Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Dieter Mersch

Epistemologies of Aesthetics

Translated by Laura Radosh

diaphanes
Series THINK ART of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith)
– Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts
and Cultural Theory (ZKK) – University of Zurich.

1st edition
ISBN 978-3-03734-521-4
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Contents

Introduction 7

Research in the Realm of Aesthetics 17

A Short History of ‘Truth’ in Art 61

Con-Stellare: The Reflexive Epistemic of the Arts 115

In Conclusion: Epistemic Practices of the Arts 165

Introduction

The following investigation should be seen as a poly­

morphic intervention in contemporary philosophies of
aesthetics and of the arts. Our starting point is a topos
that has been circulating for some time: ‘artistic research’
or research that is inherent to the arts and different from,
but comparable to, scientific research. It comprises both
a convergence of art and science (in particular natural
science and empirical research), as well as an adaptation
of historical and ethnographic research methods that
­observe present society from the ‘outside’. Definitions
of ­artistic research range from direct analogies with sci-
entific research to ironic investigations of the same—
constituting a political devaluation of science’s exclu-
sive claim to authority—up to the “democratization” of
the production of knowledge or “research by everybody”
(Forschen aller, Sibylle Peters). Whether its aim is to inter-
fere, to skew or thwart results, or to confrontationally put
forward alternative practices, the object of reference is al-
ways the practice of science. However, the present study is
less interested in a narrow definition of ‘research’ and its
‘results’ and more in epistemologies of aesthetics or the
validity and justification of aesthetic ‘knowledge’. This
shift in perspective is meant to bring aesthetic research—
however it is defined—back to the underlying question of
artistic or aesthetic thought.1

1 On this see also Henk Borgdorff and Peter Sonderen, eds.,

­Denken in Kunst. Theorien en Reflectie in het Kunst-onderwijs (Leiden:
University of Leiden, 2011).

7
 When we speak here of ‘thought’ we must—our
s­ econd focus—set our position apart from classical
­philosophical ideas about thinking thought, in particu-
lar equating thought and concepts or, since the linguistic
turn, the appropriation of thought by language. “Thought
is knowledge through concepts,” as Immanuel Kant sum-
marized.2 Thus seen, it takes the form of a synthesis of
intuition and concept and, as regards judgment, of sub-
ject (in the grammatical sense) and predicate by means of
the copula. Furthermore, concepts and their objects—the
actual site of thought—are based on predication, which in
turn is located mainly in language.3 From the beginning
the medium of discourse has been outlined in this man-
ner, so that thought in other media, for example pictures,
musical compositions, installations or poems needed to
be either declared impossible and excluded or devalued
and assigned to a pre-linguistic and therefore “primitive”
level.
The concept of ‘knowledge’ was early on placed firmly
in the realm of discourse, which meant that ­relevance
depended on making a statement or formulating an
‘­argument’ in the form of sentences. Thus ‘aesthetic
knowledge’, should it exist, must either have gone through
speech—the privileged form of expression in science
and philosophy—and be translatable into speech or it
must remain obscure, an insolent misuse of the word.

2 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Markus Weigelt

(London: Penguin, 2007), A 69, B 94.
3 On this see also Gottlob Frege, “Der Gedanke,” in Frege, ­Logische
Untersuchungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), p. 30–53
(EN: Logical Investigations, trans. P.T. Geach (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1977). However concepts and their objects are always rela-
tional: a thought predicated on ‘a’ refers to ‘a’.

8
 A ­classical work such as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meñinas
(1656), analyzed by Michel Foucault at the beginning of
The Order of Things as an example of the (failure of the)
structure and justification of representation,4 does not
have any epistemic power of its own, but receives the
same only by way of discourse, which provides interpre-
tation. In standard philosophical conceptions—with the
possible exceptions of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, Nelson Goodman,
and Arthur Danto5—there was no such thing as indepen-
dent artistic cognition and, conversely, within the arts the
production of knowledge was bound to a scientific, i.e.
methodological, research process. In this way, discursive-
ness and methodology advanced to become the main cri-
teria for the production of epistēmē. Neither, as we shall
­confirm, seems particularly suited to artistic practice.
As outlined above, the question of what ‘thought
in other media’ might mean, and its relation to art and
aesthetics, has always been a matter of dispute. We will
place this question at the center of our investigation. Our
approach shall be to inspect the ‘meaning’ of thought and
its connection to language and to take seriously the plu-
rality of the medial. ‘Thought’ is understood as a practice,
as acting with material, in materials, or through materi-
als (for example by choosing colors) or with media, in
media or through media (for example by guiding a paint-
brush, by a specific medial ordering, by the use of sound,
etc.), without however favoring ‘tacit knowledge’ as is

4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New

York: Vintage, 1994), p. 3–16.
5 To name only the philosophical protagonists of a debate that
also includes in particular representatives of analytical philosophy.

9
the trend in ­science studies and the history of science.
We shall carefully attempt to avoid any parallelism with
existing concepts as well as their transference to new ter-
ritory. I therefore insist on the paradoxical formulation
of ‘another thought’ that is simultaneously ‘other than
thought’ (as concept/­discourse). This precept aims—our
third focus—to reveal the systematic irreconcilability of
aesthetic research and scientific research and, what is
more, between art and ­science, and even between art and
philosophy. We therefore begin with an aporia, because
the incompatibility, difference, and ‘otherness’ of thought
is discussed using concepts. It is approached by, and can
only be missed by, discourse. Hence everything that can be
said about ‘aesthetic thought’ as its own independent form
of thought is said in a misleading medium. This alienation
is unavoidable as long as we are working to delineate these
differences not with art, but with concepts. This study
has no way of escaping the impossibility of its project or
its chronic ­futility, because it struggles, on a general and
abstract level, to grasp that which can only be shown on a
concrete level. In spite of this, it rises to the challenge of
never­theless ­finding words to say the unsayable.
Our fourth center of attention shall be the site of aes-
thetic epistēmē or the positions of artistic ‘thought’ (should
it exist). The question is how thought might be articulated
in another medium and, accordingly, what the mediality of
this medium might be. By no means can artistic thought,
as proposed by Arnold Schönberg, be seen as the totality
of the work.6 Nor is it, as Hubert Damisch speculated, the

6 See Arnold Schönberg, “New Music, Outmoded Music, Style and

Idea,” in Schönberg, Style and Idea, trans. Leo Black (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1984), p. 49.

10
result of a work that, as a whole, paints a portrait of a spe-
cific manner of aesthetic thinking.7 Rather, it reveals itself
in the form of those practices that ‘work in the work’, the
‘becoming’ of the processes themselves. For this reason
we speak here of thought as praxis and as performance.
This perspective is not without a series of conse-
quences. For one thing, artistic practices are somewhat
contingent—a particular practice does not lead to a cer-
tain goal; there are always alternatives. Artistic practices
can be exchanged, performed in another way or order, or
substituted by other practices; there is no element of com-
pulsion. That is why it would be wrong to refer artworks
back to an acting authorial subject. We are not looking at
artists as independent authors of their actions who are in
command of their practice. Rather our interest is in the
event, making it sufficient to point out the various ‘con-
stellations’ or montage—the particular arrangements and
the manner of their composition through which something
stands out that could not have otherwise been shown or
shown itself. We shall impart particular importance to the
function of the preposition ‘through’. Our interest is in
the stimulation of effects or leaps rather than directional
intentions or calculated efforts that follow a precise plan
and aim for closure in a manner imagined at the work’s
inception. Instead, these consequences and jumps serve
to create moments of unlocking or freeing, and all that
can be said about them is that they happen at the site
of aesthetic practices and involve art’s use of media and
materials. Put another way, this ‘unlocking’ apostrophizes

7 See Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/. Toward a History of

Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002).

11
something that creates an opening or openness that does
not specify what it is or will become.
With this we come to our fifth point, a scheme that is
critical in two ways. First, we aim to transform the classical
concept of knowledge, which is both expanded and under-
mined by the sublation of its discursive connotation and
second, to demarcate those medial practices with which
art both experiments and operates, that is, to undertake a
shift towards aesthetic production. For a long time, recep-
tion and the question of the aesthetic experience was the
dominant theme of aesthetic theories, prominent for
example in Juliane Rebentisch’s theoretical introduction
to contemporary art.8 It follows that artistic production
is a mystery that yields results, which in turn only come
into being through reception or interpretation. Aesthetic
epistēmai are limited to the meanings of the respective
positions. Because hermeneutics has enjoyed a certain
hegemony, despite many revisions and transformations,
aesthetics culminate in ‘meaning’ and the interpretation
thereof, even where art counters the efforts of significa-
tion and explicitly rejects the symbolic.
Similar claims can be made about what is known as
the affective turn. Theories of affect, like those of Brian
Massumi, always begin ‘in the middle’, an in-between
area that marks a transition (to the extent that something
can happen below the threshold of perception) or a sud-
den experience of affect before a subject is given.9 They
explore a primary nexus of relations, a net of budding rela-

8 Juliane Rebentisch, Theorien der Gegenwartskunst zur Einfüh-

rung (Hamburg: Junius, 2013).
9 See Brian Massumi, Semblance and Event (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2011), p. 161–165.

12
tionships that—in a non-hermeneutic sense of receptivity
or sensitivity—we are meant to experience in their hetero-
geneity each time anew as a sensuous event: “a stirring on
the periphery of vision itching for you to turn your atten-
tion to it.”10 Here too, the main interest is in reception
and in that which an aesthetic ‘micro-political’ work can
unleash, not in what the event itself releases; its knowledge
and the production thereof. A focus on the latter shifts our
interest to the production of knowledge itself, the concrete
practices of fabrication (poiēsis) and the media and mate-
rials involved—an erratic search that makes use of things
and the draw exerted by things, without privileging the
concomitant affects or (the processes of) understanding.
A decisive concentration on production means first and
foremost addressing such practices and their barriers;
the fumblings and hesitations, as well as the insolence
of the materials, the borderlines of technology, and the
event character of the performative or that which happens
within and evades the performative.
Two more shifts are implicit in this moment; first an
alteration in the concept of media, because media are not
apparatuses; they do not point to structures, orders or dis-
positifs, nor do they culminate in operative processes or
the nodes of technical networks. Rather the medial and
the performative are coextensive. Media instantiate; they
realize through and by means of practical performances
that differ depending on the situation and context and, in
so doing, put something into the world or induce effects.
Once again, ‘through’ is the focal point. Grounded in
materials, media make something appear; they make it

10 Ibid., p. 164.

13
visible or construct it, folding as it were the ‘as’ of signi-
fication and thus fulfilling an epistemic function without
themselves appearing or becoming graspable.11 Media
tend to appear through their disappearance and disap-
pear again by appearing. Artistic production is necessarily
tied to such medial processes, but it reveals this conceal-
ment, chronic retreat or withdrawal, making the opaque
transparent.
Art thus contains a genuinely self-reflexive moment.
The decisive reflexive act is showing that which refuses
perceptibility, assuming that perception has given the
work existence and ‘colored’ it. When this takes place—
and this is the second implicit shift—the true epistemic
‘power’ of art is manifested; the specific knowledge that
cannot be won in any other way. This is the main thrust of
this book: Art portrays, exhibits, presents, and performs,
but the decisive epistemic modus of these varying prac-
tices is always showing. Key to an epistemology of aesthet-
ics is a detailed reconstruction of these varying methods
of showing. They are delineated through the becoming of
the respective works. What is more, the relational modali-
ties in the prefixes of the crucial verbs—per-, ex-, por-, and
pre-—create a plurality of self-references that interweaves
showing with itself: the portrayal of a performance, the
exhibition of an exhibition, the performance of a portrayal,

11 On this see various efforts by the author to formulate a theory of

negative media, e.g. Dieter Mersch, “Tertium datur. Einleitung in eine
negative Medientheorie,” in Stephan Münker and Alexander Roesler,
eds., Was ist ein Medium (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008), p.  304–
321; Mersch, “Meta/Dia. Zwei unterschiedliche Zugänge zum Media-
len,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 2 (2010): p. 185–208;
Mersch, “Wozu Medienphilosophie?” Jahrbuch für Medienphiloso-
phie 1 (2015): p. 13–48.

14
the exposition of an exhibition, etc. Showing thus becomes
a continuous act of ‘showing asunder’ (Zer-zeigung). This
is what is meant by ‘aesthetic reflexivity’, a term we shall
often stress in the following. Zer-zeigung happens through
the constitution of those practices that are condensed in
contrasting constellations, medial paradoxes or chiastic
contradictions, and have the peculiarity of showing that
they show themselves. That is to say that the form in which
they appear itself becomes visible or audible.
Reflexivity, however, does not mean ‘reflecting on’,
the foundation of which would be intentional conscious-
ness. Rather it is something that happens through mak-
ing art and the concurrent processes of Zer-zeigung. We
are thus confronted with inherent reflexivity a—literal—
turning back on itself or mirroring; an inversion or conver-
sion not only in relation to an object and its content, but
also in relation to the form, the processes used, and the
work’s means, materiality, mediality, and much more. It
is a reflectio in re, a medial or performative self-reflexivity
within the order and constellation of things. It is neither
the artist nor the recipient who reflects. Rather reflexiv-
ity takes place as an event within constellations and their
composition in order to, through them, draw something
out that could not otherwise be elicited. The concomitant
movement is a leap (Sprung), a transition without causal-
ity or derivation. The aesthetic reflexivity in which we are
interested follows such leaps and bounds—passages with-
out origin, transition or finality. It is like an opening about
which one can only say that it exists and that it happens—a
rift that suddenly and unexpectedly reveals something
that had previously been hidden.
From this follows the final shift; the differentiation
between aesthetics and art or, more exactly, a reproduction

15
of the differences in the space between the two. Aesthetics
always has to do with perceptions and with singularities,
out of which it joins figures and forms. Immanent to this
jointure is always also the disjunction of separation and
connection—aesthetics is at best the condition for artistic
works, which mean more. Aesthetics are, so to speak, older
than art, more fundamental and thus also less specific; art
in contrast creates a surplus, an added value. While aes-
thetics operates with practices of drafting and creating
within the realm of the sensuous, the surplus of art and
its epistemic impulse, I hypothesize, is grounded in such
sensuous reflexivities. Thus we are always dealing with
something that at all times, even when the artistic action
understands itself as a performance or concept, equally
addresses and breaks with perception. This rupture is the
signature of a reversal or, better, per-versal (Ver-Kehrung),
inciting both a turn and a return which, in its re-petition,
creates another perception or an estrangement. It incites,
in the true meaning of the word, knowledge. This is the
site of the epistemic core of the aesthetics of production
on which we have turned our sights. Artistic knowledge
thus shows itself to be a reflexive knowledge that is other
than and separate from, but no less than, philosophical
epistēmai, equal to them in thoroughness and absolute-
ness.

16
Research in the Realm of Aesthetics

Thinking in painting is thinking as paint.

James Elkins12

Exposition

For some time now, the supposedly provocative concept

of artistic research—or art as research—has sparked enor-
mous controversy about the practice of art. In one fell
swoop, it has lifted art out of the shadow of science. Not
only has art been given a new mission, it has itself been de-
fined as a kind of research, as an epistemological practice.13

12 James Elkins, What Painting Is (New York: Routledge, 1999),

p. 113.
13 There seems to be no end to the literature, particularly in the
Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian countries, as well as in Holland.
Selected works include: Christopher Frayling, “Research in Art and
Design” [1993], in Simon Grand and Wolfgang Jonas, eds., Mapping
Design Research (Basel: de Gruyter, 2012), p. 95–107; Dennis Strand,
Research in the Creative Arts (Canberra: DETYA, 1998); Mika Hannula,
Juha Suoranta, and Tere Valén, Artistic Research. Theories, Methods
and Practices (Helsinki: Academy of Fine Arts, 2005); Katy MacLeod
and Lin Holdridge, eds., Thinking through Art. Reflections on Art as
Research (London: Routledge, 2006); Annette Balkerna and Henk
Slager, eds., Artistic Research (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Estelle
Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Practice as Research. Approaches to
Creative Art Enquiry (London: IB Taurus, 2007); Henk Borgdorff,
“Artistic Research and Academia: An Uneasy Relationship,” in Tor-
björn Lind, ed., Yearbook for Artistic Research (Stockholm: Veten-
skapsrådet, 2008), p.  82–97; Elke Bippus, ed., Kunst des Forschens.
Praxis des ästhetischen Denkens (Zurich: diaphanes, 2009); Anton Rey
and Stephan Schöbi, eds., Künstlerische Forschung. Positionen und
Perspektiven (Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 2009); Corina Caduff,

17
It seems strange that this idea should be ­controversial.
Ever since Alexander Baumgarten rang in the philosophy
of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, art has been af-
filiated with knowledge and with truth. Such notions were
central to Hegel’s philosophy, and were explored further
by ­Theodor W. Adorno and Martin Heidegger. Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, in reference to Paul Cézanne, insisted that
painting was a kind of “research” and that painters always
engaged in a kind of “mute ‘thinking’.”14 Painting itself can
be seen as a theōria in the original meaning of the word,
a ‘sight’, ‘spectacle’ or ‘vision’ that is always also innately
cerebral. This is by no means only true of the fine arts, but
also of music, architecture, and poetry. Art’s specific way
of ‘thinking’, or speculating in the sense of ‘spectator’, is
grounded in the exploration of concrete phenomena, and
of the ways in which they are observed and become visible
or audible. Each work can create its own universe through
sensitivity to nuance and intellectual attentiveness to
the exact shade and materiality of color, or to the multi­

Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Wälchli, eds., Art and Artistic Research,
Zurich Yearbook of the Arts, vol. 6 (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess,
2010); Claudia Mareis, Design als Wissenskultur (Bielefeld: transcript,
2011); Sven Beckstette, Tom Holert, and Jenni Tischer, eds., Artistic
Research. Texte zur Kunst 82 (2011); Ute Meta Bauer et al., eds., Intel-
lectual Birdhouse (London: Walther König, 2012); Michael Briggs and
Henrik Karlsson, eds., The Routledge Companion to Research in the
Arts (Oxford: Routledge, 2012); Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff,
eds., The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia
(Leiden: LUP, 2013); Jens Badura et al., eds., Künstlerische Forschung –
ein Handbuch (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015). Any number of journals and
web publications could be added to this list.
14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carlton Dallery,
in Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1964), p. 159–190, cit. p. 189. Reference to Cézanne,
p. 179.

18
farious differentiations between sequences of notes, lines,
space, and rhythm. The exposition of this universe—not
its construction—is the result of years of practice (askēsis).
The perseverance of this practice is comparable to that of
­scientific exploration.
In addition, the painter’s or composer’s studio has
been likened to the scientist’s laboratory. Both are sites
of productive chaos, of constant searching, of breaking
off and starting anew, and of the joys of discovery. These
characteristics are stressed to demonstrate the propin-
quity or even secret collusion of art and science.15 But
despite the obvious experimental character of aesthetic
practices, they are not experimental systems as defined
by Hans-Jörg ­Rheinberger. In the latter, tools, log books,
and observation aid systematic research, while art tends
towards the faltering, the chaotic, and the erratic. It seems
more correct instead to agree with James Elkins’ conten-
tion that there is an affinity between the atelier and the
alchemist’s kitchen, in which substances are continually
remixed and boiled down in a testum.16 The art of the early
and mid-twentieth century, especially 1960s performance
art and new music, explicitly embraced the terms ‘experi-
mental’ and ‘artistic research’. At the same time, there

15 See in particular Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Iterationen (Berlin:

Merve, 2005). Rheinberger says here that the “‘hyper-real’ space of
the modern laboratory…is usually closer to production in the studio
[meaning the space in which all art is created] than one generally
thinks” (p.  24). All translations from the German by Laura Radosh
unless otherwise noted.
16 See in particular Elkins, What Painting Is, p.  9: “Painting is
alchemy.” The dirty hands of the painter conjure an instant of meta-
morphosis or transmutation, sublated in the pixilation of the digi-
tal glow. The thoughts of painting are, in contrast, madness or, as
Elkins says, a “psychosis” (p. 147–152).

19
was an insistence on the provisional nature of the artis-
tic process, and on its unpredictability. “A purposeless
play,” as John Cage described it in his 1957 lecture Experi-
mental Music, “an affirmation of life—not an attempt to
bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements
in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life
we‘re living.”17 Like the process of writing, it has no end,
it collapses in on itself and despairs of ever achieving clo-
sure. The artistic experiment has no utilitarian result. It
is content with the adventure of finding the paths that
can be taken (meta hodos), and their endless labyrinthine
branches are a source equally of agony and enjoyment.
Consequently, it is in moments of creation—poiēsis—that
art celebrates the exceptionality of its knowledge or its
alternative epistēmē. This knowledge cannot be reduced
to any other form of knowledge; neither to the hermeneu-
tic knowledge of interpretation, nor to the propositional
knowledge of statements, nor to the discursive knowledge
of argumentation. Neither, although the claim is often
made, is it related to tacit knowledge, the implicit under-
standing of practical experience (we shall return to this
point later). Rather the artistic ‘search’—close not only to
experimentation, but also to the practice of writing essays
(from exagium, weighing)—its continuous exercises and
probing passageways (experiri), are the true mediums of
this knowledge. It is therefore not enough to merely take
in art or to want to understand it or to reconstruct its logos

17 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesley

University Press, 1973), p. 12. For an example from the fine arts see
Serge Stauffer, Kunst als Forschung (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess,
2013), p. 47–50, 179–182.

20
and its immanent aspirations. Instead we must, as the
following attempts to do, meticulously delineate those
effects that disclose art as a different form of knowledge—
non-discursive epistēmē—arrived at by following a thor-
oughly idiosyncratic concept of ‘research’ that takes us far
away from the scientific understanding of the term. Thus
we shall focus not only on the similarities of the research
processes, but also on their disparities, so as to better
measure the distance between them. Our interest is in
the willfulness of the arts, the other side of rationality, or
non-rationality, which is just as legitimate as, and some-
times goes further than, scientific practices of knowledge,
and which must even be seen as a sui generis practice of
knowledge.
Art lacks a clearly delineated territory. At its ­inception
is neither a research question nor a ‘de-finition’ in the
sense of a demarcation of the problems to be worked
upon. Instead, art slips erratically through the register
of the symbolic, which is why no discipline can grasp it
completely; its deterritorialization eludes a unified ‘lan-
guage’ or pragmatization. Art’s activities do not aim at
any particular knowledge, nor do they obey any political
or economic teleology. Instead, terms commonly associ-
ated with ‘research’—such as ‘hypothesis’, ‘methods’,
‘theory’ or ‘analysis’—become chronically uncertain in
the field of art. The claim to exotericism, central to the sci-
ences since the Enlightenment, is here as questionable as
science’s concern with progress and the advancement of
knowledge. The present exploration endeavors to shift the
vocabulary and at the same time elucidate an epistemology
of aesthetics. In this undertaking, ‘labor of the aesthetic
realm’—which can be read as a complement to Hegel’s

21
musings on dialectics as a “labor of the notion”18—is
taken seriously as a sui generis research process. The aim
is to demonstrate three points: First, the arts are related
more closely to philosophy and to philosophical research
than to a scientific practice of research (there are of course
differences that must be elucidated). Second, in contrast
to philosophy, artistic research retains a kind of defiance
which enables us to describe it not only as a different kind
of philosophy, but also as other than philosophy (in the
sense of metaphysics). Heidegger’s concept of ‘thinking’
and ‘poetizing’, which run parallel to one another and need
one another, can help us to better understand this—we
shall explore and critique this metaphor more deeply in
chapter two.19 Third, research or labor in the realm of aes-
thetics keeps a slight distance to art and artistic research,
because it is founded first and foremost on the senses and
is based on perception rather than the specifics of artistic
processes; i.e. it is important to differentiate between ais-
thetics (the science of perception) and artistic practices.20

18 G.W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 43.
19 Heidegger stresses the “neighborhood” of poetry and thought,
which, despite their “close nearness,” are “held apart by a delicate yet
luminous difference, each held in its own darkness” as a “dialogue
between poetry and thinking.” See Martin Heidegger, On the Way to
Language, trans. Peter Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982),
p.  90; Heidegger, “Why Poets” in Off the Beaten Path, trans. Julian
Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.  200–242,
esp.  p.  206; Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt/M.: Kloster-
mann, 1983), p. 163. See also the comprehensive study by Friedrich-
Wilhelm von Herrmann, Die zarte aber helle Differenz (Frankfurt/M.:
­Klostermann, 1999).
20 The word ‘artistic’ as in artistic research is bound to practices
grounded in aisthetics. ‘Artistic’ and ‘aisthetic’ are thereby connected,
even though they do not necessarily refer to one another. In antiquity,

22
We can perhaps only truly differentiate between these two
inextricably linked concepts on the terminological level,
but such a demarcation intimates that although there is
no art that is not based on aisthetics, there are aesthetic
practices that explore the surrounding world—or conduct
research—without achieving the status of art. Such explo-
rations of the aesthetic realm can for example be found
in pop art or conceptual art, despite Arthur Danto’s claim
that they operate only with signs on the immaterial level
and thus work with the sameness of the sensuous and the
non-sensuous.21 Even the development of pop art logos or
poster typeface—flat mirrors of capitalist production and
aesthetics—or concept art, in fact the entirety of classi-
cal conceit (concetto), is just as dependent upon sensory
experience, imagination, and ideas as it is upon the drafts
generated in an endless chain of illustrations and designs.
What is more, research in the realm of aesthetics com-
prises more than just art, namely the processes of curat-
ing or exhibiting as well as planning (in architecture) and
the creation of prototypes (in design). Artistic expertise
is an exception and just one possibility among many. We
shall wander down these two meandering pathways—the­

they are consistently used separately; technē does not include aisthēsis.
Nevertheless technē means more than its translation as ‘art’. Not until
the early modern period, when art emancipates itself from ars and
becomes autonomous, giving rise to the canon of genres that are each
their own labor within the sensuous, do the two become ­interwoven
in a fragile web that profits from the irreducibility of its threads.
On this differentiation see also Dieter Mersch, Ereignis und Aura.
Unter­suchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 2002), p. 10–11, 161–163.
21 See Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box (Oakland: University of
California Press, 1992), p. 5–6.

23
un/familiarity between art and philosophy on the one
hand and the difference between aisthetics and artistic
practice on the other—in an attempt to delineate differ-
ences in the completely overgrown and bitterly contested
terrain named ‘artistic research’. The aim is not only to
clarify that which has been obfuscated, but also to pick
up what has been dropped by the wayside or forgotten
and to integrate it into productive research in the realm
of ­aesthetics.

Artistic research

For clarity, we can map the current discussion on the topos

of artistic research onto a four-quadrant coordinate grid.
The different quadrants illustrate different epistemologi-
cal viewpoints and political/institutional perspectives. In
the first, art is and always has been a research practice.
In the second, ‘artistic research’ is a new kind of art that
stands alone in the post-avant-garde era. According to the
third, science itself is a kind of art that is not aware of its
immanent aesthetic nature. And those who adhere to the
fourth believe that the demand that art should conduct
research professionalizes the arts which, in post-modern
times, have both converged with a new understanding
of science and are simultaneously in competition with
science. Thus we are confronted with a horizontal and a
vertical line of argumentation. One line runs between the
difficult relationship between art and science and their re-
spective epistemologies. The other transverses discourses
in search of practical and political consequences in an at-
tempt to formulate criteria for, or find a raison d’être for,

24
artistic research.22 The ends of these lines connect art and
knowledge and art and science with one another in a man-
ner that demystifies science and robs it of its privileged
position, while according art its own access to cultural
epistēmai and their ‘regimes of truth’. Most of the con-
troversy is between the second and the fourth poles that,
framed by more radical positions, seem moderate in con-
trast and concentrate mostly on questions of genre as well
as institutional problems.
The first quadrant is linked to the enduring and sweep-
ing argument of the truth of art—the next chapter deals
with this debate in more detail. One representative of this
quadrant is Dirk Baecker, who asserts that art has always
“asked questions,” “experimented,” “theorized,” and
speculated by means of “methods and chance.”23 Kenneth
Clark, Nelson Goodman, and Arthur Danto have made sim-
ilar claims. In this view, artistic practice is always a form of
‘research’ involving the investigation of perception and of
media as well as the stakeholders, producers, and recipi-
ents of the art world. Seen in this way, art is basic research
in aesthetics24 and is grounded in processes that bring
together emotions and affects, and their varying intensi-
ties, while also reflecting on the act of creation itself; on
the materiality and palpability of objects as well as on the
imagination and on artistic poiēsis. At the same time, art

22 On this see also Henk Borgdorff, “Die Debatte über Forschung in

der Kunst,” in Rey and Schöbi, eds., Künstlerische Forschung, p. 23–51,
esp. 24–25.
23 Dirk Baecker, “Kunstformate (Kulturrecherche),” in Rey and
Schöbi, eds., Künstlerische Forschung, p. 79–97, cit. p. 79.
24 See Gabriele Brandstetter, “On Research,” in Sibylle Peters, ed.,
Das Forschen aller (Bielefeld: transcript, 2012), p. 63–71, cit. 64, 66.

25
deconstructs the artist as author and authority, as subject,
as social body, as a machine of desire, as a participant in
the dominant economy, and much more. Under scrutiny
is the singularity of the violence or subjectification of our
entanglement in the world; the meticulous labor of art is
to reveal each of these aspects as well as the unseen and
the hidden, and to give them voice and visibility. This goes
hand in hand with art’s obsession, its permanent creation
of scandal by uncovering the repressed, the monstrous or
the uncanny, as well as with art’s unique ability to explore
possibilities or worlds that lie outside scientific explicabil-
ity and yet form facts that cannot be revealed otherwise.
Art always begins anew. There is no finality in the arts, no
satisfying closure, state of peace, or generalizable results.
At most there is the singular, the disturbing exception25
that does not lead to cognitive gains and their supposed
truths, but rather to a break in or destabilization of the
reigning codes of knowledge. This is why Marcel Cobus-
sen has referred to art as an “intruder”26 that disturbs the
order of social certainties, upsetting the public sphere,
including archives and memories. We are referring less
to the positive event of opening to new experiences or
perspectives, in the sense of a creative dispositif that

25 On this see also Dieter Mersch, “Dispositiv, Medialität und

­singuläre Paradigmata,” in Elke Bippus, Jörg Huber, and Roberto
Nigro eds., Ästhetik x Dispositiv (Zurich: Birkhäuser, 2012), p. 25–38;
Mersch, “Singuläre Paradigmata. Kunst als epistemische Praxis,” in
Andrea Sakoparnig, Andreas Wolfsteiner, and Jürgen Bohm, eds.,
Paradigmenwechsel. Wandel in den Künsten und Wissenschaften
(­Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014), p. 119–138.
26 Marcel Cobussen, “The Intruder,” in Art and Artistic Research,
p. 46–55. In the same volume, Nina Malterud makes a similar argu-
ment, with a greater emphasis on perception, in “Can You Make Art
Without Research?”, p. 24–29.

26
is immanent to art—art does not argue by multiplying
potentialities—and more to art’s aplomb and its danger,
grounded in doubting hegemonic perceptions and their
structures as well as in an ability to show up implicit blind
spots, dissimulations or paradoxes. The means of art are
many: provocation, exaggerated affirmation that flips into
its opposite, the formulation of “impossible” alternatives,
and criticism in its literal meanings of krinein (separate,
decide, judge) and krisis (separation, division). When art
is understood as true research, then always as a critical
process that refines its sights on the precarious and the
unlikely as well as on the singular, the inconspicuous or
fragile detail and its fleeting presence.
This apotheosis of a critique can be placed squarely in
modernism between avant-garde and neo-avant-garde,27
which sees the epistemic power of art in its ability to act
as a continuous auto-da-fé. In contrast, the sway of the
second concept of artistic research—and herein lies its
true propagandistic success—stems from the specifics of
a post-avant-garde practice that has shed the permanence
of avant-garde self-referentiality and also differs from all
other historical artistic practices.28 In this case, we need to

27 On this see in particular Thierry De Duve, Kant after Duchamp

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996); Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of
Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performative Art in the Formation of Post-
Modernism (Kingston: McPherson, 2005).
28 This is the most common position. See, for example Stephen A.R.
Scrivener, “Visual Art Practice Reconsidered: Transformational Prac-
tice and the Academy,” in Maarit Mäkela and Sara Routarinne, eds.,
The Art of Research: Research Practices in Art and Design (Helsinki:
University of Art and Design, 2006), p.  156–179; Michael Schwab,
“First, the Second,” in Art and Artistic Research, p. 56–65; in the same
volume: Huib Schippers and Liam Flenady, “Beauty or Brains?”,
p.  80–87; Germán Toro Peréz, “On the Difference between Artistic

27
distinguish between art and artistic research, almost as if
we were dealing with another species, or a changed genre
that has redefined art and added a contemporary, socially
relevant dimension. Or, as Christopher Frayling put it:
“Some art counts as research … some art doesn’t. … What-
ever definition we end up with, it can never …—in princi-
ple or in practice—fit all art activities.”29 While Frayling
was referring primarily to design, ‘artistic research’ has
meanwhile expanded to include all art forms from media
art to design, theater, and film, up to music, dance, and
research itself.30 Artistic research thus seems to transcend
disciplinary borders. But in the diversity of the arts, a new
line of demarcation has been drawn, a ‘folding in’ so to
speak, that divides the arts into the disparate modalities
of researching and not-researching. The application of the
research paradigm itself experiments with and has funda-
mentally transformed art. Art has been catapulted away
from its traditional framework, an aesthetics of autonomy
and of the artworks themselves, into a sphere of social and
political or public meaningfulness. Art “after the end of
art” (Danto) has been freed from the lofty attributes of tran-
scendence and sublimity, as well as from the need to per-
manently practice self-criticism and navel-­gazing. It has
been professionalized, and has become a ­procedure that
makes use of a broad spectrum of ­strategies that, although

Research and Artistic Practice”, p.  30–39; Henk Borgdorff, “Artistic

Research as Boundary Work”, p. 72–79.
29 Frayling, “Research in Art and Design,” p. 102.
30 See Corina Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Wälchli, “Intro-
duction,” in Art and Artistic Research, p. 12–18, cit. 12; and Peters, ed.,
Das Forschen aller. For an example of “democratic” practices of sub-
versive as well as collaborative research see also hackerlab.org.

28
their focus and aims are different, are on an equal foot-
ing with scientific methodology in terms of ­exactitude and
discipline. These methods include ­observation, research
into materials and places, rehearsals, modeling, and the
systematic study of varying sources or experiments in
home-made laboratories, to name only a few. Although
they correspond with scientific procedure, there is a shift
of perspective in that art researches the research or the
methods of research in order to confuse the material, dis-
turb the trials, and question the work as work in its rela-
tion to production and to chance, as well as to methods of
publishing, documenting, and exhibiting.
Such practices are not informed by the classical dichot-
omies of aesthetics from the seventeenth to the early twen-
tieth centuries: between form and material, between dis-
egno and colore, between imagination and rationalization
or between tradition and originality. Rather they are part
of the performative turn that stimulated the transforma-
tion of art in postmodernity. Thus the concept of artistic
research is based on a particular theory of art that aims
to go beyond modernity by tearing down the borders—
entrenched since the mid-nineteenth century—between
art and science. The formation and justification of knowl-
edge is thus displaced and readjusted. This has also been
the indirect result of fairly recent developments in sci-
ence studies and in historical epistemology, which have
attempted to delineate the effects of medial and aesthetic
inscriptions in the generation of knowledge. The aim has
been both to confront the sciences with the reality of con-
tingencies—the many caesura and unpredictabilities of
science—and remind scientists of the logic of intervention
that has always been inherent to cultural technologies,

29
and which subconsciously enters their work.31 Appara-
tuses, systems of recording, and the varied and habituat-
ing laboratory practices and their theatricalization have
a decisive effect on results. They remind scientists of the
indispensability of aesthetics and technology; of practices
of invention, narratives, white noise, and the uncontrol-
lability of objects and their insubordinate repercussions.
This makes clear that the discursivity of knowledge and
of academic research takes place in a manifestly opaque
environment, which has led scientists to become unmis-
takably blind towards mediality and aesthetic conditions.
Artistic research positions itself as a necessary corrective.
It can compensate this lack by bringing to light that which
scientific research obfuscates. This is both the justifica-
tion and the pathos of research in the aesthetic realm. Art
not only describes another, repressed side of science by
illuminating its margins, its outside, its disparate spaces
or its abandoned trauma; art also shows how that which
has been cast aside lives on at the very core of scientific
practices and processes, double-crossing these practices
and questioning their validity. This implicit critique of
science, this aesthetic enlightenment, has given artistic
research such a strong position, securing it a new and nec-
essary place for art in the era of science.
The third stance in this polyphonic debate takes the
above as its starting point and focuses on the historical
differentiation between art and science, which only goes
back to the rationalism of the eighteenth century and its

31 In Iterationen (2005), Hans-Jörg Rheinberger claims that “exper-

imental ordering is the core of scientific activity” (p.  55). See also
Isabelle Stengers, Wem dient die Wissenschaft? (Munich: Murmann,
1998), p. 16–40.

30
ideal of objectivity. Only then did science begin to assert
itself in opposition to artistic practice, which was degraded
as “subjective.”32 During the Middle Ages, ars was con-
sidered the height of scientia, so that the two were inter-
secting—not competing—forms of knowledge. Art and
science enriched one another in mutual correlation. Leon-
ardo da Vinci practiced both and understood himself to be
an artist and a scientist. What is more, he extolled paint-
ing as the most exact of all sciences, claiming that it led to
truth because it is related to the eyes, which see things as
they are.33 The third branch of the artistic research debate
follows da Vinci’s lead. It propagates an end to the hier-
archization of epistēmai and the return to the union of art
and science, conjuring up the old term ars to stress the
fact that both are at the foundation of technē in its mean-
ing as the ‘virtue’ of poiein—making and poetizing. It is
this interweaving of making and poetizing, their intersec-
tion and interlinking in the context of creation, that drives
this discussion and gives it its edge. But the claims go fur-
ther: Art, which rests equally on technē and on ars, is even
better than science, which is grounded only in the former,
since all scientific practices, methods, and discourses are,
in the end, simply artisanship, which is founded not on
logos, but on ‘fabrication’ (technē) or artifice; just as the
basis of language is not the term, but its rhetorical nature

32 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone

Books, 2007).
33 See Leonardo da Vinci “Il Paragone, Parte Prima,” in Farago J.
Claire, ed., Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation with
a new Edition of the Text in the Codex Urbanas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992).
See also Alexandre Koyré, Leonardo, Galilei, Pascal. Die Anfänge der
neuzeitlichen Naturwissenschaft (Frankfurt/M.: Fischer, 1998), p. 55.

31
or figurativeness.34 For this reason, radical anarchist epis-
temologists of the 1970s, in particular Paul Feyerabend,
called for an end to the supremacy of methods, claiming
that, “in principle” myth and science are the same. All
that exists are narratives, which have replaced explana-
tions and their justifications, judged only by our desire to
believe them; just as we tend to believe the phantasmago-
rical inventions and fictions of art.35
This position has been charged with a tendency
to­wards postmodern leveling, and corresponds with the
development of technoscience, which also pragmatizes
science and often makes use of aesthetic processes, align-
ing them with scientific methods. Through these pro-
cesses, the differences between art-based research and
research-based art are obliterated, giving birth to a third
space between technoscience and technoart. In this unde-
fined interstice, the practices of both are amalgamated,
modifying the meaning of both science and art. From
here, it is not too far-fetched to again turn relations in on

34 Here we touch upon a complex area that also played a large role
in Heidegger’s critique of technology. While technē means both ‘art’
and ‘artifice’, as well as ‘fabrication’ or ‘machination’ (but not ‘decep-
tion’), represented best by Homer’s Odysseus, it also denotes the
highest achievement of work or production in the sense of poiēsis,
including its meaning as poetizing, poiein. Furthermore, the pinna-
cle of language is not argumentative dialectics, the basis of scientific
thought, but rather rhetoric, at the base of which is the figure. Thus
poiēsis and technē both lead to poiein and to language in its purest
form as rhētorikē, privileging the artistic in all cases. Plato was the
sternest critic of such thinking.
35 See Paul Feyerabend, Wissenschaft als Kunst (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 1984), a short version was published in English as ­“Science
as Art. A Study of Riegl’s Theory of Art and an Attempt to Apply it to
the Sciences,” Art + Text 12–13 (1984): p. 16–46. See also Feyerabend,
­Science in a Free Society (London: New Left Books, 1979).

32
themselves, culminating in an aesthetically understood
science-art or art-science—a crossing into a new era, a
new topography of knowledge that merges ars, technol-
ogy, art, and science into a single unit; a kind of design.
The emblem of this development is the aesthetic, techni-
cal, and scientific constructivism of the last four decades.
There has also been a corresponding and fundamental
shift in the production of knowledge, which Michael Gib-
bons attempted to diagnose as early as the 1980s with
his division into “Mode-1” and “Mode-2” science.36 This
concept addresses a caesura, a fundamental rupture
with traditional scientific conventions that marks a turn
from basic research which explores scientific principles
to technical, pragmatic science that conducts practical,
applied research, in the main for industry or for indepen-
dent research institutes.37 This new self-image has been
accompanied by the dissolving of individual disciplines
in favor of transdisciplinarity, geared towards the radi-
cal marketization of knowledge. Such processes need the
aestheticization of research practice to drive innovation.
Thus Mode-2 science is the expression of a paradigm shift
from the primacy of theōria to an always provisional prag-
matism based on probability models. The social science

36 See Helga Nowotny, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons, Re-Think-

ing Science. Knowledge and Public in the Age of Uncertainty (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2001); Michael Gibbons et al., The New Production of
Knowledge, The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary
Societies (London: Sage, 1994).
37 Rolf Kreibich, Die Wissensgesellschaft. Von Galilei zur High-
Tech-Revolution (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986); Peter Weingart,
Die Stunde der Wahrheit? Zum Verhältnis der Wissenschaft zu Poli-
tik, Wirtschaft und Medien in der Wissensgesellschaft (Weilerswist:
­Velbrück, 2001).

33
counterpart is the ‘postmodern condition’ diagnosed
by Jean-François Lyotard in 1979 and characterized as a
move from the legitimation to the performativity of knowl-
edge.38 Within this condition, what is said is judged no
longer by its discursivity or rationality, but solely by pro-
ductivity and effectiveness of results, the latter based less
on validity and more on usability, manageability, and eco-
nomic relevance. The debate on artistic research is firmly
within this reference system when it demands that art
should become more professional and latently serve the
so-called creative industries. It is important neither what
art ‘thinks’ nor whether it is ‘artistic’, but only whether it
has a place in the circulation of knowledge and the distri-
bution of creativity.
In his 2007 essay “The Mode of Knowledge Production
in Artistic Research,”39 Henk Borgdorff expressed a sneak-
ing suspicion that Mode-2 science is being used as a blue-
print for the researching arts. However we should hold on
to the specific differences between the terms ‘research’ and
‘experimental’ as used in art and in science, which make
the two incommensurable. For if we compare the types of
experimental processes on which the two are based, we
are confronted with such profound structural divergences,
it seems impossible to relate one to the other. We go into
these differences in more depth in the next chapter. For
the time being, let it suffice to say that classical scientific

38 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on

Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
39 Henk Borgdorff, “The Mode of Knowledge Production in Artistic
Research,” in Sabine Gehm, Pirkko Husemann, and ­Katharina von
Wilcke (eds.), Knowledge in Motion. Perspectives of Artistic Research
and Scientific Research in Dance (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007), p. 73–79.

34
experiments link not-knowing to prospective knowledge;
they start with hypotheses and theories and go on to either
prove or disprove them. Art, on the other hand, unveils its
own phenomena through the process of exploring them.
Among the most important characteristics of scientific
procedure are internal and external control of experi-
ments and a trajectory towards truth. Today the ideal of
exoteric control, born in the Enlightenment, only applies
somewhat, since even experts lack the necessary equip-
ment to test highly technical trials, and are unable to com-
pletely comprehend their structure, process, and results,
much less repeat and reconstruct them. The search for
truth through science retains a chronic impenetrability
that systematically subverts its striving for definiteness.
Hence, science, despite its emphasis on enlightened elu-
cidation, has an irredeemable esoteric element that can-
not be eliminated. John Isaacs plays upon this situation in
his sarcastic sculpture Say it isn’t so (1994). A ‘mad scien-
tist’, who has mutated into a laboratory rat, triumphantly
holds up his “proof” to the viewer, almost losing his bal-
ance—but his test tube is empty, we don’t have the slight-
est chance of analyzing his results. Thus the criterion of
the definiteness of truth also falls away, because the pro-
cess of research can only at best generate probabilities,
the truth of which cannot even be doubted as truth, but
remains systematically unverifiable.
The mirror image of this immunity against skepticism
is an intense focus on the future and a belief in the abso-
lute progress of science—a belief based at best on trust,
which, as which we know, circles endlessly around itself;
we can only trust in trust. Thus the experimental frame-
work of science has become instable at its very core—the
concept of experimentation underlying technoscience is

35
John Isaac: Say it isn’t so

36
no longer based on theories and laws, but on functional-
ity alone. Put another way, experiments in Mode-2 science
operate in a pragmatizing manner. They are not guided
by causal logic, but only by their own constructability;
their final goal is not to generate knowledge, but to cre-
ate stable objects.40 In this way, they are close to design,
as they create artifacts that are based exclusively on math-
ematical models or algorithms. This is especially true of
practical technosciences such as medicine, genetics, neu-
rology or nanoscience. Examples include tumor imaging,
marking substances, and making activities visible; in all
three, explanations are not as important as the possibil-
ity of error-free representation. Accordingly, technosci-
entific experiments are based on computer simulations,
which themselves stem from mathematical calculations
and constructions, for which existences are not the deci-
sive factor, but rather consistent forms. This exclusively
numerical concept of existence recognizes only that which
can be formulated without contradiction. There is thus an
unbridgeable gap between the “real” and the mathemati-
cal, which is why knowledge gained from simulations
can only be reconstructive. At most, sufficient and neces-
sary conditions can be named under which a system, for
example a population of evolutionary agents, can func-
tion. Technoscience experiments do not serve as proof of
theoretical conjectures, but merely aim to create objects
or calculations based on the validity of a ‘pragmatic defi-
niteness’ that can go no further than an unsustainable

40 “The techno-scientific experiment thus enters a space of almost

limitless technical possibilities.” Alfred Nordmann, “Experiment
Zukunft. Die Künste im Zeitalter der Technowissenschaften,” in Rey
and Schöbi, eds., Künstlerische Forschung, p. 8–22, cit. 17.

37
mathematical space of possibilities. It seems that such
experiments, to the extent that they are operating in fic-
tional realms or within ontologies of possible worlds, are
virtually identical to the ‘as if’ of aesthetic experiments. In
this manner techoscience and artistic practice—at least
a certain kind of artistic research—are so similar you can
barely tell them apart. Yet what looks alike need not neces-
sarily be alike. The mirror play of technē, ars, and epistēmē,
and of technoscience and artscience, is like an ongoing
‘intrigue’ with instable borders that can permeate one
another.
The fourth camp of the artistic research debate reacts
to this fraying of the borders between art and science
that has been ongoing since the early 1970s. This faction
orients the practice of artistic research towards scien-
tific explorations, both to partake of its successes and to
measure itself against them. For example, in an attempt
to defend the equality of art and science, the director of
Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor, instead inadvertently
brought the arts down a notch by asking, in conversation
with the historian of science Peter Galison, whether scien-
tific knowledge might not act as a model for a new kind
of artistic competence.41 In so doing he made an error of
judgment, coupling art with epistemic power, whose stan-
dards are set by the sciences, rather than defining inde-
pendent standards for art. This is perhaps the most usual
and widespread art research discourse. It demands that
fundamental “competency standards” be set for art, simi-
lar to research principles, and simultaneously adapted to

41 “How might science provide a model for a new kind of artistic

competence?” In: Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara Vanderlinden, Labo-
ratorium (DuMont, Antwerpen: Open Roomade, 2001), p. 101.

38
the new university curricula dictated by the Bologna Pro-
cess. The implementation of such standards goes hand-
in-hand with a call for professionalization and for recog-
nition of the “occupation” of the artist, as well as for the
creation of a PhD specifically for the arts, breaking with
an apotheosis of autonomy that is more than two hundred
years old in order to—ideologically—reconnect it with
the practice of early modern artists’ studios. Except that
now artists are not vassals to nobility, but enslaved to the
ruthless dynamics of a relentless capitalist economy. The
highly explosive nature of this institutional scheme lies in
the supposed objection of the arts to the hegemony of the
sciences, in particular the technosciences, as dominating
power. However while it may be an expression of art’s inde-
pendent value and a call for a sovereign zone within aca-
demia and its universitas, it is flanked by such a plethora
of legal definitions that a dual trap has been created. On
the one hand, there is an attempt to determine the inde-
terminate and, on the other hand, to subsume the arts
under science’s dispositif of legitimation, turning artistic
“research” into nothing more than a servant of technical
and scientific standards and their directives.
An examination of varying international ‘artistic
re­search’ programs and their frameworks quickly shows
the extent to which conventional scientific standards have
been adapted to fit the arts. Norway’s law of higher educa-
tion, for example, puts artistic and scientific research on
an equal footing and recognizes the former as the founda-
tion for education in aesthetics.42 However the provisions

42 The most radical definition of artistic research can be found

in the 2007 report written for the Norwegian Association of Higher
Education Institutions, Focus on Artistic Research: “A strong element

39
of the same law—as in other countries with a similar
institutional recognition of artistic research—are bla-
tantly oriented towards the latter. Guiding principles are
provided by national and international research councils.
The OECD and the British Research Assessment Exercise
and Arts and Humanities Research Council, which deal
with scientific rigor, understand “research” as an “origi-
nal investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge
and understanding.”43 Further criteria include clear
methodology, and the reproducibility and publication of
results. These definitions are taken verbatim for artistic
research, for example in the Netherlands, where academic
recognition of a doctor artium is coupled with the presen-
tation of a research proposal including clearly formulated
questions,44 or in Finland, where demands are made that

of reflection is embedded in all practices, performing as well as cre-

ative: ideas and actions are tested out and developed in a steady flow,
methods are involved and applied or refused, and results are assessed
according to intensions and ideas. This is all based within a large
field of knowledge and skills. Reflection is always implicit in the art-
ist’s work – sometimes also explicit.” The report takes this idea even
further: “The work of art is independent and a conveyor of meaning in
its own language and form, and its discursive relation to other works
and its cultural contexts. Artistic expressions can be read by peers
just as, for example, philosophy can be read by philosophers. Artistic
expressions are intellectual, creative, and skillful on their own prem-
ises and do not need translation to other languages to communicate
meaning and context.” Cited in Nina Malterud, “Can You Make Art
without Research?” in Art and Artistic Research, p. 24–29, cit. 26, 27.
43 Research Assessment Exercise, 2008 Guidance on Submissions,
Annex B, June 2005, accessed Dec. 11, 2014, http://www.rae.ac.uk/
Pubs/2005/03/rae0305.doc.
44 Borgdorff, “Die Debatte über Forschung in der Kunst,” p.  26;
Borgdorff, “Artistic Research and Academia: An Uneasy Relationship.”
See also Giaco Schiesser, “What is at stake / Qu’est-ce qu l’enjeu? Par-
adoxes / Problematics / Perspectives in Artistic Research Today,” in:

40
artistic research include a written account of the work.45
It is easy to find similar examples of scientific paradigms
that call for “result-oriented” research or for “documenta-
tion” that objectifies artistic processes and makes them
available to critical scrutiny. This of course privileges
the clear result, barring both the incalculable as well as
unforeseen or unforeseeable coincidences, which have
played a major role in neo-avant-garde art. It also fails
to encompass Aristotelian empeiría, the observation of
phenomena, which is not necessarily result-oriented, but
geared towards increasing attentiveness. When formal-
ized criteria are nevertheless set for art PhDs, despite all
of these ontological, epistemological, and methodologi-
cal differences between art and science, then, as a rule,
the fundamentals of scientific research are simply rep-
licated and adapted for aesthetic practices, without any
clarification of what this might mean in an art context.46
Concomitantly, the dominant discourse is as a rule too
narrow and sets too many preconditions. For one, there
is a focus on establishing university-like training pro-
grams with regulations similar to those for the sciences,
programs that reinstate outdated scientific standards
and dispositifs. In this way, the concept of ‘research’ in
art is contaminated from the beginning. This also holds
true for those approaches that, in the name of ‘practice-
led research’, focus on practical as opposed to theoreti-
cal knowledge, while still postulating a latent disparity

G. Bast, E.G. Carayannis, and D. F. Campell, eds., Art, Research, Inno-

vation and Society (New York: Springer, 2015), p. 197–209.
45 See Hannula, Suoranta, and Valén, Artistic Research. Theories,
Methods and Practices, p. 165.
46 See, for example, Borgdorff, “Die Debatte über Forschung in der
Kunst,” p. 34.

41
between the two. David Carr and Donald Schön, for exam-
ple, have (from different perspectives) traced the distinc-
tiveness of artistic knowledge and practical reasoning.47
This in turn can be connected, as Henk Borgdorff has
done, to Aristotelian phronēsis.48 But Borgdorff links this
not to the esprit or wit of the eighteenth century, to which
one might ascribe an inherent cognizance, but rather to
implicit or “unarticulated,” “embodied” knowledge, an
incomplete discursive concept that lacks a solid founda-
tion.49 Reference is repeatedly made to Michael Polanyi’s
concept of ‘tacit knowledge’—knowing how rather than
knowing that—which one must however be able to recon-
struct in language if its validity is to be discussed, so that
the telos of putting into words remains dominant.50 This
is particularly clear when a difference is made between
the artistic doxa as an epistēmē that cannot be general-
ized and theōria as true scientific knowledge—reinstat-
ing the old hierarchies through the back door.51 It is as if
aesthetic epistēmē has been closed in and domesticated
by discourse, as if the professionalization of art has been
bought by subordinating it to the laws of language and
judgment. But artistic knowledge is neither prereflexive
nor prelinguistic, it is simply unsayable. Rather it is just as

47 See for example David Carr, “Practical Reasoning and Knowing

How,” Journal of Human Movement Studies 4 (1978): p.  3–20; Carr,
“Art, Practical Knowledge and Aesthetic Objectivity,” Ratio 12/3
(1999): p. 240–256; and Donald Schön, The Reflexive Practitioner: How
Professionals Think in Action (New York: Basic Books, 1982).
48 Borgdorff, “Die Debatte über Forschung in der Kunst,” p. 38–39.
49 Ibid., p. 44.
50 See Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Anchor,
1967).
51 See Mats Rosengren, “Art + Research ≠ Artistic Research,” in Art
and Artistic Research, p. 106–115, cit. 106, 109–110.

42
 presentable as it is reflexive—it shows itself asunder (sich
zer-zeigend).52
Christopher Frayling (1993) therefore rightly stated
in “Research in Art and Design” that a distorted image
of scientific research informs the debate, narrowing the
definition.53 The arts have voluntarily subsumed them-
selves under a cliché, turning art itself into a caricature.
However, this is not true for the first and third quadrant
of the debate, which do not place art below science, but
put them at the same level or even put art on top.  Art is
­particularly well-geared towards criticizing that which crit-
ical intervention abhors, as it threatens its core. In some
ways, this conviction coincides with critiques of rational-
ity, ubiquitous in postmodern philosophy, and expresses
itself in an artistic reflexivity that undermines science and
scientific methods. One example would be the Yes Men,
founded by Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, who imper-
sonate ­industry representatives and as such are invited to
conferences where they, complete with all the accouter-
ments of ­modern science (including the rhetoric), give
talks that bring the economic consequences of modern
­technoscience to their hyperbolic logical conclusion.54
In the Yes Men’s relentless politics of aesthetic inversion,
affirmation flips and becomes negation. The same could be
said for John Isaacs’ grotesque sculptures, whose pseudo-
scientific positions do not refute real ­scientific practices.

52 On this see Dieter Mersch, “Die Zerzeigung. Über die ‘Geste’

des Bildes und die ‘Gabe’ des Blicks,” in Ulrich Richtmeyer, Fabian
­Goppelsröder, and Toni Hildebrandt, eds., Bild und Geste. Figura-
tionen des Denkens in Philosophie und Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript,
2014), p. 15–44.
53 Frayling, “Research in Art and Design,” p. 99–100.
54 See theyesman.org and YesLab.org.

43
Rather they audaciously use exaggeration in an attempt
to shed light on the hidden side of science, its promises
of power and banal interests. Hannes Rickli also works
in this vein, albeit quite differently, when he collects the
rejected output of digital data collection, data which liter-
ally shows ‘nothing’, and exhibits it, thus using ­aesthetic
reflection to turn latent or unrecognizable aspects of tech-
nology back into something recognizable.55

Art thinks

Strangely enough, the question of the epistemic in art and

of an epistemology of aesthetics has not yet been touched
upon in this discussion. Rather the focus has instead been
on the relationship between knowledge and art, on the ex-
tent to which art is a kind of knowledge and on what kind of
knowledge or research art is, without subsuming it under
or making it the direct object of the scientific concept of
research. In no way is the current study meant to reject the
concept or usefulness of artscience. Instead it is an inter-
rogation of art itself. The question is whether art creates
(poiein) knowledge at all, and if so, how art and epistēmē go
together, or, in the codified language of metaphysics, how
aisthēsis and truth interact or conflict with one another.
Before institutionalizing PhDs in art, thus shifting the
practical and discursive axes of art and science, we should
first pose the philosophical question and remember that
knowledge is based on thought.

55 See Hannes Rickli et al., eds., Videogramme. Die Bildwelten bio­

logischer Experimentalsysteme als Kunst- und Theorieobjekt (Zurich:
Scheidegger & Spiess, 2011).

44
 Since antiquity, the concept of ‘thought’ has been
predicated on ‘dialectics’ or ‘exegesis’ in the sense of
‘speaking out’ or ‘leading out’, open to interpretation
and thus to discussion. From the beginning, language is
hence the ruling regime; knowledge and the truth thereof
are subject to the sentence or, more precisely, to the apo-
phantic judgment and its interpretation. Only that which
can be expressed clare et distincte, as Descartes later put
it, is recognized and categorized as coherent, and there-
fore also discursive, and meaningful. Theaomai, theōria,
and theatron—‘to gaze’, ‘to contemplate’ or ‘look upon’,
and ‘insight’ or ‘clarity’ of meaning (as in ‘clearly defined’
or ‘in front of your eyes’)—all of these sight/thought meta-
phors for seeing rest on videre and its unsurpassed ‘evi-
dence’, but only to insist on their position as coming after
logos and the replicability of the sign. Thought then takes
place only within a schema or within propositional speech
or at the site where differentiations that make differences
can be made—where the real has always been subject to
primary classification, that is to say to the texture of the
symbolic and its discrimination.
In comparison, the stringency of artistic labor, its con-
scientiousness and care, is of another nature. Clearly, it
works with perception or the perceivable, so that knowl-
edge correlates with that which can be comprehended
by the senses before it is expressed in an argument or, as
Jacques Derrida would have it, changed by writing and dif-
ference.56 Nevertheless it is not only, as one might think,
about opening up possible experiences or ­reproducing

56 On the recalcitrance of art in contrast to the scripturality of the

sign, see most recently Mira Fliescher, “Signatur, Malerei, Alterität,”
Medienphilosophisches Jahrbuch 1/1 (2015): p. 67–94.

45
that which can be perceived. Art does not present any
examples of overwhelming—or of monstrosity, to stay
in the realm of fascination. Rather art aims to reflect the
­perceivable through perception, and the experiential
through experience; to push these to their margins or peri­
pheries where their aporia and caesura become visible.
That is why the ordering of argumentation, justification,
and applicability—and the opposites thereof—cannot be
paradigms for aesthetic practice. Art does not enter the
slim space between truth and falsity, just as little as art
could be rejected for being ‘false’, ‘immoderate’ or ‘insuf-
ferable’. Artistic work shows. Showing has no true-false
dichotomies. Rather it is subsumed in a ‘conjunctional-
ity’; a sum of ‘this’, and ‘this’, and ‘this’, and so on. It does
not compete with, surpass or supplant other works in the
way that scientific theories are displaced by those that
later prove or demonstrate their own superiority. Rather
the power of art57 stems from a sudden heuristics, a jump-
ing out at, an unexpected perspective or the Beuysian leap
to the side that makes use of ‘a-logic’ and inconsisten-
cies within aisthēsis, creating its own ‘evidence’. In this
way we are dealing with—similar to philosophy—another
thought, another way of thinking or something other
than thought (in its metaphysical meaning). This begs the
questions of what ‘research’ might mean in connection to
art. Is research an adequate term in this context and what
is the relation of such thought—other-than-metaphysical-

57 On the topos of ‘power’ in art and rhetoric see Jean-François Lyo-

tard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Green (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993); Christoph Menke, Kraft. Ein Grund-
begriff ästhetischer Anthropologie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2008);
Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013).

46
thought—to the distinguished labels ‘knowledge’ and
‘truth’? Traditional philosophy closed the door on these
and similar speculations by rejecting aisthēsis as inca-
pable of truth, and thus separating thought and aesthet-
ics. Is not all perception particularly subject to deception?
Hegel, in his polemic against the singularity of percep-
tion, claimed that it believes merely in the “present,” in
the “moment,” only to quickly again become “stale.”58 The
same could be said for witnessing and witnesses, who may
be recognized and questioned as authorities in a court of
law, but whose trustworthiness is always taken with reser-
vation, because witnessing relies on sight and on the other
senses.59 For this reason, must there not first have been a
cut placing, so to speak, other media within perception as
an as, deferring (differencing) and creating ‘distantiality’
(Abständigkeit) through a system of caesura (différance) to
first make perception capable of attaining knowledge?60

58 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.

A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 84ff.
59 For examples of the discourse on witnessing see Jean-Luc Nancy,
“Un souffle/Ein Hauch,” in Nicolas Berg, Jess Jochimsen, and Bernd
Stiegler, eds., Shoah. Formen der Erinnerung. Geschichte, Philosophie,
Literatur, Kunst (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), p. 122–129; ­Giorgio
Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New
York: Zone Books, 1999). A differentiation should be made in par-
ticular between witnessing in the sense of testis, a third person who
acts as a witness for others, and the survivor, the superstes, who
speaks for herself. Agamben’s discussion of the impossibility of
bearing witness is at the exact center of witnessing and self-witness,
between the futility and necessity of witnessing, an example of the
latter being court testimony that delivers the decisive facts or argu-
ments. On this see also Eva Geulen, Giorgio Agamben zur Einführung
(Hamburg: Junius, 2009), p. 129–130.
60 Here one could regret Jacques Derrida’s manifest disinterest
in perception, which he always thought of as already cut, made into

47
From the beginning, philosophy has therefore been skep-
tical of perception as a source of knowledge, at the latest
since Descartes’ rationalist arguments. Thus the achieve-
ments of art, which are always based on perception, were
doubted from the beginning. At best art was seen as an
illusory appearance (Scheinhaftigkeit—Hegel) or at worst,
a “lie” (Nietzsche).61 But then how does art unleash its
disturbing effect, its long-lasting irritation not only of the
senses, but often also of the very foundations of thought,
making logos rather than aisthēsis vulnerable to decep-
tion and pulling both into an abyss, a common night? Per-
haps we should cite not only Hegel but also Heidegger and
Adorno, who both spoke of ‘truth in art’, according art’s
labor of the aesthetic and the aisthetic a place side-by-side
with philosophy and science. Put another way, when and
how does a practice ‘beyond’ discursiveness and language
begin to become another, other-than-conceptual thought
that nevertheless has its own legitimacy or necessity? How
can we describe what happens between philosophy, art,
and science? How do their respective functions concede
that art is irreducible in concert with each of the others,
guaranteeing art its own essential mark on the scale of
those epistēmai that Hegel, as regards their closeness to
the absolute, believed to be hierarchical? And, finally,
what is the relation of this exploration to art itself, which
does not seem to care about the answer in its continuous,
rapturous frenzy?

a caesura, and thus subject to différance. Perception is then only

‘given’ if writing goes before it, that is if there has been a differentiat-
ing ­system of ordering.
61 Even though, one should add, Nietzsche esteemed both illusion
and lies, regarding them as ‘indispensable’.

48
 Of essence is the question of what kind of thought
other-than-conceptual thought—particularly when it is
apostrophized as ‘non-propositional’ or ‘non-discursive’
thought62—might be, and what kind of knowledge it
might induce. This focus comprises a two-fold shift from
our starting point; the debate on art as research. First, it
rejects the manifest scientific characterization of the term
‘research’ and lays the foundations where they belong—in
the promise of an epistemology of aesthetics grounded
first and foremost in the recognition of practices, whereby
art differentiates itself from both philosophy and sci-
ence. Knowledge in practice does not in any way change
the problematic topos of ‘implicit’ or ‘tacit’ knowledge,
but it does bring epistemic processes back to the theory-
practices of aesthetic reflexivity. Second, this change of
perspective avoids reducing the arts to its particularities or
mystifications by returning to its foundations. Rather than
calling on the artistic in the arts, it seeks to ground itself
in aisthetics and in an ecology of perceptions in order to
expose perception’s inherent potential to think or to know.
The following chapters should be read as an attempt at
such a shift. Although they repeatedly refer to art and to
exemplary artworks, these explorations are meant as para-
digms on which we can school and delineate our thoughts
to reveal, through radical examples, forms of knowledge.
Inseparable from these investigations is the other
central and still unanswered question of what aesthetic
‘research’ might mean as a specific mode of thought. In

62 For a more detailed exploration see Dieter Mersch, “Nicht-­Pro­

positionalität und ästhetisches Denken,” in Florian Dombois et al.,
Ästhetisches Denken. Nicht-Propositionalität, Episteme, Kunst (Zurich:
diaphanes, 2014), p. 28–55.

49
his seminal essay, Christopher Frayling early on distin-
guished between three modes of research, “research into,”
“research through” and “research for” art and design.63
The prepositions mark the different vectors through
which varying ‘folds’ of knowledge become visible. Into
refers simply to research in objectifying foundations, for
example when a discipline such as art history makes art
the object of its inquiry. This perspective on, this look into
art aims to define the indefinable or find terms to grasp the
ungraspable. Through art, on the other hand, denotes the
many special sciences that accompany artistic design—
materials science for design, chromatics for painting,
geometry for visual perspective or acoustics in the case of
tonal structure. They act as reference lines, so to speak,
and prepare a background against which artistic ‘results’
can arise from drafts. This is quite different from research
for art—­research that feeds art and results in art for art’s
sake. However, as useful as Frayling’s categorization is, for
the sake of clarity I propose exchanging the prepositions
‘for’ and ‘through’. The distinct facet of research through
art (Latin per and Greek dia), is that it addresses medial-
ity as the performative of instauration, the strength of
which is that it brings or puts something into the world
or creates (poiein), so that art itself becomes a means of
producing knowledge. ‘Per-/Dia-’ must, however, be differ-
entiated from ‘com-‘, ‘meta-‘ or ‘trans-‘, the common pre-
fixes for media or mediation in the sense of communica-
tion or translation, transmission or transition,64 because

63 Frayling, “Research in Art and Design,” p. 5.

64 On the difference between ‘meta’ and ‘dia’ or ‘with’ and ‘through’
in the medial see also Dieter Mersch, “Meta/Dia. Zwei unterschiedli-
che Zugänge zum Medialen.”

50
these processes delineate a transformation and create a
meta-basis, a transition that takes place without reason
or causality. The relation they describe takes the form of
a leap, a ‘transcendence’ or a sudden displacement. These
should be looked at using the figures of immanence dia
or per, which exist in the instantiation of effects and take
place in the world. We must reconstruct art as a medium
of knowledge from this starting point. To put it another
way, an epistemology of aesthetics that is rooted in praxis
must delineate exactly those performative elements which
generate the power of reflexivity within the aesthetic, that
is, within the perceivable. Aesthetic knowledge is reflex-
ive knowledge and the epistēmē of art is the result of such
practices. Artistic knowledge takes many forms and can-
not be canonized. It is closed to all forms of causality.
­Nevertheless, it exhibits typical strategies such as inter-
ruption and the staging of disruption. It thrives on the
establishment of katastrophē, revolution which stems
from tensions, rifts or dissonances and is in turn able to
create evidence and give pause for thought. It is, in other
words, ‘excedent’ (exzedentisches) knowledge, a passage-
way made out of discards that come from gaps, unbridge-
able tears and interstices that cannot be worked on or
represented, and that constantly evade discursive recon-
struction. Its dual character—the simultaneity of preci-
sion at work and the impossibility of coding or classifying
the manner of work—shall prove to be constitutive for the
epistemology of aesthetics.
This finding brings us back to the understanding of
‘artistic research’, the ‘nature’ of which is so different
from scientific research that it seems wrong to subsume
both under the same term. Heidegger argued that “the
essence of what is today science is research,” character-

51
ized by “projection,” “rigor” and “securing” results.65 But
exactly the opposite is true for aesthetic processes, which
delve into the realm of the uninsurable and are an ex-peri-
ence or journey of no return, an entanglement within the
world that repeatedly becomes tangled along the way. And
although there are no ‘results’, in the course of this pro-
cess all participants are nevertheless turned into Others.
While science takes place through investigation, it is not,
as Heidegger stressed in “The Age of the World Picture,”
the experiment that makes the research, but the other way
around. It is research that comes first and determines and
gives stature to the experiment.66 The scientific system is
the medium through which experiments are first consti-
tuted; “only because contemporary physics … is essentially
mathematical [is it] capable of being experimental.”67 In
the arts, this relation is turned around; it is the experiri
of the experimentum that is the medium through which
artistic research takes place. Surrender to the event and
its experience demarcates art and its key elements: first,
singularity; second, the alterity within iteration; and third,
passio or passibility and their precedence over actio. And
while Heidegger went on to say, in reference to scientific
research, that “to set up an experiment is to set up a con-
dition,” which includes setting up a law and controlling
the frame of reference,68 aesthetic research decontrols
the conditions and opens them for other states. It seeks

65 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Heidegger,

Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 57.
66 Ibid, p. 61.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.

52
out the unexpected or the strange, and rather than hope
for progress in knowledge, an increase of objectivity, and
stable models, it induces the oscillation of phenomena
and instigates a moment of transformation, a conversio or
inversion in observers.
Artistic thought is the outcome of such conversions
or turn-arounds. It is not the result of a directional chain
of procedures (meta-hodos) or the precise implemen­
tation of a scheme that must be followed. Rather its
events come without warning, unexpectedly, and often
as an epiphany or flash of inspiration. Consequently,
what thinking means  and being “within thinking, on
the way of thinking”69 necessitates susceptibility with-
out a way ­(mé-hodos), which unfolds along conspicuous
tracks: ­attentiveness to nuances, to details, to fragile
and often overlooked marginal perceptual phenomena
and their vibrations. For this reason, we can name four
­characteristics of the ‘experimentality’ (in the literal
sense of ­experiment) of aesthetic research as the expe-
rience of and true expetere of a coincidence that throws
us.70 First, it ­follows the original ­meaning of empeiría, ‘to

69 See Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? trans. J. Glenn

Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 30.
70 In Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. Richard
­Rojcewicz and Daniela Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: University of
Indiana Press, 2012), Heidegger reconstructed the changing mean-
ing of the experimental in the history of metaphysics from antiquity
to today. He differentiated between at least six stages of a continu-
ous alienation that give ‘ex-perience’ new contours at each level.
Characteristic for this transformation is the crossing from passio
to actio, the last stage of which, for the moment, is natural sciences
as ­mathematics and “machine sciences.” Heidegger began with
Aristotle’s empeiría, which meant “striking up against something
and indeed, something that strikes us” (p. 124), while experiencing

53
open to risks’ and ‘make visible’ (exponere) that which
binds and allows for ex-perience. Second, self-referential-
ity or self-reflexivity is the main access to as well as pull
of the ‘esoteric’ of such a wealth of experience, so that it
is at the same time an experimental experience and an
experiencing (itself) in the experimental. Here the aes-
thetic esoteric, as the entrance to within, is consciously
being contrasted with the supposedly scientific exoteric,
the ‘exit’ to the public realm. Their interplay, their dialec-
tic, reminds us of, third, the essential impossibility of the
objectification of phenomena. They cannot be negated,
they are cumbersome and opaque and their presence,
fourth, becomes known only through labor in aesthetics,
through a ‘­meeting’ in the sensate. This is the basis of
the primordiality of artistic research or, better, research
in aesthetics, as well as its justification and necessity as

became a process of “approaching something,” “looking around”

and “exploring” and moved towards “testing” or a “sharpening of the
approach” through the use of technical instruments (p.  125, 126).
Finally, methodological empiricism aimed at the “grasp of a regular-
ity,” of “something constant” under the law of causality in which the
principle of repeatability acts as a guarantor of “universal validity and
objectivity” (p. 129). Heidegger compares this “procedure” with the
violence of a “test” in the meaning of “bringing the object ‘into temp-
tation,’ setting a trap, making it that such and such is the case – that
such and such is not the case” (p. 126). This is the premise behind
the logic of modern scientific experiments as crystallized in the nine-
teenth century. It culminates in the mathematizing of experiments,
which erases the concept of experience. “Because ‘modern science’
(physics) is mathematical (not empirical), it is necessarily experimen-
tal in the sense of the measuring experiment” (p. 127, emphasis in the
original). Here Heidegger insisted on the difference between empiri-
cism in the Greek sense of empeiría and the experimental character
of modern science, the core of which is the date, expressible with a
number and normed by means of inductive probability in order to
obliterate the last traces of the singular.

54
not just an alternative, but also an indispensable form of
knowledge that is lifted through its efforts to the status of
an apriority.

Ereunistics versus zētēsis

We can neither play science against art, nor art against sci-
ence. Rather both are situated in different territories that,
however, reference one another. It seems clear that there
can be no research without the simultaneity and equipri-
mordiality (Gleichursprünglichkeit) of aesthetic research,
just as there can be no culture of science worthy of the
name that does not give art and its epistemology its right-
ful place. If we can now see the outlines of the particular
nature of artistic ‘knowledge’ and its ‘truth’ in contrast to
scientific knowledge, the specificity of this knowledge, its
disparity and difference within the concept of research, re-
mains obscure in the adventure of our discourse. On the
surface we seem to be able to find only negative attributes;
an other than that owes its ex-perience in the experiential
to the categories of attraction (affectus), passibility, the
passage, and empeiría. We thus must take one last initial
step closer to what we might rightly name aesthetic re-
search or knowledge or thought. One signpost is the dual
use of the word ‘research’ for both ‘inquiry’ and ‘critical in-
vestigation’. Both imply a search, but the first stresses the
questioning or interrogation inherent to detective work,
while the latter suggests critical reflection, the course of
which does not necessarily end in (the procedures of) dis-
course, which, as Roland Barthes has pointed out, consists
more or less of going around in circles. The latter is true, in
varying ways, of both the humanities and the arts. But we

55
 should make a distinction, a ‘fold’ in relation to the mode
of this ‘dis-cursus’. Knowledge through interpretation, re-
search, and the critical assessment of sources on the one
hand, and through careful probing, testing, and reflection
on the other hand, is immanent to—or so the claim—phi-
losophy and artistic practice.71 Neither adheres to a strict
academic norm. As regards approach, we can distinguish
between at least five concepts of research:
1) Methodologies of the natural sciences including
­experiment, empiricism, and mathematical modelling
(mathēmata);
2) methodologies of the humanities including commen-
tary, interpretation, and critical reading (krinein, theoria);
3) methodologies of the social sciences including qualita-
tive and quantitative processes for describing and creating
theories (diēgēsis, theoria);
4) methodologies of philosophy including analysis and
­reflection (logos), and, lastly;
5) practices of the arts including productive heuristics,
building singular models, and self-reflexivity (heuresis,
exagium, experiri).
Considering this pluralism, limiting research to
research in the natural sciences would be reductionism.
As it happens, the scientific concepts of research them-
selves are aware of this ambiguity. For this reason alone, it
would be groundless to deny that art is research, because
it is unclear what scientific research is, much less aes-
thetic research or research in philosophy. Demarcating
research, as most attempts at definition do, as a method-
ological search that aims for results and a gain in knowl-

71 On this see Dieter Mersch, “Kunst als epistemische Praxis,” in

Bippus, ed., Kunst des Forschens, p. 27–48.

56
edge is not particularly helpful, since the terms ‘search’
(zētēsis, eureuna), ‘method’ (praxis, met‘hodos, dikē), and
‘knowledge’ (epistēmē, gnosis, noēsis) are just as indeter-
minate as the definiendum itself. Conversely, the potential
of aesthetic epistēmē is lost from the beginning when it is
adapted to scientific processes and made to fit their rules.
While the latter deals with proof, deduction, and expla-
nation, all aimed at, as Heidegger has said, “securing” a
projected plan,72 the former is interested solely in show-
ing or making manifest (deiknynei, phainein, dēloun). The
similarity of the terms (dēlōsis, dēloun) is obvious (dēlos).
Thus mutual border crossings are not difficult. While dis-
course or language (logos) reigns in science, and percep-
tion (aisthēsis) in art, things can nevertheless be ‘shown’
through language (after all deiknynei refers to both ‘to
show’ and ‘to say’), just as they can be made manifest
(dēloun) and perceivable (aisthētos) both in argument and
in visible or audible phenomena. Opening or revealing
is the telos of both, but they differ greatly in the ways in
which they interrogate and reflect.
This irritating overlap or lack of difference also says
something about the plurality of epistēmē beyond the clas-
sical differences between theoria and aisthēsis or what
can be seen (horaton) and the object of thought (noēton).
It is revealing that antiquity, which until today determines
how ‘scientific’ science and its fundamental concepts
are, not only knew different facets of knowledge—namely
epistēmē that aimed at theoría and thus ‘seeing’ or ‘insight’
(whereby the aesthetic was always the benchmark), as well
as poiēsis, which belongs to the realm of doing or creating

72 Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” p. 57.

57
and has at its core technē, as an ethos of optimization and
a way of thinking through (dia-noeōn) that belongs wholly
to ability and artistry—but also two types of research,
albeit the concept of ‘research’ played only a marginal
and non-constitutive role in the discourse. As it happens,
we are confronted with the same duality that informs
the difference between inquiry and investigation. On the
one hand ereuna or, as verb, ereunaō, ‘detection’, and
on the other hand zētēsis or, as verb, zētein or zēteomai,
‘thoughtful search’ or ‘self-searching’. Looking at their
etymology, ereuna refers to digging up roots, or extracting
knowledge from the raw or nescient, while zētēsis stems
from zē or, indo-European, ja and dja, meaning some-
thing like ‘attain’, ‘strive’ or ‘look for’. Zētein or zēteō or
zēteomai consequently denotes an examination or study
through inquiry which was the province of the zētētes, the
judge or the zētētixos, the philosopher who adhered to
a particular school of skepticism, cultivated as a stance
(ethos), while ereuna exetasis is research into or an inter-
rogation in the sense of empirical study—study that is
immanently violent, as perhaps best expressed in Francis
Bacon’s proposal to “hound” and “torture” nature for the
sake of research. Zētēsis in contrast denotes something
else. It is not a teleological analysis with a clear goal that
ends in a result, but an open search as a continuous self-
questioning that begins with perception and attempts to
grasp phenomena ‘through’ (dia/per) its medium. This is
not research as it is usually meant, but a continuous skep-
ticism, a passion that does not put results first.73

73 It is telling that zētētikos appears in the main in the skeptical

philosophy of Pyrrho and his followers; see for example, Karl Vorlän-

58
 In short, it is research in the realm of aesthetics that
has krinō or krinein as its kritērion, the separation or differ-
entiation into the sensuous and thus in particular into an
aesthetic critique. Aesthetic research and especially artis-
tic research are situated here and hereby derive their capa-
bilities. They conduct research according to that second
definition, not inquiry in the sense of proceedings, which
always also connotes proceedings against, i.e. not ereunis-
tic, but zetetic procedures. This research researches itself
and while doing so continually separates (partage)—as
Jacques Rancière put it—the perceivable anew to make
new borders, new divisions, and new partitions, and thus
bring what has been invisible, inaudible or barely per-
ceivable to light or to the ear. Zetetic research is based,
in contrast to scientific ‘ereunistics’, on a fundamental
openness, including an openness for the unknown, unex-
pected or entangled, into which it is drawn and in which it
allows itself to become enmeshed.

der, Geschichte der Philosophie 1: Philosophie des Altertums (Reinbek:

Rowohlt, 1973), p. 152–153.

59
A Short History of ‘Truth’ in Art

Bevor ›gedacht‹ wird, muss schon ›gedichtet‹ worden sein.

Friedrich Nietzsche.74

Beauty as Truth

To begin our journey, we must first examine the question

of art as beauty and of aesthetics as a branch of philoso-
phy—not simply as a theory of perception, but first and
foremost as a science of the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’.
In the early modern period, whenever the arts are men-
tioned, they are almost always referred to as the ‘fine’ or
beautiful arts. As is well-known, aesthetics has two begin-
nings; in the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth
century. Alexander Baumgarten first defined aesthetics
as a scientia sensitiva or science of perception. In German
Idealism, Georg ­Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wil-
helm Joseph Schelling, and Friedrich Hölderlin revisited
aesthetics, ­defining it as a theory of art. The relationship
between the two is not immediately clear. The former was
grounded mostly in aisthēsis, a form of cognition classified
as belonging to the physical abilities of sensations, and

74 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachlass 1887, Kritische Studienausgabe

vol.  12, p.  550. “Before there is ‘thought’, there must have been
‘invention’.” Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman
and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 293. [As Kaufman
notes in a footnote to this quote, while dichten is usually translated as
writing poetry, it also plays on erdichten, to invent. Here dichten thus
“stresses the quasi-poetic function of the imagination” (FN  18)—
trans.]

61
was situated in the lower ranks of thought (intellectus et
ratio).75 While Baumgarten did aim to elevate perception,
he never let go of the established hierarchy. Aesthetics
was lifted up only to be pushed down again by according
it a precarious relationship to epistēmē. For Baumgarten,
only “dark comprehension” (perceptiones obscurae) could
give rise to cognitiones sensitivae.76 In Hegelian thought
in contrast, aesthetics is a philosophy of art which under-
stands the ‘work’ as the crystallization and embodiment
of an ‘idea’. From the start, aesthetics was considered to
be a kind of thought similar but subordinate to philo-
sophical thought. Aesthetics as a theory of perception was
concerned primarily with the analysis of imaginings (re-
praesentationes) and its objects or, more precisely, mani-
festations (eidos)—and therefore also of forms and their
characteristics, the apex or perfectio of which is beauty.
The ‘work’ on the other hand was seen as referring back
to the conditions of its production in poiēsis and poiein,
the principle of creation, based in the end (and as early as
Italian Renaissance art theory) on the thoughts inscribed
within the draft (disegno) and the conceit (concetto).77
The two conceptions could not be in greater oppo-
sition. The beginnings of aesthetics mirrored the old
antithesis of perception and thought that goes back to the

75 Alexander Baumgarten, Ästhetik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner

Verlag, 2007), § 30, §38.
76 Alexander Baumgarten, “Metaphysica,” in Baumgarten, Texte
zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983)
§ 511, esp. “Repraesentatio non distincta sensitiva vocatur,” also § 521
and § 544; English: Metaphysics, trans. Courtney D. Fugate and John
Hymers (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
77 See Erwin Panofsky, Idea. A Concept in Art Theory (New York:
Harper Collins, 1974).

62
Platonic separation of horaton and noēton. Accordingly,
perceptions were seen as connected both to appearances
(phainomena) and to apparitions (phantasma), their frag-
ile nature oscillating between what is apparent or emerges
on the one hand and a constant proximity to the phantas-
mal, to phantasia and its phantoms, on the other. Thought
in contrast rests on the constitution of an ‘as’, that is to
say on the delineation or definition of something as some-
thing. Perception always splits or doubles this thing and
then gives it a meaning, a signification or even, following
Derrida, a mark or an inscription.78 An artwork functions
similarly. It separates diverse materials, colors, sounds,
or performative acts (dramata), and correlates, links, and
contrasts these elements to turn them into something else:
a primordial difference that transforms a slab into a fig-
ure, a sequence of notes into a melody, a timed beat into a
rhythm or acts into a scene. Only through these processes
do they show something (theatron) or express something
that had always exposed itself as ‘something’. Percep-
tion in turn remains in a curious limbo between being
and seeming (Sein and Schein), between the impossibil-
ity of negating that we see or hear and the chronic doubt
about what presents itself to our eyes or ears.79 In its first

78 Derrida expands the concept of writing to “all orders of ‘signs’

and for all languages in general,” even going “beyond semio-linguis-
tic communication, for the entire field of what philosophy would call
experience.” Jacques Derrida, “Signature, Event, Context,” in Der-
rida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982), p. 307–330, cit. 316–317.
79 Aristotle and Lucretius, among others, already conceded a
moment in perception that could not be negated. Or as ­Gianfrancesco
Pico della Mirandola laconically stated: “Now a sense is unerring, if,
at the proper distance, it receives in itself impressions of its special
sensible through media which are sound and unimpaired” (On the

63
guise, aesthetics was an epistemological question that
did not aim to define the difference between truth and
falsity, because it constantly oscillated between the two,
culminating in a discourse on beauty as the perfection
of the phenomenon (perfectio phaenomenon), as Baum-
garten wrote in Metaphysica,80 which corresponds with
the perfection of sensate knowledge (perfectio cognitionis
sensitivae).81 Later, aesthetics was seen as being about
ideas and their material manifestation—their imagina-
tion and symbolization through signs. This bound it to the
‘truth’ of the symbolic, to representation via concepts and
even, following Hegel, to a tenacious dialectic sublation
which attempts to reach the ‘absolute’.

Imagination, trans. Harry Caplan (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1930), p. 29). Baumgarten (2007) expressed this in a somewhat more
differentiated fashion. In his chapter on “aesthetic falsity” in Aes-
thetica, he wrote about the necessity of trusting the senses (§  448,
§ 449), which, however, in the end says nothing about the content of
the perceived, because our imagination can always fool us. We don’t
always see what we think we see. Trust thus can only be linked to the
non-hypothetical nature of the perceived space, as ‘existence’ cannot
be negated in the sense of ‘not as’, because it is not a characteristic,
but rather a condition for the being or non-being of characteristics.
That’s why existence has no antithesis, but at best only nothingness. I
can fool myself about what I see, but not regarding that I see or what I
see. Ludwig Wittgenstein explained this difference using the example
of a sphere: the sphere as sphere might be doubtful, but not that it
looks to me like a sphere: “The mechanism of hypothesis would not
function if appearance too were doubtful … If there were a doubt here,
what could take the doubt away?” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Grammar, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974), p. 222. There can be no abyss of experience as portrayed
in Stanisław Lem’s Futurological Congress or the film Matrix.
80 Baumgarten, Metaphysica, § 662.
81 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 14.

64
 Early philosophies of aesthetics constantly circled
around this opposition and their most important descrip-
tions were developed within this framework. For example,
the antagonism of perception and thought is mirrored
in the relation of beauty to truth, as the latter two are the
respective utmost expressions of the former two. At the
same time, ontology is linked to the subjectivity of taste.
The work and what it is ‘saying’ demands to be substan-
tiated through translation or paraphrased in an adequate
language, while aisthēsis can take direct possession of
the ‘truth’ through cognition of a form and its idealness.
Nevertheless, there is a remarkable analogy that can be
made between the two. Just as truth has been determined
since Aristotle as the conjunction of sentence and reality,
the adaequatio intellectus et rei, in Baumgarten beauty is a
correspondence (consensus) of either the unity of an appa-
rition with an idea or of an order of thought with the thing
being shown.82 These reflect the same figure, once as cor-
respondence, saying or responding to the same thing, and
again as consensus, a common feeling on the level of sen-
sation—in both cases a ‘com-’ or a ‘co-’, a coming together
or identification—a coherence like an equation with-
out numbers that solves itself. Baumgarten repeatedly,
inspired by Leibnizian rationalism, insisted that truth,
whether logical or aesthetic—i.e. evidential—truth, comes
from the senses and used the same ‘formula’ to relate
truth to reason as an analogy.83 We are thus ­confronted

82 Ibid., §§ 18–20.
83 Ibid., esp. § 424, § 426. Here he wrote: “The logical and aesthetic
thought of virtue has in common… the ability to see through what is
true and what is false in every object, what is logically consistent…
and from what every object arises and what its origin is.” Baumgarten
continued in § 437: “Aesthetic truth demands the connection of the

65
with two perfectiones, two lines of one equation: on the
one hand the fulfillment of the form in beauty, and on the
other hand the fulfillment of the idea in truth. This figure
is typical of classical thought, which worked with units,
equivalents or consummation, and it is no coincidence
that Hegel, as regards artworks, attempts to meld ‘truth’
and ‘beauty’ into a single identity. Heidegger too, in his
oft overlooked afterword to “The Origin of the Work of
Art,” claimed: “When truth sets itself in the work, beauty
appears. This appearing (as this being of truth in the work
and as the work) is beauty,” making the event of beauty
truly part of the event of truth in art, while conversely the
truth of art is first articulated in beauty.84
The coincidence of appearance and appearing (Schein
and Scheinen) as well as apparition, and their inherent
meanings of phenomenon, deception, and coming to
light85 allows for both the depreciation of perception as
well as the leap to the concept of truth, which in all cases
remains the final criterion. Ontologically, these con­
vergences are situated completely within an understand-
ing of beauty that dates back to antiquity; to the geomet-
ric normativity of kalokagathía. Friedrich Hölderlin also
yearned for such isonomic Classical Greek pathos, as

objects deemed to be beautiful with the reasons and the reasoning, in

so far as this knowledge can be acquired through the senses through
the analogon of reason.”
84 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 52. See also p. 32:
“The shining that is set into the work is beautiful. Beauty is one way
in which truth as unconcealment comes to presence.” In no way is
Heidegger here taking leave of the concept of beauty, rather he is put-
ting it in an historical context as a way of experiencing the truth in art.
85 Translator’s note: In German, Schein (n.) or scheinen (v.) has
many meanings including to shine, reflection, appearing, appear-
ance, apparition, and also phony.

66
applied to the beauty and goodness of the artistic idea.
Thus beauty’s connection to apparitions (phantasma),
sight (opsis) and light (phōs) is grounded in its relation to
‘seeing’ in the meanings of ‘being, making, and becoming
manifest’ (phainein)—the precondition for all ‘insight’
(synesis). It is striking that, as regards their roles, beauty
is to perception as truth is to discourse. They are different
and yet intertwined dispositifs of identification and mys-
tification. Statements only appear to be true if they touch
on and resonate in being or reality, just as to be beautiful,
something must bring together form and idea—the order
of things and the ordered thought.
Truth and beauty are connected by the same pro-
cesses, the same figures, and the same logic of verifica-
tion—feeding the indemonstrable legend that the true is
legitimized by the beautiful, and that beauty is the gen-
uine form of artistic knowledge. This parallelism is an
inheritance of European metaphysics, which holds fast
to the principle of synthesis, of homoiosēs or harmonia,
and still, despite all shifts in epistemic theory, privileges
the ontological and speaks of ‘the truth of the beauti-
ful’ and the ‘beauty of truth’. Justifications for this idea
are taken from mathematical concepts: proportion, har-
mony or symmetry. Such idealizations can be observed
to this day, especially in the natural sciences, which
give priority to rational expressions and straightforward
laws with ‘elegant’ proofs. Such thought culminates in,
for example, the self-similar landscapes of the Beauty
of Fractals86 or in the persistent and unproven belief in

86 See for example H.-O. Peitgen and P.H. Richter, The Beauty of
Fractals (Berlin: Springer, 1986); Friedrich Cramer and Wolfgang
Kaempfer, Die Natur der Schönheit (Frankfurt/M.: Insel, 1992).

67
 s­ upersymmetry in elementary particle physics, put for-
ward by many in the fields of cosmology and quantum
mechanics. Whenever scientists make use of aesthetics,
beauty is the unassailable emblem of accuracy, causing a
strange reversal of art and science. While in the arts the
experience of beauty became less and less important in
the course of the 19th century, and was finally denounced
completely in the destructive craze of the avant-garde as a
“thick layer of filth” that belonged struck from the list of
relevant aesthetic concepts,87 it still reigns ascendant in
the technosciences. In this way, objectivism wins over the
arbitrariness of taste and judgment about what “pleases
universally.”88 The most bizarre example of this was per-
haps George David Birkhoff’s ­measure of ­aesthetic order,
which made up in mathematical naivety what it lacked in
classical pathos.89
Truth and beauty are thus only seemingly far apart,
since truth proves to be an objectivity that is grounded
in the ‘ground’, while subjective beauty has a pull or an
irresistible power no less than the casual constraint of
the better argument. Beauty thus denotes—beyond its
­ontologism—not an attribute but an aura that captures
us and bedazzles our souls with its siren’s song and, as

87 Paul Dermée, “What is Dada!,” in Dawn Ades, ed., The Dada

Reader: A Critical Anthology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2006), p. 248–250, cit. 248.
88 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008), § 9, A32, p. 51.
89 George David Birkhoff, “A Mathematical Approach to Aesthet-
ics,” Scientia (1931), p.  133–146. Birkhoff boils aesthetics down to
the formula M = O/C, M for mass, O for order, and C for complexity.
Aesthetic mass is determined by the ratio of order to complexity: the
greater the order and the lower the complexity, the higher the aes-
thetic value.

68
Friedrich Schiller insisted, agitates our emotions.90 This is
nothing more than an introjection of an external ­measure
of beauty, whose agitations subdue, as Jean ­Cocteau
phrased it “even those not consciously aware of it.”91
Here too we have an element of compulsion, an inability
to defend ourselves from the aura of beauty. The ‘beauti-
ful’ manifestation is inherently a moment of truth, which
promises in that second to outshine all deception because
it conceals all things and bathes them in its radiance.
Seen in this way, beauty acts as the utopia of aesthetics,
just as truth marks the utopia of discourse. Both reflect a
mathematical clarity first manifested in the Pythagorean
­tetractys and continuing on through the Platonic body to
linear ­geometrical projections, and the central perspective
derived thereof, and further to the logarithmic reworking
of the overtone series and the resulting “well-tempered”
musical mood of early modernity. We can think of this

90 See Friedrich Schiller, “Über Anmut und Würde” and “Über die
ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen” in: Gesammelte Werke in 5
Bden, Schriften zur Kunst und Philosophie, vol. 5 (Gütersloh: dtv, 1955),
p.  115–178, 319–430. English: “On Grace and Dignity” and “On the
Aesthetic Education of Man” (Project Gutenberg, 2006), http://www.
gutenberg.org/files/6798/6798-h/6798-h.htm.
91 See also Jean Cocteau, The Holy Terrors (New York: New Direc-
tions, 1966), p. 14. Walter Benjamin, in his study of Baudelaire, made
a point of bringing the aura together with beauty and linked the two
to the ritual of the moment in which the gaze takes in the beautiful
object, because beauty—like ‘aura’ in his essay on the work of art—is
an experience which belongs to the realm of ritual: “If it [the expe-
rience of ritual correspondences in Baudelaire; DM] transcends this
realm, it presents itself as the beautiful. In the beautiful, ritual value
appears as the value of art.” Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol.
4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 2003), p. 313–335, cit. 333.

69
t­ rajectory as a rationalization of mimēsis, which has not only
consistently inclined towards ­mathematizing—something
which permeates and usurps all empirical thought—but
also and conversely has advanced to become an aesthetic
design principle and hence to determine the margins of
subjective taste. Here we see, it should also be said, the
immutable presence of the desire to conquer death that
lies within all ideals. Just as ­mathematics seems to prevail
over temporality, the desire for truth and beauty aspires
to the same, without however ever shaking off one crucial
failing. While mathematics can separate from the world,
its shining aura of truth and beauty is darkened by the
pain of the real, highlighting its chronic ­imperfectability.
This pain is as integral to both truth and beauty as the
­denouement is to the climax.
Fragile and ambivalent, riddled and torn by the con-
jecture of impossibility, around 1800 the metaphysical
kinship of truth and beauty was transferred to the works
themselves and came to rest in the poetic aesthetics of
idealism. The latter understood the making of art as a cog-
nitive act grounded, in the end, in reason. Shortly there-
after this was refuted by Romanticism, idealism’s dark
counterpart, with an idea of reason as rooted in unceasing
poeticism that never ends. The reasonableness of a por-
trayal, as preferred in classicism, was believed to give art
both its affect and the ‘correct’ expression. However art
only possessed this power of ‘shining appearance’ when
the form (and not even Hegelian aesthetics was immune
to the geometric idealization thereof) was completely in
accord with the demands of the idea. As Heidegger wrote
in the afterword to “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “The
idea fits itself into the morphē. The synolon, the unitary
whole of morphē and hylē, in other words, the ergon, is in

70
the manner of energeia. This mode of presence became
the actualitas of the ens actu. This actualitas became
actuality, reality … In the manner in which, for the world
determined in the Western way, beings exist as the real,
there lies concealed a particular convergence of beauty
and truth.”92 That means that in the Western world, this
connection at the same time veiled and distorted the
same. In this short history of beauty we can see its growing
subjectivization as well as its subservience and link to an
ever-sharper instrumentalization of truth. Later, neither
truth nor beauty seem to have been relevant categories for
the arts. In the same vein as mathematical constructiv-
ism, which guided the natural sciences from the late 19th
century onwards, all feeling for an innate relationship
between art and epistēmē disappeared, pulling not only
beauty, but also the role played by art in the acquisition
of knowledge, into an abyss. Aesthetics instead becomes
a site for critique, for resistance, and for a break with real-
ity. The art of modernity—in ­particular that of the various
twentieth century avant-garde movements, whether in
architecture, the fine arts, music or literature—is, across
the board, a practice of difference. Its métier is no lon-
ger knowledge, but rather the radicalism of the question.
Art itself and the composition of art is interrogated as
regards its mediality as well as how it can be differenti-
ated from non-art, from the Other of art,93 from the real,
and from the ‘thatness’ of bare existence, which Lyotard

92 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 52.

93 See Ad Reinhardt, “Art-as-Art,” in Barbara Rose, ed., Art as Art.
The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt (Oakland: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1991).

71
has ­connected to the ‘sublime’ as a category that was ‘lost’
and then ‘saved’ by Minimal Art.94

On the Imagination’s Power of Knowledge

This historical constellation does however raise suspi-

cions that the losses suffered by beauty as well as truth in
relation to the arts are connected both to the unfortunate
beginnings of aesthetics in the Enlightenment and to a
shallow and insufficient philosophical conception of truth
and beauty. Both are grounded in a philosophical tradition
that has continued alongside the history of metaphysics
since antiquity, with latent traces reaching into the twen-
tieth century. While truth and beauty both point towards
a common base in correspondentia as well as in consensus,
discourse and perception present themselves as having
already won the right to define representation and link
these two ideals to the phantasm of absolute identity. At
the same time, the original disparities between truth and
falsity as well as between beauty and ugliness are kept, as-
suming an exclusionary negation. We are looking at a de-
cision or choice that adheres to the logic of either-or, of
strict alternatives. In this thinking, truth is grounded in
the convergence of being and thought, while falsity lies in
their divergence. Beauty and ugliness are manifest in the
coherence or lack thereof of form and material, design and
work, or form and content—independent of the definition

94 See Jean-François Lyotard, “Newman: The Instant” and “The

Sublime and the Avant-garde,” in Lyotard, The Inhuman, Reflections
on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 78–108.

72
of these terms. To be true thus means to say something
like it is and, correspondingly, beauty means that some-
thing shows itself the way it is ideally meant to be shown.
Conversely, falsity or ugliness are the continuous frustra-
tion of these aims. In all cases the point of reference is re-
ality, a presence or authenticity, which in turn has always
prefigured the relationship between art and epistēmē. It is
therefore necessary to unravel these relations, to set them
adrift, not only to shift the meanings of the concepts of
aesthetics and truth within a philosophical critique, but
also to deconstruct the presumed relationship between art
and thought. This intervention includes transforming the
discourse-centeredness of theōria, which excludes prac-
tice, as well as undoing the dichotomization of theory and
practice, which has from the beginning been hegemonic
in the construction of theory. Not until then can the prac-
tical itself become a manner of thought or of knowledge
able to follow its own way (hodos) of theorein—speculating
or viewing—and can we avoid the misconception that
thought necessitates the halting or standstill of action.
This brings us to the difficulty of theorizing a practice that
itself represents a manner of theory and hence systemati-
cally irritates those categories with which it might be de-
scribed.
To achieve this we must return to the two-fold founda-
tion of aesthetics in Baumgarten and Hegel and uncover
their common misalignment. The problem lies in the sup-
posed dissociation that is the starting point of both: the
gap between aisthētics and artistic practice. Baumgarten
actually attempted to connect the two in the first para-
graphs of his fragmented Aesthetica, in which he brought
together the “theory of the free arts” with the “art of beauti-
ful thinking” in an “analogon of reason,” thus ­postulating

73
a complementarity between art and science.95 Unfortu-
nately, he placed this analogy between art and thought
under the aegis of the ratio, in this manner neutralizing
the singularity and recalcitrance of art. In particular the
modalities and connotations of his concept of analogon
remain unclear—analogous in which respect, in reference
to which characteristics? The parallelism or association of
sensuous knowledge and logic was addressed, but noth-
ing was said as to what makes up the side-by-side of this
parataxis and which relationships it calls upon. The crite-
rion is without doubt reason, which shows up throughout
Baumgarten’s work as a mediator, guide or directive. As a
result he was never able to connect the two sections of his
study; the theory of sensate perception and the “aesthet-
ics of the other part”—the system of aesthetic arguments
and their rhetorical nature. Instead, the two sections are
divided and thus hierarchized, one is merely made to
resemble or mirror the other. Nevertheless—and this is
the incontrovertible benefit of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica—
the secret core of his manuscript is an epistemology of
the singular rooted mostly in aisthēsis that reaches ful-
fillment, as we shall see below, in art. When Baumgarten
spoke of the ‘fine’ (beautiful) arts, he seemingly gave pre-
cedence to perception. More exactly, he claimed that all
knowledge starts with perception, which is at the same
time the foundation of art, because art, as Merleau-Ponty

95 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, §  1 as well as Metaphysica, §  533. The

“analogy” is here doubled: aesthetics, as epistēmē aisthētikē, is pre-
sented as analogon to logic in the context of noeta, and art is seen as
a type of thought analogous to reason in such a way that the epistēmē
aisthētikē can itself be thought of as art, or as artistic thinking (in the
sense of rhetoric).

74
will later write, “draws upon this fabric of brute meaning”
that active, discursive thinking “would prefer to ignore.”96
It follows that aesthetic theory-practices expend
themselves in concrete materials: the stone that becomes
structure, the raw materials of bodies and sounds that
join to form figures, and the soil that is mixed for paint
or, in one word, Dingsprachen (thing-languages), as Wal-
ter Benjamin so aptly put it.97 The same is true of series
and technical apparatuses as long as they are bound to
materiality, that is to say subject to time and therefore to
entropy. These practices are always about something, its
singularity and its existence and how it resides in the irre-
placeable wonder of the presence of presences. That is
what art wants to secure: that (quod) things are, that they
have a weight, their own unique gravity, in both senses
of the word, that pulls us in, and also, that they affect us
by their singular presence, that they touch our emotions
and therefore cannot be denied. Their ‘cathexis’ lures us,
exerts a claim that both awakens and undermines our
desires, runs counter to them, delimits them or turns
them inside out. And in fact, their outside or their other-
ness is marked by their ecstasies,98 their standing ‘beside
themselves’, which also shows their rebelliousness,
their inaccessibility, and sometimes also their aggres-
sion and violence. Their agenda is their negativity:99 their

96 Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” p. 161.

97 See Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Lan-
guage of Man,” in Selected Writings Vol. I, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus
­Bullock and Walter Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996),
p. 62–74.
98 See Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1995).
99 Bruno Latour and Graham Harman both disagree and speak in
different ways of the positive agency of technical objects or of things.

75
refusal or dislocation, their “­somewhere else,” in Jacques
Lacan’s words,100 one characteristic of which is that it can-
not be negated.101 This is our formula for ‘ex-sistence’ in
the sense of ‘ek-stasis’.102 Exsistere does not connote a
meta-attribute, which has the attribute of having attri-
butes, but a standing-outside-itself, a stance that not
only exposes an inherent irrepressible surplus, but also
contains a non-negative negative that constantly under-
mines and confuses our attempts at manipulation and
classification. Because its testimonial is testimony itself,
its being is a given in the sense of a gift. This dispels all
doubt, as doubt can only arise after the work of identifi-
cation and classification has already begun. What (quid)
things are and as what they appear awakens our skepti-
cism, while the experience of existence, as Baumgarten
also admits, or that I perceive what I perceive, is tied to
the state of our bodies (statum corporis), and is therefore
incapable of being deceived.103 If perception has always

100 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of

Jacque Lacan, Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge,
1992), p.  45. Lacan goes on to add: “It is obvious that the things of
the human world are things in a universe structured by words, that
language, symbolic processes, dominate and govern all.” And further:
“The Sache is clearly the thing, a product of industry and of human
action as governed by language. However implicit they may first be
in the genesis of that action, things are always on the surface, always
within range of an explanation.” In contrast, “This Ding is not in the
relationship—which is to some extent a calculated one insofar as it
is explicable—that causes man to question his words as referring to
things which they have moreover created. There is something differ-
ent in das Ding” (Ibid., p. 45–46).
101 See also Dieter Mersch, Posthermeneutik (Berlin: Akademie Ver-
lag, 2012), p. 309–339, esp. p. 324–332.
102 Ibid., p. 60–61.
103 Baumgarten, Metaphysica, esp. § 546, p. 23.

76
been said to be ­particularly close to deception and lies,
that has been in reference to the what of appearances, the
way they appear—subject to the suppositions and inter-
pretations of the prisoners chained to Plato’s cave—but
not to perception as such, its sensuousness, the further
negation of which would make every experience impos-
sible. This is why there is sensate knowledge as well as an
epistemology of aesthetics and it is why art has a unique
practice of knowledge that, geared toward the singular,
makes present the sensate shining of the existentiality of
‘­exsistences’.
With this last statement, we’ve moved far from Baum-
garten, but he did accept the existence of both aesthetic
knowledge (scientia sensitiva) and aesthetic truth (veritas
aesthetica)104—in contrast to classical thought, which
usually assumes an opposition of the individual and the
general and of the exemplary and the universal, leaving
no place in thought and experience for singularity and
its alterity. John Locke ignored the singular, as did Hegel,
who rejected “sense-certainty” as phantasmagorical. The
Geeinzelte, as Heidegger put it, the ‘one-made-to-­stand-
individually’, has always been “subordinate to the idea
as that which properly is [and] displaced into the role of
non-being.”105 However ‘non-being’, which Gilles Deleuze

104 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, §§ 423–449.

105 Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence and Concept of Physis
in Aristotle’s Physics B 1,” in Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William
McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 183–230,
210. Regarding Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Horst Seidl wrote in his intro-
duction to the German translation (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag,
1989), p. XXVII: Either the “individual is the true real…—then science
is no longer possible, or, if rather science does apply, true reality must
belong to the general, and in turn be denied the individual.”

77
saw as a “differential,”106 is extra-ordinary (Ungeheuer), an
ominous monstrosity that awakens dread and regards with
suspicion all that flickers and is uncertain or indecisive
and lies at the margins of the sciences and their discursive
‘operationability’. It is one ‘case’ among many, which can
at best be erased with a ‘date’ and whose force of expres-
sion at best stems from its mass, from a statistical series
or the ‘law of large numbers’. The uncanny presence of the
real must continuously be tamed by the rule of the form
(eidos) and the symbolic and its orderings. The singular-
ity of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, in contrast, is in its daring
straightforward conception of a scientia singularis, because
perception has no choice but to look at individual things
(singularia) and their presence. “The aesthetician” there-
fore prefers heterogeneous and specific truths “­general,
most abstract, and most universal truths.” The aesthetic
is more concrete than mathematical abstraction, which
only recognizes ‘evidence’ with the help of demonstrative
aesthetics.107 According to Baumgarten, aesthetics are
also the base of fantasy (imaginatio), memory (memoria)
and poetry (facultas fingendi) and therefore also of the arts,
for “nihil est in phantasia, quod non ante fuerit in sensu.”108

106 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton

­(London: Continuum, 1997), esp. p. 28–70.
107 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, §  440, translation from Oleg Bychkov,
­Aesthetic Revelation Reading Ancient and Medieval Texts after Hans
Urs von Balthasar (Washington: Catholic University of America Press,
2010), p. 17. See also § 441, in which Baumgarten claims that the “the
aestheticological truth of the individual or singular” is the “most
true.” One could apply this to the necessity of visualization in sci-
ence, the vital need to take leave of abstract discourse and illustrate
thoughts using images.
108 Baumgarten, Metaphysica, § 559, p.  29; see also §  534, §§ 557–
562, §§ 579–586, §§ 589–594, p. 17, 29–31, 41–45, 45–49.

78
This sentence, which heightens the older version, “nihil
est in intellectus, quod non prius fuerit in sensu,” found in
Thomas Aquinas and going back to Aristotle,109 was taken
up by John Locke as a systematic foundation of empiri-
cism. Tellingly, it replaces understanding with imagina-
tion and also sees sensate experience, with its outrageous
tendency towards singularity, as useful not for scientific
knowledge, but for the artistic imagination as the heart of
creativity.
However there is a jump within this thinking. It leaps
from perception to fantasy, from the apprehension of exis-
tence to imagination. At the same time it makes plausible
the transition from aisthēsis to aesthetics as a philosophy
of the arts by marking its position. Baumgarten, rather
than leading the scientia sensitiva to its radical conclu-
sion, integrated it into a scientia imaginativa. We could
also say that Baumgarten added something new to the tra-
dition, but only to immediately strike this thought com-
pletely. The idea that the ratio is empty or meaningless if
it is not touched and fed by the senses is a common topos
of the early modern era. Gianfrancesco Pico della Miran-
dola also made use of it when he named “phantasy” as the
mediator between perception and understanding, making
it—like every medium—precarious.110 In this understand-
ing, the ‘imagination’ presents concepts with material
and first imparts the ability to say something about it and
form a predicate about it as something. Knowledge then

109 See Aristoteles, “De Anima,” in Philosophische Schriften in 6 Bän-

den, vol. 6, book 3, chap. 4, 429 b, 430a (English: On the Soul, trans.
J.A. Smith (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Library, updated 2014),
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/a8so/index.html.
110 Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination, p. 41.

79
comes from the power of the imagination alone. Origi-
nally, however, the scientia sensitiva meant more. It meant
knowledge that stems from perception itself. It is being
in the sense of exsistence that counts—‘given actuality’
(­Ge-Gebenheit) rather than the givens of phenomenology,
gifts that are not given until after they have been received.
With this idea, Baumgarten elevated aisthēta and at the
same time assigned ‘truth’, in particular aesthetic knowl-
edge and aesthetic truth, to the realm where the given and
its appearance has already been adapted and transformed
by fantasy and memory. Baumgarten’s chief point was that
art takes both of these, transforming them and making of
them imaginary worlds that are imbued with the persua-
sive power of the audio-visually perceived world. Imagina-
tion here becomes a source of ideas, but only insofar as
it remains bound to perception and does not float free,
decoupled from reality. Rather, as Immanuel Kant wrote
in Anthropology, most certainly following Baumgarten, “no
matter how great an artist, even a sorceress the power of
imagination may be, it is still not creative but must get the
material for its images from the senses.” But, he also said,
“The productive power of imagination … is not capable of
producing a sense representation that was never given to
our faculty of sense.”111 It is thus less aisthēsis itself that
leads the aesthetic, but rather, at least when it becomes a

111 Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), § 25, A 69 / B 70, A68
/ B 69, p. 62, p. 61. See also Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 49, A190–191,
B 193. Hegel, in general, also follows this dictum in his differentiation
of reproductive, associative, and symbolic imagination, where the
latter is a “recipient of sensible matter, out of which it forms ideas.”
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William
Wallace (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2009), § 458, p. 77.

80
theory of art, phantasia which provides the foundation for
an epistemology of aesthetics. There is a scientia singularis,
knowledge oriented toward the non-representable and
non-conceptual, but Baumgarten did not dare take this as
the foundation of art’s path to cognition. Instead he left it
to the productivity of phantasia and then expended much
energy in narrowing its orbit, domesticating it to mean
memory, with its concomitant tie to reality. This restraint
of the unmoored—both through sensation and its fixation
on the given actuality of the world and through ratio and
its concepts—is what first turns the power of imagination
into an instrument of knowledge that allows art to partici-
pate in ‘truth’.
This process mirrors the works of the early modern
era by Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, in which
excesses of the imagination, as exemplified by the paint-
ings of Hieronymus Bosch or Giuseppe Arcimboldo,
among many others, are dampened and such surfeit pro-
ductivity is brought back into the orderly sphere of reason-
ableness. “We should by sway of reason rule over phantasy,
if it errs, and not urge it on,” warned Pico, who ascribed
to the power of the fantasy just about all transgressions
from fallacy to heresy.112 This conflicted and fearful view
of the nature of fantasy is evident up until the eighteenth
century and can even be found in Kant. In the history of

112 Pico della Mirandola, On the Imagination, p.  45. See also the
exceptional study by Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Rea-
son and Imagination in Modern Times (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1989). It is telling that in this period ‘imagination’
and ‘fantasy’ continually change places. Sometimes the latter is con-
demned and imagination is held up as the creative principle, some-
times it is the other way around and imagination is accredited with
trickery and delusions while fantasy is seen as significant.

81
discourse, this creative ability—the wild side of the sub-
ject—was seen as unhealthy and thus constrained, lest the
pleasure of inventio transmogrify into lunacy. Imagination
was assumed to have a permanent and necessary seat in
the soul, where its effects are devastating if not restrained
in time and put under the control of reason. We are con-
fronted with a division of the mind, the creative part of
which is subordinated to its other, more reasonable, side.
The two must, it seems, act together if they are not to bring
forth a monstrosity. At the same time, this is the history of
a rivalry that oscillated from progression to regression—a
back and forth that was always domesticated by reason
and the limits thereof.
A similar pattern can be observed in Kant, who in all
of his Critiques (in a different manner each time, inci-
dentally) split the imagination in two; a ‘voluntary’ posi-
tive side under the reign of the will and an ‘involuntary’ or
unconscious mind.113 The subjectivity of the subject, too,
seems to be split to highlight two accomplishments: While
Kant, in the transcendental deduction of the first Critique,
spoke of a receptive or “reproductive” and a “productive”
faculty of the imagination—the former an “ingredient of
perception” and the latter an “active faculty” within us—in
the Critique of Judgment he made a further differentiation
into an “imaginatio affinitas” and an “imaginatio plas-
tica,” compensating for and at the same time concealing
the lack of a link between the two by means of intricate
elaborations.114 Here the imagination acted as a mediator

113 See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, §§ 28–29,

p. 56–67.
114 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Markus Weigelt
(London: Penguin, 2007), p. 157; Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 22; and

82
between sensibility and reason, but in such a manner that
logical or diagrammatic schematic images are first neces-
sary in order to see anything at all. Perception per se does
not know anything, rather “thoughts without content are
empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”115 This also
means that the two are reciprocal, that ratio alone is not
victorious; perception has its own relevance as a guarantee
of a link to the world. However knowledge, in particular
artistic knowledge, is necessarily precarious as long as it
is based on imagination alone. Kant granted art a role no
greater than fine-tuning our powers of cognition (just as
we tune musical instruments to fulfill another purpose),
after which he banned it to the outskirts of metaphysical
cognition. Baumgarten’s position seems significantly dif-
ferent in contrast, but despite its topicality in the end it
is as unsuitable as Kant’s, so that the currently popular
reorientation of the epistēmē of aesthetics towards Baum-
garten is a project doomed to failure. While Baumgarten
did enhance the ability of the senses to gain knowledge,
going so far as to speak of a “science of sensation,” he at
the same time bound their “aesthetic truth” to processes
that, mirroring the “analogies of reason,” ensured they
would be graspable in “analogies of the senses,” in keep-
ing with the clare et distincte of rationality—again putting
art in the shadow of the rational sciences. Art does no more
than prepare for or serve science, albeit ­independently,
and support scientific achievements. Art is not in itself
knowledgeable, at best it creates designs.

Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, § 25, § 28.

115 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 86.

83
The Truth and Falsity of Art— Hegel’s Aesthetics

The case of Hegel is different. He was more rigorous than

his predecessors in insisting upon the instability of ‘sense-
certainty’. In his view, perception of the singular is always
subject to time and can always be sublated by the concept,
which is why objects must first pass through reflexive
understanding if they are to be grasped.116 Nevertheless
Hegel, in contrast to Baumgarten, Kant, and the aesthet-
ics of affect of his time, saw the work of art as its own
kind of truth, which he placed side-by-side with religion
and philosophy. It is due to his efforts, alongside those of
­Schelling, Goethe and their contemporaries, that art—fifty
years after Baumgarten—could advance to become its own
language (Sprachform) that uses the senses as an expres-
sion in order to become a symbol that achieves purposes
analogous to discourse. Hegel’s aesthetics in particular
start with the idea, which is literally ‘real-ized’ and hence
embodied. As a body, it is always connected to an Other or
a difference that undermines the identity hidden behind
the promise of ‘aesthetic truth’. Decisively, this ‘truth’ does
not take the form of correspondence, but is representa-
tional. What is more, it proves to be a form of revelation, it
is open or apparent and reveals, because “only what is real

116 In Philosophy of Mind, Hegel said of “sensibility (feeling)”—

which Baumgarten put at the center of his thought as sensus—that it
took “the form of the dull stirring…of the spirit…where every definite
feature is still ‘immediate’…The content of sensation is thus limited
and transient” (§ 400, p. 21). And on perception and consciousness
Hegel wrote: “Consciousness, having passed beyond the sensible,
wants to take the object in its truth, not as merely immediate, but as
mediated, reflected in itself” (§ 420, p. 51).

84
and true has power to create  … what is real and true.”117
The shortcoming of this ‘truth’ is that it is bound to ob-
jects, to sounds, tones, and pigments, or to concrete acts
or voices or similar elements that make art worth stoop-
ing to material spheres. Analogous to the reflexivity of the
concept, art is neither able to recognize the universal, nor
touch upon an internalized transcendence. Rather, art
shows thought, mixing it with a foreign element which in
the end corrupts it. What is more, art is not capable of dia-
lectics in the sense of the principle of reflexivity. Rather,
the concept forces dialectics on art and makes art look up
to the truth or the universal. Art does not reach the truth
out of its own volition, as it were, but through the ‘thought
of the concept’ (Denken in Begriffen) latently inherent to
art, but unnameable. Nevertheless, it was with Hegel’s aes-
thetics—and not Baumgarten’s—that a truly philosophical
discussion of an epistemology of the arts began. Yet from
the beginning, this discourse was distorted by a series of
faults, in all senses of the word, that recognized while also
limiting the autonomy of the arts. This conflict—despite
many shifts, dissolutions and reversals—has never since
ceased. It has fought against its demise and can be found
in diverse art theory texts to this day.
The premises of Hegel’s philosophy of art are well-
known: art, religion, and philosophy all give expression
to the same understanding. However Hegel subsumed
art under beauty as the “sensuous appearance [Scheinen]
of the idea” which passes through and is surpassed by
the “mystical brilliance of the numinous” in religion and

117 G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (London: Pen-

guin, 1993), p. 6–7.

85
the “light of reason” in philosophy, where it is brought
to its proper fruition. Hegel once again re-situated that
which was thought of in antiquity as a cosmology—the
unity of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Here each
is given its own medium; the medium of intuition/percep-
tion (Anschauung) in art, the medium of sanctification in
religion, and the medium of the concept in philosophy.
Hegel’s system realized what up until that time had been
insufficiently laid out and merely embodied, conjectured,
or revealed as “spirit for the spirit.” At the same time—
and this is the peculiarity of this system—art, religion,
and philosophy do not function as different and heteron-
omous expressions of one knowledge, rather the concept
is always dominant, so that the system is hierarchical and
one form always triumphs over the respective other. These
triumphs mirror the transition from nature to spirit, from
the material to the speculative, from sensuality to the spir-
ituality of reflection, and from perception to the dialecti-
cal self-realization of the concept. Art, which deals mostly
with materials and objects, therefore occupies the lowest
position. Homologous to metaphysical tradition, the least
abstract arts are furthest removed from language—the
ranking begins with the fine arts of architecture, painting,
and sculpture and moves, step-by-step, towards poetry
(which does not yet speak in concepts, but is articulated in
the exhilaration of linguistic metaphors and figurations),
and finally the moral solemnity of the tragedy, which is
already partly imbued with religion. Art is merely one step
on the way, it is not knowledge in and of itself, and does
not manifest its own truth.
Clearly this hierarchization of forms of knowledge is
founded on the general assumption of the superiority of
one medium, namely philosophical conceptualization,

86
as the medium of reflection. In his Science of Logic, Hegel
followed this processual logic of conceptualization from
the abstract identity of being and nothingness to the con-
stitution of the absolute idea, whose privileged position
seems to be justified only by the fact that it is an integral
element of discourse.118 The mediality of the means of
representation is subsumed in the hierarchy that upholds
it, because in the end everything refers to the ‘concept’ as
the true manifestation of thought. Thus from the very first,
the epistemic enhancement of art led to its simultaneous
devaluation. This depreciation is due to the presumptu-
ousness of reason, which judges art only in accordance
with logic. Here Hegel’s system reveals its captivity in
the infiniteness of language, which in this case advances
to the only criterion for truth as truth, encompassing all
else. For it is the concept and the definition that deliver
the appropriate framework for the judgment or argu-
ment, not the painting or the poem or the musical com-
position, which at best regulate the emotions. The form
of artistic knowledge, he therefore stated in the Philoso-
phy of Mind, is “on one hand … a work” dependent upon
“external common existence,” and “on the other hand, …
the concrete contemplation and mental picture of implic-
itly absolute spirit as the Ideal.”119 It therefore expresses
itself only in the identity of form, content, and material,
and hence in the “unity of nature and spirit” as mani-
fested in “­sensuous Schein” (shining, appearance). If how-
ever we are looking for answers about the modality of this

118 See G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George D. Giovanni

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
119 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 556, p. 169.

87
knowledge, we arrive only at the “sign of the idea,” not the
idea itself, which is in turn brought forth again as a sign
“by the informing spirit” which makes it, literally, spirit-
ed.120 This is the site of the aesthetic epistēmē. Undertak-
ing the act of synthesis is, as in Kant, left to the productive
imagination, which must form the material, concurrently
bestowing appearance (Erscheinen) upon both intuition
and the object. Unlike in Kant, the role of the imagina-
tion is not to generate schemata—art is by no means only
form and the process of forming—rather Hegel calls it
“the imagination which creates signs.”121 Its wellspring
is—similar to Baumgarten122—recollection (Erinnerung),
the images stored in the “night-like mine” of the soul,
whose gloom must be dispersed by “the luminous clarity
of a present image” so that these images can be linked to
one another through “association.”123 This puzzling meta-
phor, to which Jacques Derrida devoted an entire study,124
anticipated the idea of the unconscious and of dreams as
the royal road (via regia – Freud) to the same. Here Hegel
presented the imagination as a ­nebulous abyss out of
which slowly, through the same dialectical ­movement,
concrete images arise clearly before the eyes and are
turned into signs. Once again fantasy is at the center of

120 Ibid., also § 557.

121 Ibid., § 457, p. 75, see also § 455Z, § 558.
122 Baumgarten, Metaphysica, §§ 557–559, p. 29.
123 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §  452ff. The longer quotation is an
addendum (Zusatz) to § 455, trans. A.V. Miller and cited in Jennifer
Ann Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004),
p. 88.
124 Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid. Introduction to
Hegel’s Semiology,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 69–109.

88
the artistic epistēmē, but this time as ­symbolic creative
imagination that, qua symbol, underlines its closeness to
­concept, its distant prolepsis. Hegel called it the true artis-
tic intelligence,125 that is to say the actual act of the aes-
thetic, which, as he says, makes intelligence “a thing” and
helps it finds its “sensuous expression” (Anschaulichkeit),
because “Art represents the true universal or the idea in
the form of sensuous existence.”126
As we can see, Hegel did in fact make a direct link
between the two previously divided domains of aesthetics:
the theory of sensuous knowledge on the one hand and
the theory of art on the other. While Kant’s schemata are
simply analytical tools to mediate between form and intel-
ligence, like geometric diagrams that overlay perception
and figuration and make judgment possible, for Hegel
intuition, as the “imagination which creates signs” artic-
ulates genuine poetic productivity that marks the site of
artistic knowledge. Heidegger, as we shall see further on,
later picked up on and radicalized these same thoughts.
Baumgarten had similar ideas, reflected in the structure
of his Metaphysics and the division of his Aesthetics into
a theoretical and a practical section. Poetry, he believed,
was akin to fantasy because it also saw “parts of different
imaginings  … as a whole.”127 Nevertheless, he remained
in the realm of definitions and similes. Hegel was the first
to derive the specificity of aesthetic knowledge from the
­creativity of poetics, paving the way for romantic theories

125 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, § 456Z; § 457.

126 Ibid., §  456Z; as cited in Bates, Hegel’s Theory of Imagination,
p. 99.
127 Baumgarten, Metaphysica, § 590, p. 45.

89
of poetry. That is why art was supposed to tell the ‘truth’
and be part of the absolute–for it is poetry which draws
from metaphors and creates specific forms (skēmata).
But Hegel also believed this to be exactly the problem,
the irreparable defect of art and its inventions. They con-
tinually confront us with a contradiction, with the dispa-
rate—and irreconcilable—poles of the material and the
idea. In this concept, the idea and its form are substantial,
while material and its materiality are merely insubstantial
mediators that must be overcome. Hegel’s construction
suffers from its dichotomous configuration and from the
binary opposition—maintained since the dawn of meta-
physics—between form and material, idea and material-
ity, or thought (noēton) and perception (horaton). It can be
seen in the binary opposition of physis and technē in which
nature and culture are homologous. In consequence,
truth in art is at the same time its falsity. The difference in
their construction implies a tension that, in Ernst Bloch’s
words, makes up the “central office of Hegelian logic.”128
It initiates a “dialectics of being and appearing” which is
“particularly blatant”129 in the area of aesthetics, revealing
the underlying problem of all of Hegel’s philosophy. For
art—and this is Hegel’s main insight—is first and fore-
most thought made impure and disfigured by its reliance
on material. Not until the inward significance of the exter-
nal appearance “presents itself” to us, as he noted in the

128 Ernst Bloch, Subjekt – Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Frankfurt/M.:

Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 167.
129 Ibid., p. 171. This is just as true of Gadamer’s theory of aesthet-
ics, which in this way also reveals its connection to antiquity; see
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 102–124.

90
Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, does intelligence take
on a perceivable presence, “an appearance which means
something [and] does not present to the mind’s eye itself
and that which it is qua external, but something else  …
Indeed every word points to a meaning and has no value
in itself. Just so the human eye, a man’s face, flesh, skin,
his whole figure are a revelation of mind and soul, and
in this case the meaning is always something other than
what shows itself within the immediate appearance,”130 as
Hegel said with obvious scorn. It is necessary to read this
passage, which at first seems self-evident, more closely.
We can see the legacy of Christianity and its precarious
relationship with nature and corporeality in Hegel’s claim
that sensuality, due to the idea’s dependence on embodi-
ment, betrays the purity of mind. Although there would
be no truth if it did not appear and reveal (scheinen and
erscheinen), since art does nothing more than help bring
an idea to ‘life’ by giving it a body, it also sins against the
idea. Hegel therefore believed that that which he apos-
trophized as the “infinite good” of art—namely granting
a being (Wesen) with being (Dasein) or reality—was at the
same time art’s flaw and alienating moment. As he wrote
in Encyclopedia Logic: “appearance does not stand on its
own feet, and does not have its being within itself.”131 And
yet, if we turn Hegel against himself, this is exactly the
way in which art takes revenge upon philosophy, because
philosophical writing is necessarily in debt to an aesthet-
ics that, in its dependence upon materiality, style, and the

130 Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, p. 23.

131 G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T.F. Garaets, W.A.
Suchting and H.S. Harris (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1991),
§ 131Z, p. 200.

91
rhetoric of the repressed, returns to the site of the absolute
and destroys its unconditionality. This is the foundation
of Hegel’s failure: Concepts too, carried out (austragen) by
dialectics, necessarily have a medium or signifier behind
them, which they can never get beyond or overcome.
Thus the mind’s self-externalization becomes self-
­diremption. This is moreover the foundation of the in
equal parts famous and contested theory of the “end of
art” (as well as of its paradoxes), because art can only sub-
late its own leanings towards the ‘idea’ and the ‘truth’ and
be redeemed by the rationality of the concept. Hegelian
aesthetics is satiated with this obsession. This has discred-
ited it and earned the resistance of both contemporaries
and following generations up until the twentieth century.
This obsession, incidentally, also continually found new
apologists, whether in the form of conservative assaults
on the supposed iconoclasm of the avant-garde,132 or in
the seemingly inevitable transition to post-history and the
arbitrariness of post-modernity, or in modern art’s wear-
ing itself out through self-reflexivity (leading to another
way of working; an art that is particular or political).133
At the same time, Hegel secured the proximity of art and
philosophy while provoking the rejection thereof, because

132 See Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis. The Lost Center (New Bruns-
wick/London: Transaction Publishers, 2006); Eduard Beaucamp, Das
Dilemma der Avantgarde. Aufsätze zur bildenden Kunst (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 1976).
133 On this see Michel Foucault Der Staub und die Wolke (Bremen:
Trotzdem, 1982), p.  65 and 62–63. Foucault’s diagnosis of contem-
porary literature is that the “genius” or “singer of eternity” has been
replaced by the “strategist,” the tactician of freedom. The latter adds
his weight to power conflicts without caring whether his acts will find
mercy at the court of criticism: “Currently, we are experiencing the
death of the great writer.”

92
their collaboration or ‘friendship’ is declared in the name
of a one-sided philosophical discourse whose concept
of its Other tends to usurp and simultaneously devalue
the non-conceptual. It was therefore only consistent that
Ad Reinhardt, in his polemical tirade Art as Art, rejected
all appropriation of art and grand concepts so that art is
left to just be art: “One thing to say about art is that it is
a thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything
else. Art-as-art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not
art.” He continued this series of tautologies: “Art needs no
justification with ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism,’ ‘regionalism’
or ‘nationalism,’ ‘individualism’ or ‘socialism’ or ‘mysti-
cism’ or any other ideas.”134 Or, as he added later in his
manifesto An Artist, A Fine-Artist or Free-Artist: “Only a bad
artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not
need anything.”135

Dionysus and Hermes: The Aesthetics of Difference

The relationship of art and philosophy, which Hegel in-

troduced as the closeness, familiarity, or derivativeness
(Abkünftigkeit) of the aesthetic with and from philo-
sophical discourse—with the full weight of his author-
ity, simultaneously underlining the absolute supremacy
of philosophy—increasingly became a matter of conflict
in modernity. Art does not allow itself to be led (on) by
philosophy. This strife or rift developed out of a way of­

134 Reinhardt, “Art-as-Art” p. 53.

135 Ad Reinhardt, “An Artist, A Fine-Artist or Free-Artist,” in Art-as-
Art, p. 142–143, cit. 143.

93
thinking difference, which Friedrich Nietzsche intro-
duced by i­ nversing and dissolving Hegelian figurations of
identity and instead extolling the taboo-breaking, ruptur-
ing antagonism of artistic forms of practice. That however
went hand in hand with putting the aesthetic above the
philosophical and its enlightened, rational discourse.
Nietzsche joined this nihilistic chorus with verve. Nihil-
ism, that “uncanniest of all guests,” as he noted in the
winter of 1885/1886, in this case means the “repudiation
of value” that metaphysics itself brought on, in particu-
lar the three cardinal values of the “‘true’ and ‘beautiful’
and ‘good’.”136 Art then becomes something other than
what it was. Not the “sensuous shining of the idea” and
not a call for the absolute, not even a representation, but
a Dionysian act of excess, destruction or exposure that
pulls the ‘ground’ out from under the feet of all things.
Concurrently, art decidedly does not connote actions
concerned with mirroring or representing the world and
what holds it together, rather it springs from a practice of
non-identity. This is why Nietzsche linked the Dionysian
with the destruction of the “usual barriers and limits of
existence.”137 The labor of art was no longer guided by the
process of shaping and forming, but by an act of limita-
tion that creates difference, peels off the mask of illusion
and exposes the “innermost core of things.”138 The Birth
of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first work, is still brimming with
the pathos of traditional metaphysics, and it is not clear

136 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 7.

137 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings,
trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
p. 40.
138 Ibid., p. 76.

94
exactly what he meant by the “innermost core,” which
is reminiscent of the mystification of the ontological
­concept of truth. Arthur Schopenhauer’s image of unveil-
ing Maya is misleading, because for Nietzsche, the core
remained void. It is the sign of the abyss of the real, which
does not evoke wonder (thaumazein), but strikes with
horror. This however means that Nietzsche’s concept of
art, in contrast to earlier theories of aesthetics, was con-
cerned not with a form or with a work, but with an event.
That is why the aim was no longer beauty, but the evoca-
tion of the sublime. One consequence was that art could
then only articulate itself indirectly. It needed to be de-
constructed or inverted; art necessitated intervention as a
strategy of severance. Art no longer had a fitting medium,
an adequate means of expression, except for the penetra-
tion, separation, and disruption of all means and media.
These take place not for art’s own sake, but literally as
‘re-flection’. Not in the sense of ‘shining’ but as a ‘shining
against’ (Wider-Schein), a blinding opening. Accordingly,
knowledge gained through art cannot be derived from the
manifestation of an as or from the form and its purpose.
Instead, it falls out of line, leaving the limits within which
something can be said or formed, because it is about the
modality or mediality of just this saying or forming. Art
is thus something other than the speakable and its con-
cepts. Art leaves and transverses the circles of discourse
and of science to point towards that which cannot be the
object of an assertion or an analytical observation, and is
therefore out of reach of exact results or methods. “Per-
haps,” posited Nietzsche in one of the many sentences in
The Birth of Tragedy that points in this direction, “things
which I do not understand are not automatically unrea-
sonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from

95
which the ­logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a
necessary correlative and supplement of science?”139
Nietzsche is at the beginning of a discovery of two dif-
ferent truths or concepts of truth, as well as of two differ-
ent means of gaining knowledge. These stand in opposi-
tion to one another, because the one is symbolic, while
the other extols the destruction of all symbol-making to
find, beneath the rubble, another knowledge that has
been abandoned by language and its manifestations. This
is not “implicit knowledge” (Polanyi), but an epistēmē of
the non-presentable which at the same time marks the un-
presentable as an epistemology of shock and desperation.
While scientific knowledge is geared in the main towards
the positive, artistic knowledge is geared towards the
negative. This does not mean that action within the arts
should be seen as being in opposition to science, or as its
corrective or compensation, although the passage above
does suggest the same and has often been interpreted in
this way. Rather we are looking at an aesthetic practice
of knowledge in its own right that cannot be reduced to
either scientific knowledge or to philosophical thought. It
occupies another territory and therefore asks other ques-
tions and provokes other answers. It is to science as to phi-
losophy something strange and excluded. It reminds us of
what science has missed or not thought, as well as what
it cannot interpret or mean, and it acts within the world
in a way that science never could. Nietzsche’s philosophy
of art never reached this conclusion. At best it moved in
this direction and offered, despite its pathos of suffering
and rootlessness, a model. Independent of its validity

139 Ibid., p. 71.

96
and also independent of the fact that, as we must admit,
­Nietzsche’s aesthetic ideal is still bound to the paradigm
of presentation, because it wants to break with the same it
still points us in the direction of a future in which art, sci-
ence, and philosophy can interact as equals.
At first, and by Zarathustra at the latest, writing in a
style that was no longer philosophical but itself artistic
or literary, Nietzsche contented himself with the polemi-
cal reversal of hierarchies. By conceiving of aesthetics
and science as epistēmē that correlated with one another,
he continued to keep them separate, placing the latter
beneath the former to once and for all discredit Hegel’s
claim of the absolute precedence of conceptual thought:
“At present, however, science, spurred on by its powerful
delusion, is hurrying unstoppably to its limits, where the
optimism hidden in the essence of logic will founder and
break up. For there is an infinite number of points on the
periphery of the circle of science, and while we have no
way of foreseeing how the circle could ever be completed,
a noble and gifted man inevitably encounters, before
the mid-point of his existence, boundary points on the
periphery like this, where he stares into that which can-
not be illuminated. When, to his horror, he sees how logic
curls up around itself at these limits and finally bites its
own tail, then a new form of knowledge breaks through,
tragic knowledge, which, simply to be endured, needs
art for protection and as medicine.“140 Later, the ‘fool’
and ‘play’ will mark this other epistēmē and pit the truth
of art against the watered-down solutions of science. Art,
as an alternative practice of knowledge, as a differential

140 Ibid., p. 75.

97
e­ pistemology, can learn from this. But it is no longer in
need of such exaggerated clarion calls. It is enough to
instantiate those reflections within the medial in which
artistic practices exhibit their own, idiosyncratic research
perspectives without needing to justify themselves or mir-
ror scientific precision or worry about the relevance or
validity of their results.
Nietzsche was still thinking in terms of the opposition
of science and art and their reversal: the apotheosis of aes-
thetics. Heidegger would be the first to mediate between
Hegel and Nietzsche and to develop a non-metaphysical
concept of truth, which he applied to the arts. He did so
in “The Origin of the Work of Art” in two ways. First, he
freed art from an ontology coupled solely to a focus on
the form. Second, he grounded artistic practice in the
original meanings of technē and poiēsis, going beyond
disegno—the drafting of a design—the core of which is
in turn the poiēin of composition or ‘poetizing’. This pro-
cess is not guided by the imagination, just as little as the
epistemic of the arts is realized in the delineation, the
outline or the sketch as sites of the concetto, the conceit
or idea. Artistic creativity had always stressed shaping or
manifesting thought or the immersion of form in mate-
rial. But, according to Heidegger, the productivity of art
constitutes itself in a continuous process of figuration
and defiguration. It gives birth to the symbolic and at
the same time contains an integral, irrevocable tension,
an irreconcilability that contradicts Hegelian dialectics
and is made up of what Heidegger dubbed the Riss (rup-
ture, tear). This chronic difference or caesura, which both
opens and exposes, also calls forth the Riss, ‘sketch’ or
‘design’, made by painters as a first draft and the Umriss
(outline), as well as the architect’s Grundriss (blueprint )

98
or Aufriss (projection).141 This field of connotations cre-
ates an additional shift in the concept of truth. No longer
oriented towards the absolute—towards the identical-
ness of identity and difference—and thus bound to cor-
respondence, it reveals the ‘unconcealment,’ reinstating
the original meaning of the Greek aletheia.142 The ideas
prepared by Nietzsche culminated in Heidegger’s work:
truth as difference—but not in reference to the moment,
to the event as an interruption that unmasks us and leaves
us at the precipice of our being, but as a meaning-event,
an illumination or opening up into that puts our under-
standing of the ‘world’ in, literally, another light. If for
Nietzsche Dionysus was the god of destruction, for Heide-
gger Hermes is the mediator of what cannot be mediated.
His ‘medium’ is the work, as long as, Heidegger adds in
an elitist aside, it is a ‘true’ work of art. It creates a rift
(Riss), rips aside the veil of the usual and displaces us or
alienates us from the world we know. That is why Heide-
gger wrote in reference to van Gogh: “In proximity to the
work we were suddenly somewhere other than we are usu-
ally accustomed to be.”143 That is part of the reason why,
as Heidegger continued, “art is the setting-itself-to-work
of truth,”144 which, as he stated further on, “thrusts up
the extra-ordinary [Ungeheure] while thrusting down the
ordinary, and what one takes to be such … Whenever art

141 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In particular: “The

rift-design is the drawing together into a unity of sketch and funda-
mental design rupture and outline” (p. 38).
142 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2010), § 44, 204–220. Also Heidegger, “The Ori-
gin of the Work of Art,” p. 28–32.
143 Ibid., p. 15.
144 Ibid., p. 21.

99
happens, ­whenever, that is, there is a beginning, a thrust
enters history and history either begins or resumes.”145 Art
is ‘ab-solute’ exclusiveness, the exception as such. But it
can only create historical caesura or ‘thrusts’ where it man-
ages to instate a difference; where the fissures of time split
open as radically as possible and the rift reveals its sign/
design (Zeichnung), trace or wound. Truth as difference
is for Heidegger no longer a moment of sublime sudden-
ness, but of a conflict that cannot be resolved. It is, in Lyo-
tard’s words, le différend: dissent in permanence.146And
in fact strife or polemos plays a central role in Heidegger’s
philosophy of art. In “Origin of the Work of Art” it is pre-
sented as the difference between ‘earth’ and ‘world’.147
This opposition seems at first to revive the old dichoto-
mies between form and material or idea and materiality.
However here the opening of the ‘world’, as the synchron-
icity of ‘concealment’ and ‘unconcealment’ (alētheia),
which is also concealed, is linked to the ‘ground’ of the
work of art itself. This connection is entangled. Heidegger
used ‘earth’—a term he borrowed from Hölderlin and that
should not be confused with the ‘ground’ of raw material,
or at least not exclusively—to first and foremost address
the substance out of which art is made and to which it
will be set back into: the conditions of its composition.
In a painting, the difference of figure and ground is pos-
sible as long as the figure can be distinguished because of
the ground and the ground is signified or marked by the
figure to show itself as such. In the same way ‘earth’ and

145 Ibid., p. 47, 49.

146 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. George Van Den
Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
147 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 23–27.

100
‘world’ unfold themselves reciprocally, and come to rest
in the ‘work’: “The work moves the earth into the open
of a world and holds it there. The work lets the earth be
an earth.”148 But ­Heidegger also associates another term
with earth—the Greek work for nature, physis. This refers
not only to the ‘ground’ or the materiality of material, but
also encompasses space and time, like the ‘given’, which
is not the product of a work and is, in the broadest sense,
the thingness of the thing and its presence. As something
which is unmade and unmakeable, ‘earth’ is the precondi-
tion for all composition in the sense of technē. Its material-
ity precedes it; just as Aristotle also said that poiēsis brings
forth—as technology constructs—but does not at the same
time bring forth the conditions of its bringing forth. Put
another way, the ‘earth’ is older than the ‘world’, and its
meanings and materialities are also older than their tech-
nical transformations, because the latter must, as Heide-
gger said, “come forth” from the former.
Heidegger’s most important idea in this context is
that both ‘earth’ and ‘world’ necessarily refer to and con-
ceal one another, so that neither can be placed above the
other: “In the struggle, each opponent carries the other
beyond itself.”149 The two not only have the same root,
but are completely intertwined, their relation to one
another is chiasmatic. This is what is meant by the term
‘struggle’ or ‘strife’ (Streit). Art is a means of exposing this
chiasm. Therefore if we want to know about the possibili-
ties of art, its ‘truth’ and its knowledge, we must observe
each singularly unfolding chiastic play and its practices.
Heidegger accordingly continued the previous passage as

148 Ibid., p. 24, also p. 26.

149 Ibid., p. 27.

101
follows: “The more intransigently the strife outdoes itself
on its own part, the more uncompromisingly do the oppo-
nents admit themselves into the intimacy of their simple
belonging to one another. The earth cannot do without
the openness of world if it is to appear in the liberating
surge of its self-closedness. World, on the other hand, can-
not float away from the earth if, as the prevailing breadth
and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on
something decisive.”150 Hence it is key that the artistic
process opens an interstice, an in-between in which the
dialectics of both can be seen. At the same time, by cre-
ating a Riss, art opens the chiastic gap that much more,
and makes this split explicit. The relation between ‘earth’
and ‘world’ is shaken and something breaks open which
not only reconfigures this relationship, but within which
can be found the event of its own epistēmē—an epistēmē of
opening. It reveals something which had previously been
invisible and readjusts the constellations of perception. In
this event, Heidegger’s linking of art and truth is realized:
The distinctive configuration and constellation of ‘earth’
and ‘world’ first brings forth that which is artistic in art.
It gives art a space, a purpose as art, and thus admits an
experience which rivals the illuminated clearing (Lich-
tung) of alētheia.
As we have seen, form and materiality, ground and fig-
ure, aisthēsis and symbolization took on a very different
position in Heidegger’s work than they had held in the tra-
ditional metaphysics of art, most recently in Hegel’s phi-
losophy of art, grounded as it had been in early modern-
ist aesthetics. In Heidegger, it is the event of ‘assembling’

150 Ibid.

102
or the coincidence of chiastic interplay that first allows
a literal composition or compositio, a putting together or
arranging. We investigate this point in more detail in the
next chapter. The essence of art is neither form nor the
“sensuous shining of the idea” and the concomitant shin-
ing appearance of the beautiful. Decisive is rather the sin-
gular way in which it is put together, the con-stellare that
leads to the presentiment that every ‘work’ creates its own
paradigm and its own knowledge, which cannot be mani-
fested in any other way. We will explore these ‘singular
paradigms’ further on. For now, it is enough to note that
Heidegger understood poetry (Dichtung) as an aesthetic
consolidation (Verdichtung). He made this clear in the last
section of his essay on the work of art. Poetry or figura-
tion—in the broadest sense a configuration or composi-
tion—is the essential “design” and “language of art.” All
art, Heidegger said, also art not based on language such
as architecture or music or painting, is included in this
essence (Wesen): “The essence of art is poetry. The essence
of poetry, however, is the founding [Stiftung] of truth  …
Building and plastic creation, on the other hand, happen,
always and only, in the open of saying and naming … They
are an always unique poeticizing within the clearing of
beings which has already happened, unnoticed, in the lan-
guage. As the setting-into-work of truth, art is poetry.”151

151 Ibid., p. 47, 46. This passage can only be left to stand without con-
tradiction if we add that Heidegger understood ‘poetry’ very broadly:
“Poetry is here thought in such a broad sense, and at the same time in
such an intimate and essential unity with language and the word, that
it must remain open whether art, in all its modes from architecture to
poesy, exhausts the nature of poetry” (p. 46).

103
Diapoetics and aisthetics of the epistemic

Heidegger understood artistic practice and its epistēmai

as poetical. Here ‘poetry’ means something which goes
through rather than is placed upon all art—a diapoetics,
not the Romantic metapoetics—just as Heidegger inter-
preted technē as poetical. The prefix dia—Latin per, Eng-
lish through—refers in turn, as explored in the first chap-
ter, to medial practice itself. ‘Diapoeticizing’ thus at the
same time implies ‘diaformation’—including all (self-)re-
flexive structures. We are not talking about the form itself,
the creation or composition of the completed work as the
original ‘ground’ or basis of work. Rather, we are referring
to the processes through which they first come into the
open and through which they are completely part of the
exceptionality of their singular event of truth. This is why
Heidegger also said art was “founding” or “grounding.”152
Concurrently, art only touches upon the ‘truth’ when it
tears us away from familiar certainties and confronts us
with an Other—the never-suspected or un-thought: “In
its exclusive reality, what went before is refuted by the
work.”153 Each work of art therefore establishes a new
beginning and participates in ‘grounding’ in the sense of
founding a history that is intertwined with the opening
of ‘truth’ (alētheia). This happens emphatically where art
is able to reintroduce historicity and the temporality of
meaning. Heidegger therefore named artists—and in par-
ticular ‘poets’ on whom he, completely in accordance with
Romanticism, conferred a twofold precedence: over other
forms of art and over ‘thinkers’—as the true founders of

152 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 47–49.

153 Ibid., p. 47.

104
an opening to the world, for they first discovered and in-
vented the to-be-set (and at the same time decisive) ‘word’
from which ‘being’ draws its meaning and its ‘time’. It is
unimportant that Heidegger, aside from a few remarks on
Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, and Vincent van Gogh’s famous
Pair of Shoes—the latter example perforated by Meyer
Schapiro’s critique—almost never analyzed the fine arts
or music. Neither does it matter that he concentrated
almost exclusively on writing and—not unlike Hegel—
despite assertions to the contrary, believed that the “lin-
guistic work … has a privileged position among the arts as
a whole.”154 More important is that with these ideas, best
expressed in his notes in Denkerfahrungen, he paved the
way for a two-fold path between writing and thinking or
between art and philosophy. These two paths or alterna-
tives are related, but remain independent. For example, he
wrote of Cézanne: “In the late work of the painter, the ten-
sion of emerging and not emerging has become onefold,
transformed into a mysterious identity. Is there shown
here a pathway that opens onto a belonging-together of
poet and thinker?”155 We are not talking about perception

154 Ibid., p.  45. Language is thus everywhere privileged and think-
ing about art starts with language and its poetic function. Theodor W.
Adorno explicitly problematizes this connection in “Music and Lan-
guage: A Fragment,” in Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia. Essays on Mod-
ern Music (London: Verso, 2011), p. 1–8. For a critique of Heidegger
see also Dieter Mersch, “Sprache und Aisthesis. Heidegger und die
Kunst,” in Sibylle Peters and Martin Jörg Schäfer, eds., Intellektuelle
Anschauung. Figurationen zwischen Kunst und Wissen (Bielefeld: tran-
script, 2006), p. 112–133.
155 Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, p. 163. Translation cited in Hein-
rich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger,
1929–1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 143–144.

105
or aisthēsis nor, as Heidegger still claimed in 1931/1932
in The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Parable of the Cave and
the Theaetetus, about the fact that the artist is uniquely
capable of “bringing out the inner possibilities of being,
thus for making man see what it really is with which he so
blindly busies himself.”156 Rather art, as criteria-setting po-
etics which are therefore hermeneutic in the literal mean-
ing of hermēneuein—the explanatory and understanding
interpretation of the world—sets its own kind of truth and
knowledge equal to thought and, in contrast to Hegel, not
sublimated by the philosophical concept and its implicit
hierarchical consequences. Art corrects the concept and
turns it in another direction, creating perspectives phi-
losophy had never thought. Seen in this way, art and phi-
losophy are equals and the epistemic practice of the arts
is a different, but equally suitable and useful opening of
the meanings of being which takes place outside all differ-
ences between concept and metaphor.157
That means at the same time that art ‘thinks’—if we
want to call it such—as a form of ‘poetry’ and is therefore,
unlike philosophical thought, a ‘founding’ or an ‘uncon-
cealment’ of truth in the sense of a gift of revealing that
cannot otherwise be given.158 And in fact, the possibilities
of art and its epistēmē are located here in the “neighbor-
hood of poetry and thought” which Heidegger saw as “two
parallels” that begin and intersect in the infinite, that
is to say in a place that cannot be located. This makes it

156 Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Parable of

the Cave and the Theaetetus, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum,
2002), p. 47.
157 Heidegger, “On the Way to Language,” p. 100.
158 Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 46.

106
clear that ‘thought’ has not one, but manifold and equal
possible avenues including art and philosophy, but not
art and science or philosophy and science. Science is at a
deficit because, as Heidegger says in What is Called Think-
ing?, “science does not think”159 since it works in another
dimension than and is dependent upon philosophy. We
might add that science does not poeticize. Obsessed with
precision and unambiguity, it is not in the same realm as
images, metaphors, and figures—which it nevertheless
needs for its concepts and ideas. The extent to which this
is true has become obvious since the dominance of the
technosciences, which rely not only on mathematical for-
mulas, but also on visualization and diagrammatic tools.
Without art and philosophy, science in this form would
not be possible. This does not however mean that art and
philosophy offset one another, rather each is the Other of
the other, which is why Heidegger does not speak of two
different modes of thinking, but of the difference between
‘thought’ and ‘poetry’. Each has its own position vis-à-vis
the truth—while poetry takes on the role of a savior from
or resistance fighter against the rule of technology, phi-
losophy, in the course of its history and in the return to its
beginnings at the crossroads of Western metaphysics, is
still searching for a new start.
For Heidegger, poetry, as an emblem of aesthetic
thought, does not inhabit a space below (as in Hegel) or
above (as in Nietzsche) philosophy, but at its side, liter-
ally in its ‘neighborhood’. He had this in mind when he
wrote in his late essay The Nature of Language: “poetry
and thinking are in virtue of their nature held apart by

159 Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? p. 8.

107
a delicate yet luminous difference, each held in its own
darkness.”160 Heidegger did not bring the two, in their
darkness, together, but left them separate. Poetry is dif-
ferent from thinking, thought is different from poetry.
They refer to one another; poetry provides the ‘word’
about which philosophical thought is still thinking and
conversely thinking is the task of defining and delineat-
ing problēma in its many meanings as something that
projects or as an unsolved question that is put forward,
which in turn needs ‘poetry’ to be named. Nevertheless,
the difference of each in their respective disparity is at all
times neither delineated nor nameable. Thinking cannot
be defined by poetry nor poetry by thought. And neither
poetry nor thinking can fathom the difference between
the two. This is why Heidegger spoke of their “darkness.”
The nature of aesthetics is not drawn from thought and
the nature of thought does not stem from aesthetics. Fur-
thermore, both are sequestered in their traditional role of
ratio or imagination. They remain, despite their equality
and closeness, essentially strange to one another. Neither
allows itself to be translated by the other—through which
they would have another relationship to themselves and
their respective other. This is what Heidegger meant by
their “delicate yet luminous difference.” There is the thin-
nest of borders between philosophical thought and artis-
tic poiein, but it is still noticeable. From this follows that
the aesthetic arts do not ‘think’ in linguistic or metaphoric
expressions, rather their thinking is different, the thought
of the Other or something other than thought that should
not be given the same name or practice.

160 Heidegger, “On the Way to Language,” p. 90.

108
 To grasp the relation of art—or, more exactly, of the
aesthetic—to epistēmē, our exploration must therefore
become more differentiated. The circle of art and knowl-
edge encloses questions both about thought and about
truth as well as questions about the purpose of thought
and its Other and their varying connotations. That is the
extraordinary relevance of Heidegger’s contribution to
the discussion of an epistemology of aesthetics: the sim-
ple, but paradoxical attempt to define aesthetics neither
as thought nor as not-thought, but as a third thing, an
‘allonomy’ which is resistant to all usual categorizations
and dichotomies. This implies the necessity of changing
both the concept of thought and the idea of the aesthetic,
leaving philosophy and science behind and locating art in
alterity. But—and this is the predicament of this endeavor,
as productive as it has been—the specific epistēmē of per-
ception, the power (enargeia) of aisthēsis and its sense of
singularity, remains strangely underexamined in contrast
to the element of language. In the end, Heidegger’s idea
of aisthetics was linguistic. The philosophical prejudice in
favor of the absoluteness of its own medium was upheld.
Heidegger’s philosophy of art falls short of what it achieved.
In it, language refers art and aisthēsis to one another and
brings forth the aesthetics of art. In this way, figuration is
rhetoricized or it is thought using the model of rhetoric.
Consequently aesthetic thought is put above poetry and
saying is raised above perception and its feeling for mate-
riality, which the term ‘earth’ attempted to save. There
are moments in which it becomes clear that aesthetics is
unclassifiable, that it is defined by its indefinite nature—
withholding judgment and reproducing meanings. Con-
sequently, art ‘thinks’ in leaps and discontinuities, and
produces ‘jokes’ rather than linear derivations and proofs.

109
But these moments are brought back into language and
addressed as two different ways of speaking—the ‘ground’
and the ‘poetic’. Latently, Heidegger therefore reinstated
the contempt for art and its thought/poetry—which is dis-
appointing considering his insistence on the autonomy of
both—that philosophy had long held for perception and
its exuberant colors, multifarious tactile impressions of
material, and fullness of sounds and silences, as well as
for the distribution of affect in the reproduction of medial
sensations or, more concisely, the chaos of the senses and
their convulsions.
Perhaps we should therefore favor Theodor W.
­Adorno’s preferred term ‘constellation’161 (about which
more later)—the distribution of moments that have not
yet been woven together as forms or figures—over ‘con-
figuration’ and the concomitant concept of poetics: not
joining them (fügen) in a fugue of aspects that synthesizes
the various facets of koinos in one work and balances con-
flicts (no matter how precariously), but juxtaposition, a
loose coupling or dispersion of aspects opposed so that
they create their own energy—their own contrasts and
contradictions. For there is no immediate connection to
‘found’ or ‘ground’ anything, but at first only an irritation,
a split with an opening that does not open. There is no
word sufficient to break out of the constraints of meaning
and keep that which shows itself in a constant, unfulfilled
limbo. In, for example, the music of Morton Feldman, in
which every sound is given equal footing and echoes to

161 ‘Constellation’ is one of Adorno’s basic concepts and can be

found throughout his work. On the multiple meanings of words in
Adorno see also Andreas Lehr, Kleine Formen (Norderstedt: books on
demand, 2003), esp. p. 133–183.

110
be mixed with others, or of John Cage, where indetermi-
nacy and a lack of intention give the tempo for musical
dis-order, or the Merz pictures of Kurt Schwitters, unex-
pectedly perplexing ‘asyntheses’ of found objects thrown
together in simple conjunctions, torn out of the world of
commerce and made worthless162—in all of these unclas-
sifiable, floating, and finally unknown things163 we are
dealing with another logic of aesthetic thought, an a-logic
of caesurae or decomposition that is far from Heidegger’s
concept of ‘poetry’. We are thus confronted with differ-
ent understandings of both aesthetic experience and of
‘truth’ in art and its epistemic practices. On the one hand,
we have Heidegger’s understanding, a compositionality
that unfolds from language, and on the other hand an
aesthetics of the rift, of the diabolon or contingency that
has its roots in the insoluble difference of the instant and
the experience thereof (Widerfahrung). Out of the latter,
another knowledge or a knowledge of the Other can arise,
as in arts of chance (tychē)164—without the aid of figura-
tion or metaphor or hermēneuein, or even poiein.

162 On Schwitters’ “and-”images see Peter Bexte, “Trennen und

Verbinden. Oder: Was heißt und,” Medienphilosophisches Jahrbuch,
1/1 (2015): p. 51–66.
163 Adorno wrote: “The aim of every artistic utopia today is to make
things in ignorance of what they are.” Theodor W. Adorno, “Vers une
musique informelle,” in Quasi una Fantasia, p. 269–322, cit. 322.
164 Here it is important to differentiate between radical, tychistic
uncertainty and the automaton, simulated chance that can be cal-
culated using stochastic variance. For a more in-depth exploration
see Dieter Mersch “Spiele des Zufalls und der Emergenz,” Maske und
Kothurn. Internationale Beiträge zur Theater-, Film- und Medienwis-
senschaft, 54/4 (2008): p. 19–34; and Mersch, “Positive und negative
Regeln. Zur Ambivalenz regulierter Imaginationen,” in Jörg Huber,
Gesa Ziemer, and Simon Zumsteg, eds., Archipele des Imaginären
(Zurich: Springer, 2009), p. 109–123.

111
 The question of how art and thought as well as art
and truth are connected must be posed again from this
perspective and their relationship delimited anew. The
lines of conflict run on the one hand between the arts and
aesthetic practices—from those inherent to the process
of shaping and creating, to varying types of design, up to
technology, and the art of living, whether or not they lay
claim to being artistic—and on the other hand between
thought and the varying forms of (acquiring) knowledge
that we looked at in the first part of this study (eureuna,
zētēsis). In contrast to Heidegger, we will be using a con-
cept of ‘thought’ that allows for the heterogeneity of the
term: both thought and thinking and therefore some-
thing different from what is usually meant in philosophy,
whether that be logos, a proposition, a discourse, or—as in
German idealism, systems theory, and the varying schools
of post-structuralism—the production of difference.165 In
short, we are interested in ‘thought’ that already includes
its own Other. For this reason, in the next chapter, the
term ‘aesthetic thought’ is placed in quotes to make clear
that we are not talking about thought or thinking in the

165 Thinking about thought and minding about the mind is one of
philosophy’s core activities. For this reason, the ‘meaning’ of thought
is as diverse as philosophy itself. It is however possible to make out
a few cardinal positions that reappear often and are repeatedly ref-
erenced: Thought as logos and logic (rationalism); thought as differ-
entiation (German idealism, systems theory); thought as referencing;
intentionality (phenomenology); thought as reflection. For some
­initial remarks on visual and aesthetic thought see Dieter Mersch,
“Sichtbarkeit / Sichtbarmachung. Was heißt ‘Denken im Visuel-
len’?” in Fabian Goppelsröder and Martin Beck, eds., Sichtbarkeiten
2: Präsentifizieren. Zeigen zwischen Körper, Bild und Sprache (Zürich-
­Berlin: diaphanes, 2014), p.  19–71; and Mersch, “Nicht-Propositio­
nalität und ästhetisches Denken.”

112
usual philosophical sense, nor about poeticizing, but
about something else that we have yet to characterize.
‘Thought’ is perhaps here less a method of theoretical
experiencing and more a singular means of reflexivity that
is different from other types of reflection, in particular
from substantiating discursive introspection, and cannot
be traced directly to either philosophy or science or their
research practices. Rather it comprises a distinctively
non-discursive, non-symbolic processuality that has more
to do with the literal meaning of reflectio—a mirroring or
shining back—than with intellectual speculation. For this
reason, in the previous chapter we linked it to zētēsis, the
open and never-ending quest. It can therefore be demar-
cated through its acts or actions. Hence if the question is
whether and how aesthetics is knowledge and in particular
how it brings forth another kind of knowledge indepen-
dent of scientific knowledge and philosophical epistem-
ics, and whether it has its own locality, it is important to
study its other kind of thinking as well as the Other of its
thinking (as pertains to discourse) to secure a place for it
within the cultural epistēmē. If we speak here of another
thinking or even of an other than thinking, it is because
aesthetics pushes the boundaries of all existing concepts
and categorization and refuses to fit the terminology that
has till now been used to talk about thought. It constantly
changes positions and is never found where philosophical
theory expects it to be. That is why we have taken a detour
to examine the relation between art and truth, from Baum-
garten’s scientia sensitiva to philosophical aesthetics and
from Hegel to Heidegger. These all saw a type of thēoria
in the practice of art that, each in its own way, was under-
stood as the presentation or revelation of a ‘truth’, without
however being able to truly grasp its specific ­singularity.

113
Heidegger introduced a radical shift in the history of
metaphysics in that his concept of truth comprised the
event of opening or ‘unconcealment’ (alētheia). Neverthe-
less, he remained oriented in the main towards the hap-
pening of meaning. If, however, we return to the initial
meaning of thēoria, a spectacle and things looked at, then
‘aesthetic thought’ could again be connected to the per-
formances of the phainesthai and the allowing-to-appear.
This might make it apparent that the theoretical, even if
its framework is a science such as philosophy, cannot but
refer to aesthetics, which opens our eyes and ears in order,
like the original passio, to let in an Other, an alterity. What
is more, it would not be necessary to immediately domes-
ticate this Other by finding meanings or interpretations.
With this we arrive at a difference or blurriness in both the
practice of thought and in the practice of truth that is not
subject to delineation or demarcation, but reveals itself
anew each time and is therefore, as a difference, both pro-
ductive and producing. In the next chapter, we attempt to
draw the contours of such a possibility.

114
Con-Stellare
The Reflexive Epistemic of the Arts

Thinking always takes place through ›ars‹ or demands ›ars‹.

Jean-Luc Nancy166

Where art and philosophy don’t meet

If we claim that art is its own form of knowledge and of

‘­research’, that it is inherently ‘another kind of thought’
and ‘other than thought’ then nothing less is at stake than
the recognition of a form of knowledge that has not yet
been and cannot be explained by philosophical discourse.
It is a kind of knowledge that inhabits a different conti-
nent and follows another ‘logic’ than that of language and
its predicates. The parallelism of philosophy and art ends
here, because art’s sovereignty is something other than
philosophy’s insistence on the concept. Art does not know
because it speaks, instead it makes recognizable by show-
ing. Saying and showing, as has repeatedly been pointed
out since Ludwig Wittgenstein, are two different sides of
­allowing to appear and to be perceived (Erscheinen­lassen
and Zu-Erkennen-geben).167 The function of showing is

166 Jean-Luc Nancy, “Mit-Sinn,” in Elke Bippus, Jörg Huber, and

Dorothee Richter, eds., ‘Mit-Sein’ (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer, 2010),
p. 21–32, cit. 31.
167 The difference between saying and showing, which Wittgen-
stein introduced as a key concept in Tractatus and which is one of
his main ideas, is also the central motif of this investigation of the
non-symbolic, of pictorialness, of the phainestai of materiality, and
the unspeakable instant of the appearing of the appearance. See

115
neither simply deixis nor only the expressive function
as defined by Karl Bühler, but always vacillates between
showing and showing itself (appearing). This difference is
also noted in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: “Method
of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything.
Merely show.”168 François Truffaut said almost the same
thing in his interview with Alfred Hitchcock: “A film-maker
isn’t supposed to say things; his job is to show them”169
(emphasis in the original). Clearly there is an aesthetic re-
lation between the dual figure of showing/showing oneself
and that which I have dubbed Zer-zeigung—‘showing asun-
der’—including the multifarious modalities of ­reflexivity

Dieter Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich:

Wilhelm Fink, 2002), esp. p. 236ff.; Mersch, “Wort, Bild, Ton, Zahl.
Modalitäten medialen Darstellens,” in Mersch, ed., Die Medien der
Künste (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), p.  9–49; Mersch, “Ikonizität.
Theorien des Bildlichen nach Wittgenstein,” in Ludger Schwarte, ed,
Bild-Performanz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink 2011), p.  111–136. On the
central issue in Wittgenstein see Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, “Sagen und
Zeigen. Wittgensteins ‘Hauptproblem’,” in Wittgenstein, Tractatus
logico-philosophicus, ed. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 2001), p. 35–63. Vossenkuhl links this dichotomy directly to
Bertrand Russell’s concept of ‘antinomy’ and his attempts at reso-
lution. See also Heinrich Watzka, Sagen und Zeigen. Die Verschrän-
kung von Metaphysik und Sprachkritik beim frühen und beim späten
Wittgenstein (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000); Ulrike Ramming, Mit
den Worten rechnen. Ansätze zu einem philosophischen Medienbegriff
(Bielefeld: transcript, 2006), p. 173–182; and Chris Bezzel, ed., Sagen
und Zeigen (Berlin: Parerga, 2005), to name only a few.
168 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and
Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 460.
169 François Truffaut, Hitchcock (revised edition) (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1985), p. 139. Gottfried Boehm also insisted that showing
is the primary state of pictoriality, see Boehm, Wenn Bilder Sinn erzeu-
gen (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2007), esp. p. 19–33.

116
and self-reflexivity. This is the true ‘labor of aesthetics’, its
particular doctrine or way of thinking.170
If art is another kind of thought or something other
than thought, it is in the main such practices of showing
and their entanglements. These are resistant to transla-
tion into concepts or into the language of propositions.171
At the same time, it is not a pre-predicative or pre-reflexive
knowledge as has been claimed of intuition or the imagi-
nation. Showing/showing oneself is rather already a plural-
ity: from pointing out to exhibiting and performing or pre-
senting in the sense of allowing to be seen or heard—it is
the manifestation of an event or the demonstrare of a sud-
den realization or of evidence. It is also other than speak-
ing and talking and cannot be reduced to them. As Witt-
genstein succinctly put it: “What can be shown, cannot be
said.”172 What one can do, the other cannot and vice versa.
The two may refer to one another and even be inextricably
linked like a Janus figure or a text-image, but each—as a
function—precludes the other, again proving that aesthet-
ics is heteronomous. Tauntingly, we are confronted with

170 On this see Mersch, “Die Zerzeigung.”

171 As James Elkins aptly wrote: “But a painting is a painting, and not
words describing the artist or the place it was made or the people who
commissioned it. A painting is made of paint – of fluids and stone –
and paint has its own logic, and its own meanings even before it is
shaped into the head of a madonna …. Bleary preverbal thoughts are
intermixed with namable concepts, figures and forms that are being
represented. The material memories are not usually part of what is
said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every
painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of
the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter: and
it does so at the same moment, and in the same thought, as it cap-
tures the expression of a face.” Elkins, What Painting Is, p. 2–3.
172 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus, trans C.K.
Ogden (London: Routledge Classics, 2001), 4.1212, p. 31.

117
irreconcilable competencies, in which the singularity of
aesthetics is drawn from the congruence of showing and
appearing, because showing must show itself in showing.
We are therefore confronted with a genuine non-negative
or affirmation: showing cannot take itself back or relativ-
ize itself and it is inherently non-hypothetical; it has no
conjunctive—showing cannot be provisional or merely
a possibility. The arrow points in one direction and one
direction only, even if it does not show what it is pointing
at. The latter demonstrates the instability of showing as
identification: our gaze follows a line without landing at
its end. Its object necessarily remains underdetermined.
Willard Van Orman Quine’s study of the translation of
the word gavagai suffers from this indeterminacy.173 The
‘unresearchability’ of the reference stems from the lack
of clarity inherent to showing and its ‘logic’ or ‘a-logic’ of
inclusion that does not bow to the dichotomous order of
either-or, but is simultaneously both figure and ground.
We shall return to this later. The paradoxes of showing are
therefore different from the contradictions found in dis-
course or in statements. While the former end in system-
atic irreconcilability or impossibility, the latter remain in
a kind of metastability that at best flips to one side or the
other.174 This is why aesthetics focus on the singular, on
this-here or something that can be shown. Yet it is never

173 On the theory of the indeterminacy of translation see Willard

Van Orman Quine, “Ontological Relativity,” in Quine, Ontological Rel-
ativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968),
p. 26–68.
174 For a more profound analysis of this point see Dieter Mersch,
“Politik des Erinnerns und die Geste des Zeigens,” in Karen van den
Berg and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds., Politik des Zeigens (Munich:
Fink, 2010), p. 109–126; Mersch, “Aspects of Visual Epistemology: On

118
clear what (quid) it is, only that (quod) it is. Philosophical
generalities and the universality of concepts do not speak
to it.
This explains Adorno’s topoi of untranslatability—
the refusal of judgment and the hermeneutic encircling
which does violence to the work, capturing it in concepts
and their determinants.175 Any attempt at ‘translating’ the
aesthetic immediately falls under suspicion because it
seems like a conspiracy of the word to stop the aesthetic
project and at the same time ban it. Adorno grappled his
entire career with hermeneutics, no matter how inevitable
or justifiable, that aimed to crack the riddle of art and get
to its core as if it were a fruit. He worked instead to dem-
onstrate a principal incompatibility with what might be
‘meant’; art’s resistance to the desire for meaning. Not
even ‘labor in the aesthetic realm’ is analogous to concep-
tual work and its connection of sentences or copula. The
aesthetic form does not bow down to such syntheses. It is
not a statement that opens itself to discursive understand-
ing. Such approaches bring art down a notch and devalue
it as something that needs commenting or defending.
Adorno instead insisted on art’s otherness, its strange-
ness. Philosophical writing cannot grasp the surplus of the
aesthetic and when it does, when writing imposes itself
upon art, the latter has lost and relinquished its alterity.
This explains Ad Reinhardt’s furious invective against all
philosophical attempts, no matter how well-intentioned,

the ‘Logic of the Iconic’,” in A. Benedek and K. Nyiri, eds., Images in

Language (Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 169–194.
175 See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot
Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.  441–
442.

119
to understand art. To him, these can only be assaults,
because language believes itself to be the only means of
acquiring knowledge or of thinking. The linguistic turn,
often misunderstood, began with Wittgenstein and total-
ized the regime of language, incorporating all other forms
of thought and finally equating language and thought.176
Correspondingly, ‘artistic thought’ must articulate itself
in another medium not delineated by philosophy. It must
define its own space within the polyvalences of showing/
showing oneself, so that whenever we speak of an episte-
mology of aesthetics we are not, despite Heidegger, talk-
ing about a parallelism or a relationship between two
different paths that makes their difference plausible, but
about a transformation of the epistēmai themselves.
This state of affairs has rarely been expressed ­better
than by Derrida, who in Truth in Painting postulated an
unbridgeable gap between the mediality of the arts and
of philosophy, an “abyss” that is constantly neutralized
by adamant philosophical attempts at reconciliation and
appropriation: “In order to think art in general, one thus
accredits a series of oppositions (meaning/form, inside/­
outside, content/container, signified/signifier, represented/­
representer, etc.) which, precisely, structure the traditional
interpretation of works of art. … By ­asking what art means
(to say), one submits the mark ‘art’ to a very determined

176 While the term ‘linguistic turn’ was coined retrospectively by

Richard Rorty to characterize the era of the dominance of linguis-
tic analytical discourse in which ideas, judgments, and logic were
deduced solely from the structure of the propositional sentence, this
turn rests predominantly on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, ignoring the
openness and diversity of his later philosophy, in particular his theory
of pictoriality. On the latter see Dieter Mersch, “Wittgensteins Bild-
denken,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 6 (2006): p. 925–942.

120
regime of interpretation which has supervened in history:
it consists, in its tau­tology without reserve, in interrogating
the vouloir-dire of every work of so-called art, even if its form
is not that of saying.  … When a philosopher repeats this
question without transforming it, with­out destroying it in
its form, its question-form, its onto­-interrogative structure,
he has already subjected the whole of space to the discur-
sive arts … and the logos … The philosophical en­closes art
in its circle.“177 We should add that this encircling applies
to both ends of the chain: to art, in that it is categorized as
the symbolic, and to philosophy, which authorizes itself to
judge art, an act which Derrida insisted on calling “authori-
tarian,” because the philosopher simultaneously domesti-
cates and obscures the art which he observes: “There has
been, until now, only a philosopher of art … who … never
abandons his position in front of art … who, even though
he at times fancies himself an artist producing works, is
content merely to gossip about art.”178 The word ‘gossip’
cannot be read disparagingly enough.

The model of the avant-garde

What then connects and what separates art and philoso-

phy? What takes place between the two, what are their
manifold resonances, where are they mutually oblivious?
Where does philosophy disguise art and where does art

177 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Benning-

ton and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
p. 22–23.
178 Jacques Derrida, Spurs. Nietzsche’s Styles, trans. Barbara Harlow
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 77.

121
­ ppropriate and abuse more or less arbitrary philoso-
a
phemes? Again the question of the two kinds of thought
arises—their disparity and their singular rightness that
shows art as the Other of philosophy and philosophy as
the Other of art. The two evidently occupy two disparate
but neighboring territories (as Heidegger claimed of po-
etry and thought), demarcated by clear and immovable
borders, albeit with many border-crossings. That which
divides and connects the two is conceptually opaque. To
stress their relationship is to even out their difference,
especially the various modalities by which they articulate
themselves. Their ‘as’ is diverse, the particularity of their
gift which is located here in the senses and there in lan-
guage, even if philosophical speech tends to dissolve these
boundaries. The fact that their closeness obscures the
incompatibility of the ways in which they think seems to
prove Heidegger right, yet the image of a parallelism be-
tween thought and poetry puts each on a clear path that
avoids any contamination. That image is just as inade-
quate as the postulate of their mutual ‘friendship’. More
correct would be to say there is a not-simple difference
between the two, an other-than which occasionally allows
osmosis or overlapping, but within which each remains
strange to the other. Consequently we are not interested
in ways of reading both as ‘languages’ or ‘texts’. Rather we
aim to assert that artistic epistēmai comprise knowledge
that cannot be subsumed in the philosophical and can-
not be translated—it opens up different ‘truths’ outside of
the structure of discursivity. These are not even non-dis-
cursive, because the category of discursive/non-discursive
belongs to the binary regime that has chosen discourse
as its overriding principle. Every negation remains tied to
that which it negates, so that formulating difference un-

122
derscores the primacy of that which one sought to reject.
It encloses the discarded in its norm, codes its otherness,
and secures the hegemony of philosophy. The term ‘non-
discursive’ is inadequate to mark the singularity of the aes-
thetic, because it takes an opposition as its starting point,
which inherently blocks against alterity, openness, and in-
determinacy. We are dealing with a third realm that stands
out from the difference we have delineated. This other
domain is neither discursive nor non-discursive, neither
propositional nor non-propositional, neither determining
nor non-determining; art cannot be put into relation with
other forms of discourse, it is instead a sui generis practice
of knowledge. Its ‘power’ advances first along the lines of
logic/a-logic and showing/showing oneself.
If we were to give it an artistic face, we would draw from
early, explicitly non-representational, avant-garde works:
monochrome canvases or single, drawn-out sequences of
notes with barely audible modulations that exhibit self-ref-
erential knowledge about the visual and the gaze or about
the minimal acoustic conditions of a composition. There
is no question that as regards artistic thought, the avant-
garde has the advantage of having made the reflexivity of
aesthetics its subject. Put another way, the avant-garde can
be seen as a suitable ‘theory’ of art as ‘meta-art’. For this
reason, avant-garde works mostly referred to themselves.
From the start, with Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square
(1915),the avant-garde was presented as a completely new
form of painting, destroying figure as well as ground, and
the representational depiction they evoked. Paradigmati-
cally, this painting refers to nothing but the fact of it being
a painting, its own pictoriality; neither is it a symbol nor is
it a painting of something that might suggest an outside.
Rather it is both a tautology and a non-image, a paradox

123
that leaves open whether we are looking at a black square
on a white background or a white frame on a black back-
ground. In this way it is something other than a picture;
rather it is a site of passage that breaks with all previously
accepted ideas about images. More than a meta-picture,179
it is a performative act that, through its negativity, cre-
ates something completely new, namely the quintessence
of the pictorial itself. Malevich spoke of the “icon of my
time,”180 which was simultaneously an anti-icon that led
the gaze into another space and another understanding of
iconicity. Its minimalism informed us about what makes
a picture. The knowledge it expresses is manifested nei-
ther on the level of representation nor in a non-picture, an
inability to portray, nor in an act of transcendence—with
which it is certainly connected.181 Rather it is knowledge
of the iconic itself and of its mediality, and has already
gone beyond the possibility of representation. We could,
with Wittgenstein, say that that which makes the picture
a picture cannot itself be part of the picture—it shows it.
Hence the knowledge it produces refers to itself in such a
way that it shows itself without being predicable through
something else. Its modus is artistic reflexivity.
This is of course also true of discourse that attempts to
approach this kind of art and, necessarily essayistic, at best
manages to brush against it. Language is predicated on
the break with the visual, which always shows more than

179 On the concept of the meta-picture see William T. J. Mitchell,

Picture Theory. Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 35–82, esp. 45–64.
180 Cited in Gilles Néret, Malevich, trans. Chris Miller (Cologne:
Taschen, 2003), p. 49.
181 See Massimo Cacciari, “Die Ikone,” in Volker Bohn, ed., Bildlich-
keit (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 385–429.

124
the statement can achieve. The visual ‘infinitely’ evades
speech, which tries in vain to reproduce the fullness and
speed of knowledge manifested in the simple contrast of
black and white. That is why it is paintings that answered
to Malevich’s ‘experiment’. The dialogue continued with
Piet Mondrian’s squares composed of horizontal and ver-
tical lines and the three primary colors, and Josef Albers’
more than 1000 Homages to the Square (1950), with the
flat black and white planes of Robert Rauschenberg and
Ad Reinhardt, as well as with Piero Manzoni’s Achromes
(1960)—all of which explored the pictorialness of the pic-
ture in ever-new variants. These comprise a continuous
‘discourse’ which painting holds with itself, a series of
dialogoi that act by showing and through the difference of
their showing create knowledge and an iconic thēoria that
goes further than any philosophy of the image.
John Cage’s 4'33'' (1952) is a similarly paradigmatic
piece and shares the radicalness of its negation with Black
Square, and in a similar manner shows what ‘composi-
tion’ can be and what makes music music. In contrast
to the many deconstructions of melos and rhythmos that
informed the history of new music up until the 1950s and
culminated in serialism, but still operated on the prem-
ise of a positive regime of notes whose structures could be
governed, John Cage took silence, the void or ‘phenomeno-
logical nothingness’, as the starting point for the develop-
ment of an elementary separation into sound and silence
as well as sound and noise.182 Rather than working within
the ‘tonal’ parameters of pitch, dynamics, meter, and

182 See Dieter Mersch, “Stille als Ereignis. Zur Ortschaft des musika-
lischen Geschehens,” in Jörn-Peter Hiekel, ed., Sinnbildungen. Spiri-
tualität in der Musik heute (Mainz: Schott Music, 2008), p. 46–58.

125
timbre, which organize composing as a serial procedure,
Cage created a hollowing out, a hole that indirectly mir-
rored the system of differences that had constituted musi-
cal order going back to antiquity: emptiness and fullness,
sounds and silence, noise and resonance—producing a
literal happenstance with all its connotations of occur-
rences and events. Knowledge in this case is not an analy-
sis of or acquaintance with composition or technique, but
the experience of the conditions of musicality itself: hear-
ing each note in its singularity, its coming and going—it
is Freud’s fort-da as the fundamental figure of all cultural
play. This is neither a theory of nor a philosophy of music,
but rather a reflection on music using music against music
so that knowledge of the musical can unfold from the
musical itself. Malevich’s Black Square and Cage’s 4’33’’
function as paradigmatic examples of aesthetic reflexivity.
Similar to negative theology, they shift attention to where
the practices of pictorialness or musicality are first given
or show themselves. These are medial appearances with
a paradoxical structure in that they are transparent only
because of their opacity—they disappear in appearing and
appear in their disappearance.
Accordingly, Marshall McLuhan compared the rela-
tionship of medium and the mediated to the relationship
between figure and ground: just as the “pure message”
is a figure without ground, “pure medium” would be
ground without figure.183 Because each needs the other
like the two sides of a sheet of paper, the figure sets itself

183 Marshall McLuhan and Louis Forsdale, “Technology and the

Human Dimension,” in George Sanderson and Frank MacDonald,
eds., Marshall McLuhan: The Man and His Message (Golden: Fulcrum,
1989), p. 12–24, cit. p. 21.

126
off from its ground just as the ground as ground is such
only through the figure. To show a figure it must be in
the ground and arise from the ground, but to show the
ground we must change perspective and subtract the fig-
ure as the ‘ground’ of the ground in order to see the latter
as such. Knowledge of the medial demands such medial
reflexivity, borrowed from the logic of a ‘change of aspect’
(Aspektwechsel – Wittgenstein), which cannot be demon-
strated or created intentionally like an optical illusion, but
happens at the fold or fault line. And in fact, the discov-
ery of mediality necessitates paradoxical strategies that
link negation to self-referentiality in order to show that
which is usually hidden. In this way the ‘negative aesthet-
ics’ of both Malevich and Cage, although they are based
on almost diametrically opposed maneuvers, bring what
is hidden or missing to the fore through indirect practices
of reversal. The disavowal of representation and its con-
comitant figuration as well as eschewing all composition
in favor of chance both evoke the medial, which steps
out from latency and becomes a manifest presence as an
anaesthetic model of aesthetic effect.

Épistémologie pataphysique

The unseen or indeterminate can thus be experienced

through its other—the particularity of aesthetic epistēmē
is found more than anything in this kind of knowledge of
non-knowledge. Or, in other words, that which makes vis-
ible without being visible, or makes hearing possible and
opens the ears without itself being heard or perceived.
This culminates in unlocking what has been closed to all
scientific knowledge, the “Open Sesame, I want to get out”

127
of Stanisław Jerzy Lec, which only can be managed by a
daring leap to the side.184 Leaps and paradoxes belong to-
gether. Both resist derivation and causality. They are events
par excellence. Artistic knowledge is sited neither in logos
nor in a ratio iudicandi, in fact not in any linear order of de-
duction, but in phronēsis, the intelligence of the moment,
or the epiphany—as attributed to wit or the ingenium. The
latter denotes not so much inspiration or intuition or a
comical ending, but rather the ability to make connec-
tions without resort to rational principle—in a shrewd and
‘crafty’ manner.185 Phronēsis, just like wit and imagination,
is in this way connected to the ability to critique, if we see
not only ‘crisis’ in the word ‘critique’ but also the skepti-
cism of zētēsis. Wit does not use but misuses and refuses
categories, turning them around to create a kind of think-
ing around corners, like Joseph Beuys’ smart sidestepping
hare that has leapt ahead and is somewhere other than it
seems to be. ‘Aesthetic thought’ is based on such leaps. It
must engage our wits, wittily jumping to allow the opaque
to become reflexive. Paradoxical intervention to disclose
what is hidden means drilling into and opening something
to uncover that which has not yet been thought. It means
thinking in experiments with unknown results in order to
lure out that which the ‘labor of the concept’ leaves chroni-
cally under-said. In this manner, ‘artistic thought’ is always
critical thought and contradicts scientific thought and its
regimes of truth. It undermines the implicit metaphysics

184 Stanisław Jerzy Lec, Unkempt Thoughts, trans. Jacek Gałazka

(New York: St. Martins Press, 1962), p. 20.
185 See in particular Mira Fliescher, “Der Witz der Kunst,” in Hanno
Berger, Frédéric Döhl, and Thomas Morsch, eds., Prekäre Genres.
Kleine, periphere, minoritäre, apokryphe und liminale Gattungen und
Formen (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), upcoming.

128
of philosophical systems and, in a kind of “parallel action”
(Robert Musil) to the many philosophical critiques of the
late nineteenth and twentieth century—which, not acci-
dentally, make use of aesthetic, especially literary, strate-
gies (one need only think of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno,
and Derrida, each in his own way)—allows another thought
as well as thinking the Other to assert itself.
Perhaps nobody more consistently and emphatically
supported this project than Marcel Duchamp.  Almost
his entire oeuvre can be seen as a witty, ironic, and biting
argument with the absurdity and self-constraints of the
science of his times. This is particularly true for 3 stop-
pages ­étalon (3 Standard Stoppages, 1914), which he cre-
ated in an almost scientific procedure and which he once
called—well aware of the irony—his “most important
work.” To make this piece, Duchamp three times dropped
three pieces of thread, measured using the Parisian met-
rical prototype, onto a horizontal plane from a height of
exactly one meter. Each time the fall, the resistance of the
air, and other conditions created a different curve, which
he fixated to a canvas with the care of a scientist, develop-
ing measuring sticks of the unknown, their curved edges
ridiculing any serious attempts at measurement.186 Apart
from the fact that the triple fall reminds us of both the
principle of iterability as well as of religious ritual and
ceremony, bringing scientific exoteric back to its esoteric

186 See Marcel Duchamp.  Eine Ausstellung im Museum Ludwig Köln

(Cologne: Museen der Stadt Köln, 1984), p. 144–150. On Duchamp’s
understanding of and relationship to science see Theo Steiner, Duch-
amps Experiment. Zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst (Munich: ­Wilhelm
Fink, 2006), p.  123–146, 218–254. On the understanding of science
in the avant-garde see Sabine Flach and Margarete Vöhringer, eds.,
Ultravision (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010).

129
roots, this experiment uncovers the phantasmatics of all
scientific claims to proof and generalizability: “There is
no real reason to use causality. Why not use it ironically
by inventing a world in which things come out differently
than in the usual world?” Duchamp added.187 One could
also say the indetermination of the result discredits the
metrical system as arbitrary, just as an everyday thread act-
ing as a miniature version of a platinum meter stick robs
the measurement of its exactitude. Here we have instabil-
ity in contrast to strict securing. At the same time, the rep-
etition of the fall, a series of individual falls, which each
time results in the singular measurement of bent—or,
better, crinkled—space that has been mapped by chance,
leaves behind the unambiguity and reliability of Euclid-
ean geometry and in fact of the entire physical world.188
The work 3 stoppages étalon embodies the lawlessness of
the real and a heterogeneousness that resists both system-
atic science as well as mathematics: “If I do propose to
strain a little bit the laws of physics and chemistry and so
forth, it is because I would like to think them unstable to
a degree,” as Duchamp explained. “Even gravity is a form
of coincidence or politeness since it is only by condescen-
sion that a weight is heavier when it descends than when

187 Cited in Steiner, Duchamps Experiment, p.  248–249. See also

Herbert Molderings, Kunst als Experiment. Marcel Duchamps 3 Kunst-
stoff-Normalmaße (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag Berlin, 2006);
Molderings, “Kunst als Wissenschaftskritik,” in Peter Friese, Guido
Boulboullé, and Susanne Witzgall, eds., Say it isn’t so (Heidelberg:
Kehrer 2007), p. 45–63.
188 That is why it would be misleading to relate the curvatures in 3
stoppages étalons to non-Euclidian space. That would only be again
applying a measurement of interpretation from the natural sciences,
a discipline that is a stranger to the arts.

130
Marcel Duchamp: 3 stoppages étalon, 1914

131
it rises. Right and left are obtained by letting drag behind
you a tingle of persistence in the situation.”189
Artistic practice thus becomes not only a critique of
science that makes decided use of aesthetic procedures to
counteract the methodology of empirical sciences in order
to test it, but also subvert it and confront it with its Other,
its contingency, and its lack of foundation. A subversion
which incidentally barely interested any scientists, much
less convinced them. Duchamp drew from Alfred Jarry’s
pataphysics, the basic tenets of which (with obvious ref-
erence to the motifs of Dr. Faustus) can be found in his
1911 novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphy-
sician. Pataphysics is, in contrast to metaphysics, the sci-
ence of the particular rather than the general, the excep-
tion rather than the rule, and the incidental rather than
the usual, making it predestined to become the basic dis-
cipline of aesthetics. “An epiphenomenon is that which
is superinduced upon a phenomenon,”190 Dr. Faustroll
explains, explicating the etymology of pataphysics’ from
epi meta ta phusika—that which is added to metaphys-
ics. That which is ‘superinduced’ is however incidental
or marginal, a field which Jarry claims is as wide as the
universe. Thus we are dealing with a ‘second physics’—a
physics of the ‘anomic’ and of the escaped which cannot
be generalized—a parallel world that can only be grasped
from an aesthetic perspective.
Jarry’s parody, like all parodies, has a profoundly
non-parodic core and had an immense influence on the

189 Francis Roberts, “I Propose to Strain the Laws of Physics. Inter-

view with Marcel Duchamp,” Art News LXVII (1968): p. 62–64, cit. 63.
190 Alfred Jarry, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysicisn,
trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1996), p. 21.

132
generation of Dadaists and Surrealists to follow, includ-
ing Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Joan Miró, on writers such
as Boris Vian and later Dario Fo, as well as on the Marx
Brothers. In the 1960s, out of the Pataphysical Society and
the imaginary Collège de Pataphysique, Raymond Que-
neau and others founded the Oulipo group, among whose
members were not only George Perec, but for a time also
Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. Through formal practices
of exclusion—such as Perec’s novel A Void, written with-
out the letter ‘e’—they attempted to use the mathemat-
ics of the Bourbaki group to ground art in structural play
ordered by syntax alone and no longer rooted in meaning,
symbolism or metaphor. The recourse to mathematics
was not for the sake of mathematics, but simply an escape
from the constraints of semantics and narrative by creat-
ing patterns or meaning-reproduction machines that also
act as creativity generators. Rules can be applied positively
or negatively: as an infinite production of emergence or
as the asceticism of emptying the other.191 The latter has
proven to have more affinity with art—production feeds
surplus which leads in the end to tautologies, while the
kenōsis of nothing privileges the Other and opens the yet
unknown.
The broad nexus which this covers makes it clear that,
beyond a traditional critical analysis of the poetology of
the times, the roots of Jarry’s pataphysical intervention
are deeper than they might at first sight seem. As Gilles
Deleuze has pointed out in his Essays Critical and Clinical,
pataphysics is an artistic counterpart to Heidegger’s phil-
osophical critique of metaphysics and its poststructural-

191 Mersch, “Positive und negative Regeln.”

133
ist successors: “Pataphysics (epi meta ta phusika) has as its
exact and explicit object the great Turning, the overcom-
ing of metaphysics  … We can thus consider Heidegger’s
work as a development of pataphysics in conformity with
the principles of Sophrotatos the Armenian, and of his
first disciple, Alfred Jarry.”192 What this means in prac-
tice can be observed perfectly in Duchamp’s 3 stoppages
étalon, which is not only a caricature of scientific practice,
but also presents results that exhibit irreducible singulari-
ties. Our line of argument thus returns to Baumgarten’s
Aesthetica and his doctrine of singular understandings
and their paradoxical “veritas singularis de contingentibus”
that bind perception, with its specific qualities of seeing,
feeling, and hearing, to an individual or respective thing
with its own taste and spatial constellations. Its scope is
the not-general, the ‘this’ that always also includes devia-
tions or incompatibilities; the outliers of the series that can
seemingly only be looked at as differences. A pataphysical
awareness is accordingly the awareness of the singularity
of the world. This is the site of aesthetic epistēmai. ‘Artistic
thought’ touches on practices of difference. It is aware of
even the smallest detail and has an eye for the useless, the
imponderable, and the marginal, at least if it is examining
the particularities of an object, its abnormalities or stig-
mata as well as its injuries and mismatches. Its object is
flawed or vulnerable discontinuities including the obscene
or obscure with their affinity for gaps, rifts, disorders, and
the ostracized—that which cannot be integrated but can,
most importantly, interest others and grab their attention.
The deviant, minor differences and distortions, also refer

192 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith
and Michael Greco (London: Verso, 1998), p. 91.

134
to that which causes the breaks that fragment perception
and reverse ‘aspects’. Such an inversion or turning of per-
spective is inherent to the change in position which seems
to be characteristic of the aesthetic practice of re-flexivity
and its paradoxical maneuvers.
Put another way, when art ‘researches’ and produces
its own knowledge, it is knowledge in the sense of sound-
ing out the disparate of the irregular. In Duchamp’s
words, its object are inframinces, those subtle microphe-
nomena that are usually lost at the fringes of perception
and that effect a change of perspective; for example, the
barely perceptible disparity between two mass-produced
machines of identical construction, the scent of old furni-
ture, the faded coloring of a floor that is walked on daily,
the degree of warmth held by the seat from which one has
just stood up, or the sound of clothes rubbing against one
another.193 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz called these petites

193 On this see Yoshiaki Tono, “Duchamp und ‘Inframince’,” in

Marcel Duchamp. Eine Ausstellung im Museum Ludwig, p. 54–58. Art is
particularly well suited to both activate such inframinces and to sen-
sitize its audience for them. This goes hand-in-hand with the concept
of ‘microperception’ found in Deleuze and Guattari and especially in
Brian Massumi. Aside from the implications of Massumi’s theory of
affect for the reception of art, it is important to note that Duchamp’s
inframinces are at the threshold of perception, while for Deleuze and
Massumi, ‘microperception’ is just below this threshold. For Mas-
sumi, microperception “registers only in its effect.” He speaks of
“cuts” or “microshocks” in an “interval smaller than the smallest per-
ceivable.” How then can we perceive and talk about them? Evidently,
microshocks or microperceptions are infinitesimal. Clearly then, this
is a purely theoretical concept, especially when Massumi says inter-
vals are cut in “infinite division.” Massumi is attempting to think
something that is literally too small to name; microperception can
at best be theorized indirectly, a project for which Massumi unfortu-
nately offers no conceptual framework. It is an attempt that remains

135
perceptions; those exiguous peripheral perceptions that
flitter unseen or barely noticed and disappear like phan-
toms at the moment of their appearance, making them
particularly suited to the domain of art.194 These include
the most inconspicuous nuances of color, the barely audi-
ble differences between two notes, the absence of silence,
the background clatter that tinges every sound and every
noise, as well as the unspeakable event or the breaths that
accompany speech and separate our words. Art has repeat-
edly examined such thresholds; through exhibitions of
material erosion that can only be seen over long periods of
time, through hairline cracks in the body of a text, through
unmotivated changes in rhythm or through sounds so vio-
lent they can barely be borne, amalgamating into indif-
ferent chaos. The language of science, on the other hand,
has always followed clear lines of argument and studies
the definable, the distinct, and the rule, even if only the
law of probability. Just as scientific thought can only, qua
concept, place itself authoritatively above its object and
demand a tribute, art holds on to the aesthetic Unter-
Schied (Heidegger; differ-ence, literally: under-separate)
and to the elusive dash of the break in which, unacknowl-
edged, the identity of the non-identifiable example—the
singular case and its idiosyncrasies—is manifested.
‘Artistic thought’, like all ‘thought’ in the aesthetic
realm, derives its extraordinary strength from this and its

no more than a philosophical goal. See Joel McKim’s interview with

Brian Massumi, “Of Microperception and Micropolitics,” Inflections.
A Journal for Research Creation 3 (2009), accessed March 10, 2015,
http://www.inflexions.org/n3_massumihtml.html.
194 On the meaning of petites perceptions see also Simone Mahren-
holz, Kreativität. Eine philosophische Analyse (Berlin: Akademie Ver-
lag, 2011), p. 92–97.

136
pointed wit that usually comes as an abrupt, unexpected,
epiphany. “Every artwork is an instant” Adorno therefore
wrote, “every successful work is a cessation, a suspended
moment of the process, as which it reveals itself to the
unwavering eye.”195 This also means that aesthetic knowl-
edge ‘hits’ the observer. Its epistēmai are characterized
by suddenness. This has always been its connection to
evidentia, the ‘power’ of enargeia.196 It provides opportu-
nities to think further and follow its wonders step by step
along these lines. Its telos is not enlightenment or unrav-
eling, but the performative ability to continue a whimsical
conceit productively, to interrupt, and to invert.

Singular paradigms as models of aesthetic reflection

Interest in inframinces and their exposition centers around

the disturbance, reversal, and transposition of percep-
tion. By inverting the attention of the gaze, they create
sparks which kindle something that has been compared
to vexation and a change of aspect (Aspektwechsel). They
are where moments of aesthetic reflexivity happen. This
is why we can call the singularity of ‘aesthetic thought’
‘reflexive thought’ and the particularity of its epistēmai
‘reflexive knowledge’. Where there are fractures and
markers of difference, where materials surprisingly col-
lide and tension is created, where writing tapers off onto
a white page, or a note begins to fill a space substantially,
perception is thrown back upon itself; it sees itself and
its ground, its mediality, appears. In this process, each

195 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 6.

196 See also Menke, Die Kraft der Kunst.

137
artistic work ­develops its own particular paradigm. It is
therefore unique. That is why we speak of ‘singular para-
digms’.197 Each stands for itself and cannot be compared.
At the same time, they resist analytical dissection. For this
reason, Arnold Schönberg saw the “totality” of a piece as
its true compositional idea,198 stemming from the indivis-
ible uniqueness of the work and its inner references as a
whole—not from its individual theme, motif or style. We
could also say that every artistic position forms its own
model. Each is closed and heterogeneous in comparison
to other models. Therefore each is singular; no one work
negates another, all point in different directions and stake
out their own territory. The relation of singular paradigms
to one another is that of witnesses who profess an unre-
peatable knowledge. Any duplication would be the devalu-
ation and demise of the work. Yet the testimony proves to
be the product of an extravagant experiment and continu-
ous attempts can be glimpsed in its sediment. It is filled
with alterity. The groping and fumbling, the innumerable
false starts and new beginnings make codification seem-
ingly impossible. “The artist,” as Derrida aptly described
this process, “is someone who becomes an artist only when
his hand trembles, in other words when he basically does
not know what is going to happen to him, when what is

197 See Mersch, “Singuläre Paradigmata. Kunst als epistemische

Praxis,” in Paradigmenwechsel. Wandel in den Künsten und Wissen-
schaften, p.  119–138. Giaco Schiesser speaks similarly of “singular
explorations” in Schiesser, “Widerfahrnis, Unsinn und Schlampig-
keit. Zur Epistemologie von künstlerischer Forschung,” Kunst forscht.
Kunst und Kirche 4 (2014): p. 4–9.
198 On Schönberg’s musical thought see Rudolf Stephan, “Der mu­-
sikalische Gedanke bei Schönberg,” in Stephan, Vom musikalischen
Denken (Mainz: Schott, 1985), p. 129–137.

138
going to happen to him is dictated by the other.”199 Trem-
bling is a symptom of indecisiveness or a state of limbo.
It is an errant faltering that corresponds to the fragility of
the sketch, its inadequacy and proximity to failure, con-
stantly threatened by the ineffectiveness of what can be
perceived, the burden of embodying a knowledge of sorts.
Each artwork is an instant; each composition develops its
own instrument, each picture has its own signature, and
each text is written anew. Artistic epistēmai begin with the
dis-covery of paradigms that induce an unmistakably aes-
thetic reflexivity that stems from perception and refers to
perception and is always precarious. But what makes them
possible?
First we should remember that the term ‘singular par-
adigms’ is a contradictio in adiecto because the composite
word pará-deigma goes back to the prefix para ‘beside’ or,
figuratively ‘against’ and the root deiknynai, which in turn is
related to the Sanskrit dic for ‘to say’ and ‘to show’ as well as
‘to show oneself’, so that we are contemplating something
that is not determined but rather is shown as an ‘aside’ or
in passing. In this manner we are dealing with what is also
transported within a speech, a picture or a composition,
and is used as a pattern or model to impart significance.
Paradigms denote idealizations that can only be grasped
in their reconstruction, whether by going through archives
to find the attendant but crucial ‘gestures’ of thought or
by analyzing the immanent structure of what is said and
unsaid to find the latent but fundamental conditions of
possibilities. Paradigms are therefore never explicit but
must first—like the mediality of the medium—be raised

199 Cited in Benoît Peeters, Derrida. A Biography, trans. Andrew

Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 533.

139
from their results.200 As singular events they refuse a guid-
ing role, so that it remains questionable how an individual
work can become defining at all, how it functions as an
ideal type and sets exemplary knowledge. This dilemma
becomes even clearer if we look at the Latin translation of
paradigma in exemplum or exemplar, which is eximere, to
extricate, implying a pre-selection as well as an act of iden-
tification. The individual case acts as an example for the
general, as an exemplification.201 It awakens, as Kant said
somewhat nonchalantly, our intuition.202 ‘Singular para-
digms’ are then at best tools of the intuition, applications
for discoveries that fall behind a judging and discerning
reason, rather than themselves becoming epistemological
models that answer their own questions while resisting
the discursive realm.

200 Here we refer back to a figure of Heidegger’s, who did not use
the word “paradigm,” but did speak of “guidelines.” In Contribu-
tions to Philosophy he differentiated between two kinds of thinking:
“Thinking (1) is meant on the one hand as the name for the mode
of questioning—and thus in general for the mode of relatedness—
within the interrogative relation of the human being to the being of
beings . . . (thinking as asking the question of being). Thinking (2) is
meant on the other hand as the name for the guideline employed by
thinking (1) so as to possess the horizon within which beings as such
are interpreted with respect to beingness (thinking as the guideline
for asking the question of being).” Martin Heidegger, Contributions
to Philosophy (Of the Event), trans. by Richard Rojcewicz and Daniela
Vallega-Neu (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2012), p. 360.
The first kind of thinking would be the paradigms of individual phi-
losophies within metaphysics, the second the metaparadigms of
metaphysics itself: idea, logos, ratio, subjectivity of the subject, etc.
201 Nelson Goodman sees exemplification as a central aesthetic
mode; see Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub-
lishing, 1976), esp. p. 53–64, 235–239.
202 Kant, Critique of Judgment, § 59.

140
 If however we connect them with inframinces, they stage
veritable epistemological scandals: They show their singu-
larities and nevertheless hold forth a general rule.203 When
consequently they are—like all art—not trusted, because
the singular only ever says something about the singular,
they are said to refer not to concepts, but to proper names.
At the same time we should say that Theodor Adorno’s and
Emmanuel Lévinas’ critiques of rationality fundamentally
revised the relationship between concept and proper name
and thus also between the singular and the general. For
Lévinas, the premise of alterity is held within the proper
name, while Adorno drew from Benjamin, who saw each
concept as a proper name which comprises both an identi-
cal and a non-identical component, in order to recognize
both the irreducibility of the aesthetic in epistemology
and of the epistemological in the aesthetic: “In contrast to
philosophy and the sciences, which impart knowledge,”
Adorno wrote in “Music and Language: A Fragment,” “the
elements of art which come together for the purpose of
knowledge never culminate in a decision. … Of its various
intentions one of the most urgent seems to be the asser-
tion ‘This is how it is.’”204 Apart from the equally tautologi-
cal and deictic character of “This is how it is,” its positing
manifests an affirmation that will not suffer contradic-
tion. It is an insistence that lacks any differentiation and
therefore does not need to separate itself from anything
else. It rests in itself and articulates its presence through
its own name. When art makes an argument, no ­matter

203 See Mirjam Schaub, Das Singuläre und das Exemplarische. Zur
Logik und Praxis der Beispiele in Philosophie und Ästhetik (Zürich:
diaphanes, 2010).
204 Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia, p. 4.

141
the meaning of ‘argumentation’, it is revealed in the shape
of this mutable individua as expressed in pictures, outra-
geous metaphors or compositional figures, creating a
stand-alone fortress. Individua prove to be strangers to
veritas, because individua can only be explained through
other individua, just as the singular can only be explained
through exempla. Yet all art, as Adorno wrote of music,
aims at “the divine name which has been given shape  …
the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name,
not to communicate meanings.”205
Walter Benjamin put it similarly in his short but semi-
nal 1921 essay “The Task of the Translator.” Translation
must both retain the difference between languages as
well as their “suprahistorical kinship,” which consists, as
he says explicitly, of the “pure language” of God.206 They
become “of the earth” as he wrote in his earlier text, “On
Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” touched
only by art.207 This is why they “talk” in Dingsprachen
(thing-languages), and can be called only by their proper
names. This is also why their judgments are lacking in dis-
cursive logic. The aesthetics of singular paradigms reveals
‘divine’ traces in the sense that they are the Other of speech
in the form of material apperceptions and give a home to
philosophical or scientific concepts that are inadequate
or don’t work. Put another way, aesthetic epistēmai are
rooted in sketches that reveal their own generality because
they allow the unbridgeable gap between concept (or

205 Ibid., 2.
206 Walter Benjamin “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benja-
min, Selected Writings Vol. I, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Wal-
ter Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), p. 253–263, cit. 257.
207 Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,”
Selected Writings Vol. I, p. 62–74, cit. 70.

142
medium) and object to become reflexive. This is where its
knowledge rests, unspeakable like a showing that places
instructions within rifts, making relationships fragile and
everything that was seen or heard before inscrutable.
But this enigmatizing effect is a result of the type of
link. Put somewhat differently, art works with presences,
with things and their appearances, with the phainomenai
themselves, which produce innumerable singulare ­tantum,
even where they are repeated or reproduced mechanically.
That is why their medium is the ability to perceive. Each
time they expose something individual and different, the
characteristic of which is singularity and the linguistic
equivalent of which is the signature, the unique name
that blocks all discursive cooptation.208 This is exactly the
sense in which art does not present generalizable para-
digms if the latter mean normative procedures. Neither are
artistic works themselves paradigmatic, that is they can-
not become models for further works, and when they do,
they pale as copies, clichés, and empty appropriations. All
that exists are paradoxes that, in a unique manner, create
a constellation out of which something never before seen
and not expected or anticipated can rise. There is no aes-
thetic connection that can do without this singular access
to knowledge, not even those that are produced automati-
cally or use technologies of reproduction and their manip-
ulation of the temporal axis. Even the experimental arts
of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s that were set up like scientific
experiments worked with singularia—one need only think
of Jean Tinguely’s junkyard automatons or Nam June

208 On the issue of the signature, see Mira Fliescher, Signaturen der
Alterität. Zur medialen Reflexivität der Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript,
2014).

143
Paik’s parallel montage of dozens of TV screens or Alvin
Lucier’s I am sitting in a room (1969), which used the vary-
ing resonances of the spaces in which it was performed
to reveal itself. One could also recall Robert Smithson’s
earthworks, in which entire landscapes become experien-
tial spaces or any of a multitude of interactive multimedia
installations. We should not think of singular paradigms
as aggregates, even if their make-up and shape is some-
times difficult to define and they necessitate complex
technical installations; rather they are particular and non-
repeatable reflexive agents of the Unfüglich (that which is
beyond command, from unverfügbar, ‘unavailable’, ‘inac-
cessible’ and sich fügen, ‘to acquiesce’).209 Permeated with
breakages, persistent aporia or chance discoveries, they
evoke an event that remains stubbornly insubordinate to
all authoritative methodology. Its ‘logic’ is the ‘a-logic’ of
showing asunder (Zer-zeigung).
At the same time, and this is a particularity of artistic
epistēmai, they always also refer to their own mediality. This
is their zetetic asceticism. There is no work or conceptual
statement that does not also thematize itself. The singu-
larity of the paradigms therefore also comprises recourse
to their settings, or medial forms, as if what it shows falls
back on how it shows to both mark and break with the lat-
ter. This explains ‘showing asunder’, if by this we mean
those practices that, by showing and showing themselves,
not only open something, but also recursively show them-
selves, both ex-posing and ex-hibiting themselves. Art is
therefore thought to which the genuine link of showing and

209 On the concept of the Unfüglichkeit, which associates that which

is not available with that which is not subservient or cannot be tamed,
see Mersch, Posthermeneutik.

144
reflexivity is inherent. For this reason aesthetic production
never aims at universal knowledge or a derivative ‘truth’,
but only at creating exceptions similar to unsolvable koans.
In this way it confronts us with an existential question.

Con/Com

This reflexivity takes place in particular by situating per-

ception in perception, by turning the medial against itself
and by unsettling implicit references in order to, in ever-
new ways, bring that to light which is hidden by (the realm
of) technē. One could also express this as an infinite regres-
sus or a petitio principii—movements that are related to the
one we are examining. Art allows us to perceive perception;
it mediates the medium or causes its fracture in material
to bring it back to aesthesis. It makes a tribute to passiv-
ity: that which exposes or reflects itself and takes place in
the main between elements—or rather in the hollow, the
void. Its home is between the ensemble of objects, things
and structures or between sounds, silences, and their tem-
porality or between the bulk and splitting of metaphorical
sentences in a text. This does not mean we are only deal-
ing with interstices, which always exhibit incompatibility,
but rather with moments of a particular coming-together
and with that which, in each special case, comes out of this
connection.
This is the key to aesthetic paradigms: their individual
constellations and make-up as well as their specific energy
or linkage or dispersion or tension or variance—which
do not obey a synthesis or even build a unit. We are talk-
ing about combinations of color that, as in a chemical
­reaction, provoke an explosion of the senses, or a montage

145
of found objects that creates a chance symbolic universe,
or the juxtaposition of different media that comment on
one another and seem to goad one another, or fragments of
sound whose convulsions accelerate the entropy of mean-
ing, etc. A similar claim could be made for the excess and
exorbitance of theater that adds scene to scene in a battle
against the paroxysms, exhaustion, and collapse of reality.
This also means that a brush does not become a writing
instrument that creates signs, just as a sketch is not an
alphabet. Rather it is an instrument of scratching, scrap-
ing and dabbing, leaving varying marks while also inti-
mating and obscuring traces, just as thick brushstrokes
on top of one another create layers that are indeterminate
and hidden to the human eye. One of the characteristics
of painting is that, on closer examination, every picture
becomes an impenetrable amalgamation of material, a
tangle of lines. The same holds for musical compositions
and the temporal connection of sounds, notes and silence,
in which order as well as disintegration and chance play an
equal role. In photography—as one last example—a simi-
lar movement takes place through the active handling of
framing, the passivity of light and shadow and their con-
trast, which can only be manipulated to a certain degree by
the lens and its technical options. Yet it is just these limi-
tations (and surmounting them) which gives the images
their appeal and their intelligence (phrōnesis).
A prime example of the latter is Michael Snow’s
Authorization (1969), in which he used a Polaroid cam-
era against itself. The original self-portrait of the pho-
tographer behind the camera was covered with new self-
portraits and reproduced, creating a continuous iterative
process of self-portraits of self-portraits until nothing is
left but opaque layers of coverings that deny or delay any

146
authority of the author.210 The initial portrait and the por-
traits that followed did not cover up photography and the
photographer, but masked them as more photos amassed
at the site of the photograph. Here the medium does not
obey the ‘authority’ of the author, nor does it catch sight
of itself through its results, rather the presence of the pho-
tographs emphatically documents their disappearance or
their absence in their own appearance. The mediality of
the medium is as impossible to grasp as the subjectivity of
the artist and his ‘intention’. Instead, there is a withdrawal
of sorts, a negativity that inverts, where it uses a medium
and works against it to be dis-covered, into the visual dra-
matization of a mise en abyme. In this sense, Authorization
is a photographic argumentation whose structure shows
the impossibility of such an authorization as well as the
impossibility of totalizing photography.
The specificity of aesthetic work, its interventions that
are related to its medium and specific techniques, is that
it opens up reflexive movements through the practice of
its respective constellations and that these moments are
able to rise above themselves and, in the form of a disrup-
tion or turning against themselves, create a ‘monstros-
ity’, the experience of which could not have been previ-
ously defined. Singular paradigms advance to become
critical models in both senses of the word; first, by acting
as lenses which focus and make clearer that which they
enlarge or diminish—critical in the sense of ‘distinguish’,
‘separate’, and ‘choose’ (krinō)—and second as a ‘turning
point’ ­(krisis) that creates discord, which both indicts and
judges that which has been seen or heard to bring to light

210 On Michael Snow’s Authorization see also Philipp Dubois, Der

fotografische Akt (Dresden: Philo Fine Arts, 1998), p. 19–24.

147
Michael Snow: Authorization, 1969.

148
s­ omething previously unseen or unheard (of). Art ‘thinks’
in the sense of such a critique/reflexivity—it sharpens our
senses for what is visible or audible and forces the exposi-
tion of the invisible and inaudible. Such a critique neces-
sitates meticulous practices of experimenting, compris-
ing both experiens/experior as well as the incalculability of
expetere, both putting to the test and experiencing, both
of which circle around the turning point, or the leap to the
side. In this sense, art is the event in a permanent crisis.
Impulsive change or displacement, as Heidegger called
it,211 is immanent to artworks, in which every step seems to
be both essential and contingent, without knowing where
it will lead and whether it is a step along a pre-defined
path (meta hodos) at all. “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” Samuel
Beckett wrote in The Unnamable.212 Aesthetic experiments
are such risks without return. There is no procedure and
no technique, only an aimless exposure to materials
and things or to what Gilles Deleuze called the “logic of
sensation.”213 To say that the practice of art has no rules,
or is even irrational, has its own particular charm. Unlike
in Kant’s Schematism, there is no schema or grammar
that can be applied. Each step erratically follows the result
of the last, continually threatening every move forward.
In ever new variations, artistic work explores its materi-
als through the decisive act of conjunction, of connecting
or concentration. Through combination and composition
things are combined in a continuous conflict of material

211 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 24.

212 Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London:
Calder, 1994), p. 418.
213 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon – The Logic of Sensation, trans.
­Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003).

149
elements until these reveal their ‘secret’—that which is
still unknown and undiscovered.
Art is therefore first and foremost an action: mak-
ing art. Its practices are based in the variety of ‘cons’ or
‘coms’, whereby it is unclear where the beginning is and
where the end. Con/Com creates relations, mixes and sep-
arates substances or conflates phenomena into complex
forms to be seen or heard. The ethos or immanent stance
of these conflations is to make reflexivity possible. Art is
thus both ‘constellationist’ as well as critical in the senses
named above. Self-reference is by no means merely a char-
acteristic of postmodernity, but every sound, every color,
every action or every sign, because it shows itself in show-
ing, refers back to itself, to its exact position, and to its
op-position. Whether it wants to present or expose some-
thing, it first and foremost shows itself. Every ­aesthetic
manifestation implies a showing of itself, a reflection on
its action or materials, the means used, and the gaps and
caesurae in the chain of relations. Here the term ‘con-stel-
lation’, which we are placing at the center of our analysis,
means something other than the more specific term ‘con-
figuration’, even if Adorno tended to used them synony-
mously.214 The ‘figure’ always addresses the poetic and
the symbolic, while con-stellare is, literally, no more than
dispersed dots or points, a series of stellae within which a
cluster or accumulation can be made out—in other words,
something without closure, something excessive and
exuberant. Again we see here a contrast to Heidegger’s
­philosophy of art: When aesthetics is understood as poetry
(poiein) this always also includes figuration and, it follows,

214 Lehr, Kleine Formen, p. 135.

150
the symbolic. The creation of constellations, on the other
hand, which I have identified as the core of the epistemol-
ogy of aesthetics, seems a more fitting image because it is
a loose coupling, a discontinuous web of dispersion made
up of conflicts and oppositions. In it, the play of differ-
ences, of inframinces, is accelerated in order to, through
these differences, enhance sensibilities and instate a non-
interchangeable reflection. Critique and reflexivity there-
fore belong together like constellation and conjunction,
and the true labor of singular paradigms is to give them
shape and make them apparent.
Seeing the aesthetic as another thought or other than
thought (discourse) means deciphering the link between
thinking and reflexivity with reference to those singular
paradigms that are based on ‘com/con’ practices; that is to
say their linkages are conjunctional rather than predica-
tive. To examine this more precisely, we must remember
that the practice of artistic thought is based in the main on
a connection that works with appearances and their own
substrates. The con-nection of con/com com-poses, using
the elementary acts of con-iungere, ‘binding together’,
without however being binding. Conjunctions both con-
nect and separate and have many forms: and, or, either-or,
as well as, etc. Their breadth comprises all set theory oper-
ations, with the exception of complementation, and cre-
ates diverse logics of continuity and discontinuity. This
need not have the structure of a ‘gathering’,215 nor must it

215 On the joining jointure see Martin Heidegger, “Anaximander’s

Sayings,” in Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track, p. 242–282, cit. 266–269.
See also Derrida’s commentary on the same in Jacques Derrida and
Élisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow? A Dialogue, trans. Jeff
Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 80–81.

151
always have a clear goal. Rather its modus is the passio of
perception as contained within the original meanings of
aisthēsis and empeiria—absorption and observation. For
it is not preceded by a dreamlike idea as if the act of con-
necting were, rather than a continuous practice of experi-
mentation and testing, guided by a thought that comes
from somewhere else and is realized afterwards. Rather
con-iungere works things out with the experimentalist’s
power of performativity, which itself becomes a medium.
Here thought is genuinely action. It is observation, ten-
tatively following spurs, fumblingly, with an openness to
touch and to be touched. However it would be going too far
to create a linguistic parallel between this kind of ‘conju-
gation’ with the copula, reading it as an aesthetic analogy
to the linguistic statement and turning art and labor in the
aesthetic realm to nothing more than a kind of pre-linguis-
tic language. Rather we are dealing with the experimental
speculation of combining and of montage that simultane-
ously generates ‘jointure’ and ‘dis-jointure’. That is also
the reason Adorno claimed only that music has a “similar-
ity to language.” Were it to become a language, or commu-
nication, it would no longer be an aesthetic instant, or an
event. In contrast to discursive, conceptual thought, ‘aes-
thetic thought’ culminates in constellations that are not a
synthesis, but merely a series of points, a being-together
that need not have come together to form an identity or
symbolization, but that—when it becomes art—includes
a moment of necessary reflexivity.

152
One plus one equals other

Admittedly, ‘cum’ is “a very sparse category in the history

of our thought” as Jean-Luc Nancy has noted, and there
is only one philosopher who has “sketched a particular
position” to it: Heidegger.216 But Heidegger looked at it
only in connection with his thoughts on communitas, on
‘being-with’ and the community.217 There has as yet been
no systematic reflection within philosophical discourse
on the role of this and similar prepositions. First consid-
ered ‘syncategorematic’ or without independent meaning,
working in conjunction with ‘categorematic’ expressions
that precede them and impart signification,218 they were
later elevated by Michel Serres and particularly by Bruno
Latour, who insisted on the extraordinary relevance of lin-
guistic particles.219 They order relationships spatially and
temporally, reveal and impart location and direction, and
mediate and transform. Hence they specify modalities.

216 Nancy, “Mit-Sinn,” p. 21.

217 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 117–125.
218 Edmund Husserl discusses syncategorematic expressions as
“non-independent meanings,” a characteristic they share with the
prefixes and suffixes used in inflexion. See Edmund Husserl, Logi-
cal Investigations, Volume 2, trans. J. Findlay (New York: Routledge,
1976), p. 55, IV. Investigation § 4–6.
219 See Michel Serres, Eclaircissement. Cinq Entretiens avec Bruno
Latour (Paris: F. Bourin, 1992), esp. p. 189; Bruno Latour, “Reflections
on Etienne Sourriau’s Les differents modes d’existence,” in Levi Bryant,
Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds., The Speculative Turn. Con-
tinental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), p. 304–
333. See also Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence. An Anthropology
of the Moderns (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). Also:
Mersch, “Wozu Medienphilosophie.”

153
They not only say something, but do something.220 ‘Doing
something’ is of course the keystone of the concept of the
performative, bringing us back to the link between perfor-
mativity and the medial that we explored in the first chap-
ter, and to the difference between through/dia/per and
with/meta/trans. It is notable that performatives are al-
ways marked by prepositions. John Langshaw Austin and
John R. Searle, by delineating ‘illocution’ and ‘perlocu-
tion’ as the two main modes of speech, privileged speech
acts that work ‘in saying’ and ‘by saying’.221 We should also
note that the prefix ‘per’, which is prepositional in origin,
marks, in contrast to con/com, the modality and mediality
of the speech practice it is based on.
We have made out two different basic operations,
two key forms or conceptualizing connections, that are
decisive for ‘aesthetic thought’: first, the conjunction
that connects (con/com) and second the prepositional
mode that shows the type of this being-together (through/
dia/per). We have discussed the function of through/
dia/per in the first chapter. It is a figure of immanence
within poiēsis and deals with practices that have conse-
quences by working through (per/dia) temporalities or
materials in order to take their effects to their outer lim-
its.222 This can be done by, for example, the successive­
fragmentation of series of words on the basis of chance

220 See Peter Bexte, “Vorwörter. Bemerkungen zu Theorien der

Präpositionen,” in Jan-Henrik Möller, Jörg Sternagel, and Lenore
­Hipper, eds., Paradoxalität des Medialen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2013), p. 25–40, cit. 26.
221 See in particular John L. Austin, How to do Things with Words,
2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 121–122.
222 The preposition ‘through’ as explicated here intersects in Eng-
lish with ‘by’ and ‘by means of’.

154
(Cage), by deleting a sketch and preserving its traces on
a canvas (Rauschenberg), through the specific effect of
jump cuts (Godard) or through a rhapsodic or delirious
narrative style (Burroughs), to name only a few methods.
Con/Com, on the other hand, focuses on the conjunctive
function of constellation and centers around strategies,
to put it tautologically, of ‘correlationality’, the dispersion
or concentration of which at least opens the possibility of
a relationship that, no matter how provisional, can consti-
tute the ‘as’ through which meaning first comes into the
world.223 Sometimes, as Nancy has shown, contingency
alone is sufficient; that we are “together in one place  …
creates—infinitesimally fine—relations that can appear
in the context of an event.” This means even the “juxtapo-
sition” of objects is “always able … if not to ‘make’ sense
at least to intimate sense. Painters have always known
how to use this method.”224
Con/Com thus implies knowledge without synthesis,
an ‘as’ founded on ‘together’ that, however subtly, appears
at the very beginning and allows for the possibility of, the
idea of, or a whiff of meaning. This is however only an
eventuality: Signification does not necessarily grow from a
connection; rather the latter creates the conditions for the
former. And because sense is inescapable and nonsense

223 Usually ‘as’ is associated with predication, the principle of which

is synthesis through use of a copula. If however subject and predicate
are connected by a copula, a shift of perspective takes place in the
transition from “A is p” to “A as p.” While ‘is’ is always bound to lan-
guage, ‘as’ can take place in a variety of media. There has not yet been
sufficient philosophical investigation of the varying modes of ‘as’ in
different media.
224 Nancy, “Mit-Sinn,” p. 23.

155
always also produces the sense of nonsense,225 there can
be no such thing as pure a-significance in art. Rather every
net or web of differences, however diffuse, can become
part of a symbolic order, even when it negates the same.
We should however not forget that the opposite is also
true; every relation holds within itself the possibility of a
non-relation, of a resistance to or refusal of relationships
and, as a result, of the striking out of meaning. Every for-
mation or symbolization includes an abyss, the nothing-
ness of its foundation, and thus grazes the dialectics of
symbolon in the sense of ‘thrown together’ and of diabo-
lon in the sense of ‘thrown apart’. Order and chaos, as well
as arrangement and derangement, are balanced equally
in this equation. It comprises sense as well as non-sense
within sense—its opacity or strangeness.226 Accordingly,
composition and decomposition always belong together,
throwing the process of symbolization into a permanent
krisis. Con/Com, because it operates in the realm of the
senses with bodies, substances, and materials, delineates
the movement of this crisis. Art, we must add to Nancy’s
thoughts, participates in this act. It knows the endless-
ness of the symbolic, which can only be held together by
the constellation, conjunction or stringing together of
elements, in which the break or aberration is always also
present. Art therefore always also participates in a dia-
bolic, subversive act or a ‘de-participation’.
To understand aesthetic thought and its specific form
of knowledge better, we must however also look at the

225 See Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays

on Music, Art, and Representation, trans Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1985), esp. p. 177–202.
226 See Mersch, Posthermeneutik, esp. part 2, p. 131–199.

156
entanglement of con/com—the source of ‘as’ and of the
duplication and splitting of something into ‘something
as something’—with the practices of through/per/dia and
the techniques that impart to ‘as’ its specific modality, its
‘turn’. While in principle this entanglement exists in every
form of making sense,227 unique to aesthetics is both art’s
status as genuinely singular and the fact that it can set both
of these movements against one another. No composition
formulates a thought just as no picture reveals a general
truth; rather, they present individual sounds, silences,
and rhythms, or lines and colors, just as a text links its
specific words, even if it is a copy or a technical reproduc-
tion. Even when innumerable monitors show “the same
thing” they do not have identical contents because of their
gaps and because no technical assembly, no exhibition
space, and no audience functions in exactly the same way.
The artwork’s difference or disunity proves to be a vehi-
cle of ‘not as’ or ‘other than’ and inserts a break to reveal
inframince, a reflection or unsettling. For this reason every
act (drama), as theater perhaps demonstrates best, from
the start seems to be burdened with the risk of failure. But
out of the specificity of its ‘dialogue’ with other similarly
interwoven or cut and fragmented acts, an argument or
critical reflection can emerge.228

227 This entanglement means in the end a joining of ‘meaning’ and

‘mediality’ or ‘performativity’ as the practical modus of the medial.
It shows the necessity of mediation for the constitution of meaning.
One result is that meaning cannot be reduced to the ‘as’ function of
the copula, but is always modulated by the medial, in which ‘as’ is
articulated. See also Mersch, “Wozu Medienphilosophie.”
228 ‘Argument’ is meant figuratively here; not as the basis for an
idea, but argumentum in the sense of a ‘small drama’ or a figural-
ization or theatricalization of thought. On this see Dieter Mersch,

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 That is why James Elkins brusquely distinguished
between artistic and mathematical arithmetic. While
the later calculates with formal units and their addition
is always subject to the same rules, the former counts
‘obscure’ singularia that can always be put together dif-
ferently and nevertheless result in 1+1=1, whereby each 1
is an Other229: “Every mark is a different beginning: one,
one, one  … and so on forever.  … Each mark is unique  …
They form a set or a group or a composition that consists
of two unique elements, two ones, existing together and
making something new, which is another one.”230 The
constellation and the resulting composition are strang-
ers to identical repetition, but iteration and adding at
least one new element is necessary in order to connect;
to link one to one while also allowing each one to stand
apart. Dick Raaijmakers spoke similarly about music:
“Placing one single point is not enough for expressing
something. At best it would be a demonstration  … This
situation changes when a second pin is added because
that creates a relationship between these two needles.”231
This is classical counterpoint—punctus contra punctum—
albeit in a modern sense and beyond tonality. Since Cage
at the latest, it is not simply the difference between notes

“­ Argumentum est figura. Bemerkungen zur Rhetorik der Vernunft,”

in Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, eds., de figura (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink, 2002), p. 101–126.
229 It is possible to go one step further, as Alberto Giacometti did,
and write the equation as 1+1=3, so that each singularity as well as the
conjunctive ‘+’ is counted. On this see George Didi-Huberman, The
Cube and the Face, ed. Mira Fliescher and Elena Vogman, trans. Shane
Lillis (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015).
230 Elkins, What Painting Is, p. 41.
231 Dick Raaijmakers, Cahier ‘M’ (Leuven: Orpheus 2000), p. 85.

158
that counts, but the underlying difference between sound
and silence and between notes and noise. Yves Klein illus-
trated this radically in Symphonie Monotone—Silence,
in which one consonant chord held for twenty minutes
is followed by a silence of the same length, and nothing
else.232 Each reprise, each iteration, is the piece’s ‘alter’.
As a result, iteration is founded on an elementary dis-
junction sufficient to awaken the hieroglyphic magic of
the composition.233 The number not only functions as a
mystical parameter, but within the aesthetic realm itself
becomes a material, corporeal living being. The mystery of
the constellation is its unsystematic structure, the zone of
incompletion that points in many directions, opening an
indeterminate field of figurations.
But we named one more criterion. For it is not
enough to just put something together or associate it with

232 The Monotone Symphony was famously part of the 1960 anthro-
pometry performance at the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contempo-
rain in Paris. In a certain way, it was a parallel program to his mono-
chromes. Klein later said this had been his key work; he had tried to
devote his life to the theme of this symphony.
233 Arnold Schönberg in contrast falls back upon old models when
he speaks of three constitutive elements and uses terms such as ‘ten-
sion’ or ‘balance’. See Schönberg, “New Music, Outmoded Music,
Style and Idea,” p. 113–124. In particular: “Every tone which is added
to a beginning tone makes the meaning of that tone doubtful. If,
for instance, G follows after C, the ear may not be sure whether this
expresses C major or G major, or even F major or E minor; and the
addition of other tones may or may not clarify this problem. … The
method by which balance is restored seems to me the real idea of the
composition” (p. 123, emphasis in the original) This means the num-
ber ‘two’ creates instability and a third thing is needed to settle it.
This third element creates balance, or harmonia, but only the whole
gives this balance a meaning.

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s­ omething else. Rather it is the ‘event of situating’,234 the
individual ‘face’ or the unmistakable hue which it takes on
that is important. The way in which each respective com-
position is able to come back to itself, re-mark itself and
create a self-reference is crucial. This is why it is too little
to study, as “media ecologists” do, only the formation of
relationships and their networks. Formalism, the order-
ing of knots and edges, is not of interest, but rather the
concrete per-formance, the frame and contextualization,
as well as a capability for self-reflection. An amorphous
black object in a White Cube evokes a dual contrast—be-
tween white and black and between geometry and form-
lessness—and therefore stirs up numerous connotations
concerning space and place, foreground and background,
transparency and opacity, form and deformation, etc. In
the same way, two identical objects placed in the furthest
corners of an exhibition stand out as an opposition whose
‘communication’ incites speculation on proximity and
distance, inclusion and exclusion, etc., just as a solitary
building, an architecture, gains meaning as a gesture of

234 On the concept and use of the term ‘performativity’ see Dieter
Mersch, “Das Ereignis der Setzung,” in Erika Fischer-Lichte, Chris-
tian Horn, and Matthias Warstat, eds., Performativität und Ereignis
(Tübingen: Francke, 2002), p. 41–56; Mersch, “Ereignis und Respons.
Elemente einer Theorie des Performativen,” in Jens Kertscher and
Dieter Mersch, eds., Performativität und Praxis (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2003), p. 69–94; Mersch, “Performativität und Ereignis. Überle-
gungen zur Revision des Performanz-Konzeptes der Sprache,” in Jür-
gen Fohrmann, ed., Rhetorik. Figuration und Performanz, Schriftreihe
Germanistische Symposien, Berichtband 25 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2004),
p. 502–535; and, most recently, Mersch, “The ‘Power’ of the Perfor-
mative,” in Sophie Wolfrum and Nikolai v. Brandis, eds., Performative
Urbanism. Generating and Designing Urban Space (Berlin: Jovis, 2015),
p. 39–48.

160
negation through (per/dia) its uniqueness as a façade in
time, breaking through the surface and in this way mark-
ing a difference or separation. However two things can
also be placed too far apart to allow associations to arise,
just as hushed tones very far apart from one another in an
environment full of sounds do not garner attention.
There is no way of guaranteeing the success of artis-
tic interventions or positionings, but we can name some
minimum conditions that contribute to success. To these
belong, first, that ‘something’—an object, a sound, a
phrase, a picture, etc.—must place a border or difference
together (con/com) with an Other, whether a background,
a word, an action or an entity. This first characteristic of
aesthetic thought is an instantiation of strategies of dif-
ference, just as in general artistic labor is beholden to
an economy of difference or “partage” (Rancière). This is
what first makes the con/com of constellations possible as
the constitution of the composite.
Second, the type or modus of connection seems to be
important—the respective play of its ‘togetherness’, the
specific way elements are juxtaposed, the role of the fugue
or the ‘distantiality’ ‘between’ the elements, whereby
the interstices, the emptiness and the relationship of
proximity and distance or amplitude and dynamics have
their own weight. This second characteristic of ‘aesthetic
thought’ concerns that which goes beyond the side-by-
side of its compilation, and manifests a transgression or
a surplus. Most important seems to be that the juxtapo-
sition of things puts something in the world in a perfor-
mative sense and that a shift creates a metabasis—that is
to say the specific how is key, not that (quod) it exists or
subsists.

161
 Third, it appears necessary that it have the ability to
re-mark itself, as I have called it, to exhibit itself and to
dis-concert (Ent-Setzen) at one and the same time. This
self-exhibition brings about an exposition, disturbing the
composure of its transposition. Both point towards that
which we have found to be the core of artistic thought: its
power to induce reflexivity. Its means are exposition and
transposition. These can work in many ways: by stretch-
ing the interstices, the distances between, the dislocation
or incommensurability of the relata, by exhibiting a con-
flict or ‘rift’, or through a contradiction or discord in the
‘togetherness’ of its elements. Its surplus is then perhaps
its ability to dislocate, to leap to the side. This can happen
for example when the juxtaposition of elements docu-
ments their mutual strangeness, so that bringing them
‘together’ at the same time ‘separates’ them and repulses
us. ’Something’ extraordinary catches our attention and
breaks the threads of ordinary observation. Which is
exactly what it means to trigger reflexive events of percep-
tion. These cannot be deduced, but are effects of the par-
adoxes and aporia that arise from the entanglements or
disarray of the texture itself.
For this reason we have, fourth, in many ways con-
nected ‘artistic thought’ with evidence, wit, and sud-
denness. This is where, in the end, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘artis-
tic thought’ can be distinguished. We started with the
assumption of indifferent terminology, with a broad con-
cept of aesthetics within which the ‘artistic’ is a specific
quality and ‘aesthetics’ refers only to types of relations
within the sensuous—the different ways in which they are
linked and shaped, the ground of which is usually the fig-
ure. These can be poetic or banal or inexpressive, making
it clear that the figure alone cannot be a criterion for the

162
by no means obsolete differentiation between art and not-
art. Not until the figure is broken up in equal measure by
a de-figuration, and the constellation turns in upon itself
and exposes a dis-concertedness whose discord or “dis-
sensus” (Rancière) creates reflection are we dealing with
something that can be the prerequisite for the ‘artness’ of
art. Not until then are we truly dealing with ‘singular para-
digms’.

163
In Conclusion

Epistemic Practices of the Arts

Aesthetic epistemologies follow the principles of conjunc-

tion/disjunction rather than those of delineation, categori-
zation, and differentiation. However, art itself is predicated
on more than the random juxtaposition of phenomena or
the formation of constellations in the realm of the senses.
This more is what interests us—the necessary conditions
that allow these connections and separations not only
to stimulate our thoughts but, in a particular manner, to
impart ‘artistic knowledge’. One example of an artwork
that does so is Pablo Picasso’s assemblage Tête de taureau
(1942). Two everyday objects, a bicycle saddle and handle-
bars, are connected so that something else emerges: the
impression of a bull’s skull. The simplicity of this sculpture
is also its clout. It exemplifies our idea of artistic epistēmē
on many levels. The surprising combination of individual
objects stripped of their function at first prompts a change
(conversio) of perspective. It allows them to appear as
something else, because a component that was not there
before entered the simple composition of the objects, turn-
ing them into a complex allegory. Of course an allegory of a
bull’s head could have been made with any bicycle saddle
and handlebars, as many emulators of Picasso have done.
But it is these finds and their contingencies—the choice of
this specific saddle and this specific handlebar with their
traces of use—that gives them their characteristic appear-
ance and allows a symbolism particular to them to emerge
from the formal allegory, so that we can look through (dia/
per) the thing and glimpse death and mortality. That which

165
Duchamp dubbed inframince corresponds with the subtle
characteristics of the object itself: the texture, wear, and
coloration of the leather, the rust on the weathered handle-
bar, the bareness of its naked form, the exact angle at which
the two objects are positioned, etc. Every detail, no matter
how small, plays a role, shows itself, and ‘speaks’. Even the
bronze casting that completes the final work shows some-
thing of the specific quality of the found objects.
It is also not coincidental that Tête de taureau was cre-
ated in the middle of a European catastrophe, the cata-
clysmic war years and their concomitant cultural rift. The
bull’s head is their emblem. It is the central figure associ-
ated with Europe, the classical mythological symbol of all
Mediterranean cultures, the holy animal of the Apis, Baal,
and Taurus cults, which ruled over ritual celebrations from
the time the first states were founded, and it became the
sign of spring in the Babylonian zodiac. Its significance
seems also to lie in the first letters of the alphabet, aleph
and alpha, the first written symbol of which, a triangle
on its apex, is reminiscent of an upside-down ‘A’. Trans-
formed into an icon, it reappears in the Pythagorean tet-
ractys at the dawn of science, and in the mystical Y of tri-
adic substances (tria prima) on which everything is based
and out of which everything comes, including the trimor-
phic ‘one’—the divine principle of the trinity. Picasso
presents all these in a combination of scraps—old objects
now superfluous and ennobled by bronze—while preserv-
ing all insignia of destruction. Admittedly we are still on
the level of configuration and symbolization, neverthe-
less the combination of thrown-away objects completes
an allegorical circle that includes not only life and death,
but also the entire cycle of Western culture. The times and
their historicity transude into the representation. Whether

166
Pablo Picasso: Tête de taureau, 1942

intentional or not, the epoch and its dislocations are sedi-

mented throughout Picasso’s artistic discovery.
The meeting of saddle and handlebars is also remi-
niscent of Comte de Lautréamont’s chance encounter of
a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.
Two objects that incite a ‘surreal’ effect of ‘re-flection’
or ‘re-versal’ through the way in which they are abruptly
thrown together: “An object encounters its image, an
object encounters its name,” René Magritte wrote in
Les Mots et Les Images, “It happens, that the image and
the name of this object encounter one another.”235 This

235 René Magritte, “Die Wörter und die Bilder,” in Sämtliche

Schriften, ed. A. Blavier, trans. Christiane Müller and Ralf Schiebler
(Frankfurt/M.: Carl Hanser, 1985), p. 43.

167
c­ onfrontation without primacy or hierarchy is similar to
the ‘arbitrariness’ of Ferdinand de Saussure; it is a connec-
tion without ‘motivation’. Nevertheless, we must be able
to ‘read’ the effects appropriately. In this sense, Picasso’s
Bull’s Head calls forth an entire encyclopedia of images
and symbols. Through this work knowledge becomes
a function of interpretation triggered by a moment of
shock or uncanniness. It is possible to understand the
encounter and the connection that it brings about as an
achievement of making art that stems from production
and its concomitant practices, without highlighting the
intention, ‘genius’, or authorship of the artist. Quite aside
from this, it is apparently up to the recipient to extract
associations from the work’s play of meanings, creating
infinite readings. Here knowledge arises through (dia/per)
the symbolic, which was art’s default setting, so to speak,
from the early modern era to modernity—provided that
representation was at the foreground. This remained the
case despite the level of reflexivity that was always “below”
symbolization and became a standard theme of the twen-
tieth century avant-garde: the reflexivity of materials; their
choice, the medium used, the medial, etc. We are thus
talking about artistic knowledge with art and through art.
This is the ‘zetetic’ research inherent to artistic processes
that we delineated at the end of the first chapter. This kind
of reflexivity is perhaps what most distinguishes art from
non-art. It is the quintessential criterion of art’s power of
knowledge, its particular epistēmē, that separates it from
all other kinds of knowledge production.
Therefore, when we talk about an epistemology of aes-
thetics, and in particular of the arts, we are always talking
about art’s unique manner of generating knowledge, and
thus actually about an aesthetics of production. At its core

168
is the constitution of forms of non-subjective reflexivity that
operate exclusively in the realm of the senses. The hypoth-
esis on which all of this study is based culminates in the
finding that the modality of joining, the particularities of
a work’s conjunction/disjunction, simultaneously decides,
as it were, on its ‘per’ and ‘con’ and on its performativity.
This jointure is able to become reflexive when its fabric
is catachrestic. Symbolic connections usually use diverse
means of figuration such as association and continuance,
metaphor and metonym, recursion and succession, and
many more. But there is one method in the classical canon
of rhetorical production that breaks the mold. Although it
is sometimes considered a figure, it is more like an impos-
sible figure, an ‘un-figure’ that in the process of linking
denies the same: catachresis. Usually defined as ‘linguis-
tic misuse’ or ‘linguistic excess’, it breaks out of molds of
what is speakable and is thus responsible for what cannot
be said, for an ‘outside itself’ that creates a third thing out
of antagonisms or dissonances, a thing that can only be
intimated by exaggerating and pushing the boundaries of
meaning.236 Thus we are no longer dealing with a figure.
Illimitable in a sense, catachresis more importantly shows
the monstrous within the symbolic that points towards a
heteronomy that cannot be assigned a sign. Catachrestic
constellations thus make up the true site of artistic cre-
ativity. The “imagination which creates signs” or art’s spe-
cific ability to invent is not, as Hegel believed, the source
of art’s imaginative power. Similarly, the riddle of creatio
can only be reformulated as an aporia, because if some-
thing new can be understood, it cannot be completely new,

236 On ‘catachresis’ and its use as a non-figure see also Mersch, Was
sich zeigt, Introduction.

169
and something completely new cannot be recognized as
new or even described without recourse to what is already
known. Thinking in catachresis, in leaps and chiasms, in
catastrophes and discords, and in the chronic disunity of
paradoxes and their inherent negativity defines the riski-
ness and the extraordinary adventure of art, which philo-
sophical thought has always linked to transgression and
madness.
We also identified ‘showing’—rather than ‘saying’—as
the primary self-manifestation of the aesthetic. By ‘show-
ing’ and ‘manifestation’ we do not mean expression, but
exhibition and exposition. Wherever works work only with
aisthēta and relevance is drawn from perceptions or things
and their materiality—from every nuance of coloring, from
the way in which objects are framed or combined, from the
position of a detail, from the interval between two notes
and their microtonal succession or arrhythmic place-
ment, from any hesitation of physical feeling, from ten-
sion and release, from the exact play of light and shadow,
from the way canvasses are arranged, from the dynamics
of sounds in the Black Cube of a video installation, from
the traces of carving a block of stone or marble or from its
size and placement in the exhibition hall—we are dealing
with ‘showings’ that in equal measure reveal something
and show themselves while in showing, hold themselves
back. When these processes of showing also oscillate
between ostension, deixis, manifestation, presentation,
exhibition, and allowing to appear, then their métier is
not representation, but presence which, as Michael Snow
showed in Presents (1981) develops out of the duplici-
tous dual meaning of present: gift and given. To ‘show’
underlines the relationship between seeing and seen, and
between presentation and presence. Showing also consti-

170
tutes the non-negativity of both. And as showing is transi-
tive—something is shown or referred to—there is no not-
showing at the same time; you cannot show nothing, just
as in the factual world there are no negative facts, at best
there is absentia in praesentia. This is a large constraint on
the scope of practical reflexivity in the realm of the senses.
Nonetheless there is indirect negation: It can be found,
like catachresis, in intimations and in the insufficient or
fractured means of synecdoche or metaphor—for example
when disjunctive sequences or contrasting and paradoxi-
cal constellations are formed—as well as in the entire field
of omissions and gaps, deletions, voidances, and kenōsis.
It is found where transitivity and intransitivity merge in
showing, to the extent that in showing the performativity
of showing also shows itself. The gesture remains tied to
the body that performs it; the brushstroke unveils some-
thing of the body of the painter who conducts it, as we can
see in Francois Campaux’s 1946 film on Henri Matisse’s
sens du toucher237—there is a continual interplay of show-
ing and showing oneself, they overlay one another and
sometimes even cross or sublate one another.
These crossing or breaking points, these rifts and
chiasmata, are of utmost importance to the specificity of
‘artistic thought’. Incessantly, art presents, exhibits, dis-
plays, performs, and performs in portrayal, displays in the
exhibit, thematizes the performance in the performance
itself, etc. Wherever showing and showing oneself come
together catachrestically in the form of self-reflexivity, and
the effect of negativity or contradiction is created, we can
speak of contrary catachresis that forms those aesthetic

237 Accessed March 3, 2015, http://www.christies.com/features/

henri-matisse-by-francois-campaux-fr-3058-3.aspx.

171
paradigms in which ‘thought’ takes place as crisis, as cri-
tique, and as reflexivity. In every respect, these paradigms
are beholden to the multiplication of practices of differ-
ence. Reflexivity is thus a practice of throwing back on
oneself, a re-flection, a mirroring that induces a moment
of opening. It is not necessarily based on subjectivity—as
little as it founded on the imagination or the lavish eccen-
tricity of an artistic fantasy, on the intention or inspira-
tion or fabulation of an author who views his product as
if it were subject to his invention—rather the re-flection is
literally the result of continuous performative experimen-
tation in the aesthetic realm. It is neither final nor inten-
tional nor calculated, but takes on the form of an event of
appearing; a leap.  A leap jumps out; something springs
from the combination or order of elements and their con-
stellation. This jumping out is an event. It is the source of
soaring zetetic production and the unique, ‘ineffectuable’
and irreplaceable epistēmai of the arts.
’Aesthetic thought’ arises in particular out of constel-
lations that include paradoxes, contradictions, instabili-
ties or contrasts that systematically resist resolution or
closure. Paradoxes are wondrous ‘live objects’ that only
lead in the realm of formal logic to regressive results—
the space where they have to be banned and dispelled—
because they insist on the simultaneity of the mutually
exclusive, thus breaking the iron law of contradictions
without which there is no resolution.238 Apart from that,
paradoxes are always in a state of productive imbalance or
suspense that force thought to continually change direc-

238 As early as Parmenides (and explicitly at the latest in Aristotle’s

Metaphysics), the ‘law of contradiction’, one of the founding principle
of logic, was seen as necessary to thought.

172
tion without privileging a certain idea. Artistic productiv-
ity draws its energy from withstanding this undecidabil-
ity and from the search for other, surprising, answers to
unanswerable questions. Aesthetic paradoxes are based
on contrasts. These contrastare are literally acts of ‘stand-
ing out against’ or ‘setting against’ one another and have
the particularity of simultaneously showing both sides of
this standing out—the temporal and spatial relations and
distances to one another as well as figure and ground—
for example light and dark, disparate color gradations,
the white on white of varying materials, the overlaying of
consonance and dissonance, or sequences of words that
seem to contradict one another. They do not exclude one
another; they are not disjunctive, but inclusive or conjunc-
tive. ‘Either-or’ is not dominant, but rather ‘and’, ‘as well
as’, and ‘also’. We are talking about seriality or simulta-
neity rather than the dichotomous difference of addition.
A contrast therefore never negates its complement, but
opposes it, and thus accords it validity. ‘In-difference’ is
the insignia of contrast, which is why it is not true that
what is contrary is also contradictory, just as little as white
would be ‘true’ if black were ‘false’. Rather both present
their own ‘truth’—a truth without a counterpart or falsity.
Put another way, contrary or contrasting catachresis
evokes reflexivity when its ‘differentiality’ has an ele-
ment of contradiction that cannot be resolved. Such a
lack of ­closure drives permanent unrest and vexation.
It is this movement that can be seen as ‘thought’ in the
sense of zetetic practice—a form of reflection or research
that opens itself and remains open. This event can hap-
pen through contrasting framing, through the staging
of medial ­caesurae, through the capricious handling of
­materials, through tears in the net of configuration or

173
simply though ­consuming art. Cyprien Galliard demon-
strated the way in which the reception of art can flip and
become consumption in his sardonic and rather horrify-
ing installation The Recovery of Discovery (2010), which
ended in the complete destruction of the work within very
few days. What ­Picasso used to fill a simple symbol, was
taken in this work to speed up ‘diabolic’ entropy. A light
blue seemingly elevated pyramid rose many meters high
in the light-flooded space of a White Cube, emanating an
almost mysterious silence. However the pyramid was con-
structed of full cases of Efes beer. At the opening and in the
days that followed, visitors were invited to drink the beer.
Anyone who wanted could serve themselves, and imbibe
in the artwork without remorse, literally incorporating a
spiritual symbol deeply rooted in our cultural memory. On
the day of the opening, hundreds climbed the sculpture,
ripped open the cardboard boxes and emptied them until
the pyramidal structure began to break apart, beer bottles
tumbled, and glass broke, spreading an almost unbear-
able stench. Three days later, all that was left was an amor-
phous pile barely reminiscent of its previous form. Obser-
vation thus became destruction, and participation, ruin.
The enjoyment of culture comprises its liquidation. In this
work, the knowledge of art became the direct experience
of the irreversibility of time, the inconsiderateness of com-
plimentary gratification, and the shamelessness of crav-
ing and consumption in the capitalist era—as well as the
impossibility of averting the destruction of the symbolic;
not only its materiality, but also its ‘nature’ and ‘content’.
Can artistic strategies like this be systematized? This
is not a question we can fully answer. Because aesthetic
practices are singular, they prove to be ‘in-finite’. New
findings, new positions, and changed perspectives are

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Cyprien Galliard: The Recovery of Discovery, 2010.

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always possible—and always comprise the unforesee-
able. Consequently, we can only give examples—which
are always more than we are able to draw out of them in
abstract reflection. This means art is situated in spaces
that resist reconstruction by means of abstract discourse;
art’s theōria are in no way inferior to discourse’s strategies
of explanation or justification. Thus the exemplum defies
systematization and classification: it cannot become the
object of a general theory. Nevertheless, art and the aes-
thetic are practices of knowledge in their own right and
validity, and in some respects even seem to be superior to
philosophical or scientific epistemology.239 But what ‘aes-
thetic’ or ‘artistic thought’ might mean—the roots of its
particular epistemology—can in this way only be touched
upon or at best made plausible. Examples aim at the for-
mulation of ‘concrete’ arguments that, as we have seen,
conceptual thought is insufficiently able to grasp.  Thus
it is not the examples used in this investigation that
have served to illustrate a point, but the discourse itself.
For this reason nothing can substitute direct confronta-
tion and grappling with artistic practice and its inherent
­epistemic—the alterity of its ‘thought’.

239 This superiority stems from the mode of showing, as long as it is

intertwined with evidential practice. In relation to pictorial practice
see Dieter Mersch, “Blick und Entzug. Zur Logik ikonischer Struk-
turen,” in Gottfried Boehm, Gabriele Brandstetter, and A. von Müller,
eds., Figur und Figuration (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), p. 55–69.

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