Theories of The Avant-Grade: January 1984

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Theories of the Avant-Grade
Presentation · January 1984

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Piet Strydom: ‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’, 1984
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
1
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
2
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
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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
Intellectual- Normative-evaluative Aesthetic-
Level instrumental expressive
Theoretical- Moral-practical ideas & Aesthetic-

empirical ideas & standards: expressive ideas &
standards: ‘rightness’ standards:
‘truth’ ‘authenticity’
Culture Rational Religious Aesthetic-erotic-

(symbolic natural morality expressive forms
dimension) law Autonomous art
------------- -------------------- -------------
Scientific enterprise Legal Religious Aesthetic-erotic-
& technology institution denominations expressive
behavioural patterns
Art institution
(complex of norms
regulating production,
Society distribution &
(material reception, also art
dimension) criticism)
Economy: Polity: Family Aesthetic, artistic,

capitalism state sexual & expressive
bureaucracy practices
Value orientations and action dispositions
Personality Methodical way of life: Counter-cultural

world of work | artistic lifestyle:
bohemia
* Adapted from Habermas 1981, Vol. 1, pp. 237 and 322.
9
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.
10
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.
11
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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
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.
15
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.
16
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.
17
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.
18
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.
19
(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.
20
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.
21
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.
22
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.
23
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.
24
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.
25
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.
26
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, Lukács 101 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.
27
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’.
28
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.
29
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.
30
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.
31
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.
32
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.
33
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.
34
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.
35
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.
36
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.
37
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.
38
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.
39
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.
40
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.
41
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.
42
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.
43
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.
44
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.
45
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.
46
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.
47
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.
48
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.
49
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.
50
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.
51
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.
52
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.
53
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.
54
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.
55
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.
56
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’.
57
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.
58
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.
59
(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.
60
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.
61
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.
62
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.
63
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.
64
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?
65
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.
66
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.
67
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.
68
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.
69
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.
70
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 20 th-
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.
71
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
72
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 world
Objective world: Social world:
facts norms
truth rightness
Science 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.
73
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.
74
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.
75
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
Techno-economic order Polity Culture
Features
Focus Organisation of production Control of force and Expressive symbolism
and resource allocation conflict regulation
Axial principle Functional rationality: Legitimacy: Self-expression:
efficiency equality Self-realization
Axial structure Bureaucracy and hierarchy Representation and Reflexive subjectivity
participation
Standard Utility Order Authenticity
Principle of Productivity Steering of society Ricorso
change
Social structure Hierarchical functional roles Strategically competing Anarchistic bohemian
groups and parties lifestyle
Mode of Technocratic control Decision-making Self-exploration
procedure through bargaining and
law
* 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.
76
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.
77
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’.
78
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.
79
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.
80
(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
81
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.
82
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
83
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 presentation of
representation self-understanding
Production collective individual artistic individual artist
handicraft production for a based on creative
patron subjectivity
Reception collective – sacred collective – individual –
restricted social contemplation
Institutional religious patronage market
structure community
* 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
84
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 –
85
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
86
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Theories of the Avant-Grade

Presentation · January 1984

Towards an Integrated Critical Cognitive Social Science View project

Towards an Integrated Critical Cognitive Social Science View project

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Sociology of Art – Theories of the Avant-Garde

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

1 The concept of society 4

II Modernity and the Avant-Garde

5 The concept of modernity 10

III Theories of the Avant-Garde

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

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

Summary and transition 23

9 Lukács: realism versus decadent avant-garde art 25

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

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

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

Summary and transition 49

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

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

15 The Ritter School: modern art as compensation 66

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

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

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

18 The autonomisation of art 84

Comment on the Context of the Lectures (2010) 86

Tables and Figures

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

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

1 The concept of society

2 The development or rationalisation of society

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

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

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

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

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

3 Historical development of the concept of art and philosophical aesthetics

The concept of art

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

4 Autonomous art in its place

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

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

Theoretical- Moral-practical ideas & Aesthetic-

Culture Rational Religious Aesthetic-erotic-

Economy: Polity: Family Aesthetic, artistic,

Value orientations and action dispositions

Personality Methodical way of life: Counter-cultural

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

II Modernity and the Avant-Garde

5 The concept of modernity

The three modernities: humanistic, romantic and radical

6 The concept of the avant-garde

The two avant-gardes: artistic and political

The concept of avant-garde

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

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

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

The dehumanisation of art

Inversion of the aesthetic intention

finally 20th-century avant-garde art. This law of development – or rationalisation! – is