No More Learning

Dialectics suggests that a process driven by negation must eventually cul- minate in affirmation. Proving this point, however, turned out to be diffi- cult. We think of Adorno's efforts to find affirmation in Schonberg (but not in Stravinsky). One stereotypically invokes "capitalism" and "bourgeois society. " But such cross-references no longer succeed in analytical terms, and there is no concept of society that could explain why art runs into
problems with its own autonomy (even though everyone seems to concur
191
that it does). But if dialectics--after the "dialectic of Enlightenment"
--
Self-Description 2 9 1
no longer offers any prospects for the future, are we supposed to infer that this holds for art and society as well? Or, given the improbability of this proposition, wouldn't it make more sense to sacrifice dialectics? For this reason (and without referring to other findings) we break with this loosely Marxist mode of argumentation and regard the social modernity of art, like that of other functional systems, to be a matter of system autonomy, which then becomes the theme of self-descriptions.
Self-descriptions of the system within the system, however, do not re- produce the system's operations, only the ideas that guide these opera- tions. This process preserves the differentiation of specific activities of re- flection. The theory of art is increasingly applied within works themselves, until the avant-garde eventually seizes the political idea of experimenting with the entire range of the concept of art, if not with the universality of the realm of artistic competence as such. What used to be ideal'in the idea of art is replaced by a notion of universality that is independent of objects and determined internally.
The possibilities for escaping into the exotic or the trivial that used to
be available no longer suffice; one now transgresses their boundaries.
Everything mysterious is expelled from art--unless it elicits a shock ef-
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fect
into the empty stage, the white sheet of paper,
tones resonate. This displacement focuses awareness once again on "writ- ing"--not on writing as distinct from what it signifies, but on what writ- ing, understood as graph, fissure, design, or contour, creates and leaves
194
unnoticed as its presupposed other.
and are called upon to represent their relationship to what cannot be sig- nified--they stand as "pure" forms that no longer signify any content, but function only as difference. Signs become symbols that want to be some- thing they cannot be, symbols for the reentry of the form into the form. Picasso is considered the representative painter of this century, and for good reason; the unity of his work can no longer be comprehended in terms of form or style, but only in terms of an irony which he probes in all conceivable forms and styles.
Abstraction toward pure form is merely an indication that everything is possible. The realm of the permissible and of the artistically possible keeps growing, so long as what saturates this realm can still be observed as a symbol for the fact that the only thing excluded is exclusion itself. Theory becomes the agency of permission. Its general question becomes: What
--and displaced into the unmarked space where signs are engraved
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or the silence that makes
Signs once again turn into symbols
2 9 2 Self-Description
does it mean for the art system to contain its own descriptions, and how can this fact be rendered observable in a work of art?
However, a self-description of the system can also contain a self-negation of the system--for example, as a negation of every boundary and every in- ternal determination, as a negation of the obligation to follow traditional
195
models, or as a negation of the system's future.
negation is a positive operation (here, of communication), which depends on a meaning recursively secured within an actually existing autopoietic system. Self-negation is therefore possible only when the system that exe- cutes the negation operates autopoietically, when it disposes over a mem- ory and projects a future--if only in the empty formula of "I have no idea how to go on. "
Romantic "criticism" wanted to exhaust the most perfect possibilities and complete the artwork in its unattainable perfection. Now, the chal- lenge was to locate the negation of the system within the system, to per- fect the system's autonomy, because autonomy, in its most radical sense, can be thought only in terms of the inclusion of self-negation into the sys- tem (or, phrased differently, in terms of the exclusion of hetero-negation). As a result of this development--one already "historical" from today's standpoint--one can see that art can deal with limitations in two ways: it can reject limitations as repression and try to overcome them, or it can ac- cept limitations as necessary working conditions and subsequently treat such conditions as substitutable.
Based on a fundamental notion of negativity, Adorno's aesthetics offers
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two alternative versions of negativity:
jecting any external influence, and a sociocritical version that reflects on the contradiction that art realizes itself positively in society while assum- ing a negative (critical) position vis-a-vis society. It is difficult to see which common notion of negativity could reconcile these two versions and bring about their dialectical synthesis. Earlier we raised the question of
197
whether one can assume negation at the operative level,
there must be a prelogical notion of distinction, which requires the oper- ation of negation only at the level of self-description, that is, the level where self-reference and hetero-reference are distinguished.
At any rate, one can see how modern art, in its more recent develop- ments, transforms its relationship into an extra-artistic reality in a manner that does not depend on negation. Initial experiments of this sort were lim- ited; one incorporated chance into the work of art, one allowed raw ma-
In each of these cases,
a purist version that insists on re-
or whether
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terials to appear in the work, or blanks that refer to a future continuation of the work in interpretation. Suggestions of this sort were supported by the work itself; they were able to connect to formal models and therefore
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appeared as forms.
art as such into question, when, inspired by Godel, it tries to appear as a work of art outside of the system art, or when it seeks to accomplish a reentry of nonart into art in the sense of Spencer Brown and, in so doing, generates an endless oscillation between inside and outside in an imagi-
199
nary realm outside of the calculus of forms
intended meaning of the work and can be observed accordingly--then the art-system has definitely arrived at a new level of self-description, a level characterized by the introduction of self-negation into the system (and is no longer limited to the calculability of individual forms).
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The mathematics of reentry leads to an "unobservable indeterminacy," not because it is codetermined by an incalculable environment (by inde- pendent variables), but because it is set up in a self-determining manner. Any further determination must be left to the workings of time. But the autopoiesis of the system has no place for an ultimate operation that would negate the system as a whole, because all operations are conceived from the perspective of reproduction. As a form of practicing autonomy, the self- negation of the system is only one operation among others, an attempt to press the system to its limits so as to include the excluded, or to surpass with its negativity everything that preceded it, or to allow every possible nonartistic reality to reenter the realm of art. There are many attempts of this sort. One provokes one's audience by making it extremely unlikely that art will be noticed as art, for example. One etches a sign into a park bench in the expectation (hope? ) that no one will recognize its artistic quality, but that one could prove it in court should the need arise. One might "declare" objects of utility to be works of art (Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol) or inscribe different meanings into works of art that are indistinguishable at
201
However, when a work of art is determined to call
the level of perception.
romanticism, but are presented as unreadable
attention to the fact that writing is all that matters. In "happenings," the observable content is reduced to a minimum and presented to a group of randomly selected passers-by, just to demonstrate that this is still art. Hope is invested in the negative provocation of a hopelessly random consensus of art-specific observations.
But how is this possible socially if not on the basis of autonomy? Any
--when all this makes up the
Narratives no longer invoke the incredible, as in
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--perhaps in order to call
2 9 4 Self-Description
attempt of this sort presupposes the autonomy of art and seeks to realize
autonomy in a limiting case. This is true even when autonomy is prac-
ticed as a renunciation of autonomy--when one seeks to reconcile art and
life or attempts to commercialize art to the point where it no longer
claims any specifically artistic form, where its artistic quality is reduced to
the fact that it wants to abandon itself and this is how it articulates itself
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as art.
Werner Hofmann speaks of the "art of artlessness" and explains
this trend with reference to an increasing "unlearning" of art.
204
The rea-
son why a work of art is a work of art to begin with--apart from the mere
claim--remains a mystery, as if this mystery were meant to symbolize the
unobservability of the world. This is why art is "in need of commentary"
(Gehlen), why it depends on a supplementary linguistic mediation of its
205
meaning. "Reflection paraphrases production," writes Hofmann,
one might as well claim the opposite by saying that the work of art only paraphrases reflection.
However, negating art as art is not the sole concern of modern art. Im- portant variants take issue, not with the art system, but with the system of society. Art of this sort no longer offers representations or oppositional Utopias, nor is it concerned with a social critique that feeds on ideologies. The less one is convinced that a work's novelty can be located on an as- cending line surpassing previous art in quality, the more the idea of plot- ting novelty as a provocation of society suggests itself. Given that provo- cation cannot be repeated, it is necessary to come up with ever new provocations, until society grows accustomed to this tactic and ceases to respond. This kind of art, too, is no longer possible. If the classics of provocation were still alive today, they would no longer provoke.
Significant opportunities for expression can be understood on the basis
of the distinction between inclusion and exclusion. This distinction helps
us see that artworks symbolize (the unity of) difference--especially by
aesthetically reintegrating the excluded into the realm of inclusion. One
significant example is the use of garbage and scraps in the composition of
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artworks.
Another version is the cultivation of an unkempt appearance,
which provokes exclusion in order to make the point that exclusion does
not matter. Even the aesthetics of slowness, of the easy, laid-back motor-
cycle ride, is meant to characterize a society that makes inclusion contin-
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gent upon speed.
tinction between artistic types--the painter, the sculptor, the poet, or the musician--in the figure of the "artist" as such, for whom one can no
Along the same lines, we find a blurring of the dis-
but
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longer specify criteria of inclusion. The "artist as such" celebrates inclusion as deliberate self-exclusion, as a "neither-nor" in relation to every artistic medium. All of these strategies are meant not to negate art but rather to characterize society as a system that contains its own negation by repro- ducing inclusion and exclusion through its own operations. Is this art? The question is posed by the artwork itself and turns "art" into an auxil- iary concept for understanding its presentation. Art confronts the "unre- solvable indeterminacy" of a mathematical reentry, an indeterminacy that points to the end of the calculus and leaves the future to the future.
In music, we find a similar decision, which goes far beyond rejecting the limitations of the tonal system. It focuses entirely on the tone that is actualized at any given moment, thereby destroying any possibility for memory and expectation of the sort provided by melody. Only the pre- sent counts, and each new present must come as a surprise. However, since sequentially formed identities require temporally recursive network- ings, such a program ends up canceling the distinction between music and nonmusic. The form that is supposed to accomplish this goal is the unex- pected noise, a noise that announces its unexpected occurrence only against a background of silence. Even here, one still needs authorization-- by John Cage, for example--to back up the claim that it is indeed music.
This development runs the risk of cutting off communication between art and its audience. The audience becomes an invention, a phantasm of the artist, to borrow a phrase from a publication of the Art & Language
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Group. The audience, in other words, becomes part of the artwork. Earlier one could assume that the artwork signals its own status as a work of art. External frame conditions--such as the stage and the curtain in the theater, or the frame of a painting--have always been used to demarcate art and, at the same time, to indicate "this is art," independently of the
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aesthetic quality of any particular work.
the question of quality arise. Most recent modern art experiments with, eliminating any art-internal signals. As a result, art depends all the morel on frames and external signals to indicate that an object not recognizable as art is nonetheless meant to be seen as art. Or one concerns oneself, like the Art & Language Group, with the "redescription" of styles and works,
210
which are produced solely in view of further "redescriptions. "
no longer any reason to stop production. Autopoiesis turns into form,iand only the lack of fantasy and imagination can lead to destructive external effects. When this happens, one can talk endlessly about it, which means
Only within such frames could
jThere is
;
296 Self-Description
that this talk, too, must eventually come to an end, like a fashion that be- comes obsolete when people embrace a new one. However, if the work of art no longer wants to convince as a work of art, but is merely marked as such, some observers might refuse to see it as art, or they might have re- course to the embarrassing relicts of conventional aesthetic criteria.
Perhaps the possibilities for reintegrating the negation of the system into the system are by now exhausted as well. And perhaps there is still room for an inspiration that can overcome even this impasse. At any rate, it has become possible to recognize and describe the inclusion of negation as a strategy. Art is no longer critical, nor is it concerned with theory or with justified judgments at a level of reflection that maintains an observ- ing distance from what goes on in art. Academic aesthetics is dead; it has nothing to say to art (if one asks the artists). Phenomena (of whatever kind) no longer matter; what counts is performative contradiction, a "de- construction" that turns back upon itself. One looks for ways of staging art at the level of operations that present themselves to observation as
works of art--this claim remains an integral part of the self-negation of art. Even in "the age of technical reproduction," works of art distinguish themselves from other artifacts in that they do not have to prove them-
211
selves outside of art.
they can be innovative or disagree without reservation, the only risk being that they might no longer be understood. Without having to take respon- sibility for further consequences, works of art can focus on irritating the observer. And yet, even the most radical gesture, the most alienating "in- stallation," must submit to the necessity of concretion; a babble of ideas won't do. Something must be "presented," or else the other locations within the system remain beyond reach. Works of art are also logical arti- facts, to the extent that they solve a logically insoluble paradox, namely, the paradox of instituting in a singular, concrete object their belonging to
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the genre of art and to the system of art.
does not rely on the communication of opinions that goes on among the elite who reflect on the system. He simply does what he does. The point is not to declare the end of art on the basis of convincing arguments, thereby setting an end to art. The self-negation of art is realized at the level of autopoietic operations in the form of art, so that art can continue. The much debated "end of art" does not necessarily imply stagnation; art can continue to move along--if not as a river, perhaps as an ocean. The end of art, the impossibility of art, the final sellout of all possible forms as-
This is why they can live out their originality, why
For good reasons, the artist
leads to the discovery of the compulsion to repeat.
So long as one still
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sumes a form that claims to be self-description and artwork at once, and this secures the reproduction of art as a perfectly autonomous system, a system that includes its own negation.
The growing pressure to manifest originality as deviation eventually
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believed in taste, one had to make sure that originality could be recog-
nized. Even after the forefront of discussion had shifted to the legitimiza-
tion of technical reproduction, no distinct criteria for originality came
forth. In one way or another, artworks cannot and would not exclude rep-
etition; repetition plays a role in the repeated encounter with an artwork,
in a play's repeated performance, or in the notion of a copy that remains
true to the original! Indeed, works of art are created as "potential multi-
214
pliers. "
peat himself in ever new variations on his original idea. (For awhile, this notion continues to invest the code original/copy with corresponding pos- itive and negative values. But eventually one must ask oneself how im- portant this distinction really is, and whether art will tolerate its tyranny. Once the original/copy distinction becomes the topic of "transjunctional" operations and can be accepted or rejected as a distinction, a new descrip- tion is needed to resist the hegemony of the law of novelty. "Postmod- ernism" rebels against this law; but in so doing, it only returns to an older law, which states that the work of art, in one way or another, must medi- ate between variety and redundancy in order for the appeal of novelty to become intelligible.
Undeniably, this development has a certain consistency. ^Wbrks of art distinguish themselves from other objects by virtue of their self- referentiality: they claim to be art, and they can do so because this claim is an affair of communication rather than a matter of mere objecthood^ But when the self-description of the art system focuses on this claim--the claim to be art--and henceforth claims originality exclusively for this pur- pose, the question of how it can redeem such a claim arises.
The nineteenth century solved this problem by distributing the alter- native "self-reference or hetero-reference" among two separate styles. Those who advocated the primacy of self-reference could stick to aes- meticizing artistic styles, which emphasized formal decisions. Those who preferred hetero-reference--whether in an affirmative or critical sense--
215
could count on realism.
distinctions were tested on a stylistic level, but they remained contained
The first step is to concede that the artist can be allowed to re-
This opposition became programmatic. The
298 Self-Description
within the system precisely as a form of stylistic choice (of which there were many).
This solution, however, could not withstand the increasing radicaliza-
tion of reflection (which did not exclude the possibility for distinguishing,
as before, between stylistic preferences). L'artpour I'artwas surpassed by
I'art sur Van. Self-reference is undermined when the system challenges its
own boundaries and when it begins to treat the choice of one or the other
type of reference as a system-internal operation. When "everything goes,
and only the intention counts," art retreats to self-reference, and this
holds even for programs that oppose this opening. Art approaches a
boundary where artistic information ceases to be information and be-
comes solely utterance [Mitteilung], or, more accurately, where informa-
tion is reduced to conveying to the audience that art wants to be nothing
more than utterance. Art restricts itself to signing what it subsequently
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claims to be art,
only as an element in the autopoietic chain of self-reflections and re- descriptions of the system.
To the extent that reflection on the notion of reentry is radicalized and
the distinction between art and nonart becomes increasingly paradoxical,
the relationship of art to its own history is affected as well. The diversity
of artistic creations is leveled when they are reduced to mere difference.
One no longer remembers what earlier innovations rebelled against and
217
or it produces as "conceptual art" what finds attention
how passionately they were defended and attacked.
History becomes
dehistoricized and is treated as a reservoir of simultaneously available ma-
terials for artistic forms. What goes under the ill-fated title "postmod-
218
ernism"
of what came before, especially that which will never be repeated, and re- members only a few extraordinary events.
"Postmodern" architecture and its surrounding literature provide per-
haps the most convenient access to the postmodernism debate, because in
architecture the contrast to "modern" architecture is most clearly visible.
In reacting to the essentialist simplifications of modern architecture, post-
modernism does not simply follow principles but also attempts to copy a
differentiated, diverse environment into the artwork and thus into the sys-
219
tem
sense (Ashby). The same can be said of the heterogeneity of tastes and styl- istic expectations. It also holds for the difference between the expectations of a critical elite and what the population at large is able to understand,
is therefore a typical product of memory: it has forgotten most
--it seeks to create a kind of "requisite variety" in the cybernetic
reach as a (recognizable) quotation, work is put together.
everything depends on how the
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299
and it applies to the relationship between the equally justified demands for recognizability and innovation, as well as to the (conspicuous! ) adaptation of obsolete styles to modern technology. In order to highlight die hetero- geneous demands placed upon the work, "quotations" become indispens- able--mere copying no longer suffices. "Requisite variety" requires "req- uisite simplicity. " The questions become whether, and in what way, the work can claim unity, and whether it can assert itself against its own (! ) "requisite variety. " The "purist" and "essentialist" emphasis of modernism is surpassed by a reflection upon variety. Unity is displaced by a reflection on the unity of heterogeneous distinctions.
If one wants to derive from this special case a general formula that can be applied to other artistic genres as well, then such a formula might be found in the problem of "reentry," that is to say, in the question of how the environment can enter into the system without losing its character as an unknown, unattainable environment. How, in other words, can the art system reflect upon its own differentiation, not only in die form of theory,
220 but also in individual works of art?
This problem also arises in response to the increasing tempo of change and to the self-reference perpetually stimulated by this change. One of the striking features of postmodernism is an extremely rapid alternation be-
221
tween "more or less fabricated movements"
upon the observer by the imaginative nature of their self-descriptions.
If art is capable of infinitely expanding its boundaries in order to facilitate innovation, hetero-reference is eliminated as a result. It becomes impor- tant to rely on self-reference as a principle for generating forms. The op- erations of the system are reflected upon as system-generating operations, and "works" are reduced to being temporary manifestations of this
? process. This change requires the incorporation into the artwork of dis- tinctions internal to the art system, distinctions that derive either from the history of art or from the formal repertoire available as art. When diere is no longer a binding tradition of form, and yet every form is still within
223
From the viewpoint of art, this radical break with tradition entails above all an irritation, the need to search for forms, to make decisions, and to ac- cept the primacy of self-reference. Art henceforth quotes itself, selecting stylistic elements only to reintegrate stylistic selectivity into the selection and to take into account alternative styles, so that the artwork documents
that impress themselves 222
3 0 0 Self-Description
the choice of a style as choice. Individual works, especially in architecture, create local observer positions, from which things look different than from other positions, which are also taken into account rather than being re- jected as incompatible. Works of art, in other words, are conceived in a tooly-contextural manner. Transitions take the observer by surprise, and this is the point. Works of art were always meant to elicit astonishment, but now the astonishment is incorporated into the work via a kind of reen- try. Given the abundance of possibilities, there is no end to astonishment. Accordingly, the criteria for qualifying a work as art must be stricter than ever. Presumably, the tightening of standards also increases, in an unprece- dented manner, the risk of failure and the difficulty of recognizing failure.
Efforts to reproduce the reflection theory of the art system in the form of art indicate the end of the aesthetic era in the self-description of art-- the end of all attempts to come to terms with the problems of reflection. It is clear by now that the unity of the distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference is an operative problem of any given system. The syn- thesis of information and utterance is reproduced from one moment to the next as communication. The constative and performative components of texts require, to borrow a suggestion from Paul de Man's literary theory, a rhetorical symbiosis without support in a prior unity. The ramifications for sociology are less evident, and it is not clear what will come next. We suspect that one possible solution might consist in operationallyfocused analyses that do not deny their own status as operations, operations which exclude, by virtue of the forms they select, what cannot be observed on the basis of these forms, and which include this very exclusion.
To summarize in retrospect efforts to describe the social significance of art, we can identify two distinct tendenciesJ On the surface, art continued to be preoccupied with the "beautiful" until well into the nineteenth cen- tury. Art presented itself to society in the form of its positive value. (And who would want a society devoid of beauty? Marcuse still used this argu- ment to counter the agitated students of the 1968 movement^ What was intended to be a positive code value was meant to describe the function of art in relation to the outside and, at the same time, to serve as an internal criterion for judging artworks. As it turned out, this placed too heavy a semantic burden on the concept of beauty, and artists themselves refused to adhere to the concept. To reconstruct the issue in formal terms, one sought to express in one final thought both the hetero-reference of art (its relationship to the external world as a social accomplishment) and its self-
Self-Description 3 0 1
reference (as a criterion or formula for the unity of programs). But if this project entailed formulating the difference between hetero-reference and self-reference as a unity, it amounted to rendering invisible a fundamental paradox, namely, the paradox of the unity of the distinguished, or the sys- temic paradox of the unity of system and environment.
In a concurrent but more or less underground tradition, this paradox emerged: more accurately, what emerged was the effort to erase its traces-- "the trace of the erasure of the trace," to formulate the issue by referring to
224
Derrida's paradox of the presence of the absent.
found in the Renaissance poetry of (cognitive) paradox, which assumed that the business of art was to undermine pretentious knowledge claims and methods of acquiring knowledge without offering a solution that would provide a better knowledge. A corresponding strategy was to make transparent (and thus to legitimize) the production of illusion, to disrupt the illusion within one's own domain, and, generally, to resist the demand for consistency and to qualify one's sources and intentions as irrational. We found similar intentions in romanticism, especially in its play with dou- bles, counterconcepts, and incredible events. And eventually, the so-called avant-garde turned the transgression of boundaries into a program.
From Baumgarten to Hegel reflection theory appears to have treated the guiding distinctions of aesthetic theory--especially the distinction be- tween the universal and the particular and between the intellect and the senses--along the same lines. Officially, the goal was to define the place of the fine arts; one was concerned with demarcating art and with dialectical synthesis. A second analysis, however, shows that the real issue is the "reentry" of the form into the form, of the distinction into what it distin- guishes. tThe difference between the universal and the particular is repli- cated within the particular, and the difference between the intellect and the senses recurs within the sensuous realm. The artwork, so to speak, takes on the burden of paradox and dissolves it in its own formal arrange- ment; one then sees quite concretely: it works!
One can treat a number of distinctions in this manner. When the dis- tinction between system and environment is reintroduced into the system in the form of the distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference, then used within the system to determine the self (for example, as effort and beauty), this, too, is an operation of reentry, whose function is to provide the observer with a workable distinction. And reentries are always forms, that is to say, distinctions, on whose other side paradox is not to be seen.
Crucial evidence can be
3 0 2 Self-Description
The self-description of a system is a paradoxical undertaking from its very beginning. Observation and description presuppose a difference be- tween the observer/describer and his object, whereas the intent of self- description is to negate precisely this difference. In other words, the oper- ation of self-description yields the distinction between describing and the described within the same system. This distinction generates an excess of possibilities. As a distinction, however, and as an excess that allows for multiple possibilities, it raises the question in what sense the unity of the system can still be the object of description. From the beginning to the end, the self-description of the art system is concerned with this problem, a problem that can be observed only as a paradox (and must therefore be concealed).
This is a deconstructive insight. Deconstruction, however, is not the same as destruction. The analysis does not suggest that everything is arbitrary or senseless. Rather, it demonstrates that, and in what ways, the difference between the paradox and its unfolding--which renders the paradox invisible by constructing sufficiently plausible identities and dis-
tinctions--functions so as to integrate the system of art into the "course of history," or, considered from a sociological perspective, to adapt the sys- tem to the results of social evolution while preserving its autopoietic autonomy.
VI
Post-Hegelian philosophical aesthetics had tremendous difficulty grasp- ing the semantic consequences of the differentiation of the art system, es- pecially in its modern variant. On the one hand, philosophical aesthetics raised hyper-dimensional expectations that aspire to leave out nothing, not even nonart; on the other hand, it created a peculiar milieu that was preoccupied with itself above all and kept rebelling against its own history. Whether one follows Gehlen or Marquard in assigning to art a role of re- lease and compensation, or sides with Adorno in attempting to reduce purist and sociocritical ambitions to the common denominator of nega- tivity, the problematic relationship between art and society remains unre- solved. If, however, one starts out from Parsons s pattern variables or from a theory of social systems differentiation, then it becomes immediately clear that universalism and specification do not contradict, but rather con-
dition one another. For Parsons, this is a matter of combining different
225
pattern variables.
For an elaborated theory of modern social different! -
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ation, it means that, in modern society, universality claims presuppose functional differentiation and hence a specific system reference. Indeed, only subsystems can claim universality, and only with reference to their specific function.
Making such claims requires a system-internal memory, that is, a system- internal history and a distinction between self-reference and hetero-refer- ence that refers to the system. The history of modern self-descriptions of the art system from romanticism via the avant-garde up to postmodernism can be subsumed under one perspective, as a variation on a single theme. What is at stake in all of them is the question of how to relate to the past within a system that has become autonomous, how to mediate between past and future, between memory and the freedom to change sides, in all
226
of the system's distinctions.
nius established the rule that the artist should follow his own genius rather
227
than adhere to preestablished models.
century signaled that the artwork was more than itself. The art of the past was no longer a model, an exemplary standard, or a reservoir oipara- digmata or examples. Instead, it offered the possibility for a hetero-reference that does not interfere with the autonomy of art. The art of the past has be- come history. This precludes the simple repetition of existing works or styles. By losing the self-evidence of its binding force, the art of the past re- linquishes its forms and styles as material to be exploited. Museums (and, in a different way, libraries) now serve as a system-internal context against which the new can distinguish itself and which is indispensablefor this pur- pose. Given this situation, and given that the idea of a universal and, hence, binding museum could not be realized, one can have recourse to this con- textual function and generate novelty by selecting or even creating the con-
229
text against which the new can appear as such.
volves crossing a distinguishing boundary. One operates on the other side of the new, on the side of the system's memory, in order to select the back- ground against which the works that are currently produced and posi- tioned can appear to be new.
Even if, under the signature "postmodernism," insistence on the novelty of the individual work has been replaced by the freedom to combine tradi- tional forms, the self-historicization of art remains bound to the distinction between the new and the old (otherwise, this self-historicization could not be understood in difference-theoretical terms). One must choose one of these forms: either the form of quotation or the form of recombining het-
In early modernity, a new conception of ge-
The concettismooithe seventeenth 228
This operation, too, in-
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Self-Description
erogeneous stylistic elements. Or one can take the past to be an ensemble of established expectations about art in order to provoke--and disap- point--these expectations. This strategy, too, keeps art dependent on the old/new distinction, even in reflection. Only new works can make history (which leads some people to infer an "end of history," because the possi- bilities appear to be exhausted). But this also implies that the unity of the old/new distinction is not available to reflection. And the fact that one does not reflect upon this difference facilitates the use of anachronisms in an ex-
230
plicidy modern fashion, namely, as forms that absorb contingency. old/new distinction becomes the blind spot of the system's self-description; and an observation of the third order is required--a description of a self- describing system--if one wants to know what this distinction is all about and how the art system reflects upon itself by means o? just this distinction.
The hypothesis that every fully autonomous system requires an external
reference might provide a starting point. Godel as witness. Selecting the di-
mension of time for the purpose of externalization provides the greatest
possible freedom for a specifically social, communicative self-determination
of the system. As a concrete reality that cannot, indeed must not be treated
as binding any longer, the past fulfills its function as a guarantor of auton-
omy. The past is thus neither insignificant nor dispensable. But it can
henceforth fulfill its function only paradoxically: as the presence of an ab-
sence, as the inclusion of an exclusion, as the trace that, according to Der-
231
rida,
thrives on the paradox that the unity of the distinction (old/new), which is used by an observer, cannot be indicated in the observation itself.
Even if one follows Nelson Goodman and places on art the burden of
232
is left by the effacement of the trace--in short, as a parasite that
contributing to the creation of the world,
tively only within the worldand, in observation, orAy from another world. In this way, the world accompanies all operations as a continually repro- duced "unmarked space. " At the observational level, however, it is possi- ble--in science as well as in art--to make transparent the premises behind previous ways of world making. Doing so inevitably marks the previously valid world and thereby cancels it as a world. Subsequently, earlier theo- ries, styles, works, and so forth can no longer function as world {no matter how such concepts as reality, objectivity, Being, and so on are treated at the level of philosophical terminology). In this way, the degradation of the world through signification perpetually regenerates new unobservabilities. This is why the generation of the new is ultimately inexplicable.
a world can be created opera-
The
Self-Description 305
But what happens, exactly, when postmodernism tolerates the return to a traditional reservoir of forms? One would think that the old/new dis- tinction becomes obsolete once the continued employment of old forms is tolerated or even recommended. The opposite is true. What is at stake is not merely copying old forms, but rather trying out new combinations. It appears as if, under the title of postmodernism, the system claims au- tonomy even with regard to the old/new distinction, which is to say, it claims autonomy in crossing the boundary between the old and the new, whereby the new eventually becomes obsolete as well. If this is true, then the old/new distinction must be decoupled from the distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference. The art of the past cannot be treated as something external simply because it is past and operatively unattain- able. Presumably one learns that only the system can guarantee the reality of its own world. Therefore reference to reality resides exclusively in the resistance of the system's operations to themselves--some form combina- tions simply won't work! --and in the fact that the world, whether one likes it or not, remains unobservable.
Classical thought sought to solve this problem by generalization, fol- lowing the schema of species and genres. In this way, one would arrive at ultimate principles that were continually reaffirmed in all distinctions in- volved in the practice of distinguishing. In German Idealism, particularly in romanticism, this hope faded away, withdrawing into a distance that, while it could still be localized, could no longer be reached by reflection. The hope for ultimate principles was preserved as a direction without an end, and in this sense one could still speak of the ideal of beauty. But by stating the issue in such terms, one has reached the point where even this is no longer possible. One can refuse to acknowledge this fact and keep re- belling against it. At that point, the temporal dimension of the art system turns into its reflection dimension. The goal is not to affirm the present, the moment, the decision as the sole guarantee of reality; quite the oppo- site: one perpetually rebels against the present to the extent that it still contains traces of the past. The present revolts against itself, and what is at stake in this revolt is the inclusion of the system's negation into the sys- tem. The present is reduced to a mere caesura, a temporal "nothing," where art cannot reflect but only operate. The future represents the self- reference of art, and the past, because it cannot be altered, represents its
233
hetero-reference. The parasites
way unnoticed into the system and take over its invisible government. The
generated by this distinction force their
3 0 6 Self-Description
invisible hand (the metaphor indicates the paradox) remains invisible, be- cause it knows only a timeless present. Whatever happens, happens. One begins, places a difference, draws a distinction, and then abandons oneself to what can no longer be altered, only destroyed.
Once reflection shirts to the primacy of the temporal dimension, its self-
234
description as an "aesthetics" becomes meaningless.
And yet, even after
the reference of the term--the difference between forms of knowledge
guided by theory and forms of sensuous knowledge--had long been for-
gotten, its reference to the phenomenal world remained the distinguishing
feature of aesthetics. Even when art was no longer a matter of imitation,
one still assumed that the communicative intent of art had to appear in
the artwork itself. A name for a theory that can do without this assump-
tion has not yet been found, and the undertaking is dubious. But under
the catchword deconstruction, one already debates the dissolution of the
235
"phenomenological" meaning of literature, if not of art in general.
If we compare the situation of the art system in the present century, outlined above, with the situation of other functional systems, then we notice the collapse of the internal boundary between the self-reflection or theory of the system and the system's productive operations. Everywhere else this boundary is respected. Theology does not need to produce results that can be presented in a sermon. The interdisciplinary and internation- ally oriented self-understanding of legal theory distinguishes itself from the generalized decision rules that must assume forms capable of func- tioning as law. Pedagogy, rather than being taught, stages the professional self-understanding and the mission of a profession specializing in educa- tion. The theory of knowledge is not a scientific method; it may present itself as a scientific theory about a specific object, science, but it is not meant to be applied in this realm. The self-description of the art system
appears to have developed in a different way. One might ask: Why? More than any other functional system--religion, politics, science, or |law--the art system is able to accept multiple descriptions of complexity. {More than any other functional system, it is in a position to demonstrate |that modern society and, from its perspective, the world can be described only in poly-contextural terms. In this sense, art makes the "truth" about society appear in society, while demonstrating (if it can! ) that under pre- cisely such conditions formal constraints emerge, that what fits and what doesn't becomes an issue, and that the common fear of arbitrariness, of "anything goes," is unfounded. A shift in guiding distinctions--in "con-
Self-Description 307
textures" in Gotthard Giinther's sense, or in observational "frames"--re- quires a sufficient degree of transparency. One must be able to recognize where such leaps are heading and how continuity is secured under the conditions of a shifted "frame. "
The reflection theory of the art system presents itself in and through
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works of art--no longer (if it ever did) as an aesthetics.
tual fixation of the meaning of art, famous names and masterworks al- ready exist--Dante, Giotto, Raphael, Michelangelo, Palladio, Shakespeare, Goethe--which must be included in any "discourse" about art. This makes expert competence in evaluating artworks indispensable. The trend begins with artists who write; then, with the emergence of art academies in the seventeenth century, we find artists who teach; finally, there are art pro- fessors who seek to make a name for themselves as practicing artists. There is a need for expertise and consultation in decisions about acquisitions. Exhibitions must be conceived and put together. The quality of poetry, or at least its capacity to catch the reader's attention, must be evaluated be- fore poems are published. All of this remains a "critical" business, because the system generates more possibilities than it can accept.
The need to establish a frame within the frame of the art system gener- ates a parasite, an art-specific establishment of more or less significant ex- perts, which is capable of responding positively or negatively to new publi- cations--whereby the distinction between positive and negative judgments becomes of little significance, because both can establish a given topic in the mass media. Controversies stimulate business, although certain rules of be- longing must be respected. Moreover, the rapid establishment of possible but initially excluded works prevents the establishment of experts from being disrupted by every dispute. In order to highlight one's critical com- petency, it is important to lack a specific organizational affiliation. No par- ticular organization monopolizes the art scene--neither galleries nor mu- seums, neither the theaters nor the concert halls, neither the journalists that specialize in art nor the professors of the art academies. In this regard, the claim to expertise does have a professional aspect, even when membership in a number of different organizations takes care of the necessary income. At the same time, artworks begin to emerge that reflect upon the context facilitating such success and along with it upon the "system. " As early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one finds ironic (? ) paintings of art collections or art exhibitions that depict entire walls filled with paintings-- paintings that are ruined by the fact of being exhibited. The degradation of
Prior to any tex-
308 Self-Description
the paintings by the much desired exhibition becomes a topic of art; it is displayed as art. Today one can even find exhibitions entirely dedicated to
237
paintings that depict exhibitions.
This world of art criticism, which is affected by art and reflected upon
in works of art, is the true source of the art system's self-description. Such
criticism filters and puts together what is written about art with a claim to
scientific status, a careful choice of terminology, and a sense for theoretical
consistency. Criticism is where intellectual fashions affect the art system.
To be sure, it is difficult to ignore the marginal position of recent the-
oretical trends--structuralism, poststructuralism, "literary criticism," her-
meneutics, reader-friendly reception theory, or psychoanalytical thought
--but none of these theories can establish itself as the dominant para-
digm. Such frequently used labels respond to the seemingly irresistible
urge of academic intellectuals to categorize themselves in terms of such
238
trends.
produce works "in tune with the times," but offer little help when it comes to relevant formal decisions. At least in one respect, however, recent trends in art and theory do converge, namely, with respect to the dimension of time. Artworks demonstrate their independence from tradition and play with the traditional reservoir of forms. They not only announce the end of European art but also want to be this end. They challenge the distinc- tion between art and objects of utility in order to demonstrate, as works of art, the universalization of art, the inclusion of the world in art, in or- der to make the point that this is how things are. But can one perceive this intent? Is it possible to see, to hear, to experience it in an imagination stimulated by literature? Or can one only know and understand that this is
intended?
239
When the artwork turns into genuine philosophy
restrict themselves to commenting on this state of affairs, how can things go on? Should we expect the art system henceforth to trade primarily in derivatives of the intellect, just as the financial market trades in derivative financial instruments? Are the consequences for the art system as unpre- dictable as they are in the realm of finance? Or is it possible to channel op- erations and self-descriptions once again into different tracks, so they can stimulate one another without merging? Too much identity inevitably means: no future.
More than any other functional system, art appears to succeed--or at least has the intention of doing so--in representing modern society within
Names facilitate communication. They may inspire artists to
and intellectuals
Self-Description
3 0 9
society--or, to borrow a fitting formulation by David Roberts,
ize the "emancipation of contingency" as a model of society within society. Art demonstrates, so to speak, this is how things are, or this is a possibil- ity! The paradox, which art cannot represent but only unfold, consists in the necessity of contingency. But does this mean that art must give up its art-specific manner of presenting its intent in such a way as to allow the observer to observe observations along the lines of distinctions internal to the work?
No one familiar with the art scene will deny that art can realize the emancipation of contingency in many different ways. It can adapt its op- erations, even its existence, to this situation and thus put itself at risk. Whether a strict self-limitation of the possible, of thepotestas in se ipsum, can emerge from this adaptation remains to be seen. Simply doing with- out self-generated necessities is not enough; this strategy certainly does not incorporate society into society or the form into the form. Renounc- ing necessity always sacrifices that which is distinguished from necessity, namely, freedom. The necessity/freedom distinction is replaced by the dis- tinction necessity/contingency.
By staging and perpetually restaging a form of self-reference that reflects upon itself, the art system can do without distinguishing between affir- mative and critical attitudes toward the external world. It does not need a "political function," which it never had any chance of successfully occu- pying anyway, at least not "democratically. " Instead, the art system sym- bolizes conditions that, at the level of society and its functional systems, established themselves as a consequence of functional differentiation and leave open what one thinks of them, because it no longer matters. The ap- propriation of the topics of social movements by the functional system of the mass media is one among many examples. The art system realizes so- ciety in its own realm as an exemplary case. It shows things as they are. It demonstrates what society entered into when it began to differentiate in- dividual functional systems and abandoned these systems to autonomous self-regulation. Art exemplifies a situation in which the future, no longer guaranteed by the past, has become unpredictable. Operative closure, the emancipation of contingency, self-organization, poly-contexturality, the hypercomplexity of self-descriptions, or, simpler and less accurately for- mulated, pluralism, relativism, historicism--all of these trends offer no more than different cross sections of the structural fate of modernity. By suffering its own condition, art shows that's just how it is. Whoever per-
240
to real-
3io
Self-Description
ceives this can see in modern art the paradigm of modern society. But this situation only raises the question: What difference does it make?
VII
From the very beginning, it was our intention to treat art as a unified topic, disregarding differences that result from different media and their sensuous or imaginary realization. No one will dispute that this is a his- torical task. The question is whether it can be carried out by an external observer who can take as his starting point a latent function invisible to art or proceed from "deep structures" that cannot be transformed into
241
premises useful to art.
Before investigating the problem more thoroughly, one should not insist
on an insurmountable communication barrier between external and inter- nal description. Indeed, the unity of art is thematized in the history of the art system's self-description--if initially only under the "patronage" of phi- losophy, so to speak. It is generally assumed that this self-thematization did not occur until the eighteenth century and that it followed a singulariza- tion of the concept of art and its reduction to the realm of the "fine arts," which made such a singularization possible. But this assumption is too simple. Ever since Aristotle, the concept of imitation has covered more than one artistic genre, applying not only to the imitation of objects but also to the imitation of actions, not only to the visual arts but also to drama and poetry. The real difficulty, however, could not be resolved within the
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Aristotelian framework.
tion; it seeks to embrace the world by replicating it in another medium. This purpose requires entirely different presuppositions, which might be captured in a concept but not in a unified theory. The visual arts could be significantly improved with regard to their technology of representation, especially through the invention of perspective, by representing light and shadow, and by capturing movement in a significant position. In drama and poetry, this kind of progress was inconceivable. Instead, the discussion ran aground in the old problem of truth and deception. The relationship to nature remained as vague as the concept of nature itself. One could de- fine the task of imitation as mirroring the better part of nature, or simply as manifesting a brilliant capacity for deception, which presented a trans- parent deception in a highly artful fashion while obscuring the manner in which this effect was accomplished.
The formula of imitation aims at representa-
Self-Description 311
In the eighteenth century--for a relatively short period from Baum- garten to Hegel--the guiding principle of imitation gave way to the guiding principle of aesthetics. The problem became a problem of cogni- tion, a cognition that used the senses--hence the term aesthetics--and that therefore had to renounce the highest rank in the hierarchy of cog- nitions. Sensuousness dragged one down, while the idea was uplifting-- this was the tension that art sought to express and that it had to realize as "beauty. " From Hegel's historicizing perspective, art could only represent a transitional stage in the self-realization of Spirit. But if the task of Spirit
243
was to process distinctions--one called them "oppositions"
culminate in the perfection of the self-reflection of Spirit. Since art could not claim the highest relevance, this process ended a little earlier. Pro- cessing distinctions ended in identity. And, as usual, identity meant: no future.
Today, the theory of art continues to be irritated by the idea of the end
244
of art,
aesthetics, or even with the relation to sensuousness as a distinguishing characteristic of art, only confirm this prognosis. When the artwork is forced to reflect upon the end of distinguishing, indeed, must be this end, differences among operation, program, and self-description collapse, and one arrives once again at an identity, thus, at no future.
Notions about "postmodernism" remain bound to the legend of an end of art, emphasizing a break with the formal traditions of history. Such no- tions make forms belonging to different historicalperiods available simul- taneously and thus abstract from the sequentially and periodization of his- tory emphasized by historicism. At the same time, however, they exploit the past for the purpose of authorizing forms--as a source of authority, so to speak, that does not prohibit the opposite. The difference that guides attempts of this sort is the question of whether artistic forms are bound to the context of their emergence and must perpetually overcome this con- text, or whether these forms, precisely as belonging to the past, can be di- vorced from their context and exploited for any arbitrary form combina- tion. A tradition that has come to an end, has exhausted its possibilities, can think of its "aftermath" only in terms of willfulness, of offering quo-
245
tations to a learned audience, of parody.
tion that, for its part, points to an unknown "beyond. " From the view- point of a theory of observation, one must ask who distinguishes that way and why. The history of reflecting upon the unity of the art system pro-
and efforts to break entirely with the traditions of imitation and
But the end of art is a distinc-
--it had to
Self-Description
3iz
vides an answer to this question. All attempts to determine unity as such have always also reflected on the reference to another side of the form-- whether this side is occupied by a nature perfected in itself or by a cogni- tion that has become fully reflexive. But these counterconcepts do not necessarily prevail; they could be exchanged for others, if one only knew which ones to use instead.
Thematically, the history of the self-description of art was concerned with determining the meaning of art, and changing answers to this ques- tion were determined by the differentiation of an autonomous art system and its operative closure. This development rendered all boundaries prob- lematic, canceling the distinction between the map and the territory (in thought) and favoring attempts to realize this cancellation as a work of art. Art arrives at a point where "the end of art" comes into view, where the programmatic rule of innovation not only demands distance from existing art but also seeks to surpass even this distance by enforcing a distancing from this distance from tradition. The reintegration of the tradition into an art that no longer accepts tradition is called "postmodernism. " The so- ciologist can observe all of this as an existing reality.
But the historical reconstruction of the self-description of art raises the question of whether there might have been a submerged, other history, a history concerned not with unity but with difference. Pursuing this ques- tion suggests that the theme of reflection does not define the meaning of the autonomy of art, but the meaning of the doubling of reality in which this autonomy established itself. The program of imitation would appear to be a kind of conciliatory gesture, which assumes a reality that is more beautiful (better, more perfect, and permeated by the Idea) than it pre- sents itself. Reversing this is easy but doesn't lead very far. One would merely have to show that the world (icy, bathed in cold light, nearly everywhere uninhabitable) or society is much worse than our idyllic no- tions of nature and culture would have it. Making this point today is once again called "sublime. " As early as romanticism, however, one was potentially aware of other, more far-reaching possibilities for disrupting the illusory reference to reality, namely, by incorporating the doubling of reality into art itself. If this strategy were successful today, then one could dispose over the doubling of reality in art--whether through the one- sided accentuation of artistic means, of the "script" of art, through self- sabotage, or through presenting the elimination of difference.