The Sovereignty of Art

Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida

Christoph Menke
Translated by Neil Solomon

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

This work originally appeared under the title Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische
Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida, © 1988 Athenäum Verlag, Frankfurt, Germany.

Contents
Introduction: Autonomy and Sovereignty vii
I On the Negative Logic of Aesthetic Experience
1. The Concept of Aesthetic Negativity 3
2. Aesthetic Deferral 29
3. The Aesthetics of Negativity and Hermeneutics 71
4. On the Concept of Beauty 107
II An Aesthetic Critique of Reason
5. Aesthetic Sovereignty 161
6. Problems in Grounding the Critique of Reason 181
7. The Aesthetic Experience of Crisis 215
8. Romantic and Modern Aesthetics: The Place of Art 241
in the "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity"
Notes 255
Bibliography 281
Index 299
2
Aesthetic Deferral
Chapter 1 offered two indications about the character of the concept of aesthetic
negativity. Recall that aesthetic pleasure (from the beautiful), defined by its twofold
distinctiveness, arises out of the reflection of aesthetic experience. Adorno understands
this experience first of all as the negation of the basic structure of the experience of
nonaesthetic pleasure, which he terms "automatic repetition" or "identification." Second, in
the automatic repetition it negates, aesthetic negation discovers as determinate negation
precisely the negativity that it directs against this repetition. When both defining features
are taken together, an outline of aesthetic negativity emerges: aesthetic experience is a
primarily negative event, since it is nothing other than the enactment of automatic
repetition, by which our nonaesthetic experience is defined, in such a way that it releases
from this repetition its own negation.

The starting point of aesthetic experience and thus the object of its determinate negation
is the way in which we experience the nonaesthetic. Adorno terms this mode of experience
"identificatory." The term "automatic repetition," quoted from The Dialectic of
Enlightenment, refers in Adorno to one special interpretation of the basic, identity-oriented
quality of nonaesthetic experience. No doubt, however, the emphasis in Adorno is not on
the automatic nature of the identification, but on explaining the identifying moment of
aesthetic experience as "conceptual." In this context, Adorno's notion of the conceptual
focuses on the (scientistic or idealistic) hybris of the spirit and contrasts its structure with
the two defining features of the aesthetic spirit sketched above. Adorno calls a form of
representation conceptual if its meaning, first of all, is—in contrast to aesthetic ideas—
"statable," that is, if it is statable in a finite series of logically related sentences. Second, it
is thus not connected in a constitutive sense to the letters in which it is embodied, that is,
it can be translated into other terms without change of meaning. Identificatory
(identifizierende) designation of meaning by way of clarifying translation represents the
basic structure of the form of understanding that aims at conceptual representation.

If Adorno's notion of the conceptual is understood in this way, however, it proves

unsuitable for providing a sufficiently general definition of the identificatory character of
nonaesthetic experience. For it is clear that most of our nonaesthetic understanding cannot
be subsumed under it. This is especially true for such an elementary phenomenon as the
conventionality of the processes of representation and understanding that we employ in
language. Adorno's exclusive orientation toward the conceptual reduces the
conventionality of language to an explicit agreement on meaning and thus equates
convention with definition: all nonaesthetic conceptual representation, as something
conventional, has a definable meaning for Adorno. 1 This concept of convention, though,
fails to reflect the fact that the determinacy of representation and understanding in
language, far beyond any basis in definition, rests upon practice (Einübung). That which
can be designated as "identificatory" in the nonaesthetic understanding of linguistic
representations—that is, the establishment of meaning and thus the possibility of
translation—does not need to be grounded in definitions and explicit agreements. This
means that Adorno's idea of the conceptual is unsuitable for designating the object of
aesthetic negation, for designating the "identificatory" or "automatic" quality of all
nonaesthetic understanding. This can only be achieved by means of a broader conception
of that which the diverse forms of nonaesthetic understanding share vis-à-vis their
aesthetic counterparts.

Such an extended concept of nonaesthetically achieved identification can, however, be

designated with the expression Bergson coined, Shklovsky introduced into the discussion
of aesthetics, and the Dialectic of Enlightenment subsequently took up: "automatic
repetition." 2 By reformulating the basic structure of nonaesthetic understanding in terms
of the concept of automatism, the strictures created by its equation with conceptual
unequivocality and definability are avoided. For the concept of automatism defines the
opposition between aesthetic and nonaesthetic understanding in terms of the modality in
which the understanding is enacted or realized, rather than in terms of the structure of
that which is understood (of the contents of understanding). Accordingly, those
enactments of understanding are termed automatic that make use of conventions to
successfully identify the object to be understood; on the other hand, nonautomatic
enactments of understanding are those that consist solely in the process of identification,
without the support of conventions. Even if identification is spoken of in both definitions of
modes of enacting understanding, only the automatic mode is identificatory in Adorno's
sense of the word. In automatic understanding, identification is a result; in aesthetic
understanding, by contrast, it is a process. For this reason, Bergson defined their modally
conceived difference as one of process and temporality. 3 The automatic enactment of
understanding is either totally atemporal or totally temporal in the sense of mere
repetition; its processuality disappears in the result of the process. By contrast, in
nonautomatic enactments, processuality is constitutive; whereas automatic understanding
is summed up in the act of identifying its object, the nonautomatic enactment of
understanding is irremediably temporal. The time taken in its processual constitution does
not disappear, but persists, vis-à-vis its result or end. Nonautomatic understanding is
movement through a process that cannot be synthesized into any result distinct from it,
the temporality of which Bergson described with the concept of durée: "In a word, pure
duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into
and permeate each other, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize
themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be
pure heterogeneity." 4 The insurmountable persistence of the aesthetic process introduces
a nonidentity into the synthesis of its enactment, which destroys the idea of a unity that
recapitulates understanding: "The processual character of works of art is nothing other
than their temporal core." 5

Bergson's distinction between automatic and nonautomatic enactment holds for two types
of processes: the genuinely atemporal one, which can be summarized in terms of its
result, and the constitutively temporal, the processuality of which is irreducible. In
aesthetic understanding, as a nonautomatic process, its processuality is unsublatable,
obstructive to and present in every result. The duration of aesthetic understanding is
simply antiteleological: its end is not the sublating result of the processual event. For this
reason, aesthetic and automatic understanding are not first distinguished by their
respective results; they already differ in the way each is enacted or realized. Or, put more
precisely, they are distinguished by the different constellation of result and enactment that
each embodies. "Automatic" refers to any process of understanding that leads to an end
and can thus be termed identificatory. In contrast, an enactment of understanding in
which the process persists beyond its result does not have an identificatory end; it
constitutes "the paradox of something that is, but the meaning of which is to become." 6
Such an enactment of understanding, however, can no longer be termed successful
understanding or identification. For this reason, the aesthetic processualization of the
enactment of understanding is also the subversion of any understanding-based
identification of its object: "Objectively speaking, however, the immanent processual
character of works of art, even before they take any sides at all, is the action that they
take against anything that can simply be learned or committed to memory, against all that
simply exists." 7

The distinction between the objects of understanding is derived from the distinction
between the modes of understanding—and not vice versa. 8 Those objects or signs are
aesthetic which are understood not by means of automatic recognition, but by the
unsublatable, processual realization of precisely those achievements that, in automatic
understanding, are hidden by the atemporal short-circuit of convention and occurrence
(Ereignis). Objects do not gain aesthetic character by deviating from the norms of sign
use, but rather insofar as an understanding of signs is directed at them that "de-automa
tizes" nonaesthetic identifications. Whereas the theory of aesthetic deviation construes the
otherness of the aesthetic object as an attribute of aesthetic signs, here its opposition to
automatic understanding is construed as a modal difference in the enactment of
understanding. When we understand something aesthetically, it is not that we understand
some other object; we just understand differently. That the structure of the aesthetic sign
might very well deviate from the norms of nonaesthetic use is not of primary importance;
what is important is the de-automatization of the way in which it is understood. And it is
precisely this modal, de-automatizing estrangement of automatic understanding that
represents the act of aesthetic negativity: for in aesthetic understanding, the estranging
transformation of the automatic is the determinate negation of the latter, since in its
reenactment of the identification process it injects a processuality that causes this process
to fail.

Aesthetic negativity, that is, the peculiar de-automatizing processuality of the realization of
aesthetic understanding, needs now to be recast in terms of semiotics. At first, this might
appear to move the discussion far from Adorno's terminology, but ultimately it will prove
to provide the structural basis for his model of negativity. Recourse can be made to a
whole series of approaches influenced by Bergson's distinction in order to provide such a
semiotic reformulation. They range from authors who directly follow Bergson, such as
Shklovksy and Valéry, to Jakobson and Heidegger, to those who offer the deconstructionist
theory of semiological processes. Though none of these positions will be discussed at
length here, they serve to guide the following course of argument.

2.1 Material or Signifier?

The negativity of the enactment of aesthetic understanding consists in its de-automatizing
processuality. The definition put forth by Paul Valéry and Roman Jakobson of the object of
such a process of de-automatization provides one starting point for clarifying this claim.
According to this definition, the object of aesthetic understanding is, due to its
unsublatable temporality, not a meaningful sign, but rather a "hesitation between the
sound and the sense." 9

Hesitation or vacillation, which is what the aesthetic object is, is found precisely at the
point where automatic understanding achieves "the connection between signans and
signatum" 10 that results in the sign. The latter bridges the gap between the two
dimensions of language, between the signified or meaning and the signifier or bearer of
meaning, by means of "codified contiguity" ( Jakobson). The connection between the
signifier and the signified is based on the condition that they can both be identified by
application of the rules contained in the code. These rules that are applied in automatic
understanding are constitutive rules. There are two dimensions in which they establish
what something is held to be: automatic understanding identifies the signifier
(Bedeutende) and, at the same time, the meaning (Bedeutung) embodied in it. By
identifying both according to rules, it also establishes their relationship as a "codified
contiguity." By contrast, the aesthetically processual enactment of understanding lacks
such rules that make identification possible. For this reason, aesthetic understanding does
not result in any identifications of meaning or its bearer; every effort to answer the
question as to what an aesthetic object might mean is confronted by the even more basic
question of what, if anything, in this object signifies (i.e., conveys meaning or is
significant). The aesthetic enactment of understanding vacillates between sound and
meaning, as it hesitates in identifying either one of them. Let us take a closer look at this
hesitation in terms of the problem of identifying aesthetic signifiers.

Our preliminary examination of the structure of the aesthetic spirit suggested binding the
aesthetically signified in a special way to the material stratum of its representation.
Emphasizing such parallelism of spirit and letter does not, however, suffice to produce a
distinguishing criterion for their aesthetic relation. Such parallelism of two dimensions is
instead characteristic of all representations. Due to its semiological structure, all
representation is defined as the linkage of two different dimensions, one side of which—
that of the signifier—borders on the field of material phenomena. Even the term "signifier"
underscores the difference between the meaning‐ related letter and its material facticity.
Signifiers are not given; instead, they are distinct from those things of which they are
materially composed by means of their relation to meaning: signifiers are sig nificant
materiality. They have both a material reality and a constitutive relation to the dimension
of meaning. Signifiers are the result of a structuring of material for the purposes of the
representation of the signified. It is only the relationship between material and meaning
that first generates a signifier clearly distinct from others. Taken by itself, phonic
substance is "neither more fixed nor more rigid" than the conception of meanings, which
taken by itself is a "vague, uncharted nebula." 11 It is for this reason that "it is impossible
for sound alone, a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondary thing,
substance to be put to use." 12 When something material becomes a signifier, it loses its