Beauty in nature, since it is ascribed to objects only in relation to reflection on their outer intuition, thus only to the form of their surfaces, can rightly be called an analogue of art.  But inner natural perfection, as is possessed by those things that are possible only as natural ends and hence as organized being, is not thinkable and explicable in accordance with any analogy to any physical, i.e., natural capacity that is known to us; indeed, since we ourselves belong to nature in the widest sense, it is not thinkable and explicable even trough an exact analogy with human art. (5:375, Guyer’s translation)

Perhaps this is not intelligible.  To explain: Kant’s point is that human art cannot never be of the same order as natural perfection, and this matters to what I’ve been writing about below.  If Adorno sees art as incomplete, as evidence for moral and social failure, then the roots of his argument at least go back as far as Kant.  Without going too far, for Kant the category of “inner natural perfection” is required for natural science to have a “teleology”- or in general terms, a justified method for making deductive scientific (or rational) judgments about nature.  For Adorno this distinction between artistic perfection and natural perfection breaks down and with it the possibility for beauty (even natural beauty) to bear the potential for human moral relationships.

It is very true that all the old predictions are that there will be a complete disaster; one said that the cock would completely lose its feathers and that afterwards its feathers would be more beautiful than ever.  The French do naturally not like that life is too easy, they like, like the phoenix, to rise from the ashes.  They really do believe that those that win lose.

The physical destruction of lives and personal, cultural, historical, public symbols and content (that is, both symbol and content), this, she writes, makes a looser of the destroyer… I suppose in the same sense as what the French lost, and I suppose this was ultimately true.  It is also true, I think, of her writing, a destroyed writing.  She writes in fragmented symbols and content, reconstructed in repetition.  She writes like mason rebuilding after the war.  For Adorno in the below post it is the other way around: artistic creation is nothing other than destruction disguised… or artistic creation is a hope that only betrays its failure.

[...]

What the enemies of modern art, with a better instinct than its anxious apologists, call it negativity is the epitome of what established culture has repressed and that toward which art is drawn.  In its pleasure in the repressed, art at the same time takes into itself the disaster, the principle of repression, rather than merely protesting hopelessly against it.  That art enunciates the disaster by identifying with it anticipates its enervation; this, not any photograph of the disaster or false happiness, defines the attitude of authentic contemporary art to a radically darkened objectivity; the sweetness of any other gives itself the lie.

[...]

Only literary historians would class Kafka and Meyrink together, and it takes an art historian to class Klee and Kubin together.  Admittedly, in its greatest works, such as parts of Poe’s Pym, Kurnberger’s Der Amerika-Mude, and Wedekind’s Mine-Haha, fantastic art plays over into what modernity achieved in its freedom from normal referentiality.  All the same, nothing is more damaging to theoretical knowledge of modern art than its reduction to what it has in common with older periods.  What is specific to it slips through the methodological net of “nothing new under the sun”; it is reduced to the undialectical, gapless continuum of tranquil development that it in fact explodes.  There is no denying the fatality that cultural phenomena cannot be interpreted without some translation of the new into the old, yet this implies an element of betrayal.  Second reflection would have the responsibility of correcting this.  In the relation of modern artworks to older ones that are similar, it is their differences that should be elicited.  Immersion in the historical dimension should reveal what previously remained unsolved; in no other way can a relation between the present and the past be established. (p. 19)

The essay’s best parts are the transitions between subjects where she is writing about composition itself, expanding the idea from its reference to the essay outward, creating an ever-expanding labyrinth of significations.  She writes on the WWI, as if that were a composition both artistic and social.  Or rather, she suggests it aligned the artistic and the social compositions.  War as a trope for her writing as a whole identifies the competing inclusiveness of her linguistic constructions and their powerful (conscious) extinguishment of literary norms: war is the tactic of establishment through negation.  Stein includes everything in her writing as if to destroy everything, as if to maintain everything: continually take apart and rebuild in a different arrangement the sentence, the  paragraph, the essay, do this and it will not end.

[...]

It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.

Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different everything is not the same.  Everything is not the same as the time when of the composition different.  The composition is different, that is certain.

The composition is the thing seen by every one living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.  It is that makes living a thing they are doing.  Nothing else is different, of that almost anyone can be certain.  The time when and the time of and the time in that composition is the natural phenomena of that composition and of that perhaps every one can be certain.

[...]

Each period of living differs from any other period of living not in the way life is but in the way life is conducted and that authentically speaking is composition.  After life has been conducted in a certain way everybody know it but nobody knows it, little by little, nobody know it as long as nobody knows it.  Any one creating the composition in the arts does not know it either, they are conducting life and that makes their composition what it is, it makes their work compose as it does.

[...]

And so there was the natural phenomena that was war, which had been, before war came, several generations behind the contemporary composition, because it became war and so completely needed to to be contemporary became completely contemporary and so created the completed recognition of the contemporary composition.  Every one but one may say every one became consciously became aware of the existence of the authenticity of the modern composition.  This then the contemporary in thought but contemporary in act not only contemporary in thought but contemporary in self-consciousness made everyone contemporary with the modern composition.  And so the art creation of the contemporary composition which would have been outlawed normally outlawed several generations more behind even than war, war having been brought so to speak up to date art so to speak was allowed not completely to be up to date, but nearly up to date, in other words we who created the expression of the modern composition were to be recognized before we were dead some of us even quite a long time before we were dead.  And os war may be said to have advanced a general recognition of the expression of the contemporary composition by almost thirty years. [...]

First published in 1926, Hogarth Press, London, What Are Masterpieces.