… is Art cheerful? – Controversial Autonomy and Different Aesthetics

“Life is serious, art is cheerful” – with this memorable sentence, Friedrich Schiller concludes the prologue to Wallenstein’s Camp, the first part of his Wallenstein trilogy (1797-1799) in 1797. Behind the image of cheerful art lies a serious concern: it is about the function of art in the modern era. As Schiller writes these lines, Europe faces significant turmoil. The revolution of 1789 not only brought down the intellectual and political world of the ancien régime, the troops of the revolution also changed the map of Europe. The “old, solid form”, as the prologue puts it, the order of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, has become fragile. War rages in the middle of Europe. The Holy Roman Empire is disintegrating and dissolves under pressure from Napoleon in 1806. In view of these “gloomy times”, it is the task of art, on the one hand, to “translate the gloomy image of truth into the cheerful realm of art” and, on the other hand, to “sincerely destroy the illusion it creates”. Art must not become a false reflection of external life. The “aesthetic state”, as Schiller writes in the Aesthetic Letters, is not an asylum for pleasant leisure hours, but a zone of its own in which human freedom can unfold in the here and now. “Art”, says Schiller in On the Sublime, is like an “inoculation”, i.e. a vaccination that immunises against the vicissitudes of life. It is cheerful training that nonetheless prepares for serious emergencies.

Schiller’s plea for a “cheerful” art that distances itself from political “party spirit” (factionalism) and the shallow aesthetic “naturalism” of imitation is one of the notorious examples of a concept that is still controversial today: that of aesthetic autonomy or the “aesthetics of autonomy”. One immediately thinks of the “freedom of art” enshrined in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic (Article 5, Paragraph 3) (“Art and science, research and teaching are free”). What is controversial, however, is how and to what extent art uses or is allowed to use its freedom. This is where Schiller and our key quote come into play again. Theodor W. Adorno addresses this in his Notes on Literature (1958) to pose the concept at question or to question the concept itself: Is art cheerful? – is the title of a central essay on the significance of art in the present day. For Adorno, this is a rhetorical question, the answer to which can only be ‘no’. Adorno writes under the impression of the Holocaust. His dictum “after Auschwitz, no more poems can be written” caused one of the most heated controversies in the history of literature after 1945. It also forms the central point of argumentation in the essay Is Art Cheerful?. Adorno is harsh in his criticism of the Weimar classic author, calling him the “courtly poet of German idealism”. But this is less a reference to Schiller himself than to his appropriation by the educated middle class since the 19th century, which reduced the poet of the Ode to Joy to a phrase-monger and his concept of autonomy to a mere “leisure activity”. Instead of the “inoculation of inevitable fate”, art, Adorno continued, has become nothing more than a “vitamin injection for tired businessmen”. The “culture industry” is responsible for this, degrading art to a consumer good and thus solidifying the social “context of delusion”. But cheerfulness is – as is so often the case with Adorno – dialectical. It is not just an annoyance but also a special achievement of art. Beyond the “platitude”, the sentence therefore has “its measure of truth”. Art “embodies something like freedom in the midst of unfreedom”. With Stendhal and Nietzsche, Adorno conjures up art’s “promise of happiness” (promesse de bonheur) that seeks not only distance from reality but above all an irritation of reality – in short, aesthetic “negativity”. “The task of art today is to bring order out of chaos,” he writes in his Minima Moralia. With Schiller and against a corrupted idea of ​​aesthetic autonomy, Adorno calls for a different aesthetic that is aware of the tragic dialectic of its own present. He finds it, depending on the time, in the form of tragicomedy, in the plays of Beckett and in the theatre of the absurd.

Adorno’s critique of the aesthetics of autonomy resonates – to this day. For a long time, there was consensus that art should irritate and provoke, shake up, question critically and encourage people to think about existing conditions. But this has recently changed. Art has become a scandal. Its irritation irritates, its disturbance disturbs. When the Zeit columnist Hanno Rauterberg demonstratively asks the question in an essay: “How free is art?”, it cannot be answered simply by referring to the basic law assuring artistic freedom. Numerous case studies of aesthetic and ethical controversies show that the enquiry into the role art should play in an increasingly heterogeneous society is also increasingly controversial. Some speak of sensitivity and responsibility, others of “cancel culture”. Some controversies arise around supposedly “broken words” (the title of an instructive book by the journalist Matthias Heine) such as the word “Indian”, which got a Green-Party politician into trouble and has long made Karl May’s novels suspicious of pursuing colonial identity politics. The subject of eroticism and aesthetics is no less controversial. Pictures by the painter Balthus which show twelve- to thirteen-year-old girls (e.g. Thérèse dreaming) trigger museum scandals. An online petition during a Balthus exhibition in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called for the removal of the – so the accusation goes – voyeuristic depictions. The Museum Folkwang in Essen cancelled an exhibition that had already been planned; in Basel a Balthus exhibition was held as a sign of protest. In other cases, art becomes an instrument and medium of controversy, as recently shown by the iconoclastic initiatives against high art in museums (keyword: “mashed potatoes for the climate”), which can be integrated into the long history of iconoclasm. Art is thus causing a stir – once again.

It is therefore hardly surprising that questions of art and aesthetics have reappeared not only in social debate, but also in academic debate. In political science in particular, there has even been talk of an “aesthetic turn” (Shapiro). This refers to the political “division of visibility” (Rancière) as well as the new sensitivity for “political aesthetics” in the tradition of Benjamin (W. Braungart). The controversies about the limits of artistic freedom led to an intensive debate about ethics and aesthetics. Pierre Bourdieu’s investigations into the social anchoring of taste and aesthetic judgment within (French) society in the 1960s and 1970s had a lasting impact. According to Bourdieu, art serves as a medium of social self-organisation; it is part of a ‘habitus’ that ensures “distinction” – the “fine differences”. With his view of the social inclusion and exclusion mechanisms of art and taste, Bourdieu not only inspired committed sociologists such as Didier Eribon (Retour à Reims), but also authors such as Annie Ernaux (Les années), who was recently awarded the Nobel Prize. In Germany, it was especially Andreas Reckwitz who adopted Bourdieu’s approach and his “theory of practice” (“praxeology”). In doing so, he was able to show how ‘late modern’ society is determined by aesthetic principles that are explicitly or implicitly based on the aesthetics of autonomy: for example, through an ‘imperative’ for creativity and singularity. Conversely, art and literary studies have discovered praxeological principles for themselves and made orientation towards the agents a methodological principle, with the benefit that the concrete, physical and material practices and performances in various spheres of activity can now be grasped more effectively, in line with the motto: “Follow the actors”!

The new interest in the social embedding and ‘entanglement’ of aesthetic practices should come as no surprise to researchers who study phenomena before modernity and the age of aesthetic autonomy. Of course, this ‘before’ is only an approximation. After all, the French Revolution, the founding of philosophical aesthetics (Baumgarten, Kant, Hegel), the Weimar and Viennese Classicisms, and the European Romantic movement which emanated from Germany all represented a radical change. This change, however, was often characterised by the revival of pre-modern elements – see the philhellenism of the Classical period, Goethe’s Faust, or the Romantic era’s enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. Modernity begins with the recycling of pre-modernity. Anyone who looks at modernity, or even today’s ‘late modernity’ (Reckwitz) or ‘digital modernity’ (Rauterberg), from the perspective of pre-modernity will experience some déjà vu. The social entanglement of the arts is not the exception in the pre-modern era, but the general rule. Taste, manners and ‘habitus’ as corresponding to social positionality and participation is already common in the early modern theory and practice of conversation, of “proper etiquette”, with its roots leading back through the Middle Ages to ancient rhetoric. Questions of political aesthetics, in turn, are already a determining factor for the Greek polis societies, which are essentially defined by an aesthetics of presence, sensuality and visibility. Crucially, it is also religion that produces aesthetic acts and artefacts of high intensity: be it in the literary testimonies of mysticism, in the hymns of the early modern period or in the oratorios, masses and cantatas. This refers to objects that have had a hard time in literary, visual and art studies, especially in philosophical aesthetics since Kant, and which have been devalued as applied art.

It is clear that pre-modern aesthetics appears in other places, not in museums, but in everyday life. Aesthetic questions are not only dealt with in theoretical treatises (e.g. poetics, art treatises). They are encountered in unexpected places, for example in factual and practical texts on religious didacticism, in specialist texts such as those on demonology, in grammar, rhetoric or balneology. The production of aesthetic objects also differs from ideas of aesthetic autonomy, which are characterised above all by a strong exaltation of the artist and the work. The “genius” – as has been the credo since the late 18th century – creates a work free from previous models, rules and considerations, art which is self-sufficient, free from purposes, concerns and interventions. Pre-modern aesthetics, on the other hand, is based on principles of craftsmanship (ars), on specifiable rules (praecepta), and on the imitation of models (imitatio) which can fundamentally be improved and surpassed (aemulatio superatio). Pre-modern aesthetic artefacts do not always take the form of a singular, distinctive opus. Speeches, liturgies, processions, table music or firework music and oral-rhapsodic heroic stories, for example, are constituted performatively, i.e. in action. Meanwhile, the Arthurian romances of the Middle Ages, the epigram anthologies of antiquity, or the novels of the early modern period, for example, form series (seriality). Processing, re-use, and further use – ‘recycling’ – are fundamental aesthetic practices. Pre-modern aesthetics is ‘sustainable’. It draws on existing materials, processes and traditions, not to preserve them, but with the aim of creative appropriation and updating. The research of the CRC 1391 Different Aesthetics focusses on this ‘different’ aesthetics of pre-modernity. The starting point is the realisation that aesthetic acts and artefacts always have a double field of reference. Firstly, the production (poiesis) of images or texts depends on the inherent logic of art (ars), on the techniques, rules, models, etc. that are available at the time – we call this the autological level. Additionally, aesthetic acts and artefacts are always in tension with other fields of discourse (such as religion, politics, ethics, science, etc.) and with concrete social practices (‘Sitz im Leben’) – we speak here of the ‘heterological’ dimension.

This praxeological approach, which follows aesthetic acts and actors, tracking down their physical and material quality in concrete living environments, promises a new, more comprehensive and unbiased view of the interrelationships between art and society and of conflicts and controversies – both historical and current. The similarity between pre-modern and late-modern aesthetic practices is always surprising, yet it has not seen much attention from critical theory or the political and sociological aesthetics of our day. The history of art before art, of aesthetics before aesthetics, has great potential for highly topical debates about art, its freedom and its limits. In “dark times” we are more dependent than ever on an art that does not retreat into an indifference disguised as autonomy, but rather resolutely perceives its social functions – serious and cheerful at the same time!