New German Aesthetic Theory:
Martin Seel's art of diremption
AUSTIN HARRINGTON
A central preoccupation of German aesthetic theorists over the last thirty
years has been with the social and political truth-potential of works of art.
Drawing on the distinctively Idealist and post-Idealist tradition of German
philosophy since Hegel and the early romantics up to Heidegger, Gadamer and
Adorno, several theorists have argued that works of art can and should be
understood in terms of their capacity to communicate knowledge and enlightenment
of our social-political and existential condition. This contrasts with the
eighteenth-century British empiricist tradition and its partial continuation in
contemporary analytic aesthetics, which tends to treat artworks solely as
objects of pleasure or to focus solely on the structure of aesthetic judgements.
Many of the main players in the German movement are now household names:
Hans-Robert Jau§, Albrecht Wellmer and Peter Bürger are well known for their
critical appraisals of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory since its publication in 1970.
But other figures, such as Karl-Heinz Bohrer, Rüdiger Bubner or Franz Koppe, are
less familiar, and there is now a younger generation of writers who have yet to
receive a hearing in Anglophone commentaries. Two figures worthy of particular
attention are Christoph Menke and Martin Seel. Menke's The Sovereignty of
Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (reviewed in RP
94) explores the tension between the autonomy of the aesthetic and the
`sovereign' character of the artwork in its relation of subversion to
non-aesthetic practices.1 Martin Seel's Die Kunst der Entzweiung: zum
Begriff der Asthetischen Rationalitat (The Art of Diremption: On the
Concept of Aesthetic Rationality) theorizes the rationality of aesthetic
experience in relation to moral-practical and theoretical discourse by drawing
on insights from Habermas and Wellmer into our communicative appropriation of
the differential `validity-dimensions' of artworks.2
In this article I present an account of Martin Seel's work. Although Seel has
also written on the aesthetics of nature and environmental philosophy, as well
as ethics and aesthetic aspects of the media and sport, I concentrate here on
his first book, Die Kunst der Entzweiung.3 I begin by situating him in
relation to the reception of Adorno in Germany since the 1970s and then
investigate the basic elements of his own aesthetic theory, concluding with a
critical assessment.
After Adorno
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno famously argues that contemporary artworks must
negate their immediate sensuous tendencies in order to hold out the prospect of
a utopia that resists pandering to the `system of illusions' of capitalist
consumerism and lapsing into premature reconciliation with the status quo. This
entailed a special necessity to think art's relation to critique and cognition,
and to philosophy in particular. Thus Adorno defines the truth-content of
artworks in terms of an `enigma' awaiting resolution by philosophy. On the one
hand, a work's aesthetic qualities suggest a mode of knowing to which the
determinate categories of discursive reason are not adequate; but on the other
hand, aesthetic experience cannot itself impart enlightenment without the aid of
philosophical reflection:
Philosophy and art converge in their truth content: The progressive
self-unfolding truth of the artwork is none other than the truth of the
philosophical concept.... The truth content of artworks is not what they mean
but rather what decides whether the work in itself is true or false, and this
truth of the work in-itself is commensurable to philosophical interpretation
and coincides ... with the idea of philosophical truth. For contemporary
consciousness, fixated in the tangible and unmediated, the establishment of
this relation to art obvious poses the greatest difficulties, yet without this
relation art's truth content remains inaccessible: Aesthetic experience is not
genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.4
Hans-Robert Jauss's objection to this was that by proscribing any element of
emotional catharsis in art, Adorno unwittingly undermined the possibility of any
socially transformative effects for art by closing down the necessary channels
of intersubjective communication that could release a work's expressive contents
into social interaction.5 In a somewhat conventional rehabilitation of Kantian
aesthetics, Rüdiger Bubner argued that Adorno ended only by assimilating
aesthetic experience to theory and conversely by making theory itself aesthetic,
in effect collapsing art into philosophy.6 Karl-Heinz Bohrer proposed that
grasping the emancipatory force of aesthetic experience required investigating
the specific element of shock in the instantaneous `moment'
(Augenblick) of colliding perceptions;7 while Franz Koppe argued that
artworks should essentially be seen in anthropological terms as articulations of
subjective needs and judged, following Habermas, not by the criterion of
cognitive or representational truth (Wahrheit) but by that of
`expressive authenticity' or `truthfulness' (Wahrhaftigkeit).8 Peter
Bürger's well-known argument was that the historical aim of avant-garde art has
been to subvert the idea of autonomy bequeathed to us by the bourgeois
institution of art and to reunite art with everyday life practices, in this
sense claiming that Adorno unjustifiably restricted truth and social import to
the suspect category of autonomous artworks.9
While Martin Seel's reading of Adorno reflects elements of all these
critiques, his chief point of departure is the work of Albrecht Wellmer.10 With
Jau§, Wellmer agrees that Adorno's negative dialectics prevented him from
appreciating the role of the intersubjective linguistic media through which
agents communicate their aesthetic experience by means of syntheses of thought
and feeling. Wellmer consequently adopts Habermas's neo-Kantian `communicative'
theory of the threefold validity-spheres of propositional truth, moral-practical
rightness and expressive authenticity in order to develop a way of rescuing
Adorno's ideas on truth, semblance and reconciliation in art. Against the other
critics, however, Wellmer emphasizes that Adorno already implicitly recognized
the irreducibility of the various kinds of validity at play in art to the one
purely cognitive dimension, and further that Adorno always stressed the need of
any philosophy of art to `strive, by way of the concept, to transcend the
concept'.11 Nonetheless, Wellmer accepts that Adorno failed to make clear enough
how aesthetic enlightenment `comes closer to being a capability rather than an
abstract knowledge, something more like an ability to speak, judge,
feel or perceive than the result of a cognitive effort'.12 As Wellmer puts
it:
[A]rt is involved in questions of truth in a peculiar and complex
way: not only does art open up the experience of reality, and correct and
expand it; it is also the case that aesthetic `validity'
[Stimmigkeit] (i.e. the `rightness' of a work of art) touches on
questions of truth, truthfulness, and moral and practical correctness in an
intricate fashion without being attributable to any one of the three
dimensions of truth, or even to all three together. We might therefore suppose
that the `truth of art' can only be defended, if at all, as a phenomenon of
interference between the various dimensions of truth.13
Seel elaborates Wellmer's suggestions into a systematic account of our
various communicative relationships to art.14 The title of his book alludes to
the German Idealist idea of the `diremption' of consciousness from being and the
mind's resultant yearning for identity with nature. However, Seel starts from
the premiss that in a modern or perhaps postmodern age, reason involves not
reconciliation but division and differentiation between spheres of judgement.
Reason, he writes, `is not the power of reconciliation but the art of
diremption'.15 Art and aesthetic experience occupy one place in this dirempted,
pluralistic conception of reason; they contribute to reasonable social life as a
whole, but also possess their own independent rationality. Aesthetic
considerations can check moral ones, and moral considerations aesthetic ones,
while both can check theoretical propositions, and vice versa. But the specific
rationality of the aesthetic must be neither underestimated nor exaggerated. As
Seel puts it: `Reason which is not aesthetic is not yet reason; but reason which
becomes aesthetic is no longer reason.'16
In shifting the emphasis away from predominantly cognitive critique to
perceptual experience and communication, it could be suggested that Seel here
opens up the utopian aporias of Adorno's work to a productive dialogue with the
more recent developments in social theory that stress diversity of cultural
standpoint. By foregrounding `competence' in the articulation and justification
of lived perceptions and judgements, Seel offers a way of unpacking the idea of
artistic truth-potential in terms of intercultural practices of aesthetic
discourse.
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