Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wlfflin and Adorno Author(s): Frederic J.

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Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wilfflin and Adorno*

Frederic J. Schwartz
The historyof art is no longerthe historyof styles. The notionof style, which once seemed to define the discipline,has loosenedits graspon our thoughtsabout art; many of the most powerfulminds of the field have subjected it to critique;it is not adequateto our thinking about visual form and representation today. Style has obviously been a terminalcase for some time, so much so, in fact, that the rethinking of the discipline over the last few decadesdid not submitthe categoryto the full force of its criticalwrath.1Yet the deathof this conceptseems so strangelyslow and bloodless, so nearly invisible,thatone hesitatesto write its obituary
* Earlier draftsof this articlewerepresented at UniversityCollege Londonand the to DavidBindman andMargaret Iversenfortheirinvitations, Universityof Essex.My thanks Charles FordandStellavon Boch fortheircomments. andto Nina Rosenblatt, PaulLerner, of artafter1968- or the "newarthistory," the 1. In the self-criticalhistoriography critical and political concernshave been rubric under which the new historiographical, concernwith indigrouped- the preferred targetshave beenpositivism,the monographic of art'sautonomy. Forthe most important vidual artists,andthe idealistassumption critical discussionsof the conceptof style in the historyof art,see MeyerSchapiro,"Style"(1953), repr. in Schapiro,Theoryand Philosophyof Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: influential Art and Illusion:A Study GeorgeBraziller,1994)andE. H. Gombrich's critique in the Psychologyof Pictorial Representation, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961), as well as the chapter"ThePsychologyof Styles"in his TheSense of Order:A Studyin the Psychologyof DecorativeArt,2nd ed. (London:Phaidon,1984), which containsan analysis of the workof Wilfflin thatintersects at severalpointswith my own. See also Willibald Sauerlinder,"FromStilus to Style: Reflectionson the Fate of a Notion,"Art History6.3 (1983): 253-70; and the short bibliographyin Lorenz Dittmann,Stil, Symbol,Struktur: Studienzu Kategoriender Kunstgeschichte (Munich:Fink, 1967) 14-15, n. 4. Hans Belting provides a broadbut nuancedoverview of the traditionof modem art historiography and a discussionof otheraspectsof the demise of its models in TheEnd of the Historyof S. Wood (Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1987). Art?, trans.Christopher

Cathedralsand Shoes

and lay it to rest: it has not been adequatelyhistoricized,its discursive contourshave not been drawnwith any precision,and its eclipse has yet that I would like to contribto be charted.It is to such an historicization ute here by looking at the way the concept of style did double duty in Germany:it served not only as a categoryby which the past was undermodem problem was stood, but also one throughwhich a particularly representedand analyzed.That problemwas the rise of a mass culture. My argumentis that the categoriesof art historyhave always been central to thinking about mass culture in Germany,from the rise of Kulturkritik to the Frankfurt School; and that the crisis of culture accompanyingthe developmentof a modem consumermarketwas, in turn,inscribedwithinthe analytictools of the academichistoryof art.

The art-historical notion of style is perhapsbest capturedin Heinrich famous postulatethat the essence of the Gothic can be seen W61ifflin's as easily in the shoes worn at the time as in the greatest cathedral. Wo1fflinis best-knowntoday for his famous Principles of Art History [Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe,1915], in which he introduceda that seemed to make the study of visual artiformal categories priori facts a science. The comparison, however, appeared nearly three of decades earlier, in the Prolegomenato a Psychology of Architecture notes doctoral and he it was WOilfflin's dissertation, 1886; scrupulously his source for the shoes.2 At the simplest level, style is the presence of in the visual productionof a period. But a common formaldenominator if we listen to W61fflinon the Gothic shoe, we note some quite specific idealist assumptionsthat inform his early concept of style. First, W1lfflin writes that forms can not be reducedto matters,say, of function, material,or technique(to use some then-current categoriesderived from the work of Gottfried Semper), but express instead a will that
2. HeinrichW61fflin, zu einerPsychologiederArchitektur" (1886), "Prolegomena Kleine Schriften,ed. J. Gantner(Basel: Schwabe, 1946) 45. Wilfflin's referencereads vol 2: "WeiB, KostilmkundeIV.8." He is referringto HermannWeiss, Kostumkunde im Mittelaltervom 4ten bis zum 14tenJahrhunGeschichteder Trachtunddes Gercithes dert (Stuttgart: Ebner& Seubert,1864) 557-59, 884-80. The "Prolegomena," an important and often overlookedtext, has now been translated in HarryFrancisMallgraveand Form, and Space: Problemsin German EleftheriosIkonomou,eds. and trans.,Empathy, Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (SantaMonica:The Getty Centerfor the Historyof Art and the here. Humanities,1994);I have, however,used my own translations

FredericJ. Schwartz

often manifests itself in direct opposition to material contingencies. It is not a position we usually associate with W1lfflin, but it is precisely this which constitutes for him the lesson of the Gothic shoe: Fig. 242.

03

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Figure 1. W61fflin refers to the shoes (twelfth/early thirteenth century) in fig. 242c. From Hermann Weiss, Kostiimkunde. butis this evidentin the bluntline with The humanfoot moves forward; thatits will found which it ends?No. The Gothicfoundit insufferable here no preciseexpression,so it let the shoe end in sharppoints. The breadthof the sole resultsfrom the weight of the body. But [for the Gothic] the body has no rights, it is material,and dumb material must not be yielded to, the will mustpenetrate every part. dissolves the wall into vertical elements, and Thereforearchitecture

Cathedrals and Shoes

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southtransept, begun 1176. Figure2. Soissons Cathedral, the humanfoot is given a shoe with threeraisedpoints,wherebythe is eliminated.3 feeling of heavy treading 3. 44-45. "Prolegomena" W6ltflin,

Frederic J. Schwartz

theories of empathy [Einfiihlung], Here W61fflininvokes contemporary between the mediate spirit and form (and more about letting body Yet one can see that this notion of style is already empathypresently). and it idealist, historicist, expressive: says thatvisual form expresses the historicalstateof the humanwill, the mind. But what turns form into style is a corollarythat goes one step further. It is the axiom that the will expressedin the shoe is the very same one that is expressed in the cathedral,the assumptionthat beyond the unity of form during a period lay a unity of spirit. WOlfflinfeels no obligation to argue this carefully: "That styles are not created arbihe writes, is trarilyby individualsbut out of the feeling of the Volk," Style, simply "too generally accepted to require furtherelaboration."4 in the art of an historidefined as a set of common visual denominators was taken to be simultaneouslythe expression of cally defined "Volk," interconnectedness of the spirit and and the evidence of a fundamental in Renaisa an "To writes of age. explain style," products WOilfflin sance and Baroqueof 1888, "canmean nothingother than to place it in its general historical context and to verify that it speaks in harmony with the otherorgansof its age."5 reactionto what I would like to W61fflin,however, had a paradoxical characterizeas the spiritualizednotion of style, a reaction that often blinds us to his ultimate indebtednessto it. He never challenged the assumptionsbehind it, but he worried about its epistemologicalbases; and in fact the projectof his early works, throughthe Principles, can be and then to retreatfrom the seen as an attemptfirst to circumnavigate It is this of doubtingWOlfflinwhom we problemsof the concept style. know best, and it is his probingcritiqueof the notion of style that represents the core of his attemptto make the history of art a science, to
make Kunstgeschichte a "Naturgeschichte der Kunst."6 It is therefore

worthnotingthe pointsof his critique. WOlfflin'sbasic point is that the common view that sees "the formal
46. 4. W61fflin,"Prolegomena" Simon (London:FonRenaissanceand Baroque(1888), trans.Kathrin 5. W61fflin, tana, 1964) 79.
6.

in der neuerenKunst,3rd ed. (Munich:F. Bruckmann,1918) X. This phraseis from the thatI will otherwise forewordto the first edition,which does not appearin the translation
cite: Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art,

W61fflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundgebriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung

trans.M.D. Hottinger(New York:Dover, 1950).

Cathedralsand Shoes

style [as] an expression of the age . . . has never been systematically This is the approachof what he calls "culturalhistory."The founded."7 resultis, he continues, a gooddealthatis ridiculous, of timeunder summarizing longperiods of a verygeneral kindwhichin turn aremadeto account for concepts the conditions of publicand private, intellectual and spiritual life. us witha paleimageof thewhole,andleaveus at a loss Theypresent to findthethreads tojointhesegeneral which aresupposed factsto the stylein question.8 The issue is not the statusof style as the visual expressionof a cultural that would "enable art totality, but instead the lack of a "foundation" to individual to trace events history. general principlesor laws," transthe "instinctive Ahnen] with which [instinktives forming presentiment" the arthistorianevaluateshistoricalstyles into valid knowledge.9 The problems were twofold. First, culturalhistory did not recognize artisticform as the object of a discretearea of inquiry.For culturalhistory, art tendedto serve as mere evidence of the natureof another,more encompassingspirit;the irreducible qualitiesof the visual were ignored:
7. W61fflin, Renaissanceand Baroque76. 8. W61fflin,Renaissanceand Baroque76. The relationof the historyof artto culthat focuses on the figure of Jacob turalhistory has been dealt with in a large literature and a problemloosely (andcertainlytoo loosely) referred Burckhardt to as thatof "Hegelianism."See in particular E.H. Gombrich,"In Searchof CulturalHistory,"Ideals and Idols: Essays on Valuesin History and Art (Oxford:Phaidon, 1979); Alan Colquhoun, Criticism:Modern "E.H. Gombrichand the HegelianTradition," Essays in Architectural and Historical Change (Cambridge: Architecture MIT, 1981); and Michael Ann Holly, Panofskyand the Foundationsof Art History (Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1984), esp. chap. 1. Obviously,as Gombrich pointsout (42), Wolfflinfalls preyto some of the trapsof "Hegeis thatthis happenseven as W61fflinseeks to steerclear of lianism,"' thoughmy argument them. What is interestinghere is W6lfflin's complex relationto the programof cultural as a student,andto Burckhardt, its foremostrephistory,to which he had fully subscribed resentativeand the young art historian'smentor.ClearlyW61fflinsaw Burckhardt's culturalhistoryas a far more self-criticalpracticethanothers that went by the same name. The complexityof Burckhardt's thoughtand his own doubtsaboutthe possibilityof fulas ArchiSitt, "JacobBurckhardt filling his art-historical projectare discussedin Martina tect of a New Art History," Journal of the Warburg and CourtauldInstitutes57 (1994): 227-42. On the methodologicalproblemsof relatingculturalproductsto theirlargerconof Weltanschauung," text, see KarlMannheim,"Onthe Interpretation Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge,ed. and trans.P. Kecskemeti(New York:OxfordUP, 1952) 33-83; on W61fflin,72. Mannheim'simportant essay was, significantly,first published in the Jahrbuch fiir Kunstgeschichte (1921/22). 9. W61fflin,"Prolegomena" 45.

FredericJ. Schwartz Thereis a conception of art-history whichsees nothing morein art thana 'translation of Life' (Taine)into pictorial terms,and which to interpret of the prevailing attempts everystyle as an expression moodof theage.Whowould wishto denythatthisis a fruitful wayof Yet it takesus onlyso far- as far,onemight lookingat thematter? say,as thepointatwhichartbegins.10

the arts could not express ideas, which take discursive Furthermore, form; they could at best express moods."1Culturalhistory's search for unified spiritwould necessarilyturnany non-discursiveform of expression into what anotherscholar called "bad philosophy."l12 A history of art needed to delimit its object of inquiryand the natureof the knowledge it could produce in a largerhistory of spirit. Like Alois Riegl at the same time, Wrlfflin sought to isolate form in order to establishthe In the decades discipline of art history as scientific and autonomous.13 between Renaissanceand Baroqueof 1888 and the Principles of 1915, WOlfflindevelopedthe projectfor which he is best known:he sought to track the internalunity and cyclical change of purely visual schemata, as such."14 the history of "the mode of representation But his retreatto form of of did at out a not, first, grow pure rejection the spiritualized sense of style but instead out of an attemptto make form's relationto spirit more precise. Style, he wrote, had a "doubleroot"'s:first, in the "expressionof the temperof an age and a nation"(and of the individual as well); and then in the "rational psychologicalprocess"that lay behind in the of Nowhere does Wolfschemata visual representation.16 changes in of of role the the flin dispute spirit production form. He challenges a of historical there is, he its as principle interpretation; only sufficiency visual of root style. Paradoxically,the postusays, a "second,"purely of spiritled to the call for formalismas a way late of interconnectedness
10. Wilfflin, Classic Art (1899), trans.Peterand LindaMurray(London:Phaidon, 1952) 287. Renaissanceand Baroque77. 11. W61fflin, 12. WaltherBrecht,letterof 15 July 1922 to Paul Kluckhohn,quotedin Christoph Brecht,Nadler, Benjaminund Hugo von HofK6nig, "'Geistige, private Verbtindung': und Geistesgein K8nig and Eberhard Limmert,eds., Literaturwissenschaft mannsthal," FischerTaschenbuch,1993) 156. schichte, 1910 bis 1925 (Frankfurt/Main: 13. On Riegl, see MargaretIversen,Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory(Camon this otherpivbridge:MIT, 1993), which containsextensivereferencesto the literature otal figurein Germanarthistory. 14. W6lfflin, Principles 11. ClassicArt 288. 15. W61lfflin, 16. W61fflin,Principles 11, 17.

10

Cathedrals and Shoes

of identifyingthe irreduciblyvisual as an object of knowledge;and as WOifflin'spath to the Principles shows, this postulatewas a prerequisite for his historyof vision. The second problem was the mechanismby which form and spirit could be related:"[W]e still have to find the paththat leads from the cell For the Wolfflin of Renaissance of the scholar to the mason's yard."17 and Baroque and the dissertation on the psychology of architecture, the path leads throughthe body; the problemis solved by recourseto empathy theory. We feel forms by analogy to our bodies, and forms are created as the unconsciousexpressionof the corporealfeeling of an age: into bodily form."18 It is interesting "the psychic is directlytransformed to watch WOlfflinshift between body and spirit,taking the brutephysiof the latter."Style," cality of the formeras an alibi for the intangibility
he writes, "reflects the attitude and movement of people of a time."19

or The word he uses here is Haltung, which can mean either "attitude" The of WOlfcommon the word makes metaphorical "posture." meaning flin's point for him where his argumentis on shaky ground.The body serves W3lfflin both as a transparent sign of spirit and as the organ of reception of spiritualstates; it was localizable, verifiable, a common It could be limitedto the visual and physical facts of form; denominator. it would not be asked to argue finer philosophicalpoints with ham fists. As a mediatorof knowledgethe body was chaste:it could curbthe epistemological promiscuity that saw the spirit of the age wherever it historian'slasciviouseye. looked,the omnipresent appleof the cultural At times, the culturalbody stayedbehindthe scenes, an argumentthat could be mobilized, if necessary,to justify some statementsthat might writes W6lfflin, "... surpriseus ("In the history of gable proportions," one might discover the entire evolution of world-views. I do not fear
17. W61fflin, Renaissance and Baroque 77.

18.

44 (emphasisadded).On W6lfflin's receptionanduse W6lfflin, "Prolegomena"

(Worms: Werner'sche Verlagsgesellschaft,1981); Joan GoldhammerHart, "Heinrich W6lfflin: An IntellectualBiography"(Ph.D. thesis, U of Californiaat Berkeley, 1981); Mallgrave and Ikonomou,"Introduction," Empathy,Form, and Space esp. 39-56; and Mark Jarzombek,"De-Scribingthe Languageof Looking:W6lfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism," Assemblage 23 (1994): 28-69. See also Andreas Hauser, zu W61fflin's'Kunstgeschichtlichen "Grundbegriffliches Grundbegriffen,"' Beitrage zu
Kunst und Kunstgeschichte um 1900. Jahrbuch des Schweizerischen Instituts fiir

of empathy theory, see Meinhold Lurz, Heinrich Wolfflin.:Biographie einer Kunsttheorie

(1984-1986): 39-53, an interestingchallenge to the central status Kunstwissenschaft scholarsattribute to empathyin Wilfflin's work. 44. 19. W61fflin,"Prolegomena"

Frederic J. Schwartz

11

the accusationthat this is just a game."20) But the culturalbody also led to a interest a discreet little fetish, one might say. particular W61fflin "How people like to carrythemselvesand move is expressedin the first place in costume, and it is not difficult to show that architectureand Because of the close relation to the body, costume correspond."21 clothes reveal Haltung - both spirit and corporeality.And though W61fflinseems at times to anticipateRiegl in his emphasison the minor arts as the site where "the birthplaceof a new style must be sought,"22 his famous shoes are not to be takenas just one example of those decorative arts. It is their closeness to the foot, an organ of movement, that as the object which would yield hismakes them as valid as a cathedral toricalknowledgeof visual formandthe historicalstateof mind. W61fflin's use of empathy theory should not be seen as a quaint beginningin outmodedphysiologicalaesthetics,a sin of youth. Through it he sought to solve some very serious problemsof the idealist bent of art history, the same problemshe latertried to solve by the isolation of an autonomoushistory of seeing. Wilfflin wanted to rescue the concept of style from the problems inherentin it - problems of mediation, problems of intention,problemsof agency. And in the founding generationof the history of art, it was WOlfflinwho most stubbornly fought style's simplistic equation of form and spirit, its tendency to abundanceof undifferentiated knowledge, its present an embarrassing circularform of reasoningthat workedby tautologyand allowed everything to be said and precious little to be proven,reasoningthat resisted critical thoughtand invited cliche. Yet the debased sense of style from culturalhistory, as the visual expressionof the spirit of the age, always remained:as one root of form, or as the proportionof a gable from which one can glimpse a view of the world. W61fflinsaw the problems of the art-historical concept of style with a clarity matchedby few others, but he could neverquiteescape it. And we mightask why.

The model of style as it was used around1900 raises historicalissues of many kinds: the extent to which the equationof style and spirit represents the legacy of Hegel, for example; or the natureof the interests
20. 21. 22. 33. W61fflin,"Prolegomena" 44. WlIfflin, "Prolegomena" 46. W61fflin,"Prolegomena"

12

Cathedralsand Shoes

vested in the institutionalization of the historyof art at Germanuniversities in the late nineteenthcentury.23 This model was also the basis of a scholarly practice that was complex and many-sided: once formal unity was guaranteedby spirit, attentioncould be shifted to the issues of style's diachronicdevelopment(as both W6ilfflinand Riegl show). But as centralas the assumptionof the unified forms of a cultureand of that unity as representing the spirit of its time was to the discipline, it was older than modem art history by at least a century and was shot through with concerns broaderand more urgent than the intellectual brief I have described.This sense of culturecan be tracedin Germany to a tradition of historiographywhose understandingof the present resultedin a compellingbut willful readingof the past, and whose view of history need only be read against the grain for its powerful critique of the modem to emerge in sharp relief. Germantheorists of history from Schleiermacherto Dilthey rejected the Enlightenmentnotion of the natural sciences as a model of human knowledge and sought to comprehendhuman history instead from within. The object of their communalforms study came to be the relativevalues and unquestioned a the that to Geist was seen binding society integratea culture,the around which life assumed and form. Yet we know that spirit meaning the hidden theme of this historiographical traditionthat came to be known as the Geisteswissenschaften was actually the disintegrationof stable precapitalist social forms: in the violent wake of the many forms of modernity,precisely what seemed to be disappearing from social life was positedas the very conditionof historicalexistence.24 The constructionof an idealized past as a negative reflection of a fallen presentproducedmany influentialconcepts:Germansof both the left and the right spoke of an organic Kultur instead of an alienated as opposedto a capitalistGesellZivilisation,a communalGemeinschaft schaft. And throughthe unprovedand unprovablepremise of spiritual and cultural unity, the very crisis of capitalist modernity was also
23. On the establishmentof art history as a university discipline, see Heinrich
Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin (Frankfurt/ The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969) and Michael L6wy, Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism to Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thoughtfrom Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1983).

Main:Suhrkamp,1979). 24. On the romantic of the Geisteswissenschaften, see FritzK. Ringer, anticapitalism

Bolschevism(London:NLB, 1979) partI. On the Germanhistoriographical tradition,see

FredericJ. Schwartz

13

in the arthistorians'notionof style. inscribed,howeveruncomfortably, I do not intendhere to trace the uncomfortable modernityof German back to the hermeneutic tradition.What I would like to Kunstgeschichte do insteadis to look at otherways the conceptof style functionedaround the turn of the century,when the discipline was constitutingitself and testing its categories. For art historianshad no monopoly on the concept. It figuredcentrallyin discussionsof artists,critics, and sociologists at the time - people who often publishedin the samejournalsas the art historians,who were occasionallyon the same lecture circuit, and who make even more explicit the romanticanticapitalism that is undeniablya subtextof the professionalart-historical discourse.For example,in a lecture of 1913 before the first Kongressfiir isthetik und allgemeine Peter Behrens,Jugendstilartist turnedarchitectand Kunstwissenschaft, industrialdesigner,spoke of "the goal which has found, throughout hisin "sense of This visual tory, perceptibleexpression style." unity," he "is at the time the and the same evidence of, continued, for, precondition a style. For by style we mean nothingbut the unified formalexpression, the manifestationof the entire spirituallife of an epoch."25If I have stressed the spiritualizationof form in W61fflin's early work, it is that his sense of style was not that far from because I think it important cliches of the period. Behrens's- not far,thatis, fromthe widespread There were other,more subtle,ways of talkingabout style at the time. Consider a passage from sociologist Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Moneyof 1900: unto itself, with specific sounds, [E]verystyle is like a language forexpressing andsyntax inflections life,andas longaswe knowonly of styleas ourenvironment we arenotaware a singlestylethatforms his mother factor.No one speaking an autonomous tonguenaively . . . in thathe hasto consult law-like sensesthe objective regularities
orderto express his feelings .... Rather,what one wants to express

not areone andthesame,andwe experience andwhatone expresses as suchas an independent butlanguage entity onlyourmother tongue Inthe sameway,people languages. onlyif we cometo knowforeign theirwholelife which who knowonly one uniform style permeates withits contents.26 will perceive thisstyleas beingidentical
Schaffensmit des baukiinstlerischen 25. PeterBehrens,"Uberden Zusammenhang Berlin 1-9. Oktoder Technik,"Kongress fiir AsthetikundallgemeineKunstwissenschaft, F. Enke, 1914) 255, 252. ber 1913 (Stuttgart: 26. Georg Simmel, The Philosophyof Money (1901/1908), trans.Tom Bottomore and David Frisby(London:Routledge& KeganPaul, 1978) 463.

14

Cathedralsand Shoes

Simmel's account of style as languageis intricateand precise but what is quite clear is the idea thata single style was once an integralpartof a life free from alienation,and that such a happy, unproblematic relation to a set of visual conventionswas no longer available.Contemporaries of the age was reflected in the lack of unifelt that the fragmentation fied formalprinciplesin art, architecture and the entirephysiognomyof life. of the of a true style they witnessed Instead consistency everyday what they consideredthe mechanicalimitationof earlier,dead styles, a situationthe architectHermannMuthesiusdescribed,like Simmel, with the metaphorof language:he wrote of the fall from the "artisticparaAroundthe dise of style" to a state he likens to the "Towerof Babel."27 same time, in 1902, Wl1fflin too felt this commonplacedeeply enough to confide it to his diary,writingthatthe modem age lackeda style.28 Thus the art historian'snotion of style - both in its canny version as mere visual uniformity,and in its uncannyversion as spiritualunity representsto a certainextent a longing for an idealizedpast. But I think we can give style's critiqueof modernitymuch sharper contours.For in the criticism of the was at center of a discusthe general period, style sion, one which, I would like to argue,has left traces in art historiography, and one which also concernedthe relationof style to clothes, of cathedralsto shoes. At the time style was understoodquite explicitly as conditionsof culture.This the natureof visual form underprecapitalist becomes clear througha look at a word that often appearednext to "style," a word that houndedit, followed it, and ultimately gave it its meaning. The word denoted a phenomenonthat had, for contemporaries, everything to do with the gritty realities of social productionso neatly transcendedby style. The term referredto the way critics theoculturein a capirized the productionand diffusionof form throughout talisteconomy.The wordwasfashion. The concept of fashion was an obsession of the time. In the nineteenth centuryand before, the foibles of fashion were somewhatindulgently discussed in Germanyunder the rubricof human folly. By the turn of the century the topic had assumed a greater gravity and a wider scope. Fashion was no longer discussed simply as a matter of
27. HermannMuthesius,Stilarchitektur 2nd ed. (Millheim-Ruhr: K. undBaukunst, und Publikum," Die neue Rundschau Schimmelpfeng,1903) 49; Muthesius,"Architektur 18 (1907): 207. 28. J. Gantner, und ed., HeinrichWolfflin, Tagebiucher 1864-1945.:Autobiographie, Schwabe,1984) 166. Briefe, 2nd ed. (Basel/Stuttgart:

FredericJ. Schwartz

15

clothing style, but came to be a blanket term used to describe the appearance of saleable objects of many kinds; the phenomenon of changing clothing styles was taken as the model for describing the behavior of consumer commodities in general. Extraordinary,occasionally furious debates emerged over the origin of fashions, their social meaning and psychological mechanisms. To sociologists, fashion allowed the study of the novel habits of consumersin a world now overflowing with commodities. To economists, it demandedthe investigation of the economic significance of the consumer sector of the economy, a new issue in a discipline which had traditionallyconcentrated on heavy industry, agricultureand internationaltrade. And to artists and critics, fashion came to be the central concept of a theory of the decadent natureof visual form under conditions of laissez-faire capitalism. In other words, in the discussions of fashion we see a nascent, if often crude,theoryof mass culture.29 Stil and Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft, Precisely like Kultur/Zivilisation elea in which each and Mode form discursive [fashion] pair [style] ment implied the other and defined it by opposition. The pair represents, in fact, these more widespread dichotomies transposed to the articles were written with titles critical vocabularyof art. Innumerable such as "Stil und Mode"or "Stil oder Mode,"and most boiled down to a question such as this: "Is that which we see as a conspicuous spectacle really a style, or... perhaps only a fashion? ... Style or fashion,

that is the question."30And in this vast literature,not a single voice was raised in refutationof the economist and sociologist WernerSomof fashion as "the favorite child of capibart's famous characterization talism, emerging out of the innermost essence of capitalism and
29. In The Werkbund: Design Theoryand Mass Culturebeforethe First WorldWar (New Haven and London:Yale UP, 1996), I explorethe way fashion figures in the disaround the turnof the century,andthe coursesof sociology andthe appliedartsin Germany accountof the notion of fashion in culturalcriticismI presenthere is adaptedfrom that longerdiscussion.On discussionsof fashionin Germany,see Silvia Bovenschen,ed., Die historical Listender Mode (Frankfurt/Main: 1986), in which several important Suhrkamp, On fashionandarchitectural texts arereprinted. discourse,see the essays collected in Mary Architectural Princeton In Fashion (Princeton: McLeod et al., Architecture: P, 1994), and Mark Wigley, White Walls,Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of ModernArchitecture in Germany MIT, 1995).The moregeneralproblemof the rise of consumerism (Cambridge: The DebateaboutLuxury G. Breckman, is discussedin Warren Consumption: "Disciplining in WilhelmineGermany,1890-1914,"Journalof Social History24.3 (1991):485-505. "Stil und Mode," in Im Kampfeum die Kunst:Beitrcigezu 30. Fritz Schumacher, architektonischen Heitz, 1899) 24-25. Zeitfragen(Strasbourg:

16

Cathedrals and Shoes

revealing its naturelike few otherphenomenaof our age."31

In his Der moderne Kapitalismus of 1902, from which I've just

quoted, Sombart isolates three characteristicsof the phenomenon of fashion. First, "the vast profusion of everyday articles to which it applies";second, "the absolutegeneralityoffashion, which first developed in our age." These create a tendency toward the "unificationof demand"whereby ever larger marketsare created for the very same objects, a vast demand which could be supplied with maximum effihowever, was seen as the ciency and profit. The third characteristic, most striking:"Thefranticspeedof changesin fashion."32 It was the theme of speed and change which most fascinated and "Fashionis the transient,style the lasting,"33 alarmedcontemporaries. was the oft-repeated phrase.The tendencytowardchange was seen, reasonably enough, as industry and commerce's artificial creation and maintenanceof a marketfor new goods, the result of the vast manufacturing capacity which had developed in Germanysince the middle of the nineteenthcentury,a solutionto the problemof overproduction. The economists said this straightout: "Changeof fashionappearsas the precondition for an increaseof production"; "tradeand industrycount ... on this change to such an extent that they have learnedto accelerateit and to capitalize on it in advance";"the whole business world extols fashionas a stimulant to turnover."34 It is in terms of this economic rationalethat nineteenth-century Historicism in the arts was analyzed. Most accounts of modernismin art and the appliedarts explainHistoricismas a matterof academicconservatism and bourgeois philistinism.To contemporaries, however, it was a matter of simply capital: The "historical is a truechildof ourSteamAge. Artistic tendency" cannotkeeppacewiththebreakneck mass capacity speedof modem ... [But]any danger thatfashion's need for production. perpetual
31. WernerSombart,Wirthschaft und Mode:Ein Beitragzur Theorieder modernen J.F.Bergmann, (Wiesbaden: 1902)23. Thisworkis a separately Bedarfsgestaltung published Der moderneKapitalismus excerptfromSombart's (Leipzig:Duncker& Humblot,1902). 32. Sombart,Wirthschaft undMode 13, 13, 2, 13 (emphasisin original). 33. Heinrich Pudor, "PraktischeVorschlige zur Erzielung von Qualitatswaren," Volkswirtschaftliche Blitter 9.15/16 (1910): 283. 34. AlexanderElster,"Wirtschaft und Mode,"Jahrbuch und fiir Nationalbkonomie der Mode im WirtschaftsleStatistik,3rd ser, 46 (1913): 193;Elster,"Iber die Bedeutung n.s. 24.11 (1913): 208; WalterTroeltsch, Volkswirtschaftliche ben," Kunstgewerbeblatt, G. Elwert, 1912) 13-14. Betrachtungen iiberdie Mode (Marburg:

Frederic J. Schwartz

17

will evercreate difficulties fortheartindustry was outof the change the museums are inexhaustible, andthe copyingof older question: models canproceed attheraterequired andthemarket.35 by industry The instabilityof taste that so disturbedcontemporaries was very real. At the end of the nineteenthcentury,the historical styles followed one anothervery quickly indeed, certainlyin comparisonwith what seemed to be the centuries-longdevelopment of styles in the historical past. Withintwenty-fiveyears, taste in Germanyhad gone throughthe phases of late Classical, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo, not to mention neo-Classical, Empire and various Orientalisms. With each change, consumers were encouragedto replace their branches of the possessions; and entire new industries- particularly press - thrivedon feeding the consumer'sdesire to have what was, at the moment,new, the latest,or simply "modem." The "new" or the "modem,"in other words, was understoodas an artificial constructionof capital; it was trade and industry's way of deploying visual form to change consumptionhabits, redefining needs to serve the new organization of production. The "new"was creatednot by improvementbut by slight changes, by difference:it was easier to attractthe attentionof the consumerby makingsomethingdifferentthan and tradesmen saw by making it better or cheaper.36Manufacturers their profits containedin the space of slight variationsof form, saw the sale triggeredby the crossing of a certainthresholdof distinction,cultivated the nearly quantifiableminimum that representedthe "modem." In two successive summer collections we can see that diacritically defined minimum: in 1913, the male-look with the cravat was de by 1914, when the rigueur for women, somethingthat had disappeared And the low, broad-rimmed waist was also raised and de-accentuated. hats of the earliercollection are made to hug the head more closely and terminatein exaggeratedpeaks.37Criticsof the sort of consumervision
DeutscheKunstund Dekoration8.4 35. KarlWidmer,"Modeund Kunstgewerbe," (1905): 254, 252. undMode2 1. 36. Sombart,Wirthschaft 37. What is also interestingabout such a comparisonis how insignificantthese changes appeartoday. To the retrospectiveeye, differencesin anonymousworks of the historicalpast are assumedto represent distancein time or space, whereaswe know full well know that meaningin a culturalsystem is generatedby synchronicdifference.We the eye thatsearchesfor style; look, in otherwords,with the syntheticeye of the historian, while the slight changeswe can dismiss were the ones thatheld all the meaningandwhich were immediatelyevidentto the eye of the consumer.

18

Cathedrals and Shoes

Figure 3. From Internationale Damemode, 1913.

LA

4i-

Figure 4. From Internationale Damemode, 1914.

FredericJ. Schwartz
A BRIEF OUTLINE OF SHOE

19

TERMS

IS

Unitsoles from in rubber 1960-on or synthetics

on the last

"Rocket" heelsof 1959 usuallyset back

Waisted heelsof 1958-9and again in 1962highor low

1961

1963

1965

1967

Vivier

Vivier

New Shapes

Half wood halfsteel with metalscrew

Wood enclosedin nylon or plastic

Whollyopaque and solid

plastic

Wholly clear and solid

perspex

Figure 5. From Eunice Wilson, A History of Shoe Fashions (London, 1969). that looked for the difference between the waistlines and the angle of the hats saw the winds of change that filled the sails of capital not as Not until the 1960s evolutionaryor even intelligible, but as arbitrary.

20

and Shoes Cathedrals

did an historian seek to specify the minimal increments of yearly of the signifying difference changes in shoe styles, but the arbitrariness the time. was a standard of joke

TIN;

Iiiiiiiii~l~l ...ILAii,''~!

by G. Dalsani, 1893, illustratedin EduFigure 6. Fashion caricature in der Karikatur:Sozialgeschichte der Frau ard Fuchs, Die Frau (Munich,1906). For many, though, it was no joke. Sombart,for one, dispensed with academic niceties and minced no words on the subject of Historicism, With that evidence of the lack of style which so botheredW6Olfflin. he for of the market "capitalism'sconquest" everydayobjects,38 wrote, the task of the artistwas merely "to play along with the historicalfashthe styles of the past intoCapitalese."39 ion andto translate is term: if style was the mothertongue, then Sombart's "Capitalese" fashion was the language of capital. And if style could suggest, with respect to visual form, everythingthat was thoughtto be missing in an world, fashion impliedthe visual expressionof alienated,industrialized
undKultur(Berlin:Marquardt, 38. Sombart, 1908)45. Kunstgewerbe und die alten Stilartenins Kapitalis39. ".. die historischeMode mitzumachen undKultur55. tische zu iObersetzen." Sombart, Kunstgewerbe

FredericJ. Schwartz

21

49-:~:iANN. Kitiiii iiiiiiii

::ii?ii:i ~~~~::Ilk ::::::::: ?:::::::::

roe::::: ::::::

..

.::::::::::::-

I:

1:- :

:?.:,

: :I :- : : ;:

.. . .
: l:-

1898-99. Figure7. Henryvan de Velde, candelabrum, Forfashionwas implithe entirecomplexof crisesof capitalist modernity. in a system commodities of consumer cated not only in the circulation The signs of the eternal"new"functhat tendedtowardoverproduction. Here is Simmel, tionedin yet another way in the handsof the consumer.

22

Cathedrals and Shoes

: :::

Th it"__

.~.2
::-:E7173..Ampel,
ezimmer-if
58
ri, t.rtn

ortPerlfr

.i

s.

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in the A. Wertheim mail-order Figure8. Chandelier catalogue,1903-04.

Frederic J. Schwartz

23

... ... .......: ...

....(
aij~;:
i i'
i8 I is

': ." ...ia

li -:~i~ji

iiiiai.

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.

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Figure 9. Henry van de Velde, hanging lamp, c. 1906. again, in a text on fashion first published in 1905: Social forms, apparel,aestheticjudgment,the whole style of human expression, are constantlytransformed by fashion, in such a way, however, thatthe latest fashionaffects only the upperclasses. Just as soon as the lower classes begin to copy their style, therebycrossing the line of demarcation the upperclasses have drawnand destroying the uniformityof their coherence,the upperclasses turn away from this style and adopt a new one, which in its turndifferentiates them from the masses;andthus the game goes merrilyon.40
40.

SocialForms U of Chicago P, 1971)299. (Chicago:

in DonaldLevine, ed., GeorgSimmelon Individuality and Simmel, "Fashion,"

24

and Shoes Cathedrals

...... ... ...

:. !!i i iii iii.. ... .... . .. ...... .. .. .. . .! iiii. .. ..... ii

_ii.

Figure10. Henryvan de Velde, desk andchair, 1898

28 Binde, mit Regal, zum ermnssigten Preise v.M. 3

9
-

Figure 11 Classics libraryand shelf in A. Wertheimmail-ordercatalogue, 1903/04.

FredericJ. Schwartz

25

The game of carriage-trade distinction and mass-marketappropriation that Simmel (and others) described is easy enough to follow in the appliedarts. Look, for example,at the whiplashline of the Jugendstilin a candelabrumof 1899 by Henry van de Velde, its gentle, rhythmic asymmetryshooting up from solid roots, emerging in six branchesfor the candlesand then reunitingin a crownor bud at the top. By 1903, the houses, flailing now a bit whiplashline was availablethroughmail-order wildly, coupled with distinctly non-Jugendstilelements and at somewhat loose ends. But by then, the avant-garde (and the marketniche that a had on to more moved controllable geometry.Similarly, supportedit) a Jugendstildesk by van de Velde was modem and exclusive enough to have custom made in 1898; five years later, the swinging sign of the kit of literary classics. modernwas being sold slungbeneatha starter Simmel maintaineda fine and fascinatedneutralitywhen discussing this matter;others broke into tirades against both the parvenuand the copying masses. This attentionpaid to the consumer's share revealed that fashion, in its guise as Historicism or the "new," was culturally destabilizing in its creationof signs of distinctionand identity. At the upper end of the market, fashion was the distasteful assertion of the class power of the upper bourgeoisie; as fashions trickled down, the same signs were deployed, perhapsmore disturbingly,as claims to cultural entitlement.In an art journal, one economist wrote of "the social guerrilla warfare which is incessantly waged in the field of fashion, and imitation [and which swings forever between social differentiation hallmark and thus the secure is the true of fashion economic which] Fashionunmaskedthe mass marketas base of capitalistexploitation."'41 an arenaof class conflict;it raised,in otherwords,the specterof class. Fashion raised other spectersas well. The energies of productionand the claims to class identityare also erotic energies,or so wrote the same economist:"Alongsidethe drive to imitateand the desirefor social differentiation through fashion, the most importantmoment of all is the As capital mixed with and remappedculerotic need for variation."42 it released erotic energies in orderto appropriate ture, wrote critics, also
210. die BedeutungderMode im Wirtschaftsleben" 41. Elster,"OIber 42. Elster, "Wirtschaftund Mode" 180-81 (emphasis in original). See also his 208. Elster is consequent:"One "Oberdie Bedeutungder Mode im Wirtschaftsleben" to the problemof whetherthereis a specific class erotcould push these thoughtsfurther, of fashion and its effiwhich in its turninfluencesthe transformation ics [Klassenerotik] he did not do so. cacy" (189); regrettably,

26

and Shoes Cathedrals

them. One critic equatedthe perennialmodificationswhich generatethe "new"with the way changes in clothing styles regularlyshift emphasis from one of the female "secondarysexual characteristics" to another: from hips to breaststo waist to buttocks."Industrialism," he concluded, all instincts,sexual desire as well as the urge for varia"accommodates The criticsof fashiondiscerneda tion, to make its productsdesirable."43 beat behind the primitive cyclical changes in the visible form of consumercommodities,and it alarmedthem. The id was even seen to cross nationalborders:fashion was not only classed and genderedbut had a political topography as well. Though the phenomenon of fashion extended beyond apparel,women's clothes were always the reference failed to point out that Europeanfashions point, and few commentators were developed in Paris, where they were launchedwithin the demimonde- the worldof caf6 singers,actressesandprostitutes. The constellationof fashioncan be seen as the collective anathemaof it repremodernity facing the German-speaking Bildungsbiirgertum: sented the destructiveeffects of industrialization, the deformationsof class conflict, an attack on the patriarchal rampantcommercialization, order,the revenge of the French.The hysteriamounts;voices are often shrill. Criticalthoughtand sober reflectionsurrendered before the monster of fashion as much as before the utopia of style. But fashion is of interestto us for more than its functionas a figure for the sum total of threats to the male ego of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie.44Despite its often hystericalnote, the discussion led to a powerful interpretation of the natureof visual formundermodernity. Fashionwas understood as a state of semiotic chaos thatdeveloped in the nineteenth century as a direct result of industrialproductionand speculative commerce. It was form out of control, the dystopia of the capitalist distortion of the culture it inherited and transformed.The forms of the past were disengagedfrom their original productioncontext, from a spiritualeconomy in which they representedan authentic
43. JohannesGaulke,Die asthetischeKulturdes Kapitalismus (Berlin-Tempelhof: FreierLiterarischer Verlag, 1909) 98-99. 44. On the unstablemale ego of the time, see George L. Mosse, "Masculinity and the Problemof Decadence,"in Roy Porterand MikulasTeich, eds., Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science (Cambridge: CambridgeUP, 1994); and John Fout, "Sexual Politics in WilhelmineGermany: The Male GenderCrisis,MoralPurityand Homophobia," in Fout, ed., ForbiddenHistory.:The State, Society and the Regulationof Sexuality in Modern Europe(Chicago:U of ChicagoP, 1990).

Frederic J. Schwartz

27

culturalcurrency,and then coupled with exchange value and circulated as mere commodities whose visual qualities were importantonly as exchange values. The degradedstatus of the visual forms of everyday to cite Simmel, "the revenge of the objects for the fact life represented, that they are no longer the center of our interests[but are] replacedby an indifferentmedium"- that of money. In fashion, form was seen as as a commodity.45 takingrevengefor its instrumentalization Crudeas it often was, fashionwas the first concept throughwhich the problem and the full extent of mass culture were representedin Germany - its exploitativenature,its social configurations,its signifying patterns.And when we note, in these forgottendiscussions,the constant oppositionof this concept with that of style, we realize how closely the a discourse of cultureby polar oppotwo notions are tied, structuring sites that define each other, the necessarycomplementsof Paradiseand Fall. We understand how, in the broadcriticaldiscourseof the time, the notion of style emerged from a climate of fear, and how the obsessive debatesabout fashion form the context in which art historianssought to stakeout the bordersof a disciplinethatwould mapthe historyof style. If the phenomenonof fashioncould not escape the purviewof knowledge in the present,it was repressedin the study of the past, in notions such as style. Predictablyenough, however, it came to the surface from time to time, even in W6Olfflin's work, in passing comments and splenetic asides that serve to situateand isolate his object of study in a prelapsarianpast. The body, he writes in Renaissanceand Baroque, is no longer an organ of spiritualexpression:"It is self-evident that a style can only be born when there is a strongreceptivityfor a certainkind of corporealpresence. This is a quality which is totally absent in our own age."46Clothes too, we read in Classic Art, have forfeitedtheirproximity to corporealspirit: thehuman of a styleis inthenewoutlook therealkernel bodyand upon of style This movement. and in newideasabout conception deportment when onethanthatwhichobtains is a muchmoreweighty nowadays, Howon fora masquerade. likefancydresses beingtried styleschange andwe of styledatesonlyfromourowncentury ever,thisuprooting to talkof styles,butonlyof fashions.47 havereally no longer anyright
45. Simmel, Soziologie (1908), cited in Hellmuth Wolff, "Aesthetik und Wirtschaftslehre," Volkswirtschaftliche Blitter 9.15/16 (1910): 274. 46. W61fflin,Renaissanceand Baroque78. 47. W61fflin,ClassicArt 231.

28

Cathedrals and Shoes

In assertingthe historicalrelationof costume to style in the "weighty" sense, W61fflinwas going againstthe grain;perhapshe was even being polemical; certainlyhe was treatingclothes in an unusuallyredemptive way. Present culture, however, was a fallen realm, one he described using the cliches of Kulturkritik. But fashionhauntedWOlfflin and his projectin deeperways, ways we can follow throughhis early oeuvre. In his dissertation,the spirituality of style was "too generallyacceptedto requirefurtherelaboration"; the problemwas only to bring the flood of undifferentiated knowledge this view generated under epistemological control. Two years later, in Renaissanceand Baroque,the problembecomes more complex: in conmust account for change, and he devotes a trastingtwo styles, W61lfflin chapter to the matter. Here he is in choppy waters, relating development to changes in corporealfeeling; but more revealing are the two theories he rejects. Garden-variety views of style as expression of the age were of no help; it is here that W61fflinscorns the "ridiculous" results of old-fashionedKulturgeschichte. He then proceeds to take on the problemof fashion. He does so in an unusuallydetailedand pointed the year before two-page critiqueof a theoryelaborated by Adolf GOller the publicationof Renaissanceand Baroque, one which saw historical change triggered by "blunted sensibility," by "jaded senses [that] demandeda more powerfulimpact.'"48 WhatW61fflinis rejectingin this so-called theory of exhaustion,I would like to suggest, is an analysis which interpretscultureas comprisedof subjectswho respondto novelty and stimulation,precisely the way the behaviorof consumersin the mass market was being described by W61lfflin's own contemporaries. The theory of "jading"emerged at the high-pointof architectural Historicism and Eclecticism, precisely as the debates on fashion began to rage, and Giller clearly situatedhis work in the context of the breakneck speed of stylisticchangeof the time: hadwe celebrated the adoption of Greekforms... whena Scarcely ... led us on to the less constrictive giftedmaster supremely styleof the High Renaissance. no .. But now, even the High Renaissance anddeeper downinto longer pleasesmanypeople. Theyreach deeper themorestrongly animated formal of theBaroque, whichonly system two decadesago was disdained as inorganic andmannered; or they the equallystrong andstill unfamiliar charm of the German pursue
48. Renaissanceand Baroque73. W61fflin,

FredericJ. Schwartz Renaissance. And thereis no sign thatthis progression is aboutto cometo a standstill or reverse ouritself.... Invaindo we reproach selves for followinga coursethatone moment leadsus backto the Rococoandthenextmoment discarded to thequestion: onlyrecently now?" "What Weknowwhatis happening, butwe cannot stopit. It is thatwe arefollowing a law,the samelawthatonce onlytoo evident theHighRenaissance itselfintotheBaroque, theearlyGothic pushed - thesamelawthathascarried intothelateGothic everyotherstyle fromascent to flowering andfromflowering to decay.49

29

Goller treats styles as fashions;for W61fflinhis failurewas the lack of any distinctionbetween change in the historicalpast and change in the decadentpresent.Bluntedsensibilityor jadingcould not, "as Adolf Gller The explicit mentionof would have us believe ... lead to a new style."50 comments the air of these a direct responseto the Stuttgart G6ller gives the that professor:W61fflinargues precisely changes of the nineteenth century were not governedby the same law as those that markedthe changeof the greatstyles such as the move from Classic to Baroque,the focus of his study;the recentfads,he writes,werenot even styles at all. By 1915, when the Principles were published,the sense of style as an of all manifestations interconnectedness expression of the fundamental of a culture was not one to which W61fflincould ascribe at any level, and the stakes were only not the arid ones of methodology. As Martin Wamke has recently shown in an extraordinary article, the concept of style had been confiscated for propaganda purposes in the Great War; the "spirit of the time" on which style centered was one which separatedFrenchand English from German,one which saw its fulfillmentin a war WOlfflinrejected.In the face of this political abuse of historical to the purely optical treatment of art as his concepts, Wolfflin retreated with of traffic atavistic and essentialist way avoiding any prevailing views of nationalcultures.51 Style seems to make its final exit from WOlfflin'swork when the body could no longer be epistemologicallychaste due to its violation and abuse in mobilizing fear and hatredby both sides in the war effort.
49. Adolf Gller, "Whatis the Cause of PerpetualStyle Changein Architecture?" Form,and Space 194. On Gller, see MichaelPodro, TheCrit(1887), trans.in Empathy, ical Historiansof Art (New Haven and London:Yale UP, 1982) 55-58; Mallgraveand Form, and Space 51-56; and Mitchell Schwarzer, Ikonomou,"Introduction," Empathy, ArtHistory 18.4 (1995): 568-83. "VisualHistoricismin the Aestheticsof Adolf G11ler," 50. W61fflin,Renaissanceand Baroque74-75. 27 (1989): 172-87. 51. MartinWarnke,"OnHeinrichW61fflin," Representations

30

Cathedrals and Shoes

VIA

i~~~~i
i

4y

: -:

Illy::

~
k3
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sheet. JoannyDurand,"Gottmit uns," Figure 12. Frenchpropaganda colorwoodcut, 1917.

FredericJ. Schwartz

31

But long before ideological concerns put it off-limits, methodological concernshad led him in other directions,in search of differentmodels for the historicalexplanationof forms - a path broken alreadyin his dissertation,and one whose first goal could already be discerned in 1899 with the suggestion of a "double root" of form in Classic Art, opening up the possibility of a history of artisticvision not subject to the vagariesof culturalcliche. Yet balancingthis tendency,holding it in check, and ultimatelyunderminingit was an emotional investment in the syntheticscholarlygraspof an historicallyremotevisuality that predated the capitalist commodificationof form. In his introductionto frank: earlyeditionsof the Principles,Wilfflin is surprisingly theartof thepastand between theopposition marks so clearly Nothing of thenandthemultiplicity forms of visual astheunity theartof today of art,the in thehistory now.Ina manner visualforms unprecedented with each seem to be compatible most contradictory [tendencies] of to theone-sided ... Butthelossof vitality other. strength compared taskof the scholarly It is a beautiful earlier epochsis immeasurable. to atleasttheideaof sucha unified of artto preserve visuality, history

---------Aa:::

41,:::

Grundbegriffe,secFigure 13. From WOifflin,Kunstgeschichtliche andPainterly." tion on "Linear

32

and Shoes Cathedrals the eye intoa firmand the confusing overcome jumbleandto bring clearrelation to thevisual.52

And contemporary critiquesof form undermodernityalso show us why removesvisual form of readers, of generations the to frustration WOl1fflin, sense of cultureandwithholdsit fromdialoguewith other froma broader of a society (as he does with his own theoryby suppressmanifestations in latereditions).For by positingthe law of the originalintroduction ing the eternal returnof Classic and Baroquemodes, he rejected the law

~-i:: : ii-i:i:ii-:i i?iii:i?i:i.i i :~-:rli:-ii-'ti~?:ll'~.?::~:~:: ~:?"'"''~":'i'~iir:ir::i

~:~-n ii~.~_?iiii?ii ,: :?i?i?:?~iii~i~--i:

secGrundbegriffe, Kunstgeschichtliche Figure 14a. From W561fflin, tion on "Linear andPainterly."

52. ix-x. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe W61fflin,

Frederic J Schwartz

33

Figure 14b. From Woilfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, sec-

andPainterly." tion on "Linear invoked in contemporary discussionsof both shoes and great buildings, law of demand. obsesand the supply Only in light of the contemporary sion with the breakneck goal of formalmutationcan pace and uncertain we understand the cold pathos with which WOlfflinsubmits form to a of the move from linear to painterly, law that dictates the recurrence to unity, and clarity to closed to recession, open form,multiplicity plane - the famous"principles of arthistory." to unclearness The strange abstractionof Wblfflin's principles developed in the steady rejectionof positionshe foundvariouslydistasteful,detestableor unsound.And this series of strategicretreats ultimatelyleft him with no ground on which to stand. His argument in the Principles finally - the implodes in a section of his conclusion entitled "Das Warum" "why"of it all. The section is a muddle,a strain,in the end a black hole. - from a vaguely W61fflinproposes many causes of formal changes Hegeliansuggestionthat"everyform lives on, begetting,and every style calls to a new one" to a partialand grudgingacceptance, in fact, of Gller's "theoryof palling of interestand a consequentnecessity of a

34

and Shoes Cathedrals

Yet he is fully satisfied with none of these stimulationof interest."53 explanations.Despite the title of the section, and his goal of explaining "the problem of historical development,"despite his principle of the to baroquemodes, WO61fflin change of classic modes of representation can articulateno propertheory of stylistic change. This crucial section of the book, which shouldhave been its climax, shows in the end thathe he can only postulatelaws aboutit, can not explain formaldevelopment; which is somethingquite different.Ultimatelyhe falls back on the extraartisticcauses he strove to ignore,the historicalevidence that inevitably turnedanalysis into tautology.In two centralsentences,he moves from a statementof internaldevelopmentto an acceptanceof externalfactors of the sort invokedby culturalhistory:"It is true,we only see what we look for, but we only look for what we can see. Doubtlesscertainforms of beholding pre-exist as possibilities;whether and how they come to circumstances."54 developmentdependson outward The double root of style was a double bind. It functionedfirst as a way out of the cliches of culturalhistory: there was another root of style to be explored, one that would submit to the dictates of science. But that other root could not be addressedwithout violating W61fflin's idealist principles, his sense of what culture should and must be. The double root then served as a way back from the materialismhe could not confront. WOlfflinwas caught between style and fashion. Though rejectingboth, the very rejectiondeterminedhis solution; the concepts remained, as footprintsshowing the spots from which he shifted his position and between which he triedto maneuver.The sophisticationof his critiqueof the concept of style was matchedby his repugnancewith the developmentof forms as he witnessedthem in his own culture.Ultimately, repugnance won out, and when forced to choose, WOlfflin remainedan idealist: he submittedform to law; he perfected the synthetic vision that unified the visual productionof a period;he defended the "weighty"sense of style fromthe "masquerade" of the present. But I think we can see best the way fashion haunted style where WOlfflin'snotion of style first appeared,in his discussionof the Gothic shoes. By now, in any case, we should be thoroughlysuspicious about
53. W61fflin, Principles230. 54. Wblfflin, Principles 230. On the ultimatedependenceof a history of style on extra-artisticfactors, see Mannheim,"On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung" 36. Mitchell Schwarzeralso touches on this tension in WOlfflin'swork;see "VisualHistoricism in the Aestheticsof Adolf G6ller"573.

Frederic J. Schwartz

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Gothic style as W6lfflin wrote about it, visually uniting all of a culture, from shoe to cathedral.Now that style emerges as a constructionas much implicatedin turn-of-the-century capitalismas in the distant historical past, we might ask just how much spirit there is in Wilfflin's shoes. If we interrogateWilfflin's early text, his scrupulously footnoted dissertation,we get an answer.The answeris that therewas probably very little spirit there indeed. Returningto Wilfflin's source, the Weiss, we can confirmwhat young art histoby Hermann Kostiimkunde rian writes, that the shoes appearedin the twelfth century. Yet what Wolfflin fails to point out is that, accordingto the passage he read, they emerged at the end of the twelfth century, and disappearedalmost as of the pointed shoe is in fact quite quickly.55Weiss's characterization a he it wrote, just strangeandpassing"fashion."56 unambiguous: was, On the exampleof Wolfflin,I have triedto suggestone way in which art historiansand their notion of style emergedfrom and are markedby the them;how the crisis of capitalistmodercapitalistculturethat surrounded mass of a chaoticand inescapable the development nity and, in particular, or at least to inflect, marketfor consumergoods hadthe powerto generate, a certain kind of historicalknowledge. Put anotherway, the crisis of - following Foucault, modernityproducedwhat one could characterize art-historical as a "will-to-knowledge." quite specific echoing Riegl to use it against him: it is a will And to borrowWOlfflin'sformulation that we can see as clearly in the analysisof a shoe as in that of a catheof fleeting fashioninto stablestyle. dral,in the willful transformation

I startedout writing about art history but have ended up concentrating on the emergence of mass culture theory; that is why I have lingered so long over the forgottendebates aroundthe turn of the century over fashion. Yet they were not entirelyforgotten:these debateshad an
57. 55. Weiss, Kostiimkunde writes Weiss, was startedby GrafFulkovon Anjou (or Angers), 56. The "fashion," whose shoes were designed to fit his deformedfeet (Kostimkunde557). The "strange fashionof pointed shoes" was neithercommonlyacceptednor seen in any way as appropriate in a religious sense: "A strictmoralistexpressedhimself quite emphaticallyabout this and relatedfollies of fashion:'These shoes ... areaimedupwardslike snake's tails or of God's work that is to be scorpionsor coil unsteadilylike rams' horns,a deformation deemedblasphemy. '" (874-75; emphasisin original).See also Kostiimkunde 877, 880. ...

36

and Shoes Cathedrals

afterlife.For while they providedthe foil to which historians, important in particular art historians,developednotions of the past and tools with which to analyze it, they are also the startingpoint for some of the most mass culture theory. When later importantworks of twentieth-century thinkersabout mass culturesearchedfor analyticaltools with which to approachthe problem, many reacheddirectly back to concepts develconcepts developed during their own oped in pre-war Kulturkritik, address the to youth phenomenathey had themselvesexperienced.They did not accept these conceptsuncriticallyor leave them unchanged.Yet neither the consumerculture of the 1920s and 1930s nor the theories which sought to account for it grew out of thin air; the economic and intellectualgroundfor both developmentswas fertile. Here I would like the pre-WorldWar I discussions of to suggest briefly how fundamental and were Adorno and Max Horkheimer's fashion to Theodor style notion of "cultureindustry" as developed in the chapterof that name in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to this day one of the most important statementsof the problem. The chapter, written in 1944, is subtitled "Enlightenment as Mass culled from the radio and film, mainly Deception." Using examples of the and Horkheimer Adorno discuss the social 1930s, magazines effects as well as stylistic characteristics of the standardized productsof the entertainment and distributed industry,culturalitems manufactured as commodities. Throughthe entertainment industry,they write, aesthetic experience is reified, robbingart of its balanceof affirmationof internallaw and critiqueof the society beyond itself; the seamless but false totality created by cultural commodities serves to form the decayed bourgeois ego into a malleablepolitical subject;and the mass market,repressingthe desires it arouses and mocking the happiness it promises, becomes the site at which the twentieth-century spiral of regression can be identified. Cultureindustryrepresentstaste manipulated and administeredin ways that reveal the totalitarian tendency of monopolycapitalism. The cultureindustrythesis is well known. What is interestinghere is not the thesis itself but ratherthe way the discussionremainsframedin the romantic anticapitalistterms of the earlier, prewar discussions of cultureunder capitalism.The familiardichotomouscategories of chaos versus unity, Kulturversus Zivilisation,and most importantly style versus fashion are the coordinateswithin which Adorno and Horkheimer

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constructtheir argument.Even as the very first line of the chapterstates their rejectionof the fundamental it assumptionof GermanKulturkritik, that the terms of this discourse will be central to their signals argument. Their startingpoint is the culturaldespairwe recognize well, but now have a responseto it: "The sociological convicAdomo and Horkheimer tion that the loss of the supportof objective religion, the dissolutionof the last precapitalistresidues, technical and social differentiationand specializationhave led to culturalchaos is disprovedevery day. Culture If the "unityof all protoday stampseverythingwith the same mark."57 duction"is the criterion,Adomo and Horkheimer assert,Kulturis overin evidence under advanced whelmingly capitalism.58 A few pages into the chapterAdomo and Horkheimernarrowtheir focus to the categoriesof art historyand reply similarlythat the despair misses its target:"The complaintsof the art historiansand the advocates of 'culture' over the extinction of a style-creatingforce in the For the lack of style was a West,"they write, "arehorriblyunfounded." the forms of the cultural which were being producedfor myth: goods the mass marketin fact "surpassthe rigor and authorityof true 'style,' the concept with which the educated idealize the precapitalistpast as move quite explicitly between the 'organic'. 59 Adornoand Horkheimer discursive coordinateswe recognize, between the Gothic with its putative concerns of spirit and the mass marketwith its languageof capital (though here the art-historicalterms are iconographic,not formalist): "No one who commissioneda medievalchurchcan have scrutinizedthe subjects of the stained-glasswindows more suspiciously than the directors of a studio would inspect the materialsuppliedby Balzac or Victor Hugo before declaring it marketable.No synod can have more carefully distributedthe grimaces of the devil and the torments of the damned in accordancewith the ordo of divine love than the producers determinethe tortureof the hero or the raised skirt of the leading lady in the litanyof a blockbuster film."60
57. Max Horkheimer and TheodorW. Adorno,Dialektikder Aufkliirung: PhilosoQuerido,1947) 144. See also the Englishtranslation phische Fragmente(Amsterdam: by John Cumming:Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:Continuum,1987) 120. Though all translationsfrom Adorno and Horkheimer are my own, I will continue to cite page numbersfromthe Englishtranslation in parentheses. 58. Horkheimer andAdorno,Dialektikder Aufkldrung 149 (124). 59. Horkheimer andAdorno,Dialektikder Aufkldrung 152 (127). 60. Horkheimer andAdorno,Dialektikder Aufkldirung 152-53 (127-28).

38

Cathedralsand Shoes

Adorno and Horkheimerpresenta paradox:they find "style" in precisely the kitsch of the culture industryusually considered"fashion," for despite the "permanentpressure to produce new effects," these Rehearsingthe cligoods nonetheless"remainboundto old patterns."61 of of the describe the realm of the mass marfashion, critique they ches ket as one characterized but rather than by rapidchange; revealing any inconstancy of spirit, fashion merely veils the iron consistency of the social system it serves: "Whatis new in the phase of mass culturecompared to late liberalism is the elimination of the new. The machine rotateson the same spot .... [Novelty] is served by tempo and change. Nothing can remainas it was; everythingmust be in perpetualmotion. For only the universaltriumphof the rhythmof mechanicalproduction and reproductioninsures that nothing changes, that nothing emerges that does not fit in." Change serves only "the reproductionof the It is this constancyof change always-the-same[des Immergleichen]."62 and its paradoxicalcomplicitywith the absolutepermanence of the relations of productionthat Adorno and Horkheimerseek to demonstrate, and which they choose, revealingly,to characterize as style. But while the "new style" of the cultureindustryis only a "caricature" of the style for it cultural nonetheless reveals an historical truthof critics, longed by in "The of is true revealed styles general: style transparently concept by the culture industryas the aestheticequivalentof domination.The conception of style as mere aestheticconsistencyis a romanticfantasyprojected on the past. In the unity of style... various structuresof social power are expressed, not the obscure experience of the dominated."63 The totalityof Kulturis quitesimplythatof domination. The cultureindustrychapterrevealsone of Adorno'sfavoritemodes of that of breaking down a false opposition. Instead of argumentation: and crudely uncriticallyopposing fashion and style, Horkheimerand Adornocollapse the distinction,defining style dialecticallyin relationto fashion. Style, they write, wears a changingface, while fashion is timeCulture undercapitalismrevealsanother less, hidingthe always-the-same. side of the dialecticof Enlightenment in which the irrational is rationalized andthe rational in turntakesthe maskof the irrational as an alibi. But thereis a problemhere nonetheless. Even as Adornoand Horkheimer'stext is a brilliant and ironicreplyto turn-of-the-century discussions,
61. 62. 63. Horkheimer andAdorno,Dialektikder Aufkldrung 153 (128). Horkheimer andAdorno,Dialektikder Aufklarung 160 (134). Horkheimer andAdorno,Dialektikder Aufkldrung 155 (130).

FredericJ. Schwartz

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it remainsto a certainextent also a replay of them. For althoughit far exceeds and underminesreceived accountsof style, the cultureindustry chapternonethelessinvites readingsof itself simply as a theory of fashion, hardlymore subtle, for example,than Sombart'sdiscernmentof the "unificationof demand"behind the shifting surfaces of everyday commodities and its structuralnecessity for the reproductionof capital.64 Now the cultureindustrychaptercertainlyis subtlerthan that; the collapsed distinctionbetween style and fashion is the fulcrum of Adomo and Horkheimer's argument,and the dialecticaljuxtapositionof the two provides the motor of what might otherwisebe a quite static argument. To take the notion of culture industryout of the context of the style/ fashion dialectic is to miss the irony that makes of every seemingly uninflected,monolithic statement(and there are many) a minor explosion meant to overturna very particular way of thinking found in German culturaltheorysince the end of the nineteenth century. One can at least say this: the argumentof the cultureindustrychapter representsas much the end of a debateoriginatingat the end of the last centuryas the developmentof new terms with which to analyze a later stage of capitalist modernity.Adorno and Horkheimerseem strangely caught within the terms of the earlier discussions. They subject the notion of style as spirit to critique,seeing in the indisputablesimilariBut the turn-of-the-century notion ties of form not Geist but domination. of fashion remainslargely unscathed;it displaces style and subsumes it but is itself untouchedby the decadesof capitalistdevelopmentthat sepfrom Classic Art. Fashion remains arate the Dialectic of Enlightenment - monolithic,uninflected,probablyanachronistic, precedingand formand Horkheimer moved transcendent. Adorno ing any subjectivity, far move could not but enough beyond fashion to they beyond style, makethe revisiontheirargument completelyconvincing. represents To remove the art historians'notion of style from Adomo and Horkheimer's theoryof the cultureindustryis to flattentheirargumentand to rob it of its dialecticaldrive - just as removingthe notion of fashion from some of the founding works of modem art historiographyis to miss both the necessity and the pathosof the concept of style. Yet both the art historian and the critical theorists remain caught in a similar
64. "Themore firmlycultureindustryis established,the more summarilyit can deal with the consumers' needs, producing, steering, disciplining them." Horkheimerand 171 (144). Adorno,Dialektikder Aujkldrung

40

Cathedrals and Shoes

double bind resultingfrom the crudityof the oppositionthat structures the discourse of late nineteenth-century culturalcriticism. W61lfflin set out to subjectan inadequate notion of visual form to critique,but ended up shifting endlessly between style and fashion, divorced from both the shifting of both spirit and capital. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, form and thought is brought to a prematurestandstill, with the two poles of style and fashion immovablyfixed as the visual manifestation of two kinds of absolutedomination. A notion of fashion that might still seem distressingly crude and insufficiently differentiatedfrom that which animated German Kulturkritik remainedin Adorno's work. One might point, for example, to one of Adorno's better-known essays - "TimelessFashion:On Jazz," whose very title is an oxymoronpointingto the paradoxicalcomplicity of constancy and change, freedom and coercion that is discussed not but also in the earlier work of the only in Dialectic of Enlightenment Here too the economic sociologist and economist Werner Sombart.65 terms with which he analyzesjazz are derivedfrom the critiqueof fashion: mass production, standardization,pseudo-individualizationby incrementaland arbitrary variation.66 Now clearly Adorno, a musician and composer, was as aware as anyone that the conditionsof commercial music composition and distributiondid not conform to those of, here must again be say, automobilesor dresses. His oversimplification seen in terms of the implicit argumentthat contrastsfashion's hidden but rigid industrialmapping of the marketwith the authenticcreative voice in order to undermineany superficial assumptionthat jazz (of whatevertype) representsthe latter.Adorno is still letting the terms of traditionalcultural criticism make part of his argumentfor him - a strategythat has, ironically,led many to identifyhim with precisely that kind of mandarin critique. There is, however, another line of thought in Adorno's work, one iiber Wagner alreadyclearly in evidence in the sections of the Versuch that were published before the war and culminatingin Aesthetic Theory, and one which frees the concepts of style and fashion from the
65.

Fash(Berlin and Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,1955), appearingin English as "Perennial ion,"Prisms,trans.Samueland ShierryWeber(Cambridge: MIT, 1981). 66. See Bernard "Theodor Adornomeetsthe Cadillacs," in TaniaModleski, Gendron, themost balanced discussionof Adornoon jazz. UP, 1986) 18-36.This is perhaps
ed., Studies in Entertainment. Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana

Adorno, "Zeitlose Mode: Zum Jazz," Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft

FredericJ. Schwartz

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work they had to do in arguments aboutcultureindustry- the critique of Kulturkritik and allows them to develop in anotherdirection.67 It is a line of thoughtthat lets style standas the figure for social dominanotions of originality,the new, tion, but which subjectsthe intertwined and fashion to a more searchingexplorationthanwas attemptedin Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ultimatelyit leads to the core of Adorno's aesthetic theory at the same time as it can be seen to mark an end to the historicaltrajectory of the conceptswith which I began, the terms of art history and criticism. In Aesthetic Theory,at any rate, we can find a final reckoningwith the concepts of style and fashion, one which loosens them fromtheirstandstill. The notion of the "new" is a centralone in Adorno's posthumously published work that seeks to develop a theory of art in an age which saw a constant movement forwardin the avant-garde,an age inaugurated by Baudelaire's paean to fashion and summed up in Rimbaud's dictum "il faut etre absolumentmoderne."68 Already in his early section describingthe "situation" of the work of art in modernity,Adorno relates this to the overwhelmingaffect of the power of productionas wielded throughthe mass market:"Novelty is, aesthetically,an historical development, the brand [Marke] of consumer goods which art appropriatesand through which it distinguishes itself from an everidentical product line, and throughwhich it stimulates [consumption], obedient to the need for the accumulationof capital."69 Adorno distinof to stimulate between fashion's "novelty" generation guishes demand, encouraging the needless replacement of objects, and the modem artwork'squest for the new to distance itself from works neutralized by culture industry;yet at the same time he shows that the logic of capital and that of freedom paradoxically coincide. But
67. This faultline runningthroughAdorno's work has been noted by others. See AndreasHuyssen, "Adornoin Reverse:FromHollywood to RichardWagner,"After the Great Divide: Modernism,Mass Culture,Postmodernism(Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986) 16-43; Peter Uwe Hohendahl,"ReadingMass Culture,"Prismatic Thought:Theodor W Adorno (Lincoln:U of NebraskaP, 1995) 119-48; and Thomas Y. Levin, "For October 55 the Record:Adorno on Music in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility," (1990): 23-48. Yet HarryCooper has recentlytaken issue with this tendency to reread Adorno"againstthe grain"in "On OberJazz: ReplayingAdornowith the Grain,"October 75 (1996): 99-133. TachenbuchWissen68. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp schaft, 1973) 286. 69. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie39.

42

Cathedrals and Shoes

though art mimics the unfree sphere of the commodity, it does so on its own terms: it is the active agent, appropriatinginstead of simply being appropriated;and in doing so, it runs away from the standard "productline" of culture. Adherence to fashion's imperativeof absolute contemporaneityboth rehearsesthe cultural form of address that is the sales pitch and serves as a strategyby which to escape it. Novelty is a veil over the unchangingrelations of its own production, the constant reminder in ever-new guise that nothing has changed, but its cognate form of the new has a positive potential: "Time and again, the temptationof freedomshines forth strongerfrom the threateningcategory of the new than its constricting, leveling, at times sterile aspects."70That freedom, however, cannot be found in the negative forces of the market, where, we read, the limits of the new are too narrowlycircumscribed: "If originalityhas historic roots, so is it implicated with historical injustice: with the bourgeois prevalence of consumer goods on the market, goods that must feign the ever-new to gain their customers, though they are always-the-same. But with the increasingautonomyof art, originalityhas turnedagainst the market,where it can never exceed a certain threshold."71 Novelty in the market could never step beyond a clearly defined limit; the seemingly marginal excess with which it is marked is subject to a strictly controlled calculus that compels it towards, and turns the excess into, surplus value. Recall the mutationthat dresses underwent between 1913 and 1914: these changes, which might seem to offer a model of freedom embedded in the iron grip of monopolistic market forces, only too easily surrenderto style, both in the wearers' assertion of social power and in the retrospectivegaze that dates, classifies, and subjects formal irruptionin the past to the reified concepts of historicalknowledge. The "new" is a case of compulsivecomplicity.Freedomis caught in the same forwardrush as the debasedconsumercommodity,and while its mutationscannot be reducedto the market'scycle of fashions, they cannot be separatedfrom it either. Both the new and novelty serve to stimulate,but instead of the thrill of novelty or the "derniercri," the new, writes Adorno,offers afrisson or a "shudder" [Schauer]of a nonfungible kind, one that representsan immediateresponse that bypasses
70. 71. Adomo, Asthetische Theorie 404. Adorno, Asthetische Theorie 257-58.

FredericJ. Schwartz

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conceptual thought, art's possibility of reconciliationwith a state of nature,surplusvalue in the currencyof what Adornocalls "mimesis."72 And what art shows mimeticallyis, in fact, the very abstractionof the
commodity form: "The shudder . . . is the mimetic form of behavior

that reacts to abstractness as mimesis. Only in the new is mimesis married to rationality without regression: what becomes mimetic in the shudderof the new is Ratio itself." Thus the artworkhovers between plenitudeand void. First,thereis the shudderthat is that of the confrontation with the subjective emptiness of abstractrationality,a moment, one would have to say, of truth.Second, the shuddercannotbe named; that can be indiit can be grasped only by looking into a "blindspot" cated but never pinned down, by looking into what Adorno calls the Dies da," the perfect "look here.,,73And third,once this "vollkommene "look here" can be named by turningit into a reified concept, once it can be classified by the art historianor appropriated by marketforces, it "hollow."74 presentsitself as Remarks on style in Aesthetic Theory similarly suggest that art in modernitylearnedsome of its most decisive lessons from fashion, and they fill out the argumentsketchedout above. If style for Adorno is the "'aesthetic equivalent of domination,"'as O.K. Werckmeisterwrites, "all great art, even before modernism,stands in a negative relation to style."75But even if greatart never bowed down before the stricturesof a style,76 fashion is an historicallynew challenge to any sort of formal
72. On the shudderof the new as mimetic,see Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie30. On mimesis in Adorno,see SusanBuck-Morss,TheOriginof NegativeDialectics (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester, 1977) 85-88; Karla.Schultz, Mimesis on the Move: Theodor W. Adorno' Concept of Imitation(Berne, etc.: Peter Lang, 1990); and AlbrechtWellmer, of The "Truth,Semblance,Reconciliation:Adorno'sAesthetic Redemption Modernity," Persistenceof Modernity MIT, 1991). (Cambridge: 73. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie38. of the new 74. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie39. On the arthistorian'ssubsumption into a reifiedpast, see AsthetischeTheorie36. 75. 0. K. Werckmeister, "Das Kunstwerk als Negation: Zur geschichtlichen Ende der Asthetik(Frankfurt/Main: TheodorW. Adornos," Bestimmungder Kunsttheorie Fischer, 1971) 16. This essay, publishedin its originalform in 1961 (andthus nine years before the publicationof Aesthetic Theory),remainsan incisive analysis and critiqueof Adorno'saesthetics. 76. "Theconceptof style neverquite touchedthe qualityof works;those that seem have alwaysbeen in conflict with it; style itself was theirstyle most accurately to represent the unity of style and its suspension.Every work is a force-field also in its relationto style."Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie307.

44

and Shoes Cathedrals

hegemony, one whose very principleis the negation of the old or the accepted. And it is this negationthat shows a first way out of the double bind of the style-fashion opposition.Fashion, for Adorno, has the potential to falsify the false, the bad totality of systems of repression that are sedimentedin style and artistictradition;in it are the seeds of revolution. (And Adorno might well have recalled the insight of Benjamin - who had taughthim so much about fashion- that the word for "sale"in Frenchdepartment storesis "revolution."77) A notion of the falsification of the false, however, does not go far enough in explaining why Rimbaud's dictum becomes not merely a symptom of marketpathologybut the normativedecree for art as well, as normativeas style was once thoughtto be; there must be other reasons why "greatartists since Baudelairehave conspiredwith fashion." Rimbaud'snorm, of course, "takesrecourseto somethingunconscious, to the innervation,to the disgust with the stale and familiar";and this unconscious sensibility, clearly, "is quite close to that which is anathema to the culturalconservative,to fashion."78 But in its resistanceto what really exists, Adorno continues,fashion has anothersort of truth, one which he describesas an "unconscious consciousnessof the temporal core of art, to the extent that it is not manipulated by cultureindus79 try and administration." Again Adorno is turning the tables on cultural conservatism, here using the concept of fashionto mounta new sort of critiqueof the work of art that claims to speak the language of transcendentculture. The permanenceof style was seen to reflect the constancyof spirit;but "the
77. WalterBenjamin,Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Schriften,vol. 5 (Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp,1982) 111 [B1,4]. On the centralityof the concept of fashion for Benjamin, see Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing.- WalterBenjaminand the Arcades MIT, 1989) esp. 96-101; andmy briefdiscussionof style andfashion Project(Cambridge: in the work of Adornoand Benjaminin TheWerkbund 217-22. 78. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie286. 79. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie286. In Theoryof the Avant-Garde, Peter Biirger takes issue with Adorno'sassertionof the potentialnegativityof the "new."Yet it should be bornein mind thatBilrger'spositionis contingentuponhis interpretation and rejection of the "neo-avant-garde," which, he writes, "stagesfor a second time the avant-gardiste breakwith tradition[and]becomes a manifestation that is void of sense and thatpermits the positingof any meaningwhatever." The questionhere is whetherthe historicaltrajectory Birger sketches and the criticaldistinctionshe drawsare firm enough groundfrom which to criticize Adorno's position. See Bfirger,Theoryof the Avant-Garde, trans.M. Shaw (Minneapolis:U of MinnesotaP, 1984) 59-63; as well as BenjaminBuchloh's review "Theorizing the Avant-Garde," Art in America79.10 (1984): 19-21.

FredericJ. Schwartz

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idea of permanenceis modeled on the categoryof property" and is thus For the work of to maintain art time-bound,ephemeral. any relation to objective truth, it must negate this anachronisticsense of duration: "Conceivabletoday, perhapsrequired,are works that throughtheir temporal core immolate themselves, whose life goes under without a trace in the moment of its appearance."80 Adorno is not, as has been pointed 81 to is he suggesting that art merely nor out, referring "happenings"; mimic the cheap goods that roused the ire of a bourgeois mandarinate, therebynegating notions of art that were, by the middle of the century, utterly compromised.Ratherhe is pointing to the tendency he saw for art to negate the pretenseof aesthetictruthas timeless, the belief that an artwork's capacity to grasp truth could be kept, preserved, even repeated.An artworkcould only speak the truthby the very fact that it no longer does so after its creation;a solution ceases to be authentic once it takes form and can thereforebecome the basis of a traditionor a style: "Whatevercircumventschanges in [artistic]materialthat lead to
important innovations . . . immediately presents itself as .
.

. impo-

tent."82The new pushes works of art on, "irresistibly," leaving not a monumentto timeless truthbut the void of the "look here," an empty vessel thatcannotbe refilled. In the so-called "Paralipomena," notes that Adorno did not live to Aesthetic we some final thoughtson fashion. into find Theory, integrate in Whether the mass marketor embeddedin the change of modes in the avant-garde,he writes, fashion gives lie to what Benjamin called the the work of art: aurathatsurrounded timelessthe aesthetic taboos[thatupheld] inwardness, By breaking howtherelation of artto these nessanddepth, onecansee [infashion] hasbeendegraded to merepretense. ideals(themselves quitesuspect) thatit is notwhatit claimsto be is art's confession Fashion permanent can not be so andwhaton its own termsit mustbe. ... [Fashion] of artwouldhave fromartas thebourgeois religion cleanlyseparated
80. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie265. 81. Klaus MarkusMichel, "Versuch,die 'Asthetische Theorie' zu verstehen,"in der Moderne,ed. Materialienzur asthetischenTheorie:TheodorWAdornosKonstruktion Burkhardt Lindnerand W. MartinLiidke(Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,1979) 46-47. See also Michel's discussionof the "new"(98-104). of the work core" [Zeitkern] 82. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie37. On the "temporal of art and its relationto fashion, see Hohendahl, "Philosophyof Art,"Prismatic Thought also discussesthe critiqueof style brieflyin this essay (200). esp. 198. Hohendahl

46

Cathedrals and Shoes

off fromsociety broken haspolemically it. Sincetheaesthetic subject withthis objective andits prevailing spirit, spirit,artcommunicates fashion.83 as it is, through untrue in of spiritcannotunderstand Fashionshows what the official guardians to the work of art in modernity,the promiseof plenitudeit would have what let such works communibreak;yet fashion is also, paradoxically, cate at all, for only the alienatedobject could speak for the alienated subject."[T]husfashion, despairingof the possibilityof... any reconalienation itself."84This formulationis a clear ciliation, appropriates echo of the descriptionof the artwork'smimetic response to capitalist abstractness,the convergence,as Adorno writes, of the "absoluteartwork"with the "absolute commodity."85

Figure 15. Bernini, The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, illustratedin Recession."

WOlfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, section on "Plane and

of spirit and The concept of style posited a perfect correspondence

at 83. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie468. (i have cited from these "Paralipomena" two otherpointsin the above discussion.) 84. Adomrno, AsthetischeTheorie468. 85. Adorno,AsihetischeTheorie39, 351.

FredericJ. Schwartz

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Damemode,1911. Figure 16. FromInternationale

48

Cathedralsand Shoes

form. For Adorno, this relation can be stable only in a static state of unfreedom. If for Hegel art is driven forward (and ultimately superseded) as spirit overcomes its distance and alienation from the world, for Adorno this alienation can only be overcome in modernity by asserting precisely this distance at the same time as the commodity's abstractionis grasped mimetically. This too is a forward movement, but one of stumbling toward a goal that disappearsas soon as it is reached. It is a situationAdorno capturesin a striking image: "Art, as illusion, is the dress of an invisible body. Thus fashion is dress as an absolute."86Art expresses freedom by pointing to its absence: that is its truth, one revealed by its insistent and unexpected congruencies with fashion. Art is torn from its easy relation to truth,be it body or body evaporates,unable to hold its posture, its attispirit. WiOlfflin's tude, drained of spirit, leaving only the most ephemeral fashionable commodity to speak for it. It was only with the recognitionof the dialectical truthof fashion that the deathof the concept of style could proclaimed with any certainty and the final nail driven into the coffin Wilfflin seemed set to build. It took so long because the body inside was invisible; what the body was to representcould only be understood in the recognitionof its absence. The coffin was not, as W6*lfflin had feared,overfull,but ratherempty.
86. Adorno,AsthetischeTheorie469.