ornament echoes an often openly expressed rage against moral delinquency: ‘But the man
of our time who, out of inner compulsion, smears walls with erotic symbols is a criminal
and a degenerate.’^8 The insult ‘degenerate’ connects Loos to movements of which he
certainly would not have approved. ‘One can’, he says, ‘measure the culture of a country
by the amount of graffiti on the bathroom walls.’^9 But in southern countries, in
Mediterranean countries in general, one finds a great deal. In fact, the Surrealists made
much use of such unreflected expressions. Loos would certainly have hesitated before
imputing a lack of culture to these areas. His hatred of ornament can best be understood
by examining a psychological argument.^10 He seems to see in ornament the mimetic
impulse, which runs contrary to rational objectification; he sees in it an expression which,
even in sadness and lament, is related to the pleasure principle. Arguing from this
principle, one must accept that there is a factor of expression in every object. Any special
relegation of this factor to art alone would be an oversimplification. It cannot be
separated from objects of use. Thus, even when these objects lack expression, they must
pay tribute to it by attempting to avoid it. Hence all obsolete objects of use eventually
become an expression, a collective picture of the epoch. There is barely a practical form
which, along with its appropriateness for use, would not therefore also be a symbol.
Psychoanalysis too has demonstrated this principle on the basis of unconscious images,
among which the house figures prominently. According to Freud, symbolic intention
quickly allies itself to technical forms, like the airplane, and according to contemporary
American research in mass psychology, often to the car. Thus, purposeful forms are the
language of their own purposes. By means of the mimetic impulse, the living being
equates himself with objects in his surroundings. This occurs long before artists initiate
conscious imitation. What begins as symbol becomes ornament, and finally appears
superfluous; it had its origins, nevertheless, in natural shapes, to which men adapted
themselves through their artifacts. The inner image which is expressed in that impulse
was once something external, something coercively objective. This argument explains the
fact, known since Loos, that ornament, indeed artistic form in general, cannot be
invented. The achievement of all artists, and not just those interested in specific ends, is
reduced to something incomparably more modest than the art-religion of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries would have been willing to accept. The psychological basis
of ornament hence undercuts aesthetic principles and aims. However, the question is by
no means settled how art would be possible in any form if ornamentation were no longer
a substantial element, if art itself could no longer invent any true ornaments.
This last difficulty, which Sachlichkeit unavoidably encounters, is not a mere error. It
cannot be arbitrarily corrected. It follows directly from the historical character of the
subject. Use—or consumption—is much more closely related to the pleasure principle
than an object of artistic representation responsible only to its own formal laws; it means
the ‘using up of’, the denial of the object, that it ought not to be. Pleasure appears,
according to the bourgeois work ethic, as wasted energy. Loos’s formulation makes clear
how much as an early cultural critic he was fundamentally attached to that order whose
manifestations he chastised wherever they failed to follow their own principles:
‘Ornament is wasted work energy and thereby wasted health. It has always been so. But
today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital.’^11 Two irreconcilable
motifs coincide in this statement: economy, for where else, if not in the norms of
profitability, is it stated that nothing should be wasted; and the dream of the totally
Theodor W.Adorno 9