No More Learning

At the very latest, the stylistic simplifications recommended in the tran- sition from rococo to neoclassicism committed art to opening itself to everybody and to discriminating henceforth solely on the basis of internal criteria, that is, in the process of self-observation. The norms of freedom and equality (equal access to functional systems) became accepted through- out society, thus working against a class-specific definition of criteria. Ho- garth's polemic against the cognitive claims and judgments of contem-
132
porary "connoisseurs" becomes intelligible against this background. Critique began to criticize itself, declaring war against "the pestilence of
133
our current criticism. "
But how do we explain the fact that one eventually ceased to appeal to
good taste altogether? Apparently, a well-known trick of evolution was at work in this situation, exploiting transitory phenomena to introduce per- manent structural change. Here evolution propelled such changes by sup-
134
porting the attribution of semantics in national terms.
In England, Ho-
garth chastised the still-dominating principle of imitation for providing
simplistic directives that were insufficiently formalized and systematized,
and therefore prevented artists from participating in reflection and analy-
135
According to Hogarth, this led to a situation in which "connois-
sis.
seurs," along with their mystifications and typifications (distinction of
136
"manners"), dominated the scene.
the focus of the debate shifted to the German-speaking territories, which made it possible to distance oneself from "French" frivolity--in love as
137
well as in art. For Kant, taste was only a matter of sociability. For Lud-
wig Tieck, it ended up being nothing more than pretense, suitable per- haps for communicative purposes but no longer corresponding to any subjective reality. "Common taste is not the reason why we take delight in works of art; it only invokes a feeling of shame, which is necessary to pre-
Around the mid-eighteenth century,
Self-Description
277
138
vent us from admitting that the works themselves leave us cold. "
social imperative of taste served to separate psychic from social reality, and once these realms were separated, criteria no longer mattered; what mat- tered was solely social convenience.
As a result, one could put aside the quest for criteria of taste and return (if more than just good or bad taste was at stake) to the distinctions by which art distinguished itself. After imitation had reached a final climax, the distinction between nature and art became insignificant. Beauty of na- ture coexisted with beauty in art. (In Baumgarten, both are of equal cog- nitive value. ) This, however, did not explain what the observer considered beautiful and why (one now wanted to know reasons) he judged the way he did. Art was guided only by the idea of beauty. It abandoned nature (in- deed, the entire "world system") to science, and the beauty of nature ap-
139
peared as a reflex of the beauty of art.
distinctions sinnlichlgeistig [pertaining to the senses/pertaining to the in- tellect] and particular/universal, which proved capable of combination in
140
the course of further theoretical development from Baumgarten to Kant. Presumably, these distinctions could be combined because they allowed for a reentry of the distinction into what it distinguished. Art was the ap- pearance of Spirit in the realm of the senses, or of the universal within the particular. Upon closer inspection, however, it became apparent that we are dealing with an appearance of the distinction sinnlich/geistigv/hhin the realm of the senses, or of the distinction universal/particular within the particular. How, if not by a distinction, could the other side be made no-
ticeable on the side that aesthetics is primarily concerned with?
This presentation (which adopts a deliberately noncontemporary per- spective) of a theory that began to take shape in Baumgarten under the
141
special term of an aesthetics entailed an important suggestion.
is always a tautological and ultimately paradoxical operation, which pre- supposes an imaginary space (similar to the space of imaginary numbers). Classical aesthetics failed to recognize and acknowledge this fact. It was led astray by conceiving the relationship between the particular and the universal in abstract terms. This became a problem. To be sure, one rec- ognized that this kind of abstraction was inadequate for a theory of art, and yet, from Baumgarten to Kant, efforts to understand art led straight into the field of cognitive theory. "Aesthetics" thought of itself as a cogni-
tive possibility, as a philosophical science whose task was to demarcate and
142
to investigate its own terrain.
Confronted with the need to differentiate
What remained relevant were the
The
Reentry
278 Self-Description
itself from science and Enlightenment rationalism, art felt the pressure of self-assertion, and it turned out to be "impossible to salvage art except by
143
rehabilitating the senses. "
Even in Kant, this disposition remained un-
changed; in fact, Kant inferred from it the necessity of expanding his cri-
tique of ontological metaphysics into the realm of aesthetics. At the same
time, Karl Philipp Moritz made quite clear that artistic production was
not a cognitive affair (even though he still published his treatise under the
title of "imitation"): "The beautiful cannot be known, it must be either
144 produced or felt. "
It is remarkable that the theory of art should present itself as "philoso- phy. " This self-image might be related to the fact that this "firm" had just been incorporated as an independent academic discipline. Besides that, classifying aesthetics as philosophy allowed the theory of art to be sepa- rated both from the judgment of art and from art criticism. The theoret- ically gifted philosopher who knew his texts, concepts, and theoretical ar- chitectures, and who was caught up in polemics of his own, no longer needed to be able to judge and evaluate works of art. He functioned, in- stead, as a kind of parasite, who profited from the erosion of the underly- ing criteria of art criticism and taste, and he established his competence as an expert in distinctions and justifications.
It is doubtful whether such efforts can still count as self-descriptions of the art system, especially when they are part of a general architecture of transcendental-theoretical critique, as in Kant. However, they are closely related, which becomes apparent when one takes into account the diffi- culties involved in the Kantian project, the resistance of the object to the imposition of theory, and, last but not least, the intense controversies sur- rounding Kantian suggestions in early romanticism.
In the subsequent phase, German Idealism initially returned to tradi- tional figures, enforcing their renewed and intensified deployment. Phi- losophy still had enough credit to be able to assign a position of lower rank to art. The great number of available distinctions--now called "op- posites"--were still interpreted with an eye toward unity. The indispens- able--the ultimate ground of diversity, the final thought that held oppo-
145
sites together--was called either "Idea"
world of art, as in Schiller, "Ideal. " The Idea identified itself with the pos- itive value of the code of art. It thought of itself as the beautiful, thus blocking any reflection on the logical structure of the system's binary cod- ing. How the positive value of the code could be repeatedly applied to in-
or, if it referred to the illusory
Self-Description
279
dicate the meaning of art as a whole--the unity of the difference between beautiful and ugly--remained as unclear as the naive assumption in con- temporary ethics that distinguishing between good and evil was good. The paradox one hit upon along this path remained concealed, and the cultivation of paradox in romanticism responded intuitively but in an in- sufficiently formalized manner to the problem of the unity of difference.
The Idea of beauty was considered to be an intrinsically necessary unity, and only its realization was believed to generate variation and diversifica- tion. Moreover, the ontological orientation of aesthetics was evident in its concern witli the opposition between being and appearance and in its ef- forts to restrict the role of art in realizing the Idea to the world of beauti- ful appearance. As a result, appearance was once again valued positively in relation to being (which indicates a deep uncertainty regarding the evalu- ation of modern conditions). The same holds for Schiller's distinction be-
146
tween seriousness and play. The problem, in other words, was dealt
with on the basis of familiar (and comprehensible) distinctions. By plac- ing a positive value on the other side of these distinctions, one hoped to find a way for the Idea to reenter reality. Apart from that, the context of the discussion continued to be determined by a philosophical anthropol- ogy centered on its "human" object rather than by a social theory. This orientation offered the advantage of using familiar anthropological dis- tinctions--such as understanding, reason, will, feeling, sensuousness, imagination--and thus of starting out from seemingly incontestable facts of human life. Moreover, it preserved the possibility for smuggling in cul- tural and moral prejudices that went undetected by theory and exploiting such prejudices for the purpose of "approximating" the Idea. "As always, so long as such an idea remains on the horizon, moral law allies itself with
147
empirical culturalism to dominate the field. " Neither in the political
nor in the economic sector did the contemporary theory of society entail the possibility for substituting society for the reference to "mankind. "
IV
After efforts toward reflection in the realm of art had become suffi-
ciently consolidated, reflection began to react to self-generated problems. 148
One demanded that art establish its autonomy at various levels, and on the basis of an art-specific system for reflecting the relationship between die individual and society. All traces of heteronomy had to be erased. Art
28o Self-Description
could no longer draw on erudition as it used to do in die Renaissance, nor could it rely on Bildung, as erudition was now called, since art forms
149
grounded in Bildung had become obsolete.
for imports from the sciences, which were acceptable at best as material for artistic forms. Although religion did not date, it raised the question: Which religion? All of these problems disappeared, once art began to in- sist on autonomy.
We must take the notion of autonomy quite literally here, in the sense of self-legislation; in view of Kant's Critique ofJudgment, we might per-
150
haps speak of self-organization.
structural rather than at the operative level of the production of unity; but this sufficed to establish the notion of autonomy against the outside-- against science, morality, religion, or politics. This step established the au- tonomy of art philosophically--but in a manner that failed to clarify the operative basis of autonomy and led in the nineteenth century to the sep- aration of philosophical aesthetics from a historically oriented type of re- search. As a result, the autonomy of art was eventually considered to be no more than a kind of regional ontology, governed by its own specialized a priori and its own "value. "
The traditional demands of technical expertise--of acutezza, of brilliant
accomplishment in the sense of Gracidn--lost their edge. One no longer
cared for these values, but searched instead for a basis of observation and
judgment in the autonomous self-legislation of art. In this respect, art
shared not only the typical uncertainty of an age of social transition but
also the hopes and disappointments triggered by the French Revolution
and an emerging individualism. The romantics, foremost among them
Jean Paul, reflected upon the failure of communication or, more accu-
rately, upon the disappointed hopes that individuals placed in communi-
cation. At the same time, art defined its unique aesthetic qualities in rela-
tion to the cognitive offerings of the most recent philosophy. Indeed, it
was the notion of a cognitive order, presentable in purely logical terms (de-
spite its need for transcendental-theoretical grounding), which motivated
romanticism to distance itself from philosophy. Art refused to practice
151
philosophy.
necessarily a beautiful science.
flection of the system within the system presupposed a special type of dif-
ferentiation, which required an awareness of the primacy of the part in re-
153
On the one hand, one asserted that the science of art is not
lation to the whole within reflection.
On the other hand, precisely this
152
This brought home the point that a re-
This was all the more true
Modern self-description started at the
Self-Description 2 8 1
awareness raised the problem of how reflection could be adequate to its object. The understanding that the theory of art itself could not be a work of art, if it was to fulfill its function, radicalized the questions of whether theory describes the art system from an external or internal standpoint and of how the self-positioning of theory--given that both positions were pos- sible--determines the construction of its object. The question of what re-
154
ality "is" in itself became undecidable dispute.
--and was therefore a matter of
While art was still governed by die demands of mimesis/imitation, it
could take the existence of a cosmic design for granted. Art could focus on
its unique skills, on whose basis it could strive for and find recognition. In
the second half of the eighteenth century, this assumption broke down, due
to the increasing complexity and antinomy of descriptions. The collapse of
commentary became a topic of art--for example, in Tristram Shandy. Art
not only had to organize its own resources but to project a world of its own
making and to create a convincing nexus between self-reference and hetero-
reference (which could no longer be legitimized with reference to Being or
155
nature).
and metaphors, nor did they surface at the level of taste; rather, they af- fected the manner in which the work of art claimed its right to exist. Un- der such conditions, reality no longer functioned as an object of admiration or critique; reality had to be created by the work itself, if it wanted to suc- ceed as a work of art.
From the viewpoint of an operative constructivism and from the per-
156
These changes, however, did not concern the realm of symbols
spective of the much-debated theory of self-referential systems,
tions about reality appeared to be correlates of internal resolutions of op- erative inconsistencies within the system--particularly of "contradictions" between the system's memory and momentary impulses. Romanticism continued to apply the notion of reality to the resolution of internal in- consistencies that were negotiated with what the system remembered as culture. But the resistance that generated reality was now relocated within the system, so that it could subsequently be externalized again as "nature. " Romanticism "hovered" between inside and outside, but it could no longer resolve this paradox in favor of the world as it was. Its own reflec- tion of this difference had to enter works of art themselves, for example, in the form of the incredible or uncanny assumptions it made about real- ity. The resulting irritation was appreciated as such and communicated to die observer.
assump-
2 8 2 Self-Description
The distance from reality, its treatment as a mere backdrop or means for staging art, is one of the most striking features of romanticism. As in contemporary philosophy, any reference to the world remained "specula- tive" in a positive sense. On the other hand, romanticism resisted--for good reasons--the suspicion that its relationship to reality was governed by arbitrary subjective impulses. One mystified reality so that the observer was not distracted by it. The suspension of disbelief, necessary for under- standing fictional representations, was driven to the extreme; it was pro- voked and brought to reflection in this provocation. The beholder was supposed to focus his awareness on the artwork itself. Once this was ac-
157
complished, a new realism could emerge as a correlate to Idealism.
From that moment on, distinctions came to be used in a different man- ner. Traditionally, society and art assumed that certain phenomena fell outside of any given order and that such phenomena were indeed accessi- ble. One thinks of the devil and his temptations, or of the technique of re-
158
versal employed in carnival, or of other such interruptions.
niques of this sort only managed to traverse the distinction; upon return
159
from the other side, everything would be the same as before.
merely reaffirmed the distinction. This is how one became aware of the distinction between texts (among them fictional texts) and reality, though one treated this distinction in terms of different ontological regions, and confusing these regions was forbidden. One had to be able to distinguish between a narration and something that really happened. This included the possibility, depicted in Hamlet, that it becomes impossible to turn this distinction into a decision.
By introducing concepts bound by reflection--self-possession, irony,
critique--romanticism changed all this. The novel had paved the way for
160 the reflection of the distinction between fiction and reality within itself.
Fictional texts were produced in such a way that readers were tempted to recognize their personal situation in the work and apply what they read to their own needs. This was not simply a matter of duplicating in one's own life the models one found in literature. Preferred topics such as a criminal- ity (regretted after the fact) or (prohibited) sexual liberties were meant to present the reader with situations that called for decisions, by means of which he could individualize himself in ways that yield consequences. As long as this was so, it was difficult to avoid moral implications, even though literature learned to distance itself from the obligation of moral in- struction. Romanticism took an important step beyond that. It dissolved
But tech-
They
Self-Description 283
the ontological reference of the distinction between fiction and reality,
which had been tailored to the observer, fictionalizing even what might be
taken to be a reality "out there. " It duplicated worldly affairs botli in the
realm of fiction and in reality and shrouded them in the "twilight of ro-
161
manticism. "
"If the poet, by virtue of the magic of his presentation,"
writes August Wilhelm Schlegel, "manages to transport us into an unfa-
miliar world, he is free to operate in this world according to his own
162
laws. " The reference to reality remained in suspense. In his Nachtstucke,
E. T. A. Hoffmann invokes magnetism as a potentially natural, if dubious, explanation, but the unity of his narration depends on the reader's belief
163
in the miraculous despite this explanation.
ambiguities, everything depends on who, under what circumstances, observes how others observe.
Each time a negation is introduced into the art system, it generates a different condition that enables and requires new observations. Nega- tion--as reversal, paradox, or parody--dissolves any given determination and, at the same time, supports the reflection of the system's autonomy, which articulates itselfby virtue of thefact that this ispossible. In particular, textual arts such as poetry and the novel thematized themselves and their own lit- erariness and included what until now had been excluded from litera- ture--sexuality, for example (Lucinde). The difference between self-refer- ence and hetero-reference, along with the problem of the unity of this difference, became an inevitable by-product of reflection.
Since the distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference rested on the distinction between inside and outside, the problem of its unity could not be resolved in a one-sided manner: for example, by insisting on "pure" self-reference. Just as the subject became aware of an external real- ity when it ran up against its own boundaries--otherwise there would be no boundaries--art, too could not afford not to distinguish itself. While it might be true that romanticism, and even more so modern art, tend to advocate the primacy of self-reference, neither the semantics of a "purpose without purpose" nor Vanpour I'art succeed in denying hetero-reference; they only create a situation in which their references become ambiguous. Works of art began to admit their need for interpretation and became re- ceptive to the idea that consensus might be lacking. And critique no longer meant search for the one true judgment, but rather the perpetual improvement of the artwork itself.
When, in the wake of the French Revolution, one contemplated alter-
In the face of such deliberate
284 Self-Description
natives, one ran up against the problem of communication. The romantic
critique of Idealism focused on the unresolved problem of communica-
164
tion. One preferred "hovering" in a state of undecidability,
because
communication no longer found stability in the old categories of an on-
tological metaphysics and because even successful communication could
not compensate for this lack. Hovering between the universal and the in-
dividual was now considered "interesting," a notion that adequately char-
acterized and at the same time devalued communication. One cultivated
humor and irony as forms of communication, as the presentation [Dar-
stellung] of a "hovering" self-relation. Since information (hetero-reference)
lacked certainty, one relied all the more on utterance [Mitteilung] (self-
165
reference).
It is possible to understand the romantics' longing for unity
and wholeness as a cipher for a problem of communication, and their ex-
perimentation with myth and poetry as an attempt to reach out to the
people across social boundaries. Within their own circle, the romantics in-
tensely engaged in dialogue and correspondence, only to run up against
the limits of agreement. Worst of all, claiming a separate world of beauty,
aesthetics, symbolism, and poetry bifurcated the realm of social commu-
nication. The reflection of autonomy faced an excess of internal commu-
nicative possibilities that resulted from the loss of external reference points
and their indifference. The romantics experienced this problem in the self-
relation of the subject. But freedom and reason could no longer be iden-
tified as the same. This was evident in the realization that oral communi-
cation was bound to fail (the couple in Jean Paul's Siebenkds is acutely
aware of this failure--as are the twins in his Flegeljahre, or the lover in
Constant's Adolphe, who is no longer in love--and this awareness mani-
fests itself in attempts to live out the liberties of a romantically inspired
166
communication).
Friedrich Schlegel puts it poignandy in Lucinde: "What separates the be-
167
ings is not hatred . . . but love. "
communication provoked the endless self-reflection of the subject. The in- dividual became the subject of his own being.
Written communication provides a way out of this dilemma. Texts can- not deny their communicative intent, even when they present themselves as fragments or unfinished utterances that might or might not elicit a response, or when they react to an excess of communicative possibilities
168
devoid of credibility.
standing practice in the visual arts by including the unfinished, the sketch,
Communication replicated misunderstanding. As
Lack of positive affirmation through
Text-art caught up with what had been a long-
Self-Description 285
and the fragment; and it was no accident that the visual medium of per- ception was indispensable for the stability of such forms. The fragment al- lowed for the articulation of self-referentiality; it made room for freedom to decide whether completion was necessary or whether it might be pref-
169
erable to play with the magic of the fragment;
burden the work with an excess of information. Communicating auton- omy in this manner avoided the impression that the artist did not know how to go on and therefore left his work unfinished. In order to exclude this possibility, the "fragment" was marked as form and cultivated and re- flected upon as such--and it, too, presupposed writing.
In romanticism, art was perhaps for the first time fully acknowledged as
170
writing,
and poetry was the name that announced a programmatic
form for this kind of writing. What was at stake in poetry was neither
rhetoric nor enlightenment, but the attempt to capture the unattainable.
This notion yielded the inevitable conclusion (which encountered much
171
resistance ) that the theory of literature was actually literature, and that
literature inevitably partook of literary theory. It became possible to en- tertain the notion that the reflection on art should express itself not only in learned treatises but also and above all in works of art. The prototype is Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde.
This shift affected the poetry of nature as well. Nature no longer de-
rived its significance from its own resources or from die fact that humans
are natural beings. Rather, it mirrored die infinitely displaced search of the
self for itself; a search that appeared interminable, because it no longer en-
countered a limit in society. "The relationship with nature has been su-
perseded by an intersubjective, interpersonal relationship, that in the last
analysis [but only for romanticism, N. L. ] is a relationship of the subject
172 toward itself. "
The problem became how to deal further with the excess of commu- nicative possibilities and with the interminability (or connective uncer- tainty) of communication, if thisproblem could not be resolved by the in- dividual subject. Romanticism solved it by introducing the notion of art criticism. The notion that criticism is an essential component in the per- fection of art acknowledged for the first time the status of theory as a self-
173
description of the system within the system.
Classical examples of romantic criticism are Friedrich Schlegel's essays
on Georg Forster, on Lessing, and on Goethe's Meister, all of which relate
174
works to their authors and present both as a unity.
When dealing with
completion would only
286 Self-Description
romantic criticism, we must disregard any potential analogies to science,
in particular the notion that the convergence of critical opinions indicates
175
their truth. This notion must be sacrificed. In romanticism, individual
differences between aesthetic judgments were considered normal and le-
176
gitimate.
diminish the value of critical judgment.
themselves, if they mediate communication in the form of artworks, served as an equivalent for the kind of security that was accomplished ver- bally only via consensus or dissent--an equivalent that secured the con- tinuation of autopoietic communication. Criticism was already a pro- gram for an observation of the second order--for an ability to distinguish that, for its part, could be distinguished and did not need to strive toward convergence. But if this was so, communication had to allow itself to be supported by perceptible objects in order to compensate for its boundless insecurity.
Accordingly, reflection turned into a medium for shaping critical judg-
178
ment.
tem, for the underlying idea of art. But this idea could not be realized in the form of a perceptible work. It remained unattainable. Any attempt to approach the idea exposed itself to criticism and observation. Every form infinitely displaced what made it observable, lagging behind its ambition at the level of realization. Transcending the boundaries of the imagination was as necessary as it was impossible.
This is why criticism could achieve only a broken--"reflective," "sober"
(attentive to artistic means), "ironic"--relationship to its object. Criticism
did not expect the object to meet its standards of judgment, nor did it
strive, as criticism, for beauty, let alone to surpass itself as a critically con-
ceived work of art. Its goal was neither rejection nor the mere classifica-
tion of art in terms of whether it succeeds or fails. Rather, the task of crit-
icism was to distinguish the visible from what is rendered invisible by the
visible. As if from the corner of its eye, criticism attempted to catch a
glimpse of the excluded within the included. This is why Jean Paul, unlike
Goethe and Schiller, located the sublime in the finite rather than in the
179
infinite.
cluded its own motive: the reflection of unity in the paradox of distin- guishing, which constituted the "unmarked space" and the unobservabil-
ity of observation.
Resolute awareness of the chasm between art and the
180
There was nothing offensive about disagreement, nor did it
177
This suggested that the objects
The medium itself continued to stand for the unity of the sys-
For the first time, the self-description of the art system in-
"real world" was called irony;
irony was dead serious, so to speak, about
Self-Description 287
the fact that it did not take die world seriously; it was a consistently main- tained self-assertion.
Criticism renounced the ambition of being measured against artistic standards, and the critic compensated for this renunciation by presenting himself as a member of an elite of reflection--being neither of noble birth
181
nor rich, but competent and full of high self-expectations.
As for the
negative side--neither noble nor rich--the critic could identify with artists
and poets, while distinguishing himself by his role as critic. The sheer
amount of emerging talent allowed for a differentiation of functions, if not
of persons. To many, among them Goethe and Hegel, the excessive pro-
liferation of differences appeared to be an untenable subjectivism. The re-
fusal to determine identity objectively was certainly one of the features of
romanticism. It dispensed with the Idea as the point of convergence be-
tween subject and object (even though this Idea was retained in multiple
182
Who is to say that the subject/object distinction matters to the
forms).
self-description of a functional system?
Another possibility for exploiting the freedom of autonomy while es- caping the dead end of transcendental reflection was the dissolution of
183
identity for the purpose of communication.
nated with Doppelgdnger, mirror-images, and twins, as well as with narra- tives from which the informed reader could infer that the author had split
184
himself into two different personae that communicate with one another. As Schlegel puts it, "Nobody can know himself, unless he is both himself
185
and an other. "
hetero-reference; instead they organized self-reference. Under such condi- tions, one could exploit the dissolution of identity in order to represent both the difficulties and the failure of the ego's self-reflection as a problem of communication. One did not yet speak of "genius," but there was a general awareness of the fact that the inclusion of artists into the system was the system's own affair and not determined by nature or by birth. One retained the original/copy distinction while knowing--as expressed in the figure of the Doppelgdnger--that this distinction was not derived from re- ality, but produced by art in order to commit the art system to the pro- duction of "original" works.
These epochal historical changes affected the romantic conception of historical time as well. The erosion of proven methods of inferring the future from the past at first increased freedom in relation to both past and future by allowing for a transfiguration of the past (not just of an-
Identities no longer functioned as a means to secure
Romanticism was fasci-
288 Self-Description
tiquity but also of the Middle Ages) that left the future indeterminate and turned it into a summons. What became politically an open ques- tion after the French Revolution corresponded artistically to the problem of self-confirming form. As Novalis puts it, "We have outgrown the age
186
of generally valid forms. "
To the extent that the factual limitations of what is artistically permitted
fall away, relevant art forms are defined in terms of a temporal relationship to previous forms. The avant-garde claimed to be ahead of its time. But since, like everyone else, it could not act in the future, this claim boils down in practice to a distanced, critical, and polemical attitude within a shared present. Even the self-descriptions of postmodernism suggest his- torical periodization. But claiming a historical position requires unam- biguous structural decisions of the sort postmodernism refuses to provide. Only postmodern architecture lives up to this claim in some sense, since it succeeds in distinguishing itself clearly from the reductionist style that pre- cedes it (keyword Bauhaus). Everywhere else, attempts to define postmod- ern art lead to a temporal melange of modern, late modern, and postmod- ern trends. All of these trends converge in the effort to eliminate an excess of communicative possibilities by means of the form of the utterance [Mit- teilung] rather than via the kind of information it entails. In other words, one tends to privilege self-reference over hetero-reference. This preference appears to be the decisive factor in the further development of art, espe- cially in the twentieth century. It is astonishing that such a privileging of self-reference should be possible at all, and that convincing forms could be found to articulate it--given that self-reference can be observed only by distinguishing it from hetero-reference. Hetero-reference is reduced more and more to the "unmarked space. " Entering that space yields nothing, since the boundary must be crossed again if something is to be accom- plished there. However, characterizing modern art in this way highlights the historical contingency of its bias toward self-reference, which raises the question of whether representing autonomy in terms of self-reference is a permanent solution.
Despite all agonizing over the bifurcation of the bourgeois world, and despite the diagnosis of this world as divided by oppositions, the distance that comes with differentiated reflection appears as a structure one must subsequently accept. One might dress up this structure with expectations of a "new mythology" (in the manner of the Alteste Systemprogramm of Friedrich Schlegel, Holderlin, and Schelling), only to provoke self-doubts
Self-Description 2 8 9
and disbelief. A "new mythology" requires decisions in place of the mod- els that used to be provided by tradition and by the contractually fixed or-
187
ders of patrons.
unity of sociability (= society), only to find oneself out on the limb of a
188
bourgeois interiority.
One might indulge in "sublime" experiences and
Or one can share Schiller's hopes for a moral-aesthetic
miracles, in magic, ghosts, and dreadful surprises--only to admit that for
every one of these phenomena, the modern world offers a trivial explana-
189
tion.
ble only in reflection (with emphasis on "henceforth only"). The observer has entered die scene and subjects himself to observation. Henceforth, one can no longer escape the question of what kinds of distinctions one employs in observation and why just these and not others. With the ad- vent of the observer, philosophical attempts to put down art as a com- petitor come to an end. Minerva allows more than one owl to fly, and every observer can be observed as someone who constructs a world that appears to him as if it really were the way it appears.
V
There is nothing particularly new in the romantic trend to think of art in terms of a self-generated mystery, of a limit of what can be conceptu- ally grasped. The romantic description of art is work-oriented, even where a description of artistic means would be more appropriate. It does not penetrate to the level of the elemental operations that produce and repro- duce the work. This situation changed, at the latest with the advent of im- pressionism. In the nineteenth century, even more so today, descriptions of art must keep up with the increasing awareness of the operations in- volved in art, which means that the beautiful can no longer be the goal of such descriptions.
Hegel puts an end, if not to art, at least to a philosophy of art that claims to situate it within the systematic structure of philosophical theory and to determine the range of artistic possibilities from within that struc- ture. There will always be philosophers who deal with art; but the object of interpretation is determined by the rapid development of the art sys- tem, which escapes questions concerning its why and whence. When painters, beginning with Manet, began to rediscover the canvas and ac- centuate its visual space in paintings that are still to be perceived in spatial terms, their rediscovery did not depend on a prior study of philosophy,
Or one might follow Hegel's belief that unity is henceforth possi-
2 9 0 Self-Description
nor was it motivated by irritations that came from philosophical theories. Rather, it emerged from the artists' reflection upon their own activity, from their reaction to a prior "realism," accompanied perhaps by a sense of the paradox that one at once sees the space of the image, sees it disap- pear [and become only canvas], then sees it again. No philosophy could evaluate, from the perspective of its own system, what is happening here and why. A description that wants to resonate with the art system must be able to connect to discoveries within the system.
The artistic trends that established themselves as "modern" during the second half of the nineteenth century suggested a renunciation not only of imitation but of fictionality as such. Fictional representations were not supposed to be confused with reality. The reader was meant to react with disbelief, then suspend his disbelief and consider the artwork to be a real- ity in its own right. The suspension of disbelief--this double negation of the relevance of the real--now became superfluous. Fictionality still pre- supposes the possibility for discovering what the world is really like, so that fiction can offer a fitting description. To do so, the work of art must supply both contextual similarity and redundancies. Modern art goes be- yond these conditions of fictionality. The modern artwork does not imi- tate (or does so only ironically), nor does it seek to anchor its own reality in the fictional realm. It relies exclusively on its own means to convince its audience, and it assumes that its attempt to surpass previous models is persuasive. This farewell to fictionality might be the ultimate consequence of a differentiated art system, which had to sacrifice the recognizable as- pects and redundancies implied in the notion of a fictional reality as dis- tinct from a reality "out there" in order to realize redundancies exclusively as internal suggestions within the work or, in contemporary terminology, as "intertextuality" within the system.
Some observers of the eventful (and nonetheless rich) history of twenti-
190
eth-century art have returned once again to "dialectical" presuppositions. Dialectics suggests that a process driven by negation must eventually cul- minate in affirmation. Proving this point, however, turned out to be diffi- cult. We think of Adorno's efforts to find affirmation in Schonberg (but not in Stravinsky). One stereotypically invokes "capitalism" and "bourgeois society. " But such cross-references no longer succeed in analytical terms, and there is no concept of society that could explain why art runs into
problems with its own autonomy (even though everyone seems to concur
191
that it does). But if dialectics--after the "dialectic of Enlightenment"
--
Self-Description 2 9 1
no longer offers any prospects for the future, are we supposed to infer that this holds for art and society as well? Or, given the improbability of this proposition, wouldn't it make more sense to sacrifice dialectics? For this reason (and without referring to other findings) we break with this loosely Marxist mode of argumentation and regard the social modernity of art, like that of other functional systems, to be a matter of system autonomy, which then becomes the theme of self-descriptions.
Self-descriptions of the system within the system, however, do not re- produce the system's operations, only the ideas that guide these opera- tions. This process preserves the differentiation of specific activities of re- flection. The theory of art is increasingly applied within works themselves, until the avant-garde eventually seizes the political idea of experimenting with the entire range of the concept of art, if not with the universality of the realm of artistic competence as such. What used to be ideal'in the idea of art is replaced by a notion of universality that is independent of objects and determined internally.
The possibilities for escaping into the exotic or the trivial that used to
be available no longer suffice; one now transgresses their boundaries.
Everything mysterious is expelled from art--unless it elicits a shock ef-
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fect
into the empty stage, the white sheet of paper,
tones resonate. This displacement focuses awareness once again on "writ- ing"--not on writing as distinct from what it signifies, but on what writ- ing, understood as graph, fissure, design, or contour, creates and leaves
194
unnoticed as its presupposed other.
and are called upon to represent their relationship to what cannot be sig- nified--they stand as "pure" forms that no longer signify any content, but function only as difference. Signs become symbols that want to be some- thing they cannot be, symbols for the reentry of the form into the form. Picasso is considered the representative painter of this century, and for good reason; the unity of his work can no longer be comprehended in terms of form or style, but only in terms of an irony which he probes in all conceivable forms and styles.
Abstraction toward pure form is merely an indication that everything is possible. The realm of the permissible and of the artistically possible keeps growing, so long as what saturates this realm can still be observed as a symbol for the fact that the only thing excluded is exclusion itself. Theory becomes the agency of permission. Its general question becomes: What
--and displaced into the unmarked space where signs are engraved
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or the silence that makes
Signs once again turn into symbols
2 9 2 Self-Description
does it mean for the art system to contain its own descriptions, and how can this fact be rendered observable in a work of art?
However, a self-description of the system can also contain a self-negation of the system--for example, as a negation of every boundary and every in- ternal determination, as a negation of the obligation to follow traditional
195
models, or as a negation of the system's future.
negation is a positive operation (here, of communication), which depends on a meaning recursively secured within an actually existing autopoietic system. Self-negation is therefore possible only when the system that exe- cutes the negation operates autopoietically, when it disposes over a mem- ory and projects a future--if only in the empty formula of "I have no idea how to go on. "
Romantic "criticism" wanted to exhaust the most perfect possibilities and complete the artwork in its unattainable perfection. Now, the chal- lenge was to locate the negation of the system within the system, to per- fect the system's autonomy, because autonomy, in its most radical sense, can be thought only in terms of the inclusion of self-negation into the sys- tem (or, phrased differently, in terms of the exclusion of hetero-negation). As a result of this development--one already "historical" from today's standpoint--one can see that art can deal with limitations in two ways: it can reject limitations as repression and try to overcome them, or it can ac- cept limitations as necessary working conditions and subsequently treat such conditions as substitutable.
Based on a fundamental notion of negativity, Adorno's aesthetics offers
196
two alternative versions of negativity:
jecting any external influence, and a sociocritical version that reflects on the contradiction that art realizes itself positively in society while assum- ing a negative (critical) position vis-a-vis society. It is difficult to see which common notion of negativity could reconcile these two versions and bring about their dialectical synthesis. Earlier we raised the question of
197
whether one can assume negation at the operative level,
there must be a prelogical notion of distinction, which requires the oper- ation of negation only at the level of self-description, that is, the level where self-reference and hetero-reference are distinguished.
At any rate, one can see how modern art, in its more recent develop- ments, transforms its relationship into an extra-artistic reality in a manner that does not depend on negation. Initial experiments of this sort were lim- ited; one incorporated chance into the work of art, one allowed raw ma-
In each of these cases,
a purist version that insists on re-
or whether
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293
terials to appear in the work, or blanks that refer to a future continuation of the work in interpretation. Suggestions of this sort were supported by the work itself; they were able to connect to formal models and therefore
198
appeared as forms.
art as such into question, when, inspired by Godel, it tries to appear as a work of art outside of the system art, or when it seeks to accomplish a reentry of nonart into art in the sense of Spencer Brown and, in so doing, generates an endless oscillation between inside and outside in an imagi-
199
nary realm outside of the calculus of forms
intended meaning of the work and can be observed accordingly--then the art-system has definitely arrived at a new level of self-description, a level characterized by the introduction of self-negation into the system (and is no longer limited to the calculability of individual forms).
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The mathematics of reentry leads to an "unobservable indeterminacy," not because it is codetermined by an incalculable environment (by inde- pendent variables), but because it is set up in a self-determining manner. Any further determination must be left to the workings of time. But the autopoiesis of the system has no place for an ultimate operation that would negate the system as a whole, because all operations are conceived from the perspective of reproduction. As a form of practicing autonomy, the self- negation of the system is only one operation among others, an attempt to press the system to its limits so as to include the excluded, or to surpass with its negativity everything that preceded it, or to allow every possible nonartistic reality to reenter the realm of art. There are many attempts of this sort. One provokes one's audience by making it extremely unlikely that art will be noticed as art, for example. One etches a sign into a park bench in the expectation (hope? ) that no one will recognize its artistic quality, but that one could prove it in court should the need arise. One might "declare" objects of utility to be works of art (Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol) or inscribe different meanings into works of art that are indistinguishable at
201
However, when a work of art is determined to call
the level of perception.
romanticism, but are presented as unreadable
attention to the fact that writing is all that matters. In "happenings," the observable content is reduced to a minimum and presented to a group of randomly selected passers-by, just to demonstrate that this is still art. Hope is invested in the negative provocation of a hopelessly random consensus of art-specific observations.
But how is this possible socially if not on the basis of autonomy? Any
--when all this makes up the
Narratives no longer invoke the incredible, as in
202
--perhaps in order to call
2 9 4 Self-Description
attempt of this sort presupposes the autonomy of art and seeks to realize
autonomy in a limiting case. This is true even when autonomy is prac-
ticed as a renunciation of autonomy--when one seeks to reconcile art and
life or attempts to commercialize art to the point where it no longer
claims any specifically artistic form, where its artistic quality is reduced to
the fact that it wants to abandon itself and this is how it articulates itself
203
as art.
Werner Hofmann speaks of the "art of artlessness" and explains
this trend with reference to an increasing "unlearning" of art.
204
The rea-
son why a work of art is a work of art to begin with--apart from the mere
claim--remains a mystery, as if this mystery were meant to symbolize the
unobservability of the world. This is why art is "in need of commentary"
(Gehlen), why it depends on a supplementary linguistic mediation of its
205
meaning. "Reflection paraphrases production," writes Hofmann,
one might as well claim the opposite by saying that the work of art only paraphrases reflection.
However, negating art as art is not the sole concern of modern art. Im- portant variants take issue, not with the art system, but with the system of society. Art of this sort no longer offers representations or oppositional Utopias, nor is it concerned with a social critique that feeds on ideologies. The less one is convinced that a work's novelty can be located on an as- cending line surpassing previous art in quality, the more the idea of plot- ting novelty as a provocation of society suggests itself. Given that provo- cation cannot be repeated, it is necessary to come up with ever new provocations, until society grows accustomed to this tactic and ceases to respond. This kind of art, too, is no longer possible. If the classics of provocation were still alive today, they would no longer provoke.
Significant opportunities for expression can be understood on the basis
of the distinction between inclusion and exclusion. This distinction helps
us see that artworks symbolize (the unity of) difference--especially by
aesthetically reintegrating the excluded into the realm of inclusion. One
significant example is the use of garbage and scraps in the composition of
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artworks.
Another version is the cultivation of an unkempt appearance,
which provokes exclusion in order to make the point that exclusion does
not matter. Even the aesthetics of slowness, of the easy, laid-back motor-
cycle ride, is meant to characterize a society that makes inclusion contin-
207
gent upon speed.
tinction between artistic types--the painter, the sculptor, the poet, or the musician--in the figure of the "artist" as such, for whom one can no
Along the same lines, we find a blurring of the dis-
but
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295
longer specify criteria of inclusion. The "artist as such" celebrates inclusion as deliberate self-exclusion, as a "neither-nor" in relation to every artistic medium. All of these strategies are meant not to negate art but rather to characterize society as a system that contains its own negation by repro- ducing inclusion and exclusion through its own operations. Is this art? The question is posed by the artwork itself and turns "art" into an auxil- iary concept for understanding its presentation. Art confronts the "unre- solvable indeterminacy" of a mathematical reentry, an indeterminacy that points to the end of the calculus and leaves the future to the future.
In music, we find a similar decision, which goes far beyond rejecting the limitations of the tonal system. It focuses entirely on the tone that is actualized at any given moment, thereby destroying any possibility for memory and expectation of the sort provided by melody. Only the pre- sent counts, and each new present must come as a surprise. However, since sequentially formed identities require temporally recursive network- ings, such a program ends up canceling the distinction between music and nonmusic. The form that is supposed to accomplish this goal is the unex- pected noise, a noise that announces its unexpected occurrence only against a background of silence. Even here, one still needs authorization-- by John Cage, for example--to back up the claim that it is indeed music.
This development runs the risk of cutting off communication between art and its audience. The audience becomes an invention, a phantasm of the artist, to borrow a phrase from a publication of the Art & Language
298
Group. The audience, in other words, becomes part of the artwork. Earlier one could assume that the artwork signals its own status as a work of art. External frame conditions--such as the stage and the curtain in the theater, or the frame of a painting--have always been used to demarcate art and, at the same time, to indicate "this is art," independently of the
209
aesthetic quality of any particular work.
the question of quality arise. Most recent modern art experiments with, eliminating any art-internal signals. As a result, art depends all the morel on frames and external signals to indicate that an object not recognizable as art is nonetheless meant to be seen as art. Or one concerns oneself, like the Art & Language Group, with the "redescription" of styles and works,
210
which are produced solely in view of further "redescriptions. "
no longer any reason to stop production. Autopoiesis turns into form,iand only the lack of fantasy and imagination can lead to destructive external effects. When this happens, one can talk endlessly about it, which means
Only within such frames could
jThere is
;
296 Self-Description
that this talk, too, must eventually come to an end, like a fashion that be- comes obsolete when people embrace a new one. However, if the work of art no longer wants to convince as a work of art, but is merely marked as such, some observers might refuse to see it as art, or they might have re- course to the embarrassing relicts of conventional aesthetic criteria.
Perhaps the possibilities for reintegrating the negation of the system into the system are by now exhausted as well. And perhaps there is still room for an inspiration that can overcome even this impasse. At any rate, it has become possible to recognize and describe the inclusion of negation as a strategy. Art is no longer critical, nor is it concerned with theory or with justified judgments at a level of reflection that maintains an observ- ing distance from what goes on in art. Academic aesthetics is dead; it has nothing to say to art (if one asks the artists). Phenomena (of whatever kind) no longer matter; what counts is performative contradiction, a "de- construction" that turns back upon itself. One looks for ways of staging art at the level of operations that present themselves to observation as
works of art--this claim remains an integral part of the self-negation of art. Even in "the age of technical reproduction," works of art distinguish themselves from other artifacts in that they do not have to prove them-
211
selves outside of art.
they can be innovative or disagree without reservation, the only risk being that they might no longer be understood. Without having to take respon- sibility for further consequences, works of art can focus on irritating the observer. And yet, even the most radical gesture, the most alienating "in- stallation," must submit to the necessity of concretion; a babble of ideas won't do. Something must be "presented," or else the other locations within the system remain beyond reach. Works of art are also logical arti- facts, to the extent that they solve a logically insoluble paradox, namely, the paradox of instituting in a singular, concrete object their belonging to
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the genre of art and to the system of art.
does not rely on the communication of opinions that goes on among the elite who reflect on the system. He simply does what he does. The point is not to declare the end of art on the basis of convincing arguments, thereby setting an end to art. The self-negation of art is realized at the level of autopoietic operations in the form of art, so that art can continue. The much debated "end of art" does not necessarily imply stagnation; art can continue to move along--if not as a river, perhaps as an ocean. The end of art, the impossibility of art, the final sellout of all possible forms as-
This is why they can live out their originality, why
For good reasons, the artist
leads to the discovery of the compulsion to repeat.
So long as one still
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297
sumes a form that claims to be self-description and artwork at once, and this secures the reproduction of art as a perfectly autonomous system, a system that includes its own negation.
The growing pressure to manifest originality as deviation eventually
213
believed in taste, one had to make sure that originality could be recog-
nized. Even after the forefront of discussion had shifted to the legitimiza-
tion of technical reproduction, no distinct criteria for originality came
forth. In one way or another, artworks cannot and would not exclude rep-
etition; repetition plays a role in the repeated encounter with an artwork,
in a play's repeated performance, or in the notion of a copy that remains
true to the original! Indeed, works of art are created as "potential multi-
214
pliers. "
peat himself in ever new variations on his original idea. (For awhile, this notion continues to invest the code original/copy with corresponding pos- itive and negative values. But eventually one must ask oneself how im- portant this distinction really is, and whether art will tolerate its tyranny. Once the original/copy distinction becomes the topic of "transjunctional" operations and can be accepted or rejected as a distinction, a new descrip- tion is needed to resist the hegemony of the law of novelty. "Postmod- ernism" rebels against this law; but in so doing, it only returns to an older law, which states that the work of art, in one way or another, must medi- ate between variety and redundancy in order for the appeal of novelty to become intelligible.
Undeniably, this development has a certain consistency. ^Wbrks of art distinguish themselves from other objects by virtue of their self- referentiality: they claim to be art, and they can do so because this claim is an affair of communication rather than a matter of mere objecthood^ But when the self-description of the art system focuses on this claim--the claim to be art--and henceforth claims originality exclusively for this pur- pose, the question of how it can redeem such a claim arises.
The nineteenth century solved this problem by distributing the alter- native "self-reference or hetero-reference" among two separate styles. Those who advocated the primacy of self-reference could stick to aes- meticizing artistic styles, which emphasized formal decisions. Those who preferred hetero-reference--whether in an affirmative or critical sense--
215
could count on realism.
distinctions were tested on a stylistic level, but they remained contained
The first step is to concede that the artist can be allowed to re-
This opposition became programmatic. The
298 Self-Description
within the system precisely as a form of stylistic choice (of which there were many).
This solution, however, could not withstand the increasing radicaliza-
tion of reflection (which did not exclude the possibility for distinguishing,
as before, between stylistic preferences). L'artpour I'artwas surpassed by
I'art sur Van. Self-reference is undermined when the system challenges its
own boundaries and when it begins to treat the choice of one or the other
type of reference as a system-internal operation. When "everything goes,
and only the intention counts," art retreats to self-reference, and this
holds even for programs that oppose this opening. Art approaches a
boundary where artistic information ceases to be information and be-
comes solely utterance [Mitteilung], or, more accurately, where informa-
tion is reduced to conveying to the audience that art wants to be nothing
more than utterance. Art restricts itself to signing what it subsequently
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claims to be art,
only as an element in the autopoietic chain of self-reflections and re- descriptions of the system.
To the extent that reflection on the notion of reentry is radicalized and
the distinction between art and nonart becomes increasingly paradoxical,
the relationship of art to its own history is affected as well. The diversity
of artistic creations is leveled when they are reduced to mere difference.
One no longer remembers what earlier innovations rebelled against and
217
or it produces as "conceptual art" what finds attention
how passionately they were defended and attacked.