Where matters of interpretation are concerned, “method” is the name of a mistake. Meaning is a game that is not governed by rules. Donald Davidson pointed out that even the interpretation of a simple metaphor, such as Thomas Mann’s reference to Tolstoy as a “great moralizing infant,” presents tremendous difficulties if we try to come up with a method that will translate the metaphor into “ordinary language,” whatever we may mean by that.1 But the flip side of the deflation of the problem of method is then, as an inevitable and salutary consequence, an emphasis on the act of interpretation. We do, in fact, grasp what Mann is trying to say, and we can ourselves say all kinds of useful things to help others understand it. “So too understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavor as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules” (245). Anyone who has conversed in a foreign language, played charades, taught a class, read a poem, or indeed been in any kind of substantive relationship with another human being, can find ample experiential evidence for the basic truth that meaning is a game that is not governed by rules.

The fact that language has rules, and that all kinds of social contexts in which meaning is important — including literary genres — also have rules, distracts us from this basic truth. You need rules to write a sonnet. Knowing those same rules may, plausibly, help guide my interpretation of your sonnet. But there is no method or rule that can tell me whether or not knowing those rules will help guide my interpretation. Only the poem can tell me that. This, and nothing else — certainly not a set of shapes, patterns, or relationships — is what is meant by the concept of aesthetic autonomy or “self-legislating form,” what Roberto Schwarz calls “liberated form,” the singular concept that names the specificity of the work of art as opposed to other kinds of cultural production.

Let us take as an example a lovely little poem by the mid-century Brazilian poet Ferreira Gullar:

Biography

In those days the obscenity of your sex perfumed the whole house

Next to me on the balcony in a porcelain crock a nature contrary to my own was emerging

virid

It was about two centuries after the French Revolution

And that enormous yellow flower that sprang up in the yard next to the loo

pollen body blaze2

What is the French Revolution doing here? Will it help to know that Ferreira Gullar was himself a Marxist and a revolutionary? Will it help to know about the evacuation of the Portuguese court to Rio de Janeiro in the face of Napoleon’s invasion of Lisbon? Will it help to know Hegel’s characterization of death during the Terror as of no more significance than “cleaving a head of cabbage?” Only the poem can tell us what “the French Revolution” means here: the invocation of the French Revolution produces a standpoint from which human sexuality appears so atavistic and ahistorical that it is indistinguishable from the sexuality of plants — and, conversely, a standpoint from which History itself appears as distant and irrelevant to the biography of the horny poet as it does to the life-cycle of the fertile plant. And from there the poem begins to unfurl its mysteries: the flower’s sexuality is “contrary” to the poet’s in that only the poet’s understands itself, paradoxically, as identical to the plant’s — and is therefore, perhaps, not as ahistorical as it seems. One could, I think, spend much longer with this poem. But the point I am trying to make is that while “contrary” has a more or less stable definition and “French Revolution” has a more or less stable referent, only the poem can tell us what, in the poem, they mean.

This emphasis on the act of interpretation, itself a theoretical claim whose consequences I will attempt to draw out in what follows, has nothing to do with such recent (but also perennial) North American “post-critical” slogans as “surface reading,” “just reading,” and so on, which, when they have theoretical substance at all, attempt to deflate both method and interpretation at the same time, thereby reducing the literary work to a fetish-object whose value it proves difficult to explain. As opposed to such approaches, conservative and anti-political in that they forestall discussion and disagreement — and therefore also consensus — the impetus behind the insistence on method is generally salutary: namely, to draw out the full implications of the “socially symbolic act” that is the literary text. Think of Fredric Jameson’s insistence that any properly Marxist interpretation must move through the four medieval allegorical levels from the literal through the “allegorical” (the intervention of the intended meaning of the text into its immediate historical and political context) and the “moral” (the necessary implication, whether conscious or not, of such intervention in class conflict) to the “anagogic” (the necessary implication, whether conscious or not, of class struggle in the great dialectical succession of modes of production). But since these implications are, from a Marxist standpoint, necessary, whether conscious or not, one need not make methodological claims about interpretation, nor rely on them, to find such implications and to lead others to see them. Rather, one must only be attentive to them, which is as much as to say that one must only be a Marxist, or be willing to adopt Marxism’s fundamental axes, however provisionally. One must only understand, or be willing to entertain the possibility, that class struggle is the engine of history and that history is in the last instance the history of modes of production. To think of such attention as a “method” introduces unnecessary problems.

Let us take as exemplary just one sentence from Jameson’s major statement on literary interpretation, where he points to “nodal points implicit in the ideological system [of the literary text] which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text, which have failed to become manifest in the logic of the narrative, and which we can therefore read as what the text represses.”3 Note the complexity of the rhetorical operation here. The sentence, which broadly seeks to characterize the “unsaid” of the literary text, moves through four near-synonyms — “implicit,” “unrealized,” latent (as opposed to “manifest”), and, finally “repressed.” In this movement the central premise gains with each step in theoretical heft precisely what it loses in self-evidence. The sentence begins from the “implicit” — which makes only the minimal, barely theoretical claim that “socially symbolic acts,” like all acts, have entailments and presuppositions, many which are not present to mind to the actor in the act, and which might be thought of as a purely negative, Hegelian “unconscious.” It ends with the “repressed,” which invokes a positive theory of the unconscious that, like all positive theories of the subject from astrology and phrenology through Lacan and Althusser all the way to the latest popular enthusiasms about artificial intelligence and brain science, we are not obliged to take seriously. (Meanwhile, the final modal verb in “we can read as” amounts, in a Jamesonian grammar that abounds in “should”s, “must”s, and “will”s, to a kind of equivocation: why should the description of the inevitable partiality of literary presentation — indeed, of any presentation whatever — as necessarily “repressing” traumatic content take precedence over the description of the same as merely requiring — again, like any other action — “implicit” entailments and presuppositions?) The point here is not to resolve this question, though I have suggested elsewhere that Jameson’s enormous contributions (without which neither this institute nor this paper would exist) by and large do not require such a shift from a negative to a positive unconscious. Rather, I want to point out that the conundrum is produced by the insistence on a method. “Repressed” meanings call for a method to unearth them (better, the will to method requires that meanings be repressed); “implicit” meanings simply call for interpretation.

The great Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz, in his concrete practice as a literary critic, rarely fails to touch — without, however, necessarily separating them as “allegorical levels” — on all four Jamesonian analytic moments of interpretation. Take, for example, Schwarz’s essay on Kafka’s “Worries of a Family Man,” a brilliant close reading that occupies no more than five pages.4 As is well known, Kafka’s story seems to center on Odradek, a strange object that looks like a spool but isn’t, since its spool-like form, covered indeed in random pieces of string, is supplemented by two crossed bars that enable it to “stand upright as though on two legs.”5 Indeed, Odradek speaks. The immediate allegorical question would seem to be “what does Odradek stand for”? But the allegorical secret, like the secret of Kafka’s “Eleven Sons,” which Kafka confessed are “quite simply eleven stories that I am working on,” might turn out to be entirely banal. Indeed it seems likely that if “Odradek” replaces some other substantive object or category, it is most likely the story itself or the category of the work of art, of both of which it might be said that, like Odradek, it is “useless, but in its own way complete.” But Schwarz has an insight that no method, only the story itself, could prompt: Odradek is a red herring. The story is really “about” — as indeed, its title says quite plainly — its narrator and his inconsistent (but logically structured) subjective stance when confronted with the existence of Odradek: initially amused, then condescending, dismissive, anxious, and ultimately homicidal, though this last is decorously expressed.6 Why should little Odradek provoke any reaction at all, much less this peculiar sequence? Whatever the allegorical content of Odradek, we know that his existence is described by the family man as self-justifying: he serves no external purpose, is, again, “useless but in his own way complete.” As such he is, in Schwarz’s words, “the precise and logical construction of the negation of bourgeois life” (23).

In a climactic moment, this logical construction, which needs no specific content, is shown to describe a “lumpenproletariat without hunger and without fear of the police” (24). And with this stroke, Schwarz touches immediately on all three of Jameson’s allegorical levels. The family man’s anxiety clearly has a class character: the story wouldn’t work if the narrator were a deliveryman or the housekeeper. But more importantly, his very anxiety hinges on the hidden fragility of a social order that depends for its survival on the distribution of violence and hunger. Meanwhile, it is these “higher” allegorical levels that fill out the content of the story’s allegory. What may, in some initial conception, have been intended as a mere allegory of the micropolitics of petty-bourgeois philistinism, turns out to require, as its structural corollary, something like the recognition that the very existence of an alternative to the bourgeois order, even in the unemphatic form of Odradek or the work of art, immediately suggests the worrying possibility of that order’s dissolution. This threatening existence, which Schwarz names as the lumpenproletariat without fear and without hunger, is not a secret referent, since the real lumpenproletariat is hungry and does fear the police; Schwarz’s formulation is a kind of paraphrase — just as much an impossible schematic construction as Odradek himself — that leads us to the truth of Kafka’s formulation. The question of whether Kafka was aware of the implication, consciously or unconsciously, needn’t arise.

Now of course, it is clearly the case that Schwarz proceeds in his commentary by means of a kind of “method,” namely an extraordinary sensitivity to shifts in narrative voice. But this alertness cannot be considered a method in the a priori sense dismissed above: to the degree that one finds Schwarz’s reading compelling, one will agree that that the logic of the story, in a certain sense its plot, indeed consists in a series of infinitesimal shifts in narrative voice. An extraordinary alertness to narrative voice will be useful elsewhere — most notably for Schwarz when reading the last great works of Machado de Assis — but not necessarily when reading Clarice Lispector. Note also that this more modest “method,” namely the attempt to follow the interpretive prompts immanent to the text itself, cannot serve as even the most minimal guarantee of interpretive justice. No such guarantee is available. Interpretation is a matter of disagreement — whose ground is consensus. (One might as well say: Interpretation is a matter of consensus — whose ground is disagreement). We will return to this.

Just because meaning is not governed by rules (and therefore interpretation is not usefully guided by method), does not mean that there is nothing further to be said about what we are doing when we interpret works of art. As a way of beginning to address the question, I will turn first to a 1970 essay by the great Brazilian critic Antonio Candido, a breakthrough essay that concerns Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s 1854 novel Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant.7 The greater part of Antonio Candido’s essay is devoted to drawing out the formal peculiarities of Almeida’s novel, whose distinctive texture derives from the figure of the malandro or rogue. In the novel the malandro is not precisely a type, though he is that too and will certainly become one over the subsequent course of Brazilian literary history. Rather he is a principle of composition, a figure that passes easily between two poles that Antonio Candido labels “order” and “disorder” respectively: something recognizable as bourgeois society on one hand, with its laws, marriages, professions, and all the rest, and on the other a larger zone, difficult to qualify, that presents “twenty situations of concubinage for every marriage and a thousand chance unions to every situation of concubinage” (95). This movement, once we are attuned to it, turns out to govern the novel as a whole, such that even omnipresent Major Vidigal, the fearsome representative of order throughout the novel, turns out to obey the same logic. In a climactic scene the major, approached at home in deshabille by three women who seek to intervene on the hero’s behalf, rushes inside and reemerges wearing his uniform dress coat — but without his pants. The major, complacently responsive to the blandishments of the ladies, appears “in regimentals from the belt up, homespun from the belt down — armoring reason in the norms of the law and easing the solar plexus in amiable indiscipline” (95).

At a key moment, Antonio Candido’s essay discerns two conflicting literary modes in Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s Memories of a Militia Sergeant.On one hand, the novel presents a descriptive mode, mainly pertaining to local color (the example is a Lenten procession sponsored by the goldsmiths’ guild). On the other, it presents a narrative mode, in which local color is subsumed into a formal logic (the example is a capoeira fight implicated in both sides of the order-disorder dialectic that Candido discerns as essential to the novel’s form). But for Candido these two modes do not simply exist side-by-side. Rather, the second mode is the “correct” one; the first is, “if not a mistake,” then structurally “imperfect” (88). The judgment is evidently sound, but on what does it rest? The “traditional norms of composition” invoked by Candido are external criteria and therefore not sufficient to the case.

Only the first mode is, strictly speaking, a mimetic mode. In the descriptive mode, the text owes its authority to facts outside the text, which the text is one way or another obliged to mirror, reflect, or represent. There are at least two related problems with this mode, one theoretical and one political. The theoretical problem is that the representation can never do justice to the object being represented. Every description is unavoidably not only partial, but in the scheme of things busies itself with a laughably small selection of possible attributes. Unavoidably some check must be placed on the potentially limitless number of descriptive attributes, and this check is either arbitrary or a matter of standpoint. And with this we have already flipped over to the ideological problem with mimesis as such. All the authority belongs to the object, which is only to be mirrored, reflected, or represented by the text. But in fact nothing of the kind is taking place; what is disavowed in the act of representation is the active role the representation plays in constructing the object itself. Presenting itself as a representation of reality, representation obscures the fact that the reality presented is its own production. The act of representation will always be characterized by an essential falsity, quite separate from whatever contingent inaccuracies might also be present. No conceivable authority could decide for us between representations without an appeal to the real that is itself no more than yet another representation, even as the force of such an appeal is to render representations irrelevant. Which is not to say that contemporary discourses will tire of presenting us with unlikely candidates. The problem is as boring as it is inescapable.

The second mode is, as odd as it might seem to say so, not mimetic, though it might involve mimesis. But here mimetic tokens are subsumed under another logic, and it is this logic, not represented reality, that carries authority. Since fidelity to a previously constituted reality is not at stake, the partiality of the description of Almeida’s capoeira fight does not present a problem. What is significant is the way the capoeira fight is subsumed under the narrative, the fact that, as a disruptive act that is previously known to the police, it slides effortlessly, like everything else in the novel, between the poles of order and disorder. Because, on Candido’s reading, this is the very principle of composition that governs the construction of the plot, there is nothing hidden: the plot and its structure are, obviously, precisely what is submitted to us as subject to our judgment. Finally, as we shall see in a moment, the narrative mode introduces a criterion. If all representations are partial then there is nothing to judge them by except by comparing them to the object represented — a comparison that renders the representation irrelevant. But not all narratives are plausible.

If a work of art does not imitate reality, what is its relation to reality? We have said that authority resides not in mimetic elements but in the form, which is not, strictly speaking, mimetic. But we should not make the mistake of reproducing the problem of mimesis at the level of form: that is, of suggesting merely that relations among elements mirror or reflect or imitate relations among elements in reality. We would simply run into the same problems at a higher level of sophistication. Rather, we must understand literary form as doing something fundamentally different than more or less faithfully corresponding to forms that appear in reality. But nor is form — and while the novel under discussion is in a casual sense a realist one, I mean this to apply equally to more so-called abstract modes of art — a matter of mere virtuosity. Form is, rather, an active principle, indeed, a kind of thesis or active positing. As Schwarz puts it in a commentary on Candido’s essay: “The dialectic of order and disorder is a principle of generalization that profoundly organizes the data of reality as well as those of fiction… giving both their intelligibility.”8 There is no “objective” correlation between fiction and reality; the correlation is rather a claim made by the novel itself. “In other words, before it was intuited and made objective by the novelist, the form that the critic studies was produced by the social process, even if nobody knew it.” (141). But this, again, is not a fact that can be ascertained by recourse to historical data: this is, rather, the very claim the novel makes. (Truth claims, of course, are not mimetic; otherwise the first half of this sentence would have been hard to write). Novels do not contain truth claims (or rather, what truth claims they contain are subordinated to the movement of the whole). Rather, they are truth claims: “Things stand so,” where “things,” “stand,” and “so” all come to be understood in the course of interpreting the work.

What I mean by this might be clarified by returning briefly to Georg Lukács’s 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” which, if I am not mistaken, is presupposed by both Candido’s and Schwarz’s contributions. There as elsewhere, Lukács uses the unfortunate word Widerspiegelung, reflection or mirroring, to characterize the essence of narrative art. But the first occurrence of the word in that essay modifies it to a “dynamic, artistic reflection,” and a little later, in an expression so paradoxical it should stop us in our tracks, he refers to the “art of the novel” as a subset of epic art, which presents society with a “clearer, more intense mirror-image” of itself.9 This mirror-image achieves its heightened intensity, moreover, through “a proper distribution of emphasis and… a just accentuation of what is essential” (213). “Proper” and “just” are normative terms: they have not only no equivalent but no possible equivalent in whatever aspect of reality is to be “mirrored.” One might be forgiven for thinking that the normative standpoint is simply Lukács’s: what is “proper” and “just” is what agrees with his conception of reality, most particularly his conception of historical change. But while his preference for epic content in all the arts inescapably colors his judgment, I do not believe that is what Lukács means here. Indeed, the criterion Lukács has in mind follows immediately: “A work becomes compelling and universal… when it appears not as an ingenious product of the artist’s virtuosity, but as a natural development; as something not invented, but simply discovered” (213). In other words, narrative art is always submitted to our judgment, and the criterion by which we are to judge it is not whether it was simply discovered — an obvious impossibility — but whether its content appears as if simply discovered. As Hegel had it before him, for art we require “a kind of liveliness wherein the universal is not available as law and maxim, but rather gives the impression of being inseparable from feeling and sensuous experience.”10 (As a parenthesis I will suggest that this is the missing link between Lukács, indeed of the German Idealist sequence of which he is both critic and culmination, and Friedian anti-theatricality). That is to say, narrative art invites judgment by the criterion of plausibility. Plausibility is a higher criterion than mimetic justice, which is impossible to achieve and for that reason without value. The criterion of plausibility — that the meaning of a work appear as something “not invented but discovered” — requires that every aspect of the work appear to us to be, in its way, right — even if the author does not consciously or explicitly understand its rightness.

Art makes of each of its creations a thousand-eyed Argus; inner soul and spirit become visible at every point. Not only bodily form and mien, gesture and comportment, but equally actions and events, speech and tone of voice — art has everywhere, as such externals make their way through the varying conditions in which they appear, to allow each of them to become an eye, in which the free soul can be discerned in its inner infinity. (V 203-4, A 153-4)

By “free soul” Hegel is referring to something like character, but the words apply equally well to setting, tone, color, depth, harmonic development, whatever. This is what it means for artistic meaning to be “inseparable from feeling and sensuous experience.” The moment this inseparability fails, we are left with something “invented,” something available elsewhere as a law or a maxim, and worthless as art no matter how true or right the law or maxim might be. Odradek’s interlocutor, the family man, presents an “impression of reality” that strikes us with “the force of conviction,” even though Odradek himself is a fabulous invention. The family man’s reaction is, in some way we feel with certainty but without conscious awareness of the reasons for that certainty, right. The critic’s job is to bring those reasons to light.

Candido points out that Almeida’s Memoirs achieves the standpoint of totality by means of a radical constriction of viewpoint. The book presents an “impression of reality” (89) that strikes us with the “force of conviction” (88) despite the near absence of both slaves and landholders in early 19th-century Brazil, which is to say the near absence of both the labor force and the ruling class (87). “In suppressing the slave, [Almeida] suppressed labor almost totally; in suppressing the ruling classes, he suppressed the controls of power” (95). Despite ignoring the two major candidates for forces actually shaping Brazilian society of the period, namely labor and governmental power, the novel “suggests the lively presence of a society that seems to us quite coherent and existent” (86). A failure by any mimetic standard appears in this case to be a precondition for the novel’s ability to compel conviction. Almeida’s novel, and in particular its formal principle of oscillation between order and disorder, allows us “to intuit, beyond the fragments described, certain principles constitutive of society — a hidden element that acts as a totalizer of all these partial aspects” (89).

But this “feeling of reality” (96) is a purely subjective — though, as we will explore more thoroughly below, modally universal — judgment. What is the “reality” whose presence we feel? While social form here pertains to the real, it is not a fact. Form is rather imposed upon facts of two different orders: both the facts of lived experience and the historical record, and the fictional facts that belong only to the novel. This is what Schwarz means by the “near-total” separation of the real and fictional orders: fact does not relate to fact, but both sets of facts are subjected to the same logic, “thanks to which the two series, real and fictitious, are rendered coherent” (96). Second, while this is clearly a cognitive process, it is a cognitive process of a special kind. As we have seen, Antonio Candido’s categories of judgment are expressly subjective: the “sense” (senso) or “feeling” (sentimento) or “impression” of reality, which carries a greater or lesser “force of conviction.” But if plausibility is a subjective determination, its mode is nonetheless universal: if we disagree about the “feeling of reality” produced by a work of fiction, we do not simply have different opinions or different taste: we in fact disagree about whether salient aspects of the work are, in fact, right. We should not be shocked or disappointed that this modality of judgment ultimately rests on nothing more solid than argument and consensus. (So does politics). Since Kant, aesthetic judgment has been understood as, only apparently paradoxically, both subjective and universal. The ground of this mode of judgment, which we will return to shortly, is an inchoate set of implicit and possibly unconscious convictions without which experience would not be intelligible in the first place. Recall that for Schwarz, as we saw above, a social form can, apparently paradoxically, be recognized without having been previously known. For these reasons, realism inheres in works that, like Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant, appear very far from the high realist tradition.

At a climactic moment in “Narrate or Describe?” Lukács insists: “Without a world-view, there is no composition” (228). Or, as he has it elsewhere in the same essay, the artistic essence of composition is a “world-view objectified as form” (227). (At another level of abstraction, Lukács is repeating a claim made by Schelling: “aesthetic intuition is just intellectual intuition become objective”).11 What is at stake, in other words, in the claim that works of art do not mimic reality, but rather constitute claims about it, is a conception of consciousness as an active principle: what Hegel called negativity, the autonomous relation to external conditions that are otherwise determining. Marx may have, as Engels had it, put the Hegelian tradition back on its feet. But Marxism is, nonetheless, the surviving legacy of the sequence that runs from Kant through Fichte and Schelling to Hegel. We live in a peculiar moment when anti-humanism is both, fifty years after its moment of triumph over the dialectical tradition in France, still, astonishingly, the hallmark of advanced critical theory on the left; the avowed consequence of market ideology on the right and so-called center-left; and the unreflective presupposition of mainstream cognitive and computational science. Schelling, in 1800, decried the demand that art justify itself by utility, a demand that could only be made “in an age for whom the highest efforts of human spirit consist in discoveries with directly economic application.” To this sentence he at some point scrawled in the margin of his own published copy the helpful addendum, “beets.”12 The demand that art express its value in the same form as agronomy would not surprise an upper-level university administrator today; today, a upper-level university administrator might make it herself. I have argued elsewhere that the problem of meaning, the problem of consciousness as something that cannot be understood in computational terms, is under particular pressure in our period, a period in which various discourses from neoliberal economics to object oriented ontology to affect theory have sought to topple the concept of consciousness as an active principle, and that the stakes of defending such an understanding of consciousness, such a robust and expansive sense of meaning and interpretation, is today of broad political significance — indeed, that defending an expansive sense of interpretation is itself a defense of politics as such. I would argue the same today. But one can imagine — I for one would like to live in — a world where consciousness, meaning, and interpretation were not under such pressure. Such a world would be more different than ours than it might initially appear, but the point for now is that it is eminently possible. And in such a world – a world where something like Hegelian negativity, something like human freedom, something like politics, something like reason, were hegemonically acknowledged as central to human affairs — the particular political valence I attribute to art in the current dispensation would wither away.

If works of art are complex truth claims, and interpretation is what we do when we attempt to understand and, inseparably from this, evaluate them, we are left with the question of art’s cognitive dignity. I don’t need to waste any breath dispensing with the idea, common enough in the cultural pages, that the value of art lies not only in its equivalence to beetroots but also in the “stories we tell ourselves.” If that were the case, any story would do as any other as long as it satisfied whatever credulity we were currently in the market to indulge. The question is rather: can art say things that systematic knowledge cannot? As Hegel understood, the stakes of this question are, in our own limited domain, high. If we answer in the negative, we have cast our lots with Hegel’s claim that art is “a thing of the past,” a claim that, to remind ourselves, has nothing to do with the historical disappearance of art, a secular decline in its quality, or the empirical subsumption of the production and circulation of art into some other logic, but rather with a normative lack of faith that art can any longer perform for us its “highest vocation” (V 25, A 11). If at least some of us in this room have not lost that faith, it is clear that such entities as university presidents and boards of trustees generally have, and so Hegel’s concern with the “end of art” is directly relevant to us.

Robert Pippin has recently and persuasively argued that the “end of art” for Hegel is inextricably bound up with what one might call Hegel’s big mistake: namely (I am summarizing wildly here) the presumption that emergent bourgeois institutions would come to mediate social conflict so successfully and so explicitly that society would come to have a degree of transparency to itself that would render art’s “highest vocation” obsolete.13 This is not far from Lukács’s Hegel, and to fill in Pippin’s sketch with a Lukácsian brush it would only remain to say (again summarizing wildly) that the reason bourgeois institutions fail to produce such transparency is that the capital-labor relation is a subject-object relationship and it is so irreducibly, not contingently. That is, the capital-labor relation can be suppressed or managed, but to transform it into a subject-subject relationship would be to supersede the labor-capital relation altogether. On Lukács’s account, the betrayal of the working class by the bourgeoisie in 1848 marks both the end of illusions about the universality of bourgeois institutions and the beginning of modernism as art’s abdication of its responsibility to the whole or, more sympathetically, art’s acknowledgment that it can henceforth no longer understand itself as able to fulfil that responsibility except in modes that are, broadly speaking, ironic.

Pippin’s understanding is, in other words, not only broadly convincing on its own account but also broadly compatible with at least one powerful strand of Marxist historicism. However, Hegel formulates the question in terms that may not be entirely reducible to the coordinates of his big mistake. The kernel of Hegel’s argument is that “If a truth is to be an appropriate matter for art, its own specific character must allow it to be sensuously expressible, and moreover to be, in sensuous form, adequate to itself” (V 23, A 9). Note that the second demand is much more stringent than the first. Some mathematical truths can be expressed in sensuous form, but in that form they are not, strictly speaking, mathematical; they are not, in sensuous form, “adequate to themselves” as mathematical truths. For art to have a vocation at all, in other words, it must correspond to some form of knowledge that is not expressed more adequately otherwise. This is that the reason that, as we have already seen, “for artistic interest as much as for artistic production itself, we generally require a kind of liveliness wherein the universal is not available as law and maxim, but rather gives the impression of being inseparable from feeling and sensuous experience.” (V 25, A 10).

The sentiment is virtually the same one that Lukács expresses a century later, cited above, wherein a work “becomes compelling… when it appears… as something not invented [by the artist], but merely discovered”: not, in other words, as an illustration of something existing in the mind of the artist, but as already present in sensuous experience itself. If we wanted to know exactly what Hegel meant we would want to look closely at his words. But since what we have are lecture notes we don’t have his exact words, and for now you’ll have to take my word that the closer we look at the words we have, the less certain we are precisely what Hegel means. For example, what I translated as “gives the impression” is the verb wirken, maybe more literally something like “works as,” “does for,” or “passes as.” But is this impression merely an impression, or are certain meanings indeed inseparable from feeling and sensuous experience? Are we dealing with a rhetoric or a form of truth? The whole sense of these pages is that art is for Hegel a mode of presentation, but does not correspond to a mode of truth. The impression of being bound up with sensuous appearances is only, on one hand, an artistic effect or, on the other, a deficit in explicit knowledge. There is, I think, an implicit “yet” in Hegel’s criterion: art has a place where “the universal is not [yet] available as law and maxim.” That is, artistic meaning only attains its highest vocation when, for whatever reason, systematic knowledge of the material has not been attained. Otherwise, the artist merely produces the impression that a certain kind of truth claim emerges from her material rather than from outside it. (Certainly artists strive for this effect, but Hegel’s suggestion seems to be that in the modern period such effects are merely effects and not, as Pippin has it, “sensible-affective markers of truth” [135]). On one hand, systematic knowledge has not yet been achieved, and the aesthetically acquired knowledge will be, eventually if not today, rendered obsolete and merely illustrative by some systematic discipline. On the other, already existing systematic knowledge will have been bypassed in favor of sensuous representation, and we are left with something like a propaedeutic. Neither of these possibilities is, from the standpoint of art’s cognitive dignity, satisfactory.

The problem Hegel alerts us to, one that clearly remains germane today, is that of the normative form taken by knowledge in societies like ours. It is not that, in an age that rightly prizes systematic knowledge, the artist is thereby “tempted to bring more thoughts into her work.”

Rather, our whole spiritual formation is such that the artist herself stands within a world thus characterized by reflection, with all that entails. No artist could, merely by resoluteness and force of will, abstract herself from it. (V 25, A 11).

Art will no doubt continue as decoration, stimulant, soporific, timewaster, and so on; that was never in doubt and was never of any interest. More than this, it will continue to preserve some cognitive dignity as propaedeutic and prolegomenon to systematic knowledge. But as long as systematic knowledge remains our horizon — and let’s hope it does — art’s “highest vocation” would appear to be at an end.

But certain kinds of knowledge are, without being mystically untranslatable into systematic knowledge, only directly accessible to us in embodied form. Musical intervals are all simply ratios — directly expressible as simple, mathematical relationships. When you hear an octave, you might know you are hearing the ratio 2:1, but you do not hear the ratio 2:1. Someone who knows how to recognize an octave can train someone who doesn’t in a minute or two. Neither of them needs to know that they are hearing the ratio 2:1; indeed, such knowledge is not helpful to their project of teaching and learning what an octave sounds like.

Beethoven’s violin concerto in D begins with the tympani announcing the key — five beats on D — and the next eight measures center emphatically on D major. But in the tenth measure (about twenty seconds in) the first violins, quiet but exposed, play four beats on D-sharp, echoing the rhythm of the tympani but, apparently, in a completely unrelated key.14 In short order (measure twelve), the violas join the violins in their insistence on D-sharp. The first time you hear it, the effect is astonishing; it takes nothing more than the habitual training we all have from living in a world saturated with the western tonal system to recognize that the D-sharp “doesn’t fit,” that it “comes out of nowhere,” or at least from another century — that it seems very distant from the key of D major. If we know what to expect from a Beethoven concerto, we might trust that its meaning will become clear to us in time, but it is not yet. After this enigmatic presentation of D-sharp, the orchestra settles comfortably into D, passing dramatically but briefly into D minor (m. 28-42), returning to D major to repeat the theme, then subjecting the theme itself to a parallel modulation into D minor (m. 51-56), with a lovely misleading cadence that leads, twice, briefly to F (the relative major of D minor) before returning quickly both times to D minor (57-63). In other words, we are for the next stretch very much centered around D. But in measure 65 (something over two minutes in), the D-sharp pattern returns unexpectedly though not without anticipation in the violins, with the rest of the strings supplying part of a diminished chord underneath it and emerging from the D-sharp pattern to form a chord (an inverted and therefore somewhat veiled A7) that is strongly related to D major — effectively hinting at a place for D-sharp in D major. Over the next five bars, in a dramatic crescendo, Beethoven teaches us where D-sharp fits into D major, first hammering on the D-sharp — the violins literally spelling out the diminished chord it anchors — and then leading us climactically and naturally through an inverted E minor to A7 to D major.15

Now, one can sit down with the score and puzzle all this out to arrive at a technical understanding of how Beethoven ties D-sharp to D major. But what I want to emphasize is that this technical explanation would be true, but not convincing. “You can bring D-sharp into D major by passing through the related key of E minor” is, on the evidence, true. You can put it in a textbook and use it in other compositions. But the evidence is what you hear, and no amount of technical elaboration would render its translation into propositional language plausible (or for that matter implausible), even though this translation is faithful and in its own way complete. Even if you were one of the few people in the world who can hear a score in your head just by reading it, you would still have to hear it in your head to be convinced by it. For the rest of us, hearing is believing. By the time we hear the D-sharp pattern again, accompanying the soloist in measure 111, it sounds almost natural: not because we have gotten used to it, but because we know what it means and have a sense of where it might be going, even if that knowledge and that sense are things that, in the listening, we do not pose explicitly.

I want to suggest that this is the order of truth that pertains to art: that there are truths that are more or less easily translatable into propositional language, but whose assertion can only be persuasive in sensuous form. Such a truth is, “in sensuous form, adequate to itself.” Demonstrations of such truth call on our knowledge as embodied, worlded, self-positing, social, linguistic, temporal (and so on ad infinitum — in this case, habitually tonal) beings. (It is as subjects formed in capitalist societies that we feel the rightness of Kafka’s family man). Such truth claims cannot be made persuasive in propositional form, even though their translation into propositional form need not pose any tremendous problems. The statement “Philistinism is a form of appearance of the fragility of bourgeois order” may be true, but it is not convincing in that form, and it is hard to imagine any argument — survey research? — other than a commentary on Kafka that would make it so. The “poetry of sensuous representation [Vorstellung]” cannot in these cases be superseded by “the prose of thinking.” (V 123, A 89).

Sensuous presentation is in such cases neither prologemenon nor propaedeutic. Hegel is simply wrong that, as a general proposition, “thought and reflection have soared beyond fine art.” (V 24, A 10). This is related to his overestimation of the universality of bourgeois institutions, but it seems to me not to be reducible to it. There is nothing wrong, for example, with the discipline of musicology. It’s just that in musicology (as opposed to, say, physics) the propositional translation is supplemental to the sensuous idea and not the reverse. Of course, Beethoven’s violin concerto is a specialized case, pertaining in the exposition I have given it exclusively to the realm of music itself. It may be that in this passage Beethoven has more to teach us. If it is true that in his sketchbooks Beethoven initially wrote the violins’ D-sharp as an E-flat, then he himself did not yet know how it related to the key of D, and what we are hearing is also a kind of narration of Beethoven’s own discovery of that relationship.16 In that case, these passages have something to say about the structure of action itself, the subsumption of the given into an intentional structure. Be that as it may in the musical case, the past ten years of writing on photography has insisted that contemporary photography has a great deal to say about the structure of intentional action, and it may be that art has always been and will continue to be better than philosophy at laying bare the paradoxes, ironies, and ruses that underlie human action. Similarly Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squadmay have more to say about the relation of art to the culture industry than a shelf of perfectly good sociological analyses.

But as Marxists we may, like Lukács, be forgiven for looking to art for something more epic in significance (which is not to say that the structure of intention or the relation of art to the culture industry are irrelevant to Left politics). Here I want to turn once again to the work of Roberto Schwarz, in particular his magnificent reading of Bertolt Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Stockyards.17 As is well known, Brecht set store by the didactic content of his plays, in the case of St. Joan certain lessons about labor organization and about the operation of monopolies and commodities markets. But these types of knowledge are readily available in reflexive, abstract, systematic form, principally though not exclusively in the Marxist classics themselves. Thought and reflection have indeed in this case “soared beyond fine art,” and it is not obvious what advantage such knowledge might gain from being expressed in sensuous form. As Adorno pointed out rather damningly, it is not obvious that such lessons even remain true when expressed in sensuous form. The proscription on valorizing individual over collective action, for example, rings hollow when dramatized in a play, which necessarily develops through the actions of individuals. “Thus,” says Schwarz, “against claims to the contrary, the truth of the plays would not lie in the lessons passed on, in the theorems concerning class conflict, but rather in the objective dynamic of the whole” (44).

Schwarz’s reading is extraordinarily illuminating and I will concentrate here on only two aspects of it. First, which I have touched on elsewhere, is Schwarz’s observation that throughout St. Joan, Brecht pastiches classics of German Romanticism, thereby setting up a kind of deflationary equivalence between the sublime risk of a human world without divine sanction — as found, for example, in Hölderlin’s “Hyperion’s Song of Destiny” — and the risk assumed by an investor or imposed on a worker. “Unheroic as bourgeois society is,” writes Marx, “it nonetheless required heroism, terror, civil war, and the subjugation of nations to bring it into being.”18 Speaking of the canned-meat monopolist in St. Joan, Schwarz remarks that “Brecht wanted to demonstrate that something of Mauler already existed in Faust, but not that the grandeur of the Enlightenment continued to live in speculations on the stock exchange” (56). A perceptive critic can translate Brecht’s “demonstration” into expository form; but it is only persuasive in expository form as a commentary — that is, it is only persuasive because the play is persuasive. It is hard to see how the demonstration of the identity between Romantic existential risk and bourgeois economic risk could be made in any other than poetic form.

But this demonstration is still about poetry, even if it is about poetry’s relationship to history and to class. The second aspect Schwarz highlights concerns the role of economic logic in the play. Schwarz notes that it is not exactly what one would expect from a Marxist. Marx famously remarks, in terms that are coincidentally apt, that “the characters who appear on the economic stage are merely personifications of economic relations.”19 Marx’s point, surely true, is that the logic of capitalism exerts a coercive force that supervenes any merely individual motivations on the part of the capitalist. But Schwarz shows that in St. Joan “Brecht preferred to situate himself… a step this side of the complete delegation of social energy to the market” (56). That is, Mauler is not merely the personification of the ownership of capital: there is something excessive in his character. His desire to win, to bury the competition no matter what the cost — repeatedly risking taking down the whole system including himself — exceeds merely economic logic. “It is as if there existed an imperative, or constitutional defect, demanding that nothing be done in which cunning does not have a hand” (55-56). This might seem to suggest a retreat from Marx’s insight in favor of a Shakespearean tragic flaw, a merely ethical critique of the ruthlessness of particular capitalists.

But the excess does not inhere in Mauler’s character, but in capitalist economic relations themselves. Capitalism’s logic is competitive, true enough: in order to live as a capitalist, the capitalist must compete. But the immanent objective of competition is not life, but victory; Mauler competes, perfectly logically, not to survive, but to win. Within this logic, risks beckon that would otherwise seem too monstrous to contemplate. Immanent to and necessary for the reproduction of capitalism is a drive that exceeds the reproduction of capital and that is, potentially, inimical to it. But unlike capitalism’s gravediggers, the tendency of this stupid, drive-like competitiveness is not to bury capitalism but to bury us all at once. As Schwarz puts it, “What is on the stage, under the sign of crisis, is a transformation of the cunning of capital into reflexes that are counterproductive, one would almost say antediluvian” (54). The competitive logic that capitalism presumes and encourages becomes something like a death-drive internal to capitalism itself. “The contrast between the gambling that takes place in the stock exchange and everyone’s panic facing the ups and downs of the economy recalls in fact a loss of judgment on a species-wide scale” (54).

I hope you agree that there’s a certain logical coherence to my gloss on Schwarz’s reading. But does this logic pertain to the real? St. Joan makes a claim: things stand so. Capitalism is not simply “prone to crises” because of a set of immanent contradictions. That is Marx’s account, and it is correct but — because contradictions are at least in the abstract always manageable — incomplete. Rather, because capitalism mobilizes a desire for crisis — the purely competitive desire to pull off the more daring coup, the riskier play, the bigger bet — it is a crisis machine that can never be fully managed. It’s hard to see where one would turn for evidence for such a claim. Certainly an economist might feel that she has understood economic crises tolerably well, and that if given levers long enough she could forestall them with tolerable reliability, without recourse to such concepts as death-drive, and indeed the quasi-freudian terms I have used metaphorically in my commentary don’t make a lot of sense when applied literally to a mode of production. The questions we are left with are literary-critical. Is St. Joan persuasive? Does it produce a “feeling of reality” that strikes us with the “force of conviction”? On some of the most substantial uncertainties we face, questions like these are not only the only available ones, but the only possible ones.

1. Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation(Oxford: Clarendon, 2001) 245-264. It might seem to complicate matters that Davidson insists that what a metaphor is meant to bring to our attention “is not meaning” (256). This seems to me a bizarre “restraint in using the word ‘meaning,’” and indeed Davidson himself seems to have come to the same conclusion, later writing that “I was stupidly stubborn about the word meaning when all I cared about was the primacy of first meaning.” (“Locating Literary Language,” in Truth, Language, and History [Oxford: Clarendon, 2005] 167-181, 173n7). By “first meaning” Davidson means something very like literal meaning: signification that “has a systematic place in the language of the author” (173). If we are using restraint in employing the word “meaning” in the current context, it will be to the aspect of meaning that does not have a systematic place in the language of the author: in other words, to the aspect of artworks that calls for the discipline of interpretation.
2. Biografia
   Naquela época a obscenidade de teu sexo recendia por toda a casa
   A meu lado na varanda num jarro de louça uma natureza contrária à minha emergia
   virente
   Estávamos há quase dois séculos da Revolução Francesa
   E aquela enorme flor amarela que nasceu no quintal junto ao banheiro
   pólen corpo incêndio
   Ferreira Gullar, Toda poesia (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2015) 115.
3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.(Ithaca: Cornell, 1981) 48.
4. Roberto Schwarz, “Worries of a Family Man,” trans. Nicholas Brown, Mediations 23.1 (Fall 2007) 21-25.
5. Franz Kafka, “Die Sorge des Hausvaters,” in Erzählungen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1965) 171.
6. Roberto Schwarz, “Worries of a Family Man,” 26.
7. Antonio Candido, “Dialética da malandragem,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros8 (June 1970): 67-89.
8. Roberto Schwarz, “Pressupustos, salvo engano, de ‘Dialética da malandragem,’ in Que horas são? (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002) 133.
9. Georg Lukács, “Erzählen oder beschreiben?” in Georg Lukács Werke Vol. 4, Essaysüber Realismus (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1971) 207.
10. G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungenüber dieÄsthetik, Vol. 1, Werke Vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) 25; Hegel’s Aesthetics, Vol. I, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) 10. Hereafter the German text is cited as V, and corresponding pages in the English translation are cited as A.
11. Friedrich Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2000) 296.
12. Schelling, System des transzendentalen Idealismus 293-4.
13. Robert B. Pippin, After the Beautiful (Chicago: U of Chicago, 2014).
14. Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Major, Op. 61, in Great Romantic Violin Concertos in Full Score (New York: Dover, 1985) 1-6, reprint from Ludwig van Beethovens Werke, Serie 4: Violine mit Orchester, Nr. 29 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Hartel, 1862-1865).
15. A brilliant performance by Hilary Hahn and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, is available on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cg_0jepxow
16. E-flat and D-sharp are enharmonics of each other, which means they represent the same note in a 12-tone equal tempered scale like a piano keyboard. E minor is written in sharps; the leading tone to the tonic would always be written as a D-sharp, never as an E-flat. If Beethoven had something in mind like the harmonic structure we have been discussing when he sketched those four beats, he would not have written them as E-flats.
17. Roberto Schwarz, “The Relevance of Brecht: High Points and Low,” trans. Emilio Sauri, Mediations 23.1 (Fall 2007) 27-61.
18. Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx/Engels: Werke, vol. 8 (Berlin: Dietz, 1960) 116.
19. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischenÖkonomie, Erster Band, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx/Engels: Werke, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz, 2008) 100.