautiful. (Kant, 2000: 96) Basically, we have been told what aesthetic taste is not, but now Kant has to build on this and try to say, much more fully, what it is. Before proceeding with Kant’s argument, a brief note might be made on the correlation with Weber so far. The aesthetic is not only essentially subjective and anti-rational, as already indicated, but aesthetic taste is founded on a strict isolation from every other value or need. That is, in this initial gambit of stripping away all ‘interests,’ Kant cuts off the aesthetic from the rest of society and sets it up as having its own separate domain. It might therefore be said that the polytheistic view of modernity that underlies Weber’s theory of the value-spheres is, perhaps, starting to make an appearance in Kant’s 18thcentury schema. Subjective universality ‘Subjective universality’ is a notoriously complex concept to grasp, and there are aspects of Kant’s argument on this topic that will have to be ignored here. But if we only consider the first part of this section of the Critique of Judgement, a host of valuable items applicable to our argument can be revealed. In section 6, ‘The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction,’ Kant writes: This definition of the beautiful can be deduced from the previous explanation of it as an object of satisfaction without any interest. For one cannot judge that about which he is aware that the satisfaction in it is without any interest in his own case in any way except that it must contain a ground of satisfaction for everyone. For since it is not grounded in any inclination of the subject (nor in any other underlying interest), but rather the person making the judgment feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone. (Kant, 2000: 96–7)

26 Kant Kant’s claim is that the freedom that is inherent in the radical subjectivity of aesthetic taste means that such a judgement is assumed to have a universal validity. Since there is no sense of a specific external interest or determination, the subject feels free and therefore expects that all other humans would make the same judgement if they were similarly unencumbered. A number of points flow from this initial idea. Kant would seem to be correct in saying that an aesthetic judgement is not just a personal liking for something, but assumes or demands that others should also make this same judgement. To clarify this point, Kant discusses what he calls the ‘agreeable’ taste ‘of the senses,’ where taste is solely a personal matter and would seem not to include this inbuilt demand that others should share the same liking: With regard to the agreeable, everyone is content that his judgment, which he grounds on a private feeling, and in which he says of an object that it pleases him, be restricted merely to his own person. Hence he is perfectly happy if, when he says that sparkling wine from the Canaries is agreeable, someone else should improve his expression and remind him that he should say ‘It is agreeable to me’; and this is so not only in the case of the taste of the tongue, palate, and throat,3 but also in the case of that which may be agreeable to someone’s eyes and ears. For one person, the colour violet is gentle and lovely, for another dead and lifeless. One person loves the tone of wind instruments, another that of stringed instruments. It would be folly to dispute the judgment of another that is different from our own in such a matter, with the aim of condemning it as incorrect, as if it were logically opposed to our own; thus with regard to the agreeable, the principle Everyone has his own taste (of the senses) is valid. (Kant, 2000: 97) We can admit with Kant that the beauty of a painting or landscape, unlike the liking of a particular food for example, is not just personal in this way, but problems arise with Kant’s further arguments on what constitutes aesthetic judgement. A first problem appears with the claim that the extra-personal dimension of aesthetic judgement is universal. With the appreciation of the beauty or sublime of nature, such a universality might well be assumed – everyone either will or should have the same intense, irrational pleasure. When I feel the beauty of nature, there would seem to be present the accompanying idea that every free subject – without interest – would feel the same. The late 18th century was redolent with variations of such a romantic view of the world, and such an experience of nature would seem now to have become a commonplace of modern life (if not, it should be noted, necessarily tied to some concept of the aesthetic). Now, putting aside for the moment the obvious criticism that such a view is not in fact universal but a culturally crafted ideal of the relation between humans and nature which has been garbed in the mantle of an ahistorical universality, let us consider how this particular characteristic of Kant’s aesthetic judgement, that seems to apply so well to the experience of nature, works in the case of art.4

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The short answer is that, in contrast to its application in nature, the subjectivity of taste in art is not so easily linked to the universal. The subjective experience of the beauty of a work of art, without interest, would turn out not to carry with it the assumption that everyone will or should have the same experience and make the same judgement that we might expect when we enter the beauty of nature. It does not follow that the aesthetic judgement of art is therefore merely personal (as with the ‘agreeable’ taste of food), but the accompanying aspect that leads beyond the personal is not that everyone will or should agree but only that some will or should agree with my judgement. As the value-sphere of art develops through the 19th century this anti-universal character of aesthetic taste will become more apparent. A second problem can be located in Kant’s brilliant extension of the expectation, or demand, that others should share your personal aesthetic judgement. Consider the following quote: Hence he will speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a property of the object and the judgment logical (constituting a cognition of the object through concepts of it), although it is only aesthetic and contains merely a relation of the representation of the object to the subject, because it still has the similarity with logical judgment that its validity for everyone can be presupposed. But this universality cannot originate from concepts. For there is no transition from concepts to the feeling of pleasure or displeasure (except in pure practical laws, which however bring with them an interest of the sort that is not combined with the pure judgment of taste). Consequently there must be attached to the judgment of taste, with the consciousness of an abstraction in it from all interest, a claim to validity for everyone without the universality that pertains to objects, i.e., it must be combined with a claim to subjective universality.5 (Kant, 2000: 97, emphasis added) If it is not just a matter of personal taste, and others are assumed to be able to share such judgement (in fact they should share such a judgement since it is ‘without interest’ and therefore free), then one talks with the other in order to convince them, or perhaps a discussion might ensue based on the presumption of an agreed appreciation of the aesthetic qualities in question. Kant says that there is a ‘subjective universal communicability’ (Kant, 2000: 103) that can therefore be identified as a necessary aspect of ‘subjective universality.’ Crucially, such language cannot be rooted in the merely personal (‘It’s just what I like’) but must concern the object, and thereby invoke the use of logic and concepts (see also Kant, 2000: 93,184ff). So, something like the very reason and ‘concepts’ that Kant had excluded from aesthetic judgement have had to be reintroduced. Later, Kant puts it like this: Beautiful art … is a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication.

28 Kant The universal communicability of a pleasure already includes in its concept that this must not be a pleasure of enjoyment, from mere sensation, but one of reflection; and thus aesthetic art, as beautiful art, is one that has the reflecting power of judgment and not mere sensation as its standard. (Kant, 2000: 185) However, such ‘reflection’ is still necessarily tied to the irrational and subjective in contrast to reason beyond the aesthetic. One can see how the confrontational and paradoxical idea of ‘subjective universality’ starts to be filled out in this way. This dilemma is summed up towards the end of the section on aesthetics in the 3rd Critique with Kant’s account of what he terms ‘the antinomy of taste’ (Kant, 2000: 214f). The two sides which make up this antinomy are: taste is held to be merely subjective (‘Everyone has his own taste’); but it is also the case that ‘it is possible to argue about taste,’ with the hope of coming to some agreement, which must mean that taste is also held to be something more than subjective. Kant states, however, that such argument about taste is not like the reason beyond the aesthetic which can rely on ‘proofs’ and has a much stronger claim to objective validity (as, for example, in science); but, nevertheless, ‘concepts’ must be employed when argument about taste is undertaken. Such argument is, therefore, both much more than the merely subjective, but also lesser than the reasoned argument possible outside the consideration of taste. Kant sums up the antinomy in this way: Thesis. The judgment of taste is not based on concepts, for otherwise it would be possible to dispute about it (decide by means of proofs). Antithesis. The judgment of taste is based on concepts, for otherwise, despite its variety, it would not even be possible to argue about it (to lay claim to the necessary assent of others to this judgment). (Kant, 2000: 215)6 The second problem for Kant’s understanding of the subjective universal can now be seen. And, again, it highlights the fracture between art and nature. If aesthetic taste does extend beyond the personal, it would seem that the resultant discussion of this judgement, with the use of a kind of rational theory, applies far more in the case of art and is not at all necessary in the case of nature. Indeed, the experience of beauty and the sublime in nature is, very often, ideally represented as something to be done alone: discussion is not needed, and the universality of this experience is assumed and not subject to some kind of quasi-rational demand. Numerous romantic depictions of the experience of nature laid great stress on the ideal of being alone, from Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker to Wordsworth’s ‘bliss of solitude,’ with nothing more needed, certainly not the agreement of other people. Not to have to talk with anyone else is part of this heightened experience of nature. Oddly then, nature allows the dual qualities of subjectivity and universality but without the involvement of others, language and quasi-reason; whereas

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art has subjectivity and a non-universal demand for extra-subjective agreement, which does involve some kind of rational affirmation. Kant does, on occasions, acknowledge that the experience of nature is like this. A judgement of taste demands social interaction for Kant, but he has to admit that an ‘intellectual interest’ in natural beauty can be accomplished alone. Much praise is accorded to: Someone who alone (and without any intention of wanting to communicate his observations to others) considers the beautiful shape of a wildflower, a bird, an insect, etc., in order to marvel at it, to love it … (Kant, 2000: 178) And the experience of the sublime in nature is, at least, associated with a selfsufficient separation from society: It should further be remarked that, although the satisfaction in the beautiful, much as that in the sublime, is not only clearly distinguished among the other aesthetic judgings by means of universal communicability, but also, by means of this property, acquires an interest in relation to society (in which it can be communicated), nevertheless the separation from all society is also regarded as something sublime if it rests on ideas that look beyond all sensible interest. To be self-sufficient, hence not to need society, yet without being unsociable, i.e., fleeing it, is something that comes close to the sublime, just like any superiority over needs. (Kant, 2000: 157, Kant’s emphasis) Although nature is problematic for Kant in this way, his account here benefits our present argument on art through this introduction of a kind of reason or, what we can term ‘theory,’ into the aesthetic mix. Art must include this rational language and theoretical discussion because it is not just personal – it has to talk about the art object in this way. What is important for our purposes is not only that art and theory are necessarily combined, but that such theory is tied to the subjective in a way that imposes a kind of irrational limitation to aesthetic reason.7 In addition, we can briefly note two aspects of the aesthetic that Kant has introduced here. First, there has to be an art object as the basis of such rational language – the aesthetic taste of art necessarily contains this extra-subjective materialism. This simple and obvious point will prove to be crucial in understanding the workings of the value-sphere of art. Secondly, this aesthetic discussion necessarily involves other people beyond the individual holder of aesthetic judgement. This social aspect of the aesthetic is recognised by Kant: The beautiful interests empirically only in society … For himself alone a human being abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either his hut or himself, nor seek out or still less plant flowers in order

30 Kant to decorate himself; rather, only in society does it occur to him to be not merely a human being but also, in his own way, a refined human being (the beginning of civilisation): for this is how we judge someone who is inclined to communicate his pleasure to others and is skilled at it, and who is not content with an object if he cannot feel his satisfaction in it in community [Gemeinschaft] with others. (Kant, 2000: 176–7, emphasis added) Again, this is a deceptively simple and obvious point, but the value-sphere of art depends on the development of a community of taste, where the separate individual is affirmed in their freedom by others; art, as we will see, has appeal because one of the great problems of the West – the isolation of the free subject – is partly overcome by such mutual recognition of taste afforded by the aesthetic value-sphere. Freedom The argument on freedom so far can be summed up in the following way. In the 1st Moment of Kant’s Analytic of Aesthetic Judgement we have seen ‘how the taste for the beautiful is a disinterested and free satisfaction’ (as above, Kant, 2000: 95). Interests have been cut away to show how the aesthetic is not beholden to anything beyond itself. Notable here is the way Kant must acknowledge that the freedom that he relies upon in the rest of his philosophy, especially with the moral prescriptions of his Practical Philosophy, is itself a restriction, or imposition, on the freedom of taste. Such a radically free subjectivity enables, in the 2nd Moment, the assumption and expectation that such a judgement of taste is universal for all humans. But there are problems with the claim that such universality extends into art in the same way that it would appear to extend into the experience of nature. The question here is, what more can Kant tell us about this freedom of taste? He does introduce the idea of ‘free play’ (Kant, 2000: 102ff), which, inevitably, has been the topic of much commentary. We will not develop this notion extensively here, except to say that it is a means for Kant trying to show how the ‘cognition’ involved in ‘subjective universal communicability’ can negotiate a path between the claims of the subject and the claims of the universal.8 Of more interest to our argument is the way a critical engagement with ‘subjective universality’ reveals the role of freedom in the appeal of art. To do this we need to reconsider part of a quote already given, from the start of the 2nd Moment: This definition of the beautiful can be deduced from the previous explanation of it as an object of satisfaction without any interest. For one cannot judge that about which he is aware that the satisfaction in it is without any interest in his own case in any way except that it must contain a ground of satisfaction for everyone. For since it is not grounded in any inclination of the subject (nor in any other underlying interest), but rather the person making the judgment

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feels himself completely free with regard to the satisfaction that he devotes to the object, he cannot discover as grounds of the satisfaction any private conditions, pertaining to his subject alone, and must therefore regard it as grounded in those that he can also presuppose in everyone else; consequently he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone. (Kant, 2000: 96–7, emphasis added) What we can draw out of this quotation is Kant’s emphasis on how the subject is conscious of this freedom and universality. Kant says here that ‘he9 is aware that the satisfaction in it is without any interest in his own case in any way except that it must contain a ground of satisfaction for everyone’; ‘the person making the judgment feels himself completely free’; and ‘he must believe himself to have grounds for expecting a similar pleasure of everyone’ (emphases added). External interests or conditions are not impinging on my subjectivity, and everyone is the same as me in this regard so that, in this way, the aesthetic is this condition of my consciousness that I am universally free. But, crucially, the point here is not that the subject is free but that ‘he’ knows, or feels, that he is free – there is a self-consciousness10 of freedom. What more can we say about this aesthetic freedom? We know that the irrational subjectivity that is the site of this sense of freedom must stand in acute contrast to the way freedom is combined with reason in Kant moral philosophy to produce, for example, the categorical imperative.11 The result is that we understand what this subjective freedom is not, but because Kant says so little about what this sense of aesthetic freedom actually is, we need to draw on more romantic views of subjectivity which Kant must be relying on when he enters into discussion of art, beauty, and the sublime. So, at this stage, Rousseau, despite some ambiguities about his romantic credentials, will be added to the mix. Now whatever he might have thought of Rousseau’s conception of freedom, Kant’s extraordinary ability to account for the workings of the aesthetic in early modernity has, in effect, resulted in an argument on how a Rousseau-like subjectivity becomes the self-consciousness of art. Essentially this entails, at least by implication, that a universal, free, inner subject is personally felt to be released by art. Note that it is not a question here of the philosophical validity of Rousseau’s position, but how this kind of subjectivity flourishes in art, and in so doing, adds enormously to the status and appeal of the aesthetic in modernity. Towards the end of the 2nd Discourse on Inequality Rousseau famously says: the social man lives constantly outside himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgment of others concerning him … in short, how, [we are] always asking others what we are, and never daring to ask ourselves …12 (Rousseau, 1923: 201–2) Only the ‘savage,’ more natural man escapes this external determination, according to Rousseau. This idea that there is a free, natural, inner, authentic self that has

32 Kant been imposed upon and shaped by others, is open to some well-known criticisms. Most damaging is the long-running point (from at least Hegel onwards) that there is no pre-social natural humanity, and that we humans are necessarily formed by the mutual recognition of others – there is no self that can stand outside such social determination. However, the obvious philosophical merits of such a critical position have not in any way dimmed the allure and acceptance of a Rousseaulike conception of freedom and the self. Modernity is saturated with such selfunderstanding13 – we live under ‘the spell of subjectivity,’ as Adorno puts it. The point for us, from this brief diversion to the 2nd Discourse of Rousseau, is that there is a widespread self-consciousness of this idea of the inner subject that is sustained in modernity, but that it is a clearly false idea of how freedom can exist. How does this diversion help us when we return to the main road of Kantian aesthetics? Rousseau’s view that the self can only be free when it is not a ‘social man’ living ‘in the opinion of others’ provides an obvious imperative to enter into the experience of nature, alone. The romantic conception of nature flourished, and continues to flourish, on the basis of such a conception of the self and freedom, a conception that Rousseau insightfully pinpoints and eloquently describes. Rousseau again deserves to be cited as one of the first to give voice to the romantic escape of those solitary dreamers who love to drink deeply of the beauty of nature … (Rousseau, 1979: 81) The basic anti-rational aesthetic of Kant’s account is clearly present here (if not Kant’s assumption of a social dimension to such experience as a judgement of taste); and we can learn a lesson about how a similar experience works in the case of art. What nature does is provide an external confirmation of an irrational subjectivity as free; the appreciation of natural beauty and the sublime affirms an escape from the ‘opinion of others’ and, therefore, the release or discovery of the inner authentic self. In Kant’s terms, you have managed to block out all other interests, especially those that rely on reason and concepts. But there is the deep paradox that such self-consciousness of freedom is possible only when the self becomes part of, and is dependent on, the external structures of nature. In being alone ‘to drink deeply of the beauty of nature,’ the self has become part of something much more than itself; it is, in this sense, still externally determined, but such determination is not recognised as such but actually serves to confirm the sense of inner freedom and the escape from the controlling interests of reason and desire. The lesson for our understanding of art is that Kant shows how such a free self, as expressed in the romantic ideal, can be found in society itself, and not just in nature.14 Art provides a place where the self-consciousness of a Rousseaulike ideal of the authentic self is, in fact, not only confirmed but fulfilled by ‘the opinion of others’! It should again be noted that our critical appropriation of Kant (and Rousseau) here does not signal some agreement that there is a natural, authentic inner self to be found or released, but only that the self-consciousness of such an ideal subjectivity is very much alive and well in modernity and that, outside nature, art is arguably the purest site for the realisation of such self-belief.15

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(And, if so, we have made considerable progress in answering our question concerning the appeal of art). But how does art achieve this seemingly impossible feat whereby the determination of other people creates the self-consciousness that one is free from such determination? The answer lies (and the reader is probably well ahead of me here) in Kant’s depiction of ‘subjective universality.’ We have seen that the anti-rational subjectivity of aesthetic taste must include the demand or expectation that others (or all, for Kant) must agree with my judgement. A kind of rationality is entered into, where the object of art is the topic of discussion. But such theoretical language is unlike that of science or utility or morality, because the use of logic and concepts involved in the discussion of art is necessarily tied to my subjective judgement. Kant makes this point, in a variety of guises, repeatedly. Aesthetic taste is, in Kant’s phrase, this subjective universal communicability. So, to use Rousseau’s terminology now, the opinions of others are constitutive of my subjective aesthetic judgement. But the inclusion of other people’s opinions through the necessary quasi-rational language of art, must always serve to affirm my irrational, inner subjectivity – I am always demanding, or at least assuming, that others will agree with me. In other words, aesthetic taste is the self-consciousness of this kind of freedom; and such self-consciousness is formed through other people’s opinions which must always confirm that my subjective judgement comes from a self that has been freed from any external determination, including the opinion of others.16 Kant gets close to saying just this when he attempts to find a position that can bring together the two oppositional ‘peculiarities’ of the judgement of taste: its objectivity and subjectivity. Taste makes claim merely to autonomy. To make the judgments of others into the determining ground of one’s own would be heteronomy. (Kant, 2000: 163) And he goes on: The judgment of taste is not determinable by grounds of proof at all, just as if it were merely subjective. If someone does not find a building, a view, or a poem beautiful, then, first, he does not allow approval to be internally imposed upon himself by a hundred voices who all praise it highly. The judgment of others, when it is unfavourable to our own, can of course rightly give us reservations about our own, but can never convince us of its incorrectness.Thus there is no empirical ground of proof for forcing the judgment on anyone. (Kant, 2000: 164–5) In sum, a critical consideration of Kant’s account of subjective universality reveals some predictable problems for Kant, especially with the nature/art split; but, more importantly, some marvellously persistent insights into the workings of art in modernity are also to be found.

34 Kant But the Critique of Judgment has something more to offer on subjectivity, freedom, and art. Genius Perhaps because of the inevitable inclusion of nature under the umbrella term ‘aesthetic,’ Kant does not devote the amount of time we might expect these days to consideration of the artist. However, what Kant does say is perceptive and useful, if in need of some amplification to be clearly heard. The bold start for Kant is just to call the artist ‘genius.’ We might initially recoil from such seeming hyperbole, but what Kant captures in this opening gambit, even allowing for shifts in the meaning of terms from 1790, is the astonishing rise of the artist in modernity. The special qualities of artists have long been noted,17 but the stress for Kant is on originality – the capacity of the artist to create the new. The first rule of the artist is: That genius 1) is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule, consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic. (Kant, 2000: 186) This original creation of art cannot be understood by the artist or taught to others – it is a gift of nature for Kant (Kant, 2000: 186). This inimitable characteristic marks off the ‘genius’ of the artist from even the most lauded, rational accomplishments of, even, for example, Newton. In the scientific sphere, therefore, the greatest discoverer differs only in degree from the most hard working imitator and apprentice, whereas he differs in kind from someone who is gifted by nature for beautiful art. (Kant, 2000: 188) Such original creative power – a ‘spirit’ for Kant – arises from the special ability for free imagination that resides in the artist. But to produce a work of art, such free creative power must be tempered by understanding. In fact, it transpires that the necessary control of such freedom lies in the power of judgement – in aesthetic taste: To be rich and original in ideas is not as necessary for the sake of beauty as is the suitability of the imagination in its freedom to the lawfulness of the understanding. For all the richness of the former produces, in its lawless freedom, nothing but nonsense; the power of judgment, however, is the faculty for bringing it in line with the understanding.

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Taste, like the power of judgment in general, is the discipline (or corrective) of genius, clipping its wings and making it well behaved or polished. (Kant, 2000: 197, emphasis added) With this combining of taste and genius, Kant allows us the opportunity to piece together the internal workings of the sphere of art. So, building on Kant’s ideas here, the artist has her irrational subjectivity extended to include not only the judgement of taste, but also free imagination. And with this increased expanse of subjectivity comes a concomitant increase in freedom – or, at least, the sense of that freedom. The creations of the artist are, in fact, proof of this combined freedom of taste and imagination; and such a material demonstration of free subjectivity would seem to be unavailable to anyone else. This point can be filled out when we consider what happens when the art object enters into the subjective universal communicability of taste; the artwork is, after all, the very topic of such quasi-rational language of ‘concepts.’ In Rousseau’s words, it is made for the opinion of others and can only exist as art as part of this judgement of taste. There is a double effect here for the artist. Firstly, their free subjectivity in terms of taste is, under the logic of the subjective universal, affirmed and, in fact, constituted by the opinion of others. It does not matter if it is not liked by the critics or connoisseurs, but if it is accepted as art, and fit for this discussion, then the artist’s sense of their own free subjectivity is constructed by the expectation/demand that others agree with them. Secondly, for the creation of the artist to be able to enter into the opinion of others as art is, necessarily, to have the mark of originality, of ‘the new,’ stamped upon that object – the opinion of others has agreed that this is the product of free imagination. In this way, as we witnessed with the account of subjective universal communicability above, an enormous dilemma of freedom is resolved by art, but it is even more strongly the case for the artist: a self-consciousness of inner, subjective freedom is given the strongest of affirmations by the external structures of the artworld. The art object is made by and for the judgement of taste. Really, the artist lives only in the opinion of others! But, rather than simply being the denial of a free authentic subject as Rousseau would have it, this continual creation of the new for such opinion provides, perhaps, the greatest sense of freedom modernity has to offer. Certainly, it can be argued that this self-consciousness of freedom is not the same as a ‘real’ freedom, but this is not a point for our argument: if there is the belief that the artist is free in this way then the appeal of art starts to become more comprehensible. To put this another way, to go into nature in the romantic manner – ideally alone – is to have the opportunity to feel the irrational pleasures of beauty and the sublime, and a welcoming sense of freedom within the greater order of the natural world is, in this way, possible. An escape from rationalised society (in Weber’s terms) is part of this romantic liberty, and such an escape is also part of the entry into art. But with art as part of the social world, a palpable sense of freedom is present due to the extraordinary ways that both the creation and reception of the art object exist amidst the opinions of others. And, for the artist, the scope for selfbelief in free subjectivity is, arguably, unrivalled.

36 Kant Without ends Kant further explains the exceptional qualities of the aesthetic in terms of ‘purposiveness’ or ends. If objects or activities contain some purpose or end then they lie outside the aesthetic, at least in this part of their make-up. The remarkable point that Kant makes is that just about everything that comes under some kind of human determination will have such an end, except the aesthetic. In a way, this is just developing the idea that the aesthetic is ‘without interest’ – the starting point of Kant’s argument – since every subjective desire (e.g., for some food) or rational/objective purpose (e.g., to be or do good, or just to fix a leaking tap) has some end in view. There is a basic, unremarkable logic of means and ends, and so there is the ordinary sense of something having a purpose. But this is not the case when the aesthetic comes into play: Every end, if it is regarded as a ground of satisfaction, always brings an interest with it, as the determining ground of the judgment about the object of the pleasure. Thus no subjective end can ground the judgment of taste. But further no representation of an objective end, i.e., of the possibility of the object itself in accordance with principles of purposive connection, hence no concept of the good, can determine the judgment of taste, because it is an aesthetic judgment and not a cognitive judgment … (Kant, 2000: 106) The inescapable, non-conceptual subjectivity of aesthetic judgement must preclude the usual means/ends purposiveness. Objective purposiveness can be cognised only by means of the relation of the manifold to a determinate end, thus only through a concept. From this alone it is already clear that the beautiful, the judging of which has as its ground a merely formal purposiveness, i.e., a purposiveness without an end, is entirely independent of the representation of the good, since the latter presupposes an objective purposiveness,i.e., the relation of the object to a determinate end. (Kant, 2000: 111) It follows, for Kant, that there can be no sense of ‘perfection’ in the realm of the aesthetic, since this would imply that some final end is being sought. Now the judgment of taste is an aesthetic judgment, i.e., one that rests on subjective grounds, and its determining ground cannot be a concept, and thus not a concept of a determinate end. Thus by beauty, as a formal subjective purposiveness, there is not conceived any perfection of the object as a supposedly formal but yet also objective purposiveness … (Kant, 2000: 112–3)

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Kant’s terminology here is that the aesthetic object therefore has the form of purposiveness, but cannot represent an end. He concludes this Third Moment argument with this: Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end. (Kant, 2000: 120) There are a number of implications that flow from Kant’s position here, and some of these will have to be explored more fully later. But now, at this stage of the argument, we need to give substantial consideration to how Kant and Weber can provide some mutually reinforcing ideas on means and ends. From Kant we have the proposition that the aesthetic can be contrasted with just about every sort of subjective desire and rational interest in being without an end, or purpose, or sense of perfection. Kant makes the assumption that art is therefore distinguished from the common ways that means are tied to ends (examples are given above but can include obvious cases such as procuring food to assuage hunger, fixing a roof to keep dry and, less obviously, pursuing reason to gain the good, as Kant would have it.) In such a view, Kant is caught in the usual philosophical imagining of possibilities that all humans must face, but, in contrast, Weber inserts this ordinary logic of means and ends into his sociological theory of modernity. This is not to deny, of course, that an everyday use of means to achieve ends is not also standard practice in modern life, but the picture changes when the larger perspective of the value-spheres is applied. The economic value-sphere, the realm of capitalism, is marked by the loss of ends and the rise of the means as ends, according to Weber’s famous Protestant Ethic thesis. In other words, rational dedicated mundane labour, without distraction, was the means to achieve the ultimate end of grace; but, with the loss of explicit religious meaning, these very means have become the ends: to work hard, productively and with rational efficiency – and make money – become sufficient in themselves as an ethos of modern work. These ends of the economy – once the means to meaning in Protestantism – are summed up with the maxims of Benjamin Franklin that Weber lists at the start of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (such as ‘Time is money’). That is, money-making through methodical, dutiful labour becomes the end to be followed (Weber, 1958a: 53, 70). Two quotes from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism plainly make this point. The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognised credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. (Weber, 1958a: 51, emphasis added)

38 Kant Also: In fact, the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life … is thought of so purely as an end in itself … Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of life. (Weber, 1958a: 53, emphasis added) If this means/ends reversal is apparent in the economic value-sphere, Weber claims that something similar happens in the realm of science and intellectual reason. Basically, what we have already noted as the meaning that comes with the vocation of science can be put in terms of means and ends. ‘Science as a Vocation,’ as a part of its multi-faceted argument, argues that the end, or purpose, of intellectual reason had been tied to finding the answers to the questions of the meaning of life and death. But since this is no longer possible within the disenchanted universe that science itself helped to create in the pursuit of such ultimate meaning, then science/intellectual reason will usually maintain a sense of this lost end as an irrational presupposition that provides some justification or worth for the rational enterprise. However, such meaning can now only be assumed and cannot be part of the intellectual task itself. The result of this loss of a meaningful end is that reason is caught between two poles of meaninglessness: either the means have become the ends so that virtuosic cleverness and purely technical results are glorified for their own sake; or meaning is still presupposed and desired but can no longer be rationally pursued. In this way science partakes of the endlessness of modern culture. For Weber, all this can be encapsulated in the summarising statement that the: ‘meaning of scientific work … in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end’ (Weber, 1948c: 138, Weber’s emphasis). The intellectual/scientific value-sphere, like the economic, is the story of the loss of its ends and a tendency for the means to become the ends. And the political value-sphere will repeat, in its own way, this same logic. Again, we can view what has already been said on politics through this perspective of means and ends. As already noted, in Politics as a Vocation Weber describes how the elected politician of modern democracies will pursue a ‘cause,’ if any real meaningful vocation is to be present; this is the end, or purpose of their political life. However, the political sphere inevitably throws up great barriers to the realisation of this end – these are the means of politics that cannot be avoided. Weber lists many examples of these end-thwarting means, but three might be stressed here. The first two arise from the necessities of the state: power and violence. These are means that the politician must engage with and they can each easily undermine, or in fact replace, the cause as the purpose of politics. The seductions of power are obvious: The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal

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self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’ … Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. (Weber, 1948a: 116, emphasis added) The necessary means of violence is also an ever-present threat to the cause. Weber’s position can be summed up in the following: whosoever contracts with violent means for whatever ends – and every politician does – is exposed to its specific consequences. (Weber, 1948a: 124) Violence and power are dangers for all politicians in all ages, but the rise of the third threat to the cause has vastly increased with the modern state. This threat is, of course, bureaucracy. Here not only the individual political cause but all ends of government (and any large organisation) can be overtaken by the various administrative means that the pursuit of such ends necessitates. In Economy and Society, Weber puts it plainly: In a modern state the actual ruler is necessarily and unavoidably the bureaucracy, since power is exercised neither through parliamentary speeches nor monarchical enunciations but through the routines of administration. (Weber, 1978: 1393; see also, for example, Weber, 1948a: 82) For Weber, all three of the dominant, rationalised value-spheres – the economic, scientific/intellectual and political – are beset by this dilemma of means and ends. Here lies one way that the profound meaninglessness of modernity is played out; the endlessness of modern culture arises when original purposes are replaced by the very means that once realised such ends. The aesthetic value-sphere, although it is understood as a salvation from the rationalised world, is also regarded by Weber as part of this overall senselessness, and is also characterised, as we have seen, as an endless pursuit of cultural values: under the very conditions of ‘culture,’ senseless death has seemed only to put the decisive stamp upon the senselessness of life itself. … the ‘cultivated’ man … can become ‘weary of life’ but he cannot become ‘satiated with life’ in the sense of completing a cycle. For the perfectibility of the man of culture in principle progresses indefinitely, as do the cultural values … (Weber, 1948b: 356)

40 Kant In contrast to the overarching cosmos of more enchanted worldviews, art is necessarily caught in the senselessness of modernity in terms of the meaninglessness of death and the never-ending nature of aesthetic experience. In the last chapter, we saw how Weber’s own understanding of labour and salvation can be utilised to make sense of cultural endlessness within the inner cosmos of art, and Kant shows us how something similar can be done in terms of means and ends because of the remarkable differences that mark off the aesthetic from all other facets of modern life. In his philosophical speculation about how means and ends work, we have seen how Kant argues that the aesthetic is not subject to the usual logic of ‘purposiveness.’ In the case of the aesthetic – uniquely – there is no final end that is determined by desire or reason. If we draw Kant and Weber together here we might see that, although the aesthetic is therefore ‘endless,’ and we can appreciate how the constant advancement of the new is indicative of this state, such endlessness is not subject to the same level of senselessness that afflicts all the other pursuits in modernity that make up the other value-spheres. Yes, art must be part of the overall meaninglessness of death in this disenchanted modernity, but the specific means/ends dilemmas that Weber lays out for us in his detailed arguments about how such meaninglessness manifests itself in the rationalised value-spheres, do not apply to art. The aesthetic is the child of modernity and is not shackled with the older meanings of the economy and science, nor is it crushed beneath the weight of power, violence, and bureaucracy as are the ends of politics. To be without ends in the realm of the aesthetic is not to witness the triumph of the means, rather, the constant renewal demanded by originality affirms the self-consciousness of freedom. The ‘new’ of art is indeed endless in that there is no stopping point, no end of the journey, no satiation; but rather than being an indication of ‘an ever more devastating senselessness’ with ‘culture’s every step forward’ (as quoted, Weber, 1948b: 357), the way that art exists ‘without having any purpose’ (Kant, 2000: 172) allows the pleasures of the aesthetic to be affirmed. This is how the inner cosmos of art works – by denying the means/end logic, an inner meaning is constantly re-established against the rationalised world. To try to put this point more plainly, Kant provides us with an understanding of how art defies the logic of means and ends that typifies modernity for Weber. Let us recall some of what has already been said about Weber’s theory of modernity. The value-sphere structure is a depiction of two levels of meaning: there is the long, complex story of the loss of religion and the rise of disenchantment; and within this senselessness each value-sphere will offer some limited meaning on its own terms. However, the vocational meaning that can still be found in science, politics, and, to a much more limited extent, the economy, is subject to the means/ends dilemma where even such limited meaning is necessarily endangered, always lessened, and often lost. In the case of the aesthetic value-sphere, Weber recognised how the internal meaning here functioned as an irrational salvation from the rationalised world, but Kant can now be added to this mix to clarify how the inner logic of art is able to defy and offer an alternative to the means/ends paradox of meaning. So, once we allow this Kantian understanding of art to be

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positioned within the value-sphere model, it starts to become a little clearer how art can achieve an arguably unrivalled level of meaning within the overall meaninglessness of the modern world. But we will come back to develop this idea in the second of the Adorno chapters.

What has been left behind There are undoubtedly aspects of Kant’s Third Critique which have not survived the test of time. However, when we consider Kant’s arguments about these now discarded or disposable elements we will see how Kant himself provides an illuminating rationale for why these items would be left behind in the development of the aesthetic sphere. Representation, beauty, and form The two most significant factors in art that Kant must assume are constitutive and which will be found to be in fact only optional, are beauty and representation. For 18th-century aesthetics, beauty18 is the pleasurable point of art, and art must have some content in terms of a representation of reality; but the shift to pure form by the beginning of the 20th century would show how dispensable these qualities were. Part of this development would be the separation of nature and art, with beauty more easily aligned with the natural. If we return to Kant on beauty we might start to appreciate the internal logic that will lead to the state of art that lies beyond the limits of Kant’s worldview. There are two kinds of beauty: free beauty (pulchritudo vaga) or merely adherent beauty (pulchritudo adhaerens). The first presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be; the second does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in accordance with it. The first are called (selfsubsisting) beauties of this or that thing; the latter, as adhering to a concept (conditioned beauty), are ascribed to objects that stand under the concept of a particular end. Flowers are free natural beauties. … But the beauty of a human being (and in this species that of a man, a woman, or a child), the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty. A judgment of taste in regard to an object with a determinate internal end would thus be pure only if the person making the judgment either had no concept of this end or abstracted from it in his judgment. But in that case, although this person would have made a correct judgment of taste, in that he would have judged the object as a free beauty, he would nevertheless be criticised

42 Kant and accused of a false taste by someone else, who considered beauty in the object only as an adherent property (who looked to the end of the object), even though both judge correctly in their way: the one on the basis of what he has before his sense, the other on the basis of what he has in his thoughts. (Kant, 2000: 114–16) We can see here that nature is the site of the purest beauty, precisely because it is not captive to representations of, for example, buildings and humans. Such representation entails ends that must be non-aesthetic and based on interests; and there is the consequent bind that such ends must be somehow shut out if the artwork is to be judged aesthetically. However, Kant allows that these representations must be allowed some legitimate place in the judgement of the artwork and so grants them the secondary quality of ‘adherent’ beauty, which has to be associated with reason – ‘thought’ rather than ‘sense.’ A great deal flows from this uncomfortable hierarchy of beauty. And to clarify the implications of Kant’s position, three basic, interwoven threads – representation, beauty, and form – can be considered separately. Firstly, if nature is the purest kind of beauty chiefly because there are no inherent interests whilst art is under constant threat of its aesthetic judgement being led astray by adherent beauty when it does represent such human interests, then we can start to see how the very aesthetic values of art are in necessary conflict with representation. Indeed, from the First Moment of Kant’s argument in the Critique of Judgement, where the aesthetic is contrasted with all other human interests and ends, any representation of such human life must be a source of unavoidable tension within the artwork. A qualification has to be added here. Plainly, this tension is really only in place when human interests/ends are represented, but this is not the case with the representation of nature itself. And Kant would seem to acknowledge this point in a footnote on gardens: That the art of pleasure gardens could be considered as a kind of painting, although of course it presents its forms corporeally, seems strange; but since it actually takes its forms from nature (the trees, bushes, grasses and flowers from woods and field, at least to begin with), and to that extent is not an art like the plastic arts, and also has no concept of the object and its end (as in architecture) as the condition of its arrangement, but merely the free play of the imagination in the contemplation, to that extent it coincides with merely aesthetic painting, which has no determinate theme (which puts air, land, and water together by means of light and shadows in an entertaining way). (Kant, 2000: 199n) So, all that can be stated so far is that Kant’s arguments lead away from representation of the human-centred world in all its facets but not from representation per se – some landscapes would still be able to be represented without conflict since nature is the purest kind of beauty precisely because it is without human interest.

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Secondly, Kant’s arguments about beauty give strong indications of how art and beauty are not as necessarily connected as the 18th century supposed. Kant makes it clear in the above quotations that beauty and nature are more compatible than beauty and art. At the very least, subjective, non-cognitive beauty is lesser in art than nature, and, moreover, it is under continual threat from ‘adherent beauty’ that comes from representation of aspects of the human. Further on this question of beauty, when Kant has to address the creation of art with his account of ‘genius,’ the stress, as we have seen, is nearly all on originality, not beauty. Certainly, the discussion of genius frequently repeats the idea that it is about the production of ‘beautiful art’ (Kant, 2000: 186ff), but beauty is not what is important – it is how art has to be forever made as new. Indeed, when Kant does briefly come to consider beauty in the context of his account of ‘genius,’ certain tensions between art and beauty become apparent. He repeats the point that beauty and nature are easily matched: In order to judge a beauty of nature as such, I do not need first to have a concept of what sort of thing the object is supposed to be, i.e., it is not necessary for me to know the material purposiveness (the end), but the mere form without knowledge of the end pleases for itself in the judging. (Kant, 2000: 190) And he continues with the argument that beauty in art is problematic, since it must include the ends of what is being represented, but here it is put particularly strongly: But if the object is given as a product of art, and is as such supposed to be declared to be beautiful, then, since art always presupposes an end in the cause (and its causality), a concept must first be the ground of what the thing is supposed to be, and, since the agreement of the manifold in a thing with its inner determination as an end is the perfection of the thing, in the judging of the beauty of art the perfection of the thing will also have to be taken into account, which is not even a question in the judging of a natural beauty (as such). – To be sure, in the judging especially of living objects in nature, e.g., a human being or a horse, objective purposiveness is also commonly taken into account for judging its beauty; but in that case the judgment is also no longer purely aesthetic, i.e., a mere judgment of taste. (Kant, 2000: 190) Here, in the production of art, the tension between art and beauty is what is emphasised (as opposed to art and nature), and then Kant offers a way that art can advance beauty that is beyond nature: Beautiful art displays its excellence precisely by describing beautifully things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The furies, diseases, devastations

44 Kant of war, and the like can, as harmful things, be very beautifully described, indeed even represented in painting … (Kant, 2000: 190) Beautiful art can have the naturally ugly as its content. This point brings to the boil a simmering problem for Kant. For not only does the intrusion of a nonaesthetic end seem entailed by such representation, but it would seem that the representation of these things as beautiful in fact becomes the end of art. Here is a bind for Kant: beauty and nature can go so easily together because no ends are involved but with the act of human creation of the art object, beauty itself becomes necessarily mired in the ends that Kant had tried to cut away from the realm of the aesthetic. Simply, the artist will try to make beautiful art, and this would seem to have to leave behind any supposedly naturally free state of subjectivity. The proof of natural subjective freedom – the beautiful work of art – becomes a kind of purpose, which is what Kant had wanted to exclude from the meaning of the aesthetic. Thirdly, with representation and beauty in art both put into some jeopardy under the Kantian arguments for an aesthetic that has to hold nature as the model, the concept of form can be reassessed.19 As we have seen, the Third Moment, in particular, puts great emphasis on form. The final definition is worth restating: Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an object, insofar as it is perceived in it without representation of an end. (Kant, 2000: 120, emphasis added) The way that Kant shuts out ends from the aesthetic has been mentioned, but what is he saying here on ‘form’? Under the overarching demands of Kant’s system, form is associated with a ‘purposiveness,’ against all other ends and purposes. A summarising ‘deduction of judgement of taste’ makes this point more plainly: If it is admitted that in a pure judgment of taste the satisfaction in the object is combined with the mere judging of its form, then it is nothing other than the subjective purposiveness of that form for the power of judgment that we sense as combined with the representation of the object in the mind. (Kant, 2000: 169) Such purposiveness of form will eventually lead into the teleological argument that Kant will muster in the second part of the Critique of Judgement. But, for our needs, the stress on form is significant and again shows Kant’s prescient understanding of art. In this quotation ‘the subjective purposiveness of that form’ is distinguished from the ‘representation of the object in the mind.’ Both form and representation must be present for Kant’s 18th-century judgement of taste, but this separation of form and content by Kant, and the emphasis he puts on the subjective purposiveness of form as the crucial distinguishing quality of the aesthetic,

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at least sets up a conceptual framework that gives representation a somewhat supplementary role as against the foundational function of form. At times, Kant himself pursues this logic whereby the importance of form can render all other factors redundant. With art again serving as a kind of poor relation to nature, Kant strips all content out of art and takes it back to form, since this is the basis of any aesthetic judgement of beauty. In order to do this, Kant comes to consider the purely formal elements of art such as colour and drawing, and he puts forward some remarkable divisions: Aesthetic judgments can be divided, just like theoretical (logical) ones, into empirical and pure. The first are those which assert agreeableness or disagreeableness, the second those which assert beauty of an object or the way of representing it; the former are judgments of sense (material aesthetic judgments), the latter (as formal) are alone proper judgments of taste. A judgment of taste is thus pure only insofar as no merely empirical satisfaction is mixed into its determining ground. This always happens, however, if charm or emotion has any share in the judgment by which something is to be declared to be beautiful. (Kant, 2000: 108) This ‘pure’ aesthetic judgement of taste is described as ‘formal’ in its assertion of beauty and ‘the way of representing it.’ On this basis, Kant goes on to discuss how a colour (or tone of a musical instrument) might be considered beautiful in terms of these two measures of judgement (empirical and pure): A mere colour, e.g., the green of a lawn, a mere tone (in distinction from sound and noise), say that of a violin, is declared by most people to be beautiful in itself, although both seem to have as their ground merely the matter of the representations, namely mere sensation, and on that account deserve to be called only agreeable. Yet at the same time one will surely note that the sensations of colour as well as of tone justifiably count as beautiful only insofar as both are pure, which is a determination that already concerns form, and is also the only thing that can be universally communicated about these representations with certainty … (Kant, 2002: 108–9) It is the formal, pure quality of colour which is ‘the only thing that can be universally communicated about these representations with certainty.’ How form takes precedence in Kant gains some clarity here, especially since the universal quality of his judgement of taste would seem to demand such an emphasis. His position is, perhaps, even clearer on the formal qualities of drawing: In painting and sculpture, indeed in all the pictorial arts in architecture and horticulture insofar as they are fine arts, the drawing is what is essential, in

46 Kant which what constitutes the ground of all arrangements for taste is not what gratifies in sensation but merely what pleases through its form. (Kant, 2000: 110, emphasis added) Beyond and against the ‘empirical’ quality of judgements of ‘sense’ that rely on the ‘sensation’ of charm and emotion, lies the pure aesthetic quality of form. Here Kant starts to consider the formal elements of art, such as colour and drawing. Kant’s arguments are undeveloped on this point, but it is arguably apparent that, against his intentions, Kant has again exposed the internal logic of art. Once all ends have been cut away from the aesthetic, not only does representation becomes problematic but it is upon the road to pure form that art is destined to travel. Nature, beauty, and the sublime After Kant, art will more clearly separate from nature and become the almost exclusive domain of the aesthetic. Kant provides good reasons why this fracture between these twin sites of beauty would widen. The sublime was always the sole province of nature, but Kant shows us that beauty is more pure in nature since it is unqualified by the merely ‘adherent beauty’ of artistic representation. We have also been able to tease out of Kant’s arguments on the subjective universal some of the major fault-lines between nature and art, particularly with regard to the more explicit theoretical ‘communicability’ of art and the artwork, as against the experience of nature. However, Kant also gives us some stimulating ideas on why the appeal of nature would achieve such heights in modernity in contrast to the appeal of art. To consider the allure of nature in modernity is an immense topic that lies beyond the current concern with art. However, some brief speculations might be allowed in order at least to show how art and nature would be fated to separate in terms of their respective appeals. Here we need to return to the Third Moment in order to confront Kant’s stress on how such form without interest or ends is also ‘purposive.’ Now we do not need to follow Kant’s arguments all the way to appreciate that Kant might well have hit on a major source of nature’s appeal in modern life. Part of the tremendous attraction of nature lies, as briefly mentioned, both in a sense of escape from social determination, and in the capacity of the freed subject to fill itself with experiences it can call its own – this is the basis of nature’s allure from Rousseau until today. But the persistent captivation by the natural would also seem to confirm an ongoing presumption that nature has some purpose that is without any ends – that it has, as Kant argued, a purposive form (or even an inherent ‘teleology’20). For Kant, and seemingly up until today, to be able to experience nature in terms of what the 18th century labelled beauty is to feel that you are part of some greater meaningful order. The purpose of this order is in contrast to all other human ends and values, as Kant lays out for us at the start of his argument on the aesthetic. Beauty is the value from which such purposiveness arises, but a further value can be added – the sublime. For Kant, the sublime is regarded as inferior to beauty

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in that it is formless and indicates nothing purposive in nature. (Kant, 2000: 128ff). Such ‘negative pleasure’ (Kant, 2000: 129) in the limitless magnitude of nature is, clearly, an ongoing primary attraction of the natural. Now, if we reject the idea that such appeal is part of the universal human condition and/or that nature has been made for us in this way by some beneficent deity, and accept that what is being exhibited here is merely the historically determined sensibility of beauty and the sublime, then we can draw on Weber to make sense of this play of natural attractions. Basically, it might be possible to understand nature as another value-sphere within the polytheistic structure of Weber’s conception of modernity, with Kant providing the internal value structure of this new sphere. Weber’s brief remarks on the romantic experience of nature and on the spheres of art and the erotic rely, as we saw in the last chapter, on the domination of the rationalised world in disenchanted modernity. This natural world offers not only another site of salvation from the routines of the rationalised spheres, but also a counter to the cold, senseless universe of scientific understanding. Kant’s values of aesthetic nature – an experiential irrational subjectivity, beauty, a purposiveness of form, and the sublime – might well provide a map of the internal order of such a value-sphere (even if the sublime seems to have been subject to its own process of rationalisation, and diminished to such an extent that it has ended up, at least in part, as the base sensationalism of the ‘adrenalin rush’). However, we have to leave this topic behind, not, it should be noted, because Kant’s ideas are out of date, but because their potential fecundity cannot be explored further. Morality After initially cutting off the aesthetic from morality, Kant tries to re-establish links back to ethics. (Again, it needs to be noted, the secondary literature on this topic is abundant.) Although we will not pursue Kant’s explicit arguments for this reconnection, much can be gained when we bring together Kant and Weber on this topic Kant admits that an interest in the aesthetic is readily and reasonably understood to be divergent from an interest in the moral when one is confronted by the virtuosi of taste, who are not only often but even usually vain, obstinate, and given to corrupting passions, could perhaps even less than others lay claim to the merit of devotion to moral principles; and so it appears that the feeling for the beautiful is not only specifically different from the moral feeling (as it actually is), but also that the interest that can be combined with it can be united with the moral interest with difficulty, and by no means through an inner affinity. (Kant, 2000: 178) But Kant seeks to overcome this ‘difficulty’ of the stereotypical immorality of the ‘virtuosi of taste,’ and the Third Critique offers a number of ways that

48 Kant a relationship can be said to exist between the aesthetic and the ethical. In this light, even though there are other hints and suggestions to be found, the following explicit connections can be listed: the feeling for the sublime in nature is ‘similar to the moral disposition’ (Kant, 2000: 151), and represents the moral good (Kant, 2000: 153); an interest in natural beauty is in such ‘agreement’ (Kant, 2000: 179), and holds such an ‘affinity’ (Kant, 2000: 180) with morality, that this aesthetic sensibility shows not only a ‘disposition … favourable to the moral feeling’ (Kant, 2000: 178), but must have been ‘established [in an] interest in the morally good’ (Kant, 2000, 180); and beauty more generally is taken as ‘a symbol of morality’ (Kant, 2000: 225ff). Although some of these claims are based on a distinction Kant wants to make between an ‘immediate,’ ‘intellectual’ interest in beauty and the judgement of taste (Kant, 2000: 178ff), there is, nevertheless, a plainly evident strain or tension in Kant’s attempt to re-establish a relationship between morality and the aesthetic, as witnessed in his use of such terms as ‘similar disposition,’ ‘represents,’ ‘agreement,’ ‘affinity,’ and ‘symbol.’ But the purpose of our argument is not to try to lessen or increase this strain; what is of importance from these sections of Kant’s theory is that, alongside his explicit initial exclusion of any moral ends from the judgement of taste, sits the clear assumption that the aesthetic does command some moral aspect, particularly as it is related to nature. In other words, Kant exhibits both the anti-moral makeup of aesthetic taste, and also the appealing presumption that to enter the aesthetic world is to achieve a measure of goodness. However, Kant goes even further and suggests that the degree of goodness involved, in fact, indicates an ultimate human capacity for morality. If a man who has enough taste to judge about products of beautiful art with the greatest correctness and refinement gladly leaves the room in which are to be found those beauties that sustain vanity and at best social joys and turns to the beautiful in nature, in order as it were to find here an ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he can never fully develop, then we would consider this choice of his with esteem and presuppose in him a beautiful soul [eine schöne Seele], to which no connoisseur and lover of art can lay claim on account of the interest that he takes in his objects. (Kant, 2000: 179) What are we to make of this claim that a ‘beautiful soul’ (or ‘good soul’ (Kant, 2000: 178)) can be presupposed with such a turn to natural beauty (or the sublime), and away from the beauty of art? How can the aesthetic, on a general level, be both the place of unqualified anti-morality, and such unqualified moral worth? If we leave behind Kant’s own arguments that try to bring the aesthetic and the moral together within his overall system in terms of universality, reason, and freedom, and instead combine Kant and Weber, then some answers to these questions might be forthcoming. The key here is the way that nature, as opposed to art, is regarded as pure, as simply form, and with a beauty that is able to be shorn of all the corrupting

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‘adherent’ qualities of human ends. That the human element is the cause of such corruption is exhibited by Kant in the effect that results on discovery that, for example, a birdsong (Kant, 2000: 181–2) or a flower (Kant, 2000: 178–9) was not, in fact, natural but an artificial, man-made creation designed to deceive. But this interest, which we here take in beauty, absolutely requires that it be the beauty of nature; and it disappears entirely as soon as one notices that one has been deceived and that it is only art, so much so that even taste can no longer find anything beautiful in it … (Kant, 2000: 181) To put this in Weberian terms: the beauty and sublime of nature can be considered an escape from the guilt that pervades all the value-spheres of modernity, including the sphere of the aesthetic. As we have noted, the ethic of brotherliness with its appreciation of suffering, is necessarily denied by the value-spheres, but continues into modernity to preside in moral judgement on the age. However, in nature, with its pure, formal, non-human beauty, an innocence might be experienced, not guilt. Kant’s philosophical understanding of aesthetic judgement, and the terms he uses to describe the accompanying moral dimension (e.g., ‘beautiful soul’!), provides some content to fill in the bare Weberian, sociological depiction of this uneasy combination of the ethical and anti-ethical. However, although Kant explicitly denies art the moral capacity of nature, he does sometimes seem to indicate that such an ethical link to this human side of the aesthetic might be possible (as noted, see Kant, 2000: 225ff). Also, the assumption that art is itself a site of ethical worth has been theoretically articulated, as we will see, for example, by Adorno. We can again make sense of this particular association of morality and the aesthetic by bringing together Kant and Weber. Weber agrees with Kant that the fundamental values of the aesthetic valuesphere – form, taste, and subjectivity – are fundamentally anti-moral, as we have seen. But the value-sphere theory needs some help from Kant to cope with the accompanying belief that this does not need to be the case; that art can also be, in some way, good. Simply, as the internal logic of the value-sphere of art dislodges beauty and representation from their positions of pre-eminence and becomes more formal, as Kant himself starts to describe, then, paradoxically, art become more like nature and so more innocent. That is, the often described ‘dehumanisation’ of art, whereby form succeeds content, can be interpreted via Kant as the removal from art of the ‘adherent’ impurities that marked the moral divide between art and nature. Of course, since art is still made by humans, and, arguably, is much more socially institutionalised, then art must remain more corrupted than nature. However, as the internal structure of the aesthetic sphere hardens in this way against the external rationalised world, then to enter the inner cosmos of art is, akin to nature, to leave the guilt of modernity behind. It is a cleansing of all social ties and duties, including the ones that Kant states in his Practical Philosophy, and gives a self-awareness of going beyond what must always be

50 Kant morally compromised. Basically, in the end, the value-sphere of art is not moral but, on the basis of its own internal logic of anti-ethical values, is able to consider that it is so. A curious result of this process is that the internal formalisation of art will produce the blatantly anti-ethical stand of the art for art’s sake movement, which is substantially the affirmation of Kant’s major position in the Critique of Judgement against all other value systems; and it will also produce a possible experience of art as a nature-like realm of innocence. The complexity of art’s appeal in modernity is becoming more apparent.

Conclusion: Kant and Weber The point of going back to Kant was to try to retrieve what will enhance our understanding of the appeal of the aesthetic in modern life. The basic theoretical schema of our argument, which was set up in the first chapter, came from Weber, and this chapter has attempted to see how Kant might fill out that initial Weberian sketch of art and modernity. Let us summarise this melding of Kant with Weber. Six broad areas will be mentioned: firstly, the impact on the Weberian triad of values in art – taste, creative subjectivity, and form; secondly, the place of reason and theory in the aesthetic sphere; thirdly, freedom; fourthly, originality; fifth, meaning and purposiveness; and, finally, the ‘adherent’ qualities of morality. Firstly, Kant gives a substantial boost to our understanding of how the internal values of taste, subjectivity, and form work to maintain the aesthetic value-sphere. For both Kant and Weber aesthetic taste is an irrational/anti-rational subjective judgement. Taste affirms a sense of an internal, foundational subjectivity for the viewer and artist. But Kant shows us how taste must be much more than only tied to anti-rational subjectivity. Kant’s claim is that there is a demand for universal agreement on the aesthetic judgement, and we can appreciate how, at the very least, others must be included beyond an individualised personal judgement. ‘Communicability’ is needed as the extra-subjective demand is realised, and we can perhaps start to see how the members of the value-sphere of art can be bound together by taste. Vitally, Kant wants to demonstrate how the basic subjective judgement is at all times sustained even though other humans are now included. It might be added at this stage how the somewhat hopeful universality of Kant’s understanding does indeed become undone as the sphere of art develops in the 19th century. It is, in the main, only those within this exclusive sphere who have taste and who can work this effect of binding the individual to the small community of art through the absolute affirmation of internal subjectivity. If an understanding of the values of taste and irrational subjectivity are aided by Kant in this way, what of the last of Weber’s triad of aesthetic values: form? Since beauty is explicitly essential in Kant’s aesthetics and content/representation is clearly assumed, it might seem unlikely that Kant might help our understanding of the later emphasis on pure aesthetic form and the consequent relegation of beauty and representation. On the contrary, however, we have seen how prescient his analysis was.

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In terms of the move away from representation in art, the usual explanatory stress is technological – the camera made such mimetic content redundant. However, Kant reveals the much earlier logics at work in this regard. Recall that for Kant there is a definite problem with any representation in art in the sense that it is likely to introduce non-aesthetic interests into your judgement, especially if there is human representation; so, what might determine your judgement beyond the purely aesthetic is, for example, the possible usefulness of an implement or building, or the moral or physical beauty of the human representation. It would seem to follow that ‘without interest’ as Kant argues it, carries with it the assumption that, in the long run, only form can be considered constitutive of aesthetic judgement. As for beauty, it is really only in nature that this can be properly applied in any pure sense – art must be lesser. For Kant, beauty seems to be an added ‘adherent’ quality to art, rather than necessary, despite the clear fact that, as with all 18thcentury aesthetics, Kant begins and ends with beauty and aesthetics as one. On this basis, perhaps we might even be justified in claiming that his specific arguments here point to the coming rift between art and beauty, and the consequent retention of unalloyed form as the sole survivor as a primary aesthetic value. So, Kant provides considerable insight into how the logic of form will play out. Remarkably, we can learn from his early aesthetic philosophy how beauty and content/representation would fall away and leave form as one of the three dominant values of the value-sphere of art. A second lesson from Kant comes with consideration of the communicability of aesthetic judgement and the place of reason or concepts in the art sphere. Weber sets up the realm of art as simply anti-rational (if itself also in possession of its own history of rationalisation), but Kant shows how this cannot be the case: subjective irrationality is central and unassailable yet reason is also necessarily present for aesthetic taste to function. The imperative that others should share your aesthetic judgement entails, Kant tells us, that the art object will have to be discussed using reason and concepts. However, this is necessarily a ‘quasirational’ language, since the initial anti-rational subjective judgement remains immovably determinant. Now this is not just another case of the Humean view of reason being the ‘slave of the passions,’ nor of Weber’s own famous recognition of the subjective determination of all rational inquiry. Rather, the aesthetic must be founded on an irrational judgement that necessarily binds any further rational discussion in ways that are in contrast to scientific/academic reason – the subjective nature of art in modernity is set up against reason, and Kant is at pains to show how the ‘reason’ of art is, therefore, also anti-rational. Kant’s gift of a philosophical awareness of such aesthetic quasi-rationality provides us with some abundant material to help fill out Weber’s theoretical schema. As we will develop later, such internal aesthetic theory will itself undergo its own process of rationalisation that will culminate in Duchamp’s ready-mades and the multitude of conceptual/theoretical art of the late 20th century. Such aesthetic rationalisation does not diminish the external threat that reason poses to the internal cosmos of the art sphere, as Weber put it, but Kant has shown us that

52 Kant within the aesthetic value-sphere a kind of reason is part of the meaning of art and Duchamp will extend the rational element as far as it can go without breaking the aesthetic sphere apart. Thirdly, the vitally important element that Kant allows us to include into the Weberian picture is freedom. This is such an obvious inclusion for any discussion of art in modernity but is absent in Weber’s account, and this is almost certainly due to the fact that his discussion of art takes place within his sociology of religion – Weber deliberately does not want to regard art in terms of its usual, self-conscious understanding. This is not the place to repeat the intellectual categorisations of ‘freedom’; it is enough, following Kant, to point to the sustained constant of aesthetic self-consciousness that some inner self has been engaged and released. In other words, remarkably, an 18th-century Rousseau-like view of individual freedom is still the basis of artistic creativity and sensibility. Additionally, this free self of art is formed in the ‘opinion of others,’ as Kant shows us with his understanding of taste. So, if we are seeking an answer to the appeal of art in modernity, then in this Kantian understanding we have individual subjectivity not caught in some oppositional isolation but rather realised by other humans, even if they are in disagreement with the initial judgement. This point is best illustrated with consideration of the work of art itself. Particularly for the artist, the artwork is proof of original internal subjectivity when approval is given by others in the art sphere as part of the manifestation of taste. Simply, the self and others are bound together by taste. The coming chapters on Hegel and Adorno will take up this possible aesthetic resolution of the problem of the individual as free but alone in society. However, the heavy qualification has to be made that whatever freedom might be on offer only exists within the aesthetic value-sphere, and in fact relies on the unfreedom of those outside the borders of the realm of art. If this is the case, then we are in a position to say that, in the same way that the exclusivist salvation of the aesthetic sphere provides some measure of meaning within meaninglessness, as Weber argues, so it also provides a kind of freedom within unfreedom – such anti-universality is always how the appeal of art works. A fourth point that brings Kant and Weber together concerns the endless affirmation of the new in art. Kant shows us that ‘art’ in the modern era can only be understood by cutting away all the other non-aesthetic values (such as practical use, morality and purely personal taste), but once we recognise how beauty and representation are also not part of the inner logic of art as Kant, even if against his intentions, has revealed to us, then we are left with the question of what of value is left in art? On this point Kant still provides us with the answer of originality in his section on the artist as genius. It is the making of the new that is the artistic imperative, but, as Kant argues, such originality needs to be tempered by the constraints of taste as laid out in the idea of subjective universality. This originality works as art only within the ‘communicability’ and quasi-reason of, in Weber’s terms, the inner cosmos of the aesthetic value-sphere. Fifth, the way that the aesthetic sphere provides some measure of meaning in a meaningless world is added to by Kant. For Weber, modernity has lost meaning

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through the multiple ways that the means have become the ends or, at a minimum, have undermined the ends. In all the rationalised spheres this dynamic is apparent. But Kant’s negotiation of the purposiveness and endlessness of art reveals how this means/ends dilemma of meaning is, extraordinarily, avoided. Lastly, a combination of Kant and Weber helped tease out the relation between art and morality. Although fundamentally anti-ethical, a point that Kant and Weber agree on, an understanding was needed of the sense that art can also be considered, or consider itself, as moral; and this required some modified Kantian theory to be added to Weber’s value-sphere schema. We now need to turn to address these issues of the value of art beyond the purely aesthetic. If Kant has helped us understand the internal workings of the value-sphere of art, it is Hegel who can guide us as we take up the questions of art and its setting in a wider history. With a deep breath then, let us dive down to the famously rich shipwreck of Hegel’s philosophy and see what we can salvage.

Notes 1 The analogy falters, but the same point applies to the later chapters on Adorno and Bourdieu. 2 We will use this standard English rendering of the title of the 3rd Critique, even if we rely on the English translation that calls this work ‘The Critique of the Power of Judgement.’ 3 The idea that the taste for food and drink is merely ‘agreeable’ as Kant has here, needs a qualification. Just about every food competition programme on television would seem to assume the opposite: that the taste in food is not just a matter of subjective taste, but something that can be somehow judged objectively and, in this way, such taste can achieve a common, not just personal, agreement. How often do the judging panels all give something like the same score for a dish? An answer to this conundrum might in fact lie in Kant’s very theory: such programmes reveal an aspiration for food and cooking not to be discounted as the merely personal and agreeable, but, instead, to be judged as art. 4 With the introduction of this problem, the more general point should be made here that the differences between nature and art create a deep fracturing in Kant’s overall aesthetic theory, which Kant himself was aware of, but which would only become manifest as the value-sphere of art develops through the 19th century. We will come back to tackle the divide between art and nature more thoroughly later. 5 ‘Er wird daher vom Schönen so sprechen, als ob Schönheit eine Beschaffenheit des Gegenstandes und das Urteil logisch (durch Begriffe vom Objekte eine Erkenntnis desselben ausmache) wäre; ob es gleich nur ästhetisch ist und bloß eine Beziehung der Vorstellung des Gegenstandes auf das Subjekt enthält: darum, weil es doch mit dem logischen die Ähnlichkeit hat, daß man die Gültigkeit desselben für jedermann daran voraussetzen kann. Aber aus Begriffen kann diese Allgemeinheit auch nicht entspringen. Denn von Begriffen gibt es keinen Übergang zum Gefühle der Lust oder Unlust (ausgenommen in reinen praktischen Gesetzen, die aber ein Interesse bei sich führen, dergleichen mit dem reinen Geschmacksurteile nicht verbunden ist). Folglich muß dem Geschmacksurteile, mit dem Bewußtsein der Absonderung in demselben von allem Interesse, ein Anspruch auf Gültigkeit für jedermann, ohne auf Objekte gestellte Allgemeinheit anhängen, d.i. es muß damit ein Anspruch auf subjektive Allgemeinheit verbunden sein’ (Kant, 1977: 124–5).

54 Kant 6 Kant seeks a resolution of this antinomy. Although detailed discussion of his position here lies beyond the scope of the present argument, it can be fairly stated that the proposed resolution is in some trouble, relying, as it does, on the highly contested Kantian concept of the ‘supersensible.’ Indeed, Kant himself knows he has problems when he is forced to fall back on such a strategy: Thus one sees that the removal of the antinomy of the aesthetic power of judgment takes a course similar to that followed by the Critique [of Pure Reason] in the resolution of the antinomies of pure theoretical reason, and that in the same way both here and in the Critique of Practical Reason one is compelled, against one’s will, to look beyond the sensible and to seek the unifying point of all our faculties a priori in the supersensible: because no other way remains to make reason self-consistent. (Kant, 2000: 217) For our purposes, the insight Kant provides is that these oppositional elements make up the uneasy, unbreakable bond of aesthetic taste. It can also be noted here that, in this statement of the antinomy of taste, Kant refers only to the ‘necessary assent of others’ (emphasis added) rather than the assent of everyone that would seem to be implied in the concept of ‘subjective universality.’ Such an expression lends some support to the claim that the universal does not apply to art in the same way it might apply to nature. 7 Such necessarily limited reason gives some partial explanation to two aspects of selfunderstanding in art: the ongoing, unsatisfactory rational understanding of art exhibited by artists themselves (as recognised, for example, by Socrates at the start of Plato’s Apology); and how the aesthetic is able to lay claim to being much more than just ‘art’ in the sense that it can extend into politics and morality. We will return to this last point. 8 However, there is the idea that such play between imagination and understanding gives an inner sense, a consciousness, of the freedom that the aesthetic judgement invokes (Kant, 2000: 103–4, 113). 9 We have little choice but to follow Kant’s predictably sexist terminology here. 10 ‘Self-consciousness’ is used here in a fairly loose sense, and will come to be tied into the notion of ‘for-itself.’ 11 However, Kant will sometimes assert that freedom must be the same in both cases. For example, he says this: By right, only production through freedom, i.e., through a capacity for choice that grounds its actions in reason, should be called art. (Kant, 2000: 182) But this comes after he has tried to show how the appreciation of the beauty of nature is linked to being morally good – we will discuss this tenuous claim later in this chapter. 12 ‘l’homme sociable toujours hors de lui ne fait vivre que dans l’opinion des autres, et c’est, pour ainsi dire, de leur seul jugement qu’il tire le sentiment de sa propre existence … comment, en un mot, demandant toujours aux autres ce que nous sommes et n’osant jamais nous interroger là-dessus nous-mêmes …’ (Rousseau, 1985: 54) 13 Some anecdotal evidence might be allowed here. In my many decades of teaching political philosophy, it is this passage that has never failed to be of most appeal to undergraduate students – it sums up what they do believe. 14 Although Kant gets to this position on the assumption of the social aspect of the judgement of taste in nature, as we have seen. 15 We will see, in a later chapter, how Adorno shows how the ‘culture industry’ also produces a somewhat similar self-consciousness (for-itself) of freedom.

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16 This point might be developed through Kant’s rather underdone (but, inevitably, much scrutinised) notion of an aesthetic sensus communis, where a universal, aesthetic communal (not just common) sense is postulated: I … say that taste can be called sensus communis with greater justice than can the healthy understanding, and that the aesthetic power of judgment rather than the intellectual can bear the name of a communal sense, [sensus communis aestheticus], if indeed one would use the word ‘sense’ of an effect of mere reflection on the mind: for there one means by ‘sense’ the feeling of pleasure. One could even define taste as the faculty for judging that which makes our feeling in a given representation universally communicable without the mediation of a concept. (Kant, 2000: 175) 17 See, for example, Plato’s account of the ‘divine madness’ of the artist in his Phaedrus. 18 Although the centrality of beauty in 18th-century aesthetics must be left behind, we will reconnect with beauty in the forthcoming chapter on Adorno. 19 Kant repeatedly states that it is the form or forms of nature that are aesthetically beautiful. A just given quotation makes this point: in the judgement of the beauty of nature ‘the mere form without knowledge of the end pleases for itself in the judging’ (as quoted, Kant, 2000: 190; also, for example, Kant, 2000: 178). 20 Although such a use of ‘teleology’ would be against Kant’s overall argument in the Critique of Judgement.

3

Hegel Art and the end of history

Introduction: the end of history and the end of art In contrast to the way the aesthetic theory of Kant can sensibly be extracted from its place in the overall Kantian philosophical schema, an understanding of Hegel’s theory of art needs to recognise at least some of the elements that constitute the vast Hegelian philosophical project as a whole. With this in mind, all the qualifications and hesitations that have already been mentioned concerning the theoretical task at hand apply with their greatest force here, with Hegel. An entry point might be found when we consider together two of the seemingly bewildering conclusions of Hegel’s argument: the end of art, and the end of history. As is so commonly pointed out, Hegel does not mean that history and art will not continue, but that some qualitative, climactic shift has occurred that marks off art and history from everything that has happened before. For our purposes, we will see that Hegel was basically correct on the end of art, and basically wrong on the end of history, and for this reason the philosophy of Hegel and the sociology of Weber can fruitfully be brought together. More detail will follow, but the basic Hegelian narrative on how these ‘ends’ have been reached is this: Hegel announces the philosophical self-recognition of the meaning of history – where history has a teleological Spirit that in fact leads to this philosophical awareness that surpasses but includes1 all other philosophies. Art has been one of the vital manifestations of this unfolding Spirit in a ‘sensuous shape’ (Hegel, 1975: 72) but has been surpassed (but also retained) by later religion and then philosophy; one of the great developments and dilemmas of Spirit is the Western internal inward subject that comes into importance after Ancient Greece, especially with Christianity, and is one of the prime sites of freedom. However, this individual free subject is only fulfilled by its harmonious fusion with the state; such a resolution of freedom, combined with the philosophical self-consciousness of this telos of human history as a whole, is, at times, equated by Hegel with the ‘divine.’ If the state and philosophy have provided an ‘end to history’ in this way, art has been cut off from this legal/state/theoretical resolution of the Spirit of history and only continues as the random expression of an irrational inner subjectivity – it is perhaps pleasurable and even beautiful, but it can no longer be the expression of the ongoing meaning of history. So, with such

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an end of history, art has also ended in becoming, for the first time in human history, untied from meaning, morality, and politics; it will continue, and its past can be understood as a vital part of the progress of Spirit, but its basic emotional subjectivity gives art in the modern age both its appeal, but also its contemporary historical irrelevance. But who now will dare to agree that all human history contains some inner Spirit that, in the West, has finally culminated in a teleological resolution of freedom, the state, and reason? On the other hand, within this overarching argument, Hegel understands how it is that the basic relationship between art and history has changed: the modern world of markets, laws, and reason – the ‘prosaic’, in Hegel’s terms – comes to a dominance that, even if there is not the fulfilment of meaning that Hegel asserts, does lead to a division between this site of history and art. Kant’s aesthetic theory, where art can be considered purely in terms of its own aesthetic values, serves as a kind of proof that art has ‘ended’ in this way. In sum, what we can take away from Hegel is that although history has not come to the sort of end he proclaimed, art has indeed ended very much as he argued. Vitally, from this position on the ends of history and art, a question can still be put in Hegelian terms: what happens to art if it is regarded as in fact cut off from a history where such Hegelian meaning, rather than having been achieved, has come to be, at best, radically doubted? And one answer, which will be articulated later, is that art comes itself to be the site of a degree of meaning and resolution that the prosaic world fails to achieve, and it does so on the basis of the irrational, aimless subjectivity that, for Hegel, marked the end of art. In order to appreciate the benefits of Hegel’s aesthetic theory this chapter will be structured in the following way: first, some context will be provided via a summary of Hegel’s critical account of Kant; second, two crucial Hegelian terms – romanticism and the prosaic – will be expounded in order to show how Hegel’s theory can directly help answer our overall question on the appeal of art; third, Hegel’s view of the end of history will be critically appropriated; and, finally, Weber’s value-sphere view of art will be seen to be boosted by the addition of some Hegelian insights.

Hegel and Kant In the Introduction to his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel follows and praises much of Kant’s argument before stating his standard critique of the Kantian position. This critique has great power, but also necessarily loses some of the explanatory force that we have seen displayed in the Critique of Judgement. The overall philosophical position, in which Hegel’s critical appropriation of Kant is placed, is given this first, famous depiction: it is certainly the case that art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone, a satisfaction that, at least on the part of religion, was most intimately linked with art.

58 Hegel The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of the later Middle Ages, are gone. The development of reflection in our life today has made it a need of ours, in relation both to our will and judgement, to cling to general considerations and to regulate the particular by them, with the result that universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims, prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator. But for artistic interest and production we demand in general rather a quality of life in which the universal is not present in the form of law and maxim, but which gives the impression of being one with the senses and the feelings, just as the universal and the rational is contained in the imagination by being brought into unity with a concrete sensuous appearance. Consequently, the conditions of our present time are not favourable to art. (Hegel, 1975: 10) We can see here how art has ended in being cut off from its once intimate intertwining with the ‘spiritual needs’ of an age, and has become what we know as ‘art’ – an irrational contrast to the ‘universal forms, laws, duties, rights, maxims, [which] prevail as determining reasons and are the chief regulator.’ And this new place of art in history calls forth the philosophical reflection of what this ‘art’ now is: In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. (Hegel, 1975: 11) Kant’s philosophy of art contributes much to meet this new intellectual demand. And Hegel lists four basic points of agreement with Kant: firstly, because the aesthetic judgement is without interest (as opposed to the usual appetites and needs), there is a certain ‘complacency’ with regard to the aesthetic object which is therefore granted a freedom and independence and, in this sense, becomes an ‘end in itself’ (Hegel, 1975: 58); secondly, the aesthetic involves a universal pleasure which is ‘without a concept’ and so is fundamentally to be distinguished from rational understanding2; thirdly, in terms of purpose, the ‘beautiful3… exists as purposeful in itself, without means and ends showing themselves separated as different aspects of it’ (Hegel, 1975: 59); and, fourthly, the beautiful, without a concept, is the ‘object of a necessary delight’ (Hegel, 1975: 59). So, Kant has been able to capture philosophically the way that art is pleasurable, irrational, freely self-contained, and beyond the usual formulations of means and ends. However, the great problem for Hegel is that Kant can only understand art in terms of a fundamental subjectivity, rather than history: so that while he does affirm the abstract dissolution of the opposition between concept and reality, universal and particular, understanding and sense, and

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therefore the Idea, he makes this dissolution and reconciliation itself into a purely subjective one again, not one absolutely true and actual. (Hegel, 1975: 57) Now the trick here is that Hegel is not saying that the art as we now know it, and Kant describes it, is not subjective, but that this basic subjectivity of art is the greatest indication that art has in fact ended; and that this fate of art can only be appreciated once we realise that this radical, pure, irrational aesthetic subjectivity is itself the outcome of the dialectical progress of the Spirit of history. Kant’s essentially subjectivist philosophy is a sign of both the end of art and end of history. Indeed for Hegel, as we will see, this current state of art, which Kant understands so well, is the last hurrah for what Hegel calls the ‘romanticist’4 phase of art, which extends from the medieval period to Goethe in terms of an underlying, developing, inward subjectivity. Let us admit Hegel’s point that Kant’s philosophy, with all its insights, is indicative of what ‘art’ has become rather than what the definition of ‘art’ might be in universal terms. (Even without the teleological absolutism of Hegel’s Eurocentric conclusions, this basic contrast has some profound implications, as we will see.) If Hegel can be presumed to be correct in this way, some major qualifications and criticisms now need to be made. Importantly, Hegel’s specific philosophy of art must neglect Kant’s arguments on how extra-subjective ‘reason’ is part of the aesthetic judgement itself. Hegel, as stated, does acknowledge the universal aspect of aesthetic pleasure in Kant’s argument but does not appear to appreciate the accompanying extra-subjectivist implications. As we saw, it is not that aesthetic judgement is ‘without a concept’ in a way that shuts out all rationality and includes only anti-rational, subjective feeling. Rather, Kant’s ‘subjective universal’ and ‘subjective universal communicability’ assert that the object of art must be discussed with the use of ‘concepts’ that are still necessarily tied to personal subjectivity. This point can be amplified through consideration of the idea of ‘taste.’ ‘Taste’ is a crucial term in Kant’s aesthetics (and Weber’s) but is deliberately shunned by Hegel for being a rather superficial appreciation of art, i.e., it lacks the understanding of the meaning of art as Spirit (Hegel, 1975: 16, 34). But ‘taste’ is the value that allows Kant to move beyond a purely subjectivist account of art. The ‘communicability’ and quasi-reason demanded by the art object, along with subjective feeling, constitute to a large degree aesthetic taste in modernity. As well, for Kant, such taste acts as a necessary control on the subjective freedom of the ‘genius’ artist.5 Looking back from the Weberian perspective of art as a separate value-sphere it is easier for us to appreciate how Kant’s ‘taste’ can work in this way, but it still needs to be noted how Hegel must miss this internal logic of the artworld in his general depiction of Kant and the end of art as merely subjectivist.6 Hegel’s philosophical/historical insights into the fate of art come with this cost. This point on taste will become important when we come to consider the impact on art of the end of history.

60 Hegel

The prosaic and romanticism There is a trivial sense where we are always standing at the ends of history and art, and reconsidering the past as it has led to a continual present, but Hegel, of course, intends much more than this. He announced his present as the resolution of the very essence of all human history – the telos had been, or was about to be reached; and art could now be considered as something with its own separate identity because it was now, for the first time, untethered from this very teleology of historical meaning. One way to make sense of this process is to consider Hegel’s understanding of the ‘prosaic’ and ‘romanticism.’ The prosaic There are two senses of the prosaic for Hegel: as an ordinary, common, human condition, and as the formal requirements of reason, law, and the state. Firstly, then, the prosaic exists at a general level as the consciousness of the unavoidable struggles, contingencies, and limitations of ordinary life: no matter how far individuals may contribute to the whole with their own aims and accomplish what is in line with their own individual interest, still the independence and freedom of their will remains more or less formal, determined by external circumstances and chances, and hindered by natural obstacles. This is the prose of the world [Prosa der Welt], as it appears to the consciousness both of the individual himself and of others:- a world of finitude and mutability, of entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the individual is in no position to withdraw. For every isolated living thing remains caught in the contradiction of being itself in its own eyes this shut-in unit and yet of being nevertheless dependent on something else, and the struggle to resolve this contradiction does not get beyond an attempt and the continuation of this eternal war. (Hegel, 1975: 149–50, emphasis added) Beyond the natural and social restrictions on life, human freedom develops, and it depends on art for this truth of Spirit to be initially expressed. This is the reason why spirit cannot, in the finitude of existence and its restrictedness and external necessity, find over again the immediate vision and enjoyment of its true freedom, and it is compelled to satisfy the need for this freedom, therefore, on other and higher ground. This ground is art, and art’s actuality is the Ideal. Thus it is from the deficiencies of immediate reality that the necessity of the beauty of art is derived. The task of art must therefore be firmly established

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in art’s having a calling to display the appearance of life, and especially of spiritual animation (in its freedom, externally too) and to make the external correspond with its Concept. Only so is the truth lifted out of its temporal setting, out of its straying away into a series of finites. At the same time it has won an external appearance through which the poverty of nature and prose no longer peeps; it has won an existence worthy of the truth, an existence which for its part stands there in free independence since it has its vocation in itself, and does not find it inserted there by something else. (Hegel, 1975: 152) It is only the beauty of art that can surpass the ‘deficiencies’ and ‘poverty’ of the prosaic and natural world and give a free, external appearance of the truth. Hegel famously traces this necessary art through its Symbolic and Classical phases as a slow perfection of Spirit that culminates in the sculptures and poetry of Ancient Greece. What is of fundamental importance for our argument is that art is tied to these various social orders as the bearer of the meaning of Spirit – its importance is not as art but as the truth of history. To see it as art is in fact to lose what it was, but that, of course, is all we can do. At one level, Hegel’s argument in the aesthetic lectures is simply making this one point. The second layer of the prosaic consists of two ingredients: the state/law and the reason7 of science and philosophy. The first of these ingredients can be seen to be initially added to the Hegelian mix with the discussion of Ancient Rome. After the Greek experience art loses its necessary truth, and Hegel derisively labels Rome as prosaic: the Romans we may say that, in contrast with that primeval wild poetry and transmutation of the finite, which we observe in the East – in contrast with the beautiful, harmonious poetry and well-balanced freedom of Spirit among the Greeks – here, among the Romans the prose of life makes its appearance. (Hegel, 2001: 307, emphasis added, also 310ff) This idea of the Roman prosaic is not the return of a consciousness of contingent, random, uncontrolled determination but invokes the rule of law and the state. Vitally, the problem is now the loss of art and the freedom that it expressed. The spirit of the Roman world is domination by abstraction (i.e. by dead law),the demolition of beauty and joyous customs, the suppression of the family qua immediate natural ethical life, in general the sacrifice of individuality which now surrenders itself to the state and finds its cold-blooded dignity and intellectual satisfaction in obedience to the abstract law. The principle of this political virtue is opposed to true art; abroad, its cold harshness subjugates all the individuality of nations, while, at home, formal law is developed to perfection in similar rigour. After all we find no beautiful, free, and great art in Rome. (Hegel, 1975: 514)

62 Hegel We also live in a prosaic world, but the long history of the inner subject that emerges in ancient Greece and develops through Christianity provides an individual freedom for both the prose of reason and law, and for the anti-prose of art. Despite this difference in the ‘prose of life’ between us and Rome, it needs to be remembered that the very notion of the prosaic of any kind contains a certain dullness and routine that art opposes, even when art is no longer the bearer of the truth of Spirit. The modern prosaic – so with art absented – is the site of the end of history. Firstly, the state is taken to be the telos of human freedom. As Hegel famously puts it in the introduction to his lectures on the Philosophy of History: In the history of the World, only those peoples can come under our notice which form a state. For it must be understood that this latter is the realisation of Freedom, i.e., of the absolute final aim, and that it exists for its own sake. It must further be understood that all the worth which the human being possesses – all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State. For his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence – Reason – is objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for him. Thus only is he fully conscious; thus only is he a partaker of morality – of a just and moral social and political life. For Truth is the Unity of the universal and subjective Will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of History in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity, and lives in the enjoyment of this objectivity. (Hegel, 2001: 54; also, Hegel, 1991: 275ff) The other ingredient that combines with the state to provide the full flavour of the modern world of prose is developing reason. As science: At the standpoint of our modern prosaic reflection we explain natural phenomena in accordance with universal laws and forces, the actions of men by their inner intentions and self-conscious aims, but the Greek poets looked for the Divine everywhere … (Hegel, 1975: 480) And in its final form (supplanting religion), as philosophy: The realm of the beautiful … is bordered on one side by the prose of finitude and commonplace thinking [die Prosa der Endlichkeit und des gewöhnlichen Bewusstseins], out of which art struggles on its way to truth, and on the other side the higher spheres of religion and philosophy where there is a transition to that apprehension of the Absolute which is still further removed from the sensuous sphere. (Hegel, 1975: 968)

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However, the very fact that philosophy and the rational state have lost art and its sensuous freedom means that there is still a sense that the end of history is lacking what Hegel has himself shown history once contained. In other words, by stressing the prosaic nature of the telos of all human history, the appeal of the contrasting aesthetic dimension is made apparent. The temptations of art are, in fact, so strong that they constitute, in Hegel’s eyes, a danger: art is regarded as a spiritual power which is to lift us above the whole sphere of needs, distress, and dependence, and to free us from the intelligence and wit which people are accustomed to squander on this field. Furthermore, this is supposed to be a field, mostly purely conventional, a field of mere accidents, because it is tied down in time, place, and custom, and these, it is thought, art must disdain to harbour. Yet this semblance of ideality is partly only a superior abstraction made by that modern subjective outlook which lacks courage to commit itself to externality, and partly a sort of power which the subject assumes in order by his own effort to put himself outside and beyond this sphere, if he has not already been absolutely raised above it by birth, class, and situation. As a means for this putting oneself outside and beyond there remains nothing over in that case except withdrawal into the inner world of feelings which the individual does not leave, and now in this unreality regards himself as a sapient being who just looks longingly to heaven and therefore thinks he may disdain everything on earth. But the genuine Ideal does not stop at the indeterminate and the purely inward; on the contrary; it must also go out in its totality into a specific contemplation of the external world in all its aspects. (Hegel, 1975: 245–6) In other words, the mundane life has to be lived, and here lies the ‘genuine Ideal,’ but it does take a certain courage to undertake such a prosaic existence and not be absorbed by the ‘inner world of feelings.’ But why does art have such allure, as against a life of prose? In this quotation it comes down to simply a disdain for ordinary needs and the concomitant sense of superiority achieved by the adoption of art as a ‘spiritual power.’ (A certain Bourdieu-like ‘distinction’ is in evidence!) Any Ideal ends that might be on offer in terms of the state and philosophy are here lumped together with all non-artistic, and therefore prosaic, existence. The aesthetic temptation might also be put down to the sheer sensuous pleasure that art has always offered against prosaic routines. Such a hedonistic justification has a certain Kantian authority behind it. However, Hegel considers that art has a set of qualities, beyond mere distinction and pleasure, that provides a much more substantial explanation for the appeal of art amidst the modern world of prose. In fact, Hegel’s lengthy discussion of poetry and prose (see Hegel, 1975: 971ff, 1111ff esp.) will bring out how art, although no longer necessary for the expression of the truth of Spirit, is still indispensable, and, perhaps in some ways, even superior to the prosaic forces to

64 Hegel be found at the end of history. This aspect of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics can be broken down into a number of elements. Firstly, Hegel recognises some general characteristics of poetry. He regards poetry as the ‘original presentation of truth’ (Hegel, 1975: 973) and ‘still the most universal and widespread teacher of the human race’ (Hegel, 1975: 972). This poetic truth is opposed to that of prose in the following ways: poetry presents all its subject-matter as a totality complete in itself and therefore independent; this whole may be rich and may have a vast range of relations, individuals, actions, events, feelings, sorts of ideas, but poetry must display this vast complex as perfect in itself, as produced and animated by the single principle which is manifested externally in this or that individual detail. Consequently, the universal and the rational are not expressed in poetry in abstract universality and philosophically proved interconnection, or with their aspects merely related together as in scientific thinking, but instead as animated, manifest, ensouled, determining the whole, and yet at the same time expressed in such a way that the all-comprising unity, the real animating soul, is made to work only in secret from within outwards. (Hegel, 1975: 973) Reality is therefore presented in poetry as an independent totality, rich in detail, but not united by philosophical or scientific connections; rather there is a ‘secret’ ‘animating soul’ at work within. As reason develops to philosophy ‘we acquire two different spheres of thought: poetry and prose’ (Hegel, 1975: 976). Secondly, this poetic reality is, following Kant, beyond the usual array of means and ends and, even if no longer the expression of the truth of Spirit, it can offer insights that prosaic reason cannot: Therefore the question arises: In what way can poetry still preserve its independence even when there is this conflict with its given subject-matter? Simply by not treating and presenting the external given occasion as an essential end, and itself only as a means to that, but instead by assimilating the essence of that actual fact and forming and shaping it by the freedom and the right of the imagination. In that event poetry is not the occasion and its accompaniment; but that essence is the external occasion; it is the stimulus which makes the poet abandon himself to his deeper penetration of the event and his clearer way of formulating it. In this way, he creates from his own resources what without his aid we would not have become conscious of previously in this free way in the actual event directly presented to us. (Hegel, 1975: 996) Thirdly, the prosaic path to the ends of the state and philosophy tends to become increasingly narrow, and art, in its separate independent form, flourishes accordingly. This is apparent when Hegel considers the objectivity of the state:

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in the later days of a people’s life when the universal principles which have to guide human action are no longer part and parcel of a whole people’s heart and attitude of mind but already appear objectively and independently as a just and legal order firmly established on its own account, as a prosaic arrangement of things, as a political constitution, and as moral and other prescriptions; the result is that man’s substantive obligations enter as a necessity external to him, not immanent in himself, and compelling him to recognise their validity. It is then in contrast with such an already cut-and-dried and independent state of affairs that the mind develops into a likewise independent world of subjective vision, reflection, and feeling which does not proceed to action, and expresses lyrically its dwelling on self and its preoccupation with the inner life of the individual. (Hegel, 1975: 1046, emphasis added; also 988) At least here, the state is critically depicted as a ‘cut-and-dried’ externality that compels recognition of its validity; and this is opposed to an equally necessary but different independent world of inner subjective feeling. However much the state is regarded as ‘an absolute and unmoved end in itself’ (Hegel, 1991: 275) within Hegel’s overall philosophical position, it is still inescapably prosaic and would seem, therefore, to be in need of art. Similarly, this sense of aesthetic longing is felt even in the highest stage of philosophy: there is a form of the spirit which, in one aspect, outsoars the imagination of heart and vision because it can bring its content into free self-consciousness in a more decisively universal way and in more necessary connectedness than is possible for any art at all. I mean philosophical thinking. Yet this form, conversely, is burdened with the abstraction of developing solely in the province of thinking, i.e. of purely ideal universality, so that man in the concrete may find himself forced to express the contents and results of his philosophical mind in a concrete way as penetrated by his heart and vision, his imagination and feeling, in order in this way to have and provide a total expression of his whole inner life. (Hegel, 1975: 1127–8, emphasis added) It would seem that the ‘whole inner life’ needs both philosophy and art. Hegel appears to concede here that the free, inward subject, that developed after Greece and through Christianity, cannot be content with its final manifestations in the prose of the state and philosophy, but only finds some sort of completion with art. Fourthly, more can be said about the limited condition of philosophy that we have just seen recognised by Hegel: that philosophy exists ‘solely in the province of thinking.’ Poetry as a created art object has a reality denied to philosophy:

66 Hegel Thinking is only a reconciliation between reality and truth within thinking itself. But poetic creation and formation is a reconciliation in the form of a real phenomenon itself, even if this form be presented only spiritually. (Hegel, 1975: 976, Hegel’s emphasis) Art, then, takes reality into its subjective truth by making a new reality. This activity helps us understand how the ‘independent world of subjective vision, reflection, and feeling’ gains a substantial existence. We will develop this idea below with consideration of Hegel’s account of 17th-century Dutch painting. Fifthly, and lastly, throughout his discussion of poetry and prose Hegel puts great stress on the independence and freedom of poetry as art. The quotations given above bear testament to this emphasis. Central to this notion of freedom is the way that the inward subject comes to be fully realised in art, at the same time that it is also prosaically realised in philosophy and the state. This free, artistic subjectivity, untied from the determinations of means and ends, has a purified internality that reaches its height in lyric poetry. Here the aesthetic self has all of reality at its disposal so that, even if now caught in a world of inaction that lies outside of the great movements of prosaic history, there is the sense of an uncompromised, unrivalled intensity of freedom. How the inner self of art comes to this ultimate consciousness of freedom is narrated in Hegel’s account of ‘romanticism.’ Romanticism On a general level then, the end of art is understandable in terms of the prosaic final stage of Spirit – the telos of history lies in the state and philosophy, with art now cut adrift from such resolutions. In his Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel regards this tremendous teleology of human achievement from the perspective of art. This vast philosophical history of the aesthetic is formulated into three stages: the Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic. Only this final stage is of central interest to our argument. There is probably no term in art that is more difficult to define than ‘romanticism.’ One of the problems, philosophically, is that the history of art, wedded as it is to the narration of style, is always pushing to limit ‘romanticism’ to a narrow band of examples that arise from around 1770 to 1820. For Hegel, in contrast, this period marks the end of romanticism, which on his account begins with medieval Christianity. His bigger philosophic picture is one where romanticism starts when religion transcended art as the vehicle for Spirit, with the inwardness of the subject the key factor in this transformation. So, although there are clearly many examples of Christian art, religion no longer needed art; or, to put it slightly differently, there is a necessary tension between Christianity (at least) and art, with the problem of idolatry the obvious manifestation of this tension. Indeed, for Hegel, with medieval Christianity and the beginning of romanticism, art has begun its long passage of self-annulment.

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Hegel’s extended concept of romanticism – from medieval to current art – is formed around inner subjectivity. The true content of romantic art is absolute inwardness.

(Hegel, 1975: 519)

This is what unites the great variety of artistic forms on display over these long centuries of aesthetic production. The three stages of this romantic period are: religion, chivalry and, lastly, what Hegel terms, ‘the formal independence of individual characteristics.’ This third stage of romanticism – the one on which we must concentrate – is further divided into three telling categories: ‘the independence of the individual character,’ ‘adventures,’ and ‘the dissolution of the romantic form of art’ (which contains the final subcategory entitled ‘the end of the romantic form of art’). Hegel introduces romanticism’s third phase with the following: Thus here it is the world of the particular, of the existent in general, which becomes explicitly free and, because it does not appear permeated by religion and compression into the unity of the Absolute, stands on its own feet and treads independently in its own domain [in ihrem eigenen Bereiche selbstständig ergeht]. In this third sphere of the romantic form of art, therefore, the religious materials have vanished together with chivalry and the lofty views and aims which it generated out of its inner being and to which nothing in the present and in reality directly corresponds. On the other hand, the thing which gives new satisfaction is the thirst for this present and this reality itself, the delight of the self in what is there, contentment with self, with the finitude of man and, generally, with the finite, the particular, and with paintings like portraits. In his present world man wants to see the present itself as it is – even at the cost of sacrificing beauty and ideality of content and appearance – as a live presence recreated by art, as his own human and spiritual work … As for the form for this new content, we found romantic art from its beginning onwards afflicted with the opposition that the inherently infinite subjective personality is in itself irreconcilable with the external material and is to remain unreconciled. This independent confrontation of the two sides and the withdrawal of the inner into itself is what constitutes the subject-matter of romantic art. Developing themselves inwardly, these sides separate again ever anew until at the end they fall apart from one another altogether and therefore show that they have to seek their absolute unification in a field other than art. Owing to this falling apart from one another, the sides, in respect of art, become formal [i.e. abstract] since they cannot appear as one whole in that full unity which the classical ideal gives to them. (Hegel, 1975: 573–5, emphasis added)

68 Hegel This long quote provides a summation of some important parts of Hegel’s overall argument on art. The ‘inherently infinite subjective personality’ of romantic art – the plunge into inner subjectivity – is contrasted, here in the last sentence, with the classical ideal where, without such subjectivity, the human is fully united in an external reality. With religion and chivalry as the first stages of romanticism, subjectivity could find the divine and ‘lofty views and aims’ in its undertaking of the external world; the search within leads to a higher truth without. But now, in the third stage of romanticism, the subject itself becomes the end – there is a ‘contentment with the self.’ Without religion or chivalry, the present, finite, and particular – the prosaic, in one sense – become the content of art. Hegel mentions portraits here, so the subject itself becomes the content, but elsewhere he extends this out to include the ordinary, endless contingencies of nature and everyday social life. The group of topics which this sphere can comprise widens indefinitely because art takes for its subject-matter not the inherently necessary, the province of which is complete in itself, but contingent reality in its boundless modification of shapes and relationships, i.e. nature and its variegated play of separate products, man’s daily active pursuits in his natural necessities and comfortable satisfaction, in his casual habits and situations, in the activities of family life and civil society business, but, in short, the incalculable mutability of the external objective world. (Hegel, 1975: 575–6) In the end, it is just the imprint of a particular subjectivity on the external that gives importance to reality, so that the great teleological movements of history ‘have to seek their absolute unification in a field other than art.’ In other words, there is a certain logic of romantic subjectivity that leads to art separating itself from the prosaic sites of the resolutions of Spirit for Hegel, i.e., with philosophy and the state. And the concept of the end of art starts to be filled out in this way. Also noteworthy, as emphasised in the text, is the mention of freedom, an independent, separate ‘domain,’ and even the possible abandonment of beauty.8 We will come back to these ideas, but Hegel here indicates that because the ordinary reality that has become the content of art no longer has religious meaning and is no longer part of the march of Spirit, it is in fact freed from ‘compression into unity of the Absolute.’ Despite the overarching emphasis by Hegel on the absolutist teleology of the long history of freedom, he recognises that this final stage of romanticism, beyond religion and Spirit, constitutes its own world precisely because anything can now be appreciated, from the most ordinary, as mentioned, to even the ugly (Hegel, 1975: 526ff). Or, to put it another way, in the very loss of a meaning of the divine, the world available to art becomes unrestricted, and this is so because the only significance that now counts is that which is bestowed by the inner subject. We start to glimpse how this new artworld – the valuesphere that Weber describes – gains its own values, including a sense of freedom, because it is untied from history. And Hegel’s ‘end of art’ is not, therefore, just

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loss, but something that has value because it is now a separate domain with its own subjectivist determination of reality. The subjectivist nature of this last phase of romanticism itself goes through a number of manifestations. So, for example, Hegel gives the following understanding of Shakespeare’s tragic characters, such as Macbeth and Othello: in them it is precisely this taut firmness and one-sidedness that is supremely admirable. In them there is no question of religious feeling, of an action due to the man’s own religious reconciliation, or of morality as such. On the contrary, we have individuals before us, resting independently on themselves alone, with particular ends which are their own, prescribed by their individuality alone … (Hegel, 1975: 577) As opposed to the Greeks, these plays concern the ‘development of the individual in his subjective inner life’ (Hegel, 1975: 579). Further, this inner subjectivity is separated from the external: In the characters at this stage of our discussion, owing to the contingency of what they take as their end and the independence of their individuality, no reconciliation with objectivity is possible. (Hegel, 1975: 580) And, a little later, Hegel reminds us that such reconciliation is really only possible with ‘an ethical substance like the state’ (Hegel, 1975: 581). Other plays by Shakespeare provide different realisations of this unreconciled relation of the inner subject and objectivity. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is likened to some German folk songs in the way: Yet we get here not a symbol the meaning of which remains, as previously, something abstract and universal, but an expression of something inner, i.e. of precisely this subjective living actual heart itself. (Hegel, 1975: 582–3) This drive to the inner self is seen a little differently with Hamlet: he persists in the inactivity of a beautiful inner soul which cannot make itself actual or engage in the relationships of his present world. He waits, looks in the beautiful uprightness of his heart for objective certainty, but, even after he has found it, he comes to no firm decision but lets himself be led by external circumstances … until, without his action, in this developed course of circumstances and chances, the fate of the whole realm and of himself has steadily been developed in his own withdrawn inner life. (Hegel, 1975: 584)

70 Hegel With these examples, the outside world has become a matter of contingency, with all meaning now wholly transferred into the interior of the subject in some way. A slightly different scenario arises with what Hegel terms ‘Adventures,’ where the emphasis is not so much on the interior subject but on the external contingent world which the subject encounters. Here is, comically, Cervantes, but also Dante: A higher work is that which every man has to achieve in himself, i.e. his life, whereby he settles for himself his eternal fate. This topic Dante has taken up from a Catholic point of view in his Divine Comedy, where he conducts us through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. But here, despite the strict organisation of the whole, there is no lack of fantastic ideas or adventures in so far as this work of salvation and damnation comes before us not only absolutely in its universality but as a list of practically innumerable individuals brought forward in their particular characteristics and, besides this, the poet claims for himself the right of the Church, holds the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven in his hands, pronounces salvation and damnation, and so makes himself the world’s judge who removes into Hell, Purgatory, or Paradise the best known individuals of the classical and the Christian world, poets, citizens, warriors, Cardinals, and Popes. (Hegel, 1975: 589) Though early, and still redolent with religion, Dante imposes his order on the world in this personal adventure across the universe. Against the Church, there is a subjectivist determination of the divine reality, so it is in this sense that the third stage of romanticism can extend back to the 14th century. Another set of examples in this vein comes with the category of ‘Romantic Fiction,’ where the external world sets up numerous barriers to the inevitable triumph of the inner heart: This romantic fiction is chivalry become serious again, with a real subjectmatter. The contingency of external existence has been transformed into a firm and secure order of civil society and the state, so that police, law-courts, the army, political government replace the chimerical ends which the knights errant set before themselves. Thereby the knight-errantry of the heroes as they act in more modern romances is also altered. As individuals with their subjective ends of love, honour, and ambition, or with their ideals of worldreform, they stand opposed to this substantial order and the prose of actuality which puts difficulties in their way on all sides. Therefore, in this opposition, subjective wishes and demands are screwed up to immeasurable heights; for each man finds before him an enchanted and quite alien world which he must fight because it obstructs him and in its inflexible firmness does not give way to his passions but interposes as a hindrance the will of a father or an aunt and civil relationships, etc. (Hegel, 1975: 592–3, emphasis added)

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Young people might be regarded as still especially prone to this obvious vision of the romantic, and it is a staple format of endless novels and films. But note here the necessary oppositional ‘prose of actuality’ against which the inner subject must pitch itself. All these variations on the theme of the subjectivity of romanticism serve to set up the last phases of art for Hegel. These come under the heading of the ‘Dissolution of the Romantic Form of Art,’ and it is here that we will find the end of art. Hegel restates the basic dilemma that will result in aesthetic dissolution and annulment: Within this contingency of the objects which come to be portrayed partly as a mere environment for an inherently more important subject-matter, but partly also as independent on their own account, there is presented the collapse of romantic art, which we have already touched on above. On one side, in other words, there stands the real world in, from the point of view of the ideal, its prosaic objectivity: the contents of ordinary daily life which is not apprehended in its substance (in which it has an element of the ethical and divine), but in its mutability and finite transitoriness. On the other side, it is the subjectivity of the artist which, with its feeling and insight, with the right and power of its wit, can rise to mastery of the whole of reality; it leaves nothing in its usual context and in the validity which it has for our usual way of looking at things; and it is satisfied only because everything drawn into this sphere [Bereich] proves to be inherently dissoluble owing to the shape and standing given to it by its subjective opinion, mood, and originality; and for contemplation and feeling it is dissolved. (Hegel, 1975: 595, Hegel’s emphasis) The objective, prosaic world is taken as simply a free association of contingent content that is available for aesthetic subjectivity, and the ethical, divine substance of this external reality (that resides in the state and can be apprehended by philosophy) must be forsaken. Beyond this subjectivity/objectivity relation, note in this quotation how Hegel calls this new period of art a ‘sphere’ and how everything drawn into it is ‘dissolved’ by ‘subjective opinion, mood and originality; and for contemplation and feeling.’ Or, in other words, a new, separate world of art is being made by this subjectivist determination of the external. However, Hegel must put the question of whether this new sphere of subjectivism, which is no longer the sensuous expression of Spirit, can now be called ‘art’ at all. Therefore the question soon arises whether such productions in general are still to be called works of art. If in considering them we keep before our eyes the essential nature of works of art proper (i.e. of the Ideal), where the important thing is both a subject matter not inherently arbitrary and transient and also a mode of portrayal fully in correspondence with such a subject-matter, then in the face of works of that kind the art-products of the stage we are now considering must undoubtedly fall far short. On the other hand, art has

72 Hegel still another feature which is here essentially of special importance: the artist’s subjective conception and execution of the work of art, the aspect of the individual talent which can remain faithful both to the manifestations of spirit and also to the inherently substantial life of nature, even in the extreme limits of the contingency which that life reaches, and can make significant even what is in itself without significance, and this it does through this fidelity and through the most marvellous skill of the portrayal. Then in addition there is the subjective vivacity with which the artist with his spirit and heart breathes life entirely into the existence of such topics according to their whole inner and outer shape and appearance, and presents them to our vision in this animation. In view of these aspects we may not deny the name of works of art to the creations of this sphere [Kreises]. (Hegel, 1975: 596) The subjective arbitrariness of the new ‘art’ of Hegel’s age must ‘fall far short’ of the past when aesthetic content expressed the ideal meaning of history, but this very subjectivism is able to highlight the talent and skill of the individual artist as she gives vivid life to even the most ordinary existence. To call this ‘art’ seems contradictory, given that its inherent subjectivity is, on Hegel’s own argument, something that has only relatively newly arisen and which is the basis of the very distinctions he draws between what art was and what it has become. There is a solution of a kind on offer in Hegel’s discussion of 17th-century Dutch painting9: What should enchant us is not the subject of the painting and its lifelikeness, but the pure appearance which is wholly without the sort of interest that the subject has. The one thing certain about beauty is, as it were, appearance for its own sake, and art is mastery in the portrayal of all the secrets of this ever profounder pure appearance of external realities. Especially does art consist in heeding with a sharp eye the momentary and ever changing traits of the present world in the details of its life, which yet harmonise with the universal laws of aesthetic appearance, and always faith-fully and truly keeping hold of what is most fleeting. (Hegel, 1975: 598–9, emphasis added) What Hegel emphasises in his praise of Dutch painting is how this skill for capturing ‘what is most fleeting’ creates a new kind of reality in the sense that such masterful art is able to portray the profound ‘secrets’ of the external prosaic world. The still life paintings of the Dutch golden age exhibit for Hegel how the most ordinary, everyday content can be heightened to this level: If we take, e.g., Terburg’s satin, each spot of colour by itself is a subdued gray, more or less whitish, bluish, yellowish, but when it is looked at from a certain distance there comes out through its position beside another colour the beautiful soft sheen proper to actual satin. And so it is with velvet, the play of light, cloud vapour, and, in general, with everything depicted. It is not

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the reflex of the heart which wishes to display itself in subjects such as these, as it often does in the case of a landscape, for example; on the contrary, it is the entire subjective skill of the artist which, as skill in using the means of production vividly and effectively in this objective way, displays its ability by its own efforts to generate an objective world [Gegenständlichkeit]. (Hegel, 1975: 600, emphasis added) On one level this kind of painting is merely imitative, a lingering of a mimetic relation to reality that extends back to Plato’s brutal criticism in The Republic. But Hegel states that it is more than this: the outside reality is remade by the artist, whose aesthetic skill is to be judged in how well this new objectivity is achieved. A kind of hyper-reality is created in which the fleeting is fixed and able to be appreciated in terms of aesthetic beauty and truth. Besides this new objective reality, the utter inwardness of art also allows for the possible expression of any content at all. Hegel recognises how humour in art can take up anything and everything, including art itself. Therefore every independence of an objective content along with the inherently fixed connection of the form (given as that is by the subject matter) is annihilated in itself, and the presentation is only a sporting with the topics, a derangement and perversion of the material, and a rambling to and fro, a criss-cross movement of subjective expressions, views, and attitudes whereby the author sacrifices himself and his topics alike. (Hegel, 1975: 601) Objective content, the relation between content and form, and even the artist herself, are all ‘annihilated’ with this ‘sporting’ ‘derangement’ of the material. Hegel later states that this humour is both a new kind of art and the transcendence of art: At first the infinity of personality lay in honour, love, and fidelity, and then later in particular individuality, in the specific character which coalesced with the particular content of human existence. Finally, this cohesion with such a specific limitation of subject matter was cancelled by humour which could make every determinacy waver and dissolve and therefore made it possible for art to transcend itself. Yet in this self-transcendence art is nevertheless a withdrawal of man into himself, a descent into his own breast, whereby art strips away from itself all fixed restriction to a specific range of content and treatment, and makes Humanus its new holy of holies [neuen Heiligen]: i.e. the depths and heights of the human heart as such, mankind in its joys and sorrows, its strivings, deeds, and fates. Herewith the artist acquires his subject-matter in himself and is the human spirit actually self-determining and considering, meditating, and expressing the infinity of its feelings and situations: nothing that can be living in the human breast is alien to that spirit any more. This is a subject-matter which does not remain determined artistically in itself and on its own account; on the contrary, the specific character

74 Hegel of the topic and its outward formation is left to capricious invention, yet no interest is excluded for art does not need any longer to represent only what is absolutely at home at one of its specific stages, but everything in which man as such is capable of being at home. (Hegel, 1975: 607, emphasis added) Humour indicates the ‘withdrawal of man into himself’ to such a degree that art transcends itself in that there are no restrictions on content.10 The result is that all humanity (‘mankind’), with ‘its strivings, deeds and fates,’ is now available as the artist acquires all its subject matter only from within. In other words, art is no longer associated merely with the sensuous expression of a particular period of history, but in its sheer subjectivity aligns itself with all ages in terms of the human heart. Or, art for Hegel represents a specific stage in the movement of history, but the extreme of artistic subjectivity means that any stage can now be represented; it depends only on the ‘capricious invention’ of the artist. Again, we start to see how art continues after it has ended. However, there is a little way to go beyond this stage in ‘The Dissolution of the Romantic Form of Art’: ‘The End of the Romantic Form of Art’ is where the subjectivist determination is at its peak. The artist of this last phase of art must possess a universal quality of natural talent (Hegel, 1975: 604) but in this age of extreme external contingency and subjective inwardness, a new freedom is possible: in our German case, freedom of thought has mastered the artists too, and have made them, so to say, a tabula rasa in respect of the material and the form of their productions, after the necessary particular stages of the romantic art-form have been traversed. Bondage to a particular subject-matter and a mode of portrayal suitable for this material alone are for artists today something past, and art therefore has become a free instrument which the artist can wield in proportion to his subjective skill in relation to any material of whatever kind. The artist thus stands above specific consecrated forms and configurations and moves freely on his own account, independent of the subject-matter and mode of conception in which the holy and eternal was previously made visible to human apprehension. No content, no form, is any longer immediately identical with the inwardness, the nature, the unconscious substantial essence of the artist; every material may be indifferent to him if only it does not contradict the formal law of being simply beautiful and capable of artistic treatment. Today there is no material which stands in and for itself above this relativity, and even if one matter be raised above it, still there is at least no absolute need for its representation by art. (Hegel, 1975: 605, some emphasis added) Although beauty still holds a final place here for Hegel, all material, form and content are now available for the artist as against the ‘bondage’ of the art of the past which was bound to the expression of Spirit (‘the subject-matter and mode of

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conception in which the holy and eternal was previously made visible to human apprehension’). As he goes on to say: In this way every form and every material is now at the service and command of the artist whose talent and genius is explicitly freed from the earlier limitation to one specific art-form. (Hegel, 1975: 606) Art that is ‘new, beautiful, and intrinsically valuable’ arises from this end of the romantic age.11 And Hegel, in the end, refers to examples from Goethe: Here love is transferred wholly into the imagination, its movement, happiness, and bliss. In general, in similar productions of this kind we have before us no subjective longing, no being in love, no desire, but a pure delight in the topics, an inexhaustible self-yielding of imagination, a harmless play, a freedom in toying alike with rhyme and ingenious metres and, with all this, a depth of feeling and a cheerfulness of the inwardly self-moving heart which through the serenity of the outward shape lift the soul high above all painful entanglement in the restrictions of the real world. (Hegel, 1975: 610–11) It is the inner heart, the freedom to play with form and the ability to create an ‘outward shape’ beyond the ‘restrictions of the real world,’ that all contribute to what art can offer in the modern world. For our purposes, then, Hegel sets out the appeal that art can have because it is at an end. The extreme of subjectivity here at the final stage of the romantic form of art can be seen as the loss of contact with the meaning of history and a consequent disjunction with all art of the past, but it also can be seen as creating a new site of tremendous appeal in terms of the heart, freedom, and new sense of reality. Finally, although art is now differentiated from every kind of previous human ‘art,’ a new ‘artistic truth’ therefore emerges because all humanity can be brought under this extreme subjectivism. Here Hegel reiterates and develops the point whereby the inwardness of humour gains ‘humanus’ as its content: all materials, whatever they be and from whatever period and nation they come, acquire their artistic truth [Kunstwahrheit] only when imbued with living and contemporary interest. It is in this interest that artistic truth fills man’s breast, provides his own mirror-image and brings truth home to our feelings and imagination. It is the appearance and activity of imperishable humanity [unvergänglich Menschlichen] in its many-sided significance and endless all-round development which in this reservoir of human situations and feelings can now constitute the absolute content of our art. (Hegel, 1975: 608, emphasis added)

76 Hegel So, on the one hand, romanticism and the end of art leave the truth of the divine meaning of history behind, as Hegel had previously stressed: Therefore, we acquire as the culmination of the romantic in general the contingency of both outer and inner, and the separation of these two sides, whereby art annuls itself and brings home to our minds that we must acquire higher forms for the apprehension of truth than those which art is in a position to supply. (Hegel, 1975: 529) But, on the other hand, within the realm of what art has become, all human development, situations and significance can be granted the status of ‘truth.’ Stripped of its teleological historical meaning, art can now cast its own net over all humanity and gather it together as the content source for the pure aesthetic subject. For Hegel In this account of the prosaic and romanticism we have been able to build up a lengthy list of art’s appealing qualities: from the more obvious stress on the emotional attraction of art as set against the stern seriousness of the prose of the world, to the new sense of freedom, truth and reality that the aesthetic world can induce because it has been cut off from the dominant, prosaic forces of history. On this basis at least, the contentious terms ‘romanticism’ and ‘the end of art’ have proven to be useful. Indeed, they have also proved themselves to be still highly applicable to modern art in two fundamental senses: the continuation of a basic inward subjectivity (with the central figure of the artist serving as the ideal subject, as Hegel has explained it); and the continued, vital separation of art from the other dominant forces, or spheres, of history. Certainly, the hyper-emotional, heartfelt subjectivity of early 19th-century poetry is outdated. However, Hegel’s notion of inward subjectivity is necessarily constitutive of art in the minimal sense that the creative artist is still the central figure of the aesthetic sphere. ‘Inward’ has a number of possible meanings here but, most generally, all art revolves back to being a work of the artist – art arises only from the artist, and is ‘inward’ in this sense of being beholden to no extra-aesthetic, ‘outward’ determination. All the prosaic reality of the world now turns around the artist, who is totally free to use any content, material, or form. This is the enduring endpoint of the long march of romantic inwardness for Hegel. Simply, the modern incarnation of the artist could not have existed in any other historical period, and Hegel provides a philosophical explanation of why this is the case. Also, it needs to be noted that the many styles and kinds of art that have flourished since Hegel’s time do not constitute a refutation of the fundamental conceptual value of ‘the end of art’ thesis. On the contrary, such proliferation is the logical outcome of Hegel’s understanding: the free inward subjectivity behind such aesthetic bounty depends on the fact that art did not only ‘end’ as it became

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separated from the meaning of all previous history, but that it continues to be in this state of being at an end.

Using ‘the end of history’ If, in this way, romanticism and the end of art might be plausibly preserved, what is to be done with the end of history idea as it relates to art? The easiest, most obvious path to take is simply to jettison what Hegel says on the telos of history, but this would lose an important train of thought that helps us explain the appeal of art. Such a line of thinking can be put in three steps: firstly, as already discussed, art has indeed ended in the sense that it is cut off from the life of reason, civic life, and the state, even if these prosaic structures will not complete the divine task of history as Hegel conceived it; secondly, with his emphasis on this telos of history, Hegel points to the great ideal, within these prosaic forms of the West, that there will be some kind of resolution of freedom and the state; but, thirdly, with such an ideal in mind, we can look to art itself as the site of a kind of resolution that has eluded the prosaic world. This sequence of ideas needs some clarification. The end of history for Hegel, as we have seen, is the culmination of freedom as the great meaning of human history, where the individual self, with its inner subjectivity, gains the fulfilment of freedom through unity with the external, objective state. The lectures on the Philosophy of History have already been quoted on this point, and it is worthwhile to be reminded of how Hegel puts it in the Philosophy of Right: freedom enters into its highest right, just as this ultimate end possesses the highest right in relation to individuals whose highest duty is to be members of the state … Since the state is objective spirit, it is only through being a member of the state that the individual himself has objectivity, truth, and ethical life. Union as such is itself the true content and end, and the destiny of individuals is to lead a universal life; their further particular satisfaction, activity, and mode of conduct have this substantial and universally valid basis as their point of departure and result. (Hegel, 1991: 275–6, Hegel’s emphasis) Again, this recalls Rousseau’s Social Contract as the very famous earlier attempt at such a blending of individual and government as the fulfilment of freedom, with all its seemingly contradictory statements.12 The divine absolutism of Hegel is very useful for us in that it makes this deep Western desire for such a resolution extraordinarily explicit. The question that then arises is: what happens to this quite fundamental Western drive to the unification of the subjective individual with the state (or some greater whole) as an objective manifestation of freedom when the proffered philosophical resolutions have gained little theoretical acceptance, and it has seemed to have spectacularly failed in practice? Arguably, it might be the case that Western politics and its theoretical expression

78 Hegel are still engaged in this fruitless pursuit, even if it is not so self-consciously recognised; and/or perhaps the desire is there but its prosaic resolution has had to be forsaken; or, maybe the failure of the end of history is no longer felt as such a failure because there are compensatory resolutions elsewhere – in art, for example. How can art provide a kind of end of history? Remarkably, in terms of an extension of the Hegelian conceptual framework, it is because art has ended that it can fulfil, in part, the hopes of the end of history. There are two ways that this effect can be understood: through the addition of Kant’s understanding of taste to the Hegelian framework, as already suggested; and through an elaboration of Hegel’s argument on the aesthetic truth of humanity that arises with the end of art. Taste and the end of history The end of art consists of an interlocking double movement for Hegel: on the one hand, aesthetic subjectivity reaches a position where all externalities fall under its determination; and, on the other hand, art thereby severs itself from the prosaic development of history wherein the state will provide the culmination of freedom in an objective, universal form. It is in this sense that art and history have both ended. Hegel, it has been argued, is substantially correct about art in terms of the predominance of subjectivity and the way art will form its own ‘sphere’ (as Hegel says in anticipation of Weber) that is opposed to the prosaic world of reason and law. However, he is also wrong about how art works in its separate world, and Kant, as we have seen, is far more perceptive in this case. Simply, the basic ahistorical subjectivity that Hegel continually critiques,13 is added to by the idea of subjective universal communicability, and it is this that provides a kind of external, objective affirmation of subjective freedom. As discussed in the last chapter, the objective elements here that lead beyond mere personal subjectivity are the work of art itself and the necessary inclusion of other subjects as part of the universal communicability of taste. In other words, the actual work of art itself gives an external proof of the artist’s free subjectivity, and the necessary discussion of this work gives an inter-subjective affirmation of each subject’s aesthetic freedom – this is what taste means, at least in part. Hegel has effectively ignored these extra-subjective factors, as we have seen, but he does in fact provide a kind of explanation of how the self-consciousness of this objectified subjective freedom might work. It comes in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in perhaps its most famous section. In ‘Lordship and Bondage’ (or ‘Master and Slave’) Hegel gives his highly scrutinised account of self-consciousness. As usual, all the terms in Hegel are open to intensive debate14 but perhaps we can distil some basic elements from Hegel’s discussion to aid our cause. Two brief quotations capture what Hegel says here in The Phenomenology of Spirit: Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. (Hegel, 1977: 111)

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And: They recognise themselves as mutually recognising one another. (Hegel, 1977: 112) Hegel will go on from these introductory statements to talk about the master/slave form of self-consciousness, but let us assume that we can abstract the basic model initially outlined and apply it to art at its end. What do we find? The ‘universal subjective communicability’ of taste is a process whereby artists, viewers, and audiences are mutually recognising each other in terms of their subjective free judgement – even if the details of such judgement are disputed. The work of art itself provides the basis for this interaction between the subjects of the artworld, and a mutually recognised, reinforced self-consciousness of inner, free subjectivity is the result. Such self-consciousness is achieved, by Hegelian definition, through an external other. But what we have in art after the dissolution of romanticism, rather than the master-slave dynamic of self-consciousness, is the mutual recognition of subjective freedom. To put it crudely, within the sphere of modern aesthetic taste, other subjects and the work of art itself are all telling you, ‘you are free, you are free.’ Hegel then has shown us how aesthetic freedom, as postulated in the last chapter, can indeed exist as the self-consciousness – the for-itself – of art. In other words, Hegel can help clarify the Kantian insights into the inner workings of the new sphere of art that showed how the subjectivist freedom of art is one which is realised objectively. Again, for our purposes it does not matter whether there is or is not such freedom; all that matters is that there is the self-consciousness of such freedom. The aesthetic subject is part of a greater social whole – a community of taste – but feels as if it is unconstrained by any external social determination because that external order constantly reaffirms the notion that it is not playing such a determinate role. It is in this combination of Kant and Hegel that the end of art can be said to have become the end of history. Kant provides us with the basic internal elements of how it works; and, while Hegel’s theory of self-consciousness does contribute to an understanding of the internal order, it is his grander philosophy of history, and art’s place within it, that can reveal the true significance of this objective realisation of subjective freedom. However, a large qualification needs to be repeated here. A major difference between the prosaic end of history, where subjective freedom finds itself completed in the objectivity of the state, and the end of art, where subjective freedom is formed by the external elements of taste as a kind of self-consciousness of an internal subjectivity immune from destructive objectification, concerns universality. One of the great points of the prosaic realisation of freedom is that it embraces the universal; one has only to think of the universalist formulations of constitutions, declarations, and laws within the sphere of the modern state. And Hegel stresses this universal quality, as the quotes above indicate. However, the objective/subjective self-consciousness of the community of aesthetic taste is not

80 Hegel universal. As we have already noted, despite Kant’s assumption of the subjective universal, the extra-subjective elements of taste only apply to the few, and against the many. Indeed, for taste to work in the sphere of art it cannot, in fact, be universal. This point becomes more pertinent when we come to consider Adorno and Bourdieu in later chapters. Humanity If ‘romanticism,’ ‘the end of art,’ and ‘the end of history’ can be formulated to exhibit this narrative of freedom, the assumptions that reside in art as the fulfilment of history can be extended even further to include notions of an absolute, teleological truth of humanity. All that seems so unbecoming in Hegel is now, surprisingly, able to be located in art itself. Such an argument can be gained from consideration of the new ‘artistic truth’ that Hegel identifies as emerging with the ultimate subjectivity of the final stages of romanticism. For Hegel, it will be recalled, a general notion of ‘humanity’ is generated which allows a universal notion of art to be applied in all periods and places of human activity. What this will come to entail, as an extension of Hegel’s idea, is that the inner subjectivism of art is so shorn of its historical specificity that it is even able to reach out and claim art to be definitional of what it means to be human.15 Art histories and many contemporary accounts of art depend on just such an assumption. It might even be argued that a new telos is at work here: art is the fulfilment and end of being human. If so, Hegel’s absolutism of Western reason, state, and freedom has been replaced by the absolutism of Western art, subjectivity, and freedom; however, the awareness of this new aesthetic absolute is disguised by its rejection of the kind of Western superiority that Hegel represents so vividly. Or, to put it even more bluntly, what Hegel terms the ‘artistic truth,’ in opposition to the truths of philosophy and the state, has itself become the historical truth. This might seem an extreme, even absurd position, but some credibility might be added by means of an example. In 2018, the BBC remade the old Kenneth Clark Civilisation series, with not one but three presenters, and with the telling new title of Civilisations. An obvious race, gender extension of the old Western model was the motive, but the important point for our argument was the use of art as the central content of whatever ‘civilisation’ was. The medium of television clearly favours such visual content, but, nevertheless, the bare fact that art itself could be the common theme across all the civilisations depicted is indicative of what the aesthetic has become in modernity. Four interlinked points can be made here. Firstly, Clark’s version not only stressed that it was a personal view, but that much else had to be considered as part of civilisation, including science, laws, engineering, philosophy, and manners. And, at times, he did specifically stress these aspects over art. Oddly, this is not the case with the latest series, where art is sustained as the focus almost throughout, and other factors are barely mentioned. Secondly, a new universal and new teleology emerge. While Clark might well

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have assumed some universal, human art-making trait, he begins in the 10th century in Europe, whereas the later series begins with some of the first human-made objects, which are called ‘art.’ Here it starts to become clear why art can be such an unqualified centre of attention: humans are said to be art-making beings, with ‘civilisations’ regarded as the culmination of this artistic creativity.16 So what is now being proclaimed is a new aesthetic anthropology – a new universal – that allows the many human ‘civilisations’ to be able to be brought together without necessarily prioritising the West. Accompanying this aesthetic anthropology is a strong teleology of Aristotle-like structure. The many great civilisations are the endpoints of this human aesthetic ‘need’ which, like the various political forms that arise from human logos in the Politics, can be lined up alongside one another and compared without proclaiming the necessary superiority of one type over another. However, thirdly, this process of asserting an aesthetic anthropology involves the very modern, very Western, use of the values of the internal sphere of art; these civilisations are judged as successful because of the art that has been produced, but such ‘art’ is infused with a post-Kantian set of values. Certainly, the monumental is valued as a way of matching the grandiose architectural innovations of the West, but it is the stress on the new, on design, on beauty, and on the making of a different artistic reality that enables this supposedly non-judgemental comparison some traction. In other words, the ability to allow all cultures such inclusion as ‘art,’ relies on the imposition of an absolute Western standard of aesthetic judgement. Fourth, as a qualification, the later series does provide some historical, political context beyond art – but art, in the end, remains the ultimate value. So, there is the easy sliding from pure aesthetic considerations to the wider social and cultural setting, and back again. This can take place when any art is discussed, including the most recent art now being made. However, the art comes first and then the wider historical context is given a brief mimetic consideration, with the political circumstances unable to be substantially judged except in terms of their capacity to produce art. Clearly, the philosophical slippage here is acute, but it is surely unfair to judge a television show by arcane, academic standards. What is important for our argument is: what does this add to our understanding of how art gains its appeal in modern times? And, although it is only one example, this television series does provide us with a possible additional layer to the attraction of art in modernity: art has become a new measure of humanity – of civilisation. If prosaic history has not ended as Hegel (and many others) had hoped, then art is not just an escape where some resolutions are possible, but it takes on the mantle of historical meaning itself; it does become the telos, the new absolute of modernity.

Hegel and Weber There are a number of ways that Hegel’s arguments on aesthetics can fill out Weber’s theory of the aesthetic value-sphere. This sympathetic union between the two theories is largely based on the strength of the commonalities between the

82 Hegel ‘prosaic’ of Hegel and ‘rationalisation’ in Weber. For both, art is now placed outside and against the dominant forces of the modern world which do centre on the economy, the state/law and reason. Hegel even talks of the aesthetic as a separate sphere, even if this is scarcely developed. But before listing these similarities, and how they help further our overall argument, a major difference has first to be stated. The great difference between Hegel and Weber is, of course, that there is no end of history for Weber; the opposite, in fact, is the case. Partly arising from his critique of Marxism, the fate of disenchanted modernity lies precisely in the idea that there can be no resolutions of history in terms of either a metaphysical or materialist interpretation of Hegel; that is, there is no possible way that some sense of God or the divine can arise as an answer within this rationalised world of science, capitalism, and the democratic state. Nor can the proletarian solution overcome its own contradictions – equality and freedom will in fact be lessened (or even lost) because the very attempt to enhance such values through a centralised, rational economy must result in the exponential expansion of the bureaucratic state. Despite this radical divergence of views on the end of history, Hegel can be fruitfully added to Weber in the following four ways. Firstly, Weber’s triad of aesthetic values – subjectivity, form, and taste – is freshly articulated. Hegel’s history of the aesthetic subject – the narrative of romanticism in fact – has the endpoint of inward subjectivity tied into the endless individual choice of new form or style; and, with the addition of some of Kant’s insights, taste can be understood as the inter-subjective confirmation of this subjectivity as demanded by the work of art itself. Secondly, how freedom is realised within the aesthetic sphere is given a far fuller account, as we have seen. In contrast to the universal ideals of prosaic freedom, Hegel lays out a pattern of freedom in the sphere of art which emanates from romanticism’s final form of subjective inwardness: the artist is free to choose any material, content, or form. And when we link together Hegel’s end of history with his end of art, the aesthetic sphere can be regarded as the site of the objectivist realisation of subjective freedom. Third, Weber’s conception of the value-sphere of art as an inner cosmos can attain much more substance. That is, Hegel (in tandem with Kant, at times) can help us understand how the aesthetic becomes an internal world separate from the dominant structures of the prosaic. Two factors might be identified here: the way that late romanticism creates its own reality, rather than a mimesis of the existent real; and the self-consciousness of the free inner self – this objectification of the subject, just discussed – can be seen as the creation of a community17 of taste, where the impersonal bonds of modern society are, even if only to a small degree, overcome by the extra-subjective communicability of the work of art. In this way, the internal order of the aesthetic in modernity, through its extreme subjectivity and divorce from the ruling rationalised spheres, achieves an architectural integration of the real and the social. Hegel helps us see how the end of art marks the development of an enclosed world, a cosmos, within the value-sphere of the aesthetic.

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Lastly, perhaps the meaning of art might be extended even further through some speculative use of Hegel’s understanding that the final realisation of freedom in the state – the telos of all human history – can be termed ‘divine.’ Now the debate on what the divine and God mean in Hegel is long and intense, but the very idea that Hegel offers here might be of benefit to us. Simply, perhaps a certain ‘divine’ status has settled on art in modernity because of its own teleological trajectory. The two intertwined elements that make up this process, as we have witnessed, are: firstly, how, in a limited way, art can be accorded the mantle of the end of history whereby freedom comes to be realised aesthetically rather than prosaically; and, secondly, how the separate realm of art would manufacture a universal ‘humanity’ (‘its new holy of holies’!) that enables the inclusion of all ‘civilisations’ on the basis of an absolute measure of aesthetic judgement. The question is: what can it mean to say that this aesthetic telos is divine? Again, the commentary surrounding the ‘teleological argument’ is long-standing and highly charged, but a certain minimal sense of the divine might possibly be taken up without too much bother. Such a teleology of art cannot, of course, yield any notions of a beneficent, creator god, but what it might be said to provide is some sense of a meaningful order in a meaningless universe. That is, the human world can be granted an aesthetic structure and logic that seem to have become more assured as the prosaic logics falter. More Greek than Christian, such coherence can be said to be ‘divine’ through its mere suggestion that there is something at work beyond Weber’s disenchanted senselessness. We have ransacked the Hegel stronghold and taken away some hefty items that are valuable to our cause. And when we add together what we have gained from Weber, Kant, and Hegel some answers to our questions have started to emerge. We can now turn to a thinker who has also tried to understand art in modernity through a similar combination of theorists. However, the questions to which he seeks answers are far weightier than ours.

Notes 1 How to render ‘aufheben’ into English is a long-standing problem. Fortunately, our use of Hegel does not require engagement with this scholarly debate. 2 This description does not follow Hegel’s terminology – a practice that will be repeated just for the sake of an easier exposition for the purposes of this argument. 3 Broadly, Hegel will agree with Kant that beauty is still the prime aesthetic value but, contra Kant, Hegel will raise the beauty of art above natural beauty precisely because it has for so long been integral to the meaning of human history. 4 Herder and Schlegel used the ‘romantic’ in this elongated sense. 5 It can be noted here that in this rejection of ‘taste,’ Hegel’s account of the artist tends to be restricted to a bare inner self. So, in effect, Hegel is more subjectivist than Kant on this matter. See note 13 below for more on this. 6 However, we will see that Hegel has to engage with some of these Kantian aspects of the inner workings of the sphere of art when he comes to discuss the ‘dissolution’ of art. 7 ‘Reason’ is here meant in a looser, more general sense than Hegel will specify. 8 The role of beauty is a little ambiguous in Hegel, but he does argue, at least at times, that the logic of romanticism has meant that this basic category of 18th-century a­ esthetics is

84 Hegel optional. So here he says that ‘beauty and ideality of content and appearance’ might be sacrificed, and there is also the following: Romantic art no longer has as its aim [the representation of] the free vitality of existence with its infinite tranquillity and the immersion of the soul in the corporeal, or this life as such in its very own essential nature; on the contrary, it turns its back on this summit of beauty; it intertwines its inner being with the contingency of the external world and gives unfettered play to the bold lines of the ugly. (Hegel, 1975: 526–7) Unlike Kant’s notion that the ugly can be made beautiful by art, Hegel suggests that the prosaic truth of ugliness can be expressed in art because art has lost touch with the higher forms of meaningful history where beauty had been ideally exhibited. 9 This discussion which takes place within the ‘Dissolution of the Romantic Form of Art’ comes under the subheading of: ‘The Subjective Artistic Imitation of the Existent Present.’ 10 We will come back to consider how Duchamp fits into this account of Hegel’s. 11 But Hegel also gives some middle Eastern examples: ‘A brilliant example of this; even for the present and for the subjective spiritual depth of today, is afforded especially by the Persians and Arabs in the eastern splendour of their images, in the free bliss of their imagination which deals with its objects entirely contemplatively.’ (Hegel, 1975: 610) 12 In the Philosophy of Right Hegel makes this link to Rousseau’s Social Contract explicit (Hegel, 1991: 277) 13 A major qualification is Hegel’s own dealing with the concepts of the ‘artist’ and ‘genius,’ where a very Rousseau-like subjectivity is invoked. For example: So the originality of art does indeed consume that accidental idiosyncrasy of the artist, but it absorbs it only so that the artist can wholly follow the pull and impetus of his inspired genius, filled as it is with his subject alone, and can display his own self, instead of fantasy and empty caprice, in the work he has completed in accordance with its truth. To have no manner has from time immemorial been the one grand manner, and in this sense alone are Homer, Sophocles, Raphael, Shakespeare, to be called ‘original.’ (Hegel, 1975: 298; also 290–1, 606–7) All the pronouncements on post-Greek inner subjectivity seem to be abandoned here, and what is instead offered is a universal, ahistorical account of genius artists being ‘true to themselves’ (to invoke the modern catchphrase that is so evocative of Rousseau). 14 It should be noted that, especially given its place in the structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit, this depiction of self-consciousness is almost certainly not Hegel’s own position – despite a raft of Hegelian commentary to the contrary. But we can still pick out these ideas and use them. 15 A more literal translation of ‘humanus.’ 16 According to Civilisations, the worst, most uncivilised deed is the destruction of art, for example, with the Taliban blowing up statues of the Buddha in 2001. 17 It might be too much to claim that some sort of Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinction is applicable here, though some elements are present, it can be argued. However the intersubjective structure of the aesthetic self-consciousness of taste might well be better understood as a looking back to some ideal of a lost pre-modern community rather than forward to some ideal of an unrealised post-modern state. Weber’s view of the art sphere as a ‘cosmos’ is bolstered by such comparison.

4

Adorno I Truth, beauty, and utopia

Introduction It is hard to think of anyone who could be more qualified to write aesthetic theory than Adorno. Steeped in philosophy, the arts, and especially music, he readily crossed disciplinary boundaries as the intellectual task demanded. Art, for him, was of the utmost value; so much so, in fact, that it seems unfitting to position his arguments within the overall topic of the appeal of art in modernity – ‘appeal’ seems far too mild a term in his case. However, for our purposes, Adorno’s advocacy of the aesthetic advances our quest considerably, for even when his arguments falter, they produce insights that could have come from no other source.1 Some frequently put preparatory remarks need to be repeated here. Adorno’s philosophy, especially his aesthetic theory, is unforgiving in the demands it places on the reader. He assumes a detailed knowledge of Kant and Hegel, as well as an intimacy with the history of Western art, and especially with developments in 20th-century modernism. His style deliberately eschews the standard forms of argument in order to retain a constant sense of the culpability of reason itself in the horrors of history. Any final conclusions are therefore elusive, with his dialectical method nearly always enabling an acute awareness of any criticisms that are thrown at his positions. Attempts to pin his theory down do, therefore, perhaps lose the point. And, finally, the posthumous editing and publication of Aesthetic Theory mean that some large question marks hang over the central text of Adorno’s philosophy of art. But we will press on and, as with Kant and Hegel, see what we can retrieve. The next two chapters will be divided up in the following way: in this chapter, initially, Adorno’s use of Hegel and Kant will be summarised, then a list of the ‘something more’ that Adorno claims art can provide will be surveyed, and lastly, based on a critical consideration of the foregoing, we will start to see what can be recovered for our argument in terms of truth, beauty, and utopia. In the next chapter, where Weber will play a stronger role, we will continue the critical appropriation of Adorno’s ideas and concentrate on purposelessness, spiritualisation, and suffering, and finish with a brief section on politics. It needs to be stressed that, in effect, this argument structure travels over Adorno’s theoretical landscape twice. At the risk of repetition, a general orientation is needed before

86  Adorno I the critical engagement can begin because Adorno’s ideas are so disconcertingly fragmentary, and swathed in so much dialectical formulation.

Hegel and Kant Adorno formed his aesthetic theory via a tireless, antagonistic conversation with Hegel. The importance of art for Adorno rests on two pivotal points that arise from Hegel’s position. Firstly, instead of the fulfilment of the individual in the objective state, history has culminated in Auschwitz and possible nuclear destruction – the horrific opposite of the realisation of freedom. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organised mankind poses to organised men, in the epitome of discontinuity. It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. (Adorno, 1973: 320; also, for example, Adorno, 2005: 15ff) However, secondly, art has indeed separated from the dominant historical logic and is thereby the sphere that is the least complicit in the unfolding tragedies of the 20th century. It is in art, therefore, that Adorno seeks to find some ‘semblance’ of an alternative to the prevailing order of the world.2 Art is semblance even at its highest peaks; but its semblance, the irresistible part of it, is given to it by what is not semblance. What art, notably the art decried as nihilistic, says in refraining from judgments is that everything is not just nothing. If it were, whatever is would be pale, colourless, indifferent. No light falls on men and things without reflecting transcendence. Indelible from the resistance to the fungible world of barter is the resistance of the eye that does not want the colours of the world to fade. Semblance is a promise of non-semblance. (Adorno, 1973: 404–5) Adorno needs to battle on a number of fronts to make this claim for the aesthetic tenable. Art itself must be examined, and this is what we will focus upon here, of course; but other areas have to be shown to be part of the problem that art has somehow managed to avoid. Notably, reason itself is interrogated by Adorno and is found wanting, and the popular culture of the day, the culture industry, is savagely condemned. We will need to take note of developments on these other fronts, beyond the aesthetic, as we proceed. In his aesthetic theory, Adorno negotiates a path through the Hegelian thicket of ideas. He accepts, in effect, half of the end of art thesis: yes, art has separated from the major forces of history; but, no, it is not just a subjectivist state of irrationality. In other words, he rejects Hegel’s stress on the inward subject (‘His subjectivism is so total’ (Adorno, 2002a: 356) and does not see art as ending up in

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the heartfelt, subjective expression of the likes of Goethe. The overall ‘romantic’ trajectory of Hegel is therefore seen as overdone by Adorno, with later art not bound by this vision of the dissolution of the romantic, as Hegel described it. Art is far more conceptual for Adorno, especially in its modernist forms, so that Hegel must be left behind in this regard. Also, despite the resistance of art’s internal trajectory to the prevailing historical currents, Adorno accords art some necessary mimetic3 expression of the social forces in which is it set. A delicate line has to be followed to make this point: The distance these works maintain from empirical reality is in itself partly mediated by that reality. The imagination of the artist is not a creation ex nihilo; only dilettanti and aesthetes believe it to be so. Works of art that react against empirical reality obey the forces of that reality, which reject intellectual creations and throw them back on themselves. There is no material content, no formal category of artistic creation, however mysteriously transmitted and itself unaware of the process, which did not originate in the empirical reality from which it breaks free. It is this which constitutes the true relation of art to reality, whose elements are regrouped by its formal laws. Even the avant-garde abstraction which provokes the indignation of philistines, and which has nothing in common with conceptual or logical abstraction, is a reflex response to the abstraction of the law which objectively dominates society. (Adorno, 1980: 190; see also Adorno, 1991b: 38f, and Adorno, 2004: 131–2) The content and forms of art – even the most abstract – have broken ‘free’ from the ‘empirical reality’ in which they originate, but can still be understood as marked by an extra-aesthetic determination. Simply, against a purely subjectivist account of artistic creation, the art object must reflect the historical condition of its making even when, as art, it fundamentally follows the internal logics of the pure aesthetic. Indeed, art has to be accorded a truth that reason cannot reach. 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. (Adorno, 2002a: 130) The greatness of works of art, however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides. Their very success moves beyond false consciousness, whether intentionally or not. (Adorno, 1991b: 39) It is hard to see how Hegel’s romantic view of the limited truths of art would have been open to such possibilities; after all, for Hegel, philosophy was the triumphant

88  Adorno I overcoming of art and religion. In Adorno’s dialectic of truth and history, art is again placed ahead of philosophy. Adorno says it in this way: Hegel was the first to realise that the end of art is implicit in its concept. That his prophecy was not fulfilled is based, paradoxically, on his historical optimism. He betrayed utopia by construing the existing as if it were the utopia of the absolute idea. Hegel’ s theory that the world spirit has sublated art as a form is contradicted by another theory of art to be found in his work, which subordinates art to an antagonistic existence that prevails against all affirmative philosophy. (Adorno, 2002a: 32–3) So basically we can see how Adorno must provide art in its autonomous state with something more than Hegel allowed. In one sense, Adorno accepts the overall historical place of art that Hegel gave it, but, with Hegel’s end of history so clearly falsified, the very subordination of art into ‘an antagonistic existence’ has the remarkable consequence for Adorno that the aesthetic is the only site in modernity where a future for freedom might be sustained. Beyond these points of contestation with Hegel on what art is and what it can do in the current age, it is to Kant that Adorno will turn in order to consider the further internal workings of the aesthetic. Note that, as with the points above concerning Hegel, we are only laying down a groundwork for a more detailed later discussion of the elements mentioned here. On this basis, Adorno returns to a more 18th-century aesthetic theory and wants to include beauty as part of the way art can offer something more than the existent reality beyond the aesthetic realm. Natural beauty, in line with Kant and against Hegel, is restored to its place of pre-eminence (see Adorno, 2002a: 61ff, esp. 66, 73, 76–7); and aesthetic beauty – seemingly lost, or at least diminished, in the development of the forms of art – is, paradoxically, to be found in a kind of ugliness. And even if Adorno is reluctant to use the term ‘pleasure’ in this context, such fraught, negated existence of beauty is said to be dialectically tied to a sense of happiness. What beauty still flourishes under terror is a mockery and ugliness to itself. Yet its fleeting shape attests to the avoidability of terror. Something of this paradox is fundamental to all art; today it appears in the fact that art still exists at all. The captive idea of beauty strives at once to reject happiness and to assert it. (Adorno, 2005: 121) Arguably, however, the most important element that Adorno takes from Kant’s theory of aesthetic beauty is the notion of ‘purposive without a purpose.’ Of all the phrases in Kant, this one most easily fits into the Adorno dialectical lexicon. Its worth for Adorno can be gauged in how art has a purposiveness or ‘end’ that is in contrast with all other ends because it defies the usual means/ends relationship that pervades the non-aesthetic social order.

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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 … (Adorno, 2002a: 139; also, e.g., 101, 152, 217, 225; 1980: 190) In contrast, if there is this common ground with Kant, Adorno asserts his own position through a critique of other aspects of The Critique of Judgement. In this vein, he criticises the emphasis on pleasure in Kant as a kind of hedonism (Adorno, 2002a: 11, 15, 171)); ‘genius’ is strongly rejected as an ahistorical, naturalistic solution (Adorno, 2002a: 170ff); and the centrality of ‘taste’ in Kant is discarded. This last point on taste will be taken up again as Adorno’s own position is critically assessed in line with our overriding argument concerning art in modernity.

Something more A kind of ugly beauty and mimetic truth are regained by Adorno’s critical engagement with Kant and Hegel, but on the basis that art is fundamentally separated from rationalised history, and can be understood to be so in terms of its being ‘purposive without a purpose.’ On top of this Adorno adds a number of other qualities to art that builds up a picture of the aesthetic as pointing to something beyond the travails of 20th-century history. This ‘more’ of art is put in a general way in the following quote through a comparison and linkage with nature, and its beauty: Nature is beautiful in that it appears to say more than it is. To wrest this more from that more’s contingency, to gain control of its semblance, to determine it as semblance as well as to negate it as unreal: This is the idea of art. This artifactual more does not in itself guarantee the metaphysical substance of art. That substance could be totally null, and still the artworks could posit a more as what appears. Artworks become artworks in the production of this more; they produce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they once again become separated from transcendence. The actual arena of transcendence in artworks is the nexus of their elements. By straining toward, as well as adapting to, this nexus, they go beyond the appearance that they are, though this transcendence may be unreal. Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual. Their transcendence is their eloquence, their script, but it is a script without meaning or, more precisely, a script with broken or veiled meaning. Although this transcendence is subjectively mediated, it is manifested objectively, yet all the more desultorily. Art fails its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality

90  Adorno I of being art. Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect. (Adorno, 2002a: 78, emphasis added) How can we make sense of this? As Hegel has shown, as it leaves history behind art has only become what we know as art because it has its own, separate rules and values that philosophical aesthetics can reveal. From within this ‘autonomous’ existence, art alone can transcend the external social reality and offer something more. However, this more is only a semblance – it is only part of art, after all– and such transcendence must contain its own negation as unreal. Moreover, such transcendence is not to be found in the content or specific meaning of art, nor can it be achieved as a conscious effect. Rather there is a kind of aesthetic logic of production whereby the elements of the objective artwork are subjectively brought together in such a way that this transcendent quality is possible. In this way artworks can be considered spiritual. And we might add here that the use of terms like ‘transcendent’ and ‘spiritual’ must show how art in modernity is still linked to the art of the past in terms of a religious meaning that is no longer possible; indeed art must exclude such meaning if it is to achieve transcendence. If this gives some general sense of what is at stake for Adorno, we need to investigate this ‘more’ of art more precisely. So, on top of truth, ugliness/beauty and purposiveness without purpose, some other elements need consideration: the utopian, spiritualisation (these two factors have been mentioned in the quotations already given), and a kind of moral appreciation of suffering. Each of these ideas will briefly be described before a more critical appropriation is undertaken. Firstly, a utopian4 quality is to be found in the most discomfiting forms of modernist art: Art is no more able than theory to concretize utopia, not even negatively. A cryptogram of the new is the image of collapse; only by virtue of the absolute negativity of collapse does art enunciate the unspeakable: utopia. In this image of collapse all the stigmata of the repulsive and loathsome in modern art gather. Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled: This is the true consciousness of an age in which the real possibility of utopia – that given the level of productive forces the earth could here and now be paradise – converges with the possibility of total catastrophe. (Adorno, 2002a: 32–3; also 105, 130, 311–2) It is in the grating, repellent qualities of modern art that the dreams of historical reconciliation are so undone that some utopian promise is able to be sustained. All other denials of the times, and roadmaps to the future, are overly complicit in what must be negated. In an age of barbarism, only the mimetic truth of aesthetic form contains this last remnant of what might be. Note also that this utopia bears the Marxist character of realising the potential of capitalist productivity.

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However, this promise is, of necessity, a recollection of what is possible: But because for art, utopia – the yet-to-exist – is draped in black, it remains in all its mediations 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. (Adorno, 2002a: 135) This suggests that the 18th and 19th-century hopes for the realisation of freedom are still a possible presence in the utopian quality of modernist art. The Enlightenment, Hegelian, and Marxist trajectories of what freedom should be, are continued, remarkably, in artistic form. Secondly, the notion of spiritualisation is particularly puzzling. Adorno uses the term in a number of ways to try to capture the distinctive quality of art. A few of these meanings will be briefly discussed here, but there will be a later development of this idea through a Weberian augmentation of some remarks by Adorno. On spiritualised art Adorno says: That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are: This is their spirit. The determination of artworks by spirit is akin to their determination as phenomenon, as something that appears, and not as blind appearance. What appears in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance nor to be held simply identical with it – the nonfactual in their facticity – is their spirit. It makes artworks, things among things, something other than thing. Indeed, artworks are only able to become other than thing by becoming a thing, though not through their localisation in space and time but only by an immanent process of reification that makes them self-same, self-identical. Otherwise one could not speak of their spirit, that is, of what is utterly unthinglike. Spirit is not simply spiritus, the breath that animates the work as a phenomenon; spirit is as much the force or the interior of works, the force of their objectivation; spirit participates in this force no less than in the phenomenality that is contrary to it. The spirit of artworks is their immanent mediation, which transforms their sensual moments and their objective arrangement; this is mediation in the strict sense that each and every element in the artwork becomes manifestly its own other. (Adorno, 2002a: 86–7) Spirit is here a kind of ineffable quality of art that makes it both a thing and an unthing. That it is its own other, is ‘self-same’ and ‘self-identical’ might be a way of making more sense of how it can have purposiveness without a purpose. In other words, the artwork as an object cannot be equated with all the other things of this world which cannot be self-contained.

92  Adorno I It arises from an initial separation from mythic nature which art will continually fail to redress, and, following a Hegelian line of thinking, this leads to a kind of inner logic to ugliness: Precisely through its progressive spiritualisation, through its division from nature, art wants to revoke this division from which it suffers and which inspires it. Spiritualisation provided art anew with what had been excluded from it by artistic practice since Greek antiquity: the sensuously unpleasing, the repulsive; Baudelaire virtually made this development art’s program. Hegel aimed at justifying the irresistibility of spiritualisation in the theory of what he called the romantic artwork. Since then, everything sensually pleasing in art, every charm of material, has been degraded to the level of the pre-artistic. (Adorno, 2002a, 91; also 196) In addition, Adorno regards spiritualisation as the drive in modern art to the conceptual, and this provides an antidote in artistic form to the apologetics on display in the usual array of positive cultural values: Spiritualisation takes place not through ideas announced by art but by the force with which it penetrates layers that are intentionless and hostile to the conceptual. This is not the least of the reasons why the proscribed and forbidden tempt artistic sensibilities. Spiritualisation in new art prohibits it from tarnishing itself any further with the topical preferences of philistine culture: the true, the beautiful, and the good. Into its innermost core what is usually called art’s social critique or engagement, all that is critical or negative in art, has been fused with spirit, with art’s law of form. (Adorno, 2002a: 93) The relation to a lost nature, to myth, can be seen in the following: The historical trajectory of art as spiritualisation is that of the critique of myth as well as that toward its redemption: The imagination confirms the possibilities of what it recollects. This double movement of spirit in art describes its protohistory, which is inscribed in its concept, rather than its empirical history. The uncheckable movement of spirit toward what has eluded it becomes in art the voice that speaks for what was lost in the most distantly archaic. (Adorno, 2002a: 118) As an important aid to our overarching argument, it is this origin of spiritualisation in myth which will be developed critically in terms of Weberian disenchantment. Essentially we will try to make more sense of the way that ‘art [is] the voice that speaks for what was lost in the most distantly archaic.’ Spiritualisation can therefore be seen, in part, to be made up of three primary attributes: the specific nature of the art object as compared to all other things; the

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logic of the aesthetic to the ugly and the conceptual; and a bond with its origins in myth. It is not clear how all these aspects can be united under the one term, but we will draw on each of these ideas as the argument progresses. Thirdly, Adorno, in a Kant-like gesture, seeks to grant art a moral dimension, even though it is marked by purposiveness without purpose and would seem, therefore, to be unfit to be accorded an ethical end. A kind of theodicy is at work here in Adorno, and the question of how suffering can be voiced becomes pivotal. Initially Adorno stresses how reason – discursive knowledge – is deemed incapable of performing this task: Though discursive knowledge is adequate to reality, and even to its irrationalities, which originate in its laws of motion, something in reality rebuffs rational knowledge. Suffering remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming irrational. Suffering conceptualised remains mute and inconsequential, as is obvious in post-Hitler Germany. (Adorno, 2002a: 18) It is in art that Adorno finds the capacity for the expression of suffering: In comparison with past art and the art of the present it will probably again be something else; but it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom counterfeits as positivity. If in fulfilment of the wish a future art were once again to become positive, then the suspicion that negativity was in actuality persisting would become acute; this suspicion is ever present, regression threatens unremittingly, and freedom – surely freedom from the principle of possession – cannot be possessed. But then what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering. (Adorno, 2002a, 260–1; also 257, 324) In ‘Commitment’ Adorno is even plainer: The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting … Yet this suffering, what Hegel called consciousness of adversity, also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it. (Adorno, 1980: 188)5 Adorno knows that art is necessarily hostile to any moral position, and that the experience of art itself, even if it is not simply reducible to Kant’s alleged hedonism, is the very opposite of that of suffering. Art therefore prohibits or forbids

94  Adorno I this dimension of theodicy, while also sustaining it. However this idea, that it is still only in art that suffering can attain some kind of voice, will come into direct conflict with Weber and his sociology of the value-sphere structure of modernity, as we will see.

Critical appropriation: truth, beauty, and utopia Let us run through the list of these qualities of art and consider what is of value for our argument. As mentioned, the order in which we will deal with these items is: in this chapter, truth, beauty, and utopia, and in the next, purposelessness, spiritualisation, and suffering. A separate section will consider politics. However, it needs to be stressed that they are not discrete elements and are, at times, intimately connected, as we have already witnessed. Truth Although in Adorno’s upending of Hegel, art has now overtaken philosophy in the dialectical movement of history, Adorno seeks to retain philosophy as the necessary articulation of the truth of art. The truth content of artworks is the objective solution of the enigma posed by each and every one. By demanding its solution, the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection. This alone is the justification of aesthetics. Although no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determinations, as is the case with what art judges, each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmaticalness nevertheless turns toward interpretive reason. … 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 between the unreachable and what has been realised constitutes their enigma. They have truth content and they do not have it. (Adorno, 2002a: 127–8) Much of Adorno’s writing consists of philosophical meditations on the assumed truths of works of art as witnessed, for example, in his extensive studies on music, and in his much studied, theoretical elaboration of Beckett. For our argument, what Adorno’s position on the truth of art exhibits is another facet of art’s appeal. Because art is separated from other parts of the social whole, it does have an outside perspective on the more rationalised areas of history (including reason itself) that, arguably, can provide understandings – perhaps even ‘truths’ – that are necessarily unavailable to any other source of cultural production (especially, if we follow Adorno, from that of the culture industry). Perhaps, in this sense, it is indeed a mark of a great artwork that it cannot lie.

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However, even if we can accept the worth of this point for our argument, some difficulties arise for Adorno’s proposed relationship between art, truth, and philosophy. The notion that philosophy is needed to bring out the truth of art would seem to undermine whatever power that truth might hold; or, to put it more strongly, what Adorno means by the truth of art will necessarily be undone, not realised, by philosophy. Adorno is at pains to avoid regarding art in terms of an obvious Cartesian duality as irrational, or simply anti-rational. As Adorno emphasises, the history of modern art would seem to confirm the place of reason, and a kind of conceptual theory, as part of art. But this does not avoid the basic Hegelian/Weberian division, which Adorno accepts, that art has separated from (in Weber’s terms) the rationalised spheres, which include reason as it is manifested in science and academic philosophy. This is precisely why Adorno turns to art as a place that is not so complicit in the horrors of modern history. If this is so, then whatever ‘truth’ that art has depends on being separate from such rationalised forms – being, at some level, beyond reason – and would seem to have to rely on what can only be termed as irrationality or anti-rationality. And Adorno must fall back on such an understanding when he deploys his array of ideas that include the shudder6 and beauty. However much such notions have been ‘mediated’ by history and shaped by intellectual forces, it would seem that the ‘truth’ of art, or at least the power of the ‘truth’ of art must rely on an irrational quality that is opposed to reason. It would appear to follow that the philosophical aspect of art that Adorno demands would seem to lose either the truth or the power of the truth in a fundamental way. When one reads Adorno’s philosophical discussions of Beckett, or Kafka, or, at times, Beethoven, there is indeed an enrichment of ideas but, as philosophy, the aesthetic experience has been drained away. Of course Adorno recognises that ‘no artwork can be reduced to rationalistic determinations,’ and admits that a fundamental problem resides here in terms of the role of philosophical reason – an aporia of art, in fact. But to be able to put this dilemma in the phraseology of dialectical thinking (e.g., ‘they have truth content and they do not have it’) does not therefore absolve Adorno from the possible consequence that whatever truth art might hold can only be sustained against, not through philosophy. This point might be better understood through a Weberian perspective. Adorno uses the term ‘autonomous’ to capture the separation of art from the dominant forces of history; and this expression is redolent of the Frankfurt School’s antieconomistic, Western Marxism of the early-mid 20th century. However, what if we place the possible truth of art into Weber’s value-sphere theory of modernity? We have noted in the first chapter that Weber depicts the aesthetic valuesphere as basically anti-rational or irrational. This view is scarcely developed by Weber and, following Kant, there needs to be the inclusion of theory and a kind of rationality as part of how the judgement of taste operates, but with an irrational subjectivity still primarily determinant. Essentially for Weber, the aesthetic sphere has to be marked off from the rationalised spheres of the economy, politics/ law, and science/intellectual reason; art only exists in modernity in this state of opposition and to enter into the realm of art is necessarily to leave these other

96  Adorno I spheres. The problem of the truth of art and its relation to philosophy might be understood, in these Weberian terms, as Adorno’s attempt to straddle the separate value-spheres of art and intellectual reason. Too much philosophy results in the anti-rational aspect of art being lost, and Adorno has crossed over the boundary from the sphere of art into that of science-intellectual reason; and, conversely, too little and he is stuck in the quasi-rational realm of the aesthetic. In other words Adorno, with numerous self-aware qualifications, assumes that the ‘autonomous’ status of the aesthetic allows art and philosophy to be reconciled. The sociology of art says not. What are we left with? Perhaps the personal insights from within the aesthetic sphere can provide truths that are unavailable from within the scientific/intellectual sphere – but this is something even Hegel would seem to allow. Perhaps the very forms of art can provide a mimetic understanding of the outside historical reality, e.g., with Beethoven in the early 19th century and Schoenberg in the 20th; and, perhaps, the ‘truth’ of the artwork can inspire more philosophical-rational thought. Adorno’s position does direct us to these possibilities and so the appeal of aesthetic ‘truth’ is made more apparent. But his overarching position on philosophy, truth, and art appears to founder on the rocks of Weberian sociological reality. Beauty Beauty as a quality of art arises with, and against the Enlightenment: The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place. (Adorno, 2005: 224) Beauty in nature and art depends on the domination of nature, but it also points, in highly compromised terms, beyond such domination. That the experience of natural beauty, at least according to its subjective consciousness, is entirely distinct from the domination of nature, as if the experience were at one with the primordial origin, marks out both the strength and the weakness of the experience: its strength, because it recollects a world without domination, one that probably never existed; its weakness, because through this recollection it dissolves back into that amorphousness out of which genius once arose and for the first time became conscious of the idea of freedom that could be realised in a world free from domination. (Adorno, 2002a: 66) As radiant things give up their magic claims, renounce the power with which the subject invested them and hoped with their help himself to wield,

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they become transformed into images of gentleness, promises of a happiness cured of domination over nature. This is the primeval history of luxury, that has migrated into the meaning of all art. In the magic of what reveals itself in absolute powerlessness, of beauty, at once perfection and nothingness, the illusion of omnipotence is mirrored negatively as hope. (Adorno, 2005: 224) So, for Adorno, the powerlessness of beauty combines with a past as myth (its ‘primordial origin’) to provide, in art, hope of an escape from domination. This capacity of the aesthetic to provide an alternative to domination is a key theme that runs throughout Adorno’s aesthetic theory and beauty is perhaps the clearest example of how a relation of non-domination with nature is possible. It might seem that aesthetic beauty has become outdated: not only is it no longer the currency of modern art, but ugliness itself became a dominant norm of high modernism. Adorno addresses this dilemma through the proposition, as mentioned, that ugliness and beauty are two opposing sides of the same quality, or, more precisely, that ugliness is, in fact, simply a kind of oppositional expansion of beauty: The identification of art with beauty is inadequate, and not just because it is too formal. In what art became, the category of the beautiful is only one element, one that has moreover undergone fundamental change: By absorbing the ugly, the concept of beauty has been transformed in itself, without, however, aesthetics being able to dispense with it. In the absorption of the ugly, beauty is strong enough to expand itself by its own opposite. (Adorno, 2002a: 273; also 47–8) ‘Indeed,’ Adorno states, ‘it is for the sake of the beautiful that there is no longer beauty’ (Adorno, 2002a: 53). In this way, perhaps, we can start to appreciate the sense of the quote given previously, where the ‘idea of beauty’ is therefore ‘captive’ but still ‘strives at once to reject happiness and to assert it.’ However, there is clearly a problem with this association of beauty and ugliness: it cannot be assumed that beauty’s impotent hopes of reconciliation by being an alternative to domination, which arise from the initial engagement with nature, are carried over to ugliness. As opposed to beauty, the ugly has not been made in this cauldron of escape and remembrance of the terrors of nature; rather it is formed against the beautiful only within the formal confines of art. Adorno lays stress on how beauty has an inherent formalism, and how it is in the autonomous forms of art that the beauty-ugliness shift can occur. But he also assumes that, within this formal aesthetic realm, the reconciliation, anti-domination quality of beauty has passed over into its ugly twin. Indeed, it appears that it is now the formalism itself that is crucial: The formalism inherent in the concept of the ugly and the beautiful, as is acknowledged by Kant’s aesthetics, a formalism against which artistic form

98  Adorno I is not immune, is the price art has to pay for raising itself above the domination of natural powers … (Adorno, 2002a: 48) And: In the penchant of modem art for the nauseating and physically revolting – in objecting to which the apologists of the status quo can think of nothing more substantial than that the world is ugly enough as it is and art therefore should be responsible for idle beauty – the critical material motif shows through: In its autonomous forms art decries domination, even that which has been sublimated as a spiritual principle and stands witness for what domination represses and disavows. (Adorno, 2002a: 49) The idea that the qualities of beauty can be transferred to the ugly on the basis that both are now part of the separateness of art, or that autonomy and formalism are themselves the factors that allow beauty such tremendous appeal, are belied by Adorno’s own account of the beautiful. Beauty has a possible serenity and a bringing the other into itself, and whatever reconciliation is possible, however unreal, is based on these factors: In serene beauty its recalcitrant other would be completely pacified, and such aesthetic reconciliation is fatal for the extra-aesthetic. That is the melancholy of art. It achieves an unreal reconciliation at the price of real reconciliation. All that art can do is grieve for the sacrifice it makes, which, in its powerlessness, art itself is. (Adorno, 2002a: 52) Such elements of the beautiful, however, would seem to be exactly what ugliness must deny.7 Also, Adorno seems to tie natural beauty exclusively to some standard, romantic sensibilities. Who can escape the allure of natural beauty, with its complement of dialectical consequences? Natural beauty is myth transposed into the imagination and thus, perhaps, requited. The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom something of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed. The fright appears as well in the threat of migratory flocks, which bespeak ancient divinations, forever presaging ill fortune. With regard to its content, the ambiguity of natural beauty has its origin in mythical ambiguity. (Adorno, 2002a: 66)

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Again, almost by definition, ugliness cannot support the weight of these attributes of beauty; its oppositional posture to the beautiful must lose a great deal of what the beautiful contains. In effect, Adorno wants to sustain both the mimetic truth of the horrors of history that ugliness might be able to achieve in the autonomous formalism of art, as well as the sense of reconciliation and escape from domination that comes with the beautiful. But if beauty has been largely lost to modern art, in the name of this mimetic truth, then Adorno cannot have it both ways. A minimal negation of domination through the aesthetic experience of the ugly, might be admitted, but the full hopes of reconciliation, that accrued with beauty, must surely be forsaken. For our purposes, Adorno’s arguments on beauty and ugliness perhaps start in helping to show not only the appeal of art in modernity, but also why modern art itself is often found to be so unappealing. What we might take from Adorno’s arguments here is that art cannot but be associated with beauty – it is its history, it is still an option, and ugly art will always be contrasted with beautiful art in some manner (as Hegel and Adorno both exhibit in their respective aesthetic philosophies). Also, the continued, untarnished attraction of natural beauty is a constant ideal that pressures art, even if it has long been resisted successfully from within the aesthetic value-sphere. On this basis, the appeal of art as beautiful is not lost in modernity. Adorno would seem to affirm this point with the following antinomy: The idea of beauty draws attention to something essential to art without, however, articulating it directly. If artifacts were not in various ways judged to be beautiful the interest in them would be incomprehensible and blind, and no one, neither artist nor beholder, would have reason to make that exodus from the sphere of practical aims, those of self-preservation and pleasure, that art requires by virtue of its constitution … The beautiful is no more to be defined than its concept can be dispensed with, a strict antinomy. (Adorno, 2002a: 51) Actual art objects newly made in modernity have standardly been marked by a necessary development in form that strives to leave beauty behind, so that such objects tend to repel and confuse those not familiar with the internal determinations of the aesthetic value-sphere.8 The point here is not that these modern art objects make sense only from within the artworld (a common enough idea), but that the lack of general appeal resides in the fact that such objects cannot escape the fact that they are not beautiful. Following Adorno, beauty is still the base aesthetic measure, so that much modern art must commonly be regarded as, in this sense, problematic, while at the same time a benign view of ‘art’ more generally can still flourish. So, Adorno struggles to show how the benefits of beauty can be sustained in modern art, and especially in the modern art he favours; but his dealing with beauty allows us to see more clearly how art can hold together such general appeal and such specific repulsion. We will develop these ideas a little further below.

100  Adorno I Utopia: negation, the ugly and subjectivity Adorno needs to retain some sense that the ‘more’ of art does point to a future where the universal goals of freedom and equality are radically realised. Something has to be imagined to lie beyond the Marxist critique of capitalism, and against the qualities of domination in reason, and ‘pseudo-individuality’ in the culture industry, amongst other factors. In this sense, art is positioned to have a utopian dimension. However, in the current age, no content for this utopia can be offered: ‘Art is no more able than theory to concretise utopia, not even negatively’ (as quoted, Adorno, 2002a: 32). The utopian is therefore reduced, following the standard practice of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, to the barest minimum – a semblance. The problem, once again, is that it becomes increasingly unclear whether even this reduced utopian dimension of art can be sustained, especially when the sociological implications of the value-sphere are taken into account. In the end, largely based on Adorno’s own arguments, rather than possessing a utopian quality, art has become the realised end of history – the site, itself, of a sense of individual freedom and reconciliation. Or, in other words, there is no signpost within art that points beyond itself to a ‘no-where,’ where what is now unrealised will somehow be completed; on the contrary, in order to achieve such fulfilment, there is no need to go beyond the here and now of art. We started to see how this process was at work in the last chapter, and Adorno can help fill out that initial, Hegelian sketch of art as the end of history. This use of Adorno’s own arguments involves two steps: a discussion of the factors that in effect reduce Adorno’s utopia to a shrunken state; and the role of subjectivity within and outside the aesthetic value-sphere. The first step contains consideration of two elements from Adorno’s minimalist form of utopia: negation and the ugly. On negation, Adorno, on occasions, seems to assume that in bare negativity art is utopian: even in negativity, and especially in negativity, every work of art contains the idea of the complete fulfilment of utopia. (Adorno, 2018: 147; also, 2002a: 225–6) In its very opposition to the outside forces of domination and suffering, made possible by the relative separation of art from the imperious forces of history, another, better world is beckoning – even though no concrete content can be stated and no path to such a world is knowable. However, this stripping away of the ‘Aufhebung’ of the Hegelian dialectic is problematic in that, rather than a utopian pointing beyond, this oppositional negation of the outside world can become itself the desired alternative that does no more than affirm what it opposes. Indeed, the negated forces of suffering and domination are needed for this alternative to exist. This problem is, of course, recognised by Adorno (and besets other dialectical thinkers of the Frankfurt School, especially Marcuse). A way out of this dilemma suggests itself with the second element in Adorno’s diminished utopia: ugliness. The utopian function in art, for Adorno, is not equated

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with the more obvious quality of beauty, but is to be found in ‘the repulsive and loathsome in modern art’ (as quoted, Adorno, 2002a: 32), where some sense of ‘reconciliation’ might be achieved. Here there is not just negation but: Through the irreconcilable renunciation of the semblance of reconciliation, art holds fast to the promise of reconciliation in the midst of the unreconciled. (as quoted, Adorno, 2002a: 32–3) This tortuous logic, even by Adorno’s standards, tries to hold on to at least the ‘promise’ of reconciliation even if the mere ‘semblance’ of reconciliation is now beyond art – a highly minimalist position is clearly taken. But some sense of reconciliation, through ugliness or beauty, is a vital part of Adorno’s utopian aesthetic because without it, the domination of nature (and humanity) will remain unchecked. However, there are twin problems that face Adorno here. Either this minimalist, reduced reconciliation of ugliness has in fact lost all the power that beauty once contained9 (and still does, for Adorno), as argued above; or, if the ugly does contain some promise of an escape from the domination of nature then this does not necessarily point to anything beyond art. Simply, if the aesthetic experience does contain some kind of relation to nature that is not one of domination – and the basic contrast between art and the technological control of nature in reason does suggest that this might be the case – then the question is: why would there be some utopian imperative to move beyond art to achieve this end? On this account, what again would seem to be required to push beyond the aesthetic present is an inner telos of a Hegelian kind, the very positive dialectical logic explicitly excluded from Adorno’s schema. Further, this dilemma is compounded when set in the value-sphere theory of modernity. For if some small trace of reconciliation can be glimpsed in the sphere of art, then this is yet one more factor that reinforces the inner cosmos of aesthetic meaning. And the more this internal world of art is made whole, the more viable and desirable it becomes as a final place of sanctuary from the rationalised value-spheres, rather than as a stepping-off point to somewhere else. The interdependent, oppositional bond between the spheres of modernity is, in this way, strengthened, and in such a world-view of modernity any promise of utopia must yield, in the end, to Weberian fate. Let us now, as the second step, move on to consider the complex, fraught place of subjectivity and freedom in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Although Adorno does not directly tie subjectivity/freedom into his utopian view of art, much of Adorno’s own argumentation on subjectivity, once we bring in a Weberian dimension, will be found to undercut his own claims to an aesthetic utopianism; and in this process our understanding of art’s appeal in the modern world will be helped considerably. We live, says Adorno, under ‘the spell of subjectivity’: the hopes of the Enlightenment have become so crushed beneath the historical horrors of the 20th century that we must turn in to the individual, and against the objective external

102  Adorno I forces that have failed us, in order to avoid despair. However, such individual subjectivity no longer exists. Under the ‘individualistic veil’: A candid look at the predominance of the universal does all but unbearable psychological harm to the narcissism of all individuals and to that of a democratically organised society. To see through selfhood as nonexistent, as an illusion, would easily turn all men’s objective despair into a subjective one. It would rob them of the faith implanted in them by individualistic society: that they, the individuals, are the substance. For the functionally determined individual interest to find any kind of satisfaction under existing forms, it must become primary in its own eyes … (Adorno, 1973: 312) The result is that the individual recognises itself as a kind of autonomous subject that has already been eliminated by the very forces of history that have themselves created the need for such a subject to exist. Such subjectivity, in Hegelian terms is, therefore, for-itself but not in-itself: Nevertheless, considerations which start from the subject remain false to the same extent that life has become appearance. For since the overwhelming objectivity of historical movement in its present phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases itself on the old subject, now historically condemned which is still for-itself, but no longer in-itself [das für sich noch ist, aber nicht mehr an sich]. The subject still feels sure of its autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the concentration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity itself. (Adorno, 2005: 15–16) This self-understanding (self-consciousness, in a loose sense) of an idealised inner subjectivity – for-itself, but no longer in-itself – might best be expressed in Adorno’s understanding of ‘pseudo-individuality’ in the culture industry.10 Here there is a sense of individual autonomy in the minute choices within cultural offerings that are basically the same. It is not only the standardised mode of production of the culture industry which makes the individual illusory in its products. Individuals are tolerated only as far as their wholehearted identity with the universal is beyond question. From the standardised improvisation in jazz to the original film personality who must have a lock of hair straying over her eyes so that she can be recognised as such, pseudo-individuality reigns. The individual trait is reduced to the ability of the universal so completely to mould the accidental that it can be recognised as accidental. The sulky taciturnity or the elegant walk of the individual who happens to be on show is serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimetre.

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The peculiarity of the self is a socially conditioned monopoly commodity misrepresented as natural. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002, 124–5) The Yale lock differentiation of pseudo-individuality is, perhaps, the most widespread manifestation of a subjectivity that is for-itself but not in-itself; the culture industry, for Adorno, casts the most potent of all the spells of subjectivity. Or, to put it slightly differently, the historical demand for this lost subjectivity is met by a mass market selling freedom. However, the vital point for our argument is that the spell of subjectivity not only gives some philosophical-historical context that helps explain the culture industry, but it also clearly aids an understanding of the appeal of art. The subjectivity of art would appear to be an immensely attractive option in an age when the historical forces bend the world towards the inner self as a rare site of imagined freedom. With this in mind, we can now turn to examine the aesthetic subject by, firstly, considering what Adorno himself has to say on this topic, before turning back to the insights of Kant and Hegel. Aesthetic subjectivity must offer more than the culture industry for Adorno. So what ‘more’ is there in the aesthetic subject? The clue comes with the notion that the general ‘for-itself’ of modern individuality is recalling a lost subjectivity, or, to put it slightly differently, there is a self-recognition of a free subject that no longer exists. The question then becomes one concerned with the makeup of this prior autonomous selfhood, and its relation to art. Adorno accepts that the subject, as it forms itself against the primordial fears, possesses a ‘nascent freedom’ (Adorno, 2002a: 47), but that history, as against its Hegelian teleological understanding, ‘has yet to redeem the promise of freedom’ (Adorno, 2002a: 47). The time when this subjective freedom is most easily found is with the age of the Enlightenment and into the early 19th century with its gathering bourgeois determinations. Although, even here, it is still the case that the ‘for-itself’ of such freedom will come to outstrip the actuality. Beethoven is regarded by Adorno as exhibiting this subjectivity: Beethoven’s music, which was no less affected by nominalism than was Hegel’s philosophy, is incomparable in that the intervention enjoined by the problematic of form is permeated with autonomy, that is, with the freedom of the subject that is coming to self-consciousness. (Adorno, 2002a: 222; also, Adorno, 2004: 129–30) The mimetic truth of Beethoven’s musical form is one that reveals the ‘freedom of the subject that is coming to self-consciousness.’ However, on Adorno’s account, the dominant forces of history will not allow this beginning of autonomous individuality to develop, and all that will be left is the self-consciousness of this lost subjectivity. But this is not the whole story because art has its own necessary dimension of freedom. In fact, Adorno starts his Aesthetic Theory on this assumption:

104  Adorno I For absolute freedom in art, always limited to a particular, comes into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole. In it the place of art became uncertain. The autonomy it achieved, after having freed itself from cultic function and its images, was nourished by the idea of humanity. As society became ever less a human one, this autonomy was shattered. Drawn from the ideal of humanity, art’s constituent elements withered by art’s own law of movement. Yet art’s autonomy remains irrevocable. (Adorno, 2002a: 1) Some of Adorno’s claims on subjective freedom in art are evident in this opening statement: that there is an aesthetic freedom; that it is necessarily particular as against the general unfreedom beyond the aesthetic; that the autonomous place of art is both ‘shattered’ and ‘irrevocable’; and that, perhaps, the freedom in art has ‘withered’ as the internal aesthetic logic unfolds. Let us consider this position. It becomes clear that a strong aesthetic, subjective freedom came into existence as a part of the rise of the early modern subject. Adorno sees lyric poetry, and the privileged poetic subject more generally, as an exhibition of such freedom, where it was possible to ‘develop as autonomous subjects capable of freely expressing themselves’ (Adorno, 1991b: 45). And Beethoven is granted the title of ‘genius’ (Adorno, 1973: 397), when he is also accorded such subjectivity: The autonomous Beethoven is more metaphysical, and therefore more true, than Bach’s ordo. Subjectively liberated experience and metaphysical experience converge in humanity. (Adorno, 1973: 397)11 This early modern aesthetic subjectivity might also be seen in terms of inwardness. Again, Beethoven is cited as exemplary: Beethoven is, in modified yet determinable fashion, the full experience of external life returning inwardly. (Adorno, 2002a: 116) There is a distinct Hegelian flavour to the aesthetic subject that Adorno describes here; the full-blown self of Hegel’s end of romanticism seems apparent in the inwardness of such poetry and music. Adorno also understands how this age of subjective freedom, even if more self-conscious than real, is exhibited in philosophical aesthetics: Natural beauty vanished from aesthetics as a result of the burgeoning domination of the concept of freedom and human dignity, which was inaugurated by Kant and then rigorously transplanted into aesthetics by Schiller and Hegel; in accord with this concept nothing in the world is worthy of attention except that for which the autonomous subject has itself to thank. (Adorno, 2002a: 62)

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Adorno, of course, repeatedly rejects such subjectivist aesthetics, but is also drawn back into this philosophical perspective. On the one hand, there are arguments that this early subjective freedom has been eroded by both external and internal causes. External in the way art must follow the overall destruction of the individual, so that all that is possible is a nostalgic selfconsciousness of what once was; and, internal in the way that theory and ugliness came to dominate the aesthetic so that Kantian and Hegelian aesthetic subjectivity was left behind by art’s own inner logic. However, on the other hand, Adorno’s long discussions of the subject in his aesthetic theory would seem to entail that something of this early subject is still intact in art, and he allows that art is still sufficiently ‘autonomous’ for it to be somehow still a realm of subjective freedom. We can see the tension here with the crucial Hegelian notion of inwardness: With the growing powerlessness of the autonomous subject, inwardness consequently became completely ideological, the mirage of an inner kingdom where the silent majority are indemnified for what is denied them socially; inwardness thus becomes increasingly shadowy and empty, indeed contentless in itself. Art no longer wants to accommodate itself to this situation. Yet art is scarcely imaginable without the element of inwardness. (Adorno, 2002a: 116; also Adorno, 2005: 214) The inward subject of, for example, the culture industry is stripped of its own content and has it replaced by companies that reassure the individual that nothing has changed – it is your choice. But this result of ‘the growing powerlessness of the autonomous subject,’ does not necessarily completely carry over into art which does not want ‘to accommodate itself to this situation’ and does sustain something of the inwardness of the past. Or, more generally, freedom (as the first lines of Aesthetic Theory have told us) is inescapably part of what art is: The idea of freedom, akin to aesthetic autonomy, was shaped by domination, which it universalised. This holds true as well for artworks. The more they freed themselves from external goals, the more completely they determined themselves as their own masters. Because, however, artworks always turn one side toward society, the domination they internalised also radiated externally. Once conscious of this nexus, it is impossible to insist on a critique of the culture industry that draws the line at art. Yet whoever, rightly, senses unfreedom in all art is tempted to capitulate, to resign in the face of the gathering forces of administration, with the dismissive assertion that “nothing ever changes,” whereas instead, in the semblance of what is other, its possibility also unfolds. (Adorno, 2002a: 17–18) Beyond this bare but necessary negative ‘semblance’ of freedom, Adorno credits artists as the only modern subjects who can be called ‘free,’ although this is given the inevitable dialectical qualifications:

106  Adorno I Even if one day the atomistic structure of society itself were changed, art would not have to sacrifice its social idea – in essence whether a particular is even possible – to the socially universal: As long as the particular and the universal diverge there is no freedom. Rather, freedom would secure for the subject the right that today manifests itself exclusively in the idiosyncratic compulsions that artists must obey. (Adorno, 2002a: 42) From this series of points on aesthetic subjectivity, it can be claimed that a version of the early aesthetic subject has been preserved by the separate, ‘autonomous’ sphere of art, as against the more prosaic manifestation of this incipient subjective freedom which has been savagely eroded by the violent storms of history. So an in-itself of individual freedom, on Adorno’s own account, maintains some kind of limited presence in the aesthetic sphere. However, it needs to be stressed how very limited this presence is: it is the battered remains of a subjectivity that was only just starting to emerge, was never allowed to develop and which was, even in its first bloom, heavily marked by its bourgeois environment. In addition to this in-itself of freedom, and because of art’s unavoidable place within the spell of subjectivity, a version of the for-itself of the modern subject must also be present. Adorno also provides us with a masterful description of this aesthetic self-consciousness of a freedom that does not exist. But he does so inadvertently. In his critique of Kant’s concept of genius Adorno set out a wonderfully full depiction of the ideal of the modern subject as it is located in art. Adorno states: 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 particularisation 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 … 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 … in favour 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

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the individual – opposing a spurious universality – and away from society by absolutising this individual. (Adorno, 2002a: 170) The list of the qualities of the artist as genius is a long and familiar one: spontaneous, unconscious, organic, authentic, original, free, individual – the ‘absolute subject,’ in fact. However, such genius is, of course, particular and exclusive, and contains a ‘spurious universality’: The experience of real unfreedom destroyed the exuberance of subjective freedom as freedom for all and reserved it as the exclusive domain of genius. (Adorno, 2002a: 171) This critical rendition of Kant’s concept of genius usefully highlights the foritself of aesthetic subjectivity, at least as far as the artist is concerned. The Rousseau model of the inner authentic subject as free from external determination is clearly being invoked. And what was the case with Kant and Rousseau in the late 18th century seems undimmed today. In his attempt to criticise Kant, Adorno has in fact displayed the ideal of subjective freedom in the form of the artist as genius. Adorno then has boosted our understanding of the in-itself and for-itself of aesthetic subjectivity: the beginnings of a free subject arose at the start of modernity with an attached self-consciousness of an internal authenticity; the actuality of this freedom was generally stifled but was maintained in a highly compromised form in art; and the self-consciousness of the initial individual freedom continued to flourish both beyond, but especially within, the aesthetic realm. The attractiveness of art in an age when free subjectivity is so desired becomes more comprehensible. However, if such subjectivity is constitutive of art in this way then the utopian hopes for art seem lessened; the aesthetic sphere appears to be more of an end in itself rather than some kind of stopover on a longer journey. This anti-utopian nature of aesthetic subjectivity is reinforced when we add Kantian and Hegelian elements to what Adorno has here provided. Firstly, based on what has been argued in the last chapter, the in-itself of art can be articulated through Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy. For Hegel, the long development of the romantic, inward subject declines and ends with art’s divorce from prosaic, meaningful history. This aesthetic subject is emotionally centred on the heart and the creation of the beautiful; and its freedom is one of a highly personal choice of content and modes of creation – anything can now be a topic of art, and objectified into an artwork by the use of endlessly novel forms and materials. The most ordinary, everyday autobiographical perspectives can achieve aesthetic status. Such art might be wonderful but history has left it behind. As beauty departs the aesthetic and theory becomes even more vital, Adorno considers that Hegel’s end of art/romantic individualism has itself been left behind. However, we have already discussed how a minimal, inward Hegelian subject continues into later art: aesthetic subjectivity might well have been shorn

108  Adorno I of some of its more ‘heartfelt’ attributes, but its inward, personal, anti-rational freedom, where any content and material is available, is still constitutive of the aesthetic realm. If this Hegelian depiction goes some way towards an understanding of the in-itself of the aesthetic subject, what of the for-itself? Kant, as has been argued, makes a crucial contribution by showing how the ultimate for-itself of subjectivity (as described by Adorno above) gains an unrivalled objective affirmation in the aesthetic sphere. Vitally, and what Adorno fails to mention, is that ‘genius’ in Kant also depends on the subjective universal communicability of ‘taste’; or in other words, the artwork, in order to qualify as a work of genius, must be part of the aesthetic conversation. So, in returning to Hegel and Kant in this way, we can build up the aesthetic subject of Adorno’s account. There is the in-itself from Hegel overlaid with the for-itself from Kant; an historically isolated, trivially aesthetic, personal, inward, anti-rational subject which can freely express itself in terms of content and form, and be objectively recognised as an organic, spontaneous, absolute site of unfettered freedom. If this is the case, there are some possible implications for the supposed utopianism of Adorno’s theory. Once this subjectivity is set within the valuesphere structure it does tend to boost the Weberian sense of fate, rather than the small hopes which Adorno had invested in the utopian dimension of art. This point can be put in Hegelian terms: the claim made in the last chapter that the end of art is the new end of history seems strengthened. That is, if we accept Adorno’s basic premise that the Enlightenment/19th-century hopes for the realisation of freedom have failed – even if we lighten some of Adorno’s blackest pronouncements in this regard – then the subjectivist freedom of the aesthetic value-sphere does not point beyond modernity but is, itself, the realisation of that freedom. For here the for-itself of artistic genius is combined with, not only an in-itself of aesthetic creativity, but with an actual, if merely aesthetic, resolution of the subjective-objective dilemma of individual freedom. Or, to put it more plainly, the individual realises itself in the social whole of art as a value-sphere. Certainly, it is not universal – it does depend on the unfreedom of those outside; and it is, in the end, just art, with no clear purpose. But, if there is indeed no perceivable path beyond the rationalised value-spheres, especially that of economic capitalism, then art becomes the model and measure of what is possible. In other words, if we add together Adorno, Kant, and Hegel on this matter, the historical circumstances have created an insatiable demand for exactly the kind of freedom that the aesthetic value-sphere, more than anywhere else in modernity, can supply. From Adorno’s insights here we have been able to learn much more about how the ingredient of subjective freedom has been baked into the enticingly rich cake of aesthetic appeal in modernity. And we have even learned something about the icing on top: there might not be a utopian aspect to the value-sphere of art, but part of the appeal of art is that, nonetheless, such utopianism can easily be thought to be present.

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Notes 1 It also needs to be noted here that some of the structure of the present argument has clearly borrowed heavily from Adorno’s overall theoretical position on the place of art in modernity. 2 Adorno’s grim view of history is commonly contested, of course. But this is not the place to debate how far, for example, the ongoing project of the Enlightenment might meet Adorno’s fears for the individual in what, in his terms, might be seen as the late phase of the culture industry. 3 For Adorno, ‘mimesis’ has, as might be expected, a dialectically fraught existence in art (see, for example, Adorno, 2002a: 111). 4 The influence of Bloch on Adorno needs to be mentioned here. Also, Marcuse (Marcuse, 1978, 2009) stressed the utopian quality of art; however, although the negative ‘autonomy’ of art is foundational in his theory, there is far more reliance on the experience of art itself as providing the promise of what a future, Marxist historical reconciliation might be like. Beauty, rather than high modernist form, is therefore a more prominent factor in his argument for the utopian potential of art. 5 In ‘Art and the Arts’ Adorno states: mankind whose sufferings cry out for art, for an art that does not smooth and mitigate. Art presents humanity with the dream of its own doom so that humanity may awaken, remain in control of itself, and survive. (Adorno, 2003c: 385) Also, in what has been called Adorno’s ‘Metaphysics’ is this commentary on the famous proposed ban on poetry after Auschwitz: one could not write poems of the resurrected culture - and one must write poems – in keeping with Hegel’s statement in his Aesthetics that as long as there is an awareness of suffering among human beings there must also be art as the objective form of that awareness. (Adorno, 2003c: 435) 6 Adorno’s notion of the ‘shudder’ will not be taken up as part of our argument. Although this idea deals with the important area of the experience of art, especially in its most heightened forms, Adorno’s understanding does not really help our cause. Its problems are: the invocation of the immensely vague ‘primordial’ as a contributing determination (Adorno, 2002a: 79, 331); and, most importantly, the attempt to distinguish art from the culture industry in terms of this kind of experience (Adorno, 2002a: 245–6). On this last point, Adorno seeks to describe how the ‘I’ is lost or obliterated with the shudder, but it is unclear how this is any different to, for example, the possible experience of fans in a rock concert or sports arena. On the face of it, Adorno’s shudder starts to approach a Dewey-like view of the experience of art (Dewey, 1934/1980), where popular culture is explicitly included into a more democratic vision of the aesthetic – so, the very opposite of Adorno’s theoretical intention. Also, Weber describes how modern erotic love can approach mystical levels of experience through an apparently similar dissolution of the ‘I’ (Weber, 1948b: 347). How the shudder marks off the experience of art is, therefore, again rendered unclear. 7 However this is simplifying Adorno’s account, and he does accord ‘cruelty’ a place in modern art that results from a recognition that whatever reconciliation in the aesthetic is possible, it does not change what it opposes: If in modern artworks cruelty raises its head undisguised, it confirms the truth that in the face of the overwhelming force of reality art can no longer rely on its a priori ability to transform the dreadful into form. Cruelty is an element of art’s

110  Adorno I critical reflection on itself; art despairs over the claim to power that it fulfils in being reconciled. (Adorno, 2002a: 50) 8 Theory and the conceptual are the main alienating causes favoured by Adorno (and, later, by Danto). 9 The fact that aesthetic ugliness requires extensive theory and philosophy, as Adorno himself stresses, would seem to suggest that the reconciliation ideal needs to be reduced even further. Reason, even if now tied to the aesthetic, has been forsaken by Adorno partly because it is so bound to the domination of nature, so that to build it into aesthetic ugliness as extensively as Adorno does, is to make it very difficult to see how the ugly and ‘reconciliation’ can be brought together in any way at all. 10 From Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Horkheimer, but Adorno is standardly credited with the authorship of the ideas that will be utilised here. 11 Although this might well be talking only about the works of Beethoven.

5

Adorno II Purpose, disenchantment, and suffering

Introduction In this chapter, which will feature Weber more prominently, we will continue to extract items from Adorno’s bag of aesthetic theory and see what can be of use to us. Firstly, three pieces, already briefly seen, will be examined: purposelessness, spiritualisation, and suffering; secondly, politics, an aspect of art that Adorno pointedly discarded, will be considered; and finally, a concluding section will highlight and develop the links between Adorno and Weber.

Critical appropriation continued Purposive without a purpose Kant’s formulation of art as ‘purposive without a purpose’ ranged the aesthetic against all other ends, especially practical utility. Art, to be art, can have no use beyond itself. Adorno, in his adoption of this aspect of the third Critique, encapsulates Kant’s idea in the following: 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 fulfilment or redemption through the negation of its elements. At the same time, artworks were purposeless because they had stepped out of the means-ends relation of empirical reality. Remote from reality, the purposiveness of artworks has something chimerical about it. (Adorno, 2002a: 139) The artwork as a whole is the purpose, but the artwork is purposeless because it is separated from the way means and ends are manifested in empirical reality – so the purpose of art is ‘chimerical’ in that it really can make no sense from the perspective of the extra-aesthetic reality. This difference in aesthetic purpose might seem, on the surface, to be a relatively minor matter and, if art really does not have any inherent practical (or moral) benefits, then such lack of purpose might even be regarded as a reason for

112  Adorno II art to be discounted and trivialised. But such triviality of purpose is, of course, the point. To say more on this – why, for our argument, such triviality has such significant appeal – we need to build on our previous discussion in Chapter 2 on how means and ends play out in the reality of modernity. Weber again will come into play, but we can also widen our theoretical scope of the Frankfurt School slightly and look to some ideas of Max Horkheimer. On this basis, we can identify a number of layers to this ‘empirical reality’ of means and ends that art transcends. Firstly, there is the general Kantian point that art is opposed to all the utilities of reality; it is useless in this sense. As Adorno says (citing Hölderlin): ‘the hermetic character of art … [contains] art’s renunciation of any usefulness whatever’ (Adorno, 2002a:74; also 211). But the way utility is manifested more specifically in modernity, throws up some additional, biting contrasts to the purpose/purposelessness of art. In terms, then, of how usefulness appears in modernity, a second layer is evident. The 19th century, in particular, is littered with complaints about a growing emphasis on the value of measurable benefits and economic production over all other ends. A basic divide between the ends of capitalism and some sort of counter sensibility, which often included the aesthetic, became commonplace.1 J.S. Mill’s Autobiography captures this mood well: a general lifelong defence of Bentham’s Utilitarianism is famously mitigated by exposure to romantic poetry. Art, then, is not only juxtaposed against the ordinary ends of everyday life, as Kant’s examples emphasise, but the mysterious ends of the aesthetic gained their significant appeal in an age when a new kind of rationalised utility rose to preeminence. And it would seem, prima facie, that this condition is ongoing; arguably, it has even intensified. Thirdly, beneath this rather obvious layer, the means and ends of the empirical reality of modernity provide a much more intriguing, specific contrast with the uselessness of art. Clearly building on Weber’s ideas, the Frankfurt School argues that one way of understanding the failure of the Hegelian project of the telos of spirit culminating in philosophy itself, is with the concept of instrumental reason. Instead of reason as philosophy being tied to the realisation of the human end of freedom, reason, especially as science, in fact becomes separated from any end or value.2 Max Horkheimer’s argument here is that reason has become subjective, where once it was tied to some objective ends. The Enlightenment is a kind of tipping point between the two: The philosophers of the Enlightenment attacked religion in the name of reason; in the end what they killed was not the church but metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself, the source of power of their own efforts. Reason as an organ for perceiving the true nature of reality and determining the guiding principles of our lives has come to be regarded as obsolete. Speculation is synonymous with metaphysics, and metaphysics with mythology and superstition. We might say that the history of reason or enlightenment from its beginnings in Greece down to the present has led to a state of affairs in which even the word reason is suspected of connoting some mythological

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entity. Reason has liquidated itself as an agency of ethical, moral, and religious insight. (Horkheimer, 1947: 17–18) The basic, hopeful equation of the Enlightenment – that freedom, equality, and reason were bound together – proved to be mythical. Reason can be used for any end at all – it becomes instrumentalised – so that it could even be turned against the universal ends of the Enlightenment itself, and be employed, in the extreme, to solve such problems as the ‘Jewish question.’ As Max Horkheimer puts it in Eclipse of Reason: No wonder that whole nations, and Germany is not alone in this, seem to have awakened one morning only to discover that their most cherished ideals were merely bubbles. (Horkheimer, 1947: 34; also, 21ff on instrumental reason more specifically) Art cannot provide any new empirical purpose, nor reinvigorate some end that reason once helped to make and then helped, in its instrumental form, to destroy. But it might, using Adorno’s perspective, provide a sanctuary from this manifestation of means and ends in modernity. What is remarkable in this layer of the means/ends reality is how, with instrumental reason, the problem no longer concerns the way that the ‘purposiveness’ of art must be differentiated from all practical ends, but how art has to be distinguished from the way that reason has been untethered from any specific end. Art, somehow, manages to keep its purposiveness, while the purposes of reason have been lost. We might make further sense of this conundrum after consideration of a final layer of the means/ends state of modernity. So, fourthly, we come to the crucial Weberian point that the means-ends relationship has become one where the means have become the ends; or, to put it in terms of reason, the very instrumental nature of reason in modernity becomes itself the point of reason. The clearest way to capture this notion is through consideration of how value becomes increasingly shifted to the way ends are managed or administered, especially by large institutions, so that, eventually, the stated ends are either determined or replaced by the very means that were implemented to achieve them. This is the basis of Weber’s critique of bureaucracy, as we have seen, but Adorno extends this concept to be almost definitional of modernity itself: in contrast to art, he calls the external historical reality ‘the administered world.’3 Art, even as something tolerated in the administered world, embodies what does not allow itself to be managed and what total management suppresses. (Adorno, 2002a: 234) From this depiction of the layers of the means/ends reality, what can we say about the appeal of art in terms of its ‘purposiveness without purpose’? Here, it needs to

114  Adorno II be noted, we are building on and assuming what was discussed on this issue in the earlier chapter on Kant. Initially it can be stated that there is, on a minimum level, a negative appeal at work in art. It is the contrast itself that is of importance; art’s purposelessness lies outside all these dilemmas of the prosaic, rationalised world. However, perhaps more might be added when we think in terms of art as a value-sphere, and use some of Horkheimer’s arguments. For Horkheimer, the shift to instrumental reason is one of the loss of objective reason and its replacement with subjective reason; that is, reason was objective in that it had been tied to metaphysical, moral, and political ends, even if this association was always disputed in the West. Arguably, the ‘purposiveness’ of art, based as it is on subjectivity, supplies a new objective ‘end’ which only makes sense within the sphere of art. How can this be? There is, as Adorno indicates, the purposiveness of the whole art object itself but, as Kant starts to articulate, this object is only art if it is part of taste.4 The art object is, on one level, thoroughly subjective in terms of creation and reception, but as a material object it only becomes art through the combined judgement of the arbiters of taste (which Kant casts as the universal). From the sociological perspective of Weber, this philosophically put subject-object relation might be translated into the workings of the inner cosmos of the aesthetic value-sphere. In this context, the subjective only has an aesthetic existence within an objective world – a ‘cosmos’ which is made up of art-objects judged by the intersubjectivity of taste. The only ‘end’ of art, it might be said, is to be part of this world and art has no purpose beyond this inner cosmos. Or, as a twist on what has already been said on aesthetic freedom, the sheer subjectivity of the aesthetic value-sphere is only fully realised in the objectivity of taste: the subjective means of art necessarily has an objective end. In practice this might be understood as the artist’s inward subjectivity – the personal choice of content, style, and material – being the means to achieve the objective end of the work of art. In other words, the value-sphere of art, which exists in explicit contrast to the rationalised value-spheres, has an objective inner life where all the permutations of the means/ends reality of modernity are able to be avoided. As an inner cosmos, means and ends are once again brought together, as was once possible with the objective reason of old and which had, of course, its own cosmic setting. So, in Horkheimer’s terms, if reason has forsaken its objective ends and become subjective – instrumental, in fact – then part of the appeal of art in modernity is that to enter the aesthetic value-sphere is, in some measure, to regain an objective purposiveness or ‘end,’ even though it is also, on any extra-aesthetic measure, without a purpose. Spiritualisation and disenchantment In this section we will try to develop some of Adorno’s comments on spiritualisation in Aesthetic Theory through the use of Weber’s concept of disenchantment. Now it is a commonplace to understand Adorno (and the Frankfurt School more widely) as vitally affected by contact with Weber, and here we will need to bring

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into play the Adorno text where Weberian disenchantment is most plainly on display: Dialectic of Enlightenment. The part of spiritualisation that is of interest to us concerns the origins of art in myth and magic, and is captured in the already given expression: The historical trajectory of art as spiritualisation is that of the critique of myth as well as that toward its redemption. (as quoted, Adorno, 2002a: 118) The link to Weberian disenchantment is clearly evident in such a statement, and is explicit on a number of occasions in Aesthetic Theory. In fact, disenchantment has marked art indelibly: To speak of “the magic of art” [Zauber der Kunst]5 is trite because art is allergic to any relapses into magic. Art is a stage in the process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world [Entzauberung der Welt], and it is entwined with rationalisation; this is the source of all of art’s means and methods of production; technique that disparages its ideology inheres in this ideology as much as it threatens it because art’s magical heritage stubbornly persisted throughout art’s transformations … (Adorno, 2002a: 53–4) Adorno sees this persistence of disenchantment as the source of a basic aporia between magic and rationality at work in art although this is also one of the hopes for reconciliation that the aesthetic can offer: The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or surrender of the mimetic impulse to thing-like rationality, dictates its law of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated. The depth of the process, which every artwork is, is excavated by the unreconcilability of these elements; it must be imported into the idea of art as an image of reconciliation. (Adorno, 2002a: 54–5) He brings all this together in the following, long quotation: Art is motivated by a conflict: Its enchantment, a vestige of its magical phase, is constantly repudiated as unmediated sensual immediacy by the progressive disenchantment of the world [der Entzauberung der Welt], yet without its ever being possible finally to obliterate this magical element. Only in it is art’s mimetic character preserved, and its truth is the critique that, by its sheer existence, it levels at a rationality that has become absolute. Emancipated from its claim to reality, the enchantment is itself part of enlightenment: Its semblance disenchants the disenchanted world [sein Schein entzaubert die entzauberte Welt]. This is the dialectical ether in which art today takes place. The renunciation of any claim to truth by the preserved magical element

116  Adorno II marks out the terrain of aesthetic semblance and aesthetic truth. Art inherits a comportment of spirit once directed toward essence, and with it the chance of perceiving mediately that which is essential yet otherwise tabooed by the progress of rational knowledge. Though it will not acknowledge it, for the disenchanted world the fact of art is an outrage, an afterimage of enchantment, [Nachbild des Zaubers] which it does not tolerate. If, however, art unflinchingly acquiesces in this and posits itself blindly as sorcery, it degrades itself to an act of illusion in opposition to its own claim to truth and undermines itself with a vengeance. (Adorno, 2002a: 58–9) The importance of disenchantment for Adorno is plain here when we see that the ‘magical element’ in all art is the basis of: the truth of art; its critique of rationality; and the postulation of the ‘existence of what does not exist.’ But how can we make sense of this process? Adorno does not give us much more help in Aesthetic Theory, but one suggestive phrase from the above quotation will prove useful and in fact raises Adorno’s perception of disenchantment high above most other interpretations of Weber. For Adorno states that art ‘disenchants the disenchanted world’6 [entzaubert die entzauberte Welt]. Vitally, Adorno does not indulge in the common kind of refutation of Weber’s theory of disenchantment whereby modernity is claimed to be full of enchanted or reenchanted elements. Rather, disenchantment holds and is determinate of art, but aesthetic disenchantment is able to offer something different to disenchantment of a more rationalised kind. In a sense, art maintains something of the magical past, not because it is itself ‘magical,’ but because each work of art re-enacts the deed of disenchantment itself. And, in this way, the value-sphere of art ends up providing a small, diminished recovery of the enchanted world that the Western subject left behind. To develop these notions we can now turn to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Of course the commentary on this disjointed text is immense, but we will only be concentrating on a few sections from the two chapters on the journey of Odysseus. The two themes that are of interest to our argument concern the concept of home/homeland/homesickness and the creation of art which is occasioned by the disenchantment of the Sirens. Firstly, on home, Adorno uses Homer’s Odyssey as a telling of the trajectory of Western subjectivity in terms of disenchantment; it is a tale of how the enchanted world is left behind through the reason and cunning of the developing subject, but also how this leaving of enchantment sets up a longing for what has been irretrievably lost. The journey of the subject is only one way – disenchantment cannot be undone; however, the journey has an ending in Odysseus’ homecoming. The fully individualised subject, formed through disenchanting reason, seeks to go home because home offers the promise of a return to the enchanted world from which the Western self has freed itself. But, of course, the promise cannot be fulfilled; homesickness is the incurable condition of the modern subject. Adorno describes the voyage of Odysseus in this way:

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It is a promise of the way home [Heimat]. It is homesickness [Heimweh] that gives rise to the adventures through which subjectivity (whose fundamental history is presented in the Odyssey) escapes the prehistoric world. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1979: 78)7 He goes on: If the fixed order of property implicit in settlement is the source of human alienation, in which all homesickness [Heimweh] and longing spring from a lost primal state, at the same time it is toward settlement and fixed property, on which alone, the concept of home/homeland [Heimat] is based, that all longing and homesickness are directed. Novalis’s definition according to which all philosophy is homesickness holds good only if this longing is not dissipated in the phantasm of a lost original state, but home/homeland, and nature itself, are pictured as something that have had first to be wrested from myth. Home/homeland is a state of having escaped. For this reason the criticism that the Homeric legends “withdraw from the earth” is a warranty of their truth. They “turn to men.” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 60–1; translation amended) For Adorno the emphasis here, and throughout the discussion on Odysseus, is on settled property and an incipient bourgeois subjectivity; however, the basic theme of disenchantment is always integral to this materialistic account. The vital point is how homesickness cannot be ‘dissipated in the phantasm of a lost original state,’ as merely a futile longing for the past; but rather how it comes with the assertion of the free subject against the restrictions of the world of myth – ‘home is the state of having escaped.’ To attain autonomous subjectivity entails escaping a world that will always be sought as ‘home.’ At this stage we need to augment Adorno’s rather underdone remarks on home and homesickness in order to come to an appreciation of the place of art in the Odyssean journey. Although it cannot be developed here, the allure of the home in modernity can be understood in terms of this Odyssean disenchantment. Some very brief remarks can be made. The ideal of home as the settled, internally ordered, comfortable site of personal love and family, might be understood as a shrunken version of the meaningful cosmos of the mythic past. In disenchanted modernity the magical forces are gone, but traditional elements can be sustained; and death is at least given a personal significance in a meaningless world. Notably, there is a common daily repetition of the journey of Odysseus, where the modern, labouring subject leaves home to enter the rationalised world and then travels back again at day’s end. The tale of Odysseus in Adorno’s telling might also be seen in the lifetime journey of the modern individual: the security of the childhood home is left in order for subjectivity to flourish, and a new home is made as the end of this journey. Importantly, within this home of modernity, free subjectivity is put at risk,

118  Adorno II and often ‘home,’ as with the ancient enchanted cosmos, must be escaped for a sense of autonomy to be realised – although, by this very act of freedom, the ideal of return is assured. Home, in this way, might be taken as another value-sphere of modernity that is set up against, and dependent on, the rationalised spheres. How does this help with the question of the allure of art? Art can also be taken as a kind of home in modernity, but one where subjectivity is asserted not denied. In his rendition of the incident of the Sirens, Adorno can help us develop this idea. The disenchantment of the Sirens by Odysseus shows how the subject is formed both against, and as part of the mythic world: The intertwinement of myth, power, and labour is preserved in one of the tales of Homer. Book XII of the Odyssey tells how Odysseus sailed past the Sirens. Their allurement is that of losing oneself in the past. But the hero exposed to it has come of age in suffering. In the multitude of mortal dangers which he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the person, have been hardened. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 25) Odysseus, on the advice of Circe, asserts his domination over his men and enchanted nature by being tied to the mast, with his rowers’ ears deaf with wax. He alone hears, but is not destroyed, as were all before him. The Sirens’ song becomes, in this way, art. The bonds by which he has irrevocably fettered himself to praxis at the same time keep the Sirens at a distance from praxis: their lure is neutralised as a mere object of contemplation, as art.8 (Adorno, 2002a: 27) Odysseus uses his cunning and reason to free himself from the powers of enchantment, but he can only do this by fettering himself; reason itself is a limitation in its domination. However, tied to the mast, he is enlarged as a subject by his experience of the Sirens’ song. This experience consists of a magical element that is smuggled out of the enchanted cosmos in the very act of disenchantment; the Sirens’ song is made art. In this way, art is a remembrance of the lost world of enchantment, and becomes the homeward direction of the Western subject; as the rational subject gains its autonomy from the mythic past it wants to return, but it is only in disenchanted art that the magical spell of the Sirens can now still be felt. The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied only in art, in which even history, as a representation of past life, is included. As long as art does not insist on being treated as knowledge, and thus exclude itself from praxis, it is tolerated by social praxis in the same way as pleasure. But the Sirens’ song has not yet been deprived of power as art.9 (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 25)

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Enlightenment and myth are entwined in the way that art, as this separate sphere in rationalised, disenchanted modernity, and now entirely safe from any enchanted powers, can still invoke the magical past. If this is so, then art is one of the rare means by which the homesickness of modernity is alleviated, if never cured. The long journey of the Western subject comes home to art, as a kind of return to its beginning point in the enchanted past. This home of art, unlike the domestic family home, is the positive affirmation of autonomous subjectivity, if of a peculiarly aesthetic kind. However, the modern worldview is, of course, disenchanted, so there is no new magical or re-enchanted reality to be found in the aesthetic; it is both critique of myth as well as its redemption, as Adorno says. Vitally, at the end of the journey, the subject reaches a disenchanted remnant of the magical cosmos that was left behind at the very beginning. That is, the value-sphere of art – this inner cosmos that sits within the disenchanted universe – is a faint echo of the enchanted, Homeric world of the Sirens. Within this home of the aesthetic value-sphere, the endless pursuit of art, which constantly strengthens this internal order, is the attempt, which can never succeed but can never be abandoned, to travel back to the starting point of Odysseus’ voyage: to get back, in fact, to the time before art. Each artwork stretches out to grasp something that is always just out of reach, and a new work is then created to repeat this same compulsive but futile act of return. The senselessness of the cultural endlessness of art is leavened, as we have seen, by meaningful labour and an internally objective purposiveness, but there is a desperation present, nevertheless. For in the production of the new, art is trying to regain an ancient meaning by moving further and further away from it. So, in its departure from the ancient world the subject was always trying to return, but the winds of the West were relentlessly pushing its ship further away – homewards. The subject finally comes home to art, as the separate sphere of Hegel and Weber’s account. In this way, the long journey of the Odyssean subject is completed. And on this depiction of home and the Sirens in Dialectic of Enlightenment, some substance might be given to Adorno’s claims in Aesthetic Theory that art disenchants disenchantment, and becomes the voice that speaks for what was lost in the most distantly archaic. (as quoted, Adorno, 2002a: 118) If the value-sphere is enriched in this way, the appeal of art is boosted, but the utopian dimension would, again, seem to be made less likely. This is a looking back, rather than towards some utopian, future alternative. And, as a kind of homecoming, art is the end of the journey of the Western subject in term of disenchantment, even if homesickness is not thereby entirely overcome. It is not clear, then, that there is anything in art that points to something beyond. In fact, with the inclusion of disenchantment into art, on Adorno’s own account it would seem that even more weight can be added to the idea that the value-sphere of art is part of the fate of modernity, as against Adorno’s repeated claim that the experience of non-domination in art offers the faintest glimmer of an exit sign.

120  Adorno II Suffering and taste Adorno casts the tragic reversal of Hegel’s telos of history in terms of suffering: It is the horror that verifies Hegel and stands him on his head. If he transfigured the totality of historic suffering into the positivity of the self-realising absolute, the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day – with occasional breathing spells – would teleologically be the absolute of suffering. (Adorno, 1973: 320) Such an absolute of suffering has ethical implications: A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum – bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives. (Adorno, 1973: 365) This ‘bodily’ morality is posited here against reason but also against all culture: Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed. That this could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences says more than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in those fields themselves, in the autarky that is emphatically claimed for them. All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage. (Adorno, 1973: 366–7; also, Adorno, 1981a: 34) However, not only does Adorno try to present art as the one place where this ‘untruth’ might, to some degree, be undone, but the very point of art would seem to be concerned with suffering. For, as we have noted, ‘it would be preferable that some fine day art vanish altogether than that it forget the suffering that is its expression and in which form has its substance’ (as quoted, Adorno, 2002a: 260); indeed, this suffering ‘demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it’ (as quoted, Adorno, 1980: 188). In a sense, if suffering attains such significance for Adorno as the tragic endpoint of the long history of Western Enlightenment, then art must also contain suffering at its core if it is to be able to play the part that Adorno wants for it.

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But the references to how suffering might have this aesthetic significance are surprisingly slight, even though sometimes they do say how vital suffering is to art, as we have just seen. Let us run through Adorno’s brief statements on art and suffering, beyond the more generalised claims already given. So, Adorno considers that in the ‘expression’10 of art, suffering can find its voice: ‘Expression is the suffering countenance of artworks’ (Adorno, 2002a: 111; also, 2002a: 110, 117, 252; Adorno, 2018: 62, 75). Such aesthetic expression is opposed to the harmonious and in dissonance gains a mimesis of pain and suffering (Adorno, 2002a: 110; Adorno, 2004: 86). Similarly, the ugly has a psychological identification ‘with the expression of suffering’ (Adorno, 2002a: 49; also, more generally, Adorno, 2002a: 19, 21, 40). At times, ‘the terrifying power’ (Adorno, 1980: 188) of some of the works of his favoured modernist artists, such as Schoenberg, Klee, Picasso, Beckett and Kafka, are mentioned, almost as asides, as providing something like this mimesis of suffering. (e.g., Adorno, 2002a: 237, 252, 257; Adorno, 1980: 191; Adorno, 1981b: 172; Adorno, 1991a: 59; Adorno, 2004: 86, 132) However, against this trend, beauty, in its negation of reality, is also tied to suffering (Adorno, 2018: 117, 127); and in the romantic ideals of lyric poetry suffering is captured in being so thoroughly opposed: Their pure subjectivity, the aspect of them that appears seamless and harmonious bears witness to its opposite, to suffering in an existence alien to the subject and to love for it as well – indeed, their harmoniousness is actually nothing but the mutual accord of this suffering and this love. (Adorno, 1991b: 41) Such statements on how both beauty and the dissonant and ugly can express suffering are not contradictory, given Adorno’s proposed continuum between these opposite poles of aesthetic judgement. However, if suffering is so central to the very existence of art, the problem here is how undeveloped these claims are. Part of the explanation of this problem might, perhaps, be found in Adorno himself, when he is explicit on the way that art ‘forbids’ suffering while also being its expression; if it is there at all, suffering can only have a small and threatened aesthetic existence. Indeed, here lies one of the aporias of the aesthetic: The artwork is not only the echo of suffering, it diminishes it; form, the organon of its seriousness, is at the same time the organon of the neutralisation of suffering. Art thereby falls into an unsolvable aporia. The demand for complete responsibility on the part of artworks increases the burden of their guilt; therefore this demand is to be set in counterpoint with the antithetical demand for irresponsibility. (Adorno, 2002a: 39) He also lays out the way that suffering is so easily lost in art despite, or perhaps because of, the best intentions. This point is exemplified in a piece by Schoenberg.

122  Adorno II Schoenberg’s Survivor of Warsaw remains trapped in the aporia …The socalled artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite. The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. (Adorno, 1980: 189) In this instance the attempt to express suffering fails as the pleasure and meaning of art dominates and the horror of the content is lessened. For Adorno the voice of suffering in art is always difficult to hear and is usually silenced by the very aesthetic means that is trying to make it heard. Although Adorno’s arguments on suffering are relatively slight, his overall depiction of art as a separate realm of negation, set against the brutality of the surrounding actuality, might seem to allow a minimal, contested place for the expression of suffering in art. But even this shrunken, dialectically framed site of suffering is questionable, once we turn back to Weber and consider more fully his arguments on suffering and modernity. As we have seen, Weber’s value-sphere theory of modernity is set against the ethic of brotherliness as part of his sociology of religion; and suffering, the problem of theodicy, is the central concern of the religious ethic of brotherly love.11 The sheer impersonality of the rationalised spheres of modernity prohibits such an ethic, especially in the capitalist economic reality. While the aesthetic valuesphere is formed against the rationalised reality of modernity, it is as implacably hostile to an ethic of brotherliness as the spheres it opposes. The formative values of the sphere of art – subjectivity, form, and taste – ensure that this is the case. In consequence Weber repeats the point that the immorality of modernity in the face of suffering can be ascribed not just to the ruthlessness of making money, but also to the pursuit of aesthetic taste. This is apparent in the following extended version of a previously given quotation: As a matter of fact, the refusal of modern men to assume responsibility for moral judgments tends to transform judgments of moral intent into judgments of taste (‘in poor taste’ instead of ‘reprehensible’). The inaccessibility of appeal from aesthetic judgments excludes discussion. This shift from the moral to the aesthetic evaluation of conduct is a common characteristic of intellectualist epochs; it results partly from subjectivist needs and partly from the fear of appearing narrow-minded in a traditionalist and Philistine way. (Weber, 1948b: 342, emphasis added) So, when Adorno’s aesthetic theory takes up suffering as, in some sense, the very point of art, it has strayed into Weber’s vast sociological terrain and we need to consider its fate in such an environment. The major point of dispute centres on the concept of ‘taste.’

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Taste is the foundation of Kant’s aesthetic theory of course, and from such a starting point Kant initially rejects, and then labours to try to retrieve a moral dimension for the aesthetic. Weber agrees with the Kantian view that taste is foundational, and, because of this, Weber accepts that any retrieval of some kind of ‘aesthetic morality’ is simply oxymoronic. Adorno, on the other hand, is in a difficult position. As usual, Adorno knows all the philosophical reasons why art must reject any ethical purpose, and, as we have seen, he applauds Kant’s ‘purposiveness without purpose’ formula – an understanding in which any ethical end must struggle to survive. However, although he does not put it in these terms, Adorno’s own categorical imperative demands that art have some moral purpose if it is to have any point at all. Somehow, art has to play some part in making sure that Auschwitz never happens again. How is Adorno able to make this claim, especially given the acknowledged anti-ethical nature of art? A double movement is at work here whereby the problems of an ethical end in art are seemingly stripped away from ‘suffering.’ (But it should be stressed that we are, at this point, extrapolating speculatively from the brief remarks on suffering that Adorno has given us.) Firstly, the mimesis of suffering in aesthetic form gives suffering the appearance of a bare material reality that art can somehow express, and the ethical dimension of this reality is suppressed. In this way, there is the appearance that the dilemma of the moral end has been avoided. Secondly, and more importantly, Adorno argues against the applicability of ‘taste’ to art, especially when taste is applied to modern art. The value clash of taste and morality that is so important to Kant and Weber is, apparently, no longer present as a problem. Adorno has quite a lot to say on taste, and we need to summarise his arguments with Weber’s sociology of art in mind. A number of strands make up Adorno’s rejection of taste. Firstly, whatever worth taste might have had in the past has now been undone by the failures of the modern subject. The concept of taste is itself outmoded. Responsible art adjusts itself to criteria which approximate judgements: the harmonious and the inharmonious, the correct and incorrect. But otherwise, no more choices are made; the question is no longer put, and no one demands the subjective justification of the conventions. The very existence of the subject who could verify such taste has become as questionable as has, at the opposite pole, the right to a freedom of choice which empirically, in any case, no one any longer exercises. (Adorno, 1991a: 29–30) Adorno sheets this failure home to the way the culture industry has infected official artistic culture; the individual has been liquidated in both: The sacrifice of individuality, which accommodates itself to the regularity of the successful, the doing of what everybody does, follows from the basic fact that in broad areas the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods. But the commercial necessity of

124  Adorno II connecting this identity leads to the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretence of individualism which necessarily increases in proportion to the liquidation of the individual. Even in the realm of the superstructure, the appearance is not merely the concealment of the essence, but proceeds of necessity from the essence itself. The identical character of the goods which everyone must buy hides itself behind the rigour of the universally compulsory style. (Adorno, 1991a: 40, emphasis added) The culture industry’s standardised consumption is overlaid with ‘compulsory style’ in art, which all must accept as their own taste. He goes on to deplore the reduction of musical ‘taste’ to the ‘counting of beats,’ the repetition of pleasing parts of great works with no understanding of the whole, and, what we would term the celebrity cults of performers (with limited skills and repertoire), conductors and even instruments (with, for example, the fetishisation of the Stradivarius). Secondly, taste is compromised by the need to include objects that are merely well made and harmlessly pleasurable, like porcelain figurines. Adorno characterises French art and its lack of a ‘concept of kitsch’ as an exemplification of such taste, something that ‘true’ works of art must break apart: It is the fortune and limitation of French art never to have entirely eradicated the pride in making little pictures, just as it differs most obviously from German art in not acknowledging the concept of kitsch. In countless significant manifestations it casts a conciliatory glance at what pleases because it was skilfully made: sublime artistry keeps a hold on sensuous life by a moment of harmless pleasure in the bien fait. While the absolute claim of perfection without becoming, the dialectic of truth and appearance, is thus renounced, the untruth of those dubbed by Haydn the Grand Moguls is also avoided; they, determined to have no truck with the winsome vignette or figurine, succumb to fetishism by driving out all fetishes. Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realise themselves in their resultant downfall. (Adorno, 2005: 226–7, emphasis added; see also Adorno, 2018: Lecture 17) With regard to these first two attacks on taste, it might well be admitted that much ‘tasteful’ appreciation of art does mimic the practices of consumption in the culture industry; and it can also be admitted that the connoisseur’s taste for ‘objets d’art’ stands in tension with an appreciation of, e.g., Beckett. However, it is when Adorno, with a third stratagem, directly addresses Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Judgement (Adorno, 2002a: 163ff) that his position against taste becomes less tenable.

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Basically, Adorno assumes that Kant’s fundamental stress on the subject and the irrational in the 3rd Critique means that the judgement of taste should be unseated from its pride of place in aesthetics. But we will see that taste cannot be discarded so easily, as Adorno himself is forced to admit. Adorno’s overall position on taste is that not only has modern art’s demand for more theory and less subjectivity left the judgement of taste behind, but it was probably never up to the task set for it by Kant in the first place. Taste, on account of its subjectivistic prejudice, itself stands in need of theoretical reflection not only as to why it fails in the face of the most recent modernism but why it may long have been inadequate to advanced art. (Adorno, 2002a: 333; also, e.g., 115) This demotion of taste by Adorno is problematic in three ways. Firstly, it depends on a mischaracterisation of Kant’s position; secondly, Adorno himself is forced to admit that anti-rationality is a necessary presence; and thirdly, Adorno’s own dealing with the subject-object relation of art seems to be an exemplification, not a refutation, of Kant’s judgement of taste. So firstly, the dismissal of Kantian taste as overly subjective and irrational is only possible because Adorno discounts and effectively ignores the conceptual, intersubjective aspects of Kant’s notion of subjective universal communicability. The definition of taste and the beautiful as ‘that which pleases universally without requiring a concept’ is understood by Adorno exclusively in subjectivist terms, and notably absent is Kant’ s understanding of the quasi-rational language demanded by the artwork. Such a definition of taste is held to begin and end with the subject, when Adorno, somewhat ungenerously, thinks: that something [which] ‘pleases universally’ is equivalent to the judgment that it must please each and every person. (Adorno, 2002a: 165) Here the object of art has a place in Kant’s theory merely as the means by which an individual, subjective pleasure is extended, formally, to include the pleasing of ‘each and every’ subject. The result is that, within Adorno’s dialectical rendering of the subject-object relation of art, ‘individual taste’ can be discredited as simply too subjectivist: 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. (Adorno, 2002a: 166, emphasis added) However, in seeming contradiction with this depiction of Kant, Adorno does concede that the judgement of taste is not in fact so simply subjectivist. With some

126  Adorno II inevitable qualifications, Kant is given considerable credit for his early recognition of the fundamental aporia of the art object’s relation to the subject, and the judgement of taste is no longer caricatured as simply anti-rational subjectivism: It is to Kant’s credit that he recognised the aporia of aesthetic objectivity and the judgment of taste. He did indeed carry out an aesthetic analysis of the judgment of taste in terms of its elements, but he conceived them at the same time as latent, aconceptually objective elements … Kant brought into thought the deepest impulses of an art that only developed in the one hundred fifty years after his death: an art that probed after its objectivity openly, without protection of any kind. (Adorno, 2002a, 343, emphasis added) Kant’s judgement of taste is therefore at best ambivalent in Adorno’s theory, but the overall logic of Adorno’s position strongly tends towards the rejection and misrepresentation of Kant on this issue. A second problem for Adorno’s view of taste is that he cannot himself sustain the theoretical, rational posture that supposedly accompanies modernist art. So, in terms of the place of reason in art, Adorno is compelled to allocate some significant space to the irrational or, at least, the anti-rational. Indeed, Adorno himself needs to flirt with such terms as ‘quasi-rational’ (Adorno, 2002a: 66) and ‘quasiconceptual’ (Adorno, 2002a: 137), and, seemingly, cannot avoid the anti-rational tendencies of art when, because of art’s enigmatic ‘illusoriness,’ any logic in art is ‘figurative rather than real’ (Adorno, 2002a: 137). The very purposelessness of the artwork demands such a specifically aesthetic logic: The truth of artworks depends on whether they succeed at absorbing into their immanent necessity what is not identical with the concept, what is according to that concept accidental. The purposefulness of artworks requires the purposeless, with the result that their own consistency is predicated on the illusory; semblance is indeed their logic. (Adorno, 2002a: 101) We also need to remember that Adorno’s own theory must deny reason – so complicit in the domination of nature and humanity – an unqualified place in the aesthetic. In other words, for all these reasons, Adorno’s mixture of art and rationality also seems to include a heavy dose of irrationality. The proffered contrast with Kant and the judgement of taste is therefore not nearly as stark as Adorno sometimes states it. However, it is the third problem that is the most important for our argument, since it leads directly back to Weber. After the dismissal of taste, it becomes apparent that Adorno’s own dealing with the subject-object relations in art simply reproduces Kant’s dilemmas of taste, albeit with more weight perhaps given to the objective and the rational. Simply, Adorno’s aesthetic understanding cannot do away with the subjective irrationality of art, and when Kant’s conceptual language of taste is again recognised and restored to its rightful place, then Kant and

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Adorno might both be regarded as basically working on the same problem and in the same terms. That is, for both Kant and Adorno, within the separate purposelessness of the aesthetic sphere, art must embody the subjective and objective, and the rational and irrational. Vitally, the pivotal role of the subject is shown by Adorno to be irreplaceable. The basic Kantian formula of the judgement of taste is exhibited in the following example from Adorno’s lectures on aesthetics: Let me add a second thing: I think that what is also central for accessing a work of art, for experiencing a work of art as a work of art in the first place, is that one is met with an experience of – how should I put it? – ‘meaning’ as something objective. I understand a work of art at the moment when … I understand what it is itself saying as something it says to me, not as something I am projecting onto it, something that has come only from me … I would say that this is precisely the threshold on which the artistic experience of a work of art sets itself apart from the pre-artistic or merely material experience, when one becomes aware of that quality in the work that inheres in it as an objectivity, as something spiritually objective that does not extend beyond the subject viewing the work. (Adorno, 2018: 37–8; also, e.g., 2002a: 163ff, 164 esp.) There is an objective ‘meaning’ in the artwork that is speaking only to the individual subject. This meaning is therefore not one of purely personal taste, but it is also not like the usual meaning of an object that can have some easily agreed common end and might be rationally discussed. It is ‘something spiritually objective that does not extend beyond the subject viewing the work.’ ‘Spiritual’ here indicates that the artwork is both objective and not like any non-aesthetic object, and it is immensely hard to put this spiritual meaning into rational terms – as we have seen, on a philosophical level, above. Adorno, then, would seem to be confronting the very problem Kant addresses at the start of the section on aesthetics in the Critique of Judgement, and in basically similar terms. More generally it can be said that in Adorno’s many negotiations between objectivism and subjectivism the difference between his theory and Kant’s is, as with this example, more a matter of balance than substance. On the basis of these three problem areas we can say that Adorno does not seem to have extricated himself from the Kantian aesthetic logic as successfully as he would have liked. What has this to do with suffering? Simply, if against his intentions Adorno shows that art cannot escape the hold of ‘taste,’ then a place for suffering in art becomes even harder than his dialectical statements allow. It is here that Weber’s sociological perspective can be reintroduced. Adorno’s equivocal philosophical position on taste stands in direct confrontation with Weber’s whole theory of the value-sphere structure of modernity which is based, as we have seen, on the hostility of each and every value-sphere to an ethic of suffering. The irrational value-sphere of art has taste, with its ‘subjectivist needs’ (as quoted, Weber, 1948b: 342), as its central value, and so is implacably

128  Adorno II opposed to an appreciation of suffering. Or, as Weber also says, the rise of art and its ‘unappealable subjectivity’ marks a ‘shift from the judgment “reprehensible” to the judgment “in poor taste”’ (Weber, 1978: 608). The great stress here is on how the subject-directed nature of aesthetic taste must stand in utter opposition to an ethic of care for the suffering of the other. From this Weberian, sociological perspective, if suffering is to be allowed some aesthetic voice, then Adorno would need to show how art is not definitionally determined by taste. However, as we have just seen, the opposite is the case; although Adorno does indeed try to prise taste out of his aesthetic theory, this attempt is doubtfully successful, especially in terms of the key Kantian components. The measurement of taste still applies even when the most theory-laden, ugly, high modernist forms of art are under consideration. Adorno’s theory, then, tends to confirm the Weberian view and, since taste is sustained, suffering cannot be granted the position in art that Adorno claims for it. In other words, Adorno puts his own position on suffering under threat by providing philosophical confirmation of Weber’s sociology of taste. Even further, to go beyond Weber, rather than being the one site where the voice of suffering can be found and some counter to Auschwitz expressed, the separate value-sphere of art might be identified as one of the causes of this horrific telos of history. Adorno, of course, does not exclude art from culpability but, from this Weberian perspective, the complicity of the aesthetic increases and, perhaps, comes to match that of reason itself. However, it might still be argued that a more dialectical approach could allow a kind of negative expression of suffering against, not only the prevailing order of the external rationalised spheres, but also the dominant internal order of the aesthetic sphere. This is surely the basic approach of Adorno, who is opposed to most art as firmly as he is against the culture industry. For within Adorno’s own schema, the expression of suffering, although sometimes it is generally stated as part of all art, is confined to the smallest, most heavily qualified of spaces – to only a few works, in effect. However, once such works are set within Weber’s aesthetic value-sphere, they are compelled to follow the internal logic of taste if they are to remain as art; there are no exceptions. This tiny voice then seems easily silenced by the sociological force of that of which it is a part. To understand the strength of these forces that oppose an ethics of suffering in art, the aesthetic sphere needs only to be compared with the other spheres of modernity. To enter the aesthetic value-sphere as an artist is to be bound to the values of taste as surely as the capitalist is bound to money-making in the economic sphere, the politician to the game of power in the political sphere and the intellectual to disenchanted reason in the value-sphere of science. Of course, there might well be individual acts of personal kindness and compassion, but if the logic of the value-spheres is not followed then failure and expulsion are guaranteed. As a final point regarding Adorno and taste, Adorno not only confirms the internal, loveless value structure of the aesthetic sphere but the very fact that art is deemed to be in need of an ethics of suffering would suggest that the guilt of modernity described by Weber is also confirmed by Adorno’s overall aesthetic theory. On Weber’s analysis, Adorno is here caught up in the ethical judgement

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of the age by an ethic of brotherly love. The presence of this ethic is part of Weber’s value-sphere theory of modernity as set within his overarching sociology of religion. For Weber, an ethics of suffering, as exhibited by Adorno, cannot be accounted for as merely the expression of some natural bodily or psychological trait but is the outcome of long and complex religious rationalisations that still determine the makeup of the modern secular world. However, since this is not a topic that can directly aid our argument, more cannot be said here. When we consider the appeal of art in terms of the question of suffering three points might be made. Firstly, as part of the overall logic of modernity the value-sphere of art will shut out the ethical expression of suffering because of the overriding subjectivist appeal of freedom and salvation; secondly, the aesthetic sphere is perhaps unique in modernity in that its separation from the surrounding historical forces would seem to exclude the real suffering that is part of all the other spheres, especially the economic and political; and thirdly, although a morality of suffering is effectively incompatible with the reigning values of the aesthetic sphere, there is the continued self-belief that this is not the case. In other words, there is a persistent view that art is moral, and that, by extension, an appreciation of suffering can be part of its intrinsic makeup to some degree. Arguments for the moral dimension of the aesthetic began with Kant and have remained undiminished; Adorno, in all his philosophical sophistication, is part of this tradition. Finally, with this point in mind and building on what has already been discussed in the chapter on Kant, we can contemplate the idea that a possible reason for the ongoing opinion that art can be good lies in the functionless nature of the aesthetic realm which has been cut off from prosaic history. Such a purposeless state of separation from the reality of suffering – for art apparently to escape Hegel’s ‘slaughter-bench’ of history (Hegel, 2001: 35) – is to gain a seeming innocence.12 We have seen how Kant helps introduce such a connection between art and morality, and Adorno’s rescue of the Kantian emphasis on natural beauty further helps account for the perception that there is a moral dimension to art; that is, the relative guiltlessness of art is sustained, in part, by always being bound to the even purer innocence of nature – the rightful place of a ‘beautiful soul.’ Weber’s sociology of the aesthetic sphere is dedicated to showing how, on the contrary, salvation not suffering is the meaning of this inner cosmos, and how, just like any other value-sphere, art is not innocent but guilty. But, notwithstanding this sociological reality, art’s appealing self-belief that it can be good, which Adorno so knowingly perpetuates, might be given some kind of explanation by this combination of Hegel (the separation of art from the prosaic, dominant forces of history) and Kant (the purity of natural beauty): art is able to consider itself cleansed of the sufferings of history and so can assume a position of moral ascendancy.

Politics and art After this consideration of the ‘more’ of art, we need to add one item in another column on the ‘less’ of art; that is, something has to be subtracted from art,

130  Adorno II according to Adorno: politics. Politics is not what art can do, says Adorno, if it still wants to be art. The strength of Adorno’s position here relies on his take on the Hegelian end of art: the separateness of the aesthetic sphere sufficiently allows art to escape complicity in the horrific historical outcomes of the 20th century for the ‘more’ to be possible; and this balance between being isolated from, and mimetic of, the forces of history disallows one of the most common ways that art is understood to be engaged with the prosaic world – through political effect. In other words, to think that art can change the political landscape misunderstands the nature of art in modernity.13 In ‘Commitment,’ two of Adorno’s given examples are instructive. Following Sartre, he asks the question whether perhaps the greatest modern artwork with clear political intent, Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ did have any historical/political impact. And the answer is, probably, ‘no.’ Great art, but poor politics. The other, more elaborated example concerns Brecht’s plays. Here Adorno makes the case that the direct didacticism of, for example, ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ results in poor art and poor politics. Not only is the theoretical understanding weak (fascism is not like criminal gangs), and the political effect nil (only the already converted will attend), but the work has sacrificed its separate, ‘autonomous’ status, and is so directly imitative of historical specifics, that the ‘more’ of artistic form is lost. Two quotations illustrate this point. Sartre’s frank doubt whether Guernica ‘won a single supporter for the Spanish cause’ certainly also applies to Brecht’s didactic drama. Scarcely anyone needs to be taught the fabula docet to be extracted from it – that there is injustice in the world; while the moral itself shows few traces of the dialectical theory to which Brecht gave cursory allegiance. The trappings of epic drama recall the American phrase ‘preaching to the converted.’ (Adorno, 1980: 185) His [Brecht’s] attempt to reconstruct the reality of society thus led first to a false social model and then to dramatic implausibility. Bad politics becomes bad art, and vice-versa. (Adorno, 1980: 187; also, Adorno, 2002a: 144, 242, 247; and Adorno, 2005: 144–5) Against Brecht, Adorno provides those rare examples of art that can engage effectively with history, but it is not a political engagement. So, as mentioned, it is through their artistic form that, for example, Beckett and Kafka in the literary field can capture a mimetic truth that produces a real ‘change of attitude’: Here every commitment to the world must be abandoned to satisfy the ideal of the committed work of art – that polemical alienation which Brecht as a theorist invented, and as an artist practised less and less as he committed himself more firmly to the role of a friend of mankind. This paradox, which might be charged with sophistry, can be supported without much philosophy

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by the simplest experience: Kafka’s prose and Beckett’s plays, or the truly monstrous novel The Unnameable, have an effect by comparison with which officially committed works look like pantomimes. Kafka and Beckett arouse the fear which existentialism merely talks about. By dismantling appearance, they explode from within the art which committed proclamation subjugates from without, and hence only in appearance. The inescapability of their work compels the change of attitude which committed works merely demand. He over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed, has lost for ever both any peace with the world and any chance of consoling himself with the judgment that the way of the world is bad; the element of ratification which lurks in resigned admission of the dominance of evil is burnt away. (Adorno, 1980: 191: also, e.g., Adorno, 2002a: 153–4; Adorno, 1973: 380–1; Adorno, 1981c: e.g., 258) In sum, such examples have no immediate external political content or force since they constitute a negation that is enveloped in the aesthetic. This aesthetic limit is the source of their power. Brecht, on the other hand, is caught in a no-man’s land between politics and art. For the purposes of our argument two points would seem to flow from Adorno’s position here on politics and art. Firstly, the dilemma embodied by Brecht, on Adorno’s reading, might be best understood in terms of the Weberian valuespheres. Brecht is caught between the aesthetic and political spheres and can be in either one or the other, to try to be in both results in bad politics and bad art. And, secondly, in terms of the appeal of art, Adorno shows us how art considers that it can be political, and this self-belief, however ill-founded, is an undimmed, highly attractive constant of contemporary art. In this case, we can agree with Adorno’s fundamentally Hegelian stance that the aesthetic and political have become separated, but as with the appeal of some of his own items on the ‘more’ of art list, it is the seeming of art, not the actuality, that is paramount.

Conclusion: Adorno and Weber We have covered a wide span of Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy, but the obligatory qualification needs to be made that it has necessarily been both brief and incomplete. The contribution that Adorno has made to the understanding of the appeal of art in modernity has been considerable. In this conclusion the theoretical relations between Adorno and Weber will be described and further explored, and in this process the various ways that Adorno has helped us make more sense of art’s appeal will be highlighted. Against Weber: rationality and suffering Overall, the very way that Adorno has enhanced the Weberian sociology of the value-sphere of art has, arguably, also led to an undermining of Adorno’s own

132  Adorno II claims for art. In a sense, the whole structure of the current argument ensured that this was always going to be the case. We began with Weber’s sociology of modernity, proceeded through Kant and Hegel, and have now tried to catch Adorno in this net of argumentation. However, there is a substantial point that can be garnered from this seeming ambush of Adorno: Adorno starts with Kant and Hegel, and, in the end, does not escape this pre-determined philosophical understanding. Our Weberian beginning point, on the other hand, has the potential to both use Adorno’s philosophical insights, and also explain in sociological terms the seemingly insuperable dilemmas that he documents.14 Adorno, through his engagement with Kant and Hegel, is still trying to make sense of the nature of art as a series of philosophical problems, which cannot, in the end, be resolved. But they cannot be resolved because of the very nature of aesthetic modernity that Weber, in part, describes (and, it should be noted, that Adorno, as usual, acknowledges). The two specific, self-proclaimed ‘aporias’ of Adorno that face this sociological explanation concern rationality and suffering. So, in order to secure a truth for art, Adorno seeks to grant art a more rational, philosophical dimension as a counter to both Kant and Hegel’s subjectivist irrationalism, with Kant’s alleged ‘hedonism’ a particular target. However, Adorno could not shrug off the inherent power of the anti-rational subjectivity of art. From the perspective of the value-spheres Adorno was caught between the intellectual/ scientific value-sphere and that of art. The aesthetic sphere is necessarily opposed to the rationalised spheres in modernity, and there is no philosophical escape from this sociological condition. Second, art needed to possess an ethical appreciation of suffering for Adorno, even though he acknowledges the forces that forbid such a moral dimension. This aporia is set within Adorno’s philosophy of art, but, once placed within the sociology of the value-spheres, the oppositional forces are so strong, according to Weber, that any kind of aesthetic ethics of suffering seems to be, simply, out of the question. In sympathy with Weber: means and ends, and disenchantment If Adorno and Weber are in conflict over rationality and suffering, the well-known sympathy Adorno shows for Weber is exhibited in the problem of means and ends, and in the great overriding Weberian notion of disenchantment. Adorno, and the Frankfurt School more widely, enhances Weber’s sociology of means and ends with the concepts of instrumental rationality and the administered society. And Adorno, in particular, will stress how the purposelessness of art in its separate, autonomous sphere offers an alternative to this particular condition of modernity. Weber’s pivotal theory of disenchantment is taken up and extended by Adorno in both Aesthetic Theory and Dialectic of Enlightenment. By bringing together the ideas on disenchanted art in these two works we were able, in our turn, to extend Adorno’s ideas and add some more substance to Weber’s inner cosmos of art; it was argued that the aesthetic sphere offers a homecoming for the Western subject at the end of its journey of disenchantment.

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Additions to Weber: beauty, truth, and freedom Beyond a direct engagement with Weber, Adorno is able to add some further factors that might explain the appealing nature of the aesthetic value-sphere. The most important are beauty, truth, and freedom. Adorno directs us back to a re-engagement with beauty, which he links to the ugly of modern art. From what has already been argued, two points might be identified here. As a first point on beauty, the repeated Frankfurt School claim is that aesthetic beauty provides an experience of the non-domination of nature, and this is almost the sufficient cause of their utopian hopes for art. For our argument, part of the appeal of art might well lie in this element of contrast between, in Weberian terms, the aesthetic and rationalised value-spheres, so that this factor can be added to our understanding of art’s attraction, without necessarily leading to the promise, however slight, of utopia. As a second point, Adorno rightly draws us back to an unbreakable bond between modern art, where beauty is, at best, optional, and the long history of art where the centrality of beauty, including an association with natural beauty, is a given. As the inner cosmos of the aesthetic value-sphere strengthens and the internal logic of art leads to the new of art promoting the conceptual and the ugly, with Duchamp’s ready-mades still the quintessential representations of this rejection of the aesthetic past, Adorno reminds us that such forms of art cannot escape the hold of the beautiful against which they must always be compared. The ugly and beautiful are tied together in the value-sphere of art; and this connection is, in fact, institutionalised in the major art museums and galleries where vast numbers of tourists can search out the beautiful art of the past, and might then briefly wander through the modern art rooms wherein the ugly, almost always, is manifestly evident. Such confronting modern art is likely to be rejected as surely as the beautiful art of the past is likely to be embraced. The value-sphere of art, then, must contain both this history of the beautiful, with all its definitional, accessible attractions, as well as the newest art objects which, if not beautiful, still sustain the exclusive sense of freedom and salvation that are the mainstay, as we have seen, of the appeal of art. With the inclusion of beauty, then, we might be closer to understanding how modern art might be rejected, but the ideal of art and the artist still commonly pursued. On truth, Adorno does show us how the separation between art and the outside historical forces cannot be an absolute division and some mimetic truth is possible which may well give insights beyond the scope of reason, and this might be a sign of what makes a great work of art. However, it is far from clear that this adds up to anything more than Hegel’s admission of personal, aesthetic perceptions, even if musical form is granted this truth-making capacity. Adorno, of course, concedes this as part of the aporia of the truth/non-truth of art. This dilemma is understandable in terms of the value-sphere of art, where such insights are possible but only as part of the overwhelming aesthetic logic of subjectivity, form, and taste. They can only stand as the fleeting and personal and are always imperilled by the everpresent new of art production. Significantly, again following Hegel, such aesthetic

134  Adorno II truths must also be part of building the separate reality of the world of art objects; that is, the internal reality of the cosmos of the aesthetic sphere is constantly made and remade by these truths that are also untrue in the sense that they can only be formed and exist within the aesthetic realm – to leave the sphere of art is to leave these truths behind. Or, to put it in even more strongly Weberian terms, to depart the aesthetic value-sphere and its transitory, subjective truths is, as a modern self, to enter one of the other value-spheres and be subject to that internal order of meaning and truth. Modernity is, quite simply, the movement of the self between the competing value-spheres. And such a new order will not only be necessarily anti-aesthetic but also, in all likelihood, dominated by a more purely rational mode of legitimation (as must be the case with the economic, political/legal, and scientific spheres). Lastly, on freedom, Adorno adds to our understanding of both the internal order of the value-sphere and the external forces that surround it. The grandest of the prosaic hopes for Enlightenment freedom have come undone, in varying degrees, and from this objective dejection (or just limitation) the spell of subjectivity places art in a position of pre-eminence; the art object provides material proof and intersubjective approval of an inward authenticity.15 Under the subjectivist spell, art comes to be the expression of the ‘truth’ of an inner self – of an individual that does not, did not, and cannot exist. And this for-itself of subjectivity not only gives art an ideal status, but also enables those outside the art sphere to be able to call what they do ‘art.’ For if some personally made product or performance is held to be a genuine expression of the inner self, then the bond with art has been made. New ends The accumulation of such internal and external factors sets up art as a miniaturised cosmos of beauty, truth, and freedom within which humanity has been reordered as an end of history; and this enticing destination is separated from, and contrasted with, the outside historical forces of violence, suffering, and failure of the Enlightened West. Yes, it is only art, but this achievement of purified transcendence helps produce the contested but unflagging claims to a new set of aesthetic ends. Art can be accorded its own moral, political, and utopian ends not only because the aesthetic does not partake of the means/ends formulations of the other spheres, as Kant’s philosophy announced so early, but also because the internal cosmos gathers increasing structural strength through the development of its inner logic, while the external, prosaic telos has been so diminished that it seems to have disappeared entirely. Weber’s sociology of the value-spheres can be built up with this accumulated theory to include these ends of art. From this theoretical perspective we can see how such ends are necessarily contradictory and futile, but also a necessary presence. That is, not only is art inherently immoral, quarantined from the reality of the political sphere and wholly implicated in the fate of modernity, but it also possesses the inherent quality that it can be regarded as the opposite – as a possible means to good, political, and utopian ends.

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Indeed, Adorno himself represents this state of art in modernity. The political ends are rejected but, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Adorno follows the allure of aesthetic goodness and utopia to discover if there is something of substance in the appeal of art. What did he find? His aesthetic philosophy does proffer something ‘more,’ but only as a semblance which is itself endangered by the crushing weight of his own dialectical qualifications, even before it is threatened by Weberian sociological theory. Predictably, Adorno fully recognises that this allure of art might well be deceptive. A last, basic aporia tells this part of the tale, and in so doing introduces a Weberian element that brings us back to the start of our argument; back, in fact, to the problem of meaning in modernity. The final aporia The fundamental concern for Adorno is that instead of the ‘more’ of art pointing to something good and utopian, the aesthetic sphere merely will affirm the failure of history. This is the great, unsolvable dilemma – the aporia – of the separate, ‘autonomous’ realm of art for Adorno. It is for this reason that socially the situation of art is today aporetic. If art cedes its autonomy, it delivers itself over to the machinations of the status quo; if art remains strictly for-itself, it nonetheless submits to integration as one harmless domain among others. The social totality appears in this aporia, swallowing whole whatever occurs. (Adorno, 2002a: 237) He lays out this danger at the very start of Aesthetic Theory: Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic they appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation. The clichés of art’s reconciling glow enfolding the world are repugnant not only because they parody the emphatic concept of art with its bourgeois version and class it among those Sunday institutions that provide solace. These clichés rub against the wound that art itself bears. As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularisation without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that – shorn of any hope of a world beyond – strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. The principle of autonomy is itself suspect of giving consolation: By undertaking to posit totality out of itself, whole and self-encompassing, this image is transferred to the world in which art exists and that engenders it. By virtue of its rejection of the empirical world – a rejection that inheres in art’s concept and thus is no mere escape, but a law immanent to it – art sanctions the primacy of reality. (Adorno, 2002a: 1–2)

136  Adorno II Perhaps Adorno was reading Weber on the aesthetic value-sphere, and had such thoughts in mind when he wrote this. For here art starts to take on the shape of the value-sphere: the ‘autonomy’ of art results in a separate world, ‘whole and self-encompassing,’ that gives consolation for the losses of religious meaning and ‘sanctions’ the prevailing empirical order that it rejects.16 The importance of this aporia becomes more evident when we develop this implied Weberian content. On a broad level, Weber is able to supply what is missing in Adorno’s theory: a sociology of meaning in modernity. We have already seen how this works in terms of suffering/theodicy and enchantment/disenchantment, and this quotation indicates a third area of death and salvation. On death, Adorno does have long, critical discussions of existentialist philosophy, and the meaning of death does crop up occasionally in his aesthetic theory, e.g., with Beckett and, notably, in his argument on Beethoven’s late style (Adorno, 2002b: 566). However, as the above quotation demonstrates, he tends to assume the Enlightenment secularisation thesis that religious salvation is now simply absent. Consolation might be given by art, says Adorno, but something much stronger is at work, according to Weber: a sense of religion-rivalling salvation from a new kind of ‘death’ is deemed constitutive of the aesthetic value-sphere. Adorno, then, indicates there is a gap here in terms of the loss of religion, but in Weber’s hands this seemingly small ‘consolation’ of art expands to become a grand entrance to the self-enclosed realm of the aesthetic values where, once again, death has some measure of meaning. When this final aporia is filled in with Weber’s account of death and art, as set within his vast sociology of religion, two conclusions might be made. Firstly, the aesthetic affirmation of the historical reality has become so enlarged that Adorno’s utopian quality of art, whose continued existence became less and less likely the more our argument progressed, now seems a lost cause. And, secondly, we have a clearer idea of how art can entice entry to its inner world on the promise of finding goodness or the utopian. For, beyond the ‘clichés,’ as Adorno puts it, religious meanings of salvation are afforded a connection to art within secular modernity; and, on this basis, the purified inner cosmos of the aesthetic value-sphere is not just opposed to the competing spheres of rationalised, prosaic routine, but might also be said to gain its transcendent quality through an imitation, however faint, of other-worldly perfection. At this point, after adding Adorno’s insights to our stockpile, we are in a position to address a gnawing problem of art for Adorno: its denial of universal freedom. Any freedom in art is based on the unfreedom of the many; it is a world of privilege and comes clothed by bourgeois money and pretension; and art sustains the reality of economic and social inequality. Adorno knows all this, but still tries, as we have seen, to find something else in art. The theorist who focusses on art’s blatantly anti-universal traits and thinks there is nothing more to find is Pierre Bourdieu. To his sociology of art we can now turn.

Notes 1 Amongst many others, see: Mathew Arnold (and his critique of ‘machinery’ in Culture and Anarchy), Ruskin, Dickens (e.g., in Hard Times) and Dostoevsky (e.g., in Notes from Underground).

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2 This was especially recognised by Nietzsche. 3 This is quite a common term in Adorno, and is usually used in terms of the working of domination. Of note is how he associates it with the mimetic truth to be found in Kafka (Adorno, 2002a: 230) and Beckett: ‘This shabby, damaged world of images is the negative imprint of the administered world. To this extent Beckett is realistic.’ (Adorno, 2002a:31) 4 We will return briefly to Adorno’s rejection of taste, and his intricate dealings with the subject-object relations of art, below. 5 In this section the original German expression of key terms will be given far more prominence than elsewhere. The major reasons for such an emphasis are: some of the crucial terms need a fuller exposure than a bare translation allows; and, it needs to be demonstrated how closely Adorno follows Weber’s terminology of disenchantment. 6 Elsewhere he puts it as: ‘Their enchantment is disenchantment.’ (Adorno, 2002a: 227) 7 The later translation of this section is: It promises a passage to the homeland. It is a yearning for the homeland which sets in motion the adventures by which subjectivity, the prehistory of which is narrated in the Odyssey, escapes the primeval world. (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 60) Here Heimat and Heimweh are translated as ‘homeland’ and ‘yearning for the homeland,’ instead of ‘home’ and ‘homesickness.’ This does capture the more political, fascist connotations that Adorno does reference immediately, but such a politicised translation loses the general notion of home and homesickness which the next sections of the text employ, and which the current argument will assume. No bare English translation would seem to be able to meet this problem of meaning. Within this context, the later translation will be used from now on, but with this extra meaning flagged. 8 ‘Die Bande, mit denen er sich unwiderruflich an die Praxis gefesselt hat, halten zugleich die Sirenen aus der Praxis fern: ihre Lockung wird zum bloßen Gegenstand der Kontemplation neutralisiert, zur Kunst.’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2003: 51) 9 ‘Der Drang, Vergangenes als Lebendiges zu erretten, anstatt als Stoff des Fortschritts zu benützen, stillte sich allein in der Kunst, der selbst Geschichte als Darstellung vergangenen Lebens zugehört. Solange Kunst darauf verzichtet, als Erkenntnis zu gelten, und sich dadurch von der Praxis abschließt, wird sie von der gesellschaftlichen Praxis toleriert wie die Lust. Der Gesang der Sirenen aber ist noch nicht zur Kunst entmächtigt.’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2003: 50) 10 Sometimes this is directly linked to ‘expressionism’ (e.g., Adorno, 2018: 74–5). 11 It should be noted here that Adorno explicitly rejects the importance of the ethic of brotherly love basically because: it does not change the world - leaving everything as it is (Adorno, 2005: 77; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002: 102–3); and because of a failed universality – pity to one means injustice to others (Adorno, 2000: 173–4). In reply, there is a faintly disturbing reliance on Nietzsche’s moral philosophy in these claims; and, in terms of an ethic of compassion not changing the world, and being selective in its love and care, Adorno himself is at pains to point out that such lack of agency and anti-universality are, both, also the case for art. 12 The late 18th and early 19th centuries were replete with romantic views of such innocence, especially when associated with natural beauty (see, for example, Adorno, 2002a: 63–4, where Kant and Rousseau are discussed). 13 To give counter examples from the past or the repressive present/recent past (e.g., communist China, or the Soviet Union) merely serves to confirm the point being made here. 14 It must be said that some of Adorno’s other work often takes this same explicit theoretical trajectory into sociology. But not with his aesthetic theory, which remains firmly rooted in the philosophical paradigm. 15 Although, as already noted, this subjectivist view of art is, of course, heavily disputed within the confines of the aesthetic sphere itself – from, at least, Duchamp on; but, akin

138  Adorno II to beauty, such anti-subjectivist art merely follows the internal logic of the production of the necessary new and affirms by negation the inescapable value of subjectivity, which holds such opposition in its thrall. 16 Note also that what has been argued above about ‘the spell of subjectivity’ is apparently confirmed when Adorno is forced to concede that such consolation ‘strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself.’

6

Bourdieu Distinction and the game of art

Introduction Bourdieu helps us understand how art has appeal in modernity precisely because it is so fundamentally anti-universal. To gain access to the theoretical wealth that Bourdieu can provide, this chapter will be divided into two sections: first will be a summary of the large parts of Bourdieu’s now very familiar sociology of art that can most directly help the current argument; and, second, a critical perspective will have to be employed in order to wed Bourdieu’s theory to the Weber/Kant/ Hegel/Adorno combination already constructed. It should be noted that, with regard to the second section, a critique of Bourdieu is necessary because Bourdieu maintains a somewhat dogmatic rejection of any kind of philosophically oriented theory, and this includes large swathes of Weber. As we will see, this proclaimed theoretical distinction is based on an epistemological absolutism that pertains to his ‘science’ of sociology, and on his apparent view that such philosophical theorising is part of the ideological problem that his science has unmasked.

Bourdieu’s sociology of art Habitus and capital Art is a means by which the dominant class maintains power over the working classes. The Marxist orientation in terms of class is explicit, but Bourdieu extends the understanding of ‘class’ through additional concepts such as, most notably, habitus and cultural capital. This conceptual expansion avoids the traps of economic reductionism that have beset most class analyses of art and culture. The ability to appreciate art – to feel comfortable in art museums, to know what to say and when, to understand how long the viewer should stand in front of a painting – all these capabilities are historically determined and are learnt by the cultivated fractions of the dominant class. The major social institutions through which such deeply embodied knowledge – habitus – is gained are the family and the education system. Cultural and educational capital are the results of such social training, and it is on this basis that the dominant legitimate culture of art is made available to the cultivated few. Through privileged access to cultural and

140 Bourdieu educational capital a habitus is attained that grants entry to art, while, at the same time, of course, those classes where family and schooling do not provide such capital and habitus are, to a very large extent, shut out. Yes, art museums might be free and many might sometimes attend, but the crucial social distinctions of art are not therefore erased. As Bourdieu says of cultural capital1: The embodied cultural capital of the previous generations functions as a sort of advance (both a head-start and a credit) which, by providing from the outset the example of culture incarnated in familiar models, enables the newcomer to start acquiring the basic elements of the legitimate culture, from the beginning, that is, in the most unconscious and impalpable way – and to dispense with the labour of deculturation, correction and retraining that is needed to undo the effects ofinappropriate learning. (Bourdieu, 1984: 70–1) ‘Habitus’ and its relation to art might be gleaned from the following: The habitus urges, interrogates, makes the object speak, while for its part, the object seems to incite, call upon, provoke the habitus; of course … skills, memories or images that manage to blend with the properties directly perceived can only come forth because, for a predisposed habitus, they seem magically evoked by these properties (the magical efficacy which poetry often attributes to itself finds its principle in that sort of almost physical harmony which gives words, and their connotations, the power to call up experiences buried in the folds of the body). In short, if (as aesthetes never stop proclaiming) the artistic experience is a matter of sense and, feeling, and not of decoding and reasoning, it is because the dialectic between the constituting act and the constitutive object, mutually soliciting each other, is effected in the essentially obscure relationship between the habitus and the world. (Bourdieu, 1996: 320; also, e.g., Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977/1990: 39, on schooling and habitus) As a form of ideology, the social determination of such distinction is both known and denied. On one level this historical causality is obviously the case, but, more importantly, as lived experience, such easy aesthetic comportment must basically understand itself as natural. Simply, the for-itself of art is that legitimate culture is accessible only to those who have some innate sensibility – a natural superiority, in fact. The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that, like all the ideological strategies generated in the everyday class struggle, it naturalises real differences, converting differences in the mode of acquisition of culture in to differences of nature; it only recognises as legitimate the relation to culture (or language) which least bears the visible marks of its genesis, which has nothing ‘academic,’ ‘scholastic,’ ‘bookish,’ ‘affected’ or

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‘studied’ about it, but manifests by its ease and naturalness that true culture is nature – a new mystery of immaculate conception. (Bourdieu, 1984: 68; also, e.g., 29) The aesthetic sensibility works as part of the dominant culture because, in the long run, its legitimacy is accepted throughout the classes. So even when the working classes might well dismiss modern art and even understand how social capital has been gained by those who can so easily inhabit the aesthetic realm, they still must accept the rightful superiority of such a cultural disposition. The pure disposition is so universally recognised as legitimate that no voice is heard pointing out that the definition of art, and through it the art of living, is an object of struggle among the classes. Dominated lifestyles (arts de vivre), which have practically never received systematic expression, are almost always perceived, even by their defenders, from the destructive or reductive viewpoint of the dominant aesthetic, so that their only options are degradation or self-destructive rehabilitation (‘popular culture’). (Bourdieu, 1984: 48; also 396) The whole schooling system promotes such an acceptance. This is captured in the scientistic formulations of Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture: In any given social formation, the PW [pedagogic work] through which the dominant PA [pedagogic action] is carried on succeeds all the better in imposing the legitimacy of the dominant culture the more it is accomplished. i.e. the more completely it succeeds in imposing misrecognition of the dominant arbitrary not only on the legitimate addresses of the PA but also on the members of the dominated groups or classes (the dominant ideology of the legitimate culture as the only authentic culture, i.e. as universal culture). (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977/1990: 40–1) Of course the dominant classes are not unified in their acquisition and acceptance of the aesthetic disposition. Cultural and educational capital might well not equate with economic capital; and educational success clearly can lie in the attainment of qualifications quite antipathetic to art. In other words, money and jobs can result in the familiar, ‘boorish,’ bourgeois anti-aesthetic, and there is a struggle within the dominant class for cultural legitimacy. So, a huge range of class fractions are discernible around different balances of different kinds of economic, cultural, and educational capital. Also, the arts themselves can be divided up into what is accessible to different class fractions (e.g., between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ theatre and music). Bourdieu says of these class fractions, and the battle for cultural supremacy: These struggles over the legitimate definition of culture and the legitimate way of evaluating it are only one dimension of the endless struggles which

142 Bourdieu divide every dominant class. Behind the virtues of the accomplished man the legitimate titles to the exercise of domination are at stake. Thus the glorification of ‘character-building’ sport and the valorisation of economic and political culture, at the expense of literary or artistic culture, are just two of the strategies through which the dominant fractions of the dominant class aim to discredit the values recognised by the ‘intellectual’ fractions of the dominant class and the petite bourgeoisie – whose children compete dangerously with the children of the bourgeoisie on the terrain of the most academically defined academic competence. But more profoundly, these manifestations of anti-intellectualism are only one aspect of an antagonism which, far beyond the question of the legitimate uses of the body or culture, touches on every dimension of existence; the dominant fractions always tend to conceive their relationship to the dominated fractions in terms of the opposition between the male and the female, the serious and the frivolous, the responsible and the irresponsible, the useful and the futile, the realistic and the unrealistic. (Bourdieu, 1984: 93–4) This complex picture of relations between the classes and the class fractions is empirically exhibited and verified through survey analysis. Bourdieu and his team reveal the unfailing statistical correlation between class and cultural experience. Some of the many topics covered include: what music is preferred (e.g., The Blue Danube or The Well-Tempered Klavier); what the content of art can be; how often art museums are visited; kinds of furniture shopping; preferences in food, entertainment, and sport. In this way Bourdieu proclaims the scientific truth of his sociological work as it strips away the ideology of privilege; the naturalistic superiority of aesthetic sensibility is shown to be nothing more than the attainment of capital and the acquisition of a certain kind of habitus. Art is no different from any other kind of culture in this respect. As Bourdieu states: One only has to remove the magical barrier which makes legitimate culture into a separate universe, in order to see intelligible relationships between choices as seemingly incommensurable as preferences in music or cooking, sport or politics, literature or hairstyle. (Bourdieu, 1984: 100) For our purposes, this brief summary of Bourdieu’s argument so far shows how the appeal of art, within this theoretical perspective, does lie only in its antiuniversality – in its claims to distinction from lesser sensibilities. As the dominant, legitimate culture it sustains its status as the sole provider of the highest forms of human cultural experience through the ideological illusion of natural superiority. The autonomous field Complementing the survey-based analysis of legitimate ‘taste’ in Distinction and Love of Art is Bourdieu’s construction of the autonomous fields of cultural

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production. The academic, literary, and artistic (i.e., visual art production) fields are shown to be internally ordered hierarchies of competitions for power, each with their own ‘social history’ of development. The emphasis, again, is on how the seemingly ‘natural’ order of these fields is historically determined. An indication of the direction of this theory can be seen in the following: The space of literary or artistic position takings, i.e. the structured set of the manifestations of the social agents involved in the field – literary or artistic works, of course, but also political acts and pronouncements, manifestos or polemics etc. – is inseparable from the space of literary or artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate quantity of specific capital (recognition), and, at the same time, by the occupation of a determinate position in the structure of the distribution of this specific capital. The literary or artistic field is a field of forces but also a field of struggles tending to conserve or transform the field of forces. The network of objective relations between positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of the different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their position (i.e. their position-takings), strategies which depend on their force and form on the position each occupant occupies in the power relations. (Bourdieu, 1993: 30, Bourdieu’s emphasis) The different fields of cultural production will vary in what counts as capital and how the power relations are maintained. But in the art field, from this perspective, it can be shown how certain works and artists are ‘consecrated’ through the network of power determined by galleries, curators, and critics as well as more obvious economic market forces. However, of course, sheer economic market capital and, especially, recognition by the general public, are often at the furthest remove from the ‘artistic’ capital that is gained from recognition by other artists. According to the principle of external hierarchisation in force in the temporally dominant regions of the field of power (and also in the economic field) – that is, according to the criterion of temporal success measured by indices of commercial success (such as print runs, the number of performances of plays, etc.) or social notoriety (such as decorations, commissions, etc.) – preeminence belongs to artists (etc.) who are known and recognised by the ‘general public.’ On the other hand, the principle of internal hierarchisation, that is, the degree of specific consecration, favours artists (etc.) who are known and recognised by their peers and only by them (at least in the initial phase of their enterprise) and who owe their prestige, at least negatively, to the fact that they make no concessions to the demand of the ‘general public.’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 217) The field of cultural production becomes increasingly autonomous the more the internal hierarchies become determinate of success. This internal order shuts out external judgements by working towards more purely formalist standards of

144 Bourdieu literary and artistic merit, and this internal logic towards form is reflected in, for example, the growth of the art for art’s sake movement. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu gives a detailed, empirical depiction of such a development in the French literary field, with Flaubert as the exemplification of this process. Clearly, external bourgeois and working-class judgements become more and more incompatible with the hierarchical judgements of the field as these become more selfenclosed. The class surveys of Distinction confirm this account. The hostility of the working class and of the middle-class fractions least rich in cultural capital towards every kind of formal experimentation, asserts itself both in the theatre and in painting, or still more clearly, because they have less legitimacy, in photography and the cinema. (Bourdieu, 1984: 32; emphasis added) Bourdieu also discusses how the ‘new’ works within the field, without, of course, relying on some genius creator for explanation. To gain a place in this universe, some difference needs to be established – ‘to exist is to differ’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 58). But for the new to succeed in the artistic or literary field, an economics of the avant-garde will almost certainly come into play; both economic and social capital will be needed. Economic capital is required so that sheer penury does not result in the necessary abandonment of the artistic vocation; and social capital is required for the field to be understood sufficiently for the new to be able to find a place to thrive. Bourdieu develops this theme: It is also because economic capital provides the guarantees which can be the basis of self-assurance, audacity and indifference to profit – dispositions, which, together with the flair associated with a large social capital and corresponding familiarity with the field, i.e. the art of sensing the new hierarchies and the new structure of the chances of profit, point towards the outposts, the most exposed positions of the avant-garde, and towards the riskiest investments, which are also, however, also the most profitable symbolically, and in the long run, at least for the earliest investors. (Bourdieu, 1993: 68) All these points can be brought together in the figure of Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades. Although Bourdieu gives far more precise, extensive attention to Flaubert,2 Duchamp is taken up repeatedly by Bourdieu as a representative case in art. So, the scandal and acceptance of the ready-mades such as the renowned ‘Fountain’ depended on the highly developed internal state of the field. The artist who, in attaching his name to a ready-made, confers on it a market price which is not measured on the same scale as its cost of fabrication, owes his magic efficacy to a whole logic of the field that recognises and authorises him; his act would be nothing but a crazy or insignificant gesture without the

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universe of celebrants and believers who are ready to produce it as endowed with meaning and value by reference to the entire tradition. (Bourdieu, 1996: 169) Born into a family of artists, familiar with the avant-garde Parisian culture and styles by the age of 20, ‘Marcel Duchamp moves in the artistic field like a fish in water.’ (Bourdieu, 1996: 246). Such knowledge of the ‘advanced state’ of the field is cause for success, and, on this basis, Bourdieu compares Duchamp with Henri Rousseau: In the artistic field in its advanced state of evolution, there is no place for those who do not know the history of the field and everything it has engendered, starting with a certain totally paradoxical relationship with history’s legacy. Once again, it is the field which constructs and consecrates as such those designated as ‘naifs’ by their ignorance of the logic of the game. To be convinced of this it is enough to compare methodically Le Douanier Rousseau, as ‘painter object’ entirely ‘made’ by the field and the field’s plaything, with the person who might well have ‘discovered’ him … Marcel Duchamp, creator of an art of ‘painting’ involving not only the art of producing a work, but the art of producing oneself as a painter. Nor should we forget that these two personages, endowed with properties so antithetical that no biographer would dream of relating them to each other, at least have in common the fact that they only exist as painters for posterity as a result of the entirely particular logic of a field which has reached a high degree of autonomy and is inhabited by a tradition of permanent rupture with aesthetic tradition. (Bourdieu, 1996: 244; also Bourdieu, 1993: 60–1) Duchamp, then, serves as a useful example of how the autonomous field of art operates, and Bourdieu goes a long way towards explaining how the extreme case of the ready-mades serves as a kind of endlessly repeated endpoint for art. Our understanding of how the separate sphere of art has developed and functions is, in these ways, greatly enhanced. Now, prima facie, it might seem both desirable and easy to simply add Bourdieu’s valuable sociology of the anti-universal of art onto what we have so far established. After all, the ‘autonomous field’ of art would seem, in large part, to overlap with the Weberian aesthetic ‘value-sphere.’ However, this is not to be. Bourdieu forbids such attachments to his theory, and, as we will see, the ‘field,’ although arising from a reading of Weber’s ‘Sociology of Religion,’ is in fundamental conceptual disagreement with the ‘value-sphere.’ But before we can directly match Bourdieu and Weber on this issue, some groundwork has yet to be laid: two other parts of Bourdieu’s work need to be treated briefly – the game and his opposition to Kant. Both of these areas will again provide us with insights into the ways that art gains its allure in modernity, especially with ‘the game,’ but both also bring to the surface certain problems that will need to be addressed.

146 Bourdieu The game The dynamics of the power relations of the field are frequently understood by Bourdieu as a game: A field of possible forces exercised on all bodies entering it, the field of power is also a field of struggle, and may thus be compared to a game: the dispositions, that is to say the ensemble of incorporated properties, including elegance, facility of expression or even beauty, and capital in its diverse forms – economic, cultural, social – constitute the trumps which will dictate both the manner of playing and success in the game. (Bourdieu, 1996: 10) Different fields will, of course, have very different game rules, which the sociologist can map and so understand how the game is won and lost. Such explanatory power is exhibited in Bourdieu’s well-known studies of the academic (Bourdieu, 1988) and literary (Bourdieu, 1996) fields. Some basic differences between the rules of these games (e.g., the degree of explicit codification, kinds of capital required) are summarised by Bourdieu: One of the most characteristic properties of a field is the degree to which its dynamic limits, which extend as far as the power of its effects, are converted into a juridical frontier, protected by a right of entry which is explicitly codified, such as the possession of scholarly titles, success in a competition, etc., or by measures of exclusion and discrimination, such as laws intended to assure a numerus clausus. A high degree of codification of entry into the game goes along with the existence of explicit rules of the game and a minimum consensus on these rules; by contrast, a weak degree of codification conveys states of the field in which the rules of the game are being played for in the playing of the game. The literary or artistic fields are characterised, particularly compared with the university field, by a weak degree of codification, and, by the same token, by the extreme permeability of their boundaries and the extreme diversity of the definition of the posts they offer and the principles of legitimacy which confront each other there. The analysis of the properties of agents attests to the fact that they require neither inherited economic capital to the same degree as the economic field, nor educational capital to the same degree as the university field or even sectors of the field of power such as the senior civil service. (Bourdieu, 1996: 226) The ever-developing autonomy of the field can be restated more clearly in terms of the game: as the rules of the game become more established, and the game is played only on its own terms, so the internalised structure of the field hardens against outside historical interference. The independence with respect to historical conditions has its foundations in the historical process which led to the emergence of a social game (relatively)

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free of the determinations and constraints of the historical conjuncture. Since everything produced there draws its existence and meaning, essentially, from the specific logic and history of the game itself, this game is kept afloat by virtue of its own consistency, meaning the specific regularities which define it and the mechanisms – such as the dialectic of positions, dispositions and position-takings – which confer on it its own conatus. (Bourdieu, 1996: 248) The game of art has a number of specified attributes. Firstly, aesthetic achievement is the opposite to that of ‘worldly success.’ From the perspectives of business or high society, in art, the ‘loser takes all’: The game of art is, from the point of view of business, a game of ‘loser takes all.’ In this economic world turned upside down, one cannot conquer money, honours (it is Flaubert who said that ‘honours dishonour’), women (legitimate or illegitimate), in short, all the symbols of worldly success, success in high society and success in this world, without compromising one’s salvation in the hereafter. The fundamental law of this paradoxical game is that there one has interest in disinterestedness: the love of art is a crazed love [l’amour fou], at least when one considers it from the viewpoint of the norms of the ordinary, ‘normal’ world put on to the stage by the bourgeois theatre. (Bourdieu, 1996: 21, translator’s inclusion) As an aside, note here the stress in this quotation on ‘disinterestedness’ and ‘salvation’ – we will have to come back to consider these elements. Secondly, success in the art game, as we saw with Duchamp, depends on mastering the field – on positioning oneself within the history of the field: This is the complexity of the artistic revolution: under pain of excluding oneself from the game, one cannot revolutionise a field without mobilising or invoking the experiences of the history of the field, and the great heretics – Baudelaire, Flaubert or Manet – inscribe themselves explicitly in the history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than their contemporaries, so that revolutions take the form of a return to sources, to the purity of origins. (Bourdieu, 1996: 101) And within the current state of the field: In the artistic or literary field at the current stage of its history, all acts, all gestures, all manifestations are, as a painter puts it so well ‘sorts of winks inside a milieu’: these winks, silent and hidden references to other artists, present or past, affirm in and through the games of distinction a complicity that excludes a profane that is always fated to allow the essential to escape – that is, precisely the interrelations and interactions of which the work is just

148 Bourdieu a silent trace. Never has the very structure of the field been as present in each act of production. (Bourdieu, 1996: 161) Third, the fundamental exclusionary principle of the cultural field becomes clarified through the idea of the game: as the game increasingly establishes itself by being played, the internal order of art shuts out those who do not know the rules and cannot play. Museums could say at their gates – but they do not need to, since it so goes without saying – ‘Let no-one enter here unless they are lovers of art.’ The game makes up the illusio, the investment in the game by the informed player who, possessing a sense of the game because made by the game, plays the game, and thereby makes it exist. (Bourdieu, 1996: 289–90) Fourthly, although the non-cultivated classes cannot win the museum art game, the petit bourgeois must play the more general ‘game of distinction.’ And here it risks the anxiety-inducing exposure of its lack of ‘taste’: the entry of the petite bourgeoisie into the game of distinction is marked, inter alia, by the anxiety of exposing oneself to classification by offering to the taste of others such infallible indices of personal taste as clothes or furniture, even a simple pair of armchairs … The striving towards distinction comes in with petit bourgeois aestheticism, which delights in all the cheap substitutes for chic objects and practices – driftwood and painted pebbles, cane and raffia, ‘art’ handicrafts and art photography. (Bourdieu, 1984: 57–8) In fact, the petit bourgeois even lack the right attitude to the game: The petit bourgeois do not know how to play the game of culture as a game. They take culture too seriously to go in for bluff or imposture or even for the distance and casualness which show true familiarity; too seriously to escape permanent fear of ignorance or blunders, or to sidestep tests by responding with the indifference of those who are not competing or the serene detachment of those who feel entitled to confess or even flaunt their lacunae. (Bourdieu, 1984: 330) The working classes, on the other hand, are simply cut out of the game altogether, except perhaps as a point of contrast. As for the working classes, perhaps their sole function in the system of aesthetic positions is to serve as a foil, a negative reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by successive negations. (Bourdieu, 1984: 57)

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Fifth, in contrast, to enter and succeed in the game of art is to gain the ‘cultivated pleasure’ that comes with the belief, shared amongst all the players, in the value of the art object. Indeed, the very fact that the game must have players – that it is a ‘society’ game – provides the mutual affirmation of distinction, with all its attendant satisfactions: Cultivated pleasure feeds on these intertwined references, which reinforce and legitimate each other, producing, inseparably, belief in the value of works of art, the ‘idolatry’ which is the very basis of cultivated pleasure, and the inimitable charm they objectively exert on all who are qualified to enter the game, possessed by their possession. Even in its purest form, when it seems most free of ‘worldly’ interest, this game is always a ‘society’ game, based, as Proust again says, on a ‘freemasonry of customs and a heritage of traditions’; True distinction, besides, always affects to address only distinguished persons who know the same customs … (Bourdieu, 1984: 499) So, we can start to understand the game of art; what are its rules and how it is played. One final point has to be made on how the games of culture work: the players must believe in the values and goals of the game. That is, the players cannot think that it is just a game. This is the necessary illusio of the game, according to Bourdieu. If some explanatory power might readily be accorded to Bourdieu’s use of ‘the game’ so far, cracks start to appear when ‘the game’ is stretched to have to include the illusion that no game is being played. Bourdieu puts it plainly: But it is just as true that a certain form of adherence to the game, of belief in the game and the value of its stakes, which makes the game worth the trouble of playing it is the basis of the functioning of the game, and that the collusion of agents in the illusio is the root of the competition which pits them against each other and which makes the game itself. In short, the illusio is the condition for the functioning of a game of which it is also, at least partially, the product. (Bourdieu, 1996: 228) And, again: the foundation of belief (and of the delectation which, in the case of literary fiction, it procures) resides in the illusio, the adherence to the game as a game, the acceptance of the fundamental premise that the game, literary or scientific, is worth being played, being taken seriously. (Bourdieu, 1996: 333)3 The game of each field sets up pleasure and desires that can be met only on condition of the illusio:

150 Bourdieu Each field (religious, artistic, scientific, economic, etc.), through the particular form of regulation of practices and the representations that it imposes, offers to agents a legitimate form of realising their desires, based on a particular form of the illusio. It is in the relation between the system of dispositions produced in whole or in part by the structure and functioning of the field and the system of objective potentialities offered by the field that the system of satisfactions which are (really) desirable is defined in each case, and that the reasonable strategies called for by the immanent logic of the game are engendered (which may be accompanied or not by an explicit representation of the game). (Bourdieu, 1996: 228–9) Any scientific analysis of art must, of course, cut through the belief in the game: It follows that one cannot found a genuine science of the work of art without tearing oneself out of the illusio, and suspending the relationship of complicity and connivance which ties every cultivated person to the cultural game, in order to constitute the game as object. (Bourdieu, 1996: 230) However, the scientific, academic game also has its own illusio, which has to be maintained: This is not only because one has to belong in order to have a practical mastery of the mechanisms of membership; it is also because one cannot objectify the intellectual game without putting at stake one’s own stake in the game – a risk which is at once derisory and absolute. (Bourdieu, 1984: 163) Or as he says in one of his interviews: ‘The scientific field is a game in which you have to arm yourself with reason in order to win.’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 31) The scientific illlusio is necessary for the consistency of the theory, but it does bring to the fore the obvious dilemma that ‘the game’ faces. Simply, if a game like snakes and ladders, or a card game, or a sport is being played, there is a much stronger sense that it is only a game. Certainly, in the actual playing of the game the pleasure must lie in taking the game seriously at the time and shutting out all other concerns. But, as Bourdieu has to concede, in sport there can well be a sense of ‘fair play’ and common acknowledgement that ‘it is only a game.’ Predictably, such concerns are explained away as part of a privileged view of sport – as how distinction functions in sport: Just as, in an age when sporting activities were reserved for a few, the cult of ‘fair play,’ the code of play of those who have the self-control not to get so carried away by the game that they forget that it is ‘only a game,’ was a logical development of the distinctive function of sport … (Bourdieu, 1984: 215)

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Even if this class explanation is conceded (and there are a host of examples, outside of France at least, which would seem to have manifestly refuted such an idea), there remains a difference between the illusio of sport as a game and the illusio found in the social fields as games. Or, to put it the other way around, why do ‘players’ go into the ‘games’ of art, politics, the economy, or the academy? What do they get out of it? Is it just the pleasures of winning that the autonomous field creates, like any other game? Are the values purely internally determined by the game? Is this what the scientific analysis of the field shows? In reply, and to start to put it in Weberian terms, material interests have to be met, especially and obviously in the economy. But in the cultural fields, especially art, ideal interests might also be present. We have already seen how Bourdieu uses religious terms like ‘consecration’ and, with art, ‘salvation’; and it is this clear religion-rivalling characteristic of art that is the crucial point. It is here that we will need to assess the rival claims of Bourdieu and Weber, and weigh up the relative merits of the ‘value-sphere’ and ‘field.’ In addition, it will be argued below that the contradictions inherent in the concept of the intellectual ‘game’ will lead Bourdieu himself to positions that would seem to demand the use of the very theory he prohibits. These arguments will be taken up after the next section on Kant and philosophy. Against Kant A constant in Bourdieu’s analysis of culture, and particularly in Distinction, is the critique of Kant’s theory of taste. Kant’s account is held up to represent everything that Bourdieu opposes. Three broad areas might be identified here. Firstly, there is the opposition to the philosophical, ahistorical, universalist subjectivism of Kant: Totally ahistorical, like all philosophical thought that is worthy of the name (every philosophia worth its salt is perennis) – perfectly ethnocentric, since it takes for its sole datum the lived experience of a homo aestheticus who is none other than the subject of aesthetic discourse constituted as the universal subject of aesthetic experience – Kant’s analysis of the judgement of taste finds its real basis in a set of aesthetic principles which are the universalisation of the dispositions associated with a particular social and economic condition. (Bourdieu, 1984: 493) An associated attribute of this ahistorical philosophy is the naturalisation of this ‘social and economic condition’ – a standard point in ideological critique, of course. The ideology of natural taste owes its plausibility and its efficacy to the fact that, like all the ideological strategies generated in the everyday class

152 Bourdieu struggle, it naturalises real differences, converting differences in the mode of acquisition of culture into differences of nature. (Bourdieu, 1984: 68, Bourdieu’s emphasis) Secondly, and more by implication rather than by direct engagement with Kant on this point, the language of the subjective universal of The Critique of Judgement is in fact a code that only comes with sufficient educational and cultural capital. A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into which it is encoded. The conscious or unconscious implementation of explicit or implicit schemes of perception and appreciation which constitutes pictorial or musical culture is the hidden condition for recognising the styles characteristic of a period, a school or an author, and, more generally, for the familiarity with the internal logic of works that aesthetic enjoyment presupposes. A beholder who lacks the specific code feels lost in a chaos of sounds and rhythms, colours and lines, without rhyme or reason. (Bourdieu, 1984: 2; also, e.g., 3, 67) The third broad area of Bourdieu’s position on Kant revolves around the notion of disinterested, functionless purposiveness without purpose. This purified subjectivity, where all ordinary practical ends have been eliminated is, for Bourdieu, the ultimate mark of distinction; it is what the cultivated classes create as the necessary disposition for entry into the aesthetic universe. Only on the basis of this socially formed sensibility can pure form and style be appreciated over more realist and functionalist standards of judgement. The aesthetic disposition, a generalised capacity to neutralise ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art. In other words, it presupposes the distance from the world. (Bourdieu, 1984: 54) Bourdieu draws a clear contrast with the working-class experience of the world, and the pragmatic aesthetic that results: Like the aesthetic disposition which is one dimension of it, the distant, detached or casual disposition towards the world or other people, a disposition which can scarcely be called subjective since it is objectively internalised, can only be constituted in conditions of existence that are relatively freed from urgency. The submission to necessity which inclines working-class people

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to a pragmatic, functionalist ‘aesthetic,’ refusing the gratuity and futility of formal exercises and of every form of art for art’s sake, is also the principle of all the choices of daily existence and of an art of living which rejects specifically aesthetic intentions as aberrations. (Bourdieu, 1984: 376) The ‘vulgar,’ ‘barbaric’ taste of the working class is laid out by Bourdieu as a consistent contrast to the Kantian model. For Bourdieu, each moment of Kant’s position is opposed by the ‘popular aesthetic’: It is no accident that, when one sets about reconstructing its logic, the popular ‘aesthetic’ appears as the negative opposite of the Kantian aesthetic, and that the popular ethos implicitly answers each proposition of the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ with a thesis contradicting it. (Bourdieu, 1984: 41) Of these three areas, it will be argued that although the first area is not something that needs to be disputed and clearly forms part of Hegel and Adorno’s critiques of Kant, we will have to ask whether the other two areas – the internal code and disinterested purposelessness – only function as forces of class distinction. The question of the ‘more’ of art still applies. Beyond these areas of dispute with Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Bourdieu takes Kant, as already indicated, as simply one representative of a more general philosophical approach that needs to be opposed as a whole. The ‘Postscript’ to Distinction makes this plain: The reader may have wondered why, in a text devoted to taste and art, no appeal is made to the tradition of philosophical or literary aesthetics; and he or she will no doubt have realised that this is a deliberate refusal. It is certain that the ‘high’ aesthetic, both that which is engaged in a practical form in legitimate works and that which is expressed in writing intended to make it explicit and present it formally, is fundamentally constituted, whatever the variants, against all that this research may have established – namely, the indivisibility of taste, the unity of the most ‘pure’ and most purified, the most sublime and most sublimated tastes, and the most ‘impure’ and ‘coarse,’ ordinary and primitive tastes. This means, conversely, that this project has required, above all, a sort of deliberate amnesia, a readiness to renounce the whole corpus of cultivated discourse on culture. (Bourdieu, 1984: 485) The usual philosophical aesthetic theory, with the Critique of Judgement as the seminal text, is cast as part of the problem of how the ‘pure,’ cultivated appreciation of art maintains its position of legitimate domination over ‘vulgar’ taste. In the ‘Postscript’ Bourdieu considers Derrida’s critique of Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, and concludes:

154 Bourdieu a philosophically distinguished reading of the Critique of Judgement cannot be expected to uncover the social relationship of distinction at the heart of a work that is rightly regarded as the very symbol of philosophical distinction. (Bourdieu, 1984: 500) In other words, there is an inherent aspect to philosophy that is in some measure universalising, naturalising, or ahistorical, and this must lead away from the social determinations of art. In this way, philosophy lends support to the cultural domination of the cultivated classes. Not only does Bourdieu oppose philosophical aesthetics, but he makes the further claim that the problems of aesthetics can only find answers in the sociology of the field. Here is his conclusion on Gadamer: It is clear that one does not need to choose between, on the one hand, the subjectivism of theories of the ‘aesthetic consciousness’ which reduce the aesthetic quality of a natural thing or a human work to a simple correlate of a purely contemplative attitude of consciousness, neither theoretical nor practical, and on the other hand an ontology of the work of art such as that proposed by Gadamer in Truth and Method. Questions of the meaning and value of the work of art, like the question of the specificity of aesthetic judgement, can only find solutions in a social history of the field, linked to a sociology of the conditions of the constitution of the particular disposition which the field calls for in each of its states. (Bourdieu, 1996: 290; also, Bourdieu, 1993: 258, where the philosopher Arthur Danto is the initial target)4 We will return to consider this claim, especially whether the social history of the field can in fact solve all the ‘questions of the meaning and the value of the work of art.’ But, vitally, this general anti-philosophical stance of Bourdieu also covers sociological theory, including that of Weber. In one of his (very many) interviews, Bourdieu distinguishes between his historical analysis of the social reality (seen in the history of the autonomous fields of culture, for example) and ‘long-term history’ which is part of the ‘privileged place of social philosophy’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 41). He goes on: Amongst sociologists this fact frequently gives rise to general considerations on bureaucratisation, on the process of rationalisation, on modernisation, and so on, which bring a great number of social benefits to their authors but few scientific benefits. (Bourdieu, 1990: 41–2) This ‘scientific’ position, which dismisses some Weberian theory as ‘privileged’ ‘social philosophy’ and historically over-extended, will have to be contested.

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Critique: more on the ‘more’ of art As Adorno’s arguments for art to be more than just anti-universal were seen to falter, so Bourdieu’s specific attempt to restrict art to be nothing more than antiuniversal will be shown to be not entirely successful. Two qualifying points need to be made before the argument is more seriously engaged. Firstly, Bourdieu’s class analysis of art can be extended to include, at least, gender and race, without any alteration to two basic elements: the empirical, survey-based ‘scientific’ epistemological method; and the fundamental question of how the dominant, legitimate culture functions. So there is clearly a ‘more’ of art that is an unproblematic extension within Bourdieu’s broad sociological orientation. It is in this sense of including factors beyond class that the more inclusive term ‘anti-universal’ has been deployed. Secondly, the current argument takes the approach of trying to gather what we can of value from a variety of theorists. The critical appropriation of Bourdieu, therefore, seeks to incorporate the many insights his theory offers into what we have so far put together. It is only on this basis that the following criticisms will be argued. So, all that will be attempted here is to show how Bourdieu and the theorists that we have used so far can be successfully combined, and how Bourdieu’s own work bursts its self-imposed constraints and seems to invite the inclusion of the ‘more’ of art that Weber et al. have provided for us. In this light, two strands of criticism will be followed: Bourdieu’s own stated position on Weber and meaning, and its implications for the acceptance of the value-spheres, will be considered; and freedom and philosophy will be shown to hold a problematic place in Bourdieu’s own work. To Weber and the value-sphere Bourdieu acknowledges the immense debt he owes to Weber, and this is apparent in the use of concepts like legitimation, class and status, charisma and rationalisation. Absent, however, are meaning and the value-spheres. In one sense the question of whether meaning is included does come down to the acceptance or rejection of Weber’s philosophical anthropology. If it is accepted that there is a universal human need or interest in the provision of some kind of answer to questions of life, death, and suffering, then how this interest is met or not met in modernity becomes important. Weber’s response is the theory of the value-spheres. But, conversely, if such a philosophical anthropology is dismissed, then the associated theory is, obviously, dispensable. On one level, Bourdieu does not seem to rate the importance of such questions, so the absence of the value-sphere theory is understandable. However, there are two broad points that indicate that Bourdieu’s own work is in fact troubled by the problem of meaning. Firstly, we need to examine Bourdieu’s own view of Weber with regard to such matters.

156 Bourdieu A qualification needs to be stated initially. Interpretations and utilisations of Weber’s vast writings are so various that to contend with Bourdieu on Weber is not to assert that his particular reading is wrong or somehow an assault on the true or essential Weber. All that can be argued is how a different interpretation and use might have more explanatory power than another. In this case, Weber’s ‘value-sphere’ will be shown to offer more about art, in the long run, than Bourdieu’s ‘field.’ The ‘field’ derives from a critical reading of the ‘Sociology of Religion’ section in Weber’s Economy and Society. The crucial question that arises from this appropriation of Weber for our argument is: what happens to meaning? Bourdieu seems to accept that Weber’s philosophical anthropology does throw up legitimate problems of meaning. In one interview, specifically on how he is both with and against Weber, Bourdieu replies to a question on religion and meaning: Question: …. Is there such a thing as a ‘will to faith,’ some sort of anthropological predisposition? Pierre Bourdieu: I wrote something about this in my second contribution to the religious field. This is obviously not a simple issue, but the question is whether or not an answer to this problem is actually of any significance. What came first? The need or the world which – after all, in its own way and in its own order – implants this need in us? I am satisfied with the Weberian definition: religion is a systematic answer to the question of life and death. Actually, this is a beautiful definition. To be sure, there are ‘existential’ questions that oblige us to reflect upon the ‘transcendental’ – and, hence, the collective – conditions of the transcendental: questions about life and death; the death of people whom we love; ‘ultimate’ questions; illness, human suffering. These are all questions that people never manage to answer on their own. Religion gives systematic answers to these questions – or rather quasisystematic answers, because they are not systematic as, for example, in logic. Religion gives coherence to the ‘discontinuous’ events of our life; it bestows abstract contingence with concrete coherence; in this respect, it resembles philosophy, a ‘total’ explanation of the world. (Bourdieu, Schultheis, and Pfeuffer, 2011: 120) So, religion (and philosophy) do provide some sort of coherent, quasi-systematic answers to universal ‘transcendental’ questions of life, death, and suffering. The question he also puts here is whether the problem of meaning is of any significance, and he directs us to the origins of the ‘field’ that come with his reading of the ‘Sociology of Religion.’ In this reading of the section in Economy and Society on priests, prophets, and magicians, ‘religious interests’ have an important place, but their significance is not how the questions of meaning are met, but how groups legitimate their positions of power.

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One may properly speak of religious interests (still defined in generic terms) when there appears alongside those magical demands which continue to subsist, at least amongst certain classes, the expectation of a systematic message capable of giving a unitary meaning of life. Such a message would propose a coherent vision of the world and human existence to its privileged addressees and give them the means to achieve the more or less systematic regulation of their everyday behaviour. It would at the same time be capable of providing them with justification of their existence in its specific form, that is their existence as occupants of a determinate social position. If religion has a social function and if it is, as a consequence, susceptible to sociological analysis, this is because the laity expect of it not only justifications of their existence that can offer them deliverance from the existential anguish of contingency and abandonment, or even from physical woes, suffering, sickness or death. Religion also has social functions in so far as the laity expect justifications of their existence as occupants of a particular position in the social structure. (Bourdieu, 1987: 123–4, Bourdieu’s emphasis) We can see here how the significance of religious interests for Bourdieu comes with its ‘social function’ of justification for social positions; and this is what is ‘susceptible to sociological analysis.’ Now Bourdieu rightly goes on to show how, for Weber, class interests are furthered by religious interests so that certain groups will legitimate their position through the very religious questions that are asked and answered. (In fact Bourdieu could make an even stronger case here, since Weber will stress how the very question of death will be favoured over the question of suffering by the privileged classes.) Bourdieu’s continued emphasis on this line of thinking in Weber leads to the conclusion that: Religious legitimacy at any given time is nothing other than the state of the specifically religious power relations at that moment; that is, it is the result of past struggles for the monopoly of the accepted exercise of religious power. (Bourdieu, 1987: 127, Bourdieu’s emphasis) The concept of the ‘field’ is plainly apparent. And the religious ‘game’ in play here can, of course, be changed to almost anything at all, including, as we have seen, to the game of art. The logic of Bourdieu’s critical interpretation of Weber is one where meaning is dropped from, or, better, merged into the power relations of the field, and this enables the empirical sociological analysis favoured by Bourdieu. In Weber’s extensive writings on the sociology of religion both the social functions of religion and the meeting of ideal interests by religion are abundantly present, as Bourdieu seems to acknowledge. Sometimes one area is emphasised over another, and sometimes they are discussed together as inextricably linked. And it is the case that in the section of Economy and Society, which Bourdieu takes as the

158 Bourdieu inspiration for the concept of the field, the function of religion in terms of domination and legitimation is to the fore. However, to move further into the ‘Sociology of Religion’ is to arrive at sections where meaning is the focus, and indeed to come, eventually, to the value-spheres of modernity. It seems clear how this extraction of the ‘field’ from Weber very much meets Bourdieu’s demands for an empirical science of the power relations of cultural legitimation. But, beyond this science of the function of the field, it does not seem such a radical departure, on the basis of Bourdieu’s own understanding of Weber and meaning, to take up the other side of Weber on religion and consider art as a value-sphere, not just a field. Both sides might be acknowledged, although this does require that the strictly patrolled limits of Bourdieu’s ‘science’ of the ‘game’ be breached. With this background in mind, the second broad problem area can be addressed. Here two dilemmas face Bourdieu if meaning is not made part of the understanding of art. Firstly, a problem for Bourdieu would seem to be that the ‘autonomous fields’ of the aesthetic (so, in his terms, the literary and visual art fields) only arise in modernity. The basic Hegelian point on the end of art is that ‘art’ is in fact invented in the 18th century as it separated from the prosaic world. How can the ‘field,’ as a kind of universal conceptual tool, understand this specific historical formation? Art might well function as an internal set of power relations that serves to legitimate the dominant culture, but this theorisation of art as a ‘field’ does not seem to be able to address the question of how art – as something that exists in its own right – is a modern phenomenon. On this point, the major difference between ‘fields’ and ‘value-spheres’ needs to be recalled. Simply, Weber only uses the idea of the value-sphere within the context of what we have come to call modernity; Weber’s theory of modernity is in fact the theory of the value-spheres. This breakup of the social order into separate competing spheres of meaning is contrasted to the cosmic unities outside of modernity. Now Weber is not saying that the areas of the economy or politics in, for example, the East or the history of the West, do not have their own characteristics; he often emphasises such traits in his empirical studies. But, for Weber, the disenchanted meaninglessness of the modern world is the basic precondition of the ‘polytheism’ of the value-spheres. As an internal ‘cosmos’ of meaning within meaninglessness, the aesthetic value-sphere is, in this way, understandable as a product of modernity. So Bourdieu might well be right when he criticises Weber for not theorising the power relations that exist in religious or artistic ‘fields’: Weber does not perceive that the universes of specialists function like relatively autonomous microcosms, structured spaces (hence spaces amenable to structural analysis, but of another type) of objective relations between positions – that of the prophet and that of the priest or that of the consecrated artist and that of the avant-garde artist, for example. These relations are the true

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principle of the position-takings of different producers, of the competition which pits them against each other. (Bourdieu, 1996: 204) But for the ‘field’ to be able to cover both these examples would seem to entail, at the very least, a methodological bias that makes it most unlikely that the significance of the advent of art in modernity will be recognised. Secondly, Bourdieu very frequently talks of art in religious terms. This is especially the case at the start and end of The Love of Art. On the first page comes the following direct comparisons of art and religion: The religion of art also has its fundamentalists and modernists, yet these factions unite in raising the question of cultural salvation in the language of grace … Does this not sound like the mysticism of salvation? … This is the same logic which results in granting the evidence and resources of salvation only to a chosen few and praising the saintly simplicity of children and of the ignorant. (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 1) He goes on to see art as ‘terrestrial nourishment’ and a ‘mystical approach to salvation,’ whereby it can now be said that: The time has come and the advent of the Kingdom of Art on earth has already been glimpsed … (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 3–4) And, at the end, the space of the art museum is regarded in various ways as ‘sacred,’ ‘religious,’ ‘mystic,’ and ‘Puritan’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 112), and where: the love of art is the clear mark of the chosen, separating by an invisible and insuperable barrier, those who are touched by it from those whose who have not received this grace … (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 112) Elsewhere, art is also seen as a separate alternative universe: as a ‘sacred universe of legitimate culture’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 53), and where the scientific task is ‘to remove the magical barrier which makes legitimate culture into a separate universe’ (as quoted, Bourdieu, 1984: 100). Of course the point for Bourdieu is that art functions to limit entry to this universe of ‘cultural salvation’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 113), ‘in order for culture to fulfil its function of legitimating inherited privileges’ (Bourdieu and Darbel, 1991: 111). But why is art, especially visual museum art, so easily

160 Bourdieu compared to religion? Certainly Bourdieu will use religious terms like ‘charisma’ and ‘consecration’ in his accounts of other fields; but the scientific/intellectual field of cultural reproduction, let alone politics and the economy, would seem inherently resistant to such a full-blooded comparison. The argument of The Love of Art (and elsewhere) is that religion and art are comparable as fields of power, both legitimating privilege. Religion can be utilised so blatantly because it is assumed to be nothing but this. However, if the questions of human meaning are included – questions which Bourdieu concedes religion does answer – then we might start to appreciate how art and religion are so compatible: art also gives some sort of response to such questions within the limits of the overall disenchanted meaninglessness of the modern world. Art is religion-rivalling, according to Weber, because it sets up an internal universe or ‘cosmos’ where a sense of ‘salvation’ is possible, exactly as Bourdieu, in his own way, describes. In other words, Bourdieu’s own depiction of art, and his own concessions on religion and meaning, would seem to lead to the conclusion that art should be considered as a value-sphere, rather than a field. There is more at play in art than the concept of the ‘game’ can allow. Freedom, the Enlightenment, and philosophy In Distinction, any ‘freedom’ that might be granted to the aesthetic disposition is understood in terms of the anti-universal: it is a freedom that comes with the privileged classes’ ‘distance from necessity’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 53): The aesthetic disposition, a generalised capacity to neutralise ordinary urgencies and to bracket off practical ends, a durable inclination and aptitude for practice without a practical function, can only be constituted within an experience of the world freed from urgency and through the practice of activities which are an end in themselves, such as scholastic exercises or the contemplation of works of art. (Bourdieu, 1984: 54, emphasis added) That is, practical ends, which are the mark of ‘vulgar’ aesthetics, are able to be left behind if there is sufficient capital of the right kind. This experience of activities ‘as ends in themselves’ allows a kind of freedom, but only in relation to the vulgar taste of necessity. The tastes of freedom can only assert themselves as such in relation to the tastes of necessity, which are thereby brought to the level of the aesthetic and so defined as vulgar. (Bourdieu, 1984: 56) However, beyond Distinction, with Bourdieu’s accounts of the autonomous cultural fields of science and the arts, a different concept of freedom is recognised

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which would seem to have value beyond class relations. There are two parts to this aspect of Bourdieu’s understanding. Firstly, towards the end of The Rules of Art, Bourdieu writes of reason, the self, and freedom: Only social history can effectively supply the means to rediscover the historical truth in the objectivised or incorporeal traces of history which present themselves to awareness in the guise of a universal essence. Reminding ourselves of the historical determinations of reasoning may constitute the principle of a true freedom with respect to these determinations. Free thought must be won by a historical anamnesis capable of revealing everything in thought which is the forgotten product of historical work. Becoming resolutely aware of historical determinations, a true reconquest of the self (which is the exact opposite of the magical flight into ‘essential thought’) offers a possibility of really controlling these determinations … Like souls which, according to the myth of Er, have drunk the waters of Lethe after having chosen their lot of determinations, our thought has forgotten the ontogenesis and the phylogenesis of its own structures; since their roots are to be found in the structures of social fields established by history, they can be restored to our thought by knowledge of history and of the structure of these fields. The effort I have made here to try to advance this knowledge would be justified, to my mind, if I had succeeded in demonstrating (and convincingly) the possibility of a way of thinking about the social conditions of thought which gives thought an opportunity of freedom in relation to those conditions. (Bourdieu, 1996: 311–12, emphasis added) To uncover the truth of the historical determination of reason is seen as a way of achieving freedom; these determinations might be controlled by the knowledge of them, and a new self somehow regained. This is the justification Bourdieu gives for his study of the history and structure of the cultural fields. What are the implications of the claims being made here? It would appear that the intellectual task for Bourdieu is much more than just a game of power – of winning and losing. There is, in effect, a reliance on a classic Enlightenment formulation of reason and truth bringing about freedom from historical determination for the self. And to account for these elements of reason, freedom and the self would seem to demand the services of the very philosophically minded thought that Bourdieu dismisses. Further, these Enlightenment values are not some extra-historical inventions but are, in fact, part of the very fields that are the subject of Bourdieu’s investigation, especially the intellectual field. Indeed, Bourdieu would seem to have said precisely this in the statement above. It would seem to follow that if such elements are part of this field, then not only can it not be considered just a ‘game,’ but Bourdieu’s sociological, scientific method cannot be considered sufficient to analyse fully the make-up of the field itself. On the basis of this particular writing, Bourdieu is placed in an uncomfortable position: simply, philosophy beyond the game is needed. But such philosophy

162 Bourdieu need not be the ahistorical, fetishising theory that Bourdieu raises as a spectre that threatens his empirical sociology. We have seen how Adorno deals in reason, freedom, and the self in a way that is as hostile to ahistorical theory as Bourdieu. In fact, Adorno’s philosophy is the historical questioning of the very concepts that Bourdieu brings forth in his assumption of some kind of Enlightenment progress (even if Adorno’s sense of history sometimes does reach back as far as the ‘primordial’5 origins of humanity). For Bourdieu to make these claims is to enter into the realm of the dialectic of Enlightenment and its fundamental philosophical questions: what is the relation between reason and freedom, what kind of subjectivity/self is Bourdieu proposing, how does this justification fit into the spell of subjectivity and the failure of the ends of history? This is not to say that Adorno’s arguments are conclusive or need to be accepted, and it is certainly the case that these ideas of Adorno are not open to the scientific methodologies of Bourdieu’s brand of sociology. But here is one significant approach that can both preserve Bourdieu’s empirical sociology and provide the philosophical tools needed to deal with the historical facts of the Enlightenment that the very object of Bourdieu’s scientific analysis must contain. The implications of this Enlightenment justification so far only clearly relate to the intellectual/academic field of reason. However, Bourdieu develops a further argument to include all the autonomous fields of cultural production, where art itself is also understood as the site of such freedom. This is the second part to Bourdieu’s granting of an extra dimension to freedom beyond class distinction. In the ‘Postscript’ to the Rules of Art comes a spirited defence of the autonomy of the cultural fields: it is especially urgent today that intellectuals mobilise and create a veritable Internationale of intellectuals committed to defending the autonomy of the universes of cultural production or, to parody a language now out of fashion, the ownership by cultural producers of their instruments of production and circulation (and hence of evaluation and consecration). I do not think I am succumbing to an apocalyptic vision of the state of the field of cultural production by saying that this autonomy is very severely threatened or, more precisely, that a threat of a totally new sort today hangs over its functioning; and that artists, writers and scholars are more and more completely excluded from public debate, both because they are less inclined to intervene in it and because the possibility of an effective intervention is less and less frequently offered to them. The threats to autonomy result from the increasingly greater interpenetration between the world of art and the world of money. (Bourdieu, 1996: 334, emphasis added) Clearly it is no longer just a game, and art is matched with reason in terms of the threat to autonomy. The great value that is at stake is, again, freedom. The Enlightenment formulation of Bourdieu’s presupposition – with art, reason, and freedom now combined – is even plainer in the following:

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Those I am addressing here are not all those who conceive of culture as a patrimony, a dead culture to be made into an obligatory cult of ritual piety, or as an instrument of domination and distinction, cultural bastion and Bastille, to be erected against the Barbarians within and without (who these days often seem to the new defenders of the West to be one and the same), but rather those who conceive of culture as an instrument of freedom presupposing freedom, as a modus operandi allowing the permanent supersession of the opus operatum, of the desolate, cultured ‘thing.’ These people will grant me, I hope, the right I grant myself here to call for the modern incarnation of the critical power of intellectuals, a ‘collective intellectual’ who might be capable of making a discourse of freedom heard, a discourse that recognises no other limit than the constraints and controls which each artist, each writer and each scholar, armed with all the acquisitions of his or her predecessors, enjoin upon themselves and all others. (Bourdieu, 1996: 339–40, emphasis added) At least in this particular plea,6 an artistic freedom beyond the Distinction definition of art (‘an instrument of domination and distinction’) is being explicitly proclaimed. And, again, such freedom has in fact been denied by both the empirical, anti-philosophy of Bourdieu, and by the strategy (however fruitful) of understanding the field as a ‘game.’ Bourdieu is here stating that there is ‘more’ to art than class disposition and codes. But what is this ‘more,’ this freedom of art beyond the anti-universal? Again, this is precisely what Adorno can address and Bourdieu cannot. Unlike Bourdieu, Adorno is reluctant to bring freedom and art together because his ‘more’ of art is a means to keep alive some alternative to the current state of unfreedom; the danger is that freedom in art becomes an end in itself. We have seen that, perhaps, this is precisely what art has become. Now these arguments can, of course, be rejected, but it is this sort of debate that Bourdieu encounters when he steps outside his own theoretical constraints in this way. Again, such philosophically minded argument need not be part of the naturalising legitimation of culture, and such theory does not devalue the gains of Bourdieu’s own work – on the contrary. However, to enter this philosophical terrain might well mean that not only will the likes of Adorno be profitably encountered, but also perhaps Hegel, and even, in the end, Immanuel Kant himself. In sum, if the fields of cultural production do contain traces of Enlightenment freedom, as we have seen Bourdieu concede at the end of The Rules of Art, then the ‘field’ would seem to be have been surpassed as the adequate theoretical model for both intellectual reason and art. The anti-philosophical science of the field and the conceptualisation of the field as a game of power relations have produced a bounty of theory, but certain important factors have been shown to elude their anti-universalism. On the other hand, the value-sphere model, with added philosophical improvements, is one way that such elements might be theorised. The arguments of the previous chapters have tried to show how this is possible.

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Concluding remarks Although these arguments on the ‘more’ of art have tried to find the limitations of Bourdieu’s work, the obvious strengths of Bourdieu’s sociology need to be remembered. We are delivered an understanding of how art comes to be paraded and embraced as naturally superior to all other cultural practices, and how the less cultivated classes are necessarily denied entrance to this realm of ostensibly heightened experience.7 The universal appeal of art in all its anti-universal, smug reality is thrown into clear relief. Also, through Bourdieu’s depictions of the rules that govern success and failure within the fields of cultural production, the development of the internal order of art taken as a value-sphere acquires a sociologically detailed understanding. It is possible to add Bourdieu’s insights to all that has gone before if two of his principles of research are challenged: the epistemological rejection of more philosophically attuned theory and the conceptual restriction of the field to being only a game of power. Bourdieu’s fears that some ahistorical, fetishising legitimation of the dominant culture must slip by if such precepts are overturned, have been shown, it is hoped, to be groundless. A last word on this critical use of Bourdieu can be granted to Weber. Bourdieu’s class analysis of the appeal of art might well be seen to fulfil Weber’s much-cited request at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism for the inclusion of a more materialistic perspective to act as a balance against his own explicitly ‘spiritualistic’ theory: But it is, of course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and of history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation, accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth. (Weber, 1958a: 183)

Notes 1 Here Bourdieu’s example is traditional aristocratic culture, but the general point is clear. 2 Manet is also a focus (see, especially, Bourdieu, 2017) 3 However, Bourdieu gives the exceptional case of Mallarmé, who, as a very successful player of the literary game, explicitly states that it is only a ‘game’ (Bourdieu, 1993: 72). 4 Bourdieu’s own personal confrontation with the aristocratic rule of philosophy in the French academy is told in the ‘Preface’ to the English edition of Homo Academicus. 5 Although not averse to large-scale theoretical claims, in terms of both historical time and cultural space, even Weber draws the line at the conceptual overreach of the ‘allegedly primordial’ (Weber, 1978: 321). 6 This particular piece might well be considered to lie outside the academic game and to be more in keeping with Bourdieu’s role as a public intellectual. Nevertheless, it is not clear that such a distinction overcomes the substantial problems discussed here.

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7 What has not been challenged is the notion that the many are still excluded from the art museum on the basis of cultural capital and habitus. However, Bourdieu’s mid-late 20th-century surveys do now seem dated due to the tourist/selfie domination of major art galleries. A new norm seems to have been established, and quiet, cultivated aesthetic comportment has been, literally, pushed aside.

6a Addendum Labour

We have seen, via Weber, how the Protestant view of labour as a means to salvation might be regarded as palely reflected in the production of art. We also need to note two other ways that the appeal of art rests on the very work of making the artwork. Both are associated with Marx, so it seems appropriate to make these points after consideration of Bourdieu, despite the fact that these issues have no place in Bourdieu’s particular class-based theories of art. Firstly, the problem of the division of labour might be seen to be met, especially in art’s most modern forms. If art does increasingly include the conceptual and quasi-rational, then the oft-stated divide between intellectual and manual labour seems to have been overcome: manual labour techniques can be married with intellectualised content drawn from an unlimited supply of ideas. Further, the possibilities for artistic practice have become so multitudinous that the restrictive force of the economic division of labour, so commonly recognised in the 19th century, can be left behind once the aesthetic sphere is entered. That is, the artist is no longer necessarily tied to long apprenticeships of training in specialised techniques as found, for example, in the old master workshops or in more traditionally minded art schools. The artist can now adopt almost any kind of labour practice, or combination of practices, that her inward subjectivity demands. And, in this way, the value-sphere of art starts to approach Marx’s famous utopian image of freedom beyond the division of labour: For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind,

Addendum  167 without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now. (Marx, 2000b: 185) Even though aesthetic labour practices are not directly imitative of what Marx describes here, the basic dilemma of the division of labour that Marx targets would seem to be absent in art. Of course, the actual economic division of labour is not thereby overcome; but this is the point of art’s appeal. As ever, art relies on its oppositional stance to the rationalised routines that surround it. Secondly, the young Marx’s concept of alienated labour would seem not to apply to artistic production. It is worth repeating Marx’s much-cited words on both the alienation of the product of labour and the alienation of the activity of labour itself1: We have treated the act of alienation of practical human activity, labour, from two aspects. (1) The relationship of the worker to the product of his labour as an alien object that has power over him. This relationship is at the same time the relationship to the sensuous exterior world and to natural objects as to an alien and hostile world opposed to him. (2) The relationship of labour to the act of production inside labour. This relationship is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as something that is alien and does not belong to him; it is activity that is passivity, power that is weakness, procreation that is castration, the worker’s own physical and intellectual energy, his personal life (for what is life except activity?) as an activity directed against himself, independent of him and not belonging to him. It is self-alienation, as above it was the alienation of the object. (Marx, 2000a: 89) The making of the art object, as we have recounted it, is the opposite of such alienated labour: the object and its external world of existence in the aesthetic sphere affirm the self, not oppose it; and the activity, both physical and intellectual, is tied explicitly to the self as its very expression and is therefore not self-alienating. Again, the contrast with the external economic sphere is stark, and the allure of art is manifestly apparent.

Note 1 The third element, species-being, need not be taken up here.

7

Conclusion

Implications Meaning and freedom Class and the appeal of distinction constitute a significant addition to our argument. However, the overall, most general themes taken up in the preceding discussions concern meaning and freedom. The appeal of art – its extraordinary status in modern life – arises partly from the fact that within all of disenchanted modernity it is in the value-sphere of art that these longed-for ends are most likely to be found. However, such aesthetic capability is necessarily formed in opposition to, and in contrast with, the rationalised, prosaic external order of the world, so all that is possible is a meaning within meaninglessness, and freedom within unfreedom. So far ‘art’ has been discussed on this very broad, usually abstract level through a direct examination of a range of items lifted out of some of the most important theories of the aesthetic. At this late stage, on the basis of this argument, it is now possible to focus on some more specific content. We can begin with the smallest site of appeal and move up to the most general. Duchamp The art world has long been fascinated with Duchamp, and, in particular, with his work ‘Fountain.’ How might this be explained? The basis of Duchamp’s appeal lies in the way he can, at the same time: radically challenge art; maintain a place within art; and powerfully develop the internal cosmos of the aesthetic value-sphere. How this has been achieved has already been hinted at in a few scattered remarks. These isolated comments can be pulled together here and, when this is done, the case of Duchamp will be seen to provide a remarkable confirmation of many key ideas of the preceding argument. The ready-mades, with ‘Fountain’ from 1917 the most famous example, are so radically and confrontationally successful because they challenge four key elements of the aesthetic world while also maintaining the overall order of that inner realm. These four elements are: beauty, form, rationality, and subjectivity.1

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Let us briefly consider each of these factors before moving on to a more theoretical examination of what Duchamp also must accept and, in fact, affirm as art. Beauty by this time is a value that has become readily disposable on the frontline of art, although Duchamp’s choice of the most unbeautiful objects still has an impact. With regard to form, the ready-mades take a step past the logic that led, through the stripping away of all content, to the pure form of art. Content is returned but can now be taken up solely within the limits of the aesthetic sphere, as anti-art. On rationality, Duchamp wants his art objects to be viewed without the usual emotional, irrational responses typified in the romantic ideal; in fact only a rational response is required. Finally, the most telling of these four elements is the confrontation with aesthetic subjectivity. ‘Fountain,’ with its fake signature on an object probably picked up from a junk heap, denies the fundamental status of the creator artist and its accompanying self-consciousness of the authentic expressive subject. If these are the four elements of Duchamp’s challenge, we can place this anti-art into a more specific sociological-philosophical setting to establish how it is, nevertheless, still art. Initially, we can assume Bourdieu’s substantial sociological explanation as to how the game of art had become so advanced that someone like Duchamp could play and win. Duchamp, as we saw Bourdieu argue, was able to position himself as the radical outsider because of his deep insider knowledge, with necessary support from other artists, curators, critics, and patrons. However, it is more than this. Duchamp might also be considered the ultimate game-player from the Bourdieu theoretical perspective in the sense that he targets the class divide between utilitarian ends and aesthetic ‘taste.’ The most ordinary items with the most obvious functions are made art because all the extra-aesthetic understanding – the basis of working-class ‘taste’ – is completely discarded. The class confrontation is direct and unforgiving with the consequence that the rules and codes of the game of art have become even less accessible to those without the necessary social capital and habitus. Secondly, the sociological explanation of Duchamp can be continued with reference to Weber. Essentially, from a Weberian sociological perspective, the readymades only make sense within the aesthetic value-sphere, and seem shockingly nonsensical within the terms of any of the rationalised spheres where reason itself is a dominant form of legitimation. The necessary, definitional contrast between the aesthetic and the rationalised spheres is the very condition that allows the ready-mades to be art. The rational appreciation of the ready-mades, as advocated by Duchamp, relies therefore on a peculiarly aesthetic form of rationalisation that is denied by the intellectual sphere. In terms of the Weberian values of the sphere of art, the aesthetically rationalised ready-mades are merely another new style created by the artist as subject that develops and relies on unethical taste. Thirdly, Adorno’s dialectical theory can be utilised. On this basis Duchamp’s anti-art can be more readily identified as only constituted by what it negates. So, as anti-art, Duchamp’s hyper-rationality sits as the balanced polar opposite of the heartfelt emotion of the romantic ideal; the rejection of aesthetic subjectivity is nothing more than a declaration of not being the aesthetic subject (more on

170 Conclusion this below); and crucially, the ugliness of the ready-mades cannot shake off the necessary, defining presence of the beautiful in art. Duchamp is so deeply embedded in the value-sphere/game of art because his work is just ‘anti’ and is wholly formed by that which it is against. In this way Duchamp must uphold the central continued existence of this irrational aesthetic subject, and beauty – his own art depends on it. Adorno’s ideas can be used to make one further point on Duchamp’s art. When this internal play in art is placed into a wider historical context, then the importance of the humorous triviality of ‘Fountain’ becomes apparent. For what is centrally attacked by Duchamp – the mythological authentic inner self of expressive freedom – is precisely the self-consciousness of a lost individual freedom that marks Adorno’s spell of subjectivity. That is, for Adorno the failure of the external historical hopes causes a retreat to the subject and its internal myths. Duchamp, then, is dealing with a vitally powerful force that still holds modernity under its spell, with art at the very epicentre of such disenchanted sorcery. And, although Duchamp’s humour cannot break the spell, part of the appeal of the ready-mades is that their throwaway appearance belies a disturbing knowledge of the age. We keep smiling at ‘Fountain’ not just because it is a piece of scrap plumbing, but because it touches on the fraught state of freedom in modernity. The humour keeps us warm as we come into contact with some of art’s more icy truths. Or, to put it the other way around, it is unlikely ‘Fountain’ would have maintained its high renown in art if it was not doing much more that it seems, and Adorno’s ideas offer one way of understanding what this extra significance might be. Up until now, with Bourdieu, Weber, and Adorno, essentially we have identified what Duchamp is against and the sociological conditions of this anti-art. With a turn to the philosophies of Kant and Hegel we can start to appreciate more clearly what Duchamp must rely on in the realm of art for his oppositional stance to be on such firm aesthetic ground. So, fourthly, how can Duchamp be regarded in Kantian terms? If the readymades do return content to art beyond pure form, then this does seem to lie outside of Kant’s understanding which suggested that any human-related content had an embedded anti-aesthetic end that was difficult to ignore. The re-introduction of such content appears to be a reversal of the logic of art as Kant foretold it – art would seem to have become less, not more, pure. However, the content of Duchamp’s ready-mades is now utterly aesthetic: any ‘adherent’ human qualities have been left behind as they have become, as anti-art, just art objects. If this is indeed the case then, although Kant’s incipient logic of art might therefore have been surpassed, his predominant aesthetic theory has in fact been vindicated; it is precisely because the purposeless state of the aesthetic has become so triumphant that everyday objects like a urinal or bottle rack can now be judged only as art. That is, their mundane, original purpose achieves a state of purposelessness, and becomes purely aesthetic, not through the logic of form and its denial of any human content and ends, but through a confrontation with that very logic of form within the sphere of art. In fact, the very success of the ready-mades might be ascribed to their ability to shift from human purpose to aesthetic purposelessness.

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As Kant’s central idea on the ends of art is in fact reinforced in this way, Duchamp must also affirm a judgement of taste, even as he deliberately targets beauty and a Kantian, irrational subjectivity in the proclamation of his ‘anti-art.’ In other words, a conceptual discussion of these objects is demanded, as Kant portrayed it in his notion of subjective universal communicability. Such conversation might well be more rational than Kant would have imagined, but it is also far less rational than Duchamp intended because it is still taking place within the bounds of art. Duchamp might push such rationality to its aesthetic limit, but Kant has shown what that limit is. Our previous discussion of Adorno on this issue of art and reason has, it is hoped, shown how any internal rationalisation of art must remain, in the end, quasi-rational. And the ready-mades might therefore be considered to confirm Kant’s judgement of taste as the logic of the value-sphere of art. Lastly with Kant, even if the ideal of the creator artist is mocked with the ‘R. Mutt’ signature,2 and with the very presentation of the found, utilitarian object as art, the genius artist of Kant is not therefore wholly overthrown. Its prime defining quality, originality, is on prominent display, with Duchamp much celebrated as an artist in this very sense. Kant can, therefore, help us see how Duchamp is, in everything he does, at work within the sphere of art. The very notion of ‘anti-art’ must be playing on the field of art, as Bourdieu tells it, and Kant can show us three constituents of the common ground that Duchamp must share with what he attacks: purposelessness, taste, and the genius artist. Finally, with Hegel, four further factors help explain the Duchamp effect. Firstly, the ready-mades are given the stamp of aesthetic reality. To place them in an art gallery is to render the external world into something else,3 even if this is a far cry from the artistic skill needed to create a 17th-century Dutch painting of satin. Secondly, there is the continuation of the long romantic tradition of making the ordinary, and even the ugly, the content of art. This is part of the basic, complex division between art and the prosaic, which Duchamp manifestly upholds with these found items. Thirdly, the new of Duchamp would seem to fulfil Hegel’s partial definition of late romanticism as the ability to make use of any material and any content; and, especially with humour, as we have noted, art gains the capacity to take up and question everything, including art itself. It is on this basis that something like ‘Fountain’ is able to be offered up as art, and part of its appeal is, simply, that it is funny. Fourth, Hegel’s late-romantic, end-of-art view also stresses the triviality of inward aesthetic subjectivity; art becomes merely the endless personal choices of the subject cut off from the great forces of history. Duchamp’s readymades underscore this very point; such everyday objects, that are chosen by the artist, gain their authority and significance from the inward subject itself. Hegel, then, further exhibits the aesthetic nature of the anti-aesthetic of Duchamp in terms of reality, the prosaic, humour, and inward subjectivity. Of course Duchamp’s 20th-century art objects lie well beyond Hegel’s 19th-century aesthetic sensibility – necessarily so. But the example of Duchamp, perhaps paradoxically, might be seen as a strong confirmation, at least in these specific terms, of Hegel’s theory of romanticism and the end of art.

172 Conclusion At this point, we can start to recognise how Duchamp’s anti-art works in terms of subjectivity. From Kant and Hegel we have, arguably, learnt that such art depends, in some measure, on the subjectivity of taste, originality, and inwardness. This constitutes the ‘in-itself’ of the aesthetic subject that Duchamp must sustain for his objects to be art. What Duchamp can challenge is the creative, authentic, expressive, inner self: the ‘for-itself’ of art. This is a self-consciousness of a subjectivity that does not exist but it is, nevertheless, perhaps the greatest source of art’s appeal; it is in art that this long-standing, Rousseau-inspired model of ideal freedom can most easily be discovered. Duchamp, ‘like a fish in water,’ knows the game so well that he can successfully target this central notion of freedom in art, the very heart of aesthetic appeal, while standing firmly on the ground of the ‘in-itself’ of aesthetic subjectivity. If some measure of understanding might have been gained about the appeal of only one artist and one artwork, we can move up the scale and try to account for the modern attraction of the visual arts. Visual art Although most of the claims that have been made about art in the main preceding argument pertain to all art forms, it is clearly visual art that has been assumed to be the model form that needs to be explained. The way that visual art has become the centre-piece of aesthetic theory reflects the priority status that such art has gained in modernity. So, the question becomes why has visual art become this ideal version of artistic expression? And, then, how does this help us in our understanding of the appeal of art? To emphasise this rise in the standing of visual art it only needs to be noted that Hegel ranked painting lower than music, and especially poetry. For Hegel, the romantic stage of aesthetic development was most appropriately realised by ‘the subjective art of painting, music and poetry’ (Hegel, 1975: 89) (as compared to the association of the symbolic era with architecture, and the classical with sculpture). But poetry was the superior romantic form because its imaginative character could be found in all beautiful production: poetry is adequate to all forms of the beautiful and extends over all of them, because its proper element is beautiful imagination, and imagination is indispensable for every beautiful production, no matter to what form of art it belongs. (Hegel, 1975: 90) This universal quality of poetry is identified explicitly by Hegel in terms of a sheer inner subjectivity. Poetry, in this way, is the culmination of all art, before Spirit moves over to the ‘prose of thought’: Poetry is the universal art of the spirit which has become free in itself and which is not tied down for its realisation to external sensuous material;

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instead, it launches out exclusively in the inner space and the inner time of ideas and feelings. Yet, precisely, at this highest stage, art now transcends itself, in that it forsakes the element of a reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and passes over from the poetry of the imagination to the prose of thought. (Hegel, 1975: 89, partially quoted above) Hegel, in the 1820s, assumed the primacy of poetry as we do the visual arts. Perhaps one reason for this shift, on the basis of Hegel’s own understanding here, is that the visual arts have themselves been able to shut out all ‘external sensuous material’ with the development of pure form and with the subsequent variety of styles and content that Duchamp, so early on, partially initiated. But two other external causes have to be stated as the more likely reasons for the ascendant appeal of the visual in art. Firstly, money: the market is able to buy and sell paintings, but it is hard to imagine how it could do this with, for example, poetry. Secondly, technology: the imagery demands of, especially, television, cinema and social media result in the assumptions of the age leaning heavily towards visual rather than literary forms (with, as noted, Civilisations a clear example of how it is not just art in general that will be foregrounded as the measure of ‘civilisation,’ but the emphasis must be on art that can be seen readily as a television screen image.) A final reason for the importance of visual culture helps our argument on the appeal of art in modernity. There has been a long history of commentary concerning the temporary, disposable, insatiable nature of modern cultural experience, especially in consumer capitalism and the overlapping culture industry. Weber’s depiction of the endlessness of such experience is just one of many. However, the visual arts can be regarded as both a mimetic reflection of this condition, and, also, as a kind of ideal resolution of such a senseless pursuit of the new. Remarkably, this resolution is achieved because the extreme experience and creation of the new in the visual arts reaches a pleasing state of satisfied stability. Consider the visit to the art museum. When paintings are lined up on walls in art galleries and museums, the valued experience is not just one of quiet contemplation of each picture, but includes the ineradicable presence of the work about to be judged. Each viewing, even when obeying the full-blown habitus of the cultivated classes, is relatively short, and assumes that another painting is about to be seen; to look at a single picture, or object, contains the expectation and promise of the work to come. A similar point can be made about the making of the visual art object. There will be exceptions of course, but the actual creative labour can be relatively swift and the aim is not one work but a show – a collection. Again, each art production points beyond itself, to the next creation. So, here we can start to see another dimension to the endlessness of aesthetic culture, where visual art can contain an ever-present sense of the new that has not yet arrived. Such endlessness is one, therefore, of continual hope and promise. The constant search for fresh, original experiences in modern culture, to fill

174 Conclusion the always hungry self with something different, reaches a point in visual art of remarkable equilibrium. The sense of the new never fades since what is being experienced has the expectation of the next experience already embedded into it. If visual art can achieve this mimetic resolution of the endlessness of modern culture then its position as the dominant art form gains a further explanation; but, more importantly for the present argument, the appeal of such art also becomes more understandable. The visual arts offer the ideal destination for modern travellers in search of experience; they only need the right amount of capital, of various kinds, to gain access to cultural objects that contain the satisfying knowledge that this is not all there is. The discussion has moved from one artist and artwork to one form of art, and can now ascend to the content of the universal. The appeal of ‘humanity’ As noted, when ‘art’ as we know it developed its own sphere and started to emerge as separate from the rationalised, prosaic world, an aesthetic ‘humanity’ was invented. An inner logic of values, very much as Kant outlined it so early on, produced this universal conception of humanity in a double sense: all aspects of humanity could be the possible content of art; and products from all human cultures could be regarded as art. In other words, the inward subject of modern aesthetic creation was ‘free’ to choose anything as the content of its art object; and the Kantian values were universalised so that cultural products from any age or place were able to be incorporated in terms of some mixture of form, subjectivity and, especially, beauty. This basically Hegelian understanding of a sense of aesthetic humanity imposes a great order on the human world, and with such order comes meaning. Such meaning can be understood in terms of Weber’s philosophical anthropology. To provide a senseless world with meaningful structure is sometimes seen by Weber as the fundamental anthropological purpose of all culture. Weber states that as ‘cultural beings’ [Kulturmensch] humankind gives meaning to the world: ‘Culture’ is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance. (Weber, 1949: 81, Weber’s emphasis) Religion is one obvious, extensive manifestation of such cultural meaning, but aesthetic humanity might be taken as another. And, as suggested, such an aesthetic ordering of the world might even be said to contain the sense of a minimally divine teleology. An addition to this understanding of the ‘humanity’ of art can now be made. Here we return to the content of the visual arts in the main, and try to make more sense of Adorno’s notion of art as disenchanted disenchantment. Broadly, this additional facet of humanity is one where art is reattached to its pre-modern existence as a purveyor of human meaning. To argue this claim is necessarily to

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qualify the fundamental Hegelian/Weberian point, assumed throughout the argument so far, that art in modernity has separated from the prosaic historical world and has been cut off from the meaningful place it once had in, for example, medieval Christianity or the civic life of ancient Athens. Hegel makes this point explicit: We may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection, but the form of art has ceased to be the supreme need of the spirit. No matter how excellent we find the statues of the Greek gods, no matter how we see God the Father, Christ and Mary so estimably and perfectly portrayed: it is no help; we bow the knee no longer [before these artistic portrayals]. (Hegel, 1975: 103) However, again, consider the art museum and its galleries of objects, or a gothic cathedral such as Chartres. Although we must judge these works as art, following what Hegel tells us here, we also know that they were once not art or, at least, had a previous, qualitatively different existence as ‘art.’ We know that before they became museum/tourist art they were part of human meaning, to be worshipped as representations of the divine. Hegel tells us this as well, not only in this quotation but throughout his lectures on aesthetics; and in the museum galleries, for example, there are nearly always guided tours and curators’ descriptions where such context is usually mentioned, even if very briefly. Of course, the aesthetic conception of humanity must be predominant in the value-sphere of art, but there is also this extra knowledge that adds at least a qualification to the prevailing judgement of taste. Such knowledge does introduce another element of rationality to the aesthetic appreciation of these objects, with Hegel’s inward romantic subject more averse to such an inclusion than Kant’s subjective universal communicability. However, the problem from Kant’s perspective is that the reconnection to meaning brings with it human ends that must taint the purposeless purity of art, which has natural beauty as its ideal. This is the case, but these purposes do not concern roofing or eating but religion and meaning. And, vitally, these ends were once the very ends of these art objects. Adherent human purpose is rationally reattached but such ends of meaning should be distinguished from the mundane examples Kant uses in the Critique of Judgement. If the old meaning is regathered in this way, what sort of meaning is it? Clearly it is of very minor significance and now exists as a mere rational appendage to the aesthetic object. But, again, if we add all these attachments together, with the museum galleries once more the model, then something larger starts to emerge. The inner cosmos might be said to be studded with such small meanings, and to enter into the art world is to gain, in this particular way, some sense of a greater cosmic order that has been lost. Such an understanding helps fill out Adorno’s notion of disenchanted disenchantment. The homecoming of art is a return to a remnant of the enchanted world that had been left behind, but we might appreciate that this home of art is partly made up of fragments from that older cosmos. Objects of former worlds

176 Conclusion are exhibited as art, but also as lost meaning. Such meaning has been rationally reattached, and is fully disenchanted, but it is nevertheless a direct link back to the enchanted shores that were abandoned long ago by the Western subject. The rational incorporation of such meaning – knowing that it was once not just disenchanted art – can then, rightly, be said to be the disenchantment of disenchantment. The overall effect of such knowledge of meaning in art is that a connection is made to all human cultures where such objects have been made. A universal idea of humanity is present, but, in this case, it is not in the sense of humans as artmaking, but as meaning-making. Weber’s philosophical anthropology can again be invoked, and, with such a concept of humanity, more is added to art’s appeal as a site of meaning within meaninglessness.

Three questions We began with three questions: what is the appeal of art in modernity; if art is so appealing why is modern art so often denounced; and, again, if art is so appealing why is the title ‘artist’ such an ambivalent one? There has been a long argument that has addressed the first question, and on the basis of that answer, which attempted to show the multiple layers which made up the allure of the aesthetic, the other two questions might now be considered. Modern art resides at the centre of the aesthetic value-sphere, and so is furthest removed from the external prosaic world. The values at work in this sphere develop a logic that leads to pure form and to the internally referential content of, for example, Duchamp; beauty, representation and other non-aesthetic values are increasingly lost, or reintroduced only in terms of the current state of aesthetic taste. Modern art, then, tends to make sense only from within the aesthetic valuesphere, with the less artistically attuned therefore shut out from such understanding. Open hostility is sometimes the result. However, this has not dimmed the attraction of ‘art’ in a more general sense. Practitioners and audiences well outside the inner game can still gain some sense of meaning and freedom based on two elements that they can share with art of all kinds, including the most modern: the self-consciousness of an inner, authentic, expressive self; and the production and/or appreciation of the new. The local, amateur art show is an example. All that is really missing is the imprimatur of taste, that can only be bestowed by the custodians at the very centre of the sphere. Additionally, the value-sphere of art contains not only its central logic that leads to modern art, but also the universal ideal of an aesthetic humanity. This is most easily realised in the art museum, but such institutions are only a reflection of a much wider understanding of the world, that includes all manner of ‘art.’ And, within this universal scope of the aesthetic value-sphere, beauty, representation, and past meanings can be found that provide a legitimate and accessible view of art that can sustain those who are not part of the central game. If modern art’s relation to the general appeal of art might, in some measure, be understood in this way, what about the question of the artist. Beyond the standard objection that the artist produces nothing socially useful and often depends on

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public funding to do so, the ambivalent status of the artist rests on the positive appeal of art being combined with three potentially negative factors, with the first two concerned with the anti-universal nature of art. Firstly, the ‘artist’ must be both respected and looked on with suspicion through her association with the affectations of the cultivated class fractions. Following Bourdieu, such a blatant declaration of distinction is caught between the qualities of condescension and ‘natural’ superiority that make up the ideology of aesthetic taste. Secondly, to call oneself an ‘artist’ is a proclamation of personal salvation and freedom that in fact depends on most people, the non-artists, not being saved and not being free. Aesthetic salvation is from the living ‘death’ or anti-life that most must endure outside the value-sphere of art; and the freedom to make art relies, at least, on the unfree labour of the economic sphere. Yes, many can visit the valuesphere of art but the professional artist, who produces the art-object as material proof of an inner freedom, can dwell there full-time with only occasional sorties to the external, rationalised world of unfreedom and ‘death’ by prose. The statement ‘I am an artist’ therefore sends the mixed message that, although the meaning and freedom of art is a promise for all, it is also claimed as the exclusive possession of the Elect who abide in the inner sanctum of the aesthetic value-sphere. Third, we have seen that for Weber the pursuit of the aesthetic values must come at the cost of ethical values. Taste, not morality, becomes the measure of human worth. The result is that, set within the value-spheres of modernity, the artist as the supreme possessor of taste will be judged implicitly as immoral in this sense. Notwithstanding this quality of unethical superiority, there is a basic truth in the stance of the artist: modernity and its labours are meaningless, or more meaningless than is possible in the aesthetic sphere; and, in many senses, the other value-spheres are, in comparison, resolutely unfree. For these reasons the status of the artist is equivocal but, at the same time, the widespread appeal of art remains undiminished.

Notes 1 Although we have been following the rule, instigated at least since Plato, that the comments of artists about their own work should not be taken seriously, an exception can be made with Duchamp. At least in some of his interviews, but certainly not in the various Dada manifestos, Duchamp shows an acute understanding of the state of the game and the nature of his own art. (See, for example, Duchamp, 2018.) 2 And, also, with Duchamp’s alter ego ‘Rrose Sélavy.’ 3 A commonly made point in philosophical aesthetics.

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Index

aesthetic judgement 24, 26–7, 29–30, 33, 36, 42, 45, 49–51, 54n8, 58–9, 81, 83, 121–2, 154; empirical 45; pure 45 aesthetic theory 51, 53n4, 56–7, 85–6, 88, 97, 100–1, 105, 111, 122–3, 128, 136, 137n14, 153, 170, 172 Aesthetic Theory 85, 103, 105, 114–16, 119, 132, 135 ancient Greece 12, 20n11, 56, 58, 61–2, 65, 69, 83, 84n13, 92, 112, 175 archaeologists 21–2 artist 1, 7, 11–12, 14, 16, 18, 19n2, 34–5, 44, 50, 52, 54n7, 55n17, 71–6, 79, 82, 83n5, 84n13, 87, 99, 105–7, 121, 128, 130, 133, 143–5, 147, 158, 162–3, 166, 169, 171–2, 174, 176–7, 177n1; creative 14, 76, 169, 171; genius 59, 84n13, 107, 171; individual 16, 72 artistic 1, 7, 16, 18, 46, 52, 63, 73, 81, 92, 108, 122, 127, 143–4, 147, 150, 163, 166–7, 171–2, 175–6; creativity 52, 81, 87; culture 123, 142; experience 127, 140; field 143–7, 158; form 15, 67, 91–2, 97, 130; interest 58; subjectivity 66, 74; treatment 74; truth 75, 80 artwork 18, 35, 42, 46, 52, 87, 89–92, 94–6, 105–8, 109n7, 111, 115, 119, 121, 125–7, 130, 135, 166, 172, 174 Auschwitz 86, 109n5, 120, 123, 128, 135 Bach, J. S. 104 beauty 6, 19, 21–8, 31–2, 34–7, 41–52, 55n18, 60–1, 67–8, 72, 74, 81, 83n3, 83n8, 85, 88–90, 94–9, 101, 107, 109n4, 121, 133–4, 138n15, 146, 168–71, 174, 176; aesthetic 23, 45, 73, 88, 97, 133; natural 29, 32, 43, 48, 54n11, 55n19, 83n3, 88, 96, 98–9, 104, 129, 133, 137n12, 175

Beckett, S. 94–5, 121, 124, 130–1, 136, 137n3 Beethoven, L. van 95–6, 103–4, 110n11, 136 Bell, D. 19n2, Bentham, J. 112 Brecht, B. 130–1 brotherliness 13–14, 20n17, 49, 122 capitalism 4, 7, 9–11, 19n2, 20n20, 37, 82, 90, 100, 108, 112, 122, 128, 173 Christianity 3–4, 56, 62, 65–6, 175; Catholic 5, 70; Protestant 4, 7, 9, 16–18, 19n2, 37, 166; Puritan 4, 8, 16, 19n2, 159 Civilisations 80, 84n16, 173 Clark, K. 80 critique 57, 78, 82, 89, 92, 100, 105–6, 113, 115–16, 119–20, 125, 136n1, 139, 151, 153, 155 Critique of Judgement 21–3, 25, 42, 44, 50, 55n20, 57, 89, 124, 127, 152–4, 175; see also Critique of the Power of Judgement; Third Critique Critique of Practical Reason 54n6 Critique of Pure Reason 23, 54n6 Critique of the Power of Judgement 53n2 Dante 70; see also divine death 3–6, 8, 12–13, 16–18, 19n5, 20n20, 38–40, 117, 126, 136, 155–7, 177 Dialectic of Enlightenment 110, 115–16, 119, 132 disenchantment 4–6, 17, 19, 40, 92, 114–19, 132, 136, 137n5, 137n6, 174–6 Distinction 142, 144, 151, 153, 160, 163 divine 4, 10, 23, 55n17, 56, 62, 68, 70–1, 76–7, 82–3, 174–5; Comedy 70 Duchamp, M. 51–2, 84n10, 133, 137n15, 144–5, 147, 168–73, 176, 177n1, 177n2 Dutch painting 66, 72, 171

Index  Economy and Society 14, 19n4, 39, 156–7 end of art 18, 22, 44, 56–7, 59, 66, 68, 71, 76–80, 82, 86, 88, 107–8, 114, 130, 158, 171 end of history 56–7, 59, 62–4, 77–80, 82–3, 88, 100, 108, 134 Enlightenment 91, 96, 101, 103, 108, 109n2, 112–13, 115, 119–20, 134, 136, 160–3 ethical 3, 9, 14, 17, 48–9, 61, 69, 71, 77, 93, 113, 120, 123, 128–9, 132, 177; anti- 14, 49–50, 53, 123; un- 13, 169, 177 ethics 13–15, 17, 20n17, 37–8, 47, 49, 122, 127–9, 132, 137n11 Flaubert, G. 144, 147 Frankfurt School 95, 100, 112, 114, 132–3 Franklin, B. 37 galleries 1, 143, 175; art 133, 165n7, 171, 173, 175 Goethe 59, 75, 87 Haydn, J. 124 Hitler, A. 93, 120 Horkheimer, M. 103, 110n10, 112–14, 117–18 humanity 3, 32, 74–6, 78, 80–1, 83, 101, 104, 109n5, 126, 134, 162, 174–6 Intermediary Reflection 2, 5, 12–14, 20n18 Kafka, F. 95, 121, 130–1, 137n3 Lectures on Aesthetics 57, 64, 66, 127, 175 Love of Art 142, 159–60 Marx, K. 16, 19, 82, 90–1, 95, 100, 109n4, 139, 166–7 Mill, J. S. 112 modern art 1, 76, 90, 92, 95, 97, 99, 101, 109n7, 123, 125, 130, 133, 141, 176 Moment: First 23, 25, 30, 42; Second 30; Third 37, 44, 46 morality 8, 22, 33, 47–50, 52–3, 54n7, 57, 62, 69, 120, 122–3, 129, 177 museum 1, 148, 173, 175; art 133, 139–40, 142, 159, 165n7, 173, 175 nature 1–2, 8, 10, 15, 20n20, 21–3, 26–30, 32–5, 40–51, 53n4, 54n6, 54n11, 54n14, 55n19, 61, 63, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 84n8,

183

89, 92, 96–7, 101, 107, 110n9, 112–13, 117–18, 123, 126, 128–30, 132–3, 140–1, 152, 171, 173, 177, 177n1 Nietzsche, F. 6, 137n2, 137n11 Odyssey 116–18, 137n7; Odysseus 116–19; Sirens 116, 118–19, 137n8, 137n9 pedagogic: action 141; work 141 Phenomenology of Spirit 78, 84n14 Philosophy of History 62, 77, 79 Philosophy of Right 77, 84n12 Picasso, P. 121, 130 Plato 23, 54n7, 55n17, 73, 177n1 politics 2, 7, 9, 11, 17–18, 23, 38–40, 54n7, 54n13, 57, 61–2, 65, 70, 77, 81, 85, 94–5, 111, 114, 128–31, 134–5, 137n7, 142–3, 151, 158, 160; see also value-sphere; vocation Practical Philosophy 23, 30, 49 prosaic 18, 57, 60–6, 68, 71–2, 76–9, 81–3, 84n8, 106–7, 114, 129–30, 134, 136, 158, 168, 171, 174–6 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The 7–8, 19n4, 37, 164 purposiveness 21, 36–7, 40, 43–4, 46–7, 50, 53, 88–91, 93, 111, 113–14, 123, 152; objective 36, 43, 119; subjective 36, 44 Rational and Social Foundations of Music 19n2 religion 2–4, 9–17, 19n5, 20n12, 20n18, 40, 52, 56–7, 62, 66–8, 70, 88, 112, 122, 129, 136, 145, 151, 156–60, 174–5 Roman 61 romanticism 10, 57, 60, 66–71, 76–7, 79–80, 82, 83n8, 104, 171 Rousseau, J.-J. 28, 31–3, 35, 46, 52, 54n12, 77, 84n12, 84n13, 107, 137n12, 145, 172 Rules of Art 144, 161–3 Schoenberg, A. 96, 121–2 self-consciousness 20n19, 31–3, 35, 40, 52, 54n10, 54n15, 56, 62, 65, 78–9, 82, 84n14, 84n17, 102–4, 106–7, 169–70, 172, 176 semblance 63, 86–7, 89–90, 100–1, 105, 115–16, 126, 135 Shakespeare, W. 69, 84n13 spiritual 3, 57–8, 61–3, 66–7, 84n11, 89–90, 98, 127, 164

184 Index spiritualisation 85, 90–2, 94, 111, 114–15 sublime 21–2, 26, 28–9, 31–2, 35, 46–9, 124, 153 suffering 3, 13, 19n5, 49, 85, 90, 93–4, 100, 109n5, 111, 118, 120–3, 127–9, 131–2, 134, 136, 155–7 teleological 22, 44, 56–7, 59, 68, 76, 80, 83, 103, 120 teleology 46, 55n20, 60, 66, 68, 80–1, 83, 174 Third Critique 28, 41, 47, 53n2, 111, 125 Tolstoi, L. 5 tomb-raiders 21–3 universality 26–8, 30–1, 48, 50, 52, 64–5, 70, 79, 107, 137n11, 142; subjective 25, 27–8, 30, 33, 52, 54n6

utopia 85, 88, 90–1, 94, 100–1, 107–8, 109n4, 119, 133–6, 166 value-sphere: aesthetic 11, 13–16, 21, 23, 30, 39–40, 42, 49–50, 52, 81, 95, 99–100, 108, 114, 119, 122, 128, 133–4, 136, 158, 168–9, 176–7; of art 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 27, 29–30, 49–51, 53, 53n4, 82, 108, 114, 116, 119, 127–9, 131, 133, 166, 168, 171, 175–7; economic 7, 37–9; erotic 11–13; intellectual 7, 39; model 41, 163; of modernity 23, 118; political 7, 38–9; rationalised 9, 15, 39, 101, 108, 114, 133; theory 2–3, 10–11, 49, 95, 101, 122, 129, 155; Weber’s 53, 57, 95, 122, 128–9 vocation: politics as a 7, 9, 38; science as a 3, 5, 7–10, 12, 38