No More Learning

This was how John Donne
55
dragged paradox out into the open--a paradox hidden
behind abstract
concepts of species and genre in the controversy between realists and nom-
inalists, in Ramism, and in a Platonism that was once again perceived as
modern. But Donne did not expect anyone to believe in such decep-
56
tions.
gumentative mode of theologians and philosophers. Unlike in traditional rhetoric, to which early modern art owed its awareness of tricks, the recip- ient of the message was not supposed to be deluded or remain in the dark. Rather, he was exposed to a shock, which rendered the deception trans- parent and elicited admiration (admiratio). The meaning of admiratio
The point was to reveal the deception, which now included the ar-
2 6 0 Self-Description
shifted toward irritation. In order to accomplish this goal, art had to know its audience, which soon gave rise to a discussion about whether art was
57
meant for the common people or for connoisseurs.
Did the concetto draw its force of conviction from erudition? The hu-
manism of the Renaissance tempts us to believe all too quickly that this was so. Several authors expressed themselves in ways that support this claim--and they seemed to be aware that expertise and a knowledge of lit-
58
erature did not depend on social origin.
"learned plagiary" (with reference to Ben Jonson).
the idiosyncrasies of "witty" allusions did not justify sacrificing redundan- cies embedded in the foundations of knowledge shared by all of Europe. Moreover, we must keep in mind that art depended on patronage and, hence, on contracts. Thematic models were frequently tied to specific ex- pectations, especially in the iconography of the visual arts. If the artist pos- sessed the necessary education (which became possible only in the wake of print), he could balance thematic faithfulness and artistic freedom in ways
60
that avoided potential conflicts with the client.
sixteenth century, these ties began to crumble, a trend that seemed to be supported by the fact that the artist took responsibility for his own con- cetto, turning it into a flash of wit. Against every stylistic rule of traditional rhetoric, one "conceived" the improbability of forms, the lack of resem- blance, exaggeration, artificiality, skill, and the confusion of signs. More- over, the notion ofconcetto implied that the flash of wit had no effect of its own accord. "Ogni concetto," writes Pellegrini, "e sempre necessariamente
61
sommistrato dall occorso di qualqu'altro concetto. "
supported and encouraged one another. They pointed to one another within a recursive network of implicit and explicit references, which served as a precondition for the observation of astonishing and striking appear- ances. And where an early humanistic erudition still claimed truth to be the entire realm of its awareness, one looked for another kind of fascina- tion within the mutually supporting network of concetti, namely, for an in- tellectual force that convinced by deviating from the familiar.
The notion of concettismo renders imitation {mimesis) problematic, with- out overcoming it right away. A contemporary text, written entirely in the
1
spirit of concettismo? states that art supplements nature with a second be-
ing, elevating it to a state of supremely beautiful perfection. But how could one know such perfection if not through nature? Consequently, the con- cept of nature dissolved into a multiplicity of meanings--depending on
Dryden still spoke positively of
59
However, tolerating
In the second half of the
Concetti mutually
Self-Description 261
63
what one wanted to get out of it.
tory, which must be taken into account if one wants to understand why imitation prevailed for so long. The beginnings of the concept in Plato suggest an act of liberation--a liberation from the idea that the invisible re- sides within the (cult) image. The notion of "residing in," which always carries religious connotations, was replaced by a notion of relation, which was subsequently burdened with the entire legacy of religion, and which
64
remained in need of interpretation.
the "simulacra" of the old world, and this is what earned the support of a theologically inspired religion--until it was taken entirely for granted and there was no further need to insist on it.
This tradition still assumed that things themselves preserved a memory of their origin and communicated this meaning to those who perceived them. But this notion conflicted with another assumption running paral- lel to the former, namely, that the artist himself was the origin of the art- work and that works of art preserved the memory of the artist. In Plato, this contradiction results in a devaluation of art. With the revalorization of art in early modernity, this solution became unacceptable. The demand that artworks had to be original shifted the emphasis entirely onto the (in- explicable) genius of the artist. A process of erosion began to affect all for- mer ties and eventually called into question the notion of imitation itself.
If we base this conceptual history on an analytical scheme that tran- scends it, then we realize that the concept of imitatio combines two com- ponents: one of resemblance (to what? ), and one of repeatability (redun- dancy). In one way or another, a sufficient degree of recognizability must be secured; the concept of imitatio accomplishes this by referring to an al- ready existing knowledge of the world. The assumption is that redun- dancy can be guaranteed by resemblance. After all, it is possible that, within this combination, the accent shifts away from resemblance and to- ward redundancy, especially when the reference of the demand for resem- blance becomes increasingly unclear--resemblance can refer to clerical tradition, to reality or to the ideas behind reality, to Being or to appear- ance, to what exists or to what does not exist but could exist or ought to exist. So long as repeatability is guaranteed, one can grant more room to nonresemblance. What matters, eventually, is nothing more than the re- peatability of observation, and this is guaranteed only by the manner in which the artwork is executed.
Long before the final break with imitation, one began to focus on artis-
The notion of imitatio has a long his-
Imitatio amounts to a liberation from
z6z Self-Description
tic skill. To the extent one becomes concerned with know-how (in the widest technical sense), the notion of art as imitatio loses its power to con- vince. With music, one was forced to relinquish the idea of cosmic imita- tion for the simple reason that the idea of the cosmos as a harmony of pro-
65
portions and numerical relationships began to wane.
for example, imitation in poetry could still mean imitation of the divine in-
66
spiration of what could or ought to be.
ations from the familiar became possible; they were sought out, legiti- mized, and made conspicuous. According to Aristotle, poetry must also
67
Poetry compares itself to painting and vice versa. The treatises on imitation typically contain contradictory state-
69
ments.
only a more demanding kind of imitation that strives to create an illusion
stimulate astonishment.
68
Imitation is too easy and therefore no longer deserves admiration;
can assert itself as art.
70 71 Instead of imitatio one emphasized inventio,
which no longer meant discovery but invention. By imitation, art elicits as-
tonishment and calls attention to itself. (Familiar and recognizable objects
appear in an unfamiliar context. ) Once art is fully differentiated, getting at-
tention becomes its own affair. O n the basis of the old doctrine of the art of
72
painting,
sort, by which the artist can refer more precisely to his artistic means. "At- tracting the spectators" with a successful imitation is henceforth only the
73
gain, the reward of the effort. The same venerable doctrine requires that
the means by which art accomplishes its effects remain hidden, that knowl- edge and know-how (and accordingly the roles of artist and observer) remain
7A
strictly separate. The function of imitation is subsequendy reduced to dif-
ferentiating between the observational modes of the artist and his audience;
but this step does not interfere with the prevailing notion that imitation is
75
the essence of art and the form of its truth --as if the essence of art were
to mediate between two different modes of observation, one pertaining to the artist, and the other to the audience.
What most restricted the meaning of imitation--apart from the neces- sity of displaying skill in order to receive attention--was perhaps the dis-
76
tinction between originality and imitation.
the meaning of imitation from its cosmic frame of reference and inte- grated it into a distinction that was valid only in art. The fate of imitation as a counterconcept to originality was sealed, despite initial attempts to salvage the old cosmological reference by distinguishing between imita- tion of nature and imitation of art.
Roger de Piles mentions evaluative criteria of a quite different
To Sir Philip Sidney,
At the same time, deliberate devi-
This distinction decoupled
Self-Description 263
Sacrificing imitation as the meaning and destiny of art must have been difficult, if not impossible, so long as cosmology still assumed an origin or creation of the world that coexisted with the present in the form of a de- scent. Creation accounted for the possibility of art and, at the same time,
77
art was bound to the creation.
had to be understood as an imitation of originally fixed determinations,
78
for example, as a Platonic recollection of ideas.
sister of knowledge, so to speak, a sister who was brought up more liber- ally. Both knowledge and art are "pleasing" to mankind because they re- present the origin and the essence of things. Kant, in his Third Critique, no longer thinks of this correlation as an imitation of products but in
79
terms of a parallel action, an analogy. Kant's contemporaries substituted
80
die subjective endowment of meaning for imitation.
were decoupled, even though it was difficult to think of the subject with- out the correlate of a world. One no longer assumed a common origin of subject and world, and yet the origin of artistic skill was still understood to be nature, as genius.
In romanticism, for die first time accounts of the function of art were
81
fully separated from the idea of imitation.
tion was retained. It reemerged repeatedly in the nineteenth century, but it sounded hollow once it was reduced to the function of emphasizing die fact that art operates in the world in a nonarbitrary manner. Imitation was now primarily understood as selection, and selection was understood to be an intensification, which permitted art to "imitate" the opposite of
82
what it found in the real world.
The competition with truth became ob-
Under these conditions, knowledge, too,
solete, and the expulsion of artists from the republic was no longer worth
any serious discussion. One spoke of a culture state [Kulturstaat]. Only
83
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the form in which art dis- played its accomplishments was called disegno. Disegno replaced the scho-
84
lastic notion of intentio, substituting for the immanent teleology of action
a concept that clearly distinguished between internal conception and ex- ternal execution while subsuming both aspects under the same concept.
Disegno, or "drawing" as it was later called, is one of the most interest- ing notions of the tradition, because it cannot be grasped in ontological terms. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the boundary of an object, just
85
traces remained of the old concern about the exclusive rights of poetry. The problem now was how to fill the empty space of its autonomy.
like the boundary between past and future, amounts to nothing.
The
Poetry was the younger
Art and nature
To be sure, the word imita-
264 Self-Description
boundary is neither internal nor external to the object. Disegno is the rup- ture of a continuum; it explodes the world with the consequence that,
86
henceforth, there is one side. It is nothing one can draw from nature. more value was placed on artistic activity, disegno was thought of as artists' know-how and was supplemented by other notions. This inevitably raised the issue of criteria for good or inferior disegno and opened up an arena for debate and historical development. In and of itself, disegno was nothing more than a special case of Spencer Brown's injunction: "draw a distinc- tion. " At the same time, it involved more than simply following this in- junction "somehow. " Ontological nothingness had to be transformed into demonstrable skill that required criteria. Only then did it open up a space in which art could establish itself as a recursive system that creates its own determinations and stands in for itself.
This step established a worldview characteristic of other functional sys-
tems as well, a worldview that combined universalization and specifica-
tion. From the perspective of art, everythingwas disegno. The notion was
fully backed by theology--after all, God himself created the world on the
87
basis of a disegno. Philosophy, the sciences, the art of government, even
theology, all had to rest on an underlying disegno if they wanted to be ef-
88
fective in the world.
view of the designed world, namely, the artes in the usual sense, the "dis-
89
egno humano pratico. "
cluded almost everything--because it was specifically tailored to art. It was capable of formulating high demands, which, however, could no longer be decided upon by vote.
As never before, this first wave of reflection on art brought home the point that visibility depends on drawing a boundary against the invisible. In assuming form, art includes what it excludes. Deception deserves ad- miration as deception, as arteficium. The mere fact that deception is pos- sible says something about the world. In this regard, the artistic focus on deception paralleled a simultaneous scientific interest in hallucinations-- but rather than aim at a reality behind deception (after all, this was the age of a revived skepticism), art sought to make transparent the worldly fact of deception. The machina mundiwas copied as machinatio. The orienta- tion toward species and genres was reduced to the absurd as such. By pro- claiming and demonstrating such positions, art asserted--itself. This was what the self-description of art had to put into words.
Once the stakes of art were defined in terms of acutezza--which de-
The theory of art, however, treated only a partial
This concept included everything--and ex-
As
Self-Description 2 6 5
served admiration for its own sake--one discovered what remained invisi-
ble on the observer's side--the inscrutability of genius, the no so cheot je
ne sais quoi, which, in the seventeenth century, soon degenerated into
90
a cliche.
Art taught how to observe oneself as an observer, and self-
observation hit upon the unfathomable. Art demanded a type of admira-
tion that could not fully explain or account for itself. Ambivalent emotional
references (admiration, astonishment, terror, pity) entered into the classical
1
topic of thaumastbnladmiratio? which, in Descartes, took on the meaning
of "deviation, novelty" and eventually came very close to what today one
2
might call irritation? This ambivalence concerned observation itself rather
than its motives and interests, and it was closely related to the fact that one could analyze existing works according to their manner of presentation (maniera) without having the slightest idea of how novelty came about as novelty and why only the new couldplease. What remained unaccounted for was not the object itself, but the operation that brought it about. The in- visible observer announced himself in the description of his product. At this
93 point, the notion of good (cultivated) taste launched its career.
The seventeenth century invited art (especially poetry, narrative, and the theater) to do what science could never dream of, namely, to undermine the distinction between being and nonbeing, or between being and appearance. This is evident in John Donne, in Cervantes, and in Shakespeare, to men- tion examples pertaining to each one of the above-mentioned genres. The
94
unity of the distinction henceforth appeared only as paradox.
had been cultivating the art of paradox for quite some time, thus making paradox available as a means of irritation. Art drew on this familiar practice, but it used paradox in less arbitrary ways, not just for the sake of displaying
95
the art of paradox as an effective skill. To be sure, art played with para-
dox--for example, by exploiting the linguistic feature of using "nihil," "nothing," "nobody," and so forth as a grammatical subject, as something active, capable of being indicated and determined. The artistic interest in paradox aimed beyond mere trickery toward establishing a terrain on which science could not operate, yet nonetheless yielded insights--a terrain where fetal deception (of the self and others) reigns, where love or a sincerity that comes across as naivete" prevails, or, more generally, where the world pre- sents itself as appearance, devoid of stability and without essences.
Thus art came to emphasize its own obscurity, novelty, and paradox. Disegno became blurred; its extension into the invisible, unworked realm of the imaginary space of art could only be guessed at. But what can one hold
Rhetoric
i66 Self-Description
onto there, except the work of art itself? The illusion it creates predisposes art to serve courtly entertainments and to supply courts with material-- for example, in the form of the transparent nonrealism of novels in the style of Amadis. Art brought cunning, deceit, and illusion onto the stage, and in this way it copied into itself what it practiced. In the same vein, one expected the hero, since he performed admirable deeds on stage and was admired within its reality, also to be admired by the spectator, even though the audience experienced the stage as an illusory world and its situations
96
as out of the ordinary. Admiratio was generated as its own means. difference between being and appearance, between everyday life and the extraordinary was replicated within the world of appearance. To invoke Spencer Brown once again, the distinction "reenters" the distinguished, a solution to the problem that logic had to accept or, at any rate, could not surpass logic. The observer has no way of knowing how he observes; this insight was at once brought home to him and kept from him.
Art thus established itself on one side of the distinction Being/Appear- ance or Truth/Beauty and left the other side to science. Both systems cod- ified their sides as true/false or as beautiful/ugly, but the prior distinction was therewith forgotten or treated as a thematic premise for scientific re- search or artistic representation. In the domain of art, the fiction of the distinction between fiction and reality was not recognized. This primary fiction functioned, rather, as an unapproachable law, a transcendental condition, an unconscious realm in which there was no distinction be-
97
tween fiction and reality, no doubling of reality. In brief, it functioned as
paradox.
Beautiful appearance had to legitimize itself against religion and sci-
ence. But this necessity entailed the opportunity to adapt the relationship
between art and politics to changing conditions. After the invention of
print, politics was practiced not only in the form of courtly service but
also by publishing one's opinions for an anonymous audience in anticipa-
tion of a public (political, according to contemporary understanding) ef-
98
fect. We think of such authors as Erasmus, Sir Thomas More, Seyssel,
and Quevedo or, more generally, of the use of ambivalent stylistic means and of fictional (difficult to "censor") representations of political views. The topos of the world as a stage made room for inventions in artistic form, while easing the relationship between art and politics. This might
explain the sudden transition to modern forms of theater in the second
99
half of the sixteenth century.
The
Self-Description 267
The sharp differentiation of truth and beauty (science and art) should not lead one to expect that the old unity of the good and the beautiful (of honestum et decorum, morality and art) would be given up as well. Until the sentimental turn in the theory of morality toward the end of the sev- enteenth century, we can observe distinct parallel developments in the sci- ence of social behavior (morals, science de mceurs) and aesthetics, both of which shared a distance from modern science and an interest in beautiful appearance. The smoothing of social relationships required retaining, in- deed revalorizing, the rhetorical tradition against the background of ques- tionable and inscrutable religious meanings, in which one continued nonetheless to believe. In antiquity, ethics, unlike art, was expected to ap-
100
ply the guiding distinction virtue/vice to its own procedures.
tinction increasingly lost importance. The production of beautiful ap- pearance was now treated as the production of a work to be judged only from the perspective of its result.
The decisive difference that impelled art toward autonomy appears to have been the difference between art and the rationalism of the new sci- ences. Religion tolerated this differentiation of art and science, though it had also to accept the differentiation of both domains from itself. Around the mid-seventeenth century, a specifically political aesthetic differentiated itself in the form of the courtly ceremony, which, for roughly one hun- dred years, made it possible to stage the political reputation of those in
101
power at a sensuous-aesthetic level
--and to free the general develop-
ment of the self-description of the art system for further differentiation.
Ceremony was the cornerstone of an order of representation, to which be-
longed not only bodies and stylized gestures but also gardens, buildings,
city planning, theater performances (as microtheater within the macro-
theater), historical and poetic texts, as well as other things. These objects
functioned as a kind of circle of references, designed to hold together
widely distributed codings and structural asymmetries, including those of
politics, in the form of a thoroughly planned order of signs. Ceremony in
this sense was not a sacred ritual; it was not taken for granted as a proven
102
103
Rather, one now distinguished between religious and secular Ceremony still tolerated the liberties of an ingenious artistic
tradition.
ceremony.
variation, precisely the kind of liberties which the art system now claimed as its own terrain. Ceremony was presented with an awareness of its arti-
ficiality and of its regional differences, and this was why one needed a spe-
104
cial science of ceremony
The self-understanding of art, however, was
This dis-
268 Self-Description
no longer affected by this perishing hybrid. What would later be called "aesthetics" continued to be guided by distinctions within "higher" forms of cognition. Kant still felt the need to emphasize the distinction between ideas of reason and aesthetic ideas, which absolves him from saying any more about aesthetic ideas than that they are representations of the imag-
105
ination produced without concepts.
No matter what subsequent conceptual efforts accomplished, in view of
such an opposition, the self-description of art was forced to abide at the level of nonformulations in the manner of je ne sais quoi. This must have felt like a thorn in the side at a time that was preparing for a new ratio- nalism keen on distinctions and for "enlightenment"--at a time, in other words, when individuals were no longer disciplined by class hierarchy, but instead by the supposition that they act rationally.
Ill
In seventeenth-century theoretical discussions of art, the dimension of time gained significance to the extent that guiding perspectives became more irrational and de-ontologized. On the one hand, this shift in em- phasis gave rise to a discussion of rank--whether ancient art was superior to modern art or vice versa. On the other hand, one demanded--as if the matter had already been settled--that art present an original creation, that it be new and astonishing in a pleasing manner.
Regarding technical matters of composition, artistic production re- mained bound to experience, to what one could learn in workshops and from models that one might occasionally ignore. The semantics of self- description glossed over such matters; it changed more rapidly and called attention to styles and stylistic changes so as to affect the art system. In or- der to organize and regulate the mediating role of self-description (we think of Colbert), one established academies that cultivated education and communication about art. Temporal schemata such as old/new, original/ copy were stabilized and eventually taken for granted.
In the wake of the invention of the printing press, one copied continu- ously, emphatically welcoming the opportunity to do so. In view of this trend, the simultaneous devaluation of the concept of copia was astonish- ing, especially since in the rhetorical tradition the concept carried the pos- itive connotation of mastery over a great number of occasionally applica- ble figures and commonplaces (topoi). Apparently, the shift in the meaning
Self-Description 2 6 9
of copia was related to the revalorization of novelty within the dimension
106
of time.
trend that facilitated the distribution of art, which was also received with enthusiasm and from which novelty, for its part, could benefit. One found oneself in the midst of a new era, in which new ideas were communicated faster and spread among a much larger audience.
There is no need to elaborate on the details of this discussion. We will restrict ourselves to a few points that become significant in the transition to the eighteenth century, particularly in the realm of art.
The criteria of novelty and originality asserted and strengthened the dif- ferentiation of the art system, especially in relation to the systems of reli- gion and politics, which, during the seventeenth century, remained rather hostile toward innovation, because they feared potential "unrest. " Science and education, however, distinguished themselves from art as well. These systems were interested in proliferating new ideas in a different manner, since their capacity for innovation depended on providing the greatest possible number of people with an opportunity to learn quickly about the new trends to which they had to adapt. In these disciplines, copying was the very condition for the increasing probability of innovation. This was different in art, where emphasis was on the originality of individual works.
In connection with these changes, the meaning of the miraculous, of the extraordinary and unusual, of meraviglia shifted as well: it was no longer considered a thematic quality of art but referred instead to the accom- plishment of the artist. The classical discussion of the role of astonishment, which dates back to Aristotle, came to a close and was transformed into a debate about criteria for evaluating artistic accomplishments. The issue was no longer one of claiming license for extravagant moves in relation to cosmic events; rather, it turned more or less on the question of how an artist could maintain control over variety and bring it to bear on the unity of the work. The miraculous and the new merged with what one expected from art in terms of the originality and tlie difficulty of its task.
In addition, the temporalization of requirements within the art system affected the possibility of fixing objective criteria of beauty and for doing justice to such criteria in evaluating works of art. For the next one hundred years, one argued about "taste" and expected from this concept an answer to these new uncertainties. From a sociostructural perspective, this turn was related to the fact that the upper classes had lost the certainty of their judgments and now had to demonstrate expertise or at least pretend to do
The value of novelty stood in an orthogonal relation to the
2 7 0 Self-Description
so--in Italy, this situation was a consequence of frequent turnovers in the papacy along with their favorites and clans; in France, it occurred as a re- sult of a court centralism that enforced fashion, and in England it resulted from the upheavals of a long civil war. Origo no longer indicated the eter- nal presence of the origin or the aftereffects of descent. Originality now testified to the unexpected and inexplicable emergence of the new. Things lost their memory, so to speak. Their primary function was no longer to remind the beholder of their own nature or their creator. Now, objects were referred to by signs, or they were fitted out with the name of an au- thor in order to remind the beholder of their origin in time. This hap- pened at a level of communication outside the image or the text. Under such conditions, the artist had to create or at least stylize himself as the ori- gin. In retrospect, he could be described as "genius.
" After all, originality was not a recipe that provided instructions for being original or for pro- ducing original works. Rather, we are dealing with a construct of second- order observation, which indirectly turned into a concern and a topic of art in its attempt to market itself as new and original.
The old system of connoisseurship was gradually replaced by a new sys- tem that combined a market-oriented mediation with expertise, and by a
107
critique that had been observing this trend all along.
Art had to publicly
assert itself both against critical judgment and against the market. In
search of criteria for judgment, the eighteenth-century reflection on art
clearly responded to a public interest in art and art criticism. In this con-
text, we should mention the discussion, initiated by Jonathan Richardson
in England, concerning objectivity and the recognition of the unique na-
108
ture of painting.
flected the effects of rhetoric. One praised the beautiful and the good, and presented in a negative light what one rejected. But the discussion failed to produce analyses of any depth, let alone a theoretically integrated ter- minology. Because of their didactic mission, the academies founded in the seventeenth century still taught familiar techniques, but one now found
109
this literature more in France than in Italy. One praised works that went
against the rules to represent their subject matter in a gracious, delightful, and agreeable manner. But it was not clear, as Coypel complained, how one could derive aesthetic criteria, if art was supposed to please and every-
110
body already knew what pleased him.
The emerging public sphere--
In its style of argumentation, this discussion still re-
made up of the noisy, inchoately expressive crowd that visited art exhibi-
111
tions
--was not specific to any one class, and that made it difficult for
Self-Description 2 7 1
the reflection on art to sort out its criteria, especially when it lacked a the- oretical guiding thread. It became virtually impossible to distinguish art criticism from the mere assertion of reputation.
In retrospect, the failure to determine objective criteria is often simpli- fied as a transition from objective to subjective (sensualist, pleasure- oriented) criteria. Upon closer inspection this view is untenable. Assum- ing subjective criteria without any grounding in reality makes no sense whatever. (Even Kant is forced to make concessions in this regard. ) But it is true that the inside/outside distinction as a two-sided form became in- creasingly significant to the individual and displaced previously privileged concepts of order, both in epistemology and in aesthetics. Only against this background does the continued significance of the pleasure/disgust distinction throughout the eighteenth century become intelligible. The distinction was anchored at the internal side of the inside/outside distinc- tion, but since it could not be controlled internally, it referred to external motives. The "inside" was elaborated as a counterconcept to the "outside"; it was fitted out with emotions, an imagination, and a desire for individ- ualization; it reigned over pleasure and disgust and was subject to associa- tions that remained to be explained by psychology--and this, in all prob- ability, was the major reason why the idea of imitation ran into such difficulties in the course of the century and had to be either detached from the notion of objective reproduction or abandoned altogether.
Since the inside/outside distinction remained in suspense, it generated further distinctions. The eighteenth century was overdetermined by mul- tiple distinctions--art and nature, the beautiful and the sublime, the sim- ple and the complex, the sensuous and the spiritual, the particular and the general. These distinctions yielded a variety of different hauls from the ocean of tradition, and yet they could not satisfy the self-description of an
112
art system that depended on new formations.
The available distinctions
made room for semantic experiments urgently in need of theoretical con-
solidation. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this need was ful-
filled by philosophy, which began to establish itself as an academic disci-
pline and was in a position to take on this task. One now spoke of a
"philosophy of art" (just as one speaks of a philosophy of history or a phi-
losophy of religion) in a new way, and tried to relate the self-description
of art to an object. The most important text in this regard--a text soon to
1 be outdone by its romantic successors, is Kant's Critique ofJudgment. TM
In the eighteenth century, reflection on the unity of the art system be-
2 7 2 Self-Description
came a problem for the first time. Until then, one spoke of a plurality of
artes and reflection focused on specific artistic genres, especially on poetry.
Concepts such as disegno, imitatio, or verisimilitudo suggested a wealth of
metaphors, analogies, and connections. As we indicated in Chapter 4,
however, there was no unambiguous relationship between internal and ex-
ternal boundaries and, hence, no art system to be reflected upon as a
114
Yet the heterogeneity of art did preserve a unity, because the
unity.
artist's skill was only another, practical kind of knowledge that differed
115
from the contemplative knowledge of theory.
change until the second half of the eighteenth century. Art began to dis-
116
tance itself not only from science but also from morality,
and the realm
that partook of the revalorization of a genial artistic imagination became
problematic as a unity. The old principle of imitation became untenable;
at least, one investigated other, more appropriate alternatives to imitation.
One realized that imitation established a difference toward what lay out-
side, that it amounted to a transgression of the system's boundary, and
that it made more sense to work with internal distinctions and inquire
into their unity. The goal was to demarcate a realm that pertained exclu-
sively to art (or perhaps to a view of nature trained in art). Starting with
117
Baumgarten, efforts of this sort were called "aesthetics. "
In order to appreciate this theoretical proposition, we must keep in mind that throughout the tradition, theory was distinguished, not from practice, but from a type of knowledge grounded in immediate sense im-
pressions. A theoros was someone who observed the festival as an envoy
and reported to those at home, or someone who returned from Delphi
with a message from the oracle. Theory was knowledge at a distance, so to
speak (the kind of knowledge that envoys could bring home from other
cities or countries, and to which they could testify in a credible man-
118
ner
up kind of knowledge; it stayed within reach and made no special de- mands on memory and communicative credibility. One could still count on this semantic disposition when the term aesthetics was introduced as a name for the theory of art. At first, aesthetics did not differentiate between the beautiful in nature and in art. It merely assigned a positive cognitive value to sense perceptions directed toward the beautiful. The object of such perceptions could be either the new concept of nature or art.
Contrary to what the concept suggests, aesthetics is not a theory of sense perception--such a theory would have to be carried out as a psy-
). Knowledge mediated by the senses, on the other hand, was a close-
This situation did not
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273
chology. Already in Baumgarten and more strongly after him--until Kant and beyond--conceptual efforts aimed at a theory of the judgment of sense perception, which paralleled similar attempts to formulate an ethics concerned with the judgment of moral conduct. Aesthetics picked up the thread which, during the first half of the century, had led to radical doubts about the possibility for justifying criteria, both in the realm of a publicly oriented art criticism and in the doctrine of taste. One was concerned, in other words, with linguistic procedures of justification, with issues of con- sensus, and with the possibility for distinguishing between high and low artistic quality, or at least with developing standards of quality. In addi- tion, one sought to supply directives that would allow individuals to par- ticipate in a meaningful way in what was happening in art (the viewpoint of perception, by contrast, suggested that individuals should know best what they perceive). No matter which idea might have been responsible for its name, aesthetics was carried out as a theory of art within philo- sophical reflection, and it occupied the place of the self-description of this
119
particular functional system.
Aesthetics, in treating the relationship between nature and art--which
has nothing to do with perception--found itself in a position where, after renouncing the notion of order as imitation, it was forced to take sides. One gained the impression that a change in leadership was taking place. The more the natural sciences followed the model of physics and reduced their representations of nature to mathematical equations, and the more they formulated these representations in terms of long-term processes which, like geological processes, reached back into prehistoric ages, the greater the need for "meaning. " The fine arts took on the task of a self-
120
reflection of sensibility. At the same time, the reflection upon sensibility
transcended the inferiority of an exclusively private sphere and exposed it to public view. This was the reason why one could speak of Bildung.
Art no longer sought to imitate nature (no matter in how idealized a form). However, art had to present its own order--especially in litera- ture--in such a way that the observer could draw inferences pertaining to his own life and to his own world of experience, whether this experience concerned the private or the public sphere. The individual turned into a subject; he became the constructor of his own history, a history with which he could identify; and the reader was offered an opportunity to try this out for himself. The force of nature was pitched against transcenden- tal philosophy, but it resided within the subject, together with transcen-
Self-Description
274
dental philosophy: as the experience that not everything obeys one's
121
thoughts and one's own will.
was reversed: one now exploited this difference in order to attribute to re- ality the kind of hardships one actually experienced, or one invoked it to
122
stimulate critique, if not reform.
Or one pursued the seemingly oppo-
The analogy between fiction and reality
site goal and projected onto nature experiences one derived from art and
its pleasurable consumption. This held equally for the "beautiful" and the
"sublime. " The beautiful in art became the measure of natural beauty.
Even after this transition was complete and had become familiar, it was
long before art dared to expand the primacy of its self-reference to the
point where hetero-reference was reduced to a play with its own, in-
evitable history, or with a material used exclusively by art itself. Eventually,
Hegel would restrict aesthetics to a "philosophy of art" that excluded nat-
123
--a move that necessitated alternative means of externaliza-
ural beauty
tion, for example, in the form of "Spirit. "
Apart from that, once beautiful appearance had been clearly demar- cated, one could again draw on science. With Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, the system of science had developed a reflection theory of its own, an early version of constructivism. Only momentary sensations and impressions counted as a source of reality. All subsequent identifications, including the identity of the observing self and its objects, were declared "fictions" or fa- miliar "habits. " It was no longer possible to justify inductive inferences with reference to die essence of tilings and their correspondence to innate ideas. This situation provided an opportunity for art to play its fictions off
124
against those adopted merely by habit
fundamental sociostructural changes were pressing toward new semantic formations. In view of the latest philosophical reflection, it was impossible for the reader not to question his identity and his habitual forms (one al- ready spoke of Bildung), neither of which were more than "inferential en- tities. " Starting in the Enlightenment, the new reflection on art adopted
125
the imperative to be "critical. "
ferred to cautious selection within a positive/negative schematism of good/ bad, true/false, or success/failure, or to its rhetorical presentation. At stake here was, rather, the imperative to examine critically, and in accordance with the spirit of the eighteenth century, the ties to one's own tradition. Tradition now appeared to be an externally imposed immaturity from which one sought to liberate oneself. The reflection on art was expected to mark its distance from its own tradition; art thereby participated in soci-
--especially in an era in which
This imperative, however, no longer re-
notion of taste displaced the notion of the intellect.
One insisted on
Self-Description
275
ety despite the autonomy of its self-image. In both society and art, the ap- peal to descent lost its legitimizing force. It was difficult to give up ab- solute criteria, even though one knew perfectly well that such criteria were incapable of settling controversies. As transcendental-theoretical or ideal- ist formulations indicated, abandoning the search for absolute criteria ap- peared almost impossible. Generally, however, one tended to be guided more by the distinction between rationality and tradition and by the de- mands of the age. One was in a position to risk autonomy, indeed, one was compelled to do so. Once liberated from tradition, die self-grounding of rationality was seamlessly transformed into another kind of interruption of self-reference, namely, into the self-reflection of the present moment
[Jetztzeit] and later into historical relativism.
Another transformation, which concerned the social component of
artistic judgment, took much longer to become effective. As early as the seventeenth century, the relationship between sign and signified had be- come ambiguous, at least in art. This ambiguity justified the function of the criterion of (good) taste. In the course of the seventeenth century, die
126
distinguishing objectively between beautiful and less beautiful works,
while assuming a subjective position in order to deal with the problem of
how one could know and judge such distinctions. Solving such problems
21
required fantasia, ingenio acuto edattivo, and memorial and the prime
128
concern was to eliminate unsuccessful works.
by exclusion without being able to determine beauty itself. The problem
129
was that the distinction could not be denied.
yond doubt, one could tolerate irrational criteria of judgment. Taste was supposed to be "delicate," which was incompatible with the idea of law. Taste judged intuitively.
In a dissolving stratificatory order, the relationship between code and
criteria could function as a means of social discrimination and prove itself
in this function; but (perhaps for this very reason? ) this solution remained
theoretically unsatisfactory. It led to the circular argument that taste could
be recognized only in an intuitively appropriate aesthetic judgment which,
in turn, must manifest itself in good taste. There was no possibility for dis-
tinguishing between first- and second-order observation. In order to in-
terrupt the circle, one incorporated time: the judgment of taste was in-
stantaneous and direct, whereas its adequacy became apparent only after
130
the fact. But this begged the question of how one went about recogniz-
One derived the beautiful
So long as the code was be-
276 Self-Description
ing the adequacy of judgment. For a while, the semantics of taste fed off the traditional notion that obscurity was a legitimate property of art, a no- tion we addressed in the previous section. But appealing to tradition fell short, once it became important that art distinguish itself from other func- tional systems by virtue of its own identity.
This was all the more true when the art system, in addressing the gen- eral public in a specific manner, had to leave room for the inclusion of everybody, just like any other functional system. The eighteenth century still distinguished between different styles, depending on whether they
131
were addressed to the general public or only to a few select individuals. 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.