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It is best for the Philosophers of this Age to imitate the Antients as their Children; to have their Blood derived down to them; but to add a new Complexion, and Life of their own: While those, that endeavour to come near them in every Line, and Feature, may rather be called their dead Pictures or Statues, than their genuine Off-spring. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, 51 Experimental, in the legitimate sense, means nothing other than art’s self-conscious power of resistance against what is conventionally forced upon it from the outside, by consensus. Theodor Adorno, “Difficulties,” 651 Can art really ever engage in experiments? Consider the following two quite different—even contradictory—assertions about the relationship between experiments and art. In “The Aporias of the Avant-Garde,” media theorist Hans Magnus Enzensberger contended that insofar as the term “experiment” “designates a scientific procedure for the verification of theories or hypotheses through methodical observation of natural phenomena,” works of art cannot truly engage in experiments: “the experiment is a procedure for bringing about scientific insights, not for bringing about art.”1 Enzensberger does not deny that artists and critics often describe works as experiments, and he archly notes that “the obligatory modifier is bold, but the choice of ennobling epithet courageous is also permitted” (35). However, he contends that applying this term to the arts is simply a kind of “bluff,” a way of “flirting with scientific methods and their demands” without “ever seriously getting involved” with these latter while at the same time seeking to adopt the “moral immunity” associated with the sciences. Frankfurt School critic Theodor Adorno, by contrast, argued that “art is now scarcely possible unless it does experiment.”2 Adorno defended this claim with Chapter 1 Romanticism, Art, and Experiments romanticism, art, and experiments 15 the assertion that “the idea of the experimental” is one means by which twentiethcentury artists have resisted the demands of a capitalist culture industry that has come to control and administer almost every aspect of the social world. The idea of experiment provides art with resources for resistance in part by displacing what had become an increasingly nostalgic, and hence problematic, “image of the artist ’s unconscious organic labor” with an image of creation drawn from science: namely, the image of “conscious control over materials.” The idea of experiment also enabled artists and audiences to appropriate and transform into a form of activity the passivity that has become part and parcel of modern life: rather than simply passively accepting an administered, and hence completely alien, social world, the experimental work of art allows individuals to “integrat[e what is alien] into subjectivity’s own undertaking as an element of the process of production [of the work of art].” It is difficult to imagine a starker contrast: Enzensberger denies that art can ever really be experimental; Adorno insists not only that modern art is experimental but that art cannot persist if it ceases to be so. Which side to take? It seems fair to say that subsequent literary, art, and media criticism has generally been less interested in taking sides than in hoping for a possible happy middle ground between the two positions. Thus, while “experimental” often seems to play a descriptive or classificatory role in anthologies, essays, and criticism devoted to various “experimental” arts—“experimental literature” and “experimental film,” for example, presumably mark out kinds of literature and film that differ from other modes or genres of those arts—there is often little or no engagement with the term “experimental” or, alternatively, an open admission that the denotation of the term is a bit hazy.3 The primary function of the term in contemporary criticism seems to be less denotation than approbation: that is, describing a piece of writing, a film, or a musical composition as experimental is less a means of identifying specific qualities than of encouraging renewed inspection and appreciation of that work. Works described and valued as experimental frequently question the principles of earlier works of art or in some other way present viewers, listeners, or readers with interpretive difficulties, and it is almost invariably these aspects that are valued in such works; experimental art, in other words, is good because it opens new horizons or possibilities for art. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, “experimental” is thus often used in literary and art criticism as a synonym for other terms that connote transgression or the expansion of boundaries , such as “radical” or...

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