ART&RESEARCH

The definition of art that I attempt to give in this essay culminates in the assertion that art asserts a consistency owed to its opening to inconsistency. We will see that the concept of art, like that of the human subject, must open up to non-art and the non-subjective in order to situate art and the subject, together with all their claims to autonomy, on the line of fracture between reality and ideality, the possible and the impossible, the particular and the universal.

The nine theses are:
1. Art is that which generates a concept of art.
2. The artwork implies a surpassing and transgressing of its factual conditions.
3. An artwork is something other than (merely) a document of its times.
4. Art articulates a difference from the texture of facts.
5. The artwork is the affirmation of this difference.
6. This affirmation takes place as an assertion of form.
7. Every assertion of form is indebted to making contact with formlessness.
8. Making contact with formlessness corresponds to making a contact with truth.
9. Art’s making contact with truth opens it up to universality.

1. Art is that which generates a concept of art.
"Art likewise is in no way simply equivalent with artworks, for artists are always also at work on art and not only on artworks."¹

How can the interrelationship among these three concepts be defined: What is art? What are artworks? What is an artist? How do these concepts fit together? "Art stirs," Adorno says, "most energetically where it decomposes its subordinating concept."² The concept of art cannot be reduced to that of the artwork because every (authentic or real) artwork cannot be reduced to any preceding concept of art, but rather inaugurates a concept appropriate to itself. The work is never exhausted in exemplifying an established, officially sanctioned concept of art. What the work achieves divides into a resisting and an affirmative element. The work embodies resistance against the existing order, against art as an already weakened cultural production with diminished capacity to resist. There is an irreconcilable difference between art and culture, for which reason art is compelled to defend itself against culture and its imperatives. An artist is someone who brings forth a concept of art that did not exist before. Only those artworks count that, instead of inscribing themselves into an instituted concept of art, generate a concept opposed to the instituted concept. It is always a matter of opening up in the dynamics of production to a still undefined concept of art; it is never a matter of a routine programme oriented toward fixed norms.

"In truth," Adorno says, artworks are "force fields in which the conflict is carried out between the commended norm and what is seeking expression in them. The higher they rank, the more energetically do they fight out this conflict, frequently renouncing affirmative success."³ The artwork articulates the conflict between what exists and the new so that the work enters as an arena for carrying out a differentiation (or difference) in which the established understanding of art meets an objection. At the same time it must remain clear that a distinct separation between the existing and new remains an unfulfillable challenge:

Even the category of the new, which in the artwork represents what has yet to exist and that whereby the work transcends the given, bears the scar of the very-same underneath the constant new. Consciousness, fettered to this day, has not gained mastery over the new, not even in the image: Consciousness dreams of the new but is not able to dream the new itself.⁴

The artwork draws its power from resistance against powers that reduce it to an effect of the existing order. The work’s affirmative element lies in its opening to beyond what exists, whose positivity it first generates. The experience of art is the experience both of its conditions of possibility and of the affront to those that it represents. The concept of art condenses the paradox of an achievement that has to turn against its own possibilities in favor of the impossible as the impossibility that is possible for achievement.

Art is that which brings forth a concept of art in asserting works that, while resisting their assimilation into the existing order, articulate themselves as affirmations of contingency, as figures of an opening to that indeterminacy and incommensurability marking off the truth of the space of facts. I call the universe of facts the dimension of socially, politically, economically, historically, culturally, biologically, technically, and so on overdetermined reality. Here the artwork struggles for its autonomy — in the field of factical codification, real heteronomy into which it remains in jeopardy of relapsing:

Artworks are able to appropriate their heterogeneous element, their entwinement with society, because they are themselves always at the same time something social. Nevertheless, art’s autonomy, wrested painfully from society as well as socially derived in itself, has the potential of reversing into heteronomy; everything new is weaker than the accumulated ever-same, and it is ready to regress back into it.⁵

No matter how much art "refuses definition,"⁶ it also demands one. Art is scarcely anything other than work on its own concept, the determination of what art is and ought to be. In the opening to where it has long since already been admitted, the dimension of constituted certainties and valencies, art is pushed to the limit not only of the space of facts but also of its concept and its form of appearance hitherto. Art contains a dynamic for bringing forth itself through works in a continual redefinition of what is to be understood by its concept. Art extends the concept of art by unbounding itself to its other that bounds it. Every artwork is a form of unbounding, an excess directed toward its implicit inconsistency.⁷ It is an excess marking its unbounding from its border, its openness to formlessness, whose bearer it remains. Art is an assertion of form generating itself in an opening to formlessness.⁸ No matter whether this formlessness be society as an overly complex, intracontradictory space of facts (the zone of sociohistorico-symbolic evidence), or whether it be the point of inconsistency within this domain, the incommensurability commensurable with formlessness.

2. The artwork implies a surpassing and transgressing of its factual conditions.

"All artworks, even the affirmative, are a priori polemical."⁹

Affirmation by the artwork is the affirmation of its polemical violence directed against everything that limits its claim to autonomy: constituted reality in its complexity and multiplicity, which Adorno calls society. Art exists only in the here and now of this one world without an exit, the world of facts. Art is not an escape from it; it formulates its claim to autonomy in the midst of the world of determinants in order, in an opening to heteronomy, to escape this world’s phantasmagoric mistaking of itself. Just as there is freedom only under conditions of factual unfreedom, sovereign independence only under conditions of its absence, autonomy becomes a demand and necessity only in the field of factual heteronomy. Adorno never ceases to plead for the possibility of aesthetic autonomy in its opening to its impossibility. Thus he becomes the advocate of a possible impossibility. Art implies a "refusal of empirical facts." Art distances itself "from the empirical world," not by fleeing into a second, higher world, but by intensifying its relation to this empirical world. Art’s "inescapable affirmative essence"¹⁰ must turn against its distorted image, against the idealist temptation to locate art somewhere beyond the world of facts. Affirmation is not naïveté or approval. Affirmation is invention and construction. The artwork’s affirmative intensity implies a double gesture comprising the acknowledgment of its historicity as well as the courage not to enclose itself smugly within the critical, reflexive reassurance of its resultant status, which demands its opening up to the inconsistency of the web of determinants. Facts are nothing but facts: art knows that knowledge is not everything, that the artist's responsibility begins with building up an affirmative resistance against all kinds of vulgar materialism and positivism, at the same time suspending all kinds of idealism, promising it a reality beyond this single, unique reality, in order finally to dehistoricize it completely. Realism and idealism are pseudo-alternatives for the history of philosophy, for philosophical aesthetics, for art.

A "concept of history" as a "critique of philosophy" that "does not seek to abandon philosophy itself," as we read in the preface to the 1969 edition of Dialectic of Enlightenment,¹¹ has its counterpart in the effort, “by way of the concept, to transcend the concept"¹² as well as in an understanding of art that conceives of itself, in view of its impossibility (heteronomy, historicity), as possible (autonomous, universal). What holds for the concept of a "true human being" — “He would be neither a mere function of a whole, which is inflicted upon him so thoroughly that he cannot distinguish himself from it anymore, nor would he simply retrench himself in his pure selfhood" — holds also for the true artwork.¹³ In the field of tension between immanence and transcendence, the concept of art, along with that of the subject, situates itself porously between the factual social interconnections and their inconsistency, contact with which opens up the chance of autonomy and freedom. That is the affirmation achieved by the artwork, the acknowledgment of itself as an element of the empirical world as well as a figure of its resistant opposition.

3. An artwork is something other than (merely) a document of its times.

"The distinction . . . between the artwork and the document holds good insofar as it rejects works that are not in themselves determined by the law of form."¹⁴

Art was never anything other than consent to the fragility of its times. Art does not come from a stable situation; it is the experience of the inconsistency of its reality. Art exists only as the experience of the porosity of the system of facts. Therefore, for it, there cannot be any alliance with facts, which does not mean that it disputes or misrecognizes their power. But art does not exhaust itself in demonstrating this non-misrecognition through the analytical power that is also immanent within it. As long as art does not surpass its knowledge, it is not art. It would be nothing other than a self-reassurance for the subject within the web of its critically commentated situation. Only an assertion of form that evades a narcissistic self-reassuring by articulating the transience of the certainty of facts succeeds in confronting the universal inconsistency that is the subject’s proper time and proper place.¹⁵

More than being a document of its times, the artwork is a corruption of the zeitgeist and the socio-historic texture from which it indeed arises. If a work were nothing other than the result of its conditions and reducible to its determinants, it would not be a work. The essential feature of an artwork is that it inscribes a resistance in the reality to which it belongs by appearing in it as something incommensurable. What distances it from the document is this excess that alienates it from its status as a fact, since this status indicates the ontological fragility of the texture of facts. The artwork's assertion of form disputes neither its origins in the world of facts nor its existence in this world; it resists simply its reduction to it by appearing in it as something unforeseen. The appearance of the work shows it to be the arena for a conflict between the existing order and that which threatens to topple it. Whereas the document is for transporting information, for communicating and archiving it, the artwork is a questioning of information, communication, and archiving. The insistence that "the arts will not fit into any gapless concept of art" says in the first place that there is no such gapless concept.¹⁶ Since art practices the permanent re-destabilization of all stable forms and concepts, it compels for each artwork its appropriate concept whose universality experiences its corrective through the singularity of the individual work in order, at the same time, to point beyond it to its universality. The artwork's universality must take up the singularity of the individual result like an uninvited guest. If it does not do this, it is a fiction of universality. True universality is one that affirms the singular status of artworks instead of negating it. The artwork is universal by building up a form, beyond its status as a document, that is held hovering above the abyss of formlessness, which in turn points to the incommensurability of the world of facts. No work is grounded in any sort of ontological principle. Rather, it is an assertion that, although such a principle does not exist, the form fought for by the work opposes mere arbitrariness through evidence evident only to the form.

4. Art articulates a difference from the texture of facts.

"Foreignness to the world is an element of art: Whoever perceives it other than as foreign fails to perceive it at all."¹⁷

Art is an assertion of difference. In the zone of familiarity, art appears as something unfamiliar. The artwork has an alienness that makes it into something unfamiliar in the domain of established certainties. With sovereign independence it resists its appropriation by communicative intelligence. The "adequate assimilation" of its reception, as Adorno says, is the "communication of the uncommunicable."¹⁸ Instead of primarily communicating, art is an invention and a construction. Its progressivism is due to the will to assert a form that makes precise the universal formlessness (the exterior, the real, chaos, the incommensurable, or, following Adorno, the nonidentical or elementary). Art exists only as an assertion of form that accelerates beyond what is known while refusing to assimilate itself into any sort of nature. The alliance with anything natural is necessarily regressive. Such an alliance enters a coalition with a metaphysics of the origin that is at work in every attempt to stabilize the present by turning back to the past. Art is the surpassing and transgressing of naturalism and originism. What is new in art is too new to be as old as an origin. The artwork neither articulates its intimacy with nature and origins, nor does it enter into solidarity with the zeitgeist. Art exists only as a conflict with its times. Every persuasive artwork comes from the future; it never arises from the past. Weak art can be recognized through its sentimentality, nostalgia, adoration of the past, in short, through its inability to make the future precise. Instead of competing with documentation and historical work, it is a matter of giving a form to the formlessness of tomorrow today, here and now. Art implies the courage to give answers to questions that do not preexist. There is no art beyond the affirmation of something new. No matter, as demanded by the Aristotelian perspective, how much it remains tied to what exists, no matter how much it remains embedded in the material texture, nevertheless the new rewrites it by appearing in this texture as something unforeseen.

The artwork implies an "antithetical critical element"¹⁹ that allows it to reflect its conditions. It must not exhaust itself in such reflection, however, since it includes, like any positing, assertion of form and decision, an element of proflective blindness, an element evading its self-understanding and its self-reassuring. A minimum of blindness, a minimum of tendentiousness and interest, a minimum of uncontrollability and violence is still part of the most careful analysis. If it denies that, it is naive and offers itself as such as an object of analysis that convicts it of an implicit blindness. Now art does not have much to do with mistrust, conviction, and police zeal. Its critical power correlates with an affirmation resembling an ontological consent. Obviously, both elements cross over in the artwork: consent and not being in agreement, affirmation and negativity. The political aspect of art lies in turning equally to both elements, on the one hand, refusing to neutralize its critical power in a merely blind affirmation, in order, on the other hand, to keep the certainty alive within it that there can be no art that could, or even should, get rid of its blindness, since it marks the work’s opening to something unknown and new. That is what distinguishes it from journalism — this opening to its blindness as a productive power. Blindness, ambivalence, and truth mark the status of incommensurability of a world that has begun to believe in itself as if in a fact. There is only one world; there is no second world, no world behind this one, no utopian place. But this one world without an exit is in no way identical with the intelligence it supplies about itself in the form of images, language, information. Rather, it has an incommensurability that withdraws from any direct appearance. It denotes nothing other than the inconsistency of the universe of consistency that we call reality. The affirmative trait of the artwork sews it to this incommensurability, which inscribes itself as a resistance in every religiosity of the facts.

The alertness and care of art, its political nature, become visible in its resistance against the temptation to turn itself into journalism, in its resistance against the power of facts, on the one hand, and against the aesthetic, always idealist mistaking of itself in the phantasma of pure art, on the other. Art exists only in the sphere of economic, cultural, social, and political overdetermination. Here it must articulate its distance from everything that limits its claim to autonomy.

5. The artwork is the affirmation of this difference.

As an affirmation of difference, art affirms the hyperbolism characterizing it, which obliges it to respect the incommensurable rather than facts that misrecognize their fictitious status. In the eighty-second aphorism in Minima Moralia, Adorno describes the opening of thinking to the inconsistency of facts:

While thought relates to facts and moves by criticizing them, its movement depends no less on the maintenance of distance. It expresses exactly what is, precisely because what is is never quite as thought expresses it. Essential to it is an element of exaggeration, of over-shooting the object, of self-detachment from the weight of the factual, so that instead of merely reproducing being it can, at once rigorous and free, determine it. Thus every thought resembles play, with which Hegel no less than Nietzsche compared the work of the mind. The unbarbaric side of philosophy is its tacit awareness of the element of irresponsibility, of blitheness springing from the volatility of thought, which forever escapes what it judges. Such licence is resented by the positivistic spirit and put down to mental disorder. Divergence from the facts becomes mere wrongness, the moment of play a luxury in a world where the intellectual functions have to account for their every moment with a stop-watch. But as soon as thought repudiates its inviolable distance and tries with a thousand subtle arguments to prove its literal correctness, it founders. If it leaves behind the medium of virtuality, of anticipation that cannot be wholly fulfilled by any single piece of actuality; in short, if instead of interpretation it seeks to become mere statement, everything it states becomes, in fact, untrue. Its apologetics, inspired by uncertainty and a bad conscience, can be refuted at every step by demonstrating the non-identity which it will not acknowledge, yet which alone makes it thought. If, on the other hand, it tried to claim its distance as a privilege, it would act no better, but would proclaim two kinds of truth, that of the facts and that of ideas. That would be to decompose truth itself, and truly to denigrate thought. Distance is not a safety-zone but a field of tension.²⁰

What Adorno says about thinking holds in the same degree for art. Art is a form of exaggeration in that it affirms the "difference from facts" as the condition of its possibility.²¹ Art exists only as a hyperbolic (because unreserved) affirmation of its hyperbolism. Positivism, which is devoted to the facts like proven certainties, understands nothing as long as it reduces thinking (as well as art) to a sequence of certain steps, robbing it of its fantasy. It could almost be said that there is no thinking that is not art, if art implies the excess, the surpassing and transgressing of the authority of facts. The artistic character of thinking would mark its relatedness to a practice of articulation of the self in the world that pronounces the imperative of literalness in order to provoke a disturbance in the midst of established, correct facts by inventing new (aesthetic) forms and new concepts. The distance from what is correct and well known, from the factual and the firmly existing, is the element in which art and philosophy come to themselves, without relying on arriving punctually. Ontological unpunctuality is inherent within the human subject. The subject is never simultaneous, never on time, never identical with itself. Derrida has thought of this incongruence of the subject as an irreducible deferment (différance). Adorno's concept of the nonidentical marks this rift. Rift or gulf, incision in the subject, these are hallmarks of art and philosophy insofar as they resist positivist and idealist ideology. Art's affirmation is the affirmation of this incision, which, by alienating it from the zone of facts, keeps every subject cut, nonidentical with itself, that is, free and unfree at the same time. Autonomous and heteronomous like the artwork, which remains a result of society and history while at the same time flying over them, entirely in the sense of flying over (survol) of which Deleuze and Guattari speak in order to articulate the difference between becoming and history. The movement of becoming is transhistorical in that it flies over the merely historical but without losing contact with it. The territory flown over is constitutive for the subject flying over qua subject flown over. Society — as denoted by Adorno — has penetrated every artwork, whether the artist wanted it to or not. But nevertheless it affirms a certain distance from it, an infinitesimal freedom that can scarcely be proved, like the aesthetic, nonobjective evidence inherent in the plausibility of a persuasive artwork.

6. This affirmation takes place as an assertion of form.

How is the place of the work within the social field to be determined? How do the production of art, art criticism, art studies, and philosophy relate to one another? Is there a political commission for an artwork? Is art necessarily critical—critical of institutions, the market, ideology? Or does an artwork put certain limits upon criticism and its good conscience, which make of it a risky, necessarily affirmative practice? Does its sense lie in these categories of resistance and subversion invariably associated with the artwork, but also in a self-calming that enables the artist to participate in the political game without genuine commitment, so that political consciousness takes on the function of a depoliticization that has not been admitted? How affirmative must an artwork be in order to be subversive or political?

In order to be an assertion of form and truth, art and philosophy must refuse the "order of real politics."²² That is the order of the possible, of pragmatism and its practical cleverness, of situational intelligence. It is the order of phrónesis, as Aristotle says, the dimension of diplomatic reason. Aristotle calls phrónesis intelligence in particularity, in unfreedom, intelligence that operates in relation to the situation in which it decides and acts.²³ As Gadamer ceaselessly underscored, it is the principle of hermeneutics, reason that ponders and weighs up. That brings it close to the pragmatic estimation of doxá, of sound common sense. Art and philosophy have an inherent absolute resistance to doxá and phrónesis because they compel the subject to decelerate, to brake itself, to renounce power. Philosophy and art want to erect the subject as a power of assertion that resists defusing by doxá and phrónesis. The subject truly decides and acts only by neglecting its situation, ignoring and transcending it by puncturing the texture of facts. Subject is nothing other than the name for this puncturing and hyperbole, which it necessarily represents. Hence the mistrust of a subject of such self-authorization because it resists its own defusing by the spirit of facts.