No More Learning

141. Zuccaro L'idea dei Pittori, pp. i3iff.
142. A common formula speaks of "the arts and literature. "
143. We take this to be symptomatic of a new formulation that today would
be described as autopoiesis. It is not just a grammatical mistake of the type "a smoked fish-dealer. "
144. On this development, see esp. Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Modern Sys-
tem of the Arts" (1951), quoted from Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York, 1965), pp. 163-227. See further Gunther Scholtz, "Der Weg zum Kunstsystem des deutschen Idealismus," in Walter Jaeschke and Helmut Holzhey, eds. , Friiher Idealismus und Fruhromantik: Der Streit um die Grundlagen der Asthetik (1795-180$) (Hamburg, 1990), pp. 12-29; Plumpe, Asthetische Kommunikation, pp. 256? .
145. Perhaps we should add here that the famous "querelle des anciens et modernes" toward the end of the seventeenth century confronted the difficulty of embracing the sciences and technological developments along with what was later distinguished as art. Under such conditions, comparative historical judg- ments are obviously difficult and controversial.
146. We shall return to this point in Chapter 7, below.
147. See Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts. "
148. See Charles Dejob, De I'influence du Concile de Trente sur la litterature et
les beaux-arts chez lespeuples catholiques (Paris, 1884; rpt. Geneva, 1969), who pre- sents these events as a religious success story of Catholicism. One finds a more sophisticated picture in Federico Zeri, Pittura e Controriforma: L' "arte senza tempo"di Scipione da Gaeta (Turin, 1957); Emile Male, L'art religieux apres le Con- cile de Trente: Etude sur Ticonographie delafindu XVIe siecle, du XVIIe siecle, du XWIIe siecle (Paris, 1932), offers detailed, thematically coherent analyses of paint-
ings. On the corresponding Protestant measures, which were not directed against innovative artistic audacity but polemicized in an Old Testament manner against
idol worship and the distractions that kept churchgoers from their pious duties,
see John Phillips, The Reformation ofImages: The Destruction ofArt in England, 1535-1660 (Berkeley, Calif. , 1973). On the reverberations that were felt until the eighteenth century, see Pears, The Discovery ofPainting, pp. 4iff. On the corre-
Notes to Pages 182-86
365
sponding rejection of the theater, see Fraser, The War Against Poetry, esp. pp. 29ff. ; and Agnew, Worlds Apart.
149. In current neurophysiological terminology, one might speak of a re- peated "impregnation" of cells that are no longer occupied. See Heinz von Foer- ster, Das Geddchtnis: Eine quantenmechanische Untersuchung (Vienna, 1948).
150. See Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy.
151. Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criti- cism (New York, 1968), provides a detailed account of this dispute.
152. Ibid. , p. 117. See also pp. I33ff.
153. Susie I. Tucker, Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (Cambridge, 1972), illustrates this bifurcation with detailed evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
154. See Belting, BildundKult, pp. 5ioff.
155. To mention details: one objected to Michelangelo's LastJudgment on the grounds that it depicts devils without horns, angels without wings, Christ with- out his beard, the kisses of the blessed, and generally too much nudity (although theologians could hardly claim that the focus of Christ's resurrection is clothing). Figures that are unknown in traditional clerical history but are included in the picture for aesthetic reasons (to fill a space or serve as an ornament) have to be eliminated. Sacred figures must not be presented too realistically. Mary at the cross, fainting? No way! She is depicted standing upright: stabat.
156. See the treatises of church officials in vol. 2 of Barocchi, ed. , Trattati d'el arte del Cinquecento, which include, among others, Giovanni Andrea Gilio, Dial- ogo nel quale si ragiona degli errori e degli abusi de'pittori circa d'historie (1564), and Gabriele Paletotti, Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre etprofane (1582). The mediocre intellectual quality of these treatises suggests that they defend a lost position.
157. See Werner Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation (Berlin, 1921).
158. "L'extrfeme habilite' des artistes fait douter de leur sincdrite'," observes Male, L'art religieux apres le Concile de Trente, p. ix.
$5
1. On the system of science, see Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaftder Ge- sellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), esp. pp. i94ff. ; on the legal system, Luhmann, "Die Codierung des Rechtssystems," Rechtstheorie 17 (1986): 171-203, and Luhmann, Das Recht der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. ifijff. ; on the educational system, Luhmann, "Codierung und Programmierung: Bildung und Selektion im Erzie- hungssystem," in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufkldrung, vol. 4 (Opladen, 1987), pp. 182-201; on the economic system, Luhmann, Die Wirtschaft der Geselhchaft (Frankfurt, 1988), pp. 846? . , i87ff. and passim; on the health care system, Luh-
366 Notes to Pages 186-89
mann, "Der medizinische Code," in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufkldrung, vol. 5 (Opladen, 1990), pp. 183-95.
2. George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form (1969; rpt. New York, 1979), p. 1.
3. See, e. g. , Julia Kristeva, "Poesie et ndgativiteV' in Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherchespour un sbnanalyse (Paris, 1969), pp. 246-77 (explicitly on p. 265), fur- ther pp. i5off. The function of the "zero" is not a negation of meaning; on the contrary, it is meant to exclude the absence of meaning.
4. Gotthard Gunther calls the processing of such acceptance/rejection dis- tinctions with reference to a primarily positive/negative disjunction a "trans- junctional operation" and argues that treating such a possibility in logical terms requires a structurally rich, multivalent logic capable of dissolving the paradoxes that arise within a bivalent logic. See Gotthard Gunther, "Cybernetic Ontology andTransjunctional Operations," in Gunther, Beitrdgezu einer operationsfdhigen Dialektik, vol. 1 (Hamburg, 1976), pp. 249-328.
5. "If conditionality is an essential component in the concept of organiza- tion," writes W. Ross Ashby, "Principles of the Self-Organizing System," quoted
from Walter Buckley, ed. , Modern Systems Research for the Behavioral Scientist: A Sourcebook (Chicago, 1968), pp. 108-28 (109).
6. See George Spencer Brown, "Self-Reference, Distinctions and Time," Teoria _
Sociological! 2. (1993): 47 53-
7. See Niklas Luhmann, "Das Moderne der modernen Gesellschaft," in Luh-
Z
mann, Beobachtungen der Moderne (Opladen, 1992), pp. 11-49 ( 9Q> trans, as
"Modernity in Contemporary Society," in Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, Calif. , 1998), pp. 1-21.
8. Sigfried J. Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1989), advances the opposite view concerning the dis-
tinction literary/nonliterary, as does Peter Fuchs, Moderne Kommunikation: Zur Theorie des operativen Displacements (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. i64ff, concerning the
distinction art/nonart as a system code. We concede that literature or, more gen- erally, art, must distinguish itself in this manner (how else? ) from other things. There is no doubt that the avant-garde programmatically emphasized this refer- ential distinction. However, it does not sufficiently describe the internal struc- ture ofpreferences, which functions as a code. On the basis of this structure, the art system exposes itself to the paradoxical distinctions between inside and out- side or between universalism and specification. In addition, a code would have to generate programs that "operationalize" the system's preferences at the level of its operations. Here the art/nonart distinction is as unsatisfactory as beautiful/ ugly.
9. For an overview, see Niels Werber, Literatur als System: Zur Ausdifferen- zierung literarischer Kommunikation (Opladen, 1992).
10. E. g. , in the abundance of moral ambiguities in the self-commenting au-
Notes to Pages 190-91
367
tonographies of Ludwig Tieck's William Lovell, and, of course, in the work's the- oretical reflections.
11. The first quotation is from Lucinde, the second from the essay "Uber Less- ing. " See Friedrich Schlegel, Werke in zwei B'dnden (Berlin, 1980), vol. 2, p. 35, and vol. 1, p. no.
12. "Moralitat ohne Sinn fur Paradoxic ist gemein," states Friedrich Schlegel, ibid. , vol. 1, p. 272.
13. Moreover, one also finds formulations that do not refer to ideals or values and therefore come closer to current notions of balance. See, e. g. , Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Idea del Tempio delta Pittura (Milan, 1590), p. 62: "differenze e quella cosa per la quale si discerne, & awerisce l'amicitia & l'inimicitia delle cose. " And on p. 83: "Belezza non e altro che una certa gratia vivace & spirituale, la qual per il raggio divino prima s'infonde ne gl'Angeli in cui si vedeno le figure di qualuna sfera che si chiamano in loro essemplari, & l'ldee; poi passa ne gli an- imi, ove le figure si chiamano ragioni, & notitie; & finalemente nella materia ove si dicono imagini & forme. "
14. In his Erstes Kritisches Wdldchen with reference to examples from antiquity. See Bernhard Suphan, ed. , Herder Sammtliche Werke, vol. 3 (Berlin, 1878), pp. J2ff. (quotation on p. 59).
15. For a historically extensive treatment, see Hans Robert Jauss, ed. , Die nicht mehr schonen Kiinste: Grenzphdnomene des Asthetischen, Poetik und Hermeneutik, vol. 3 (Munich, 1968).
16. See, e. g. , Henri Testelin, Sentiments desplus Habiles Peintres sur la Pratique de h Peinture et la Sculpture (Paris, 1696), pp. 39f.
17. See, e. g. , William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, written with a view of fixing the fluctuating Ideas of Taste (London, 1753; Oxford, 1955), pp. 326? . , 6iff. Hogarth makes the remarkable assumption that the principles of producing
beautiful works (for Hogarth, forms of drawing a line) are not applicable to ugly objects, so that a representation of such objects (although it is admissible) re- quires a deviation from these principles. The "waving line" of beauty is not suited for this purpose (pp. 67f. ). See also the distinction between the drawing (trait) of persons (noble/grossiere) according to their social "condition" in Tes- telin, Sentiments desplus Habiles Peintres, pp. 12,13,17,40.
18. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon, oder uber die Grenzen der Ma- lerei undPoesie (1766), quoted from Lessings Werke, vol. 3 (Leipzig-Vienna, n. d. ), pp. 1-194.
19. See Friedrich Schlegel, "Vom asthetischen Wert der griechischen Kom- modie," quoted from Werke in zwei B'dnden (Berlin, 1980), vol. 1, pp. 3-14, esp. p. 8, with emphasis on the differentiation and specialization of the code: "Nichts verdient Tadel in einem Kunstwerk als Vergehungen wider die Schon- heit und wider die Darstellung: das HalSliche und das Fehlerhafte. " Note how
368 Notes to Pages 191-96
Schlegel already distinguishes between the figural and the operative component of representation.
20.
See Niklas Luhmann, "1st Kunst codierbar? " in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufkldrung vol. 3 (Opladen, 1981), pp. 245-66.
21. Claiming that this is possible because of prior aesthetic experiences with artworks does litde to salvage the terminology. Especially for people, this claim is dubious. (In fact, the opposite might be so: experience with artworks helps recognize the beauty in ugly people. ) Besides, this subterfuge offers no clue as to what exactly enables works of art to serve as a paradigm of beauty.
22. For Kant, this seems to be evident: "Man kann uberhaupt Schonheit (Sie mag Natur- oder Kunstschonheit sein) den Ausdruck asthetischer Ideen nennen; nur dafi in der schonen Kunst diese Idee durch einen Begriff vom Objekt veran- lafit werden muS" (Kritik der Urteilskra. fi, ? 51). Yet soon thereafter, Kant talks about the beauty of die word, of gesture, and of tones (articulation, gesticula- tion, and modulation).
23. See, e. g. , Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry Concerning Beauty, Order, Har- mony, Design, Treatise I of his Inquiry into the Original ofOur Ideas ofBeauty and Virtue (1725; 4th ed. , 1738; critical ed. The Hague, 1973), ? 4, II, p. 55.
24. Schiller, e. g. , grounds the unity of the idea of beauty in the fact that there can be only one equilibrium of reality and form. See Uber die asthetische Erzie- hung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, quoted from Schiller, Samtliche
Werke, vol. 5 (Munich, 1967), p. 619. See also Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, Vorlesungen uber Asthetik, ed. Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse (Leipzig, 1829; rpt.
Darmstadt, 1973), esp. pp. 47ff.
25. As when August Wilhelm Schlegel writes in Die Kunstlehre (vol. 1 of the
Vorlesungen uber schbne Literatur undKunst): "Das Schone ist eine symbolische Darstellung des Unendlichen" (quoted from Kritische Schrifien undBriefe, vol. 2 [Stuttgart, 1963], p. 81).
26. See Jean Paul, Vorschule der Asthetik, quoted from Werke, vol. 5 (Munich, 1963), p. 43: "Schonheit sei, wie es einen Zirkel der Logik gibt, der Zirkel der Phantasie, weil der Kreis die reichste, einfachste, unerschopflichste, leichtfafi- lichste Figur ist; aber der wirkliche Zirkel ist ja selber eine Schonheit, und so wiirde die Definition (wie leider jede) ein logischer. "
27. Parsons employs this formulation in his theory of symbolically generalized media of exchange.
28. See Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974).
29. Michel Serres, Le Parasite (Paris, 1980).
30. SeeMaryDouglas,PurityandDanger:AnAnalysisofConceptsofPollution and Taboo (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970).
31. A remarkable example is the manuscript, available only as a copy, of The Codex Nuttall: A Picture ManuscriptfromAncient Mexico, ed. ZeliaNuttall (rpt.
Notes to Pages 196-99 369
New York, 1975). Examples of this sort illustrate the effects of evolution. Even though the representations all focus on the same thing, there is a diversification of species, a wealth of forms that depends on cultural tradition and is not im- mediately intelligible today.
32. This is expressed explicidy in the above-mentioned Codex Nuttall but also more indirecdy in the Greek world of heroes and demigods, whose significance rested primarily on the fact that the aristocracy traced its origins to them.
33. See Plato, Sophistes, 253 D-E.
34. Ibid. , D, the first lines.
35. The first example is techne tes grammatikes, ibid. , 253 A.
36. See Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplace (New
York, 1962; rpt. Westport, Conn. , 1974). Even in the seventeenth century, one still found statements such as: "reasons urging [passions, N. L. ] proceed from solid amplifications, amplifications are gathered from common places, common places fit for oratorical persuasion concern a part of Rhetorick called Invention. " See Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604; enlarged ed. London, 1630), p. 185.
37. See Boileau, who takes up the ancient distinction between amplification and proof in his translation of Longinus. For amplification ("ne sert qu'a esten- dre et a exagerer"), see Nicolas Boileau-Despr^aux, Traiti du Sublime, quoted from CEuvres (Paris, 1713), pp. 593-692, 63iff. According to Thomas Sprat, the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge made a deci- sive move "to reject all the amplifications, digressions and swellings of style" (Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London . . . [London, 1667; rpt. Lon- don, 1966], p. 113).
38. See Kant, Kritik der Urteilskra. fi, Intro. VI. (Not accidentally, this remark occurs in the context of investigations that aspire to an aesthetics. )
39. See Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poetry (1595; Lincoln, Nebr. , 1970), p. 12. Soon thereafter, diis seems to have become the general opinion. See, e. g. , Jonathan Richardson, A Discourse on the Dignity, Certainty, Pleasure, and Advan- tage of the Science ofa Connoisseur (1719), quoted from The Works (London, 1773; rpt. Hildesheim, 1969), pp. 241-346 (247ff. ).
40. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such publications occupied an important place, especially in the realm of painting. For examples, see Christo- foro Sorte, Osservazioni nella pittura (1580), quoted from Paola Barocchi, ed. ,
Trattati d'arte del cinquecento, vol. 1 (Bari, i960), pp. 271-301; or, more exten- sively, Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, Trattato dell'arte, della Pittura, Scultura ed ar- chitettura, 3 vols. (1584; Rome, 1844).
41. See Gotthard Giinther, "Die historische Kategorie des Neuen," in Giin- ther, Beitrage zur Grundlegung einer operationsfdhigen Dialektik (Hamburg, 1980), vol. 3, pp. 183-210.
42. On "ballads" and mystery stories motivated by executions, see esp. Len-
37Q Notes to Pages ipp-203
nardj. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (NewYork, 1983), pp. 42ff.
43. See Sidney, The Defense of Poetry, pp. i3ff.
44. Raising this issue assumed that the Aristotelian concept of nature was no longer intelligible and that the text of the Poetics was used merely for purposes of quotation and illustration.
45. See Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York, 1968), pp. i58ff. The context is the Italian discussion of classical and contemporary texts, which was later taken up in France and Eng- land. Torquato Tasso still emphasizes both intelligibility and astonishing novelty. An artwork that pleases "non sara piu chiara e piu distinta, ma molto piu portara
di novita e di meraviglia," in Discorsi dell'arte poetica e in particolare sopra ilpo- ema eroico, quoted from Tasso, Prosa (Milan, 1969), p. 388. One can already dis- cern the new tendency to foreground novelty.
46. See (Pseudo) Cicero, Ad Herennium, III, XXII, quoted from The Loeb Classical Library edition (Cambridge, Mass. , 1968), pp. 2i8ff. On subsequent de- velopments, see Paolo Rossi, "La costruzione delle immagini nei trattati di memoria artificiale del Rinascimento," in Umanesimo e simbolismo, Archivio di filosofia (1958), pp. 161-78; Cesare Vasoli, "Umanesimo e Simbologia nei primi scritti Lulliani e mnemotechnici del Bruno," ibid. , pp. 251-304. See also Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966).
47. This is indeed noticed and emphasized--even by Jonathan Richardson, A Discourse on the Dignity, p. 270: "nor can any man pronounce upon the pleasure of another"--despite the author's concern with the solid principles of a science of expertise as a precondition of pleasure.
48. O n the corresponding notion of time, see Chapter 3, section III, above.
49. Another, equally transitory solution might have been a sophisticated tech- nique for covering over the traces of the rules on which an artwork was based and subsequently deflecting the admiration to the successful deception. Rooted in the older rhetorical tradition, this notion of art was especially important for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Gerhard Schroder, Logos und List (Konigsstein/Ts. , 1985).
50. It is difficult to appreciate Hogarth's opinion that ugly objects defy repre- sentation in accordance with the recipe for beauty (curved lines): "The ugliness of the toad, the hug, the bear and the spider are totally void of this waving-line. " See Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, pp. 66f.
51. See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass. , 1981). Danto must have recourse to contrived examples in order to demonstrate complete indistinguishability. If an artist were to create two identical (indistinguishable) objects without marking one as the copy of the other, such a program could communicate only one thing: that this is the program.
Notes to Pages 203-8
37i
52. See the complex analysis of "without" as a condition for beauty in Jacques Derrick, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chi- cago, 1987), pp. 83ff.
53. The twentieth letter of Schiller, Briefe iiber die dsthetische Erziehung des Menschen, p. 634 n.
54. Schiller, "Notwendige Grenzen beim Gebrauch schoner Formen," ibid. , p. 688.
55. As we note in passing, this insight dissolves the traditional nexus between freedom and power in the political context and the nexus between freedom and hierarchy in the social context, which does not mean that cognition (in the sense of exploring a space for decisions) cannot be influenced by power or by hierar- chical positions.
56. Robert Glanville, Objekte (Berlin, 1988), claims that this is true for all ob- jects. This is not easy to see. It is remarkable, however, that this claim is made by an architect.
57. See, e. g. , Karl Philipp Moritz, "Die metaphysische Schonheitslinie," in Schriften zur Asthetik und Poetik (Tubingen, 1962), pp. 151-57 (157): "Das Ge- horige weglassen [or rather: das gehorige Weglassen, N. L. ], ist also eigentlich das wahre Wesen der Kunst, die mehr negativ, als positiv zu Werke gehen mufi, wenn sie gefallen soil. " One can trace this view into our own century, e. g. , to Mondrian.
58. Explicitly, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Die Kunstlehre (Pt. 1 of the lectures on literature and art), quoted from Kritische Schriften und Briefe, vol. 2 (Stutt- gart, 1963), p. 71. See also Chapter 4, section VII, above.
59. On the separation of these distinctions in a sociotheoretical context, see
also Niklas Luhmann, "Das Moderne der modernen Gesellschaft," in Luhmann, 2
Beobachtungen der Moderne (Opladen, 1992), pp. 11-49 ( 5ff-); trans, as "Moder- nity in Contemporary Society," in Luhmann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, Calif, 1998), pp. 1^21 (9ff.