Why society can no longer reflect on itself aesthetically in the modern age
Robert Kurz
The separation of art and life is an old trauma of modernity. All artists who want to express a truth and who consume themselves existentially in their creations have always suffered from this separation. Whether art shows well-proportioned beauty or, conversely, the aesthetics of ugliness in its various representations, whether it criticizes society or seeks to rediscover the wealth of forms in nature, whether it is realistically or fantastically oriented: it always remains separated from everyday life and thus from social reality as if by a glass but impenetrable wall. Artistic creations are either ignored or they are world-famous as museum objects, dead before they are even born. The artist thus resembles a figure from the tragedies of antiquity: just as water and fruit forever recede before the thirsty Tantalus, so life recedes before him; just as King Midas had to starve to death because all objects turned to gold under his touch, so the artist as a social being must starve to death because all objects turn into pure exhibits under his touch; and like Sisyphus, he always rolls his stone in vain – his work remains disconnected from the world.
All attempts by art to break out of its glass ghetto have failed. Sculptures set up in factories and paintings on the walls of offices remained foreign bodies; literary readings in churches or schools never got beyond the character of compulsory events. When the Dadaists resorted to provocation out of desperation and dragged toilet bowls or rusty iron pipes into the sacred halls of art to mock the bourgeoisie, this offer was accepted with animal seriousness as an art object and cataloged like Michelangelo’s sculptures or Picasso’s paintings. The tautological definition is: art is everything that society perceives a priori in a separate space, in a reservation called “art,” and which, therefore, in its impregnated artistic objectivity, can be collected independently of any content, like stamps or insects. It doesn’t matter what the art wants and how it presents this, its effects are always defused and trivialized.
Art is only “allowed” to return to social reality if it gives itself up and capitulates unconditionally: As the design of commodities and as a culture industry for the domestic use of capitalist people, it can no longer be art, because it then ceases to represent an aesthetic reflection of society and the relation between humans and the world. For design and the culture industry are per se as lacking in reflection as business management: the aesthetic form of the commodity no longer relates to the whole of nature and society, but is sufficient unto itself. But if the aesthetics of the individual artistic production no longer contain any reflection “on” the position of the object in a larger overall context, if it is no longer part of an aesthetic “cosmos,” then it can no longer be art. For the essence of the artistic consists precisely in the aesthetic reflection of a cultural “cosmos,” in which the individual object of art always reflects the whole in a particular way.
Art in the modern age therefore only has the choice of either being appropriated by the culture industry as an ordinary economic object, or leading an “elevated” illusory existence as a dead, unrealized foreign body alongside real life. It is systematically prevented from fulfilling its task of aesthetic reflection of the whole as an integral part of the social life process. And like all its specific problems, modernity has also elevated this dilemma of art to the status of something supra-historical and universal. If there is something fundamentally wrong with the wonderful modern era, then it is never supposed to be a historical problem that can be overcome through critique, but always an irrevocable condition of existence per se that humanity unfortunately has to live with. Modernism also perceives the dilemma of the separateness of art and life through this lens of false ontologization. People pretend that in ancient Greece the artist was just as much a seller of his possibilities as he is today and that even the ancient Egyptians exhibited their images of the gods in galleries and museums or put price tags on them at auctions.
But in the older civilizations there was no separate social department called “art” or “culture” in the sense that we understand them today. The modern structure of separate and mutually independent spheres, which also determines our language and our thinking, was completely alien to all earlier societies. Whatever human deficits, problems and social power relations they had, they did not divide their existence into separate functional areas. Such a division of social life only developed when the so-called economy was detached from the rest of life in the modern era; an elementary change that cannot be emphasized enough. Recent systems theory regards this as “progress” and the previous state of humanity as a lack of “differentiation,” axiomatically assuming a measure of primitiveness. From this perspective, the more integrated a society is through an overarching cultural context, the more primitive it is; and conversely, the more “differentiated” a society is, the more it has split into separate spheres (based on the independence of the capitalist economy), the more “developed” it appears and the more “opportunities” it supposedly offers. This way of thinking has become so self-evident that it no longer seems absurd to see the highest achievement of social evolution in the fact that the functionally reduced human being only represents an intersection of systemic structures.
In reality, however, pre-modern civilizations were not primitive, but highly differentiated; only this kind of differentiation does not correspond to the concept of it accepted today. The old, predominantly agrarian societies did not have a culture, in the way that one “has” an external and random object, but they were a culture. This is even expressed in our scientific language, albeit most of the time unconsciously: we readily speak of the “culture” of ancient Egypt, antiquity, the Middle Ages, etc. and, as a rule, we indicate in this way both the special artifacts and artistic representations of sculpture, painting or literature and, on the other hand, the respective civilization, accompanied by its social structure and its relationship to the world in general. On the other hand, when we talk about “modern culture,” we only mean that particular aspect of artistic forms of expression that have been relegated to a separate sphere and never the social context as a whole. So we unconsciously “know” that culture used to be the whole and not a functionally separate sphere for the edification of the money-earning individual on his Sunday trips to the museum.
In fact, the Latin word “cultus,” from which our concept of culture derives, means both “planting” and “agriculture” as well as “worship,” “way of life,” “sociality,” “education” and even “clothing” (for certain occasions). This multi-layered terminology points to the culturally integrated character of ancient agrarian civilizations. The differentiated contents and forms of both their “metabolism with nature” (Marx) and their social relations and aesthetics did not fall apart as “subsystems,” each with its “own logic,” but were always only different aspects of a single and coherent cultural mode of existence. In modern terms, the description of this culturally integrated existence must sound confusing: production was aesthetic, aesthetics was religious, religion was political, politics was cultural and culture was social. In other words, the social aspects that are distinct for us were intertwined, and each area of life was to a certain extent contained in every other.
One might perhaps be tempted to speak of these agrarian cultures as religiously constituted, because religion was apparently the strongest integrative element of such a “society as culture.” It is well known that not only all kinds of artistic crafts, but also the theater and sporting competitions emerged from cultic acts; more precisely: they were cultic acts of a special kind. But even the quite ordinary activities of everyday life had a fundamentally cultic character; even humor and irony were cultically integrated. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to single out “religion” as the systemically defining moment of such societies, because in doing so we are already thinking of our functional concept of separate spheres. But religion was not a religion in the modern sense either, not a mere “belief,” not a limited opportunity for transcendental thoughts, and certainly not a “private matter.”
We should therefore not simply imagine the religious character of ancient cultures as a restrictive, irrationally coercive relation – this applies much more to the “detached” capitalist economy of modernity itself. In the older civilizations, the religious aspect was at the same time the public aspect and the form of debate – what we call “politics.” It is not for nothing that the Latin word “privatus” has a rather negative, derogatory meaning, which becomes even clearer for us when we look at the corresponding term in ancient Greece: there, the “private person” who does not participate in public life on a daily basis and as a matter of course, is the “idiot.” The fact that the religious aspect is both the form of public life and encompasses the whole of everyday life is not, however, an index of the limitations of this society, as the ideology of modern self-legitimization claims. Conversely, it could just as well be said that such a civilization had much more room for public opinion and debate than the modern system, in which most of society’s affairs are settled automatically and without debate through the mechanics of the “detached” economy. Whichever way we look at it, our modern self-image does not allow us to come to terms with the existence of a culturally integrated society. We have no concepts for it.
In a “society as culture,” which knew no separate functional spheres, “art” must have necessarily always been part of everyday life; it was therefore completely unthinkable as the exhibition of a sterilized and dead sphere “behind glass.” But that is precisely why it was not art as art, but a specific moment in an integrated social context. The “artist” could therefore only be an artist and be recognized in the sense of a technical ability, but not as a social representative of “the” art beyond everyday life. By contrast, in modernity, which is culturally disintegrated by an independent economy, dissociated aesthetics takes on an absurd form. Although every manifestation of life itself always has an aesthetic aspect for people, the “economized” world of modernity has negated this elementary fact. “Work” is not aesthetic, the economy is not aesthetic, politics is not aesthetic, life in general is not aesthetic – only aesthetics is aesthetic. The “fine arts” have turned into a phantom. It is as if the aesthetics of things lead an abstracted, ghostly existence of their own alongside things; just as, incidentally, the sociality of products leads a special existence alongside products in the abstract form of money, which has become an end in itself, and abstract formal logic as the “money of the mind” (Marx) takes on a life of its own alongside the concrete logic of real relationships.
The modern artist’s glass prison consists precisely in this structural separation of the aesthetic. Art flounders helplessly back and forth in this prison; it is no longer the artistic form of a social content and thus an aesthetic reflection of the whole, but a dissociated “formality” – form without a common, socially defined content; thus it ultimately becomes an end in itself and, as “art for art’s sake,” an involuntary caricature of the “detached” economy. But once, in its distress, it has fallen hopelessly in love with itself, art begins to suppress its dilemma by “aestheticizing” the spawns of the functionalist split as such. But if the structure of modernity is not critiqued, but its unresolved existence itself is aestheticized, then bodies torn apart by grenades, raped women, starving children and the obscenity of power can also appear as merely aesthetic objects. Such an “aestheticization of politics” without a critique of the system of divisions leads directly to barbarism. This was the secret of fascism, which staged social disintegration as a bloody Neronian Gesamtkunstwerk.
Conversely, the “politicization of aesthetics,” as propagated by the left for a long time, has also proven to be a dead end. When art gives itself over to “agitprop” – even with the best social intentions – it capitulates just as unconditionally as when it is transformed into design and the culture industry. If art does not want to wither away and fall silent for good, it must make its dilemma public; not by adapting to traditional politics, however, but through a radical aesthetic critique of the existing order. If art can no longer reflect the divided whole positively, it must do so negatively by making us aware of the aesthetic intolerability of the “economized” world. To a certain extent, art must become militant with its own means and demand the subordination of the economy to a newly invented (no longer traditionally bound) cultural “cosmos” in which the aesthetics of the whole triumphs over so-called economic efficiency. Only an art that overcomes itself as a critique of social de-aestheticization can return to life.
Originally published in Folha de S. Paulo on 04/04/1999
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