No More Learning

80. See Yves Barel, Le paradoxe et le systeme: Essai sur le fantastique social, 2d ed. (Grenoble, 1989), pp. yif. , i8jf. , 302f.
81. See, e. g. , David Daube, "Dissent in Bible and Talmud," California Law Review 59 (1971): 784-94; or Jeffrey I. Roth, "The Justification for Controversy under Jewish Law," California Law Review 76 (1988): 338-87.
82. So in Jacques Derrida, "Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenol- ogy of Language," Margins ofPhilosophy, pp. 155-73, p. 172, n. 16. On the notion of "ichnography," see also Michel Serres, Genese (Paris, 1982), pp. 4off. and fre- quently throughout. One could cite further evidence for this basic idea, which underlies the critique of ontological metaphysics and its dependence on the premise of presence.
83. See Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration ofthe Commonplace: A Philoso- phy ofArt (Cambridge, Mass. , 1981).
84. Friedrich Schlegel emphasized the work's isolation as the essential step on which everything else depends: "Das Wesendichste sind die bestimmten Zwecke, die Absonderung, wodurch allein das Kunstwerk Umrifi erhalt und in sich selbst vollendet wird" {Gesprachtiberdie Poesie, pp. 157O.
85. According to the "law of crossing" in Spencer Brown, Laws ofForm, p. 12: "The value of a crossing made again is not the value of the crossing," and "for any boundary, to recross is not to cross. "
86. In response to questions raised by Georg Stanitzek at the Center for In- terdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld: "Was ist Kommunikation? Vorlage fur das Kolloquium 'Systemtheorie und Literaturwissenschaft'" (January 6-8, 1994).
87. David Roberts, "The Paradox of Form: Literature and Self-Reference," Poetics 21 (1992): 75-91.
88. See Theodor W Adorno, Asthetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7 (Frankfurt, 1970). See also Chapter 7, section V, below.
89. For more on this, see Niklas Luhmann, "Zeichen als Form," in Dirk Baecker, ed. , Probleme der Form (Frankfurt, 1993), pp. 45-69; trans, as "Sign as Form," in Baecker, ed. , Problems ofForm, trans. Michael Irmscher, with Leah Ed- wards (Stanford, Calif. , 1999), pp. 46-63.
90. See also Stanley Fish's critique of a "reception theory" which, despite its proclaimed emphasis on one side, has failed to disengage itself from its oppo- site--production--and is therefore unable to make distinctions. "Why No One's Afraid of Wolfgang Iser," in Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally:
Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford, 1989), pp. 68-86. Fish's critique falls short, however, because of its own reluc-
tance to make distinctions.
33Q
Notes to Pages 37-40
91. "We see now that thefirstdistinction, the mark, and the observer [whom we had assumed "outside," N. L. ] are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical" (Spencer Brown, Laws ofForm, p. 76). We are dealing here with the "reentry" of the form into the form and, in this sense, with a binding of the imaginary space that cannot be thematized.
92. There is no need to derive this--by no means novel--insight from the radicalism of Spencer Brown's formal calculus. Husserl analyzed how determina-
tion is gained through a variation of shades, and these analyses, too, ground a common precondition of experiencing and acting in the conditions of possibility
for determination. See especially ? 41 in Edmund Husserl, Idem zu einer reinen Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philosophie, vol. 1, Husserliana, vol. 3 (The Hague, 1950), pp. 9iff. See further his Erfahrung und Urteil: Untersuchun-
gen zur Genealogie der Logik (Hamburg, 1948), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenominolope de la perception (Paris, 1945), esp. his analyses of C&sanne on the search for identity, pp. 372ff. On the same topic, see Gerard Wormser, "Merleau- Ponty--Die Farbe und die Malerei," Selbstorganisation 4 (1993): 233-50.
93. For fitting formulations, see Lodovico Dolce, Dialogo della Pittura (1557), quoted from Paola Barocchi, ed. , Trattati d'arte del cinquecento, vol. 1 (Bari, i960), pp. 141-206 (170). For an overview, see Luigi Grassi, "I concetti di schizzo, abozzo, macchia, 'non finito' e la costruzione dell opera d'arte," in Studi di onore di Pietro Silva (Florence, 1957), pp. 97-106.
94. While this recognition does not put an end to the elaborate and rather confusing debate concerning a reader-oriented text theory, it does displace its problematic.
95. See Henri Focillon, The Life ofForms in Art (New York, 1992), p. 103.
96. According to a formulation of Z. W. Pylyshyn, "Computation and Cog- nition: Issues in the Foundation of Cognitive Science," Behavioral and Brain Sci- ences 3 (1980): 120; quoted from Klaus Fischer, "Die kognitive Konstitution sozialer Strukturen," Zeitschriftfur Soziologie 1% (1989): 16-34 (24)-
97. We are following the observation that perception requires the repression of neurophysiological information, a "forgetting" of the operative closure of the nervous system. See section I, above. Once again, this condition cannot be lifted; the work of art cannot be experienced as a mode of information processing within one's own brain--it remains "outside. " Instead, perception is transformed into a process of reflection, at least into more persistent viewing or more con- centrated listening.
98. Ciardi and Williams, How Does a Poem Mean? p. 6. See also Menke- Eggers, Die Souveranitat der Kunst, pp. 77ff.
99. In response to this question, Shaftesbury, among many others, suggests that the artist can be interested only in an audience that is critical, competent, and capable of judgment, or, as it was put in the eighteenth century, in an audi-
Notes to Pages 40-47
331
ence that possesses "taste. " See Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2d ed. (n. p. , 1714; rpt. Farnborough Hants. , 1968), vol. 1, pp. 243f. But this idea is by far too general and begs the question of how a work of art can be created, if not in view of rules, at least in anticipation
of taste. To respond adequately, one would have to say that the artwork must cre- ate generalized expectations in order to specify these expectations via informa- tion. After all, we are dealing neither with a declaration of norms nor with a functional equivalent of law or morality.
100. Usually this point is expressed--though not forcefully enough--with reference to the permanent need of significant artworks for interpretation.
101. This beginning before all differentiation is, upon closer inspection, no be- ginning at all--despite Hegel's formulation--but rather a. permanentprecondition
of all the operations of "Spirit. " On Hegel's mode of presentation, see, e. g. , the following excerpt from Hegel's Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophic der Religion I, p. 94: "Aber beim Anfang hat man noch nicht unterschiedene Bestimmungen, Eines
und ein Anderes: beim Anfang ist man nur beim Einen, nicht beim Anderen. "
102. On this problem, see also Niklas Luhmann, "Sthenographie und Euryal- istik," in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. , Paradoxien, Dis- sonanzen, Zusammenbruche: Situationen offener Epistemologie (Frankfurt, 1991), pp. 58-82. A logical concept of paradox is not at issue here. Logic, no matter how
it presents paradox (e. g. , as a necessary collapse of the distinction between lev-
els), considers paradox as something to be avoided. By contrast, we suggest that operations that observe, even those of logic, cannot avoid only unfolding para- doxes, that is, replacing them with distinctions.
103. Foroneofmanyexamples,seeGiovanniPaoloLomazzo,IdeadelTempio della Pittura (Milan, 1590), p. 43: the tempio itself cannot be seen. On "imitation" as the downscaled reproduction of a nature that cannot be grasped as a whole, see Moritz, Schriften zurAsthetik, p. 92.
104. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1974), p. 70.
105. See, e. g. , Antoine Coypel, Discours prononcez dans les conferences de L'Acadimie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Paris, 1721), p. 72.
106. Within an ontologically inspired frame of observation, one could only say that the boundary is "nothing. " See, e. g. , Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks (New York, n. d. ), pp. 61, 73f.
107. Perhaps we should abandon the word "object" altogether and return to the "thing" (in the sense of res). However, we retain the "object" since in English and French literature the reconstruction has concerned this word. See also, in German translation, Ranulph Glanville, Objekte (Berlin, 1988).
108. One would have to add that symbolization is necessary because the pre- supposed simultaneity of other consciousnesses blocks access to these conscious-
332
Notes to Pages 47-53
nesses. See especially George Herbert Mead, "The Social Self," Journal ofPhibs- ophy 10 (1913): 374-80; Mead, "A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Sym- bol," Journal ofPhilosophy 19 (1922): 157-63; and Mead, "The Genesis of the Self and Social Control," InternationalJournal of'Ethics 35 (1924/25): 251-77.
109. Serres, Genese, p. 146.
no. von Foerster, Observing Systems, pp. 273fF.
in. Another well-known example from religion is persons transported into
ecstasy, whose public obsession points to transcendent powers without there be-
ing a need for verbal communication. For biblical evidence, see Michael Welker, Gottes Geist: Theologie des Heiligen Geistes (Neukirchen-Vluyn, 1992), pp. 79ff.
112. Serres, Genese.
113. This conceptual choice requires a distinction between meaning and infor- mation. See Donald W. MacKay, Information, Mechanism and Meaning (Cam- bridge, Mass. , 1969).
114. Umberto Eco, too, in Opera aperta, e. g. , p. 119, considers the increase in information to be a general poetic principle; but not until today does art explic- itly aim at this principle and press it to its limits. According to Eco, artworks should therefore remain "open" to further information.
115. On this concept, see Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco Varela, The
Tree ofKnowledge: The Biological Roots ofHuman Understanding (Boston, 1992),
pp. 7sff. , i8iff.
116. See Alfred Gierer, Die Physik, das Leben unddie Seek (Munich, 1985), esp.
pp. mff.
117. For a semiotic theory, see, e. g. , Menke-Eggers, Die Souverdnitat der Kunst,
pp. 6iff. Aesthetic experience defines its own signifieds as significant.
118. Disregarding this distinction regresses to the epoch of the cult of genius, which--although it formulated for the first time the radical temporality of art as opposed to its mere historicity--went too far in inferring the rank of an artwork from its unexpected appearance and the genius of the artist from the suddenness
of his insights. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Plotzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des asthetis- chen Scheins (Frankfurt, 1981).
119. Critics might suspect that this is stilted nonsense: How is a tautology (art communicates by means of artworks) supposed to sound less trivial when backed up by theory?
Precisely this must be shown. The formulation may prove fruitful to interpretation, or it may be capable of synthesizing insights (of a historical and systematic nature) that would otherwise remain isolated.
120. For a special perspective on this question, see Niklas Luhmann, "Das Kunstwerk und die Selbstreproduktion der Kunst," in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. , Stil: Geschichten undFunktionen eines kulturwissen- schaftlichen Diskurselements (Frankfurt, 1986), pp. 620-72.
121. The notion of clearly defined artistic genres has become increasingly prob-
Notes to Pages 54-58
333
lematic. Genres do not constitute autopoietic systems in their own right, but they obviously facilitate the autopoiesis of art by making possible an observing that is restricted and trained, including the recognition of astonishing but intelligible de- viations from given formal models. On the integration of genre distinctions--lit- erature feeds off literature, representing nothing beyond itself--see, e. g. , Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland, 1973).
? 2
1. This differs from Fichte: the observer does not begin by positing himself.
2. The question whether such observers "exist" and who they are must be left to sociology.
3. SeeChapter1,sectionIX.
4. See Humberto R. Maturana, who limits his analyses to living systems:
Erkennen: Die Organisation und Verkorperung von Wirklichkeit: Ausgewdhlte Ar- beiten zur biologischen Epistemologie (Braunschweig, 1982), pp. 34, i49f.
5. Negations are thus no longer primary operations as in classical logic. We shall return to this point when discussing modern art--an art that negates art. See Chapter 4, section II, and Chapter 7, section V, below.
6. As does Novalis in his Fichte-Studien: "Wie wird das absolute Ich ein em- pirisches Ich? " (quoted from Novalis: Werke, Tagebiicher undBriefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Hans-Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, vol. 2 [Darmstadt, 1978], p. 31)-
7. See the corresponding propositions in George Spencer Brown, Laws of Form (1969; rpt. New York, 1979), p. 105.
8. As insiders will notice, we are thinking of Paul de Man.
9. See Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), p. 66.
10. A selection of the above-mentioned literature includes: Heinz von Foer-
ster, Observing Systems (Seaside, Calif, 1981); Humberto R. Maturana, Erkennen; Maturana, "The Biological Foundation of Self Consciousness and the Physical Domain of Existence," in Niklas Luhmann et al. , Beobachter: Konvergenz der Erkenntnistheorien? (Munich, 1990), pp. 47-117; Dean MacCannell and Juliet F. MacCannell, The Time of the Sign: A Semiotic Interpretation ofModern Culture (Bloomington, Ind. , 1982); Spencer Brown, Laws ofForm, Gotthard Gunther, Beitrage zur Grundlegung einer operationsfahigen Dialektik, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1976-1980); Rino Genovese, Carla Benedetti, and Paolo Garbolino, Modi diAt-
tribuzione: Filosofia e teoria dei sistemi (Naples, 1989); George W. Stocking Jr. ,
ed. , Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Field Work (Madison, Wis. , 1983); Ranulph Glanville, Objekte (Berlin 1988); Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der
334
Notes to Pages 59-64
Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1990), esp. pp. 68ff. ; and the entire literature on artificial intelligence. For an overview, see also Francisco Varela, Kognitionswissenschafi-- Kognitionstechnik: Eine Skizze aktueller Perspektiven (Frankfurt, 1990).
11. In the sense of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, eds. , Ma- terialities of Communication, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, Calif. , 1994). 12. See also the strange active/passive ambiguity of "impression" in Raymond
Roussel, and on this Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches pour un setnanalyse (Paris, 1969), pp. 2i6ff. (and also pp. i8iff).
13. For a different account, see Glanville, Objekte.
14. See also Louis H. Kauffman, "Self-Reference and Recursive Forms," Jour- nal ofSocial and Biological Structures 10 (1987): 53-72.
15. See the distinction between natural and artificial restrictions in Lars Lof- gren, "Some Foundational Views on General Systems and the Hempel Paradox," InternationalJournal of General Systems 4 (1978): 243-53 (244). This distinction must be accepted as a distinction, since there is no further observer who could say whether something is "in truth" natural or artificial, necessary or contingent.
16. See Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construc- tion ofScientific Facts (Beverly Hills, Calif. , 1979); Karin Knorr-Cetina, DieFabri- kation von Erkenntnis: Zur Anthropologic der Naturwissenschafien (Frankfurt, 1984).
17. On the history of specialization that led to the production of "papers" and
on the corresponding irrelevance of the presence of other observers in science,
see Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre andActivity ofthe Experimental Article in Science (Madison, Wis. , 1988). On the cycle of exaggera- tion and criticism and the increasing "sensitivity to mistakes" in the wake of these developments, see Michael Mulkay and G. Nigel Gilbert, "Accounting for Error: How Scientists Construct Their Social World When They Account for Correct and Incorrect Belief," Sociology 16 (1982): 165-83.
18. See Rudolf Stichweh, "Die Autopoiesis der Wissenschaft," in Dirk Baecker et al. , eds. , Theorie als Passion (Frankfurt, 1987), pp. 447-81 (459ff. ).
19. See Dirk Baecker, Information und Risiko in der Marktwirtschaft (Frank- furt, 1988), esp. pp. i98ff.
20. Simpler societies organize their economies along constant prices that are independent of scarcity or abundance, or supply and demand, because for a first- order observer this kind of information is too difficult and too risky to obtain. See Elisabeth Cashdan, "Information Costs and Customary Prices," in Cashdan, ed. , Risk and Uncertainty in Tribal and Peasant Societies (Boulder, 1990), pp. 259-78.
21. See Machiavelli, Discorsi II, Chap. 24 and Principe, Chap. 20, quoted from Opere, 7th ed. (Milan, 1976), pp. 288 and no, respectively.
22. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes (1807), quoted from the edition by Jo- hannes Hoffmeister, 4th ed. (Leipzig, 1937), pp. i4iff.
23. This, of course, is not Hegel's terminology.
Notes to Pages 6$-68
335
24. See Niklas Luhmann, "Gesellschaftliche Komplexitat und offentliche Mei-
nung," in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufkldrung, vol. 5 (Opladen, 1990), pp. 170-82;
Luhmann, "Die Beobachtung der Beobachter im politischen System: Zur Theo-
rie der offentlichen Meinung," in Jiirgen Willke, ed. , Offentliche Meinung: Theo-
rien, Methoden, Befunde. Beitrage zu Ehren von Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (Frei- _
burg, 1992), pp. 77 86.
25. See the two essays "Sozialsystem Familie" and "Gliick und Ungliick der
Kommunikation in Familien: Zur Genese von Pathologien," in Niklas Luh-
mann, Soziologische Aufkldrung, vol. 5, pp. i96ff. , 2i8ff. On communication rou- tines, see also Alois Hahn, "Konsensusfiktionen in Kleingruppen: Dargestellt am Beispiel von jungen Ehen," in Friedhelm Neidhardt, ed. , Gruppensoziologie: Per- spektiven und Materialien. Kolner Zeitschriftfur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, special issue 15 (Opladen, 1983), pp. 210-33.
26. In Spencer Brown, Laws ofForm, we read: "Call the space cloven by any distinction, together with the entire content of the space, the form of the dis- tinction. " It is crucial that the concept of form embrace the entire realm ("the en- tire content of the space") occupied by a distinction. Form refers not just to one side, to a shape as such, or merely to an object or a system. Rather, the indication of a system makes the distinction between system and environment possible.
27. For a pertinent critique of this notion, see Martin Heidegger, "Der Ur- sprung des Kunstwerks," in Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt, 1950), pp. 7-68.
28. See also Niklas Luhmann, "Kontingenz als Eigenwert der modernen Gesellschaft," in Luhmann, Beobachtungen der Moderne (Opladen, 1992), pp. 93-128; trans, as "Contingency as Modern Society's Defining Attribute," in Luh- mann, Observations on Modernity, trans. William Whobrey (Stanford, Calif. , 1998), pp. 44-62.
29. On the parallel problem of pedagogical intent, see Niklas Luhmann and Eberhard Schnorr, eds. , Zwischen Absicht und Person: Fragen an die Padagogik (Frankfurt, 1972).
30. In the tradition, novus initially means simply deviation (see Johannes Sporl, "Das Alte und das Neue im Mittelalter: Studien zum Problem des mitte- lalterlichen Fortschrittsbewufitseins," Historisches Jahrbuch 50 [1930]: 297-341; 498-524; Walter Freund, Modernus und andere Zeitbegriffe des Mittelalters [Co- logne, 1957]). Indeed, novelty without factual discontinuity is unrecognizable. The shift of emphasis toward a temporal dimension does not occur until the be- ginning of modernity. At first, the emphasis on novelty is apparently motivated
by an adherence to the principle of imitation--as codified in Aristotle's Poetics-- which, at the same time, sought to deflect the suspicion of slavish imitation. In Sir Philip Sydney, The Defense ofPoetry (1595; Lincoln, Nebr. , 1970), p. 9, we read, e. g. , "Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, does grow in effect into another nature in
336 Notes to Pages 69-ji
making things either better than nature brings forth or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, the demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like. " The issue here is evidendy still novelty of deviation rather than historical novelty.
31. See Charles Sterling, StillLife PaintingfromAntiquity to the Twentieth Cen- tury, 2d ed. (New York, 1981).
32. On the history of the concept, see Wolfgang Binder, "'Genufi' in Dichtung
und Philosophic des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts," rpt. in Binder, Aufichliisse: Studien zur deutschen Literatur (Zurich, 1976), pp. 7-33; and G. Biller and R. Meyer, "GenuK," Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophic, vol. 3 (Stuttgart, 1974), columns 316-22. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the concept maintained a dis-
tinct relationship with possession ("jouissance, jouir, c'est connoitre, ^prouver, sen-
tir les avantages de posseder," we read in the Encyclopidie ou Dictionnaire raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers, vol. 8 [Neufchastel, 1765], p. 889). At the same time, however, the relationship to the present is emphasized, and above all the heightening of experience through reflexivity that makes possible the enjoyment
of pain as well as self-enjoyment. There is raw pleasure and refined pleasure, sen-
suous pleasure and moral or spiritual pleasure. On the scale of social values, the concept is subject to variation. What is interpreted in the text as second-order ob- servation was accomplished in those days via a distance from oneself and from the world. See, e. g. , anonymous (Marquis de Caraccioli), Lajouissance de soi-meme (rpt. Utrecht-Amsterdam, 1759). (The inference from the incommunicability of
the self to the necessity of self-enjoyment is remarkable [ibid. , p. 3]. )
p . There is no lack of attempts to go beyond the juxtaposition of perspec-
tives. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass. , 1981), invites us to consider that "the spectator stands to
artist as reader to writer in a kind of spontaneous collaboration. In terms of the
logic of artistic identification, simply to identify one element imposes a whole set
of other identifications which stand or fall with it. The whole thing moves at once" (p. 119; author's emphasis). This formulation only requires a better theoretical contextualization of its words and concepts.
34. I deliberately do not say: intention.
35. One can find a similar view in Arthur C. Danto, although he works with the dangerous concept of interpretation: "The Appreciation and Interpretation
of Works of Art," in Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement ofArt (New York, 1986), pp. 23-46. Interpretation, in the sense of the distinction between artworks and other objects, is constitutive for the creation of the work of art.