‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’, unpublished lecture course on the sociology of art, 1984.

Piet Strydom: ‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’, 1984

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Sociology of Art – Theories of the Avant-Garde (Lecture, January–March 1984)

Piet Strydom Department of Sociology

University College Cork

© piet strydom


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Table of Content

I The Place of Art in the Socio-Cultural Configuration of Modernity

1 The concept of society 4

2 The development or rationalisation of society 4

3 Historical development of the concept of art and philosophical aesthetics 6

The concept of art 7

Aesthetics 7

4 Autonomous art in its place 8

II Modernity and the Avant-Garde

5 The concept of modernity 10

The three modernities: humanistic, romantic and radical 10

6 The concept of the avant-garde 11

The two avant-gardes: artistic and political 12

The concept of avant-garde 12

III Theories of the Avant-Garde

7 José Ortega y Gassett: an early typology of the avant-garde 14

The dehumanisation of art 14

Inversion of the aesthetic intention 15

Typology of the avant-garde 16

Evaluation 16

8 Renato Poggioli: dialectical typology of the avant-garde 18

History of the avant-garde 18

Movements versus schools 19

Typology of the avant-garde: logic and dialectic 19

Evaluation 20

Summary and transition 23

Historical introduction: Hegel’s thesis of ‘the end of art’ 23

9 Lukács: realism versus decadent avant-garde art 25

The concrete and the abstract: epic, tragedy and abstraction 25

Abstraction, reification and ideology-critique 26

Realism and formalism (including the avant-garde) 27

Evaluation 29

10 Adorno: avant-garde art as a form of critical cognition 31

The autonomy of art – versus Brecht and Benjamin 31

The work of art as ‘windowless monad’ 33

Two basic principles of the sociology of art 34

Evaluation: Adorno versus Lukács 35


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11 Walter Benjamin: the critical allegorical avant-garde work of art 37

Allegory versus symbol 37

Technological and artistic change: from auratic to avant-garde art 38

The non-organic allegorical avant-garde work of art 41

Evaluation: between Lukács and Adorno 42

12 Herbert Marcuse: the avant-garde – anti-art or formalist? 43

Emergence of the modern artistic personality 43

Critique of autonomous art as ideology 44

Avant-garde art as critique pointing to the pleasure principle 45

Technological invalidation of avant-garde art 46

The avant-garde as the reintegration of art and life 47

Art as the form of reality 47

Evaluation 48

Summary and transition 49

13 Peter Bürger: the avant-garde as explanatory category 50

The critical-hermeneutical model 50

The autonomy of art 51

The avant-garde as attack against the institution of art 52

The significance of the avant-garde 53

The avant-garde as explanatory factor 54

Evaluation 55

Transition 56

14 Arnold Gehlen: the death of reflexive, conceptual, avant-garde art 57

Rationality of the artistic image 57

Three historical types of art: ideal, realistic, and aesthetic 58

Conditions of aesthetic art of reflection 61

Avant-garde art as reflexive, conceptual art 62

The conservative theory of the death of the avant-garde and the end of art 63

Evaluation 65

15 The Ritter School: modern art as compensation 66

Roots of the theory of art as compensation 66

Joachim Ritter 68

Odo Marquard 68

Evaluation 70

16 Daniel Bell: the avant-garde and the postmodern age 74

The internal contradictions and double-bind of modernity 74

The subversive avant-garde and the debasement of modernity 78

Evaluation 80


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IV Conclusion: The Autonomy of Art and the Avant-Garde

17 Point of departure: process of rationalisation-cum-disenchantment 83

Rationalisation 83

Disenchantment (disillusionment-enlightenment) 83

18 The autonomisation of art 84

Socio-cultural-motivational rationalisation 84

Disenchantment-enlightenment 84

Ideology 84

19 The avant-garde 85

The historical avant-garde 85

Contemporary manifestations of the impact of the avant-garde 85

Comment on the Context of the Lectures (2010) 86

Tables and Figures

Table I.1: Autonomous art in the context of modern society 9

Figure III.1: Art in the Configuration of the Lifeworld and Formal

World Concepts 73

Table III.1: Bell’s View of the Differentiation of Society 76

Figure IV.1: Theoretical-Political Positions on Modernity 83

Table IV.1: Historical Development of Art 84

Table IV.2: Dimensions of the Avant-Garde 85


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I The Place of Art in the Socio-Cultural Configuration of Modernity

Since our main theme is the ‘Sociology of Modern Art: Theories of the Avant-Garde’,

the first task is to clarify, at least in a rough and preliminary way, the place of art in

the social and cultural configuration of the modern period. For this purpose, let us

begin by considering the concept of society and the development or rationalisation of

society. This should provide a structural overview of the framework within which

modern art finds its place.

1 The concept of society

Classical sociology, from Hegel and Marx over Durkheim and Pareto to Tönnies and

Weber, had as it main concern the transition from traditional to modern society: Hegel

– the reduction of the ancient and medieval distinction between household (oikos) and

state (polis) to their common denominator society or ‘civil society’; Marx – from

primitive communism to ‘capitalist society’; Durkheim – from ‘mechanical’ to

‘organic solidarity’; Tönnies – from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft; and Weber – from

the world pervaded by magic to a ‘disenchanted, rationalised society’. On the basis of

these various analyses, sociologists in the course of time advanced two distinct, if

extreme, concepts of society: the strict economically defined concept of society qua a

complex of forces and relations of production (Marxist); and a concept of society

defined exclusively in immanent cultural or normative terms (e.g. symbolic

interactionism).

Despite a certain persistence of these two concepts, however, we know today that

sociology can operate adequately, especially if it seeks to come to terms with the arts,

only with a differentiated concept of society – that is, regarding society under the

double aspect of both the economic and the symbolic, cultural and normative.1 This

bi-focal concept of society, which applies strictly speaking only to the modern period,

must next be related to the concept of development or rationalisation if we are to

clarify the place of art in the social and cultural configuration of the modern period.

This process accounts for the differentiation of society into a variety of components

and sphere at different dimensions. Weber provides a good starting point for this,

reinforced by the interpretations of such authors as Talcott Parsons and especially

Jürgen Habermas and Peter Bürger.

2 The development or rationalisation of society

Max Weber, as is well known, regarded the world-historical specificity or

characteristic uniqueness of modern Western society as residing in the fact that,

within its context, a process called ‘rationalisation’ attains its complete deployment.

In modern Western society, and only here, does a process come to penetrate all

spheres of life which enables human beings to master things through calculation, to

systematise contexts of complexes of meaning, and to develop a systematic and

methodical way of life – that is, the process of ‘rationalisation’. Asserting itself in all

spheres of life as it does, the process of rationalisation determines not only scientific

and technical processes, but also the state, bureaucracy, education, the pursuit of

knowledge, law, capitalism, as well as art and architecture and even ethical decisions

and the organisation of everyday life.

1 For a closer specification, see my 1981-82 lecture course , ‘An Introduction to the Sociology of Art’,

p. 99 (original manuscript), which in certain respects draws on Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen

Handelns, Vol. 1-2, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981.


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As regards the rationalisation of art and architecture, Weber has the following to say:

‘…rational harmonic music…our chromatics and enharmonics…our

orchestra…our system of notation…all these things are known only in the

Occident…In architecture…the rational use of the Gothic vault…as a

constructive principle…and foundation of a style extending to sculpture and

painting…does not occur elsewhere.’2

Here Weber calls rational the establishment of a coherent musical, architectonic or art

system which allows optimal revolution of given technical problems. Rationality is

thus located on the level of artistic material.3 This means to say that art is not yet

given a unique place in modern Western society; rather, it is cited as but one example

of occidental rationalism among others. However, Weber’s analysis of art belongs to a

broader concern of his – his concern with cultural rationalisation which, besides art,

also embraces science and technology, on the one hand, and religiously based ethics,

on the other. Accordingly, he characterises cultural rationalisation in the modern

period as the differentiation of the substantive rationality contained in religion and

metaphysics into three autonomous value spheres: science and technology; the moral-

legal sphere; and finally art and art criticism.4

As regards the autonomisation of art, Weber writes as follows:

‘Since its beginnings, religion has been an inexhaustible fountain of

opportunities for artistic creation…This is shown in…idols, icons, and other

religious artefacts…in music…in sorcerers as holy singers and dancers…in

temples and churches…in paraments and church implements of all sorts which

have served as objects of applied art…[But] art as a carrier of magical

effects…and the evolution of the inherent logic of art…have tended to [create]

an increasingly tense relation [with religion]’.5

These artistically stylised modes of expression, which initially served religious cults,

became autonomous at first through the court patronage system and then through the

capitalist systems of artistic production for the market. Under the conditions of

rationalisation, Weber submits: ‘art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously

grasped independent values which exist in their own right’.6 Accordingly, Weber

conceives of the independence or autonomy of art above all as the unfolding of what

he calls ‘the inherent logic of art’7 as a distinct cultural value sphere.

This development rendered possible the rationalisation of art itself and, along with it,

the cultivation of experience relative to inner nature: the methodical expressive

interpretation of subjectivity which has been set free from everyday conventions of

cognition and action; the opening up and exploration of new sensibilities. Weber

2 ‘Author’s Introduction’, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Allen & Unwin,

1976, pp. 14-5. 3 Bürger, Zur Funktionswandel der Literatur, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983, p. 11.

4 Habermas, ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’, New German Critique, No, 22, pp. 3-14, here p. 8.

5 Weber, in Gerth and Mills eds, From Max Weber, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, p. 341.

6 Ibid., p. 342.

7 Ibid., p. 341.


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investigated this tendency with reference to the phenomenon of bohemianism, a life

style corresponding to the stage of development of modern art. In this case, Weber

speaks of the becoming autonomous and stylisation of a consciously cultivated

extraordinary sphere, which is accompanied by a form of eroticism or sex which

admits of being raised to an orgiastic level of pathological obsession.8

Although Weber did not consider the autonomisation of the sphere of aesthetic value

with reference to the formation of an art public and the development of art criticism,

he did give attention to the institutionalisation of art as such.9 He observed that as

soon as it becomes a cosmos of independent values:

‘…art takes on the function of a this-worldly salvation…It provides a

salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing

pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism. With this claim to a

redemptory function, art begins to compete directly with salvation

religion…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 substitute to religious experience’.10

Here Weber seems to suggest that in modern Western society art at institutional level

functions or, at least, could function as a functional equivalent of the institution of

religion.11

This of course does not mean that art in modern Western society is nothing

but a substitute religion, but rather that Weber regards autonomous art and the

expressive self-representation of subjectivity as standing in a complementary relation

to the purposive-rational practice of everyday life.

However, Weber was more interested in those effects which flowed from the

conscious grasping of autonomous aesthetic values to artistic material and the

techniques of artistic production. He noted that art becomes a cosmos of independent

and autonomous aesthetic values which are progressively more consciously grasped –

and then he asked how this conscious grasping and becoming reflexive of the

autonomous values affected artistic material and techniques. In the posthumously

published work, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music,12

for instance, he

considers harmonic music by looking at the development of such forms as the sonata,

symphony and opera, and musical instruments such as the organ, piano and violin. Of

particular importance to him is the creation of the modern system of cord harmonics,

the emergence of the modern system of notation, and the development of the

construction of instruments, especially the piano as typical modern bourgeois

instrument which developed technically from the clavichord and the cembalo.13

8 Ibid., pp. 346-7.

9 Among the first to investigate the institutionalisation of art was the Swiss-French proto-sociologist,

Germaine Necker, known as Madame de Staël (1766-1817), particularly in De la litterature considérée

dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, originally published in 1800. 10

Ibid., pp. 342-3. 11

Bürger, Zum Funktionswandel, pp. 27-30. 12

Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press. 13

Se, e.g., ‘The History of the Piano’, in W. G. Runciman (ed.) Max Weber: Selections in Translation,

Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1978, pp. 378-82.


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3 Historical development of the concept of art and philosophical aesthetics

Weber’s depiction of the rationalisation of society and, within it, the becoming

autonomous of art as a cultural value sphere as well as an institution, assumed the

emergence not only of an altogether new concept of art, but also of aesthetics –

classical German philosophical aesthetics.

The concept of art

Up until the 17th

century, the word ‘art’ was used in a sense which embraced

knowledge, any human skill and the conscious transformation of nature for use by

humans. In the Renaissance, for instance, the artist played the role also of scientist,

engineer, general handyman, and so forth. Already at this stage, however, we see

signs of the becoming autonomous of art. Weber is thus able to write about Leonardo

da Vinci as artistic experimenter:

‘Art was elevated to the status of a science, and that means at the same time

and above all: the artist was elevated to the status of a doctor’.14

Only later, during the 18th

century when ‘art’ came to signify a particular group of

skills, the ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative arts’, were the familiar distinctions between ‘art’

and ‘science’ and between ‘art’ and ‘crafts’ introduced. In the wake of the 18th

-

century differentiation of the aesthetic sphere, art in the sense of ‘beautiful

appearance’ was contrasted with practical reality and understood in terms of this

contrast. At this stage, the different art forms such as literature, plastic arts and music

were also distinguished and became gradually institutionalised as a distinct sphere of

human practice. Art became a standpoint of its own and advanced a claim to being

autonomous. This claim found expression in, for instance, the emergence of aesthetics

– classical German philosophical aesthetics, or the philosophy of beautiful or fine art.

Aesthetics15

In 1750, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the so-called father of philosophical

aesthetics, published his Aesthetica in Frankfurt – that is, at the very time when the

word ‘art’ conclusively acquired the meaning of ‘fine arts’.

The first formulation of the idea of the autonomy of art, however, is to be found in the

writings of Karl Philipp Moritz and Friedrich Schiller. In 1786, Moritz wrote in his

book, Das Edelste in der Natur,16

that the dominant idea of the useful is in the process

of displacing the beautiful and that even nature was increasingly regarded under the

exclusive aspect of what products could be drawn from it. In his Über die Ästhetische

Erziehung des Menschen of 1795,17

Schiller in turn developed a critique of the

consequences the division of labour proved to have for the individual and ascribed to

art the task of re-establishing humanity. Thus, at the very moment when purposive-

rationality and the division of labour won recognition as the basic principles of

modern society, art was seen as the only possible sphere in which the lost totality of

humanity could be preserved. However, it is Immanuel Kant who came to dominate

this new field of philosophical knowledge – aesthetics.

14

Cited by Bürger, Zum Funktionswandel, p. 80, footnote 8. 15

Compare Bürger, Vermittlung, Reception, Funktion, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979, pp. 177-8. 16

On Moritz, see Robert Minder’s study, Glaube, Skepsis, Rationalismus, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. 17

Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965.


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In his Critique of Judgement, Kant elaborated on the characteristic uniqueness of the

object of aesthetics. Although he did so from the point of view of the judgement of

taste, he at the same time established aesthetic objects – what he called ‘beautiful

art’18

and the beauty of nature – as distinct from both theoretical and practical matters

and as open to objective evaluation. By so doing, Kant delimited the aesthetic sphere

from other cultural spheres of value and from the practice of life. By his concept of

‘genius’,19

further, Kant gave positive content to the so delimited aesthetic sphere.

The talented artist is able to give authentic expression to those experiences he

undergoes in concentrating on his own subjectivity which has been set free from the

conventions and compulsions of cognition and action.

The autonomy of art in this sense of a distinct cultural value sphere in which the

experience of subjectivity is systematically and methodically pursued, was taken up

into and became an inalienable part of the modern self-understanding circa the middle

of the previous century: 1850 – the modern consciousness which places emphasis

upon the new, displays a new consciousness of time concerned with the authentic

present and the future, and sets itself off from tradition. At the time, it was most

paradigmatically captured in the writings of Baudelaire.

4 Autonomous art in its place

To conclude, let me summarise the main point I have been trying to make.

In order to grasp the place of art in the social and cultural configuration of modern

society, one has to adopt a differentiated concept of society which embraces both the

material and symbolic dimensions and thus allows one to understand the

characteristically modern multileveled developmental or rationalisation process. For

this purpose, we chose Weber as our guide, while taking some cues from authors like

Habermas and Bürger.

At the material dimension, society underwent a process of societal rationalisation

which led to the establishment of the capitalist economy and the administrative state

as well as of the complementary modern form of the family. At the symbolic level,

but in close interaction with societal rationalisation, a process of cultural

rationalisation took place which led to the differentiation of distinct cultural spheres

which became autonomous and in their development henceforth followed their own

particular inherent logics: intellectual culture, especially scientific thinking, second

the moral sphere, particularly morality, law and politics, and finally the aesthetic

sphere embracing art and art criticism. Kant captured this development with his three

critiques, the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason, and finally

the Critique of Judgement. Weber, who as a neo-Kantian understood this perfectly,

gave this philosophical understanding of modern developments a sociological twist by

way of his famous theory of rationalisation.

As regards the differentiated aesthetic domain, the autonomisation of art followed its

own inherent logic at three distinct levels: the cultural level of the increasingly

conscious grasping of the core idea and value or standard of this sphere; the socio-

cultural level of the institution of art involving the production, distribution and

18

Kant, Critique of Judgement, New York: Hafner, 1972, § 44, pp. 147-9. 19

Ibid., § 46-50.


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consumption of art; and finally the artist – Kant’s ‘genius’ – who explores and

expresses his or her own subjectivity in an unconventional way supported by the

counter-cultural bohemian life style.

From this multilevel view of rationalisation, we obtain a clear picture of where art –

modern autonomous art – fits into the overall framework of modern society (see Table

I.1 below).

Table I.1: Autonomous art in the context of modern society*

Sphere

Level

Intellectual-

instrumental

Normative-evaluative

Aesthetic-

expressive

Culture

(symbolic

dimension)

Theoretical-

empirical ideas &

standards:

‘truth’

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Scientific enterprise

& technology

Moral-practical ideas &

standards:

‘rightness’

Rational Religious

natural morality

law

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Legal Religious

institution denominations

Aesthetic-

expressive ideas &

standards:

‘authenticity’

Aesthetic-erotic-

expressive forms

Autonomous art

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Aesthetic-erotic-

expressive

behavioural patterns

Art institution

(complex of norms

regulating production,

distribution &

reception, also art

criticism)

Society

(material

dimension)

Economy:

capitalism

Polity:

state

bureaucracy

Family

Aesthetic, artistic,

sexual & expressive

practices

Personality

Value orientations and action dispositions

Methodical way of life: Counter-cultural

world of work | artistic lifestyle:

bohemia

* Adapted from Habermas 1981, Vol. 1, pp. 237 and 322.


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II Modernity and the Avant-Garde

Having clarified in a preliminary way the place of autonomous art in the socio-

cultural configuration of modern society, let us move a little closer to art itself and as

such by considering the concept of the avant-garde, preceded by the concept of

modernity.

5 The concept of modernity

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, the word ‘modernity’

derives from the late Latin modernus pertaining to or characteristic of the present,

officially the Christian present vis-à-vis the pagan past,20

which has its root in the

Latin hodiernus, of today. The word ‘modern’ entered the various European

languages by the 16th

century, ‘modernity’ in the 17th

and ‘modernism’ in the 18th

century.

The three modernities: humanistic, romantic and radical

As regards the concept, it is indeed the case that various periods in the past considered

themselves to be ‘modern’, not only our own period – for instance, the period of

Charles the Great, the 12th

century. The term ‘modern’ appeared and reappeared, it

would seem, precisely during those periods in Europe when the consciousness of a

new epoch took form through a renewed relationship to antiquity.21

In this case, we

have what may be called the humanistic concept of modernity22

– a return, at once

spontaneous and willed, to eternal values, long forgotten and buried, but which a

reborn and renewed history makes once again present; a concept that assigns to

‘antiquity’ the role of the classical and exemplary age and to ‘modernity’ the role of a

renaissance or a restoration of the ancient and classic.

Apart form the humanistic, there is also what may be called the romantic concept of

modernity which arose in the late 18th

century. Against the background of the

Enlightenment, modern science, the promise of the advance of knowledge and of the

betterment of the social and moral conditions of humanity, the romantics opposed the

antique ideals of the humanists and classicists. The romantic concept of modernity,

however, proved to be rather ambiguous. On the one hand, opposing the classicism of

antiquity, the romantics searched for a new historical epoch and found it in the

idealised Middle Ages.23

On the other hand, the romantic concept contained the

conviction that the new and modern should be regarded in terms of a birth rather than

a rebirth, not a restoration but a fundamental instauration, a construction of the

present and future not on the foundations of the past, but on the ruins of the time.24

From this latter aspect of romantic modernity there emerged at about the middle of the

19th

century a radical consciousness of modernity which severed all specific historical

ties and thus came to abstractly oppose the present to the past and tradition – that is,

the concept of modernity,25

a third radical one distinct from the humanistic and

20

See Habermas depending on Jauss in ‘Modernity and Postmodernity’, p. 3. 21

Habermas, Ibid., pp. 3-4. 22

Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1968, p. 217. 23

Habermas, Ibid., p.4. 24

Poggioli, Ibid., p. 217. 25

Compare Habermas, Ibid.; and Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow ed., The

Foucault Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.


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romantic concepts, which still has contemporary relevance and which we have in

mind when, in this course, we speak of ‘the sociology of modern art’. In the visual

arts, this period commenced with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; in

literature, with the work of Baudelaire. It is this concept of modernity, with its

opposition to tradition, its emphasis on the new, and its new time consciousness of

valuing the authentic present and the future, which corresponds to the avant-gardistic

feeling for the modern.

It is sometimes objected that, in its own time, all art is modern – an objection which

implies that there is no real distinction between something like a humanistic, a

romantic and a radical concept of modernity and, thus, that our contemporary

modernity is not at all as radical as the moderns like to think. It should be insisted,

however, that in each case not only the ‘modernity’ involved, but also the degree and

quality of consciousness of being modern differ sharply. At no time in history other

than our own, for instance, do we discover any evidence of the peculiar temporal

structure displayed by contemporary modernity: to be human is to be a futural or

future-oriented being concerned with living an authentic present, while disposing over

the past in so far as it is still alive, yet opposing the neutralised history of the so-called

‘imaginary museum’ of historicism.26

Octavio Paz27

is thus able to write regarding

time that it is not past-present-future, the time of things experienced in object-oriented

mode of before and after that counts, but future-past-present, the time of human

experience in the interpretative mode.

6 The concept of the avant-garde

First something about the word: There is no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of English

Etymology, but this is not surprising since the word belongs almost exclusively to the

neo-Latin languages and cultures – French, Italian and Spanish. Both English and

German for long showed a certain degree of resistance to the word, but since the

1960s and especially the 1970s the word ‘avant-garde’ appears in these two languages

without inverted commas, which would suggest that it has been appropriated. The

ugly English ‘vanguard’ and ‘advance guard’ have thus lost ground.28

We now know29

that the word avant-garde is of French origin, originally a military

term first used in old French designating the foremost division of an army, in English

referred to as the reconnaissance party. The early classical French sociologist Claude

Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), intellectual heir of Jean Jacques Rousseau and a

colonel in the French army during the American War of Independence, transferred the

term ‘avant-garde’ from the military to the artistic field and thus gave it its modern

cultural meaning:

‘What a most beautiful destiny for the arts, that of exercising over society a

positive power, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van

of all the intellectual faculties, in the epoch of their greatest development. This

is the duty of artists, this is their mission…’30

26

See Poggioli, Ibid.; Habermas, Ibid., pp. 4-5. 27

Paz, Alternative Current, London: Wildwood House, 1974, p. 20. 28

Poggioli, Ibid., pp. 508. 29

Donald Egbert, Social Radicalism in the Arts, London: Duckworth, 1970, pp. 118, 121. 30

Saint-Simon cited in Egbert, Ibid., pp. 121-2; See also Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of

Capitalism, London: Heinemann, 1978, p. 35.


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The two avant-gardes: artistic and political

Saint-Simon’s doctrine also gave rise to a second idea of avant-garde distinct from the

artistic avant-garde celebrated in this quotation – the idea of a socio-practical, more

specifically, a political avant-garde.31

Subsequently, in the thinking of the followers of

Saint-Simon as well as of Charles Fourier, the idea of an artistic avant-garde became

closely associated with the idea of a political, even a revolutionary and radical, avant-

garde. Avant-gardism in the arts was linked to the ideals of radicalism which was not

purely cultural, but also political. This alliance of the two avant-gardes is evident

from the passage from a work by Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant, a Fourierist, published

shortly before the 1848 Revolution dealing with De la mission de l’art et du role des

artistes:

‘Art, the expression of society, manifests, in its highest soaring, the most

advanced social tendencies: it is the forerunner and the revealer. Therefore, to

know whether art worthily fulfils its proper mission as initiator, whether the

artist is truly of the avant-garde, one must know where Humanity is going,

know what the destiny of the human race is…Along with the hymn to

happiness, the dolorous and despairing ode…To lay bare with the brutal brush

all the brutalities, all the filth, which are at the base of our society.’32

Although loosened at times, and before the turn of the century indeed to such an

extent that the cultural meaning of the term came to predominate, the artistic and

political avant-gardes often coincided. This relationship between the two avant-gardes

is not without significance in the 20th

century – various avant-garde movements,

displaying as they do clear political allegiances, mostly to the left but, to be sure, also

some to the right.

The concept of avant-garde

As regards the concept ‘avant-garde’, there is on the whole agreement that it applies

not to all art, but specifically to the modern period. It should be pointed out

immediately, however, that it does not coincide exactly with the art of the modern

period; rather than coinciding with or being coextensive with modern art as such, the

concept avant-garde designates only certain groups of radical, innovatory artists, from

German Expressionism, Cubism, Italian Futurism, through Abstractionism and the

Russian avant-garde, to Dada and Surrealism.

In English, the term ‘modernism’ is very often used to refer to modern art, including

the avant-garde; and even when the avant-garde as such is meant modernism is used

as the designation. This usage confounds many and leads to a confusion of the

problem of the avant-garde and the problem of all modern art.33

In literature, there has

been a Hispano-American movement called ‘modernism’, and it may well be possible

to identify such a movement in Europe and the US which would include such authors

as Thomas Mann, Proust, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and so forth. It could therefore be said

that the avant-garde and modernism are the twin offshoots of the sensibility of

modernity; but it is a mistake to regard them as one. For various reasons, it makes

little sense to lump the aforementioned authors together with such movements as

31

Egbert, Ibid., p. 122. 32

Cited in Poggiolo, Ibid., p. 9. 33

Ibid., p. 8; Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avant-Garde and Postmodernism in the

1970s’, New German Critique, No, 22, 1981, pp. 23-40, here p. 26.


13

Dada, Russian Constructivism or Suprematism and Surrealism. Poggioli gives still

another connotation to ‘modernism’: ‘modernolatry’, noting the blind adoration of the

idols and fetishes of our time (with reference to Marinetti), ‘modernity-snobbery’

(with reference to Huxley), and ‘the wistful and nostalgic mythologism which attracts

so many of the artists and critics of the modern age’ – all of which is tantamount to

‘the degeneration of modernity into modernism’ and, therefore, obviously have

nothing whatsoever to do with modernity proper and even less with the avant-garde.34

The distinction between avant-garde and modernism having been made, let us

continue with the concept of the avant-garde. First, as Bürger35

has made clear, it is a

specifically historical concept – that is, it cannot be generalised to earlier epochs; it

applies only to the modern period, indeed, only to a part of it. Second, the avant-garde

is a phenomenon characteristic of Western Europe as a whole, spreading later also to

North and South America – that is, it is a phase of artistic development which

transcends national boundaries. Third, it is a concept which cannot be confined to a

particular artistic medium, say literature, but applies to universal experimental

tendencies which transcend the traditional boundaries of different forms of art.36

Now,

if the concept of the avant-garde is a historical concept that applies transversally to a

variety of national phenomena as well as to different forms of art, the main problem

attaching to the employment of the concept is then the issue of the unity of the avant-

garde. What characterises the avant-garde as the avant-garde?

Conclusion

This question – What characterises the avant-garde as the avant-garde? – thus

becomes the leading question of this course of lecture. In what is to follow, we shall

tackle this question by adopting the indirect strategy of considering a number of

different theories of the avant-garde which purport, in one way or another, to solve the

problem of the unity of the avant-garde. These proposals stretch from a typology of

the characteristic features of the avant-garde (Ortega y Gassett; Poggioli), through the

determination of the nature of avant-garde art (Lukács; Adorno; Benjamin; Marcuse)

and the demonstration of the explanatory power of the concept (Bürger), to the

identification of the social effect or impact of the avant-garde on society – typically,

neutralising it or depicted as negative (Gehlen; Marquard; especially Bell).

As regards my own contribution, I see my task as combining the emphasis on the

explanatory power of the concept and the social significance of the historical avant-

garde, but in a manner that not only contradicts but goes well beyond the conservative

and neo-conservative neutralisation and indictment of the avant-garde.

34

Poggioli, Ibid., p. 218-9. 35

Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. 36

See Burkhardt Lindner, ‘Aufhebung der Kunst in Lebenspraxis?’, in W. Martin Lüdke (ed.), Theorie

der Avantgarde: Antworten auf Peter Bürgers Bestimmung von Kunst und bürgerliche Gesellschaft,

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976, p. 72.


14

7 José Ortega y Gassett: an early typology of the avant-garde

José Ortega y Gassett’s (1883-1955) The Dehumanization of Art, written originally in

Spanish in 1925 and first published in English in 1948, is one of the earliest essays

available which attempts to make sense of modern, more specifically, avant-garde art.

Indeed, this essay identified a number of characteristic features of the avant-garde

which time and again made their reappearance in some way in the subsequent

literature on this cultural phenomenon of the 20th

century.

The dehumanisation of art

What Ortega calls the ‘dehumanisation of art’ corresponds closely to what Weber

called ‘disenchantment’ – the other side of the process of rationalisation, but as

applying to art he evaluated it more positively. Weber borrowed the phrase

Entzauberung der Welt from the poet and writer Friedrich Schiller. Over time, the

‘disenchantment of the world’ has come to be accepted as the standard translation for

this German phrase, but considered more closely it is clear that the German means

more precisely the driving out of magic from the world.37

In the case of art, this

means that it is no longer tied to a form of life which, as ‘a cosmos of impersonal

forces’, is largely religiously articulated; that works of art are no longer surrounded

and pervaded by a magical, animistic aura; that art among various other things has

become the subject of rationalisation, namely a cosmos of consciously grasped,

independent values which unfolds according to its own inherent logic.

According to Ortega, ‘the most general and most characteristic feature of modern

artistic production (is) the tendency to dehumanize art’.38

This he takes to signify an

entirely ‘new artistic sensibility’,39

not only on the part of the artist but also of his or

her public. To make clear what he means in an initial step, Ortega compares an avant-

garde painting with one dating from the middle of the 19th

century:

‘…the artist of 1860 wanted nothing so much as to give the objects in his

picture the same looks and airs they possess outside it when they occur as part

of the “lived” or “human” reality…In modern paintings the opposite happens.

It is not that the painter is bungling and fails to render the natural (natural =

human) thing because he deviates from it, but that these deviations point in a

direction opposite to that which would lead to reality. Far from going more or

less clumsily toward reality, the artist is seen as going against it. He is

brazenly set on deforming reality, shattering its human aspect, dehumanizing

it’.40

Here he contrasts lived reality or human reality captured by traditional works of art

and what he goes on to identify as the ‘artistic form’ or ‘ultra objects’ of the ‘new

37

In Anthony Giddens’ new edition of Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and the

Spirit of Capitalism, it is indeed translated as ‘the elimination of magic from the world’. Weber is

explicit about the complementary sides of ‘the great historical process…The rationalization of the

world, the elimination of magic…from the world…as a means of salvation, the Catholics had not

carried nearly as far as the Puritans (and before them the Jews) had done’ (pp. 105, 117). 38

The Dehumanization of Art, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956, p. 19; originally La

Dehumanizacion del Arte. 39

Ibid., p. 18-9. 40

Ibid., 19-20.


15

ultra worldly world’41

of avant-garde art. And from this he draws the conclusion that

the perception of lived reality and the perception of artistic form are incompatible.

Everyday reality is composed of elements that can be ranked hierarchically: the realm

of persons, living beings, and inorganic things, but avant-garde art most carefully

avoids the first stratum. Ortega illustrates his argument with an example from music.

From Beethoven to Wagner, music was primarily concerned with expressing personal

feelings; art was confession and melodrama. This art took advantage of ‘a noble

weakness’ in human beings which exposes them to infection from a neighbour’s joys

and sorrows. Thus, instead of delighting in the artistic object, people delighted in their

own emotions. Such infection, however, is no mental phenomenon but rather works

like a reflex. Avant-garde art, by contrast, does not proceed by psychic contagion or

infection, and art should not, since such contagion or infection is an unconscious

phenomenon – and art ‘ought to be full clarity, high noon of the intellect’.42

Aesthetic

pleasure must be a seeing pleasure; it must have a motive, not a cause. Such seeing

requires distance, which in turn presupposes a de-realisation. When de-realisation is

lacking, an awkward perplexity arises: we do not know how to perceive, as for

instance in the case of the melodramatic wax figures of Madame Tussaud.

In Ortega’s judgement, avant-garde art, more broadly the new modern artistic

sensibility, is characterised by a disgust at seeing art mixed up with life; it abhors

nothing so much as blurred borderlines; thus it is characterised by ‘mental

honesty…Life is one thing, art is another’.43

What Ortega here in effect registers is the

recognition and acceptance on the part of avant-garde art of its limits as one

autonomous sphere of cultural value amongst others.

Inversion of the aesthetic intention

At the centre of the dehumanisation of art lies what Ortega regards as an inversion of

the aesthetic intention which he seeks to make clear as follows:

‘The relation between our minds and things consists in that we think the

things, that we form ideas about them. We possess of reality, strictly speaking,

nothing but the ideas we have succeeded in forming about it…By means of

ideas we see the world, but in a natural attitude of the mind we do not see the

ideas…a tendency resident in human nature prompts us to assume that reality

is what we think of it…lead(ing) us to an ingenuous idealization of reality…If

we invert the natural direction of this process; if we turn our back on alleged

reality…if we deliberately propose to “realize” our ideas – then we have

dehumanization and, as it were, derealized them…We give three-dimensional

being to mere patterns, we objectify the subjective, we “worldify” the

immanent’.44

In his essay, ’On Point of View in the Arts’, Ortega isolates as the guiding law of the

changes in painting over the centuries the following: ‘First things are painted; then

sensations; finally, ideas’.45

The suggested development thus runs from, for example,

Giotto at the dawn of the modern period, Impressionism in the mid-19th

century, and

41

Ibid., 20, 23, 28. 42

Ibid., p. 25. 43

Ibid., p. 29. 44

Ibid., pp. 34-5. 45

Ibid., p. 117.


16

finally 20th

-century avant-garde art. This law of development – or rationalisation! – is

extended in The Dehumanization of Art to all other forms of art: music (Debussy),

poetry (Mallarmé, Baudelaire) and theatre (Pirandello). In these terms, painting, say:

‘…completely reversed its function, and instead of putting us within what is outside,

endeavoured to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects’.46

Art has thus become reflexive; it has become a mode of ‘reflection’47

– eliminating all

that is human, placing a ban on all pathos, and invariably waggish: from open

clownery through irony to art ridiculing art itself, to ‘turn against Art itself’.48

Typology of the avant-garde

Against this background, certain characteristic features of the avant-garde become

visible. Ortega identifies four of these features which type-cast avant-garde art.

(i) Iconoclasm:49

avant-garde art turns against tradition and its norms and ideals,

actively seeking the destruction of those norms and ideals; it turns against and

engages in a critique of art itself and as such.

(ii) Insistence on the aesthetic alone: the avant-garde regards the work of art as

nothing but a work of art, which leads Ortega to characterise avant-garde art as being

‘artistic art’.50

As against a widespread tendency to confuse aesthetic experience with

ordinary behaviour, purely aesthetic elements are brought forward so as to preclude a

sentimental intervention. It thus harbours a tendency toward the ‘purification of art’51

– the elimination of the all too human elements predominant in naturalism and

romanticism and thus producing an art which can be comprehended only by people

who possess a specific artistic sensibility as distinct from a general human sensibility.

Far from betraying arrogance, however, this tendency signifies a new modesty.

(iii) Immanence:52

at the beginning of the modern period, in view of the downfall of

the religious worldview and the relativism of science, art was expected to take upon

itself nothing less than the salvation of humankind [e.g. Moritz, Schiller].

Consequently, artists worked with the air of a prophet and founder of religion. By

contrast, the avant-garde artist is no longer willing to accept such an enormous

mission. Art is no longer transcendent but rather immanent – ‘a minor issue’,53

a thing

of little consequence, as it were.

(iv) Unpopularity:54

being iconoclastic, purely aesthetic and immanent, avant-garde

art is essentially and decidedly unpopular. It divides the public in two groups,

working like a social agent who divides the audience into those who understand

avant-garde art and those who do not only not understand it but have a strong hatred

for it.

46

Ibid., 116. 47

Ibid., p. 44. 48

Ibid., p. 42. 49

Ibid., pp. 37, 38-42. 50

Ibid., pp. 8-13. 51

Ibid., p. 11. 52

Ibid., 45-48. 53

Ibid., p. 48. 54

Ibid., 3-7.


17

Evaluation

Ortega’s study of the avant-garde was motivated neither by ire nor enthusiasm, but

rather by a desire to understand the new art of the 20th century in a way that would

enable him to define it by identifying its characteristic features, even if this proved

almost impossible at this early stage due to the object being a nascent reality.

Although he was not particularly impressed with what it had produced up until then,

he expected that it would achieve more at a later stage. His focus was therefore not on

content, but instead on the core intention or thrust of the avant-garde.

Of one thing Ortega is absolutely convinced, however, and that is that ‘there is no

turning back’55

from the modernity of avant-garde art. Least of all is it possible to

regress to the realism of the 19th

century and the naturalistic and romantic impulses

behind it. For him, realism is an impure form of art which required a ‘double seeing’ –

that is, of both ‘lived reality’ and ‘artistic form’ – and thus was a ‘cross-eyed’ or

‘squinting art’ which must be regarded as a ‘maximum aberration in the history of

taste’ and as a ‘freak in aesthetic evolution’.56

Avant-garde art, by contrast, is

characterised by a ‘will to style’, and ‘to stylize means to deform reality, to derealize;

style involves dehumanization’.57

Art is a mental phenomenon and avant-garde art as

idea art in distinction to both thing art and sensation art answers to the imperative of

the times. While he declined to make strong claims about his findings, in fact insisted

on their preliminary nature, the four features he singled out – iconoclasm, pure art,

immanence and unpopularity – proved to have been quite perspicacious, despite the

fact that these features would later call forth a variety of different interpretations by

subsequent theorists of the avant-garde.

55

Ibid., p. 50. 56

Ibid., p. 23. 57

Loc. cit.


18

8 Renato Poggioli: dialectical typology of the avant-garde

Poggioli’s book, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, which appeared in 1968 in English

but was originally published in Italian in 1962, is to a certain extent a criticism and

extension of Ortega y Gassett’s analysis of avant-garde art. Like Ortega, however,

Poggioli treats the concept of the avant-garde as a strictly ‘historical concept’.58

Accordingly, he regards avant-garde art as an exclusively modern phenomenon which

came into being at the moment when ‘art began to contemplate itself’59

or, differently,

when it became reflexive. In fact, the avant-garde was historically impossible prior to

the elaboration of the idea itself. The authentic avant-garde could arise only at that

point in time when the concept as we know it had emerged. Now, such a concept is

available in Western historical consciousness, strictly speaking, only in our epoch,

with the most remote temporal limits located in the later 18th

and early 19th

century.

History of the avant-garde60

Poggioli identifies four phases in the historical development of the avant-garde.

(i) Having its prehistory in the German Sturm und Drang of the early Romantics when

the later so-called ‘bohemia’ had already appeared, the preparatory or initial phase

was borne by French movements of the late 19th

century such as Aestheticism,

Symbolism and Impressionism. Outstanding figures during this later period included

Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Cézanne who inspired the transition from Impressionism to

Cubism.

(ii) The second phase started in earnest with the later Fauves who played a significant

mediating or bridging role, but it came into its own only with the appearance, under

some influence of the author and critic Apollinaire, of Futurism and Cubism, the latter

of which gave rise to Abstractionism. The emergence of German Expressionism

during this point proved crucial for the next phase for which it opened the door, as it

were.

(iii) The third and more violent tidal wave of avant-gardism, as Poggioli describes it,

stated just after the First World War with the appearance of Dada and Surrealism. The

German movement of New Objectivity also belongs in this context. Although this

period in the history of the avant-garde came to a close with the Italian Novocento

movement, it was actually due to Dadaism’s radical ‘attempted suicide’61

and thus

overcoming of the avant-garde that avant-gardism once again found and was able to

renew itself.

(iv) The liquidation of the third phase, in Poggioli’s view, inaugurated the fourth

period in the history of the avant-garde in which avant-gardism was generalised and

became second nature to all modern art. Writing in the early 1960s, Poggioli regarded

the art of his own time as representative of this phase of development. Passing the

task on to the future critic, he declined to venture a pronouncement on the values that

would live on, but he was confident that avant-garde art, which had then entered a

58

Poggioli,, p. 3. 59

Ibid., p. 14. 60

Ibid., pp. 226-34. 61

Ibid., p. 230.


19

period of rest and readjustment, would become art ‘in spite of itself, or even in the

out-and-out denial of itself’.62

Poggioli rejects out of hand all talk of ‘overcoming the avant-garde’.63

In his view, the

avant-garde has exhausted neither its specific experience nor the more general one of

its own inheritance. In this respect, he engages in polemics against Ortega, who draws

a sharp distinction between Romanticism and the avant-garde, on foot of the fact that

Romanticism is an inalienable part of modernity and serves as a vital impetus for

avant-gardism. The avant-garde, therefore, will continue as long as the civilisation of

which we are part is not overthrown. He thus submits: ‘it does not seem predictable or

possible that a mentality which has now predominated for almost a century in the art

of the West…can disappear’.64

And he is adamant: ‘the modern spirit certainly cannot

enslave itself to the conservative instinct. For it not to renew itself means to die’.65

Accordingly, Poggioli regards the avant-garde as the law of contemporary art.

Movements versus schools66

The avant-garde is a group phenomenon. Now, traditionally art is indeed also

characterised by the formation of artistic groupings. But whereas traditional groupings

took the form of schools, avant-garde group formation follows the pattern of

movements instead. The school is pre-eminently static and classical, presupposing as

it does a master and a method. The movement, by contrast, is dynamic. Conceiving of

culture as it does as a creation, as a centre of activity.

Characteristic of the avant-garde movements, in addition, is the publication of

manifestos and periodicals serving as organ for a specific current. Schools by

definition have no need of organs of this kind by virtue of the fact that they intend to

transmit fixed norms which are rooted in a Weltanschauung – a pre-given worldview

which is completely absent from movements. Instead of aiming to discuss, therefore,

schools are bent on teaching only.

By its very nature, a movement is a dialectical phenomenon, both from an internal and

an external perspective. Internally, psychological motivations and ideological

orientations drive this dialectical dynamic and, externally, the same effect derives

from the practical and social consequences of a movement and their recursive impact

on the movement. It is from the study of this ‘dialectic of movements’67

, as Poggioli

calls it, that he is able to construct his typology of the characteristic features of the

avant-garde.

Typology of the avant-garde: logic and dialectic

Since Poggioli adopts a dynamic or processual perspective, his typology is intended to

capture not simply static characteristics, but rather moments in the dialectical

development of the avant-garde. Four such moments must be identified to get a full

picture of the logic and dialectic of the avant-garde movements.

62

Ibid., p. 231. 63

Ibid., p. 48. 64

Ibid., p. 224. 65

Ibid., p. 223. 66

Ibid., pp. 17-25. 67

Ibid., p.25.


20

(i) Activism or the activistic moment:68

while constituted to obtain a positive result,

above all the affirmation of avant-gardism in all cultural fields, a movement often

‘takes shape and agitates for no other end than its own self’69

– whether out of a taste

for action, the sheer joy for dynamism or fascination with the exhilaration of

adventure; considering the centrality of the avant-garde’s concern with the new, the

engagement in adventure might well be the most important among these various

motives.

(ii) Antagonism or the antagonistic moment:70

one of the most important reasons for

the formation of a movement is to ‘agitate against something or someone’71

– whether

the academy, tradition, a master or the public; opposition or hostility of this kind is a

tendency exhibited permanently by the avant-garde.

(iii) Nihilism or the nihilistic moment:72

the dynamic features or attitudes of activism

and antagonism inherent in a movement can and often do drive it beyond the point of

regulation or control by a convention or even a principle, leading to joyful acts of

‘beating down barriers, razing obstacles, destroying whatever stands in its way’.73

(iv) Agonism or the agonistic moment:74

the febrile obsession with the new in

conjunction with the animal spirit of its human carrier can and often does lead to a

movement loosing sight of the losses of others and even of its own catastrophe and

ruin; such self-destruction could even be welcomed as a necessary sacrifice for the

success of future movements.

Rather than just listing the typological features of the avant-garde, however, Poggioli

sets the first two and the second two features in an interesting relation. According to

him, the first two – activism and antagonism – which are immanent in the concept of

movement constitute what he calls ‘the logic of movements’.75

The second two –

nihilism and agonism – which transcend the concept of movement can be regarded as

completing ‘the dialectic of movements’76

in that they render the first two static or

abiding features dynamic.

Evaluation

In evaluating Poggioli’s conception and interpretation of the avant-garde, there are

two dimensions that must be attended to. The first concerns the evaluation or criticism

of avant-garde art, and the second has to do with the nature of the avant-garde

movements.

First, it is essential to take account of Poggioli’s metacritique of the critics of avant-

garde art. He notes that critics from both the left and the right employ the concept of

‘degeneration’ – a biological concept deriving from authors like Max Nordau and

Cesare Lombrosso – in their respective criticisms of the avant-garde. Poggioli thus

68

Ibid., pp. 25-26. 69

Ibid., p. 25. 70

Ibid., pp. 25-6. 71

Ibid., p. 25. 72

Ibid., p. 26. 73

Loc. cit. 74

Loc. cit. 75

Ibid., p. 27. 76

Loc. cit.


21

defends avant-garde art simultaneously on two fronts – that is, against rightist culture

critics and leftist socio-political critics who ‘condemn avant-garde art in the name of a

present that both denounce’77

– the former in the name of the past and the latter in the

name of the future. Poggioli sees the rightist culture critics, what he calls ‘the enemies

of the new times’, as being motivated by ‘a nationalistic or conservative nostalgia’

which leads them to ‘condemn the times en bloc with the charge of degeneration and

[to] repudiate not only forms of art and culture, but also the most lively forces of our

period’, including democracy.78

The leftist socio-political critics are those who link

the avant-garde as a reputedly degenerate form of art to the ‘advanced state of decay

and crisis which the bourgeois class and the capitalist economy are held to have

reached’79

under late modern conditions. Both left and right accuse the avant-garde

artist of degeneracy and irresponsibility, and they even engage in unacceptable

‘polemical personalism’, instead of focusing critical attention on ‘our statesmen and

ruling classes’. Yet, in so far as it appeals not to ‘a reactionary and retrospective

nostalgia’ but rather to ‘an anticipatory and utopian dream’, the ‘leftist criticism

remains always more acceptable than the rightist’.80

But there is also a second – less political and more theoretical – aspect of Poggioli’s

theory of the avant-garde that is of importance and needs to be noted. It relates to his

position on the logic and dialectic of the avant-garde movements.

Poggioli regards the first two features of the avant-garde – activism and antagonism –

together with the concept of movement and the very idea of avant-garde as immanent

to the movements. They are orientations or ‘attitudes’ and thus ‘rational elements’ of

every movement which form part of its ‘ideology’,81

as he calls it. More properly, we

may say that these aspects make up the cognitive dimension of the avant-garde as a

movement. From this perspective, his claim that activism and antagonism constitute

what he calls ‘the logic of movements’ becomes more comprehensible. These

elements represent the abiding features of a movement that enable it to generate and

regenerate itself and to produce whatever it aims at bringing into being or about. This

cognitive conception also suggests that Poggioli’s interpretation of this dimension in

terms of purposive-rationality – he speaks of rationality as ‘the relation of means to

ends’82

– is far too narrow. Considering the socio-cultural configuration of modernity

discussed earlier (see Table I:1 above), rationality and hence the cognitive dimension

of the avant-garde must be understood not only in intellectual-instrumental terms, but

at the same time also in normative-evaluative and aesthetic-expressive terms.83

Poggioli regards the remaining features specified by his typology – nihilism and

agonism – as moments ‘transcending’84

the movement. They emerge only in the

course of the activist and antagonist generation of the movement – agonism as a

‘psychological’ event unfolding in the dimension of ‘time’ or the temporality of the

77

Ibid., p. 168. 78

Ibid., p. 167. 79

Ibid., pp. 167-8. 80

Ibid., p. 168. 81

Ibid., p. 27. 82

Ibid., p. 26. 83

This aspect, crucial for the argument of this course, is further elaborated in later lectures, captured in

particular in Table III:1. 84

Loc. cit.


22

movement and its individual members; and nihilism as a social event running its

course in the medium of ‘history’ which can only be ‘comprehended sociologically’.85

For Poggioli, these two sets of quite different features should be seen in relation to

one another. Immanently, the movement generates itself and produces both products

and actions. In turn, the movement and its outcomes give rise to effects which, on the

one hand, recursively loop back on the movement, driving it psychologically forward,

but on the other transcend the movement socially and historically, likewise working

back on the movement by bringing it to an end and, if successful to some degree,

allowing the establishment of enduring aesthetic values. Poggioli thus comes to the

significant theoretical conclusion that the avant-garde as a movement can be

adequately understood only if both its ‘logic’ – borne by activism and antagonism –

and its ‘dialectic’86

– adding the multiplying and recursive effect of agonism and

nihilism – are taken into account from a dynamic or processual perspective.

85

Ibid., p. 27. 86

Ibid., p. 27.


23

Summary and transition

In the previous lecture, we reviewed two related theories of the avant-garde which

took the form of a typology of the characteristic features of the avant-garde

constructed from a broadly sociological point of view – namely, the theories of José

Ortega y Gassett and Renato Poggioli. On this occasion, I propose that we consider

two theories of the avant-garde which on the basis of a strong normative orientation

come to diametrically opposed evaluations of avant-garde art – the theories of Georg

Lukács and Theodor Adorno. It should be noted that both these theorists come from

the left, and the fact that they differ sharply in their positions on the avant-garde

makes clear that Poggioli’s category of the leftist critic is too restrictive.

Historical introduction: Hegel’s thesis of ‘the end of art’

In the 1820s, Hegel (1770-1831) historicised aesthetics by seeking to grasp the

development of art by means of the conceptual pair subjectivity (‘mind’/’spirit’)–

external reality (‘sensuality’). In these terms, the form-content dialectic is realised

differently in the major epochs in the historical development of art:87

(i) in symbolic (i.e. oriental) art the objective moment predominates;

(ii) in classical (i.e. Greek) art a unique balance is achieved between the objective and

the subjective moments, so that the interpenetration of form and content reaches its

perfection here;

(iii) romantic (Christian from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th

century) art proved

incapable of maintaining this achievement since it ‘calls the spirit to itself’ and thus

takes subjectivity as the basic principle of art, which marks it as a phenomenon of

decline.

In the context of Hegel’s analysis presented in his Aesthetics, accordingly, we come

across the phrase, ‘the end of art’. This phrase has led to much speculation, confusion

and divergent interpretations. One interpretation holds that Hegel’s phrase intends the

dissolution of the absolutist claim of the aesthetic art of the modern period – a

collapse which reputedly occurred at the beginning of the 19th

century.88

This

interpretation is supported by Hegel’s suggestion that romantic art represents the end

of art in the sense of giving way to higher forms of consciousness, such as

philosophy.

According to another interpretation, Hegel’s phrase intends to make the point that,

since the ancient, classical Greek view of beauty had been overtaken by the biblical-

Christian view of salvation, art was compelled, as something not necessary to

salvation, either to serve salvation or to capitulate. Either way, both meant the end of

art. Chronologically, this implies that art already came to an end circa the 1st century

after Christ – the end of art thus preceding the appearance of modernity and its form

of aesthetic art.89

This interpretation is supported by Hegel’s suggestion of the

87

Compare Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, p. 118. 88

This interpretation goes back to the work of Joachim Ritter dating from the 1940s, theorist of art as

compensation, taken up by Odo Marquard, ‘Kunst als Kompensation ihres Endes’, in Willi Oelmüller,

Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie, Vol. 1, Paderborn: Schöningh, pp. 159-68, here p. 162. 89

Hans-Georg Gadamer, in Oelmüller, Op. cit., p. 162-3.


24

decomposition of romantic art into realism and subjectivism: the end of art in the

sense of classicism as the perfect interpenetration of form and content. As far as

content is concerned, however, the phrase ‘the end of art’ here means, in turn,

something eschatological deriving from Christianity: the end of art is an expectation

forming part of the more general expectation of the end of the – hitherto bad and

corrupted – world.

It is noteworthy that in the writings of Karl Marx90

similar motives appear. He, too,

speaks of the end or the overcoming of art – sometimes in the sense of the end of

classicism; at other times in the sense of art as utopia, art as eschatology, demanding

its realisation in a new and different society.

The important point, however, is that both Lukács and Adorno come from a Hegelian-

Marxist background, their aesthetic positions thus being decisively shaped by this

common set of assumptions. A basic difference remains, however – a difference

which is highlighted by the contrast between their respective theories of the avant-

garde. In Lukács, Hegel’s distinction between classical and romantic art reappears as

the distinction between realistic art and formalist or avant-garde art. While he

valorises early 19th

century realistic art, he rejects avant-garde art as inauthentic and,

indeed, as a phenomenon of decadence.91

For Adorno,92

as in the case of Lukács,

avant-garde art is a manifestation of the alienation characteristic of the 20th

-century

late capitalist society. By contrast with Lukács, however, he evaluates avant-garde art

as the only possible authentic and therefore necessary expression under late modern

conditions.

Different versions of Hegel’s thesis of the end of art also make their appearance in

other theorists of the avant-garde to be discussed below – including the critical

theorists Benjamin, Marcuse and Bürger, but even also the conservative theorists

Gehlen, Marquard and Bell.

90

For a first guide to Marx on art, see Maynard Solomon ed., Marxism and Art, Brighton: Harverster,

1979, pp. 3-8; see also Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts,

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 91

Lukács, Wider die mißverstandenen Realismus, Hamburg, 1958. 92

Theodor Adorno, ‘Erpreßte Versöhnung: Zu Georg Lukács: “Wider den mißverstandenen

Realismus”’, in Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981, pp, 251-80.


25

9 Lukács: realism versus decadent avant-garde art

In his early work of 1920, Theory of the Novel,93

Lukács (1885-1971) – one of the

most, if not the most, towering figures in the sociology of literature – accepted as his

main conceptual instrument the Hegelian distinction between the concrete and the

abstract. That it remained central to his thinking is apparent from a series of his

writings over the following decades, such as his contribution to the debate of 1938

between him, Ernst Bloch, Bertold Brecht, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno

about realism and modernism,94

and his 1955 study of 20th

-century realism where he

emphatically takes the position that: ‘Philosophy distinguishes between abstract and

concrete (in Hegel, ‘real’) potentiality’.95

A work of art is concrete in terms of this

distinction in so far as its elements are all meaningful from the outset, where the

artist’s raw material has an immediate meaning requiring no explanation or

justification on the part of the artist – as, for example, in the case of art produced in a

tribal, agricultural or pre-industrial society. By contrast, a work of art is abstract to the

extent that the raw material from which it was constructed is characterised by a loss of

immediate meaning so that it needs to be rendered meaningful through symbolism –

as, for example, in the case of art produced in the modern industrial era. The abstract

represents the antithetical concept which calls out to be completed by the idea of

concreteness – the basic characteristic of concreteness in art being, first, the

experience of everything in human terms and, second, the experience of a totality in

the sense of a complete, harmonious world.

The concrete and the abstract: epic, tragedy and abstraction

Building on Hegel’s theory of the development of art, Lukács discovers in ancient

Greek literature three basic stages. First, the epic is concrete, characterised by

concrete epic narration which is possible only when daily life is still felt as

meaningful. After the dissolution of this meaningful unity, tragedy, in which daily

existence and meaning started to become opposed to one another, took the place of

epic. Finally, in Platonic philosophy, existence and meaning parted company

completely, with the result that intellectual abstractness displace epic concreteness

entirely. Hegel had already proposed to regard the novel as the modern equivalent of

the epic. Following Hegel, but also basing himself on Weber’s thesis of the

disenchantment of the world, Lukács submits that the novel, as a form, is the attempt

in modern times to recapture something of the concrete quality of epic narration as a

reconciliation between life and meaning: ‘It is the epic of the world abandoned by

God’.96

At the same time, however, the novel is problematic in its very structure since

it no longer represents a closed and established form like the epic.

Given the opposition between life and meaning or matter and spirit, from Lukács’

perspective novels tend to fall into two general categories.97

On the one hand, we have

the novel of ‘abstract idealism’ in which case the hero accepts unquestioningly the

world’s meaning (e.g. Cervantes’ Don Quixote). On the other hand, Lukács speaks of

the novel of ‘romantic disillusionment’ in which case the emphasis is exclusively on

93

London: Merlin Press. 94

New Left Books, ed., Aesthetics and Politics, London: Verso, 1977. 95

Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, London: Merlin Press, 1979, p. 21. 96

Lukács cited by Frederick Jameson, Marxism and Form, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971, p. 172. 97

See e.g. Lukács’ series of analyses of major authors in Studies in European Realism, London: Merlin

Press, 1972.


26

the subjective experience of the passive, receptive, contemplative hero (e. g.

Flaugert’s Education sentimentale). The former is primarily spatial, depicting the

hero’s experience as a series of adventures and wonderings through geographical

landscapes; by contrast, the dominant mode of being in the latter is time itself. In a

formally correct step, both Goethe (Wilhelm Meister) and Tolstoy sought to synthesise

these two basic types of narration. Yet, both fell short of a reinvention of the epic. In

Lukács’ view, they were bound to fail in that the transformation of the novel into the

epic has its precondition not in the novelist’s will, but rather in the transformation of

his or her society. The epic cannot be rejuvenated until the world itself has been

transformed and hence rejuvenated as a meaningful human world.

In his Theory of the Novel, then, we see Lukács taking a position which provides him

with a criterion for discriminating critically between literary works of art. He

valorises concrete narration since it relates to totality. This ideal of the concrete would

in the course of the development of his work not only came to form the kernel of

Lukács’ theory of realism, but inscribed in Theory of the Novel already his critical

viewpoint on the art of the modern period and, in particular, his critique of the avant-

garde.98

The essential difference between his early and later position resides in the

fact that the ideal of concrete narration, which initially had been tied to the golden age

of Greek epic, was projected into the future. It is this shift in perspective in the wake

of the First World War, the abdication of the German Kaiser and the prospect of a

revolution which drove a wedge between Lukács and his friend Weber and led him to

the Marxist theory of history which he embraced in his famous book, History and

Class Consciousness of 1923.99

It enabled him to offer a new interpretation of the art

of the modern period according to which isolated examples of genuinely concrete

works could indeed be found in the overwhelming mass of abstract works.

Abstraction, reification and ideology-critique

In order to give substance to the Hegelian idea of the abstract for the purposes of a

differentiated analysis of the modern period, Lukács synthesised the Marxian and

Weberian perspectives in History and Class Consciousness – more specifically,

Marx’s concept of ‘commodity fetishism’ and Weber’ concept of ‘rationalisation’-

cum-‘disenchantment’.100

The outcome was his theory of ‘reification’ which forms

the core of his book. The thrust of this theory is that the social world of modern

bourgeois society became progressively reduced to a mechanical system. Human

social relations became reified (Latin: res = thing) or thingified, as it were, by virtue

of the fact that under capitalist conditions people are able to relate to each other only

through things; human social relations take the form of labour power to wage, money

to money, commodity to commodity. Reification in this sense penetrates all spheres of

life, from the merely economic, through bureaucracy and the organisation of

knowledge, to consciousness. Not only the social and natural sciences are threatened

by narrow specialisation and an anti-philosophical bent, but a crisis takes also the

aesthetic sphere in its grip.

Armed with this reconstituted concept of the abstract, Lukács succeeded in proposing

an altogether new interpretation of Marxism – cultural Marxism, Marxism as the

98

Compare Jameson, Op. cit., esp. pp. 199, 204-5. 99

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin Press, 1971. 100

Lukács, Op. cit., pp. 83-222; see also Andrew Arato, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism’, in

Arato and Gebhardt (eds) The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, pp. 191-6.


27

critique of ideology. As the name indicates, this kind of critique is an assault against

the ideological – that is the abstract and reified – character of human social relations

in modern society under capitalist conditions. For this reason, Lukács101

stresses that

we should not forget, like vulgar Marxism, that capitalism is not purely economic, but

also socio-cultural; it is not merely the material reproduction of society, but also its

normative reproduction. The task of ideology-critique, accordingly, is to prevent the

ideological normative reproduction of society and to contribute to giving the self-

reproduction of society a new direction.

Ideology-critique, it should be clear, is possible only to the extent that the

phenomenon of reification is related systematically to the concrete totality of society.

Critique in Lukács’ sense remains inconceivable unless recourse is had the category

of totality which, as we have seen, is intimately linked to the concept of the concrete.

As is the case with most of Lukács’ concepts, ‘totality’ too is a concept borrowed

from Hegel. Ultimately, it goes back to the humanist tradition of classical culture. It

expresses the image of a harmonious reality or whole which, as in History and Class

Consciousness, represents the essence of humanitas, postulated as the goal of socialist

society.102

Ideology-critique proceeds by placing a phenomenon within the totality to

which it most properly belongs. A work of art, for instance, is not merely located in

its particular historical context – say, bourgeois society circa 1860 – but is at the same

time measured against the yardstick of an objectively possible harmonious totality,

which means the fulfilment of the potential of that society. As such, ideology-critique

for Lukács is a process of ‘mediation’ – a concept which likewise derives from Hegel.

The immediately given reified appearance of reality is mediated in as much as we

‘first recognise and reduplicate it, and secondly raise to self-consciousness the

immanent tendencies of the object moving toward self realisation’.103

Realism and formalism (including the avant-garde)

Not only Lukács’ political thought, but also his aesthetics centre on the concept of

totality. Indeed, his aesthetic position is inseparable from his political theory.104

In

History and Class Consciousness, he gave the concept of totality political application:

the victory of the proletariat will at least resolve all contradictions and realise society

in its concrete totality. The proletariat, by virtue of its position in society, which is

comparable to Hegel’s slave, has privileged access to knowledge of the totality of

society as reality the objective potential of which still needs to be realised. In

contradistinction, the bourgeoisie, whose mode of knowledge is a static,

contemplative one, like that of Hegel’s master, the privileged mode of knowledge

consists of a union of thought and action. Knowledge of this latter kind is for Lukács

a reflection of reality, not in the sense of a photographic or empirical portrayal, but of

a dissolving of reified appearance and a sense of forces and historical tendencies at

work in the present, a grasping of the concreteness and fullness of reality in human

social categories.105

After History and Class Consciousness, Lukács was able to

differentiate also his account of the aesthetic sphere. The politicised concept of

totality, the presupposition of ideology-critique, was now adopted for the new

aesthetic theory as a formal criterion of the work of art.

101

Ibid., p. 249. 102

Compare Sylvia Frederici, ‘Notes on Lukács’ Aesthetics’, Telos No. 11, 1972, p. 147. 103

Arato, Op. cit., p. 198. 104

Bernd Witte, ‘Benjamin and Lukács’, New German Critique No. 5, 1975, p. 14. 105

Jameson, Op. cit., pp. 185-90.


28

Lukács’ basic assumption, borrowed from Hegel, is that ‘the true is the whole’.

According to him, this conviction at the same time forms the kernel of the proletarian

worldview. Now, since the true is the whole, great art invariably represents the whole

as such. And art which represents the whole of reality is equivalent to realism.

Realism is the aesthetic form or artistic style corresponding to the proletarian

worldview. Realistic art reflects, reproduces or represents the whole of reality, yet not

in the sense of photographic realism, but of being anthropomorphic, evocative,

committed, inner-worldly and consciousness-raising. Truly great art is true to reality

and is characterised by a passionate striving toward a comprehensive representation of

reality, including is objective possibility. The totality of reality refers in particular to

the human totality, the realisation and fulfilment of human potentialities.

In his Ästhetik,106

accordingly, Lukács lays much emphasis on the becoming human of

people (Menschwerdung des Menschen) or humanisation. In his introduction to the

aesthetic writings of Marx and Engels of 1945, he even submits that great art, true

realism and humanism are inextricably bound up with one another and that the

principle of unification is to be found in the concern for the integrity of humanity. On

this view, the great artist does not merely create a realistic picture of society, but also

protests against the dehumanisation of man.107

The artist is not and cannot be an

objective observer or spectator, but plays a specific role in that his most characteristic

task is to bring to consciousness the process of social development and the

possibilities of human progress inherent in it.

The great historical periods of realism, according to Lukács, are ancient Greece, the

Renaissance and France of the early 19th

century. The individual authors to whom he

always returns as the great realists include Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Tolstoy, Scott,

Gorky, Thomas Mann and, finally, Solzhenitsyn. However, within realism itself he

makes a threefold subdivision: bourgeois realism, critical realism and, finally,

socialist realism. The first is the realism of the ascending bourgeoisie represented by

the line of authors from Diderot to Fielding; the second the realism of authors

protesting against the dehumanising effect of capitalism brought into being by the

bourgeoisie in the period when they indisputably came to power, from Balzac to

Mann; and the third the realism of Gorky and Solzhenitsyn, representing the

ascending proletariat and the revolution, which does not merely portray reality

realistically and protest critically, but also suggests the possibility of an alternative,

human society.

The ability of the artist to assume the progressive or revolutionary worldview and its

corresponding realistic form depends not on him- or herself, but strictly on his or her

position in the historical development of society. The great writers of France at the

turn of the 18th

century, for instance, were able to create truly realist art by virtue of

the fact that they witnessed the sensational inauguration of a completely new

historical epoch. For a brief moment, the total social process came to view and

authors like Diderot and Balzac were privileged to catch a glimpse of it. Their

immediate successors, like Flaubert and Zola, were denied this opportunity since the

historical conditions giving rise to the new epoch soon became petrified and inert, as

106

Lukács, Ästhetik, Vol. 1-2. Neuwied: Luchterhand. 107

Here we pick up a resonance linking Lukács’ critique and Ortega’s defence of ‘dehumanisation’.


29

is shown by the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the concomitant defeat of the

proletariat. In the hands of those following upon the great authors, consequently,

realism declined into naturalism. While Balzac pictures the last great struggles against

the dehumanisation following in the wake of capitalism, Zola photographically

reproduces and disinterestedly described the surface appearance of social reality

without approaching its deep-seated structure. Still later, after the developmental

process had taken its course in fragmenting and reifying reality by means of the

capitalist division of labour, formalism made its appearance, betraying a complete

loss of historical sense. In contradistinction to the great realist writers, later authors

such as Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil and Beckett were unable to portray more that

splinters of reality, subjective impressions and opinions, which remain essentially

groundless and hence unintelligible to the mass of their readers. At best, these

formalists only reflect capitalist reality, without pointing toward a possible way out of

the impasse.

Evaluation

In his many and influential contributions to the critical analysis of the art, especially

the literature, of the modern period, Lukács for the most part operated with the basic

critical distinction between realism and modernism, without making a distinction

between modernist and avant-garde art. This practice was of course reinforced by the

more general acceptance of a broad and indiscriminate concept of modernism in the

various debates in which he took part. When necessary, however, his did draw finer

distinctions and articulated his criticism of the literature, of the modern period from

his preferred realist point of view in specific and pointed ways. At various stages of

his career as a theorist and critic, he actually attacked the undifferentiated view of

modern art and insisted on presenting a different position. This position was based on

a threefold distinction within modern art which he indeed regarded as an over-

simplification, yet one not nearly as crude as the generally accepted view which both

lumped things together that had to be distinguished and excluded others that needed to

be included. This threefold distinction internally differentiates and specifies not only

the woolly category of modernism, but also his own concept of formalism to which he

opposed realism. Against this background, his characterisation and evaluation of the

avant-garde stands out clearly.

According to Lukács, the literature of the modern period can be divided, as he writes,

into ‘three main currents’:108

(i) Expressly anti-realist or pseudo-realist literature which is intended as an apologia

for and defence of the status quo – a category of literature he regards as being of a

quality that does not warrant a response.

(ii) What he tellingly describes as ‘so-called avant-garde literature’ from mid-19th

-

century Naturalism to 20th

century Surrealism which is in the main characterised by

‘its growing distance from, and progressive dissolution of, realism’; as such, it

contrasts very sharply with what he calls ‘authentic modern literature’.

(iii) Finally, the literature of 20th

-century realism which, as the authentic aesthetic

form, he regards as rightly swimming against the mainstream of literary development,

108

Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance’, in New Left Books, Op. cit., pp. 28-59, here p. 29.


30

more particularly, against anti-realism on the one hand and the avant-garde on the

other; the complexity of this form of realism is represented by such authors as Gorky,

Thomas and Heinrich Mann and Romain Rolland who, in his opinion, are unjustly

ignored by the mainstream.

From this socio-politically inspired analytical description of modern literature it is

evident that Lukács regards avant-garde literature as the only credible opponent of

realism. But whereas realism adopts the proper form and assumes the proper task of

reflecting objective reality and thus seeks ‘to grasp that reality as it truly is’, avant-

garde literature not only makes no reference to objective reality but even denies that

literature, and hence more generally art, has any such reference. For Lukács, this

means that the avant-garde exhaust itself by ‘reproducing whatever manifests itself

immediately and on the surface’.109

This counterproductive concern ends in the

exultation of subjectivity – and ‘by exulting man’s subjectivity, at the expense of the

objective reality of his environment, man’s subjectivity itself is impoverished’.110

This

fixation on the immediate, the surface and ultimately subjectivity is reflected in the

swift succession of avant-garde movements and the accompanying ‘embittered

internecine quarrels that flare up between them’.111

Consequently, realism and the

avant-garde stand to one another as authentic art to inauthentic art.

From this it can be concluded that Lukács has a strong normative – negative –

evaluation not only of avant-garde artistic output, but also of avant-garde movement

formation. Indeed, by 1958 he was thus willing to slam avant-gardism as a whole as

‘decadent’.112

109

Ibid., p. 33. 110

Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, p. 24. 111

‘Realism in the Balance’, p, 36. 112

Lukács, Wider die mißverstandenen Realismus.


31

10 Adorno: avant-garde art as a form of critical cognition

What the members of the Frankfurt School called ‘Critical Theory’ during their early

years, the 1930s, stood for a kind of cultural Marxism which in certain crucial

respects had been borrowed from Georg Lukács’ early works up to History and Class

Consciousness. Although Theodor Ardorno’s (1903-69) position cannot be identified

with those of his fellow critical theorists, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, he

like them took essential cues from Lukács. As Hegelian-Marxists, Adorn and Lukács

shared the central concept of ‘mediation’ which represents the kernel of their

respective reinterpretations of Marxism as a form of critique of society. Most

important, perhaps, is the concept of ‘reification’, the outcome of Lukács’

combination of Marx and Weber, which Adorno extended into an investigation of the

conditions and criteria of art and culture. His own contribution was to shift the

emphasis to technology as a veil which is cast over reality by the logic of

administration and thus comes to form the ‘second nature’113

– as Lukács called it – of

society. At this level, Adorno approached the development of society from the point

of view of a process of progressive rationalisation. As is evident from Adorno’s

particular concept of dialectical critique of art and culture, however, his work also

owes much to Walter Benjamin. Above all, he took over Benjamin’s concept of

immanent redemptive critique. In addition, he also utilised the concept of allegory for

the purposes of analysing avant-garde art and sought to incorporate the concept of

technique in the sense of the unity of artistic technique and material techniques of

reproduction into his sociology of music. In his studies of the sociology of art, finally,

he also drew on Bertold Brecht’s understanding of the nature of art in contemporary

society.

The autonomy of art – versus Brecht and Benjamin

Adorno’s initial position on art and society took shape in the 1930s in the course of a

controversy with Brecht and Benjamin, what has come to be known as the ‘Brecht-

Benjamin-Adorno debate’.114

In a certain sense, incidentally, this debate intersected

with yet a larger debate in which also Ernst Bloch and Lukács participated.115

In his Dreigroschenprozess,116

Brecht advanced to view that in contemporary society

the autonomy of art is a mere illusion in view of the predominance of the interest in

employing capital. Far from being autonomous, art is a commodity. In Brecht’s mind,

the development from autonomy to commodity represented progress in that it made

possible a new type of art. Finally, he sought to account for the dissolution of

autonomous religion-based radiant art and the genesis of art as a commodity by

reference to the development of capitalism, on the one hand, and to technical

development, on the other. Benjamin117

not only broadened the concept of ‘radiant

art’, renaming it ‘auratic art’, but also employed Brecht’s suggestion that the

utilisation of new techniques may have contributed to the dissolution of the autonomy

113

History and Class Consciousness, pp. 86, 128. 114

See Peter Bürger, Seminar: Literatur- und Kunstsoziologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978, pp. 11-20,

with bibliographical details of the documentation on pp. 462-63. 115

For the documents of this debate, see New Left Books, Aesthetics and Politics, Op. cit. 116

This is presented as a court case in which Brecht loses against a film company who broke the

contact allowing him to remain involved in the filming of his own work. 117

Walter Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter siener technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, in Benjamin,

Illuminationen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980, pp. 136-69; abridged translation, ‘The Work of Art in the

Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Maynard Solomon (ed.) Marxism and Art, pp. 550-57.


32

of art in a much stronger sense than Brecht himself was willing to countenance. Now,

Adorno’s118

main objection to Brecht and Benjamin was directed against their

treatment of the autonomy of art.

As against Brecht, who held that all works of art in principle possessed the character

of commodities, Adorno showed that a crucial distinction must be made in

contemporary art. Whereas Brecht refused to search for further divisions, such as for

instance ‘the clever distinction between true and false art’, Adorno insisted that the

decisive event in the cultural development of bourgeois art is represented by the

break-up of art into ‘culture industry’ and ‘esoteric art’ for the specialist. ‘Both bear

the stigma of capitalism, both contain elements of change…Both are torn halves of an

integral freedom, to which however they do not add up’.119

Besides the letter addressed to Benjamin on 18 March 1936, Adorno’s criticism of

Benjamin’s employment of Brecht’s ideas was formulated also, and indeed in

particular, in the essay of 1938 entitled ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the

Regression of Listening’.120

In the letter, he criticises Benjamin for overlooking the

moment of truth – what he calls the sign of freedom – of autonomous art and his

consequent covering up of the contradictory nature of bourgeois art. The aim of

Adorno’s criticism, as he saw it, was to save Benjamin from the influence of Brecht,

as he says, to ‘hold (Benjamin’s) arm steady until the sun of Brecht has once more

sunk in exotic waters’.121

In the essay, Adorno uses Lukács’ concept of reification to

disclose the internal logic and workings of the culture industry and, against this

background, attacks the main thesis of Benjamin’s essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age

of its Mechanical Reproduction’. From the letter to Benjamin it is clear that Adorno

had another interest in Benjamin’s theory. Whereas the latter was concerned with the

socially determined attitude of the recipient of art in contemporary society, the former

concentrated on the single work of art. In the essay, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music

and the Regression of Listening’, Adorno for the first time centred on reception and

thus took up the problem at the same level of argumentation as Benjamin. Benjamin

advanced the thesis that new media such as photography and especially the film

engender a radically new mode of reception which corresponds to the interests of the

masses. The place of auratic art, which calls for concentration, contemplation,

empathy, absorption and identification, is taken by distracted reception which

represents a collective mode of perception characterised by distantiation and critical

testing. Adorno, too, finds that distraction has become the dominant feature of the

reception of music, yet in contradistinction to Benjamin he regards it not as a

historically progressive step but rather as a regressive occurrence. Distracted

reception, far from making possible critical distantiation, in fact binds the recipient to

the immediacy of momentary effects. The musical composition as such is no longer

the object of reception, but merely particular stimulating effects.

118

‘Letter of 18 March 1936’, in New Left Books, O. cit., pp. 120-6.; also in New Left Review, No. 81,

1973, pp. 63-8. 119

Ibid., p. 123. 120

Adorno, ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in A. Arato and E.

Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1978, pp. 270-99. 121

‘Letter of 18 March 1936’, p. 126.


33

The regression of listening in this sense, according to Adorno, has its roots in the fact

that music has become a fetish.122

Signs of the fetish-character in music are to be

found everywhere: in the cult of master violins such as Stradivarius or Amati, the

public valuation of singing voices, particularly those having volume and are

especially high, the veneration of the star conductor, the hunting down of the so-

called ‘characteristic idea’ of a composer with the zeal of belief in property, musical

works taking on the role of stars which result in the exclusion of moderately good

works, the shrinking of musical programmes and the selection of the accepted classics

in terms of the principle that the most familiar is the most successful, and so forth.

Adorno leads back the new mode of reception stemming from fetishism not to the

new media, as did Benjamin following Brecht’s suggestion, but to the development of

capitalist society at large. But whereas Brecht, who also exhibited this tendency, was

still content to conceive of the dynamic of capitalism as subjecting all spheres of life

to the interest in employing capital, the utilisation of the concept of fetish suggests

that Adorno seeks to find a foothold in Marx’s Capital itself, in a principle which at

the same time is responsible for the ‘liquidation of the individual’.123

This principle is

to be found in exchange value: ‘The more inexorably the principle of exchange value

destroys use values for human beings, the more deeply does exchange value disguise

itself as the real object of enjoyment’.124

The establishment and independence of

exchange value answers on the side of the subject to the interest in consumption. The

recipient is no longer interested in enjoyment of the object, the use value, but values

the buy itself: ‘The consumer is really worshipping the money that he himself has

paid for the ticket to the Toscanini concert’.125

The work of art as ‘windowless monad’

Adorno pursued further his analysis of the so-called ‘culture industry’, which has a

major role to play in the development and maintenance of the fetish-character of art,

in the central chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer,

which is entitled ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’.126

The

only difference between the positions taken by Adorno in 1938 and in 1944 is that,

whereas he initially still cultivated hope that works of autonomous art would bring

about the perception of the totality of society on the part of the addressees, he felt

himself compelled to embrace a more pessimistic stance in the face of the success of

Fascism.

Adorno’s objection to Benjamin’s thesis to give reception a central place in art

criticism and thus to take the needs of the masses as reference point has deeper roots

that merely his mistrust of commercialised aesthetic communication under conditions

of the culture industry. Like Lukács, Adorno assumes that social facts are never given

but in principle mediated in the sense that they receive a determinate character from

the social whole to which they belong. The mediation of work of art and society must

moreover be sought not in some third social agency, but in the work of art itself. Now,

if one assumes that the social relevance of a work of art resides in the very structure

of the work, then it follows that reception or the communicative aspect of the work of

122

‘On the Fetish-Character…’, p. 286. 123

Ibid., p. 276. 124

Ibid., p. 279. 125

Ibid., p. 278. 126

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York: Herder and Herder, 1972, pp. 120-

67.


34

art is of no consequence whatsoever. This is exactly the position Adorno takes. In

Ästhetische Theorie, his incomplete final major work, he insists that ‘communication

of the work of art with the external, with the world, to which blissfully or miserably it

closes itself off, happens through non-communication’.127

The work of art, especially

the avant-garde work of art, is autonomous in the sense that it is free from socially

determined communication, which Adorno distrusts. Using the expression of the early

modern philosopher Leibniz, he even refers to the work of art as a ‘windowless

monad’128

– that is, a closed and self-sufficient whole, which correlates with yet

foregoes communication with reality, thus proving itself fragmented. Only as such

can the work of art obtain an appropriate level of autonomy which enables it to

‘disclose what is being covered up by empirical reality’ and thus to achieve in its own

way what critical social theory achieves conceptually: to offer a critique of reality.

Ultimately, then, Adorno’s reservations about reception rests on his conception of the

work of art, its creation, its nature and its relation to society.

Two basic principles of the sociology of art

The two basic principles of Adorno’s sociology of art that emerge from the above are,

first, that the social character or social relevance of the work of art resides in the

structure of the work of art itself; and, second, that the relation between the structure

of the work of art and society is of a direct or immediate kind. Social struggles and

class relations imprint themselves directly on the structure of the work of art, not

through the artist entering upon a conscious treatment of the social relations of the

time. ‘Works of art’, Adorno submits in Ästhetische Theorie, ‘unconsciously write the

history of their epoch’.129

When the artist deliberately undertakes to give artistic form

to the society of the time, he is in danger of losing his grip on what is of importance.

The artist succeeds in incorporating society in the structure of the work of art only

when he or she concentrates single-mindedly on the pre-given artistic material.

Artistic material represents the historically achieved level of artistic technique,

including themes, motifs and their formal treatment. The concept of artistic material

occupies central position in Adorno’s theory of the mediation of art and society.130

The concept indicates that location where work of art and society meet and thus

serves to make both artistic development and social development accessible. In so far

as an artist succeeds in the creation of a work of art, as Habermas says, it

‘incorporate(s) the cracks and crevices of a world torn apart mercilessly into (its)

representations’.131

What stands out is that Adorno keeps to an emphatic concept of the work of art. It

allows him to see art as an expression of the truth of society, a truth that Critical

Theory through critique must elevate to a conceptual level. Whence his dictum: ‘In

the truth content (of art), or in its absence, aesthetic and social critique are one’.132

Adorno thus regards avant-garde art as a legitimate source of critical insight, despite

the fact that its mode of knowledge differs from that of science. The work of art,

which relates not immediately but only mediately to history, offers insight into its

127

Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol.7, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970, p. 15. 128

Loc. cit. 129

Op. cit., p. 272. 130

Bürger, ‘Das Vermittlungsproblem in der Kunstsoziologie Adornos’, in Bürger, Vermittlung,

Reception, Funktion, pp. 79-92. 131

Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, London: Heinemann, 1974, p. 241. 132

Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1973, p.


35

social condition; it refers not to facts or objective structures, but to the meaning of

history. This is does not directly, but only negatively. The category of negativity, it

should be noted, is absolutely central to Adorno’s whole position, his principal

philosophical work being significantly entitled Negative Dialektik.133

Evaluation: Adorno versus Lukács

At this stage, both the similarities and differences between Adorno and Lukács are

apparent. Both proceed from the epistemological assumption of non-alienated

relations versus reification. Both further operate with a similar model of art. They

therefore reject the view that the problem of the mediation between art and society

can be resolved with reference to social agencies enabling production and reception.

Both are convinced that the mediation between art and society is to be sought not in

some third phenomenon intervening between the two, but rather in the work of art

itself.134

Autonomy, and not engagement, represents the social nature of art. Society

comes to appearance in the work of art, and art provides a critique of society, of

ideology. To the extent that emphasis is placed on the social content of artistic

structure, both Adorno and Lukács uphold the principles of representational aesthetics

and, either implicitly or explicitly, reject reception aesthetics.135

Both thus keep to an

emphatic concept of the work of art, and both assume that that the individual work of

art mediates the general and the particular. In fact, basic to the positions of both

Adorno and Lukács is the distinction between the organic or symbolic and the non-

organic or allegorical work of art. The stark difference between the two lies in their

respective evaluations of this distinction.136

Lukács equates the realist work with the organic work of art and takes the latter as

aesthetic norm on the basis of which the non-organic avant-garde work of art can be

declared decadent.137

Adorno, by contrast, elevates the non-organic work of art to the

norm, at least for contemporary society, and condemns all attempts to fix on realist art

in Lukács’ sense as tantamount to aesthetic regression.138

Both these aesthetic

theories, including theories of the avant-garde, make important decisions already on

the theoretical level; both are strongly normative in the sense that both, like Hegel’s

aesthetics on which they are each in his own way dependent, contain a predetermined

standard which is applied to contemporary art, particularly to avant-garde art.139

Analogous to Hegel’s valuation of classical art and criticism of romantic art, Lukács

places a premium on realistic art and rejects avant-garde art. Adorno likewise starts

from Hegel, but instead of taking over his evaluations rather attempts to pursue

Hegel’s historicisation of art forms to its final conclusion, such that no historical type

of form-content dialectic is accorded priority over another. From this point of view,

the avant-garde work of art appears as the historically necessary expression of

alienation in contemporary society. To attempt to measure it with the yardstick of

133

Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966. 134

Bürger, Vermittlung, Reception, Funktion, p. 71. 135

Hohendahl, ‘Introduction to Reception Aesthetics’, New German Critique, No. 10, 1977, p. 32. 136

Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, pp. 117-20. 137

Lukács, Wider die mißverstandenen Realismus. 138

Adorno, ‘Erpreßte Versöhnung’. 139

Compare Bürger, Op. cit.


36

classical or realistic art is not simply misguided, but in fact naïve.140

Lukács, too,

regards the avant-garde work of art as an expression of alienation in contemporary

society, which for him means the inability of bourgeois intellectuals to grasp the real

historical forces of development. On this political assumption Lukács bases the

possibility of a realistic art in contemporary society. Adorno does not share this

perspective. For him, avant-garde art is the only possible authentic art in

contemporary society. Every attempt to create organically closed works of art are

doomed to regress below the level of artistic material and technique already available

and, what is more, opens itself to the suspicion of ideology. Instead of laying bare the

contradictions of contemporary society, the organic work of art promotes through its

very form the illusion of an unscathed society – which is the exact condition we face

in our epoch.

In the most important paragraph on the concept of modernity in relation to art in his

Ästhetische Theorie,141

therefore, Adorno submits that avant-garde art is the art of ‘the

most advance consciousness’ in which ‘the most advanced and differentiated

procedural means’ are brought to bear on ‘the most advanced and differentiated

experiences’ – so that is can be asserted with good reason that, socially, avant-garde

art as a mode of cognition, knowledge and penetrating insight is critical.

140

In ‘Erpreßte Versöhnung’, Adorno speaks of ‘Lukács’ neo-naiveté’, p. 273, and he opens the same

volume containing this piece, Noten zur Literatur, with an essay entitled ‘Über epische Naivetät’, pp.

34-40 – the epic, as we know, being Lukács’ ideal aesthetic form. 141

Ästhetische Theorie, p. 57.


37

11 Walter Benjamin: the allegorical avant-garde work of art

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), called ‘the most important German literary critic

between the two wars’ by Hannah Arendt, was also an essayist, philosopher and

sociologist who associated first informally and later in Paris formally with the

Frankfurt School, that is, the Institute for Social Research in exile headed by Max

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. From the point of view of the sociology of art

interested in the avant-garde, it is particularly noteworthy that one of his enemies,

Georg Lukács, referred to Benjamin as ‘one of the finest theorists of the avant-garde’.

Benjamin was in part a student of Georg Simmel, but his thought underwent an

important change in 1924 under the impact of Lukács’ History and Class

Consciousness, with the result that he integrated also a Hegelian-Marxist emphasis

alongside Jewish mysticism and Surrealism.

Allegory versus symbol

Benjamin’s important study of the German tragedy, Ursprung des deutschen

Traurspiel142

publish in 1928 gives clear evidence of the influence of Lukácsian

Marxism, which means to say the synthesis of Marx and Weber.143

At this point it

should be noted that Benjamin was one of the first to recognise the importance of

Lukács’ major early work. He adopted the basic idea of the book as his own so that it

became a decisive influence in his philosophical development. It also assisted him to

gain clarity about the political elements of his own thought.144

Be that as it may, in his

study of the Traurspiel he concentrated on the Baroque. This period was characterised

by a peculiar time consciousness, namely a vision of history as chronicle, as mere

succession without development, the relentless turning of the wheel of fortune, which

ultimately resulted in the decline, decay and disintegration of everything. As an

artistic form, the Traurspiel corresponds to the Baroque vision of history as chronicle,

while its content is constituted by melancholy. Assisted by Lukács’ theory of

reification, which thematises the second nature of modern society, Benjamin

interprets the Traurspiel as dealing with a situation in which human beings find

themselves given over to the power of things. His main thesis – and here he

introduces the important concept of ‘allegory’ – is that the allegorical mode of

expression, rather than the symbolic mode of expression,145

comes to predominate in

the Baroque, as in all periods in which things lose their immediate relationship with

intersubjective meanings or where there is a lack of immanent meaning in the world.

Allegory as a mode of expression in the Baroque Traurspiel serves to point to an

external referent, and thus to transport the audience to a position outside the power of

things, outside the destructive stream of time, to afford the audience an experience of

transcendence.

Whereas a symbol as a mode of expression presupposes a rounded, closed totality of

beautiful appearance, allegory, as Benjamin understands it,146

represents a fragment

separate from the total context of life. Accordingly, the allegorical mode of expression

amounts to attempting to create meaning by putting together a number of isolated and

meaningless fragments of reality. The meaning so created is an artificial or

142

Ursprung des deutschen Traurspiel, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 143

See Arato, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism’, pp. 68-71. 144

See Witte, ‘Benjamin and Lukács’, pp. 4, 8, 9. 145

Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, London: Sheed & Ward, pp. 63ff. 146

See Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, pp. 93-4.


38

conventional one since it is posited rather than derived from the original context of the

fragments. Only by employing this mode of expression is the Baroque melancholy

drama able to fulfil its task of offering transcendence to people fatefully caught up in

the context of reified second nature over which they were powerless. Important to

note is that the concept of allegory later formed the basis of Benjamin’s conception of

the avant-garde.

Technological and artistic change: from auratic to avant-garde art

During the 1920s, liberal intellectuals as well as the revolutionary Russian avant-

garde exhibited a pronounced interest in technical development in the realm of art. In

this context belongs the concern of Brecht and Benjamin with the changing function

of the productive forces of art, the former exerting a profound influence over the latter

– as we saw in the previous discussion of Adorno. Benjamin as critic, it should be

noted, became the principal commentator on and champion of Brechtian theatre and

played an important part in bringing Brecht to prominence. Benjamin was affected not

only by Brecht’s theory of epic theatre and revolutionary engagement, but also by his

insistence on the revolutionary role of art, artist and, by implication, critic.147

More

specifically, he was impressed by Brecht’s explanatory thesis according to which the

development and utilisation of new techniques may have hastened the process of the

dissolution of traditional art. Brecht moreover referred to traditional art as ‘religiously

based radiant art’ – an expression Benjamin followed up with a theory of the

dissolution of auratic art.148

What Benjamin basically shared with Brecht, as well as

with other members of the Frankfurt School, was the conviction of the essentially

political character of culture in general and of art in particular149

– a conviction which

should be understood in the context of their common struggle against Fascism. This

position is evident from both Benjamin’s essays, ‘The Author as Producer’ and ‘The

Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction’. At the same time, these are

also the very essays in which Benjamin gives Brecht’s thesis about the effect of

technical development on art a stronger form than Brecht himself did.

The essay, ‘The Author as Producer’, does not simply assert that the artist is a

producer in the sense of art being a part of the economic base, as Marxist interpreters

seeking to claim Benjamin exclusively for their cause are apt to think.150

Benjamin’s

position is more subtle in that he attempts to establish a relation between base and

superstructure. For this purpose, he introduces the central concept of technique.

Technique refers to the transmission of both material and artistic productivity. As

such, it is not only an instrument or artistic means, but also the materialisation of

thoughts and modes of seeing. By means of this differentiated concept of technique,

Benjamin wants to overcome the dichotomy of form and content as well as the

dichotomy, upheld by Lukács for instance, between the political tendency and the

artistic quality of a work of art. By placing technique central, Benjamin is able to

argue that the artist is a producer, not of politically relevant statements and formulas,

but of forms of expression – that is, forms and means of production of consciousness.

147

See Solomon, Marxism and Art, p. 542. 148

Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. 149

Hohendahl, ‘Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics’, New

German Critique, No. 16, p. 89. 150

E.g., Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, London: Methuen, 1977, p. 60.


39

This, in fact, is Benjamin’s definition of the avant-garde artist.151

The task of the

artist, in these terms, is to concentrate on the development of the emancipatory

potential of art. He or she should not uncritically assume the existing level of

technical development, but should rather develop and thus revolutionise those

techniques. By so doing, the artist contributes to the creation of new forms of social

relationships between artist and public – forms whereby consumers are related to

production and hence enable the public to become collaborators of the artist. The

artist should not concern him- or herself exclusively with an art object, but with the

means of production. Only in this way could art fulfil its task of creating demands

which could be satisfied only later; only in this way could art, as revolutionary and

utopian, lead society rather than lag behind it; only in this way could art be truly

avant-garde art.

In the essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin

pursued the Brechtian theme of the dissolution of religiously based radiant art still

more consistently by including also the question of reception. The main burden of the

essay is to characterise the decisive change in art during the early 20th

century in

terms of the loss of aura and, further, to trace this occurrence back to changes in the

realm of reproduction techniques. The central concept of ‘aura’ is Benjamin’s

equivalent of Brecht’s ‘radiant art’, but in addition it also owes something to Marx’s

concept of ‘fetishism’152

as well as Weber’s concept of ‘disenchantment’.153

Benjamin

starts from a particular type of relationship between work of art and recipient, which

he denotes with the concept of aura. Aura refers to a number of related things: first,

the authenticity of a non-reproducible work, second unique existence in the context of

tradition, and third the phenomenon of distance that separates us from the unique

harmonious work of art. Aura in this sense has its origin in religious cult ritual, but for

Benjamin the auratic mode of reception is typical not only of sacred art, but also of art

since the Renaissance. The decisive transformation in the realm of art, according to

Benjamin, is not represented by the break between sacred medieval art and profane

Renaissance art, but is rather marked by the loss of aura. This is a phenomenon of the

early 20th

century which rests on the phenomenal technical developments of the

time.154

He did of course acknowledge an intermediate or transitional form of art,

namely the autonomous aesthetic art of the 19th

century, yet it too was still pervaded

by aura, indeed in a somewhat different way than sacred art. Auratic reception takes

the form of concentration, contemplation, empathy, absorption and identification.

This type of reception became impossible once art forms involved their own

reproducibility, not only new media such as photography and the film, but also the

reproduction of paintings and music on gramophone records. Benjamin’s principal

thesis is that change in reproduction techniques in the 20th

century transformed the

mode of perception, with the result that the very character of art itself was decisively

altered. The contemplative mode of perception of the individual in the case of auratic

art now made way for a collective mode of perception which is characterised by

distraction, yet also by critical testing. Instead of ritual, art was now founded on

politics.

151

Benjamin thus has a more profound and ambitious cognitive conception of the avant-garde artist and

avant-garde art than Poggioli discussed earlier. 152

Solomon, Op. cit., p. 545. 153

Arato, Op. cit., p. 209. 154

Recall, for instance, the 19th

century fusion of science and technology, the Franco-Prussian War of

1870 and, particularly, the First World War.


40

In a letter to Horkheimer in 1935 in which he offered his essay on art and mechanical

reproduction for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Benjamin155

expressed the contention that this essay was a decisive step in the direction of a

materialistic theory of art. In the very essay in which he dealt with interrelated

changes in techniques and art, however, we also find a second explanation for the loss

or aura – an explanation which gives a twist to Benjamin’s theory of the avant-garde.

The artist of the avant-garde, especially Dadaism, according to Benjamin, created by

pictorial and literary means the effects which were only later introduced over a wider

front by way of the film: ‘The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales

value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. The studied

degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this

uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscurities and every

imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which

they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless

destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with

the very means of production’.156

In this case, the loss of aura is not explained by

changes in reproduction techniques, but traced back to the intention of the avant-

garde. The transformation of the character of art is here not the result of technological

innovation, but the more or less conscious action of an artistic generation. The avant-

garde movement Dadaism is ascribed the role of a precursor, while change of

techniques is at most responsible for the generalisation of a new mode of perception

and hence reception of art. The materialist aspect of Benjamin’s thesis resides less in

his explanation in terms of technological development than in the implicit

demonstration that works of art do not exert an effect by themselves, but only within

an institutional framework and, further, that reception is both historically and socially

founded.157

This problem, and the criticism of Adorno, indeed led Benjamin to revise his position,

at least to the extent of relativising the element of technological determinism. Still

later, in his famous theses on the philosophy of history158

written shortly before his

suicide in the face of the Gestapo in 1940, Benjamin would finally break with

Brecht.159

Given the tension between the technological and the historical-sociological

versions of the materialist dimension, Benjamin more subtly restated his argument in

essays such as ‘The Storyteller’ and ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ of 1936 and 1938

respectively.160

In these pieces, Benjamin concentrates on the substrate of aura that is

lost, namely the community or communicative experience, the destruction of genuine

experience which rests on community and communication. He thus not only relocates

the loss of aura, but also subtly redefines the concept of aura itself.161

155

Benjamin, ‘Letter of 16 October 1935’, Briefe, Vol. 2, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, p.690; see also J. F.

Vogelaar ed., Kunst als Kritik, Amsterdam: van Gennep, 1973, p. 255. 156

Benjamin, ‘Das Kunstwerk in Zeitalter siener technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’, p. 163-4. 157

Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, pp. 35-40. 158

Benjamin, ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in Illuminationen, pp. 251-261; abridged translation,

‘Three Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Solomon, Marxism and Art, pp. 559-61. 159

Arato, Op. cit., p. 215; Hohendahl, ‘Introduction to Reception Aesthetics’, p. 57. 160

Benjamin, ‘Der Erzäler’ (‘The Stroyteller’), in Illuminationen, pp. 385-410, and ‘Über einige

Motive bei Baudelaire’ (‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’), Illuminationen, pp. 185-229; see also Arato, pp.

210-11, and Vogelaar, p. 257. 161

See Arato, ‘Aesthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism’, p. 211.


41

Whatever the nature of the shift in Benjamin’s position regarding the place of

reproduction techniques in artistic change and whatever implications it may have for

the concept of aura, one thing is certain: the concept of aura assumes a central critical

function in that it is designed to clarify a radical change in the historical context of

art.162

Initially, the thesis of the loss of aura served the purpose not only of declaring

the end of tradition art but, according to the overtly materialistic explanation, the end

of art as such in the sense of the reintegration of art into life. Adorno’s criticism

brought home to Benjamin the point that such an undifferentiated integration cannot

be anything other than a false abolition of art. Subsequently, therefore, the

reformulated thesis of the loss of aura was designed also to mark the radical change or

decisive break between aesthetic or auratic art and avant-garde or post-auratic art.163

Benjamin’s conception of avant-garde art in this context approached Adorno’s

understanding according to which art is the repository of truth and as such the

representation of utopia.

The non-organic allegorical avant-garde work of art

Benjamin applied his critical acumen not merely to Romanticism and the Baroque,

but more importantly also to modern art. In this case, his concept of allegory is of the

utmost importance. Although he developed the concept in relation to the Baroque, it

would seem as though he struck on the idea in the first place only through contact

with avant-garde art. I may even be claimed that the concept of allegory represents the

central category for the analysis of the avant-garde. Such authors as Lukács, Adorno,

Bloch, Habermas and Bürger all took Benjamin’s concept of allegory in some sense

or another as the key to the interpretation of modern art.164

Now, the concept of allegory is central to the concept of the non-organic work of art

which, of course, corresponds to the avant-garde work of art. As such, it forms the

most important, indeed, the core aspect of Benjamin’s theory of the avant-garde. In

order to clarify it somewhat, it is helpful to call on Brecht, as close associate of

Benjamin in this respect. In his Arbeitsjournal,165

Brecht spelled out the elementary

distinction on which he based himself. On the one hand, the traditional Aristotelian

view of composition is that the play forms an ‘absolute whole’, that is, an organic

unity of whole and part which carries an audience hypnotically through from

beginning to end. Since the organic unity forms a harmonious totality, the parts do not

admit of being taken out of context and of being confronted with those parts of real

life to which they correspond. To this organic conception of the play, Brecht opposed

what he called a non-organic conception of the play. If the play still forms a unity, it

is a unity which consists of independent parts which can, and indeed must, be

confronted with the corresponding parts of real life. As regards its form, the work of

art is uneven, interrupted, discontinuous, juxtaposing scenes in ways that disrupt

conventional expectations, compel the audience into critical reflection on the

construction of the play and its relation to reality, and make use of different art forms

and techniques such as film, back projection, song and choreography which integrate

smoothly neither with one another nor with the whole. Brecht can be said to be an

avant-gardist to the extent that he works in terms of a non-organic concept of the

work of art according to which he frees the parts from the predominance of the whole

162

Hohendahl, ‘Introduction…, p. 58. 163

Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, London: Heinemann, 1976, p. 84, speaks of ‘post-auratic art’. 164

See Arato, Op. cit., pp. 208, 212; Bürger, TdA, pp. 92-5. 165

Bürger, TdA, p. 127.


42

and thereby seeks to create a new type of political art. The independence or autonomy

of the individual parts and their transcendent relation to reality is the presupposition

of the shocking ‘alienation effect’ (Verfremdungseffekt) of his idea of epic drama.

Benjamin himself employed the concept of allegory in his analysis of the work of

Baudelaire – the exemplary representative of the modern artistic attitude

corresponding to avant-garde art. This 19th

century French poet was confronted by the

disappearance of the collective experience which historically supported poetry. To

solve the resulting problem he took this very disappearance as his central creative

principle. The new mode of art he was thus able to create out of the disappearance of

aura represents nothing less than an allegorical art. It revealed the present as ruin and

juxtaposed to the ruins the elements of dream, memory and fantasy. This

juxtaposition, to which Benjamin refers as ‘dialectical image’, was calculated not to

transport the public conservatively back to some bygone golden age, but rather to

activate the repressed collective memory and thus to make the present ripe for

change.166

Evaluation

Benjamin’s theory of the avant-garde seems, in a certain sense, to lie between those of

Lukács and Adorno. On the one hand, it has selective recourse to the past in order to

reach the future, but as far as the understanding and evaluation of the non-organic

work of art and the avant-garde movements are concerned, on the other hand, it is

much closer to Adorno’s.

166

Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’; see also Arato, Op. cit., p. 213. Here it should be remarked

that the emerging debate contrasting Foucault to Habermas, or Nietzschean genealogy against Critical

Theory, needs to take note that Foucault’s interpretation of modernity with reference to Baudelaire in

his essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’, Op. cit., seems to coincide in a central respect with the critical

theorist Benjamin’s notion of ‘dialectical image’ derived from the very same source.


43

12 Herbert Marcuse: the avant-garde – anti-art or formalist?

There can be no doubt about the fact that art and aesthetics are absolutely central to

the thought of Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). That the critical analysis of art

represents more than a merely subordinate theme in his work is borne out by the fact

that his career of almost 60 years opens as well as closes with a major study on art.167

From the very start, Marcuse’s position amounted to a concentration on ‘the

ideological-utopian double structure of art’.168

The central problem for Marcuse in

dealing with this double structure is ‘the relation between art and revolution, more

specifically, the significance of art for revolutionising of blunted sensuality and the

repressed structure of the drives’.169

In all of this, the avant-garde is given a privileged

place.

Emergence of the modern artistic personality

Alasdair MacIntyre in his book on Marcuse170

in the Fontana Modern Master series is

mistaken when he refers to Marcuse’s study on Hegel of 1933 done under Heidegger

as Marcuse’s doctoral dissertation. Marcuse had received his doctorate 11 years

earlier at the University of Freiburg for his study of the German artist novel under

Prof. Philipp Witkop.171

In dealing with a form of art which calls into question the

nature of art itself, the dissertation maps out central concerns of Marcuse’s later

writings. The Künstlerroman represents a sub-type of the so-called German

Bildungsroman, the novel of cultivation or inner development in which the principle

character passes from innocence to mature self-consciousness as the story unfolds; in

the Künstlerroman the artist plays this role. Accordingly, it portrays the development

of a specifically artistic self-consciousness and the attendant tension between the artist

and his or her surrounding world. Marcuse’s thesis is now that ‘the dissolution and

tearing asunder of a unitary form of life, the opposition of art and life, the separation

of the artist from the surrounding world, is the condition for the emergence of the

Künstlerroman, and its problem is the suffering and longing of the artist, his struggle

for a new community’.172

Here we have the starting point of Marcuse’s later theory of

the avant-garde which turns on the opposition of art and life. Both theoretically and

methodologically, Marcuse’s analysis of the century-and-a-half long tradition of the

artist novel from Goethe to Thomas Mann is conducted in Hegelian terms. A major

impetus in the revival of interest in Hegel during the first decades of the 20th

century

came from Georg Lukács. Marcuse had been slightly acquainted with Lukács and

studied his pre-Marxist writings on literature, Soul and Form and Theory of the

Novel,173

which led him to develop his treatment of the problematic of the

Künstlerroman in terms of Lukács’ neo-Hegelian framework.

The Künstlerroman emerged for the first time when the artist’s relation to a specific

form of life became tenuous, that is, when art became autonomous and hence

separated from life. The effort to overcome this debilitating antagonism of art and life

167

Der deutsche Künstlerroman, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978, originally 1922, and The Aesthetic

Dimension, Boston: Beacon Press, 1978 and London: Macmillan, 1979. 168

Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. 2, p. 518. 169

Habermas, ‘Herbert Marcuse über Kunst und Revolution’, in Habermas, Kultur und Kritik,

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 345-52, here 345-6. 170

MacIntyre, Marcuse, London: Fontana, 1972. 171

Barry Katz, ‘New Sources of Marcuse’s Aesthetics’, New German Critique, No 17, 1979, p. 177. 172

Cited in Katz, p. 177. 173

Lukács, Soul and Form, London: Merlin Press, 1974: Theory of the Novel, Op. cit.


44

is inspired by the conception of a primordial state of harmony. Marcuse discovers

such perfect unity in pre-Socratic Greek culture, which gave rise to the epic poetry of

Homer, ‘where life was itself art’, as well as in the Viking origins of the Germanic

peoples, in which case ‘the perfect harmony of art and life spoke through the ancient

bard’.174

This original unity was torn asunder in the epoch of division and difference

which eventuated in the European world with its repressive religious dogmas and

institutions and the divisive bourgeois city – a world ‘utterly devalued, impoverished,

brutal and hostile, offering no fulfilment’.175

Marcuse is convinced that a resolution of

this situation of alienation is prefigured in art. The primordial state of harmony, the

original perfect unity, is preserved in art; the lost values of this harmonious world and

of the unity of art and life are preserved in artistic subjectivity. To the extent that the

Künstlerroman represents the fully developed artistic personality and self-

consciousness, artistic subjectivity as such, it not only is a symptom of a world of

alienation, but also a concrete anticipation of the negation and transcendence of this

negative state.

Critique of autonomous art as ideology

Marcuse’s analysis of the German Künstlerroman was guided by inherently critical

categories. He characterised modern society as a world abandoned by God and sought

after an essential standard of truth transcending the objectively posited fact of the

world. Yet the philosophical-aesthetic plane on which the analysis was conducted was

not quite appropriate to a concretisation of the implicit critique of modern society. His

concept of critique took shape only upon his association from 1933 onwards with the

Institute for Social Research headed by Horkheimer and Adorno. Record of this

crucial phase in Marcuse’s career is to be found in his important essay, ‘The

Affirmative Character of Culture’,176

originally published in 1937 in the Institute’s

Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VI. Although the influence of Lukács’ and

Adorno’s ideology-critical analyses of art is visible in the essay, Marcuse’s originality

lies in bringing critique to bear, not on individual works of art, but rather on the larger

framework of art. He focuses his critique of ideology, which he developed on the

Marxian model, on the twofold character of classical bourgeois art which established

itself as autonomous.

In his essay of 1843 entitled ‘Toward a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:

Introduction’,177

Marx depicts religion both as false consciousness and as containing a

moment of truth, and then shows what critique seeks to accomplish. By means of this

example, Marx first tries to make clear the contradictory structure of ideology: on the

one hand, religion is an illusion inverting the planes of heaven and earth and, on the

other, it is the expression of real experience, the experience of suffering. The social

function of religion is correspondingly ambiguous: it lightens the burden of suffering,

yet simultaneously impedes the realisation of freedom and happiness. Critique, as

Marx sees it here, seeks to separate the truth and falsity of ideology with a view to

disillusioning people, bringing them to their senses and thus abolishing ideology by

changing the conditions requiring ideology in the first place.

174

Cited in Katz, p. 178. 175

Loc. cit. 176

Marcuse, Negations, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 88-133. 177

Karl Marx, in Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat eds, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy

and Society, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967, pp. 249-51.


45

Marcuse follows this model very closely indeed in the essay on the affirmative nature

of culture.178

He determines the global function of art in modern society as being of a

twofold or rather contradictory nature. Through classical bourgeois art, the world of

beautiful appearance is established as autonomous in the sense that it exists separately

from and beyond the everyday world of competition and social labour. This autonomy

is illusory179

in that art allows the fulfilment of an individual claim to happiness in the

realm of fiction, whereas it simultaneously veils the complete absence of happiness in

everyday reality. At the same time, however, there is a moment of truth in the

autonomy of art since the ideal of the beautiful gives expression to the longing for a

happier life, for the humanity, friendliness and solidarity withheld in everyday life,

and thereby transcends the status quo.180

Like Marx who discovers in religion a

moment of stabilisation of the status quo (as consolation it impedes the forces

inducing change), Marcuse shows that bourgeois culture refers all human values to

the realm of the ideal, namely art, and thus precludes their possible realisation. And

like Marx who recognises a critical moment in religion (an expression of and protest

against real suffering), Marcuse interprets the embodiment of human values in the

great works of bourgeois art as a protest against a society which is incapable of

fulfilling the demand of humanity and solidarity: ‘Ideal beauty was the form in which

yearning could be expressed and happiness enjoyed. Thus art became the presage of

possible truth’.181

Marcuse calls bourgeois art ‘affirmative’ because of the fact that it separates ideal

values from everyday life and transfers them to a separate autonomous realm of their

own. The concept of the affirmative, therefore, refers to the contradictory function of

culture in general and art in particular, which indeed contains ‘remembrance of what

could be’, yet simultaneously furnishes ‘the justification of the established form of

existence’.182

But Marcuse follows Marx not only in uncovering the contradictory

nature of autonomous art. He also subjects affirmative art to ideology critique. The

truth reserved in bourgeois ideals, but restricted exclusively to the sphere of art or

beautiful appearance, must be reintegrated into life: ‘culture must be reintegrated into

the material life process’,183

which means to say art as an autonomous sphere separate

from reality must be overcome dialectically: ‘affirmative culture must be

abolished’.184

As against beautiful appearance as an expression of ideals and the

simultaneous neutralisation of their possible realisation, the critique of art as ideology

eventuates in the demand for the abolition of autonomous art, the elimination of the

difference between art and life, the reintegration of culture as such into the material

process of life.

Avant-garde art as critique pointing to the pleasure principle

At the time of writing the essay on affirmative culture, Marcuse was faced with the

Fascist attempt to generally diffuse cultural values, on the one hand, and the

scientistic Marxist anticipation of the coming happiness, on the other, and accordingly

178

See Habermas, ‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Critique’; Bürger, VRF, pp. 167, 165. 179

Marcuse, ‘The Affirmative…’, p. 119. 180

Ibid., pp. 98-9. 181

Ibid., 182

Ibid., p. 93. 183

Ibid., p. 130. 184

Ibid., pp. 129-33.


46

recognised the possibility of ‘a false abolition of culture’.185

To counter such a

prospect, he envisaged different form of politicised art – that is, avant-garde art –

which would liberate sensuality and the drives. Avant-garde art is a form of critique

practiced by people, studied in the Künstlerroman, who have been disillusioned and

brought to their senses. For the purpose of this alternative form of art, he undertook in

Eros and Civilization to establish ‘the inner connection between pleasure,

sensuousness, beauty, truth, art and freedom’ and, thus, to recapture ‘the original

meaning and function of aesthetic’.186

This took the form, more specifically, of

bringing forward the transcendent utopian moment of art and to point to a utopian

faculty whereby we are able, through memory and remembrance, to project or

anticipate – if only negatively – the re-establishment of society as a whole. This

remembering anticipation, as it were, not only served as the basis of a new sensibility

and new sexual politics, but also provides the necessary primary energy of

revolutionary activities.

In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse confirms his interpretation of autonomous art as

having an ambivalent function. In so far as it partially opposes the status quo he

applauds it, yet insists that under contemporary conditions this is no longer sufficient.

What is called for instead is avant-garde art: ‘At the present stage, in the period of

total mobilization, even this highly ambivalent opposition seems no longer viable. Art

survives only where it cancels itself, where it saves its substance by denying its

traditional form and thereby denying reconciliation: where it becomes surrealist and

atonal’.187

At this point, Marcuse refers to Adorno in a footnote which suggests that

he is in general agreement with Adorno’s theory of the avant-garde. Like Adorno, he

sees avant-garde art, as for instance represented by Surrealism and atonal music, as

the only repository of truth in contemporary society. For him, truth coincides with

eros – sexuality or eroticism no longer repressed by the reality principle, but

deploying under the guidance of the pleasure principle. Unlike Adorno, however,

Marcuse does not concentrate on the individual work of art, however, but rather on

what he calls ‘the aesthetic dimension’ in the broad sense of including not only art but

also sexuality. This difference is widened further by Marcuse’s strong leanings toward

interpreting this dimension in terms of the realisation and thus abolition of art. From

this point of view, Eros and Civilization can be regarded as a statement of Marcuse’s

theory of the avant-garde and of the type of society it demands.

Technological invalidation of avant-garde art

If this is how Marcuse regarded the aesthetic dimension in the mid-1950s, in 1964 he

virtually reversed his position in One-Dimensional Man.188

The utopian view of art as

transcendence and as the vehicle of such archetypal images of human existence under

non-repressive civilisation as Orpheus and Narcissus189

was indeed retained, yet it

tended to be overwhelmed by the pessimistic conviction that industrial society renders

art impotent: ‘Art contains the rationality of negation…it is the Great Refusal..[Yet]

the developing technological reality undermines not only the traditional forms but the

very basis of the artistic alienation…[and thus]…invalidates…the very substance of

185

Habermas, Consciousness-Raising…’. p. 33. 186

Eros and Civilization, London: Sphere Books, 1970, originally 1955, here p. 143, italics in the

original. 187

Ibid., p. 122. 188

One-Dimensional Man, London: Sphere Books, 1969. 189

Eros and Civilization, section 8, pp. 132-42.


47

art’.190

Marcuse see the avant-garde such as Dada and Surrealism as an effort to

produce alienation and thus to make artistic truth communicable, yet under conditions

of industrial society he discovers the tendency of the avant-garde to entertain ‘without

endangering the good conscience’, just like the modern classics and the Beatniks.

The avant-garde as the reintegration of art and life

During the late 1960s, the period of the student movement, Marcuse thought that the

place and function of art were changing, that art was transcending itself to become ‘a

factor in the reconstruction of nature and society…the total reorganization of life in a

new society’.191

He once again became convinced that art could help ‘to free the

mutilated unconscious and the mutilated consciousness which solidify the repressive

Establishment’.192

As is apparent from the chapter on ‘The New Sensibility’ from the

Essay on Liberation,193

he at least for a moment believed that art was assuming

‘concrete form in the flower-strewn barricades of the Paris students’.194

In his view,

the dialectical abolition of culture and, hence, the reintegration of art and life was in

process – the end of art was in sight. Marcuse’s theory of the avant-garde here took

the form of an argument in favour of the reintegration of art and life, which accounts

for the fact that during this period he most consistently referred to Surrealism as the

paradigmatic case of the avant-garde.

Art as the form of reality

An Essay on Liberation was written when the student protests were at their height. In

1969 at the time of the delivery of his Guggenheim Museum lecture on ‘Art as Form

of Reality’,195

however, Marcuse was faced with a new situation: the protest

movements have passed their zenith. A year later, the beginnings of a revolution had

shrunk to a mere revolt, while a massive countermovement occupied the centre of the

stage. It is in this period that Marcuse wrote Counterrevolution and Revolt.196

In these

pieces, a different emphasis becomes visible. Up until now, Marcuse’s main concern

had been the significance of art for revolution, the potential of art and aesthetic

experience to lend theselves to becoming a political force, the cognitive function of

art which is its inherent radical, political function, art’s ability ‘to name the

unnameable’ and ‘to confront man with the dreams he betrays and the crimes he

forgets’.197

At this late stage in his career, by contrast, he drew attention to ‘the

tension between art and revolution’.198

Instead of encouraging the reintegration of art

and life, he now argues against their dedifferentiation. Art may not fulfil the

surrealistic demand of being transformed into life itself. Art is capable of expressing

its radical potential only to the extent that it remains art. The subversive truth of art

comes to the fore only in the transformation of reality into beautiful appearance.

Whereas Marcuse had been one of the first to attack the affirmative nature of art as

the ideological dimension of bourgeois art, he now discovers in the autonomous

symbolic universe of art the source of the negation of the status quo. During the

190

On-Dimensional Man, p. 62. 191

Marcuse, ‘Art in a One-Dimensional Society’, in Lee Baxandall ed., Radical Perspectives in the

Arts, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 65-6, 61. 192

Ibid., p. 66. 193

An Essay on Liberation, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. 194

Habermas , ‘Consciousness-Raising…’, p. 33. 195

New Left Review, No. 74, pp. 51-8. 196

Konterrevolution und Revolte, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973. 197

‘Art as the Form of Reality’, p. 57. 198

See Habermas, ‘Herbert Marcuse über Kunst und Revolution’, p. 346.


48

period of the student revolts he appealed to anti-art in all its variety in order to prove

his point about the abolition of art; at this stage, by contrast, he submitted that anti-art

– ‘all attempts to produce the absence of Form’ – is self-defeating. For being in

principle incapable of bridging the gap between art and reality, ‘the rebellion against

“form” only succeeds in a loss of artistic quality; illusory destruction, illusory

abolition of culture, the false proclamation of the end of art’. Coming much closer to

Adorno’s aesthetics that ever before, he takes the position that: ‘The authentic

oeuvres, the true avant-garde of our time, far from obscuring this distance, far from

playing down alienation, enlarge it and hardens their incompatibility with the given

reality…I believe that the authentic avant-garde of today are not those who try

desperately to produce the absence of Form and the union with real life, but rather

those who do not recoil from the exigencies of Form’.199

The authentic new form, in

his judgement, is represented by such artists as Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Kafka,

Joyce and Picasso, and is continued by Stockhausen and Beckett.

Evaluation

It is the case that Marcuse’s subterranean attachment to the German romantic

movement colours his understanding of the avant-garde – an understanding which is

reflected in his tendency to think of the avant-garde in the naturalistic terms of eros.

But it would be a mistake, as Habermas200

has pointed out, to interpret Marcuse’s late

warning against the destruction of art as an autonomous realm as a conservative

capitulation.

This is borne out by Marcuse’s last book, The Aesthetic Dimension.201

His adversary

is a particular Marxist interpretation of aesthetics which stresses the class character of

art and treats it as ideology pure and simple. Against this position, he argues that the

abolition of the transcendent power of art would mean regression in the sense that art

as a ‘regulative idea’,202

which means to say, the reflexive or ‘metasocial’ dimension

of culture, would be obliterated or neutralised: ‘The end of art is imaginable only

when human beings are no longer able to distinguish between truth and falsity, good

and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and between the present and the future. And that

would be the case of complete barbarism at the height of civilization.’203

The abiding

problem of human beings as social beings, for which art, its form, cognitive power

and its critical potential are required, is the ‘permanent transformation of society

under the principle of freedom’204

– and this will remain the case even in some society

of the future which is qualitatively vastly different from late modern society. ‘Art

reflects this dynamic in its insistence on its own truth, which has its ground in social

reality and is yet its “other”’.205

199

‘Art as the Form of Reality’, p. 57. 200

‘Herbert Marcuse über…’, p. 347. 201

The Aethetic Dimension, London: Macmillan, 1979, a translation of Die Permanenz der Kunst:

Wider eine bestimmte Marxistische Ästhetik, 1977. 202

Ibid., p. 69. 203

Ibid., p. 204

Ibid., p. 71 205

Ibid., p. 72.


49

Summary and transition

In the overview of theories of the avant-garde, we have thus far considered the

following:

Ortega y Gassett and Renato Poggioli:

both presenting a typology of characteristic features of the avant-garde, such as

iconoclasm, reflexive artistic or aesthetic art, immanence, unpopularity, activism,

antagonism, nihilism and agonism.

Neo-Marxist or critical theories:

Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno:

two diametrically opposed Hegelian-Marxist inspired theories – the avant-garde

regarded as decadent from the point of view of realism being the normative standard

versus the avant-garde work of art qua windowless monad as the sole remaining

repository of truth in modern society, negativity being the specific vehicle of its

impact.

Walter Benjamin:

avant-garde as politicised mass art which through the shock effect of allegorisation

makes available to the public an experience of the lost communication community of

the past and thus prepares the present for radical change.

Herbert Marcuse:

avant-garde art, first conceived – along Surrealist lines – as anti-art, i.e. as spearhead

of the attempt to abolish culture so as to reintegrate art and life, a conception which

was temporarily interrupted by the pessimism of industrial-technological one-

dimensionality, but revitalised during the period of the student movement; and

secondly conceived – along formalist lines – as a utopian and transcendent yet

immanently rooted form serving as a negative mirror in which society appears as

fragmented.

At this stage, I propose that we consider the work of a younger author who, also

belonging to the group of critical theorists, deliberately sets out to bring together basic

insights deriving from the work of Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin and Marcuse, while

also learning from Habermas – and, moreover, doing so to create a synthesis in the

form of a theory of the avant-garde which is currently proving very influential indeed:

Peter Bürger (1936-), Theorie der Avantgarde, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974,

second edition 1981.


50

13 Peter Bürger: the avant-garde as explanatory category

Peter Bürger understands his study of art, particularly literature, as in principle being

of a critical nature, speaking of ‘critical science’.206

Following the critical theorists,

his study of art is guided by an interest in a rational society. This cognitive interest is

operative in the study of art in so far as it determines the categories in terms of which

art is treated. Of first importance, therefore, is a categorical framework which allows

access to the relations between art and society. Far from seeking to formulate new

categories which are opposed to the allegedly false categories of traditional science,

critical science starts from the most advanced level of knowledge achieved at the

time.

The critical-hermeneutical model

From hermeneutics represented by Gadamer as one of the most advanced disciplines

today, Bürger borrows the insight that the interpretation of art is undertaken not in a

purely historical perspective, but from the point of view of the present. In order to

circumvent the likelihood of justifying or legitimating the present, however, Bürger

insists with Habermas that hermeneutics needs to be related to the critique of ideology

oriented toward unravelling the contradictory relation between art and society. For the

purpose of developing a model of critique, Bürger depends on Marx’s critique of

religion and Marcuse’s application and extension of it in the essay on ‘The

Affirmative Character of Culture’ discussed in some detail earlier. Marx’s model

allows not only the grasping of the dialectical relation between art and society, but

also the investigation of changes in the function of art. In order to make the model

applicable to art, Bürger introduces the concept of ‘the intention of the work of art’

(Werkintention)207

to take account of the fact that the content of a work is essentially

constituted by its form. This concept, it should be noted, refers less to the intention of

the artist than to the stimuli or means of impact contained in the work itself which

calls for an immanent or formal mode of analysis. Bürger accordingly regards the

function of the work of art as the outcome of the interplay between the historically

determined intention of the work and the real historical situation of the public. From

Marcuse’s employment of Marx’s model, Bürger derives the concept of ‘the

institution of art’ (der Institution Kunst)208

for the purpose of incorporating the

theoretical insight that art is in principle social by nature and, hence, that both the

production and reception of every single work of art are determined by an institutional

complex of conditions. The resulting conceptual framework Bürger himself refers to

as ‘a critical-hermeneutical model’.209

The most basic assumption of this position of Bürger’s is that aesthetic theory

possesses content only to the extent that it takes into account the level of historical

development of its object.210

There is a definite relation between the unfolding of the

object and our scientific categories in the sense that progress in knowledge depends

on, or is made possible by, the level of development or differentiation achieved by the

object of knowledge.211

As regards art as object of knowledge, this means that an

206

TdA, pp. 8-18. 207

Ibid., p. 12. 208

Ibid., p. 15. 209

Ibid., p. 17. 210

Ibid., pp. 7, 135. 211

Ibid., pp. 21-2.


51

adequate level of knowledge of art in the modern period was for the first time possible

only at that stage when art became fully differentiated into an autonomous realm. The

process of establishment of art as an autonomous institution started in the 18th

century, and it was completed only in the 20th

century. This latter stage in the

development of art is marked by Aestheticism, the movement which took art as its

own object, and against which reacted the historical avant-garde movements such as

Dadaism, early Surrealism, the post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde, Italian

Futurism and German Expressionism from about 1916 to the late 1930s.212

Once this

development had been completed, once art had become autonomous in the form of

Aestheticism and passed over into the stage of its self-critique in the form of the

avant-garde, full knowledge of the process as a whole could be obtained.213

The

avant-garde thus plays an absolutely central role in obtaining adequate knowledge of

modern art as a whole: for Bürger, the avant-garde is the essential reference point for

making sense of and accounting for modern art.

Bürger takes his cues from a statement by Marx in the Grundrisse where he submits

that the present, which first of all makes possible knowledge, has become transparent

to itself or has been superseded, not through internal criticism but rather through self-

criticism – for example, Christianity gaining an objective understanding of earlier

mythologies, or bourgeois economics grasping preceding forms of economics only

once their own self-criticism had set in.214

Bürger transfers the concept of self-critique

to the realm of art. Whereas various instances of system-immanent criticism are in

evidence in art, the self-critique of art, which became possible with the full autonomy

of the institution of art, took effect with the historical avant-garde movements:215

the

avant-garde being the self-critique of art as such.

Dadaism, the most radical of these movements, no longer criticised particular

tendencies within art, but levelled its critique at the institution of art as such as it had

become established in an autonomous form in the late 19th

and early 20th

century

bourgeois society. At that point when Aestheticism conclusively separated art from

the practice of life and proceeded to unfold the aesthetic in its purity, where art was

deprived of its social and political significance, at that point the avant-garde protest

asserted itself with a view to reintegrating art and life. In effect, it revealed the

autonomy of art and uncovered for the first time the institution of art as such.216

At the

stage of the self-critique of art, the totality of the developmental process of art became

visible.

The autonomy of art

The autonomy of art can be understood in a number of different ways. From the point

of view of art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art), first, it is of the very essence of art to be

autonomous in the sense of being separate from society. From the point of view of

positivistic sociology, secondly, art is autonomous only in the mind of the artist. In

contradistinction to these conceptions, Bürger takes the expression ‘the autonomy of

art’ as a category of bourgeois society which both refers to the process of

differentiation of art as a particular sphere of human activity from the practice of life

212

Ibid., p. 22. 213

Ibid., pp. 27-8. 214

Ibid., p. 106. 215

Ibid., p. 28. 216

Ibid., p. 29.


52

and at the same time covers up this process as a socially determined historical event.

It is a contradictory and hence ideological category which brings together a moment

of truth – autonomy of art from life – and a moment of falsity – hypostatising this

historical fact as the essence of art.217

The first step toward the autonomy of art was taken during the Renaissance when art

was combined with science and thus became emancipated from ritual. But it was only

during the 19th

century, with the development of bourgeois society and political

dominance of the economically independent bourgeoisie, that the autonomy of art was

established. At that moment, the concept of art for the first time made its appearance

and was theorised by aesthetics in the sense of an independent philosophical

discipline, its central concept being the autonomy of art.218

Immanuel Kant and

Friedrich Schiller became the leading figures in this new field of philosophical

knowledge. While art had been established as an autonomous institution by the end of

the 18th

century,219

the content of art was finally rendered devoid of all social and

political significance only at about the turn of the 19th

century. Once the development

at this level both of the institution and the content of art had come to an end in

Aestheticism, the autonomy of art was secure. The dominant feature of art in modern

society was now its separation from the practice of life.220

The avant-garde as attack against the institution of art

The Continental avant-garde was borne by a number of similar iconoclastic

movements which directed their attacks against the status of art in modern bourgeois

society. These movements negated not merely a preceding conception of art, an art

style, but the institution of art as such in so far as it was separated from the practice of

life. In demanding the becoming practical of art, they did not call for the content of art

to assume social and political significance; rather than the content of art, the avant-

garde focused on the function of art in society. Whereas Aestheticism transposed the

autonomy of art in the sense of its separation from the practice of life into the content

of art, the avant-garde sought to abolish the distinction between art and life. In

Hegelian Aufhebung vein, they did not intend merely to abolish art, but rather to

integrate it into the practice of life in such as way as to preserve it in a changed form.

Aestheticism kept a distance between art and the practice of life in the sense of the

purposive-rational or instrumental organisation of society. The avant-garde, it should

be noted, did not want to reintegrate art into the purposive-rational practice of life;

despising the purposive-rational practice of life, they sought to derive from art itself a

completely new practice of life. This intention had consequences for a number of

different aspects of art: the field of application, production and reception. As regards

application, art in the avant-garde view could no longer have a particular purpose, but

the practice of life could become aesthetic and art practical.221

As regards production,

aestheticism emphasised individual creation; the avant-garde, by contrast, negated

individual production and destroyed the theory of genius by acting as movements

exhibiting signed mass-produced items, such as a Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal

217

Ibid., pp. 49-50, 63. 218

Ibid., p; 57. 219

A development registered in 1800, as indicated earlier, by Madame de Staël. 220

Bürger, TdA, pp. 65-7. 221

Ibid., p. 69.


53

of 1917.222

Likewise, the avant-garde negated individual reception. The public was

either provoked as a collective by means of shock therapy, as in the case of Dadaism,

or eliminated altogether, as in the case of Surrealist écriture automatique.223

The significance of the avant-garde

The avant-garde, however, did not succeed in fulfilling its intention of reintegration

art and life. Indeed, in bourgeois society this is in principle impossible since it would

amount to a false abolition of art unless society was radically transformed.224

For this

reason, Bürger speaks of the avant-garde as a historical movement: the avant-garde is

a phenomenon of the past, a historical phenomenon.225

Consequently, art for some

time now finds itself in a ‘post-avant-garde phase’.226

After the failure of the avant-

garde, the institution of art continues to exist independently of the practice of life;

works of art are still being created. Both the institution of art and the category of the

work of art survived and were restored. As Bürger insists, however, this does not

mean that the avant-garde has no significance for contemporary art and aesthetics.227

Quite the contrary, the significance of the avant-garde can be seen at the level of the

institution of art, the work of art, and artistic technique.

(i) Despite the fact that the institution of art continues to exist independently of the

practice of life, the attack launched against it by the avant-garde not only revealed the

institution of art, but also identified its basic principle as being the neutralisation of

the critical potential of art. After the historical avant-garde, therefore, all art is

confronted by the question whether it contents itself with the autonomy status of art or

whether it undertakes to overcome it.228

(ii) After the avant-garde, the category of the work of art was not merely restored, but

it was indeed extended and broadened. Despite the failure of the political intention of

the avant-garde, its significance for the work of art can hardly be over-estimated. The

far-reaching consequences can be seen in its revolutionary destruction of the

traditional concept of the organic or symbolic work of art and the introduction of the

non-organic or allegorical work of art which allows the incorporation of political

motives alongside artistic motifs.229

(iii) Until the rise of the avant-garde, style in the sense of a system of norms or

epochal conventions had been the most general concept for the description of art

works. In the wake of Aestheticism, the avant-garde was instrumental in freeing

artistic technique or artistic material from the compulsion of an epochal style. The

avant-garde instituted as the new principle disposition over the artistic means of all

epochs. The category of artistic technique, material or means now became the central

and most general category for the description of a work of art.230

222

Ibid., p. 70. 223

Ibid., pp. 71-2; VRF, pp. 196-7 224

TdA, pp. 72-3. 225

Ibid., p. 79. 226

Ibid., p. 78. 227

‘The Significance of the Avant-garde for Contemporary Aesthetics: A Reply to Jürgen Habermas’,

New German Critique, No 22, 1981, pp. 19-22. 228

TdA, p. 78. 229

Ibid., pp. 76, 80. 230

Ibid., pp. 22-4.


54

By breaking decisively with tradition and by attacking the institution of art, the avant-

garde transformed the historical sequence of styles and techniques into a simultaneity

of radically different types of artistic material. As a consequence, it has become

impossible to identify a specific historical state of material and technique with

reference to the present. No artistic movement can any longer legitimately claim that

it, as art, represents the most advanced stage of development.231

To the extent that

Lukács advances such a claim on behalf of realism and Adorno on behalf of the

avant-garde, both theorists belong to a particular historical stage of artistic

development. Indeed, the total disposability of artistic forms and techniques – that is

the irrationality of post-avant-garde art in contemporary capitalist society – precludes

the development of aesthetic theory in the sense in which it had been developed from

Kant via Schiller and Hegel to Lukács and Adorno.232

The avant-garde as explanatory factor

Let us explore this aspect of Bürger’s position.233

Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde

is not a history of the European movements, but a theory of art relative to its

contemporary stage of development. Considering, for instance, Schiller’s Über naïve

und sentimentalische Dichtung, Hegel’s Aesthetics and Lukács’ Theory of the Novel

as examples of aesthetic theory or theory of art, it is possible to arrive at some

common characteristics of such a theory. All the authors present a historical

construction of societal development – that is, antiquity versus modern bourgeois

society – which is related to a corresponding development in art. At the same time, a

system of concepts is produced for dealing with the object such that account is taken

of its contradictory nature. In general, aesthetic theories of this type are characterised

by a combination of a historical construction and a systematic or theoretical grasp of

the object. As soon as one attempts to transfer this type of aesthetic theory to the

changes in modern society, the historical construction loses its applicability. The

problem, therefore, is how the development of art in modern society can be

reconstructed. Lukács and Adorno gave different yet related answers to this question.

Lukács applied the Hegelian model of aesthetics to bourgeois society while

combining it with an historical construction of Marxist origin. Accordingly, the

literature of the ascending revolutionary bourgeoisie – classical realist literature –

takes the place occupied by classical Greek art in Hegel’s system. Despite its

historical character, realism is posited as atemporal norm. To the extent that literature

after 1848 leaves behind the model of classical realism, Lukács regards it as a sign of

decline of bourgeois society, with the result that he sees the avant-garde as a

phenomenon of bourgeois decadence. By contrast, Adorno reconstructed the

development of art in modern bourgeois society according to the model of increasing

rationality, that is, a growing disposition over art. In contradistinction to Lukács,

Adorno emphasised as criterion the avant-garde since, in his view, it represented the

most advanced level of art in bourgeois society.

Both the polemically counter-posed theories of Lukács and Adorno in fact utilise the

avant-garde as their point of reference. And what is more, both authors attach a strong

evaluation to the avant-garde: Adorno positively – the avant-garde is the most

advanced; Lukács negatively – the avant-garde as decadence. In view of the fact that

231

Ibid., p. 16. 232

Ibid., p. 131. 233

VRF, pp. 9-14.


55

these evaluations derive from the cultural and political situation of the 1920s and

1930s, Bürger suggests that the positions of these two theorists, despite their radical

differences, may be regarded in exactly the same light: both are historical. At this

stage, therefore, it is possible to select the avant-garde as reference point of a theory

of art in contemporary society which avoids preceding evaluations. What Bürger

attempts to do is to shift the problem of aesthetic theory from preceding evaluations to

the break of the avant-garde with the institution of art and thus to establish the avant-

garde as the logical place, the explanatory factor, of the development of art in 20th

century bourgeois society. Only by shifting the problem in this way can the dead-end

of aesthetic theory as marked by the paradoxical opposition of Lukács and Adorno be

overcome. Whereas neither Lukács nor Adorn could come to terms with and

understand Brecht’s position, Bürger is convinced that he is able to accommodate

Brecht’s committed or political art in his new theory. Brecht’s great achievement as a

representative of the avant-garde was to have contributed to the attack against the

institution of art as well as to the conception of the non-organic work of art which

eliminated the old dichotomy between pure and political art. On the one hand, the

avant-garde’s attack on art demonstrated that the impact of art depends not just on the

work of art, but also on the institution of art. On the other, by introducing the non-

organic work of art, the parts of which no longer depend upon the unity of an organic

whole, the avant-garde created the possibility of incorporating both political and non-

political aspects in a single art work. Neither Lukács nor Adorno understood the new

relationship between art and realty and, hence, the new type of avant-gardist political

art to which Brecht made an important contribution.

Evaluation

By regarding the avant-garde as a historical phenomenon by means of which the

development of art can be explained, Bürger precludes the kind of evaluation

underpinning Lukács’ and Adorno’s theories and thus moves beyond the level of

theoretical development attained by them. Instead of a preceding evaluation, he

focuses on the break of the avant-garde with tradition and its concomitant disclosure

of the institution of art and its function. The central category of aesthetic theory is

now the sociological concept of the institution of art. On this basis, the procedure of

critique, which Lukács and Adorno confined to individual works of art, is now

brought to bear on the normative framework which regulates the functioning of works

of art in society. The critical-hermeneutical analysis of individual art works and the

institutional framework of art supplement each other.

By taking this position, Bürger in effect provides a solution to the problem of the

unity of the avant-garde. The various avant-garde movements are reconstructed in

terms of a single basic problematic: the break with tradition, critique of the institution

of art, the self-critique of art as such. He is thus able to employ the concept of the

avant-garde not as a descriptive category, as is most often the case, but rather as a

category by means of which the development of art in the modern period can be

systematised in a meaningful way. Henceforth, the category of the avant-garde is one

of great theoretical value.234

234

For the critical reception of Bürger’s proposals, see among others e.g.: W. M. Ludke ed., Theorie

der Avantgarde, 1976; P. U, Hohendahl, ‘Prolegomena to a History of Literary Criticism’, New

German Critique, No. 11, 1977; P. U. Hohendahl, ‘Autonomy of Art: Looking Back at Adorno’s

“Ästhetische Theorie”’, German Quarterly, LVI, 1981; A, Huyssen, ‘The Search for Tradition: Avant-

garde and Postmodernism in the 1970s’, New German Critique, No, 22, 1981, pp. 23-40.


56

Transition

At this stage, we come to a group of theories of the avant-garde which may be

identified as being of a conservative or neo-conservative nature. At bottom, i.e.

politically, therefore, they differ sharply from the critical theories of Lukács, Adorno,

Benjamin, Marcuse and Bürger gone through earlier. This type of theory is put

forward by the conservative German sociologist Arnold Gehlen, by the conservative

so-called Ritter School, founded by Joachim Ritter and represented for instance by

Odo Marquard, and by the well-know American neo-conservative sociologist Daniel

Bell.

I propose that we consider first the position of Arnold Gehlen as presented in his

book, Zeitbilder: Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der moderne Malerei (Images of Time:

On the Sociology and Aesthetics of Modern Painting), Frankfurt/Bonn: Athenäum,

1965 second edition, originally published 1960.

It should be noted at the outset that Gehlen, a very perceptive sociologist, offers a

very interesting and important analysis of modern painting, with an emphasis on the

avant-garde (Cubism, Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, German Expressionism). This

analysis is not necessarily conservative by nature; what is conservative are the

conclusions he draws from his analysis. These conclusions are in some sense or

another in accord with those of Ritter and Marquard and, especially, the influential

conclusions of Bell – all authors to be discussed later.


57

14 Arnold Gehlen: the death of reflexive, conceptual, avant-garde art

At the outset of this course, a conception of modern art was introduced with reference

to Max Weber’s theory of rationalisation according to which art can be internally

differentiated along cultural, social and personality line. Arnold Gehlen proceeds

mainly on the first two levels, the cultural and the social.235

On the social level, he deals expressly with the institutionalisation of art in modern

society. On the cultural level, which claims by far the greater part of his attention,

Gehlen clearly follows Weber in order to be able to transpose the theme of modern art

into a specifically sociological problem. He proceeds on the assumption that the

applicability of sociology increases with the degree of internal rationalisation of its

object – which would mean that modern society is sociologically the most transparent.

Like Weber and Adorno, Gehlen takes as his model for the reconstruction of the

development of art the increasing rationality of art or, differently, the growing

reflexive disposition over art. Thus he is able to approach painting from the point of

view of what he calls ‘the rationality of the artistic image’ (Bildrationalität)236

– that

is, the standard according to which a painting or historical group of paintings is

produced and which makes certain demands of understanding on the public. Gehlen

thus reconstructs epochal changes with reference to the rationality of the artistic

image in the course of time from the point of view of the modern period – that is,

from the point of view of that art became autonomous not only from science and

morality but also from the practice of life, and thus started to develop according to its

own internal logic.237

Rationality of the artistic image

The reconstruction of the changes in the rationality of the artistic image enables

Gehlen to identify three basic forms of artistic image:238

(i) Ideal art of representation: mythological, religious, symbolic and historical

painting corresponding ideal-typically to Feudalism, but continuing into the 19th

century;

(ii) Realistic art of recognition: the art of the Renaissance and the Age of Discovery,

i.e., of the pre-industrial modern period, but continuing until the First World War;

(iii) Aesthetic art of reflection: the half-abstract, abstract, formalistic and action art of

the period beginning just before 1910 and represented par excellence by the avant-

garde.

The change in the rationality of the artistic image underlying these three forms is from

the reference system of ideal absolute truths external to art, to the reference system of

external nature, to human subjectivity in its reflexive form as the reference system of

art.239

235

Zeitbilder, pp. 206, 228. 236

Ibid., p. 14, also 39. 237

Ibid., pp. 188-94. 238

Ibid., pp. 15-6. 239

Ibid., pp. 16-7. Compare Ortega y Gassett’s plotting of modern art from ‘things’ to ‘sensations’ to

‘ideas’.


58

Three historical types of art: ideal, realistic, and aesthetic

Let us consider each of these types of art, giving relatively more attention to the third

– namely avant-garde art.

(i) Ideal art of representation:240

The human mind is able in thought to traverse the realms of the present, past and

future. An image can serve as mediation of these various realms in that it brings to

view something that can otherwise only be thought. Thought is something fleeting; an

image has the power to fix, make present or represent what is retained only with

difficulty in thought. Since the fine arts traditionally disposed exclusively over such

power, they alone were able to complement and complete thought. For this reason,

religion developed hand in hand with the artistic representation of the divine.

Monotheism was the first form of religion to question this relationship since the

invisible God does not tolerate representation. While Judaism and Islam rejected the

image, Christianity’s incarnated God called for representation.

Although in the Christian religion art was subordinate during the Middle Ages, it was

nevertheless regarded as indispensable to make God present and to support the mass

of believers in their wavering and insecure faith. What was of importance in medieval

art, therefore, was only its content, its objective dimension which, in addition,

required secondary motives or connotations: it depicted scenes and thus brought to

view what was already known beforehand. Ideal art is an art which presupposes an

already available thought and hence brought to the image by members of the religious

community as public. The meaning of what is depicted is not derivable from the

image alone. It is contained in the preceding idea of the ideal absolute truth external to

and more important than the image, for what is depicted already has validity outside

and before the image – e.g., St Martin, the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and so forth.

In this case, the reference point of art lies in ideal absolute truth given external to art.

The emancipation of the formal aesthetic dimension was just not possible since the

artistic image was subordinate to a pre-given idea. The picture had to fix externally

something internal and thus lend the latter’s validity a degree of stability. Ideal art

must therefore be seen within the context of an accompanying institution in which it

has the function of bringing people together and of fixing the core ideas for the

institution. What is true of religious art also holds for court art. No power that seeks to

assert itself in a decisive manner can neglect to occupy the consciousness of those

who are to be dominated, and the validity of its claim manifests itself in the fact that it

completely determines this consciousness, not only its thoughts, but also the very way

it sees the world. What appears to the individual as the external fixation of the inner,

is from the point of view of the institution a matter of representation. Thus both the

church and the court embodied themselves in the visible symbols offered by art with a

view to complementing and completing consciousness, to lend ideas visibility, and

thus to occupy the mind or to dominate the people.

(ii) Realistic art of recognition:241

If we consider closely the internal rationality of the artistic image of ideal art, then it

becomes apparent that this type of image has two dimensions: first, the recognition of

240

Ibid., pp. 15, 22-7. 241

Ibid., pp. 15, 27-35.


59

the objective content presented in the image – the primary motif, e.g. a male figure

nailed to a wooden cross; second, the meaning given to the objective content by the

thought of idea drawn from external reference system of ideal absolute truth – the

secondary motif, e.g. the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Now, if we remove the second

dimension, then only the objectively recognisable content, the primary motif, remains.

A pure example of this would be Dutch genre painting of the 17th

century, say, a still

life depicting a silver dish, glasses, fruit and flowers. This painting contains nothing

requiring special preceding knowledge; the mere recognition of the objects is

sufficient. Such a painting contains what Gehlen calls the realistic form of artistic

image. No special thought or ideas intervene between the painter and the subject. A

still life could, of course, contain also a human skull, candles and an hourglass –

however, then it would not be an example of realistic art of recognition but, as a

depiction of the idea of vanity, an ideal image.

The first important change in the internal rationality of the artistic image, namely the

shift from the reference system of ideal absolute truth external to art to external nature

as the reference system of art, consists, then, in the elimination of the secondary motif

or the dimension of connotations, leaving only the dimension of the objectively

recognisable. The authority of nature was from now on the a priori, while optical

recognition of the primary motif alone carried the rationality of the artistic image.

This progression to realistic art of recognition, the first example of which appeared in

Northern Europe circa 1550 and subsequently found its typical embodiment in Dutch

genre painting, was the first step toward the independence or autonomy of art.242

The

autonomy and legitimacy of this-worldly reality, whose richness and detail called for

concentrated attention, was discovered simultaneously with the freedom of art which

could now turn to any subject and thus become increasingly artistic and aesthetic. Art

freed itself from subordination to a world of external ideas, had no (church or court)

patron and institutional commission any longer, became private and democratic,

oriented toward the immediately given. Art, science, morality, law and so forth

became differentiated, the unity of the Feudal worldview collapsed, art emancipated

itself and henceforth followed its own internal lawfulness.

Gehlen sees a connection between realistic art, the increasing importance of the

bourgeoisie in Italy and the Netherlands, and the characteristically modern orientation

toward the penetration, appropriation and mastery of palpable reality. In the North,

this tendency was supported by the Reformation to the extent that its exclusive

concentration on the Holy Scripture and the question of salvation effectively did away

with the whole intermediate sacred realm between God and earth, and thus neutralised

the external world and made it available for exploitation. The Calvinist iconoclastic

movement of 1566, in particular, contributed to pushing art to the profane level. Art

could now play a role in the general offensive against external nature, at first

combining with science in the pursuit of knowledge, accompanying machine builders,

scientists and explorers in their pursuits and exploits, but later making its own cultural

contribution on the strength of its own internal rationality: exploring reflexive

subjectivity.

242

Ibid., p. 29.


60

(iii) Aesthetic art of reflection: 243

The most radical change in the rationality of the artistic image, indeed one assuming

revolutionary proportions in the sense that it involved the liquidation of tradition,244

occurred when also the primary motif, the object of optical recognition, was

eliminated – that is, when external nature as reference system of art became displaced

by reflexive human subjectivity.

The turn toward subjectivity consisted initially merely in upsetting the seeing habits

of the viewers such that they reflected on their own visual competence. This was the

case with Impressionism.245

This impressionistic reflection on the process of seeing

inaugurated the dissolution of the domination of the object and hence the

emancipation of the surface or plane of the artistic image. This process started around

1860. Whereas the Impressionist was mainly interested in the changes in light and

colour nuances, Seurat – the founder of ‘Pointillism’ in 1885 – radicalised or

rationalised the subjective turn by refining visual experience still further through

decomposing the object into a configuration of coloured points.246

From Gehlen’s

perspective, Seurat may be called the first modern classic: he turned his back on the

tradition, made a new beginning, forced the shock effect of the unfamiliar, and

formulated a theory about the laws of the visibility of the visible.

The development inaugurated by the turn to the subjective took its own course,

deploying according to its internal logic or lawfulness, which led to the modern

condition of chronic reflexivity.247

Now, what does Gehlen mean by reflection? When

we engage in action or thought, a series of experiences as a rule follows

unproblematically; however, when an impediment interferes in this continuum of

experience, consciousness is thrown back upon itself as it is required to relate two

conflicting experiences or pieces of data. Thought now proceeds by moving to and fro

between these two poles in order to re-establish the continuum. Thus, acts of

reflection are called forth when two discrepant or conflicting experiences refuse to

meet, or when they interfere with one another. The reflexive potential of modern

aesthetic art resides in the incorporation in the painting of at least two purely optical

dimensions which interfere with one another. One achievement of the eye is

consequently played off against another. The necessary technical means for the

incorporation of chronic reflection into painting was clearly unavailable in

Impressionistic painting, but it was left to Post-Impressionism to develop it

systematically.

The decisive discovery consists in the destruction of the harmony of a total

embodiment248

by introducing a two-dimensional artistic image249

- i.e., an

independent stimulus or attraction surface maintained alongside a recognisable object.

The picture leads the viewer to the represented object, but prevents his or her final

entry to the illusory reality by interrupting his or her experience by an independent

243

Ibid., pp. 15-6, 39-43, 57ff. 244

Ibid., p. 188. 245

Ibid., p. 57. 246

Ibid., pp. 58, 68. 247

Ibid., p. 62. Here with this diagnosis of ‘chronic reflexivity’ Gehlen’s conservative interpretation

enters. 248

Ibid., p. 40. Here we hear resonances with Brecht’s distinction between the organic and non-organic

work of art. 249

Ibid., pp. 64ff.


61

experience triggered off by the stimulus or attraction surface. The two experiences do

not coincide or meet and, hence, leave the viewer in a state of wide-awake perplexity

and tension, a standing reflexive state of optical brightness. The precursor of this

technique of tension between objectivity and surface effect was Delacroix and the

great master Gauguin to whose names Gehlen adds those of Degas and Toulouse-

Lautrec. Paul Cézanne, called the purist painter of his generation, took up this

problematic of Post-Impressionist painting and developed it in an original way. He

created a subtle kind of painting which prevents empathy and identification on the

part of the viewer, while simultaneously weakening the validity of the object.

Conditions of aesthetic art of reflection

A number of factors250

can be identified which supported and hastened the tempo of

the development of aesthetic art of reflection which is based on the abolition of the

object of recognition and a turn toward the subjective.

(i) First, in the wake of the irresistible process of democratisation, art finally lost its

representational function. Nobody could any longer accept a mere existence as being

exemplary, an example to be emulated. After the Napoleonic period, the heroic

classical representation of great actions and elevated style collapsed completely. The

representational gesture lost its credibility and became pathetic.

(ii) Second, around the middle of the 19th

century, the relationship between painting

and natural science was severed. This relationship could exist intact only as long as

the natural sciences proceeded on the basis of vivid and graphic visual models of

mechanisms or biological organisms. This epoch now came to an end. In 1858,

cathode rays were discovered and in the 1860s Maxwell formulated his

electromagnetic theory, with the result that the natural sciences took a strictly

mathematical turn and adopted a completely abstract view.

(iii) Third, concrete coloured nature disappeared not only from the heads of

physicists, but at the same time also from social space. The epoch of the modern city

coincided with radical developments in the natural sciences. Brick, concrete, steel and

glass now became the elements of the normal human environment.

(iv) In the fourth place, artistic material or the demands of the object was finally

exhausted. At the latest around 1900, every possible subject figured in painting:

landscapes, seascapes, cloudscapes, townscapes, animal studies, genre painting, the

still life, every possible thing was committed to canvass, even art itself: architecture,

the painter showed painting, the author busy writing, even poems were painted. All

thematic possibilities were simply exhausted.

(v) Fifth, as art reached the level of the conscious subjectivism of a permanent state of

reflection, embodied in the problematisation of the relation between image surface

and eye, technology intervened. The discovery of photography and later the film

decisively affected the fate of painting. The human need for images was now fulfilled

by the new media, with the result that painting lost its position in the field of real

needs and was forced to reflect on itself, on problems and tasks that only painting

itself could resolve: giving form to the visible free from any interest in particular

250

Ibid., pp. 40-3.


62

objects. Artists now started experimenting not with the content of consciousness, but

with structures of consciousness with a view to extending their limits. In a

characteristically modern move, painting came to concentrate not on the ‘what’ of

artistic presentation but on the ‘how’, not the objective but the subjective dimension.

(vi) Finally, the subjectively oriented new art shared with the abovementioned

technical innovations a common presupposition: extending living space. Art made its

contribution by exploring, varying and enriching aesthetic experience as such.

All of the above conditions taken together circumscribe the situation in which art in

the early 20th

century was compelled to justify itself by means of its own resources, its

own artistic means. Asking questions about itself, it placed an interrogation mark over

itself. This becoming problematic of art to itself appeared as the posing and resolution

of specifically artistic and aesthetic problems: art has become reflexive. Visuality was

rendered artistically independent; artistic means became autonomous; the process of

painting could now be identified for what it is, namely as a mode of action; painting

became aesthetic, i.e., painting became painting: painting became reflexive art and as

such it could no longer avoid specifying the reason of its existence, giving an account

of itself, or justifying itself; painting was now a reflection on its own foundations.

Henceforth, every painting had to specify the very rule or standard in terms of which

it wanted to be judged. The rationality of the artistic image was now tied to reflexive

subjectivity.251

In Gehlen’s judgement, the change from ideal absolute truths to subjectivity in the

internal rationality of the artistic image culminated in the avant-garde art of Pablo

Picasso, Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian which

broke decisively and in truly revolutionary manner with tradition in order to establish

an oppositional realm.252

Avant-garde art as conceptual art

To make clear what occurs in avant-garde art, let us consider a little more deeply the

question of the internal rationality of the artistic image comparatively.253

First, ideal art, presupposing the connotations of the public, transposed something

known beforehand into a visible image. When the sense of a visible object is

generally understandable to all who approach it with corresponding meanings which

cannot be derived from the optical content alone, then a close relationship comes into

being between painting and writing. For this reason, the mythological and religious art

of the past naturally incorporated writing in painting. The inscription in ideal painting

had the function of leading the connotations of the public into the image.

When, in the realistic form, the artistic reference system changed such that painting

was no longer representation but rather a discovery and opening up of reality, writing

disappeared from the artistic image. The high degree of internal rationality achieved

in realism strictly called for optical-conceptual understanding and thus made writing

superfluous. In the case of the depiction of a particular scene, e.g. the bridge of Arles

of the harbour of Rotterdam, a title or caption was sufficient to identify the object.

251

Ibid., pp. 62, 189, 194. 252

Ibid., pp. 16, 188, 203. 253

Ibid., pp. 51-4, 59.


63

Finally, when art turned away from external reality and entered the labyrinth of

subjectivity, the concept assumed a leading position in that it pressed toward a

clarification of the relationship between external reality and the subject and, hence, of

the question regarding the meaning and legitimacy of painting itself. Through such

clarification, the concept took the form of a systematic theory of perception or of

painting which touched the core of artistic activity and had to be transformed into

pictorial attributes. Consequently, a system of signs had to be found by means of

which the painter could translate the conceptualised relation to reality to

conceptualised perception or artistic practice in optical or pictorial language.

Aesthetic painting of reflection is thus essentially theoretical, but in the reflexive

sense of the subject being incorporated in the painting through the conceptual-

theoretical component. In this sense, Gehlen calls avant-garde painting ‘conceptual

painting’. The outstanding examples of artist who theorised about their artistic

practice to such a degree that their reflections on subjectivity were incorporated in

their paintings are the Cubists Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris as well as

Paul Klee and Vassily Kandinsky. The highly reflexive, intellectual and theoretical

nature of avant-garde art also accounts for the need for commentary in the form of art

literature, artists’ theories and manifestos. Such literature, it should be emphasised,

forms an integral and indeed essential part of avant-garde painting to the extent that

avant-garde painting, especially abstract painting, has broken with the object of

recognition.

Avant-garde art is conceptual art, as Gehlen calls it, in the sense of art that is both

thought through and requires thought to be understood. Conceptual painting is a type

of painting that contains considerations which first conceptually clarifies the meaning

and the legitimacy of the painting and, secondly, on the conceptual basis, defines the

elements making up the work. Both these aspects concern giving reasons for a pure

art which determines its own rules or laws in clear consciousness and

conceptuality.254

Conceptual painting, we may say, is a type of work of art which

comes into being together with reflection on its conditions, goals, rationale and

legitimacy, and hence explicitly contains the moments of its genesis or constitution.

The conservative theory of the death of the avant-garde and the end of art

Gehlen’s illuminating and in many respects commendable analysis of the

development of art in terms of the internal rationality of the artistic image contains

important staring points for the development of a theory of the avant-garde –

particularly the notion of conceptual art, although it is in need of further clarification.

This important formal element, however, does not exhaust Gehlen’s theory of the

avant-garde. For him, a number of conclusions follow from his analysis which

contribute essential aspects to his theory of the avant-garde and, indeed, give it its

peculiar – conservative – character which so sharply contrasts with those of Lukács,

Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and Bürger. Let us finally assess the conclusions.

Avant-garde art, according to Gehlen, represents nothing less than a fundamental

revolution,255

involving, internally, a change in the reference system of art from

254

Ibid., p. 75; it is interesting to compare Alain Touraine’s view that today we live in a society which

understands itself as one that has to create itself without metasocial guarantees according to normative

guidelines it lays down itself, e.g. The Self-Production of Society, 1977. 255

Ibid., 188, 203.


64

nature to the reflexive subject and, externally, the liquidation of tradition and age-old

cultural forms. The roaring twenties mark the fulcrum of this revolution. As is evident

from the contributions made by science, philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis and so

forth, the avant-garde movement in art formed but a part of a more embracing cultural

transition which was inspired by the cultural pathos of what Gehlen calls ‘the great

translation into life’.256

During the period leading up to the 1920s, there was an

immense build-up of pressure on all levels – e.g., a mountain of facts in science

through Einstein, psychoanalysis, and so forth, and in art developments from Post-

Impressionism onwards – which called for a radical reduction, a translation into

action.

Gehlen’s thesis is now that, while the same art is at present still being produced, it

lacks the power and force of the 1920s.257

In particular, abstract art, which has

pursued the internal rationality of art to its conclusion, has come to the end of its wits.

Gehlen spends no less that five pages to prove that 20th

-century painting, especially

abstract painting, is trapped revolving in unproductive circles, talking of its having

become entangled in freedom. The avant-garde revolution created freedom of

movement and experimentation through the destruction of tradition, of the notion of

canonical style and of the object. Paradoxically, however, these moves led not only to

the coexistence of a multiplicity of styles and models, which makes creation much

more difficult, but also to the primacy of individual styles. Since no external

conditions of the work of art such as tradition or the object is recognised, the work of

art itself becomes the source of inspiration. The artist enters a circle in respect of

which there are neither inner nor external standards of control. The result is an inner

emptiness which leads to a loss of the ability to communicate. In addition, Gehlen

also finds evidence on the institutional level of the end of avant-garde art. It is indeed

the case that the isolation of the artist was effectively neutralised by ‘secondary

institutionalisation’258

whereby the flimsy art organism was stabilised by an

international market-oriented organisation – yet not for long. For painting did not

reckon with the possibility of weariness and fatigue on the part of the stimulated eye.

Gehlen finds all sorts of evidence to support his contention that such an eventuality

was strengthened by doubt in the public mind about the seriousness and authenticity

of avant-garde art, and a financial crisis which led to the collapse of the avant-garde

art market.

A more important argument is that avant-garde art, with abstract art in front, pursued

the internal logic of art to its very end. From that point onwards, therefore, no

immanent artistic development is any longer possible.259

The development of art is at

an end and with it also a history of art that purports to follow the development of art

according to its internal logic. As a consequence, we are at preset faced with a

situation of the ‘syncretism’ of a mixture of all styles and possibilities,260

a plurality

of artistic techniques and styles.261

The syncretism or plurality is supported by the fact

that there is no longer a dominant class acting as patrons of the arts. Instead,

subjectivity predominates, and since it lacks authority and is essentially unstable, no

256

Ibid., 204. 257

Ibid., p. 205. 258

Ibid., p. 207. 259

Ibid., p. 206. 260

Loc. cit. 261

Ibid., p. 229.


65

single style admits of being stabilised.262

And since art in contemporary society is

merely a peripheral phenomenon, none of the newest directions can claim the title of

avant-garde art form of tomorrow. Today, as in the future, therefore, we must reckon

with a ‘crystallisation’263

of techniques and styles – i.e., with the fact that in art, as in

modern culture as a whole, ‘the fundamental contents and all the immanent

possibilities have been exhausted’.264

We have reached the end of the road, we are in

the stage of ‘post-histoire’.265

By means of his theory of the exhaustion and death of the avant-garde and the

inauguration of the syncretic, crystallised period of post-history, Gehlen has

contributed to laying the foundation of the neo-conservative theory of postmodernity

which came strongly to the fore during the past five years or so. According to this

new ideology, modern culture is exhausted to such an extent that we need to abandon

the project of modernity altogether. Taking leave of modern culture, we are exhorted

to shape a culture that subordinates itself to and supports the capitalist organisation of

society which since the 1974 oil crisis is itself in the throws of deep trouble. The neo-

conservative talk of exhaustion of modern culture and the beginning of the

postmodern age is designed to defuse and deactivate the explosive, critical and

rationalising potential of modern culture – for instance of art, but not only of art. Art

has a sensitising potential which extends integrally over the whole body and, as such,

transcends sheer subjectivity in the sense of immanent privacy. Thus is has the

potential of making a contribution to the clarification of collective goals and of

rationalising communication and the democratic organisation of social life.

Evaluation

It is indeed ironic that Gehlen should draw such neo-conservative conclusions from

his analysis of the development of art, for his notion of conceptual painting is

eminently suited to account for the peculiar potential of art. Far from possessing a

potential of touching the self-understanding of people in contemporary society,

Gehlen insists that art, like other components of modern culture, has been deprived of

its status of ‘the great key attitude’266

and has consequently lost its transcendent,

utopian ‘appeal value’ together with the ability to be translated into a progressive

worldview and world transformative action. Contemporary art – this is Gehlen’s

thesis – is an example of an age-old cultural sphere which has completely transformed

itself in order to happily adapt to industrial-technological society. Art has adopted the

forms of consciousness which arose from the interplay of science, technology and

individualism, with the result that it renounced the function – as Gehlen refers to it –

of ‘keeping in view’ (vor Augen halten) – which is precisely the function the critical

theorists ascribe to art.267

262

Ibid., pp. 208-9. 263

Ibid., p. 157. 264

Gehlen cited by Habermas, ‘Neoconservative Culture Criticism’, p. 82. 265

Gehlen, Zeitbilder, p. 206. 266

Ibid., p. 221. 267

Does not conceptual art as an art which determines is own rules or laws ‘keep in view’ precisely the

fact that, as Touraine submits (see footnote 254 above), contemporary society is a society which has no

option other than to produce itself according to the normative guidelines it sets itself?


66

15 The Ritter School: modern art as compensation

In the present lecture I propose to consider, still within the framework of neo-

conservative theories of the avant-garde, the theory of art as compensation. For this

purpose, I shall concentrate of the so-called Joachim Ritter School, especially Odo

Marquard’s ‘Kunst als Kompensation ihres Ende’ (‘Art as Compensation of its

End’),268

in which he puts forward the thesis that the function of modern art,

particularly the avant-garde, is exhausted by its compensatory effect.

Roots of the theory of art as compensation

The idea of the autonomy of art, as we know, had been formulated first in the 18th

century. It was accompanied not only by the first explicit critique of purposive-

rationality or instrumental rationality as the basic principle of the organisation and

practice of life in modern society, but also by that characteristic experience on the part

of intellectuals and artists which later became known as alienation. This connection

between the declaration of the autonomy of art and the experience of alienation is

particularly obvious in the work of Karl Philipp Moritz and Friedrich Schiller.269

In

1786, Moritz wrote in his book, Das Edelste in der Natur, that the dominant idea of

the useful has progressively displaced the beautiful, with the result that even nature is

regarded only from the utilitarian point of view of exploitation and possible mastery

over things and events. Basic to the theory of aesthetic education developed by

Schiller in his Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen is a critique of the

consequences of the division of labour in modern society: ‘Externally chained to only

a single fragment of the whole, human beings themselves develop into only a

fragment of what they as humans could be…they are prevented from developing the

harmony of their being’.270

Thus, at the time when purposive-rationality and the division of labour were

recognised as the basic principles of the organisation of modern society, art came to

be regarded as the only possible sphere in which the lost harmonious totality of being

human could be redeemed and re-established. After religion had lost its validity as all-

encompassing worldview which reconciled and unified the disparate sectors of reality,

art took its place as a functional equivalent, at least in the case of the propertied and

educated bourgeois class of that time. Habermas, for example, speaks of ‘the religion

of cultivation of the early modern period’ which involved the ‘contemplative

reception of auratic works of art’.271

The concept of autonomy, therefore, does not

refer only to the relationship between art and society, but also contains a specification

of the function of art in modern society: the function of redeeming and re-establishing

the harmony of the human personality which was systematically disturbed by the

peculiar mode of organisation of modern society. It is in this way that the idea of

compensation arose in the context of philosophical aesthetics along with the

declaration of the autonomy of art around the middle of the 18th

century: art

compensates the alienation that inevitably accompanies the purposive-rational

organisation of the practice of life.

268

In Willi Oelmüller ed., Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie, Vol. 1: Ästhetische Erfahrung,

Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981, pp. 159-68, with documentation of discussion, pp. 168-99. 269

See Minder, Op. cit.; Schiller, Op. cit.; Bürger VRF, pp. 177-9. 270

Free translation from ‘Sechster Brief’, p. 20. 271

See Habermas, TdkH II, p. 284.


67

Max Weber also noted the complementary relationship in which autonomous art and

the value-orientations and action-dispositions of the bohemian artistic personality

stand to the purposive rational practice of life. He analysed the compensatory effect of

art in so far as it assumed the role of a functional equivalent of religion. When it

becomes autonomous, Weber submits: ‘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. With this claim to a redemptory function, art begins to

compete directly with salvation religion’.272

In the 20th

century aesthetics and sociology of art, the idea of compensation suggested

by Moritz and Schiller and analysed by Weber is implicitly and explicitly accepted in

different senses. On one extreme, it is implied by the critical neo-Marxist conception

of art as utopia in the sense of a form opposing the existing state of affairs. In this

case, compensation is interpreted, not as restitution or making good a totality which is

in some way or another damaged without removing the source of the damage, but as a

negative counterbalance: keeping critically alive the truth of the whole, as in Adorno,

or keeping alive the possibility of radical transformation or revolution, as in Marcuse.

Habermas likewise takes the view that autonomous art has become the refuge for a

satisfaction, even if only virtual, of those needs that have become, as it were, illegal in

the material life process of bourgeois society. Rather than taking on ‘tasks in the

economic and political systems’, it instead ‘collects residual needs that could find no

satisfaction within the “system of needs”’ – such needs as ‘the desire for a mimetic

relation to nature; the need for living together in solidarity outside the group egoism

of the immediate family; the longing for the happiness of a communicative experience

exempt from imperatives of purposive-rationality and giving scope to imagination as

well as spontaneity’.273

Important to note, however, is that Habermas takes care to

distinguish between classical bourgeois art of the earlier modern period and

radicalised avant-garde art of the 20th

century, and is thus able to critically

differentiate the idea of complementarity or compensation: ‘In the artistically

beautiful, the bourgeoisie once [i.e. in classical modern art] could experience

primarily its own ideals and the redemption, however fictive, of a promise of

happiness that was merely suspended in everyday life. But in radicalized art [i.e. 20th

century avant-garde art] it soon had to recognise the negative rather than the

complement of its social practice…The truth thereby comes to light that in bourgeois

society art expresses not the promise but the irretrievable sacrifice of bourgeois

rationalization, the plainly incompatible experiences and not the esoteric fulfilment

withheld, but merely deferred, gratifications’.274

In contradistinction to the critical theorists who emphasise the negative and critical

sense of compensation, the neo-conservatives take compensation in a positive and

uncritical sense. Whereas the former regard art as contributing to the tendency of

society to overcome its own inadequate organisation in favour of improvement, the

latter have in mind restitution, making good or fulfilment without seeing the necessity

of any change is society whatsoever. This is true of Joachim Ritter, the founder of the

Ritter School, and his followers such as Odo Marquard who strongly defend the idea

of art as compensation.

272

Weber, in Gerth and Mills, p. 342. 273

Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, p. 78. 274

Ibid., p. 85.


68

Joachim Ritter

Ritter’s thesis is essentially that in modern society the process of modernisation has

led to both the objectification and the disenchantment of reality and, further, that

while disenchantment represents a loss, it is compensated by the development of an

organ of re-enchantment: the specifically modern compensatory organ of aesthetic

art.275

Ritter develops his thesis not with reference to Weber’s theory of

rationalisation, however, but through an interpretation of Hegel’s theory of

institutional modernisation deriving from Aristotelianism and British political

economy.276

Following Hegel, Ritter assumes that the modern conception of freedom – first

formulated by Christianity and established as a right by the French Revolution –

necessarily depends on domination over nature by means of industrial labour. Civil or

bourgeois society represents what Hegel called ‘a system of needs’, a system that

determines labour relations. Civil or bourgeois society as a system of needs and

corresponding labour relations rested on a process of ‘diremption’ or ‘division’

(Entzweiung) which in principle does not admit of being regulated or unified by an

encompassing rationality. As such, modern society has broken with tradition and has

become ‘historiless’, as Ritter says. What remains of an encompassing rationality –

aesthetic experience, religious ideas and morality – at the same time continues its

existence in subjectivity. Through this rationality, the members of modern society are

able to maintain a link with their mental-spiritual origin in tradition. Thus the same

society that rids itself of tradition and hence of history also provides subjectivity with

an organ by means of which the division of society, if not unified, can at least be

compensated. Subjectivity is the locus of a harmony which has been driven from

society by dominant instrumental rationality but is not irretrievably lost.

The function of art in modern society is thus to uphold those paradigms of rationality

which had been pushed out by the dominant purposive-rationality. Those contents

which have no place in the purposive-rationally organised society are now expressed

in art. Art thus becomes a refuge for residual metaphysical and mythical contents

which have been excluded from modern society. Aesthetic rationality accompanies,

complements and compensates purposive-rationality. Descartes’ rationalistic method

is complemented and compensated by Pascal’s logique du coeur, irritas logica by

veritas aesthetica, Newton’s mechanical nature by the beautiful nature of art and

poetry.277

Only by way of the compensatory organ of art is the harmony and richness

of humanity conserved, a harmony and richness which society can neither express nor

realise.

Odo Marquard

Marquard starts from Ritter’s contention that modern art is a true conservation and as

such compensation. But he gives this theory of art as compensation a special twist by

275

See Marquard, p. 161; also Heinz Paetzold, ‘Einige Positionen gegenwärtiger Ästhetik’, Neue

Rindschau, Vol. 86, 1975, pp. 605-27, here 617-9. 276

Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977; see also Seyla Benhabib, ‘Die Moderne

und die Aporien der Kritischen Theorie’, in W. Bonss and A. Honneth eds, Sozialforschung als Kritik,

Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982, pp. 127-75, here 171 footnote 22; Manfred Riedel, ‘Hegels Begriff der

bürgerlichen Gesellschaft und das Problem seines geschichtliche Ursprungs’, in Riedel ed., Materialien

zu Hegel’s Rechtphilosophie, Vol. 2, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975, pp. 247-75. 277

Ritter, O. cit., p. 215.


69

means of Hegel’s thesis of the end of art. Following Hans-Georg Gadamer, he

understands this Hegelian thesis to mean that classical Greek art, as the most perfect

manifestation of art, had come to an end due to Christianity and the subsequent

secularised philosophy of history and philosophy of revolution.278

On this basis,

Marquard advances his ‘positive theory of compensation’ as consisting of two theses:

first, modern aesthetic art, particularly avant-garde art, is a historical reaction to the

end of art; and, second, modern aesthetic art compensates not only the objectification

of reality and the purposive-rational organisation of society, but also the

disappearance of an eschatological or utopian conception of the world.

From the purposes of this theory of art as a double compensation Marquard draws the

conclusion that we are compelled to surrender once and for all the connection

between art and eschatology or utopia or what he regards as the eschatological

instrumentalisation of art: modern aesthetic art is so little capable of acting as a

vehicle of eschatology and utopia that it, quite to the contrary, precisely compensates

the essential eschatological and utopian blindness of modern society.279

Art has to

compensate the disappearance of a transcendent vision which occurred when the

original eschatological vision was transformed into the modern conditional attitude. In

modern society, the purposive-rational organisation of social life led to the

predominance of the experimental attitude. In this attitude, reality is in principle

approached in conditional terms, i.e., from the point of view of ‘as if’ – as if it is not

what it is but something else . Modern society has become fictional and as a result art

is compelled to assume the function of salvaging and conserving the present, what is,

the status quo. Concentrating on the present, as it does, art shuns the as if character of

reality, the fictional character of reality: modern aesthetic art, avant-garde art, is anti-

fictional; art is anti-fiction. This means that art is conservative, and only as such can it

at all be art, for it has to recuperate and conserve the present state of affairs which was

denounced by eschatology and devalued by the modern attitude. In order to be able to

play this conservative role, art had to transform itself into aesthetic art, to become

what it had never been: autonomous art. Art was required to abstract from and thus to

disburden itself of all existential content.

This development, according to Marquard, started during the Renaissance, was

conceptually formulated in the 18th

century in philosophical aesthetics, but reached it

goal only in the 20th

century avant-garde art. The decisive condition that had to be

fulfilled before this process of development could be completed was what Marquard

calls the ‘overburdening of the human lifeworld’ or the ‘hypertrophy of pressure

toward legitimation’280

– by which he means the unlimited and excessive increase of

the demand to justify or provide reasons for everything in the modern world. This

absolute burden of justification had been promoted by the French Revolution, but

came to rest securely on the shoulders of each and every member of modern society

only when the final eschatological statement, Nietzsche’s thesis of the death of God,

had been pronounced. With the disappearance of God from the scene and hence with

the loss of grace, modern man faced a merciless world in which he had to justify

virtually everything, even his own being and presence. Henceforth, he had to assume

full responsibility and fulfil the absolute demand of justification.

278

Marquard, O. cit., pp. 162-3. 279

Ibid., p. 163. 280

Ibid., pp. 165, 171.


70

Max Weber already expressed the contention that the modern individual

characteristically refuses to assume responsibility for moral judgements and thus

‘tends to transform judgements of moral intent into judgements of taste’, for the

‘inaccessibility of appeal from aesthetic judgements excludes discussion’.281

This

statement may well have served as a starting point for Marquard but, to be sure, he is

still more radical in his claim than Weber. And let us note that Weber never gave a

positive thought the re-enchantment of the disenchanted world by means of, say, the

creation of a new mythology.

According to Marquard, the absolute burden of justification has become unbearable

since no human being is able to place him- or herself totally at the disposal of a

tribunal. For this reason, he claims, since the 18th

century there had been a growing

need to disburden oneself of responsibility. This desire to rid oneself of the demand

for justification or the provision of reasons is what gave rise to autonomous art. In its

wake art became a refuge where modern people can hide from the demand for

justification; art became compensation for the lost grace or mercy of God. The avant-

garde, by breaking completely with tradition, radicalised this modern tendency. The

avant-garde work of art, therefore, is the best example of a work of art in the face of

which the demand for justification becomes silent and grows dumb.

Evaluation

In discussing the work of Arnold Gehlen, we already saw that one of the major

strategies of the neo-conservatives is to attempt to blunt and defuse the enlightening

and critical potential of the explosive contents of cultural modernity, including

autonomous art. Marquard’s theory of aesthetic art as compensation represents a

paradigmatic example of this strategy. Modern aesthetic art compensates not only the

rationalisation of society, but also the disenchantment of culture and the world; not

only the objectification of the lifeworld, but also the modern mode of rational or

critical discursive legitimation. As such, art is conservative: art provides an

affirmative experience of the present state of affairs, expressed in the thesis of art as

anti-fiction; at the same time, art also conserves, in the midst of the modern mode of

rational discursive legitimation, the essentially feudal mode of legitimation based on

tradition requiring no reasons to be provided. In art, as in tradition which is closed to

questioning and critical discussion, we have a haven in which we can silently and

dumbly take shelter against demands for justification and validation. Art has a

compensatory function in that it makes modern society bearable and thus removes the

necessity of having to work toward transforming society into an interpersonally well-

ordered, human and humane complex of social relations.

From a critical point of view, this conception of the function of art in modern society

simply means that modern aesthetic art is ideological. It stands solely in the service of

maintaining the status quo. This conclusion would not deter Marquard, though, for in

his view it is only in this form of a purely immanent art, one devoid of all utopian

reference and by its illusory character restricting aesthetic experience to the private

individual level, that art can at all cherish a hope of having any effect in modern

society. In contradistinction to Marquard’s main thesis, it should be objected from a

sociological point of view that it is untenable to assert a general compensatory

function for art, particularly considering avant-garde art. It is necessary to reformulate

281

Weber, Op. cit., p. 342.


71

his thesis more precisely, both historically and theoretically. While contemporary neo-

avant-garde art or trivial literature – what Lukács called ‘expressly anti-realist or

pseudo-realist literature’ – may well fulfil an inherently compensatory function, the

question is what Dadaism’s provocative exhibitions, Picasso’s Guernica, Penderecki’s

Devils of Ludon, or Francis Bacon’s portraits compensate, and for which social group

or class? Marquard fails to consider the possibility of an internal division in 20th

-

century art, say in Adorno’s terms, into art and culture industry.

A more important point concerns the neo-conservative desire to withdraw ever greater

parts of modern society from legitimation and thus to minimise the burden of

justification and validation. All the conservative parties in power today are actively

engaged in attempts to free the political and administrative system as much as

possible from participation on the part of citizens. They systematically reject cultural

modernity with its emphasis on justification in favour of revitalising the conservative

power of tradition and to subjectivise and privatise competences of imagination,

reflection and criticism. Marquard’s proposal to eliminate the utopian content of art so

as to be able to render it conservative in the sense of preserving the traditional model

of legitimation and thus of supporting the status quo must be seen in the context of

this neo-conservative programme for the deactivation of cultural modernity.

The point is, however, that the neo-conservatives, in order to be able to withdraw

socio-cultural spheres from legitimation, overstate the degree to which there actually

is a demand for justification and validation in modern society – whence Marquard’s

exaggerated talk of ‘the absolute burden justification’ which rests on the shoulders of

every modern individual. I would like to close this lecture282

with a clarification of

those areas where justification and validation is required in modern society and,

further, to show where art fits into this framework. Against this background, it should

become evident that art, certainly 20th

-century avant-garde aesthetic art, cannot be

immunised against the demand for justification, not to mention being a haven offering

shelter to those who cannot bear the demands of the times.

In the pre-modern period, centred worldviews unified the various dimensions of the

world and thus were able – with the assistance of henchmen like the Inquisition – to

immunise their core are against dissonant experiences and, concomitantly, against

demands for justification and validation. The contents of cultural tradition which a

people naively and unproblematically accepted as valid proved sufficient as both a

basis and justification of action and social relationships. In the course of time,

however, centred worldviews collapsed and the various dimensions of reality

differentiated for the lifeworld and from one another. The result was that in the

modern period the scope of the naively accepted lifeworld decreased, the lost areas

being given over to the consciously entertained spheres denoted formally by the

concepts of the external objective world, the normative social world and the inner

subjective world. First, in the field of technical-instrumental knowledge cognitive

explosion shook the lifeworld to such a degree that the external world differentiated in

respect of which objective knowledge is pursued by science in terms of the standard

of truth. Second, a slow process of differentiation led to the separation of a social

world of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations from the diffuse background of

the lifeworld, governed by the standard of normative correctness. Finally, also a

282

For this purpose, I draw essentially on Habermas, TdkH, Vol. 2.


72

subjective world of experience to which the individual has privileged access and

which is governed by the standard of authenticity made its appearance. It devolved

upon autonomous art to explore this area, the endetic domain of human needs, in a

systematic way (see Figure III.1 below).

On this basis, we may submit that the modern understanding of the world consists of a

reference system of formal world concepts – the objective, the social and the

subjective worlds – which are of a different status than the lifeworld from which they

differentiated and in which they remain rooted. These three formal worlds

respectively represent facts, norms and experiences which can become topics of

discussion, dispute, conflict, critique, agreement and so forth – but only on the basis

of the intersubjectivity provided by the naively assumed, unproblematic, unquestioned

lifeworld by means of cultural knowledge and language. The lifeworld is constitutive

of intersubjective understanding and agreement as such, while the three formal

concepts form a reference system for that about which understanding and agreement

is possible. It is only on the basis of assuming the abiding foundation of the lifeworld

that facts, norms and experiences can become problematic and that human beings can

come to a mutual understanding and perhaps agreement about the objective, the social

and subjective worlds.

A number of implications follow from this account. First, it is obvious that it is

untenable to speak of ‘an absolute burden of justification’. The members of modern

society, like their predecessors, naively assume the validity of their intersubjective

lifeworld as the unproblematic and unquestioned context of their speech and action.

They proceed on such resources as cultural knowledge, group solidarities and

individual competences offered by the lifeworld in order to deal with the limitations

and conditions of their action situations in the guise of facts, norms and experiences.

Justification or validation is demanded only in respect of the objective, social and

subjective worlds in so far as facts, norms and experiences become problematic as

limitations. Cultural knowledge and language may also become topics of conscious

operations when they fail as resources, giving rise to misunderstanding, and thus call

for correction or reparation by interpreters, translators or therapists. But to the extent

that cultural contents serve as dependable resources, they do not figure as objects of

justification and validation. This is sufficient to demonstrate that the neo-conservative

exaggerated talk of an absolute burden of justification is untenable.

Secondly, the clarification of the relationship between the lifeworld and the three

formal world concepts has the implication that art does not admit of being completely

withdrawn from the demand for justification: aesthetic art, especially avant-garde art,

cannot possibly be regarded as a haven offering shelter against the demand for

justification and hence as a preserver of the traditional mode of legitimation. As in the

case of any speech and action, the artist too assumes as familiar, unproblematic and

valid certain cultural, social and individual resources which do not necessarily call for

justification. Yet in so far as artistic activity is located in the subjective world and

takes the form of an expressive exploration of subjective experience, guided by the

standard of authenticity, the demand for justification cannot be avoided. Similarly in

so far as art spills over from the subjective world of experience into the social world

of norms it has to face the justificatory demand. Art contains what may be called

aesthetic-practical knowledge or, differently, it inevitably advances a validity claim to

authenticity and may relate to or even advance a validity claim to normative


73

correctness – all of which implies that art is open to discussion and criticism, and thus

involves the giving and the possible questioning and even rejection of reasons.

Figure III.1: Art in the Configuration of the Lifeworld and

Formal World Concepts*

Lifeworld Cultural resources:

knowledge & language

intersubjectivity

solidarity

competences

Communication

Inner world

Subjective Subjective

world: world:

Actor 1 Actor 2

experience experience

(endetics)

Art

External Objective world:

facts

truth

Science

world Social world:

norms

rightness

Morality & Law

* Construction using Habermasian distinctions

Thus it is neither the case that modern society is subject to an absolute burden of

justification, nor that art can be immunised against the demand for justification.

Avant-garde art, above all, does not shrink back from making validity claims; nor

does it look for a hiding place from justificatory demands.


74

16 Daniel Bell: the avant-garde and the postmodern age

The present lecture will be devoted to the last of the neo-conservative theories of the

avant-garde to be considered in this course – the theory of Daniel Bell, a well-know

and influential American sociologist and leading neo-conservative, which was first

and most extensively advanced in his book, The Cultural Contradictions of

Capitalism,283

published in the later 1970s. Bell differs from such neo-conservatives

as Ritter and Marquard who regard modern art, especially avant-garde art, as a

compensation for the purposive-rational organisation of the practice of life and for the

critical-discursive mode of legitimation of the modern period. Bell’s main thesis is

that avant-garde art – what he generally refers to as ‘modernist culture’ – possesses a

subversive power in that it requires an anarchistic bohemian lifestyle and unleashes

subjectivistic and hedonistic motives which progressively erode the discipline of

occupational life and, indeed, the moral basis of modern capitalist society. There is

thus a stronger comparison with Gehlen’s position.

Bell proceeds from the assumption that at this stage capitalism has been well

institutionalised and, to the extent that modernist culture has come to pervade

everyday life, culture has been trivialised, avant-garde art has repeated its end, and

modernist culture is exhausted – leaving a serious problem in its wake. How could

norms be generated in society to limit the subversive power of modernist culture and

to re-establish the moral basis of capitalist society, namely the ethic of discipline,

work, the deferral of gratification, obedience and achievement? For Bell, the key

word here is limits: setting ‘a limit to the exploration of those cultural experiences

which go beyond moral norms and embrace the demonic in the delusion that all

experience is “creative”…setting a limit to hybris’.284

Bell’s theory of the avant-garde forms part of a more encompassing theory, the theory

of the contradictions of capitalism or what he also calls ‘the double-bind of

modernity’.285

To understand and eventually to be able to evaluate Bell’s position and

claims, it is necessary to be clear about his general theoretical approach to the analysis

of modern society.

The internal contradictions and double-bind of modernity

In contradistinction to Marxism and functionalism, both of which regard society as a

structurally unified complex which determines every social action and phenomenon,

Bell approaches modern – capitalist or bourgeois – society as being a complex of

three distinct realms which do not smoothly interrelate or integrate: as an ‘uneasy

amalgam’ of the social structure or the techno-economic order, the polity or the state

and administration, and the culture.286

Rather than being determined by the economy,

as Marxist hold, or by the dominant value system, as functionalist hold, these realms

are relatively autonomous from one another and, indeed, to such an extent that each

can be seen as following its own rhythm of change and its own norms legitimating its

own kind of behaviour – that is, each sphere is characterised by its own logic of

development, as Weber would say, a development which moreover deploys according

to its own standard or principle. Bell speaks of each realm as having its own ‘axial

283

London: Heinemann, 1978, original US edition 1976. 284

Ibid., p. xxix. 285

Ibid., table of contents: Part One. 286

Ibid., pp. xxx, 10.


75

principle’.287

The contradictions Bell discovers in modern society can be traced back

to the differentiation of the economy, the polity and culture and their subsequent

independent development according to contrary axial principles, with the result that

these realms have come to stand in a relationship of tension and discord to one

another.

Stated in this way, it is evident that Bell’s position is inspired by Weber’s diagnostic

interpretation of modern society according to which the various spheres became

differentiated only to stand in a relation of tension to one another:288

Weber’s thesis of

the loss of meaning, i.e., the meaningful unification of reality by metaphysical-

religious worldviews collapsed, with the result that tensions or conflict between

antagonistic spheres and related values can no longer be resolved from a

superordinate point of view.

It will be helpful to go briefly over the details of Bell’s view of the three basic realms

of modern society (see Table III.1 below).289

(i) The techno-economic order is concerned with the organisation of production and

the allocation of goods and services. It involves the use of technology for instrumental

ends. Its axial principle is functional rationality and economising, which ultimately

devolves upon efficiency. The axial structure is bureaucracy and hierarchy, deriving

from the specialisation and segmentation of functions required by the need to organise

activities. The measure of value is utility. The principle of change is productivity. The

social structure is reified in that it consists of a structure of roles, each with its own

degree of authority, which relate by way of exchange. The mode of procedure is

primarily technocratic in character.

(ii) The polity controls the legitimate use of force and the regulation of conflict. The

axial principle is legitimacy in the sense of power being held and governance being

exercised only with the consent of the governed – the implicit condition being

equality. The axial structure of political control and conflict resolution is order, and

the principle of change resides in the steering capacity of society. The social structure

is an open network of strategically competing social groups and parties. Finally, the

political-administrative mode of procedure includes more and more features, yet in

principle decisions are carried out by bargaining and by law.

(iii) Culture is the realm of symbolic forms (à la Ernst Cassirer) or the realm of

symbolic expression: ‘those efforts in painting, poetry and fiction, or within the

religious forms of litany, liturgy and ritual, which seek to explore and express the

meaning of human existence in some imaginative form’.290

Due to the limited number

of modalities of culture deriving from the condition humaine – death, tragedy,

heroism, loyalty, obligation, redemption, love, sacrifice, compassion, etc. – culture

has historically been fused with religion. Traditionally, the realm of culture is the

ream of unity or of unifying meaning. Whereas science is the search for the unity of

nature, religion has always been the search for the unity of culture; it guarded the

portals of culture by rejecting those works of art which threatened the moral norms of

287

Ibid., pp. xxx, xvi, 11. 288

Weber, in Gerth and Mills, p. 328. 289

Bell, Op. cit., pp. 11-4. 290

Ibid., p. 12.


76

society. However, modernity has disrupted the bond between religion and culture.

Instead of religion, ‘the most aggressive outsider of the modern movement… the self-

proclaimed avant-garde which calls itself modernism’,291

has become constitutive of

culture.292

It is thus that the axial principle of modern culture now is ‘the expression

and remaking of the “self” in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfilment’.293

Table III.1: Bell’s View of the Differentiation of Society*

Realm

Features

Techno-economic order

Polity

Culture

Focus Organisation of production

and resource allocation

Control of force and

conflict regulation

Expressive symbolism

Axial principle Functional rationality:

efficiency

Legitimacy:

equality

Self-expression:

Self-realization

Axial structure Bureaucracy and hierarchy Representation and

participation

Reflexive subjectivity

Standard Utility Order Authenticity

Principle of

change

Productivity Steering of society Ricorso

Social structure Hierarchical functional roles Strategically competing

groups and parties

Anarchistic bohemian

lifestyle

Mode of

procedure

Technocratic control Decision-making

through bargaining and

law

Self-exploration

* Reconstructed from Bell’s verbal account

And in this search there is a systematic denial of limits and boundaries to experience;

cultural experiences which go beyond moral norms and even embrace ‘the

demonic’294

are systematically and methodically pursued – all with a view to

authentic expression, self-realisation and self-fulfilment. The axial structure of

modern culture, therefore, is that of self-exploration, which can be measured by the

authenticity of subjective experience and expression. Whereas the principle of change

and development in the techno-economic and political order is relatively clear-cut and

linear, no unambiguous principle of this kind can be found in culture; ‘Boulez does

not replace Bach’; in culture there is always ricorso, as Bell calls it with Vico, a

return to basic human concerns, a renewal and recreation. The social structure

corresponding to the capitalist economy is a reified system of roles, and that

corresponding to the modern polity takes the form of strategically competing groups

or parties. By contrast, modern culture finds institutional embodiment in ‘anarchistic

bohemian lifestyles’295

characterised by self-indulgent, hedonistic and even immoral

practices. To this institutional base of modern culture corresponds what Bell – like

Gehlen – calls ‘syncretism’:296

‘the mingling of strange gods…the mélange of cultural

artefacts…the jumbling of styles in modern art, which absorbs African masks or

Japanese prints into its modes of depicting spatial perceptions’. Thus Bell sees the

defining characteristic of modern culture in its ‘extraordinary freedom to ransack the

291

Ibid., p. xxi. This quotation suggests that Bell does not make an adequate distinction between

modernism and the avant-garde. 292

Ibid., p. xxix. 293

Ibid., p. 13. 294

Ibid., p. xxix. 295

Ibid., p. xxiv. 296

Ibid., p. 13.


77

world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon – a freedom

ultimately predicated on the axial principle of modern culture.

Decisive for Bell’s theoretical position is now that rather than concentrating only on

the differentiation of distinct realms in modern society, he regards the very

differentiation of realms as resulting in fundamental contradictions, disjunctions or

discordances between these realms which in turn progressively erode the prerequisites

for the continued existence of modern society as such. The development of modern

society is paradoxical by nature in that the differentiation of distinct realms which

originally established modern society, itself already contains the seeds for the

subversion and annulment of developed modern society. For Bell, this is ‘a general,

theoretical approach to the analysis of modern society’.297

In terms of his theoretical

model of differentiation, Bell distinguishes different structural sources of tension in

modern society: the contradiction, disjunction or discord, first, between the techno-

economic social structure which is bureaucratic and hierarchical and a polity which

rests on the formal principle of equality and participation; and, second, between a

techno-economic social structure which is organised according to roles and

specialisation and a culture which is concerned with the enhancement and fulfilment

of the self and the whole person.298

Despite the fact that different structural sources of

tension can be distinguished, Bell emphasises the disjunction between the social

structure of society and culture as being of the greatest importance. The

‘contradictions of capitalism’ to which the title of Bell’s book refers, rest on ‘the

disjunction between the kind of organization and the norms demanded in the

economic realm and the norms of self-realization that are now central in the

culture’.299

Starting from Weber’s analysis of the emergence and rationalisation of modern

society which accords central place to the Protestant ethic of asceticism or frugality

and acquisitiveness, Bell submits that the ascetic element, and hence the basic

religious or moral legitimation of capitalist behaviour, has virtually disappeared in

modern society.300

This is due to the appearance of the avant-garde or, more broadly,

modernist culture and its destructive onslaught against the bourgeois world view.301

Whereas historically the techno-economic order and culture had been joined to

produce a single character structure – the modal character of the puritan Protestant

who engages in a methodical, planned and disciplined way of life oriented toward an

occupation regarded as a calling, a character type which later spread throughout

modern societies – they have now become unjoined. The various realms of modern

capitalist society were still held together by the religious-moral normative basis at the

time of its emergence, but the unfolding of modern society through the process of

modernisation brought about the severance of the tie between the social structure and

culture. The process of secularisation302

lying at the core of the process of

modernisation created beneficial conditions in the economic realm, but in culture

proved to be catastrophic in that it led to a profanation of values orientations and

297

Ibid., p. 14. 298

Interesting to note, it is obvious that this proposition is contrary to Marquard’s thesis of

compensation. 299

Bell, Op. cit., p.15. 300

Ibid., p. xx. 301

Ibid., p. xxi. 302

Ibid., p. 19.


78

action dispositions, with the result that hedonistic motives and subversive attitudes,

which are altogether incompatible with the moral basis of modern capitalist society,

infiltrated everyday life and eventually became dominant in the culture. Bell is aware

that certain characteristic problems of modernity arise in the economy and polity,303

but there is no doubt that he is convinced that the current crisis of authority and crisis

of motivation – i.e., the lack of willingness to obey and achieve – can be traced to the

avant-garde and, more broadly, modernist culture as a destructive agent directing its

hostility toward the conventions and virtues of the rationalised practice of life centring

on the economy and administration.304

The subversive avant-garde and the debasement of modernity

According to Bell, the defining characteristics of the avant-garde or modernist culture

can be located on three dimensions – namely, the thematic, the stylistic, and what we

may call reflexivity.

(i) Thematically, modernist culture has been a rage against order, especially against

bourgeois orderliness. Instead, the emphasis is on the self and the unceasing search

for experience. Baudelaire, the avatar of the modern attitude, expressed this rage in an

exemplary manner: ‘To be a useful man has always appeared to me as something

hideous’.305

Thus utility and purposive-rationality is seen as devitalising, while

creativity is propelled by the exploration of all dimensions of subjectivity and

experience, even of the demonic. No limits can be set to this, neither aesthetic limits

nor moral limits. Crucial to modernist culture is the insistence that experience should

have no boundaries, that there should be nothing sacred.

(ii) Stylistically, avant-garde art is characterised by what Bell calls ‘the eclipse of

distance’306

– i.e., the elimination of aesthetic psychic distance with a view to

achieving immediacy, impact, simultaneity and sensation. This eclipse of distance

results, on the one hand, in the replacement of contemplative reception by the

incorporation of the recipient in the experience and, on the other, in an emphasis on

the primary process (à la Freud) of dream, hallucination, instinct and impulse. All in

all, this means that the avant-garde rejects the rational cosmology which had been

introduced into the arts during the Renaissance – the cosmology of foreground and

background in pictorial space; of beginning, middle and end in time; of distinction of

genres and the modes of work appropriate to each genre. As a formal characteristic,

the eclipse of distance is in evidence in all the arts – in literature as ‘stream of

consciousness’ or écriture automatique; in poetry the disruption of ordered metre by

the introduction of free verse; in painting the elimination of interior distance within

the canvass by the non-figurative and abstract approach; in music the upset of balance

of melody and harmony. On the whole, this means that the arts repudiate mimesis as

the principle of art.

(iii) Finally, avant-garde art is characterised by a preoccupation with the medium –

what we may call reflexivity in the sense of art being concerned with itself. Although

artists have always been confronted by the formal problem of the artistic medium as

vehicle of what is to be depicted in the work of art, the 20th

century has seen an

303

Ibid., pp. xxix, xv. 304

Ibid., p. xxi. 305

Cited by Bell, Ibid., p. 17. 306

Ibid., p. xxi. Here is a resonance with what Benjamin called ‘the loss of aura’.


79

unprecedented preoccupation, not with then content of genre and style, but with the

medium of art itself – i.e., with the abstract properties of language in literature; with

the actual texture of paint, materials and encaustic surface in painting; with the

abstract sounds, the aleatory or chance factors in music, and so forth.

Bell accepts that the modern attitude has been responsible for one of the greatest

periods of creative efflorescence in Western culture. The period 1850 to 1930 is equal

to any previous period; all we need to do is to look at the number of masterpieces.

This surge of creativity arose in large part from the tension between culture, with its

adversary stance, and bourgeois social structure. According to Bell, however, this was

achieved only at a price – the price of the loss of coherence in culture, as can be seen

in the spread of an antinomian attitude to moral norms and, still more important, the

price of the blurring of the distinction between art and life.307

The dedifferentiation of

art and life, together with the emphasis on self-expression, meant in Bell’s opinion the

‘debasement of modernity’.308

All standards disappeared and, consequently,

judgement became impossible, since the acting out of impulse, rather than the

reflective discipline of the imagination, became the touchstone of experience and

satisfaction. The individual, his or her feelings and sentiments, rather than some

standard of quality and value, came to determine the worth of cultural objects. This

stage of modernity has become characterised by the production of incoherent

culture.309

The emphasis on the exploration of the self and the realisation of the full potential of

the individual proved to have anomic effects, indeed, a subversive power. The

exploration and realisation of the potential of subjectivity came increasingly into

conflict with the norms and role requirements of the techno-economic order.310

The

impulsive searching for sensation and excitement started to undermine the bourgeois

attitudes of calculation and methodical constraint.311

As long as work and wealth had

a religious-moral sanction, they possessed a justification and legitimacy, but when

this basis became eroded to such an extent that it collapsed, the justification and

legitimacy of social action patterns passed from religion to modernist culture. A shift

occurred from an emphasis on character to an emphasis on personality, from work to

lifestyle as the source of satisfaction and criterion of desirable behaviour – i.e. the

style of life, not of the businessman, but of the artist defying the conventions of

society and blatantly promoting hedonism.312

The artist and not the wealthy middle

class came to dominate the audience and to impose his judgement. Through the

institutionalisation of this pattern by ‘the culturati’,313

adversary culture came to

occupy the central position in the cultural order.314

Fantasy came to reign almost

supreme in culture with the result that culture took the initiative in promoting change,

while the economy was geared to meet these new demands.315

307

Ibid., pp. xxii-iii. 308

Ibid., p. xv. 309

Ibid., p. 16. 310

Ibid., p. xvii. 311

Ibid., p. xxvi. 312

Ibid., p. xxiv. 313

Ibid., p. xxvi. 314

Ibid., pp. 39-41. 315

Ibid., pp. xxv, 75.


80

Culture in the sense, not of expressive symbolism and moral meanings, but as lifestyle

thus assumed the role of avant-garde. This produced a further tension. Not only has

there been a contradiction between the techno-economic order and the cultural realm,

but this tension has given rise to a contradiction in the economy itself. In the capitalist

enterprise, the nominal ethos is still the one of work, delayed gratification, career

orientation and so forth, but on the marketing side, the sale of goods, packaging in

glossy images of glamour and sex, promotes a hedonistic lifestyle.316

Not only has

capitalism been fully institutionalised and routinised, according to Bell, but the avant-

garde has led culture to be trivialised.317

Through the normalisation of

experimentation, nothing new is forthcoming. Avant-garde art no longer shocks.

Bell’s conclusion, therefore, is that like all bad history, the avant-garde and, more

broadly, modernist culture, has ‘repeated its end’;318

‘what has been established in the

last thirty years has been the tawdry rule of fad and fashion’;319

cultural modernity is

exhausted:320

‘there is no tension. The creative impulses have gone slack. It has

become an empty vessel’. Like Gehlen, Bell thus comes to the conclusion that the

avant-garde is dead, having died of its success. We have now entered the post-modern

age.321

Post-modernity is characterised by the fact that it rejects the aesthetic justification of

life supplied by the avant-garde in favour of an emphasis on instinct and impulse. The

avant-garde, however daring, kept its imagination largely within the constraints of art,

however much the boundaries of art have been shifted. Thus the avant-garde had still

been on the side of order. Post-modernity, pursuing the lead of the avant-garde to its

conclusion, tears down all boundaries and insists on acting out.

The problem for the neo-conservative thus becomes that of the generation of norms in

society which are capable of limiting libertinism, eroticism, freedom of impulse, in a

word, the hedonistic lifestyle. What new norms will set limits to the levelling effect of

the dedifferentiation of art and life inaugurated by the avant-garde? Bell places all his

hope on what he calls ‘the constitutive character of culture’, namely religion.322

A

religious revival is the only solution. Like Heidegger, he is convinced that ‘only a god

can save us now’. The tedium of the unrestrained self, the death of the avant-garde

and the exhaustion of cultural modernity are bound to bring our culture to an

awareness of the limits of exploring the mundane and, thus, to inspire an effort to

recover the sacred. Only in this way will we be able to ‘set a limit to hybris’.323

Evaluation

A number of points can and must be raised in criticism of Bell’s theory of the avant-

garde and of modernity. The first concerns his theory of the avant-garde, the second

his theoretical approach to modern society, and finally – and most importantly – the

underdeveloped concept of culture which internally shapes both his general approach

and view of cultural modernity.

316

Loc. cit. 317

Ibid., p. xxvi. 318

Loc. cit. 319

Ibid., p. xxvii. 320

Ibid., pp. xxxi, 20. 321

Ibid., pp. 29, 51-2. 322

Ibid., pp. xxviii-xxix. 323

Ibid., p. xxix.


81

(i) Theory of the avant-garde

According to Bell’s position, the avant-garde is responsible for blurring the distinction

between art and life. This resulted in a dedifferentiation of independent realms in the

sense that what was once permitted only in imagination passed over into fantasy and

is now acted out by individuals who want to make their lives a work of art. The

dedifferentiation constitutes a loss of coherence in culture and, to the extent that it

leads to the widespread institutionalisation of a hedonistic lifestyle, grows into a

contradiction in modern society. The avant-garde proved entirely successful in thus

reintegration art and life. Large numbers of people today are engaged in a hedonistic

lifestyle, while the market economy is geared toward satisfying the demands of

culture.

It should be noted that the ideal of the reintegration of art and life had been an ideal of

only certain avant-garde movements, especially Surrealism, and then only certain

sections of the movement. Max Ernst, the most intelligent and theoretical of the

Surrealists, for instance, never shared this ideal. Bell’s theory of the avant-garde

applies at best only to that section of Surrealism which strove to eradicate the

difference between art and life. But, then, the Surrealist programme was never

realised. The dedifferentiation of art and life Bell has in mind can, in fact, only refer

to the false abolition of art which led to the commercialisation of art and the

employment of art for the purposes of advertising and commercial promotion. This

means that Bell not only operates with an unclear concept of the avant-garde, but also

that he confuses cause and effect. Instead of considering also the economy, he directs

his criticism exclusively at the avant-garde.

(ii) General theoretical approach to the analysis of modern society

According to Bell’s theoretical approach, modern society must not only be seen as

differentiated into the distinct realms of the economy, the polity and culture, but also

that its very differentiation leads to tensions and contradictions between autonomous

realms. Like Weber, Bell on the one hand focuses attention on these tensions and

contradictions but, unlike Weber, he on the other is convinced that these tensions and

contradictions can be eliminated by unifying the world as a whole. Religion holds out

this possibility. Like a new myth, religion will bring together the diverse realms of

society to form a concrete substantive morality at the level of the practice of life

which would provide the members of society with a clearly defined identity and

existential security. Like Hegel who lamented its loss, Weber studious denied the

possibility of such a unification. In the modern period, science, morality and law, and

autonomous art differentiated from the religious worldview. What was left of religion

has become largely subjective faith. On this basis, a unification of the world is in

principle impossible. In addition, it should be noted, by virtue of the dedifferentiation

of science, morality and law, and of art from the religious worldview, one cannot

theoretically reintroduce religion. And what is more, the attempt to create a new

mythology in the form of a religious unification of the world would itself result in a

regressive dedifferentiation of realms – i.e., the very kind of dedifferentiation Bell

criticises the avant-garde for.

(iii) Undifferentiated concept of culture

Bell, indeed, proceeds theoretically on the basis of a notion of dedifferentiation. This

implies that the concept of culture or cultural modernity he advances is not

sufficiently complex to capture the late modern situation. He conceives of culture as


82

the realm of expressive symbolism embracing art and religion, with the latter assumed

to be constitutive of culture. Bell’s concomitant neglect to attend to the differentiated

nature of culture results in his confusion of various dimensions which need to be

clearly kept apart.

Cultural modernity embraces science and technology, morality and law, and

autonomous art and expressive patterns. If only Bell observed these distinctions, he

would have been able to recognise that, while subjectivity is systematically and

methodically explored in the realm of autonomous art, modern culture is at the same

time also characterised by the universalisation of morality and law – involving such

principles as rights, freedom, equality, solidarity, justice, responsibility and so forth.

Cultural modernity is by no means all hedonism; on the contrary, it is characterised by

a moral sensibility which, from time to time, give rise to pressures and both cultural

and social movements toward realising this universalistic import. Under these

circumstances, it is not so easy – in fact, it is implausible – to link the avant-garde to

moral degeneration, as does Bell. If anything, there is rather a relation between the

best avant-garde art and universal structures of consciousness – as is emphasised in

one way or another by the critical theorists Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse and

Bürger, to whom we should also add Habermas, whatever other differences there may

be between them. Other causal factors or forces will have to be identified, and these

might well be found in the economy, particularly in its consumption arm.


83

IV Conclusion: The Autonomy of Art and the Avant-Garde

17 Point of departure: process of rationalisation-cum-disenchantment

Rationalisation

material reproduction: (i) societal rationalisation: capitalist economy and modern

bureaucratic administrative state

(ii) cultural rationalisation: science, morality and law,

symbolic reproduction: autonomous art and expressive patterns

(iii) motivational rationalisation: methodical way of life

(vocation/work) and counter-cultural, bohemian lifestyle

Disenchantment (disillusionment-enlightenment)

(i) Collapse of the unitary, unifying religious-metaphysical worldview

(ii) Differentiation of categories of knowledge and validity claims (corresponding to

the cultural spheres of science, morality/law, and autonomous art): theoretical-

empirical (factual), moral-practical (normative), aesthetic-practical (expressive)

knowledge; validity claims of truth, correctness/rightness, authenticity/

appropriateness

(iii) Bringing to awareness the sphere of symbolically mediated human praxis as the

only possible source of meaning and validity, i.e. the only possible frame of reference

for the advancement and redemption of validity claims

Figure IV.1: Theoretical-Political Positions on Modernity

science: factual – truth

culture morality/law: normative – rightness

art: expressive – authenticity

rationalisation economy

cum society social integration;

disenchantment polity institutionalisation

unitary-

unifying

worldview

personality individual identity:

socialisation/individuation

everyday communicative practice

old conservative neo-conservative Critical Theory

1 2 3


84

18 The autonomisation of art

Socio-cultural-motivational rationalisation

Table IV.1: Historical Development of Art*

Sacred Object Church/Court Art Autonomous Art

Use cult object object of

representation

presentation of

self-understanding

Production collective

handicraft

individual artistic

production for a

patron

individual artist

based on creative

subjectivity

Reception collective – sacred collective –

restricted social

individual –

contemplation

Institutional

structure

religious

community

patronage market

* Elaboration of Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde, 1981, p. 65

Autonomy, accordingly, means different things depending on level of reference:

(i) Culture: autonomous cultural sphere of value following its own internal logic

according to the standard of validity of authenticity/appropriateness: art for art’s sake,

Aestheticism

(ii) Society: autonomous institution of art: individual production and reception,

accompanied by art criticism, and a market-oriented distribution mechanism

(iii) Personality: absolutised creative subjectivity encapsulated by the idea of genius

embedded in the countercultural bohemian lifestyle

Disenchantment-enlightenment

Separation of aesthetic-expressive component of culture from the other components;

concentration on art’s inner logic and value standard; recognition that art embodies

aesthetic-practical knowledge which could be authentic or inauthentic, appropriate or

not; rejection of external systems of reference (e.g. ideal absolute truths, nature or

objective truths) in favour of the aesthetic itself; realisation that art is a medium of

experience of transcendence

Ideology

Autonomy, however, also means that art can now assume a dual function:

(i) a refuge for needs which are forced out of the life process by the purposive-rational

organisation of society;

(ii) making bearable or compensating the negative experiences associated with the

purposive-rational organisation of social life; taken together it means art can now play

an ideological role


85

19 The avant-garde

The historical avant-garde

The historical avant-garde is a radicalisation of the preceding development of art, but

it is also a reaction to Aestheticism: a critique of the institution of art with a view to

overcoming the ideological character of art

Table IV.2: Dimensions of the Avant-Garde

Avant-Garde Art

Use exploration & expression of subjectivity

Production individual as member of a movement (rejection of

theory of genius)

Reception individual

Institutional structure attempt to avoid the market

Contemporary manifestations of the impact of the avant-garde

Art is today understood as forming part of the sphere of symbolically mediated human

practice and thus admits of being discussed and criticised; recognition of art as a

medium of non-reified cognition of the historically specific possibilities of

transcendence; the realisation that art is part of the sphere and practice of

communication and that its validity claim emerges only from practice in this sphere,

without reference to any external source, and hence can also only be redeemed in this

sphere.

Art is a cognitive structure forming part of communicative rationality and thus

represents a medium of communication for: endeutics or the articulation of needs; the

clarification and expression of inner nature or subjectivity; the clarification of self-

interpretation and self-understanding; making need interpretations available for being

related to both purposive-rational processes and moral discourse; contributes to the

communicative clarification of collective goals; it thus relates to the life process and

the organisation of society.

– End –


86

Comment on the Context of the Lectures

This lecture course was delivered at UCC between January and March 1984 after I

had spent 1983 as a sabbatical year in Frankfurt where I attended the lectures,

seminars and colloquia of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas as well as other

events like Peter Sloterdijk’s reading from his work, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft,

(which we also discussed in Habermas’ colloquium) fresh from the press and

organised by Suhrkamp Verlag, and more importantly the 1983 Adorno Conference at

the University of Frankfurt, organised among others by Habermas, to which critical

theorists like Peter Bürger also made a contribution. This was a politically lively and

intellectually electrifying period.

In 1983, there were massive protests all over Europe against the stationing of US

Pershing missiles on European soil in which I participated together with the

countercultural community around the University of Frankfurt, carrying a banner on a

protest march of the Peace Movement through Frankfurt. A number of intellectually

very important publications had just appeared: Habermas’ Theorie des

kommunikativen Handelns (1981); the new edition of Peter Bürger’s Theorie der

Avantgarde (1981); the Festschrift for Karl-Otto Apel, Kommunikation und Reflexion,

edited by Wolfgang Kuhlmann and Dietrich Böhler (1982); and Habermas’

Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (1983), containing also his piece on

discourse ethics meant for Apel’s Festschrift but too big to be included. It was also

the time of the Tendenzwende, the conservative turn politically led by Ronald Reagan

and Margaret Thatcher and intellectually giving rise to the controversy about neo-

conservatism. All these motives were still fresh in my mind and entered the

preparation and presentation of these lectures.

Since the course was given in the second half of the year due to sabbatical leave

arrangements, the lectures were doubled up to be presented in two-hour slots. The

first introductory talk about the course was given on 4 January, while the first lecture

on the place of art was delivered on 11 January, followed by modernity and avant-

garde on the 18th

, Ortega and Poggioli on the 25th

, Lukács and Adorno 1 February,

Benjamin and Marcuse on the 8th

, Bürger the 15th

, Gehlen the 22nd

, the Ritter Schule

the 29th

, Bell on 7 March, and the last lecture summarising the notions of autonomy

and avant-garde followed by discussion on the 14th

of March 1984.

PS

Kinsale

22 December 2010

‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’, unpublished lecture course on the sociology of art, 1984.

Documents

Transcript of ‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’, unpublished lecture course on the sociology of art, 1984.