The aesthetic as unregimented experience is incommunicable dialogically.

Interviewee: Roger Behrens

If it somehow proved possible today to recreate such a – and it sounds almost like Martin Buber! – dialogical aesthetic potential, it would indeed mean breaking through immanence, akin to a reactivation of a concrete utopia. It is only through dialogue – and not through fetishized forms of so-called communication – that the aesthetic as a collective experience can be regained. And, by the way, Benjamin had envisioned something similar – a messianic cosmology if we may call it that – at the conclusion of his One Way Street from 1928, the aphorism entitled “To the Planetarium”. – For now though, the aesthetic as unregimented experience remains individual, and as an individual experience of the aesthetic bound in turn to the artwork. But the days of a work aesthetics are long numbered, current art, i.e. contemporary art, is an art after art/post-art art. If it manages to open new perspectives on the possibility of a liberated society, then only sporadically and individually. And under the given social conditions it is not communicable dialogically, neither politically nor aesthetically.