SOURCE: “Language for One, Language for All: Adorno and Modernism,” in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics, edited by John Rahn, W. W. Norton & Company, 1994, pp. 21-39.

Modernity can be assigned a minimalist as well as a maximalist definition. In the first case, one would go back to the birth of modern subjectivity, to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the French Revolution, and modernity would be understood as the perpetual re-questioning of the normative criteria on which a posttraditional society is founded, as a chronic tension between the demands of profitability, of efficaciousness, of maintenance, and the demands of validity, of the autonomous logics in the sciences, of norms, and of arts.¹ From this perspective, the historical catastrophes of the nineteenth century do not justify the verdict which denounces modern reason as such. In the second case, modernity can be seen as the absolute radicality of the political and artistic avant-gardes and of their continuous bid for change, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century, a radicality which opposes to the apocalyptic negativity of modern societies a demand for rational reconciliation without compromise. In this latter case, after the successive defeats of the radical movements, there appears a deceived and bitter, cynical or desperate “postmodernity,” and a sceptical realism which ends up denouncing as utopian the perspectives of minimalist modernity.²

Adorno's thought is situated midway between these two definitions, and leans strongly toward the second. What separates Adorno from postmodernity is his paradoxical effort to save normativity and the emancipating potential of reason, whose totalitarian drift he nevertheless denounces. As for his successors, the principle of all essential change is resolutely confined to a force which is exterior to reason, and notably to the imagination without which it would be sterile and repressive.

Historically, Adorno's thought stems from a triple failure: the failure of Western humanism at Auschwitz, a catastrophe which the culture of Bach and Beethoven, of Goethe and Hölderlin, of Kant and Hegel, did not know how to prevent; the failure, in Stalinism, of the political movement which had claimed “to realize philosophy”;³ the failure, finally, of Western culture in a cultural industry dominated by the American model. In all three cases, Adorno (and Horkheimer, with whom he wrote La Dialectique de la raison, completed in 1944) sees the triumph of instrumental or practical reason in the modern subject, a subject which ends up by abolishing itself as subject.

However—and it is this which links Adorno to the first definition of modernity—philosophy “keeps itself alive” by virtue of its practical failures. It strives to save that which instrumental reason can only miss or destroy: the nonidentical, the individual, and the particular.⁴ What permits thinking, in opposition to the spontaneous tendency of thought—“to think means to identify”⁵—is the very failure of an identification which misses its object; by a sort of return of the repressed, that which is nonidentical forces thought into a “dialectic,” that is to say, into a critical reflection on itself, and into a mimetic relation with its object, much like the processes which are expressed in art. Instead of identifying its object, dialectical thought identifies itself with it, while at the same time retaining its identity as critical thought.

As Habermas has shown, this conclusion is inevitable within the framework of a philosophy of the subject, such as Adorno's philosophy remains. It can apprehend only by objectification—and thus by “reification”—that which arises from an essentially intersubjective “identity” of persons and of relations of reciprocity on which, in a final analysis, the social fabric relies. That is why it attempts to offer a remedy by a mimetic approach and a conceptuality founded on “affinity.” The recent theory which grounds society, language, and personal identity on the activity of communication, anterior to any reifying objectification, can avoid this stumbling block and more accurately assign a place to the pathologies of modernity. It escapes the aporias of maximalism and its postmodern consequences, because it is not compelled to attribute to the catastrophes of the twentieth century a meaning tied to the totalitarian essence of the modern subject.

I

Among the theories of modern art, the aspiration of the Adornian project is unique; it is comparable only to the three or four great syntheses of German philosophy, to the aesthetics of Kant and Schelling, of Hegel and the young Lukács, and to the collection of essays by Walter Benjamin which served as a model for the musical and literary studies of Adorno himself. Of all these theories, that of Adorno is the only one which was able to take into account, not only romanticism and postromanticism, but also the avant-gardes, their decline, and their influence up to the threshold of postmodernism.

In spite of the pessimistic tone which he consciously adopts, Adorno still speaks of an artistic modernity of the future. For him in 1969, not only is this adventure, menaced by cultural industry, yet to be concluded, but he places in it his hope for the survival of the critical spirit, since, according to him, dialectical thought itself relies on a conceptual equivalent of the mimetic attitude. Right up to its negation by a radically demystified art, aesthetic appearance is for him the basis of hope. It is this and this alone which maintains the perspective of a reconciled world, a view which philosophic thought is incapable of preserving without the aid of art.⁶ Demystified and reconciled myth, rational mimesis, art, and especially the disenchanted art of the avant-garde constitute the normative base of Adornian philosophy; this is the base which authorizes its critique of society.

The ultimate and incomplete synthesis of all Adorno's essays, his Aesthetic Theory, attempts to reconstruct all of artistic modernity as a function of the same historical situation. All modern works should be understood as responses to one and the same problem, that of myth, of disenchantment which is the process of an Enlightenment ongoing for thousands of years, and finally of reconciliation. It is a reflection on art seen from the interior, from the point of view of creation and of the work, with all the complexity and all the reflexive character that this implies for a modern artist. This is why the Aesthetic Theory—with its concentric structure and its aphoristic writing—draws close to being a work of art in itself, playing with the concepts to render them more permeable to their objects, and denying itself the transparency of a linear reading. No aesthetic connects art and modernity as closely; art is only realized by liberating itself from all heteronomy; it is the art of the avant-garde which reveals the essence of all art, but also its aporias.

Adorno's thought is paradoxical. Dedicated entirely to modernity, at the same time it gnaws away at its very foundations. In spite of the disastrous balance sheet which he draws up, Adorno nevertheless refuses to abandon the project of modernity. It is this which constitutes his intermediate position between the two definitions of modernity. There is no other root of reason for him; if the dialectical concept tends to be mimetic, the mimesis of modern art is rational and—contrary to Nietzsche and Heidegger—does not thrust its roots into a past which is anterior to Reason. It is this which saves Adorno from irrationalism, without however permitting him to differentiate art and philosophy as much as he would like to do.

One can say—in reflecting on Albrecht Wellmer's analysis⁷—that the paradox of Adornian thought is due to his fusion of two types of criticism, that of a rational philosophy of history and that of a critique of reason in the name of its other. The appeal to reason's other becomes inevitable once Adorno and Horkheimer begin to interpret the rationality of the historical process according to the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic of progress as well as to the Weberian analysis of bureaucratic rationality.⁸ Instrumental reason, which governs the development of the Mind (or of the productive forces), thus escapes all rational control, to the extent that all reason is instrumental, is the objectification of a reality by a subject. From this perspective, the critique of reason can only be carried forth in the name of reason's other, in the name of the nonidentical (nature, urges, poetry, the oppressed). Adorno's originality with regard to Nietsche lies in the fact that for him the nonidentical is not irrational, but rather a deformed element of integral reason. The dynamic which connects the two sides of reason, the “dialectic of reason,” is fundamentally a dialectic of mimesis: domination mimes the violence of natural forces in order to master them by work and by conceptual thought—it is a mimesis of death in the name of the conservation of self—whereas aesthetic affinity mimes that which is dominated.

As with Heidegger, the development of the modern subject coincides with the progress of reification, of the objectifying and dominating relation to nature, both external and internal; but analogously, the development of the subject is accompanied for Adorno by an internal differentiation whose effects are beneficial. Dominating reason gives rise to the birth of mimetic reason in the arts and in dialectical thought. To the extent that it is contrasted with magic, art is a rationalized mimesis, an appearance conscious of its unreality. Alone, it cannot reconcile a reality which has been oppressed and destroyed by instrumental reason; it can only testify to a possible reconciliation, evoked by aesthetic appearance, while representing nonreconciled reality.⁹ Modern works—those of Schönberg, of Kafka, or of Beckett—thus call forth reconciliation and at the same time deny it by their use of dissonance; to present dissonance as resolved in creating a harmonious work of art would deprive art of its critical force.

According to Adorno, humanity will escape its self-destruction by instrumental reason only to the extent that the two sides of mimesis reach a reconciliation. Now, the imbalance of modernity results from the fact that avant-garde art is already a synthesis of mimesis and of rationality—of the most advanced techniques and principles of organization—whereas positivist philosophy, sciences, technology, economic administration, and management have eliminated every mimetic element. As a successful synthesis of the human endeavor, art thus once again becomes the model for philosophy.¹⁰

If modern art is obscure and refuses itself to immediate comprehension, this is because its apparent irrationality is the inverse of instrumental reason. In exploring the repressed domain of the nonidentical which it is in the business of saving, this art incarnates a form of reason which would no longer be instrumental. It is thus that in speaking of artistic modernity Adorno does not cease to consider current problems in philosophy.

The dialectic of mimesis appears especially in connection with concepts of innovation and experimentation; it culminates in that which Adorno calls the “subjective point,” a sort of point of no return for artistic radicality.

Designed on the model of a commodity which must affirm its competitive uniqueness, the novelty of the modern work is at the same time a mortal parody of itself, to the point of the self-destruction of art. Contrary to appearances, a new work shows reality as it is, increasingly damaged under its polished surface, disfigured by the universal reign of merchandise, a final avatar of classical domination. The novelty of avant-garde art is its incessant transcendence of negativity. At the same time, the work nonetheless remains an artistic appearance, and in this manner a promise of happiness, thanks to a form, in itself new, which projects a distanced light on the reality which it reveals. This entanglement of disillusion and of utopian promise constitutes the dialectic of artistic modernity according to Adorno; it associates the content of truth with a quasi-messianic function of appearance in general.

If the new is “irresistible,”¹¹ that is because each work which is truly new forces itself as a conquest upon other artists, analogous to a scientific discovery, henceforth not to be dismissed. It is this which connects the development of art both to the history of truth and to the development of productive forces, including the knowledge of artistic techniques. A work of art is intimately linked to a commodity in a capitalist society and can only affirm its autonomy by pulling itself away from the circulation of exchange by dint of its uselessness, in the manner of a “ready-made” by Duchamp.¹² The truth of an avant-garde work consists in revealing all the violence, all the inhumanity, all the reification which crystallizes in a commodity produced by modern society.¹³ It remains to be known if art can be associated this closely to truth and to a philosophy of history univocally reduced to a course toward the catastrophe, whose Benjaminian image seems to have profoundly impressed Adorno.¹⁴

Dominating reason being irrational—the destruction of nature and of humankind—apparent irrationality in modern art is according to Adorno a form of rational reaction which denounces false instrumental logic. More precisely—and in this Adorno undoubtedly intends to take into account the Kantian systematic—art opposes to instrumental rationality the very finality of reason. In its continual reaction to the development of productive forces, art follows their logic by anticipating the diversion of technical potentials to human ends.¹⁵ It is to this intimate relation with the movement of history that aesthetic novelty owes its “irresistible” character.

By establishing such a close relation between art and historic reality, Adorno denies himself the concept of a logic proper to the artistic creation itself, founded on the emancipation and the differentiation of subjectivity, in the sense of a minimalist theory of modernity. This, moreover, is why he relativizes the autonomy of art from the very start of his Aesthetic Theory.¹⁶ The seductive force of the Adornian aesthetic is tied to the fact that a great number of modern artists were themselves involved with a logic of transcendence, devolving from the motion of the historic process toward the worst, even if they did not adhere to the dialectic of reason and of its mimetic inverse. The debate on the “end of the avant-gardes,” ongoing since the 1970s, has revealed a break with this logic of transcendence. In this context, the renunciation of the maximalist model could open out into two opposing perspectives: a pure and simple inversion of radical logic, or the elaboration of another logic, compatible with the minimalist model. Discussions on postmodernism fall within the first hypothesis; rather than a pursuit of radicalization, there is a provocative acceptance of all that which former reasoning had banished from modernism: a taste for the eccentric, for kitsch, for luxuriant excess rather than ascetic rigor; rather than a critical conscience going against the stream, a complacent adherence to what is in vogue. This inversion remains attached in a negative sense to avant-gardist dogmatism: “one must be absolutely postmodern.” In the second hypothesis, it is a question of reconstructing a logic of artistic modernity which is not simply the obverse of economic and social history, but which reacts in its own way, according to its own proper logic. The first path follows, in spite of itself, the logic of maximalism through a new global turning point and a new sectarianism which this time is eclectic; the second separates out the elements of a subjective singularization of language, even as in the apocalyptic logic of the avant-gardes.

If the dialectic of modernism tries to establish a relation between art and historic truth, the analysis of experimentation is concerned with the status of the subject in modernity; it defines the procedure which a subject impaired by identifying reason must follow—to bring about that which is modern. Originally, the concept of experimentation “simply meant that a self-conscious will set out to explore unknown and illicit ways of doing things;”¹⁷ at a later time—a time that was current for Adorno—this concept designated “the fact that the artistic subject uses methods the results of which it cannot foresee.”¹⁸ By abandoning itself to heteronomy—in aleatory music, in action painting, and in automatic writing—the subject exposes itself to regression while trying to remain master of itself at the point of contact with that which is the most alien to it.¹⁹ Artistic modernity is thus a test for the sovereignty of the aesthetic subject before the insignificant and the nonaesthetic; but for Adorno, the irrational element which thus imposes itself upon the subject has the characteristics of truth repressed by reason.

The theory of the “subjective point” relates to the same problematic of the subject: “If modern art as a whole can be understood as a continual intervention of the subject, which is no longer at all disposed to let the traditional game of forms of works of art play in a nonreflective way, then to the continual interventions of the self, there corresponds a tendency to give up in powerlessness.”²⁰ For when everything is a construction of the subject, “there remains only abstract unity, freed from the antithetical moment by which alone it became united.”²¹ Art is at the same stroke “rejected at the point of pure subjectivity,”²² by the cry of expressionism, by cubist construction, by the gesture of Dada, by the intervention of Duchamp. After having reached this extreme point, the artist—as Picasso and Schönberg themselves illustrate—can only come back to a more traditional order. In this, Adorno sees signs of the end of an art which renounces itself rather than compromise; truth content risks destroying aesthetic appearance. Beckett alone succeeds at this tour de force: “The space assigned to works of art, between discursive barbarism and poetic prettification, is hardly more vast than the point of indifference in which Beckett has set up shop.”²³

This restrictive concept of subjectivity as an integrative force—which, once having lost the aid of tradition, could only choose between sterile domination and abandonment of self—is due to the limits of the philosophy of the subject, the domain within which Adorno's thought remains.²⁴ According to this philosophy, the subject is essentially an objectifying activity, even when it examines itself; it would thus not be able to constitute any meaning, since meaning is always intersubjective. According to Adorno, the growing weight of the absurd in modern art is due to the increasing force of a subject which dismantles all valid meaning. One might thus believe that Adorno expresses a regret vis-à-vis the objectivity of meaning in traditional societies, but this is not at all so. In truth, the stakes of art are for him foreign to the signification; art is a kind of “nonsignifying language,”²⁵ as he characterizes both natural beauty and a modern art which—as does music—moves away from all narration. The progressive intellectualization of art contributes to this just as does its primitivism, the taste for fauvism. But in spite of this refusal of signification, Adorno attributes a very precise message to the language of art: it is the “language of suffering”; it evokes the negativity of reality and exorcises it through form. All “authentic” works convey this same message, which converges with the ultimate goal of philosophy.

II

Recent attempts to liberate aesthetics from this metaphysical heritage which—for Adorno, but also for Heidegger—makes of art the preserver of a precise truth, generally have the flaw of remaining negatively dependent on these concepts. Thinking to return to Kant or to Nietzsche, they substitute something for truth, be it the play of subjective faculties, authenticity, or a relativization of the concept of truth.

Albrecht Wellmer and Martin Seel,²⁶ who endeavor to reinterpret Adorno in light of the thought of Habermas, are drawn to aesthetics as a means of completing a theory of the forms of rationality. Their analysis concentrates on the contribution of art and of aesthetic reception to the collective process of communication. Thus, Wellmer opens aesthetics to art, an aesthetics which is posterior to the Aesthetic Theory, by attributing to modern subjectivity the same power of regeneration and integration that Adorno had reserved for the open forms of art. This allows him to reformulate the Adornian aesthetic utopia as a salvation for the socially excluded and repressed, not only in an aesthetic testimony of truth, but in a communication constantly enlarged through the action of art.

As for Martin Seel, he renounces such a utopia to conceive a social game of rationalities in which art serves as invitation to make experiences—experiments—for their own sake. The work of art presents a “way of seeing” which cannot be objectivized (p. 272) but which, if it succeeds, can be actualized and made the object of a discourse showing others the mode of perception which leads to such a comprehension.

In the history of aesthetics, Martin Seel distinguishes two great, erroneous tendencies: the “privative,” which considers a work of art as inexpressible, radically foreign to a discursive apprehension of the real (Seel cites Nietzsche, Valéry, Bataille, Bubner); and the “superlative,” which sees in the aesthetic phenomenon the manifestation of a truth superior to that which discursive reason can attain; the first tendency is purist, the second fundamentalist (pp. 46-47). Now, Seel's endeavor consists in defining a more rational relation with art, that of attention to a content of experience presented in the form of a nonpropositional articulation. The criterion for the aesthetic value is not truth but rather aesthetic “success” (pp. 126ff.). Those works or artistic manifestations are successful which express the contents of lived attitudes to which they alone give us access; of which they reveal to us a new sense; and which appear to us as adequate and essential for a “just” life in the present time (pp. 210-11). Aesthetic rationality appears initially in an argumentative form highlighting that which shows itself to be expression in the artistic phenomenon (p. 214). Such an emphasis is both interpretation (commentary) and actualization (confrontation, immediate emotion), and becomes criticism by combining these two aspects. Criticism specifies the mode of perception which reveals the signification of the aesthetic phenomenon (p. 296); the artists themselves do not communicate any signification but make something which is significant in itself (p. 291).

For Seel, art does not aim for anything other than to acquaint us with the experiences that are possible on the horizon of the historic present—and first to draw our distancing attention to the experience which is ours; it does not convey any other utopia (p. 330). That of a widening message, integrating what up until then was inexpressible, is not specifically aesthetic, but rather political. Those who make the experience aesthetic live the fragile presence of liberty, not its ever-vanishing future (p. 332). Seel thus rejects all aesthetics of “preappearance” or of the anticipation of a real utopia, where he sees nothing but illusion.

His book is an important attempt to articulate a domain which is difficult to grasp, that of an expression which is neither idiosyncratic nor conceptual. He represents the most recent example of a paradoxical effort characteristic of German thought since Kant: to make sense of art through philosophy, while at the same time making art a privileged object of reflection, and keeping guard against its philosophic overevaluation. Reason has need of an art which clarifies, but art is not the totality of reason (p. 326).

Wellmer and Seel react against the privilege Adorno assigns to the creative process and to the work of art. As does H. R. Jauss (and Paul Ricoeur, who develops in Time and Narrative a theory of mimesis as refiguration of reality through the configuration of the artwork itself), they endeavor to reintroduce the receptive subject that the Aesthetic Theory had dismissed. This option actually recommends itself when one perceives the limits of the philosophy of the subject, which lead Adorno to admit of no social impact on the part of modern works, and to conceive only the evocation of a utopian reconciliation with nature, one which balks at all practical realization.

It remains that aesthetics—unlike ethics—is concerned with historically dated and completed objects which have the particularity of being able to influence well beyond the time of their creation.²⁷ If aesthetic judgment renders “present” an experience crystallized in the work, one must admit that the work itself is not devoid of that rationality that criticism realizes; “a moment of reason is affirmed in the autonomy of the radically differentiated domain of avant-garde art.”²⁸ Before analyzing the activity which consists in appropriating and making available the experience contained in the work, it is thus necessary to examine the rationality inherent in the aesthetic object, without which there is neither aesthetic nor critical experience. Without it, the work of art remains reason's irrational other and gains access to rationality only in critical discourse.

Traditional art—narrative, coherent, significant by itself—often seems to be rational in that it is composed of elements arising from a cognitive or moral rationality; on the other hand, modern art distinguishes itself precisely—and Adorno stresses this—by its apparent irrationality. It is this which led Nietzsche to see in the work of Wagner a resurgence of “presocratic” Dionysianism, radically foreign to the modern logos. The problem thus consists in identifying, precisely in this modern art which is reduced to that which is unique to it, the element which constitutes aesthetic validity—that in the name of which a work is considered a success—and which allows it to be judged. This brings us back to associating the rationality of the work of art with its validity as a work.

Aesthetics always comes up against the difficulty of reconciling the virtually universal validity of the successful work, the equivocal or polysemous character of this universality, and the singular character of the experience to which it gives form (often even of the material in which it is realized). Kant thus speaks of a universality without the intervention of a concept, Adorno of a nonsignificant eloquence. In both cases, one of the terms has a particular connotation: for Kant, the nonconceptual aspect expresses both a deficiency which turns art into the “symbol of morality,” and a path which leads to a moral life; for Adorno, eloquence is paradoxically univocal: it tells of the suffering that knowledge cannot express, and thus the difference between works becomes secondary in relation to the “nonrepresentable” which is the content of truth.

Art—especially modern art—is thus a language, but a language charged with intense energy and which denies communication.²⁹ Aesthetic eloquence establishes itself in two ways: by a break with the established significations of ordinary language and by the creation of a singularized and intensified language, a language “for one.” The elaboration of this language “for one” transforms it into a language “for all,” made virtually universal by dint of its intelligibility, which necessitates a deciphering.³⁰ Aesthetic comprehension—and criticism—is thus an art of translation which causes the apparent singularity of the work (and of the experience which constitutes it) to attain a virtually universal signification, but which is for its own part a function of a particular actualization. The unity of aesthetic “validity” does not in any way reduce the diversity of the “nonsignificant eloquence” particular to each work, nor the plurality of interpretations of which each can become the object, precisely to the extent that it is successful.

For Adorno, the particular nature of modern art was a function of reality—of absolute suffering under the reign of totalitarian identity—about which artworks unfurled their eloquence. According to the concept which has just been sketched, modern art is essentially a function of an internal necessity of decentralized subjectivity; a language “for one” charged with individual energy, which becomes “language for all” when the work is successful, is a proposal of meaning³¹ in the form of contingent figures and ordered materials.

The intensified proposals of meaning do not form a continuous tradition, according to the concept of hermeneutics; nor do they reveal a hidden essence along the line of the truth of being, but rather, a fragile construction whose internal coherence is always a little strained. That which saves the meaning—that rare commodity of postmetaphysical modernity—from contingency and total arbitrariness, is the fact that its elaboration is subterraneanly a collective work, constantly nourished by the social exchange of experiences, which is the foundation of artistic configurations; no singularity deprived of all supra-individual signification can crystallize into a work.

Proposals of meaning reflect an interpretation and an arrangement of sensitive perception for which the accuracy of tone and the original character of the experience (and of the language found to express it) count more than the conformity to facts and to norms. Art is not in the order of the everyday, even though it seeks its epiphanies in the most ordinary life; it can take the liberty—and this is in fact what one expects from it—of ignoring the intersubjective demands which constitute daily life in society. Only in this way does the stylization of the proposal of meaning become possible. For the receiving subjects, impressed by this ordering of meaning acquired at the price of a certain number of abstractions, the proposal will be confronted with suitable experiences, but also with quotidian demands, and its pertinence will be tested against the true and the just.

From here onwards, one can attempt to explain—without premature reference to historical reality—certain characteristics of modern art, notably the status of negativity and its avatars. According to our hypothesis, the proposal for a coherence of meaning based upon an absolutely singular experience brings into play the demand for a radical expression of self which—from Baudelaire to Beckett—comes up against rigid and intolerant social structures. It is this which gives to aesthetic singularity the appearance of the destructive, satanic, revolted negative. It breaks with the everyday and the constraints of rational subjectivity to bring to life an instant of absolute presence. The sudden shock of ecstasy or of sacred horror snatches it away from all habit and from all familiarity and plunges it into a lucid rapture. Extreme singularity wounds hopes for inviolable personal integrity, whose pathological deformations it denounces while at the same time becoming attached to them in as much as they are images of singularity. So long as the singularity of the subject is not established, it appears demoniac, and art is inhabited by a spirit of revolt; once it is recognized—and it is this which seems today to be the case—art loses its role of representing the “accursed part.” Initially subversive, artists tend to become public characters, proposing each of their singularities as a model across the schemas of their experience. Contrary to that which maximalist modernity dreads, it is not the absolute singularity whose existence is menaced, that will be mutilated, leveled, or abolished by social normalization. What risks generalization is a singularity that is without universal bearing, a pluralism of “differences,” empty and flatulent.³² At the extreme, current culture tends to multiply voiceless narcissisms one upon another, and to confuse the fugitive attention that they arouse with aesthetic or intellectual expression. Hence also, during a certain time, the cult of madness, of perversions and of abnormalities of all sorts, which themselves have no aesthetic value, but only documentary interest. The demand for aesthetic validity which characterizes an intensified proposal of meaning calls for a symmetry between the “voice” emanating from the work and that of the receiving subject; so long as it is a “proposal of meaning,” the work is not a psychoanalytical “case” which one studies, and this symmetry is the basis of aesthetic rationality.

In accordance with its subversive side, aesthetic singularity thus questions the forms of social normativity which uselessly limit the expression of self. Inversely, coherence of meaning, placed under the demand for originality, is ceaselessly confronted with the resistance of the nonmeaningful and the untenable. From Manet and Baudelaire to Beckett and Bacon, the sovereignty of art affirms itself in the face of the negative and the insignificant. The work is a “proposal” of meaning at the risk of failure: of a meaning which can remain private or of limited interest. In the course of this process, the means employed to affirm the sovereignty of the artist are continually reduced to the “essential”: to the expression of an invincible singularity, inexpressible in existing artistic languages. Basic geometric shapes, primitive strokes, pure or elementary colors, bidimensionality, distanced daily objects, raw materials, displayed in the context of a show, can play this role, and arouse the shock of the inartistic annexed by the sovereignty of the artistic sphere.

“Proposal of meaning” signifies finally that the language “for one”—the singularity of the work which seeks to be recognized as singular universal³³—must be presented to an audience, in order to put to the test its virtually universal intelligibility, its effect of aesthetic coherence as a singularized language, and its power to make the singularity of its experience resonate in the historical experience of the receiving subjects. It is thus necessary that the work overcome at least the three stumbling blocks of absolute singularity: being nonintelligible or stripped of interest; the obstacle of aesthetic incoherence, or that of a break in tone incompletely mastered; and of inadequacy to historical expectations of originality, or of the nontopicality of the dissonance to which it responds.

Contrary to dramaturgical activity in daily life, which aims at influencing others to attain a precise goal, the presentation of works before an anonymous audience—a sort of generalized Other—establishes a contract between the work and its viewers.³⁴ Nothing, in fact, obliges them to subject themselves to the discipline of the work, but once they have freely abandoned themselves to it, they will experience—or not—the internal necessity, and will recognize it by their aesthetic emotion and their critical judgment. It is this logic which makes of art (and of the aesthetic experience) a sphere of a demand for validity analogous to those which define science and ethics, but of a weaker demand, incapable of assuring the cohesion of society; it is a demand without an immediate “illocutory force,” without necessary consequence for daily life. That which could have welded together the audience of certain works in the past—recited epics, tragedies presented before the entire city on special occasions—was due to values other than aesthetic. The modern novel and painting, or recorded music, address themselves to an isolated individual; and the collective experience of the concert, of the theater, and of the cinema, even if it can mobilize shared values, does not create any real tie capable of uniting individuals outside of the aesthetic space.

The demand for truth always comes back to a necessity inherent in the arguments, and only in the second place to facts and events (which cannot of themselves assert their truth). The demand for moral justice is already inherent in the norms themselves, whose legitimacy is presupposed in every modern society, and only secondly in the arguments which justify them.³⁵ As for the aesthetic demand, it is expressed by each singular, historically situated work which offers itself to the public, and only secondly by the criticism which justifies it, which recommends it or contests its value. But unlike truth and justice, no subject is obliged to accept the proposal of aesthetic meaning. If truth and justice are fallible, their demand is peremptory once one is obliged to admit its pertinence; the universality of a work of art, and more recently, of certain films evoking solidarity, remains on the contrary precarious and tied to the possibility of actualizing singular experience. That is why there exists a mortal rivalry among the works for the conquest of a universality of meaning; in this rivalry, the contingency of the subject's situation—which gives the subject access to a privileged experience—escapes the will of the artist. It is the “natural” part of the “genius”; only the capacity to exploit it, to confer upon it the form of a language “for all,” is within the province of the artist.

The cognitive and moral dimensions of language tend to parenthesize the particular meaning of the historic situation; the existence or the nonexistence of the facts and events, the normative adequation or inadequation of maxims of action and of institutions do not imply in themselves any relation of these demands either to the plans of the subjects or to the ultimate goals that they are pursuing. Intensified proposals of meaning schematize in pregnant materials the historical interpretations of the desires and the situations of the world; they thus reduce the metaphysical projects of the past to horizons of meaning that subjectivity assigns to itself in the aesthetic space.³⁶ In modern society, this meaning must prove itself in the process of artistic reception, where it interacts with other demands for validity and with rival proposals. Postmodern “aestheto-centrism,” inspired by the Nietzschean theory of the “artist philosopher,” can thus be understood as a refusal of this reduction of metaphysics to a hypothetical status, to simple proposals of meaning; it is through loyalty to the lost absolute that everything is reduced to a game of appearances.

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What makes Adorno correct in his analysis of radical modernity is that, until recently, most artists themselves admitted the logic of the worst and of apocalyptic anticipation. From Baudelaire to Beckett, including Kafka and Schönberg, modernity constantly repeated an apocalyptic blackmail which aimed to force the course of history. It is this implicit theology which collapses along with maximalist modernity. But just as the moral catastrophes of the twentieth century prohibit, in ethics, a simple “return to” a classical doctrine, and necessitate instead a redefinition of moral theory, neither can aesthetics go back in time. To reformulate the conditions of recognition of an action or a work does not mean to dissolve all criteria in “contextuality.”

Writers like Thomas Bernhard illustrate the passage from the apocalyptic vision (e.g., Corrections) to a proposal of meaning of the minimalist type (Le neveu de Wittgenstein). One may regret the passing of the fascinating beauty of the apocalyptic works, animated as they are by a certainty which transcends singularity, for even the nonmeaningful in them is more powerful than the risk of triviality that lies in wait for the atheological creator; but the decline of this type of creation has seemed inevitable since the banalization of singular difference. At the same time, the proposal of meaning that was apocalyptic blackmail—“going beyond real negativity by the despair of the imagination,” according to Adorno's formula—becomes an option among others, somewhat historically dated, and one would seek in these works that which connects with the stylization of a singularity. In this sense, postmodern “sensibility” is a proposal of meaning that is legitimate in itself.

Such an aesthetics—and it is still this which distinguishes it from that of Adorno—is not the principal support of a critical theory of society; it is complementary to an ethics inscribed in the ordinary language of modern societies. This ethics constitutes the normative expectations of reciprocity which allow for evaluation of the legitimacy of the social order and of equity in interpersonal relations. In a society which plays against the universality of egalitarian commerce the card of singularity and of the “difference” of each one—including anarchist and ultraconservative impulses—aesthetics cannot of itself represent the normative base of criticism. Tolerance for the expression of singularities serves often as a safety valve for persistent injustices. As for works of post-avant-gardist modernity which content themselves with seeking a “secular illumination” in the frame of a world which is neither the worst nor the best, their critical force will be all the greater as their normative reference is no longer an inverse image of redemption, but rather a meaning which is conceivable here below, here and now.

Notes

1. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “La Modernité: un projet inachevé,” translated by G. Raulet, Critique, no. 413 (October 1981): 950-69.

2. Jean-François Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979) and A. Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985) converge in this way up to a certain point in their criticism of Habermas. [Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword by Frederic Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).]

3. Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectique négative (Paris: Éditions Payot, 1978), 11. [Originally published in German as Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966). English edition, Negative Dialectics, translated by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Seabury Press, 1973).]

4. Dialectique négative, 15.

5. Dialectique négative, 12.

6. The Aesthetic Theory defines the content of the verities in works of art as “the act of freeing oneself from myth and bringing about a reconciliation with it” [trans. C. Lenhardt (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 266]. This definition is borrowed from Walter Benjamin's essay on Goethe. The schema is invariably applied in all the concrete interpretations of Adorno, whether it is a matter of Goethe or Balzac, of Schönberg, of Kafka, or of Beckett. [This and subsequent references to the English translation of Aesthetic Theory are for the convenience of the reader. In most cases, we have translated directly from the French translation by Marc Jimenez (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1974), as cited in the original form of the article.]

7. Albrecht Wellmer, “Wahrheit, Schein, Versöhnung. Adornos ästhetische Rettung der Modernität,” in Zur Dialektik, 9-47 (cf. note 2).

8. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Théorie de l'agir communicationnel, translated by Jean-Marc Ferry and Jean-Louis Schlegel (Paris: Éditions Arthème Fayard, 1987), vol. 1, 371ff. [Originally published in German as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 2 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981-85). English translation, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., translated by Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann; Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-87).]

9. This is what Wellmer calls the “dialectic of aesthetic appearance,” Zur Dialektik, 15ff. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, La dialectique de la raison, trans. E. Kaufholz (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1974), 35-36. [Originally published in German as Philosophische Fragmente (New York: Institute of Social Research, 1944). English edition, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by John Cumming (London: Allen Lane; New York: Seabury Press, 1972).]

10. Dialectique de la raison, 36: “In so far as an expression of totality, art claims the dignity of the absolute. It is this which has at times prompted philosophy to concede the primacy over knowledge to art. According to Schelling, art begins at the point where knowledge fails; art is ‘the model of science and is already found where science has yet to penetrate.’ According to his theory, the separation of the image and the sign is ‘completely abolished each time that there is an artistic representation.’ The bourgeois world was only rarely inclined to show such trust in art.”

11. Aesthetic Theory, 31.

12. In connection with the young Marx, it was often observed that his criticism of alienated work was based upon a creativist model close to the human ideal of the Renaissance and of German idealism. If this model disappears in Das Kapital, Aesthetic Theory goes back to a normative basis founded on the model of artistic creation.

13. This is why Adorno's aesthetics remain in a sense an aesthetics of “reflection” (cf. Wellmer, Zur Dialektik, 29).

14. With the exception of Peter Bürger, the German critics of Adorno question the predominance of the concept of truth in his aesthetics. They propose either a theory of aesthetic pleasure, indifferent to truth (Karl Heinz Bohrer, Rüdiger Bubner), or a relativization of the concept of truth (authenticity with Franz Koppe; “potential for truth” with Albrecht Wellmer).

15. Art is truly modern, according to Adorno, “when it has the capacity to absorb the results of industrialization under capitalist relations of production, while following its own experiential mode and at the same time giving expression to the crisis of experience.” Aesthetic Theory, 50.

16. “To be sure, autonomy remains irrevocable. … Today, however, autonomous art begins to manifest an aspect of blindness. … It is not certain that after its total emancipation, art would not have undermined and lost those presuppositions which made it possible.” Aesthetic Theory, 1-2.

17. Aesthetic Theory, 35.

18. Aesthetic Theory, 35.

19. Aesthetic Theory, 36.

20. Aesthetic Theory, 43.

21. Aesthetic Theory, 43.

22. Aesthetic Theory, 44.

23. Aesthetic Theory, 47.

24. It is this which Jürgen Habermas (Théorie de l'agir communicationnel, and Albrecht Wellmer (Zur Dialektik) demonstrate.

25. “The total subjective elaboration of art, in so far as it is a nonconceptual language, is, at the stage of rationality, the only figure in which something is reflected which resembles the language of Creation. … Art tries to imitate an expression that would not contain human intention.” Aesthetic Theory, 115.

26. Wellmer, Zur Dialektik; Martin Seel, Die Kunst der Entzweiung: Zum Begriff der ästhetischen Rationalität (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985).

27. Cf. György Lukács, Philosophie de l'art (1912-1914): premiers écrits sur l'esthétique, translated by Rainer Rochlitz and Alain Pernet (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1981), 159ff. [Originally published in German as Heidelberger Philosophie der Kunst (1912-1914), edited by György Márkus and Frank Benseler (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1975).]

28. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 117. [English edition as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, in association with Basil Blackwell; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).]

29. Wellmer (Zur Dialektik, 62ff.) emphasizes the equal importance of signifying and energetic aspects in the aesthetic object.

30. It is this process which is dealt with by the phenomenology of the creative process developed by Lukács in his Philosophie de l'art, 41ff.

31. “The power to create meaning, presently confined for the most part to aesthetic domains, remains contingent as does any truly innovative force.” Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, 373. According to Lukács's Philosophie de l'art, a work of art is the utopia of a world which can satisfy our expectations of integral self-realization. Such a definition excludes negative works from art, whereas the “proposition of meaning” accepts the affirmation of an experience of nonmeaning.

32. Michel Foucault had observed this phenomenon of a deceptive individuation in contemporary society, attributing it unilaterally to a result of power; cf. Surveiller et punir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1975) [English edition as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane; New York: Pantheon Books, 1978)] and Volonté de savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976) [English translation as The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane; New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).]

33. Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857, 3 vols., Bibliothèque de philosophie (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1971-83), vol. 1, 7. [English translation as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821-1857, translated by Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981-).]

34. Cf. Aesthetic Theory, 108: “The viewer unknowingly and unintentionally signs a contract with the art work, as it were, pledging to subordinate himself to the work on condition that it speak to him.”

35. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Morale et communication, translated by Chr. Bouchindhomme (Paris: Édition du Cerf, 1986), 80ff. [Originally in German as Moralbewuβtsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983).]

36. Cf. Lukács, Philosophie de l'art, 213-26.