Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
recoding of the values of contemporary art. Writings by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty have played a central role here in the last twenty years, as have the apparently more avant-garde versions of French philosophical theory, which present themselves as philosophies of the new, such as those of Deleuze and Badiou. There has been an inability to grasp contemporary art philosophically in its contemporaneity and hence in its decisive difference from art of the past. The reason for this is two-fold. The first is a continuing conflation of ‘art’ and ‘aesthetic’; the second is an inability to think the concept of art at once philosophically and historically with any kind of futurity.
Art, Aesthetic, Futurity
The first of these reasons, the conflation of art and aesthetic, so thoroughly pervades both philosophical and popular discourses about art that the term ‘aesthetics’ (Ästhetik) has long been used, and continues to be used, as the very name for the philosophical discourse on art – a practice that was already so commonplace in Germany by the 1820s than even Hegel succumbed to it, despite his explicit recognition of its inappropriateness, at the beginning of his Lectures on the topic. With the closure of the brief, polemically anti-aesthetic interlude of conceptual art, the slippage has once again largely disappeared from view. In fact, it has recently been actively propounded by Rancière’s influential conception of the ‘aesthetic regime’ of art, by which Rancière appears to believe art is still governed.20 Badiou’s ‘inaesthetics’, on the other hand, while apparently the opposite of aesthetics, is actually just a paradoxical, alternative formulation of the radically singularizing vision of aesthetic as the philosophical truth of art. As the description of ‘the strictly intra-philosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art’, inaesthetics is precisely what has traditionally been designated by ‘aesthetics’ as the discourse of the aesthetic conception of art. As Badiou himself puts it, in his third maxim of affirmationist art: ‘The truth of which art is the process is always the truth of the sensible qua sensible …’21
The second reason for the failure to grasp art’s contemporaneity philosophically – the aforementioned inability to think the concept of art at once philosophically and historically with any kind of futurity – has a more complicated philosophical distribution. It derives, in part, from the aforementioned de-historicizing function of ‘aesthetic’ in its conceptual distinction from ‘art’, and in part from a more general refusal of the temporal logic of historical totalization, in its futural, performative or hypothetical dimension, which is inextricable from the critical act of historical judgements of the present (see Chapter 1, below). Heideggerian ontology of art, for example, whilst philosophically ‘anti-aesthetic’, is so in the name of a Romanticism of Being, to which ‘art’ is appended as an ‘original’ appearing. The history of art is thereby subordinated to an epochal history of Being in which the present’s openness to the future functions only as the basis for a ‘return to origin’.22 Ontological in a quite different, but equally unhistorical sense, yet naturalistically futural, Deleuze’s proposition that ‘the work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else’ offers a post-Heideggerian, neo-Nietzschean ontology of art as a diagrammatic construction of forces. Deleuze and Guattari are as insistent on the difference of their ontological concept of ‘affect’ from ‘aesthetic’ as they are on that between the concepts of ‘percept’ and ‘perception’. Yet it is precisely the ontological depth of this notion of sensation that makes it only indifferently applicable to art, in a principled exclusion of both its conceptual and historical aspects, which parallels the indifference of ‘aesthetic’ to the art/non-art distinction, while nonetheless functioning meta-critically as the criterion differentiating art from ‘philosophy’ and ‘science’. The problem is that, today, the art/non-art distinction does not primarily concern art’s transcendental difference from these other intellectual practices (in a reprise of the neo-Kantian discourse of spheres of validity), but rather its difference from the literality of the everyday.23
There is no critically relevant pure ‘aesthetics’ of contemporary art, because contemporary art is not an aesthetic art in any philosophically significant sense of the term. And there is no critically relevant non-historical ontology of art, because the modern art of which contemporary art remains a distinctive development is irreducibly historical in the temporal structure of its significance. More specifically, it will be argued, contemporary art is historically determined as a postconceptual art. As such, it actualizes the idea of the work of art to be found in the Jena Romantic philosophy of art, under new historical conditions. The art history that ‘art criticism [ideally] is’ is the art history of a historically reflective (that is, post-Hegelian) Romantic philosophy of art. This was the legacy bequeathed, in an earlier period, to Adorno by Walter Benjamin. It is handed down to us today, developed and transformed (mediated by the subsequent history of modernism) by Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.24
Aesthetic Theory towers above all other twentieth-century philosophical texts about art. More than any other, it provides us with the philosophical means to clarify the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘aesthetic’ in the context of contemporary art. Yet it is itself on occasion not exempt from this terminological confusion, although Adorno is more careful than his English translators.25 In so far as the present book adopts a systematic philosophical approach to the comprehension and judgement of contemporary art, that approach is thus best described as ‘post-Adornian’, or at least that of a philosophy of art ‘after Aesthetic Theory’. But it is a quite specific Adorno that is at stake: not the Kant-orientated Adorno of a recent philosophical aesthetics invested in the recovery of modernist painting,26 but an Adorno strongly inflected by Benjamin’s mediating concept of cultural form, which in Adorno’s own work rarely extends beyond the social form of the commodity.27 Benjamin’s writings span the decisive years of early twentieth-century Europe, 1913–40; Adorno’s mature work, from Dialectic of Enlightenment to Aesthetic Theory (1944–69), gave them an afterlife under rather different Euro-American conditions. The ‘contemporary art’ that still finds its constantly renewed origins in the 1960s begins at the historical point at which Adorno’s work breaks off, as a series of new departures, which left behind the impasse of that particular modernism that traced itself back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, within which Adorno himself remained trapped. Writing about such art and its conditions today may set out from what Benjamin and Adorno achieved, but it cannot be restricted merely to extending their work. This threefold appropriative, critical and differential relation to their legacy is marked here, in particular, by the transdisciplinary dynamics of the construction of the book’s central concepts: contemporary, art, aesthetic, modernism, medium (/post-medium/transmedia), transcategoriality, conceptual art/postconceptual art, distributive unity, art-space and art-time.
This book thus aspires to be philosophical in its interpretative mode, not in a narrowly disciplinary sense, but rather in line with the ‘philosophizing beyond philosophy’ that Adorno identified as a distinctive feature of Benjamin’s thought. This ‘beyond philosophy’ was, and remains, necessarily at once intellectual and institutional. In Benjamin, its intellectual form was, broadly speaking, that of a modified early German Romantic philosophical model of criticism. Institutionally, it inhabited what critical spaces it could find in the public sphere of intellectual journalism. Adorno mimicked those aspirations, from the safe haven of the university, making occasional sorties into public life (radio), and dealing with academic disciplines negatively, through mutual critique. One task of contemporary criticism is to renew this legacy and develop it further, transforming it again, through critical engagement with the concrete manifestations of an increasingly transnationalized contemporary, postconceptual art. To do so would be to restore to art criticism its central role in constituting the history of art, not simply at the level of its canon, but at the level of the historical temporality of art itself. Today the theoretical register of a more comprehensive intellectual mode of address is less strictly Romantic and more that of a fluid, philosophically reflective transdisciplinarity.28 The place of philosophy as a discipline within philosophical thought more generally is, one might say, at its best, akin to that of ‘laboratory’ constructivism within the history of Soviet constructivism: an experimental activity on forms, divorced from life, and the positivities of other knowledges, in the anticipation – or hope, at least – of some subsequent integration into life practice