Eva Geulen's slim book argues that Hegel's idea of the end of art fails -- in its beginning as well as in its end -- to qualify as a genuine idea and is better regarded as a rumour. Further, as a rumour this notion is best encountered as it has been repeatedly enacted, that is, according to the manner in which it appears within discourse, here specifically the discourse of modern aesthetic theory. Her premise is that the rumour stands to the concept as aesthetic reflection does to philosophy. Geulen's book thus provocatively traces Hegel's purported idea of the end of art through the four key figures of modern German aesthetics: Nietzsche, Benjamin, Adorno, and Heidegger.
Hegel
Hegel, according to Geulen, does not initiate the thesis, or even the idea, of the end of art but rather inaugurates the central motif and tradition of modernity, which is to say, the discourse of modernity, by setting into motion the rumour of the end of art:
"The end of art -- this is the book's claim -- has not just been played out variously and repetitively, but the playing out occasionally provides glimpses of the rules of the game, the discursive conditions under which it is played. At the end of the end of art one does not find an end, but a beginning: the discovery of the end of art as a discourse of modernity" (14).
The emphatic achievement of classical art is the transformation of the symbol into convention and tradition. In short, tradition -- the locus of conventionality -- itself might be characterized as just that successful melding of invention and discovery:
"Conventions can be denounced, suppressed, transformed, and degraded; one can accuse or praise them. But there is only one place where conventions are produced. The imaginary home of anachronicity, in which tradition and convention are invented in order to be rejected, transformed, or sublated, is the museum" (38).
The museum then, obvious enough to many writers in aesthetics, functions as the entombment of the past. Less obvious to most is that by functioning this way the museum also necessarily makes available the (modern) possibility of the establishment of traditions, and of what might be called the invention of discovery.
Nietzsche
[Nietzsche discusses the history of the tragic form and introduces an intellectual dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian (very loosely: reality as disordered and undifferentiated by forms versus reality as ordered and differentiated by forms). Nietzsche claims life always involves a struggle between these two elements, each battling for control over the existence of humanity]
The continuing and continuous birth and rebirth of the tradition of modernity -- specifically as tragedy -- ought to come immediately to mind. And therewith Geulen's subsequent chapter is titled "Nietzsche's Retrograde Motion," in which, and without explicit acknowledgement, it is nonetheless apparent that it is all too easy to replace the Hegelian tropes of invention and discovery with the Nietzschean figures of Apollo and Dionysus. But the reconciliation achieved for (and by?) Hegel in the simultaneous invention of the museum and discovery of classical art is for Nietzsche instead tragedy, indeed a tragedy made genuine by its success at making all aesthetic appearance homogeneous:
"In tragedy appearance becomes visible as appearance, and just as the privileged status of tragedy is the result of a translation, so translation is also its innermost principle: 'Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus: and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained'"(57-58).
When all aesthetic appearances become interchangeable, tragedy comes to an end, and what Nietzsche calls "tragic knowledge" no longer has any import beyond any other form of knowledge. Nietzsche's repeated reports of the death, demise, suicide, etc. of tragedy is characterized by Geulen as the overdetermination of tragedy's end. And the purpose of this overdetermination is for Nietzsche to provide himself an ironic distance from the death of tragedy as well as from tragedy per se. Irony thereby becomes the (aesthetic) means by which Nietzsche attempts to avoid the deathliness of the Hegelian end of art aesthetic. Nietzsche's accomplishment, however, remains ambiguous (and therefore not distinct enough from Hegel's); for his ironising of tragedy and tragic knowledge also can be read as re-enactment of just that ambiguous interplay between discovery and invention. Irony is at once the inventive undermining of a tradition -- insofar as it calls into question the legitimacy of any assertion -- as well as the reinforcement, hence discovery, of the force of some tradition.
Benjamin
The "rumour" of the end of art, in the work of Benjamin, now comes to speak of the very ambivalence of tradition itself, regardless of whether it is the tradition of art. Benjamin's rumouring thus expands to consider the fraught character of history as well as the possibility that it could, with the appropriate device, cease to be altogether, or rather: come to be in a wholly unique manner. (No doubt Nietzsche's own "untimely meditation" on the uses and disadvantages of history might nonetheless have provided an inspiring model).
Film -- or better, the moving camera which produces it -- serves as the premier apparatus which, according to Benjamin, has no history precisely because it is instead the capacity to produce its objects in the very act and form of their presentation. The historical continuity previously reaffirmed by the very sequence of event followed by representation, is no longer the sole form of historical coming into existence. History, now genuinely produced exclusively by the mechanism of the movie camera, thus collapses as but the mere representation of some prior continuity. Benjamin's mechanical reproducibility essay promises a kind of future beyond the end of art, perhaps also thereby beyond the end of history. And yet, there remains something of the ambivalence of the rumour in Benjamin's own unresolved thoughts on the nature of the famous "aura."
Though this trope has become central to the reception of Benjamin, Geulen makes innovative use of it by likening aura -- which she describes as "less a concept than a performative intervention" (84) -- to the movement of rumour: "Its [aura's] decay does not invade aura from without; rather, the decay produces it in the first place… . The explication of the aura does not proceed from a preordained standpoint, but unfolds in a series of steps and from various perspectives" (85). In the end, however, aura is not rumour enough; it remains entrenched, even and especially in its disappearing, decaying appearance, too closely allied with the Hegelian requirement that all reflection on aesthetics begins (and thereby ends?) with the end of art.
Adorno
Adorno "has little to contribute to a genealogy of modernity as developed by Hegel, Nietzsche, or Benjamin" (91). His concern is best understood as centred on the (negative) character of language rather than on art or aesthetics. Indeed, "Adorno advances the aesthetic as a category of experience as an alternative to the aesthetic as art" (92-93). It will turn out that for Geulen this substitution by Adorno of experience for art is directed toward a critique of the failure of language, whose curse it is to forget as well as to suppress the difference between the world and the world of thought.
Heidegger
"Because Heidegger's reflections on art cannot be severed from his political decision in favour of national socialism, they also represent the fatal apex of that [aesthetic] tradition, and render it transparent" (112).
This transparency is immediately made opaque, however, by the difficulties of his texts, and then compounded by the many Heideggerian-infected interpretations of them. Still, Geulen succeeds in bringing much light to "The Origin of the Work of Art" essay and in recuperating Heidegger as a central figure in the rediscovery of the Hegelian end of art discourse, which is to say the return to the insight regarding the constitutive ambivalence of the modern tradition of aesthetic reflection:
"What Hegel founded was, strictly speaking, not a thing but an empty place, an indeterminacy, an unclarity, an absence. It has proven endlessly productive".
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