ABSTRACT
The art which remains possible must be incidental or retrospective, but in both variants it is, as it were, the art of scholars. The enlightening 'art' of scholars is theoretical in that it is premised upon what it takes to have been a devastating critique of existing art — including mainstream modernism — and because it shapes itself and its contribution to the tasks of culture on the basis of theory. Culture then, initially a vehicle for individual and collective liberation from nature is essentially an activity of making or self-formation. Hegel's description of how the cultural project itself gives rise to antagonistic realms or forms of life, organised around different assumptions, values, methods and languages, still seems pertinent. Theorists of culture are drawn towards, and try to represent, the open-endedness of action and the total contingency of its products, which would reflexively include the subject, whatever it is that 'acts'.
