No More Learning

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.
From the viewpoint of an operative constructivism and from the per-
156
These changes, however, did not concern the realm of symbols
spective of the much-debated theory of self-referential systems,
tions about reality appeared to be correlates of internal resolutions of op- erative inconsistencies within the system--particularly of "contradictions" between the system's memory and momentary impulses. Romanticism continued to apply the notion of reality to the resolution of internal in- consistencies that were negotiated with what the system remembered as culture. But the resistance that generated reality was now relocated within the system, so that it could subsequently be externalized again as "nature.
" Romanticism "hovered" between inside and outside, but it could no longer resolve this paradox in favor of the world as it was. Its own reflec- tion of this difference had to enter works of art themselves, for example, in the form of the incredible or uncanny assumptions it made about real- ity. The resulting irritation was appreciated as such and communicated to die observer.
assump-
2 8 2 Self-Description
The distance from reality, its treatment as a mere backdrop or means for staging art, is one of the most striking features of romanticism. As in contemporary philosophy, any reference to the world remained "specula- tive" in a positive sense. On the other hand, romanticism resisted--for good reasons--the suspicion that its relationship to reality was governed by arbitrary subjective impulses. One mystified reality so that the observer was not distracted by it. The suspension of disbelief, necessary for under- standing fictional representations, was driven to the extreme; it was pro- voked and brought to reflection in this provocation. The beholder was supposed to focus his awareness on the artwork itself. Once this was ac-
157
complished, a new realism could emerge as a correlate to Idealism.
From that moment on, distinctions came to be used in a different man- ner. Traditionally, society and art assumed that certain phenomena fell outside of any given order and that such phenomena were indeed accessi- ble. One thinks of the devil and his temptations, or of the technique of re-
158
versal employed in carnival, or of other such interruptions.
niques of this sort only managed to traverse the distinction; upon return
159
from the other side, everything would be the same as before.
merely reaffirmed the distinction. This is how one became aware of the distinction between texts (among them fictional texts) and reality, though one treated this distinction in terms of different ontological regions, and confusing these regions was forbidden. One had to be able to distinguish between a narration and something that really happened. This included the possibility, depicted in Hamlet, that it becomes impossible to turn this distinction into a decision.
By introducing concepts bound by reflection--self-possession, irony,
critique--romanticism changed all this. The novel had paved the way for
160 the reflection of the distinction between fiction and reality within itself.
Fictional texts were produced in such a way that readers were tempted to recognize their personal situation in the work and apply what they read to their own needs. This was not simply a matter of duplicating in one's own life the models one found in literature. Preferred topics such as a criminal- ity (regretted after the fact) or (prohibited) sexual liberties were meant to present the reader with situations that called for decisions, by means of which he could individualize himself in ways that yield consequences. As long as this was so, it was difficult to avoid moral implications, even though literature learned to distance itself from the obligation of moral in- struction. Romanticism took an important step beyond that. It dissolved
But tech-
They
Self-Description 283
the ontological reference of the distinction between fiction and reality,
which had been tailored to the observer, fictionalizing even what might be
taken to be a reality "out there. " It duplicated worldly affairs botli in the
realm of fiction and in reality and shrouded them in the "twilight of ro-
161
manticism. "
"If the poet, by virtue of the magic of his presentation,"
writes August Wilhelm Schlegel, "manages to transport us into an unfa-
miliar world, he is free to operate in this world according to his own
162
laws. " The reference to reality remained in suspense. In his Nachtstucke,
E. T. A. Hoffmann invokes magnetism as a potentially natural, if dubious, explanation, but the unity of his narration depends on the reader's belief
163
in the miraculous despite this explanation.
ambiguities, everything depends on who, under what circumstances, observes how others observe.
Each time a negation is introduced into the art system, it generates a different condition that enables and requires new observations. Nega- tion--as reversal, paradox, or parody--dissolves any given determination and, at the same time, supports the reflection of the system's autonomy, which articulates itselfby virtue of thefact that this ispossible. In particular, textual arts such as poetry and the novel thematized themselves and their own lit- erariness and included what until now had been excluded from litera- ture--sexuality, for example (Lucinde). The difference between self-refer- ence and hetero-reference, along with the problem of the unity of this difference, became an inevitable by-product of reflection.
Since the distinction between self-reference and hetero-reference rested on the distinction between inside and outside, the problem of its unity could not be resolved in a one-sided manner: for example, by insisting on "pure" self-reference. Just as the subject became aware of an external real- ity when it ran up against its own boundaries--otherwise there would be no boundaries--art, too could not afford not to distinguish itself. While it might be true that romanticism, and even more so modern art, tend to advocate the primacy of self-reference, neither the semantics of a "purpose without purpose" nor Vanpour I'art succeed in denying hetero-reference; they only create a situation in which their references become ambiguous. Works of art began to admit their need for interpretation and became re- ceptive to the idea that consensus might be lacking. And critique no longer meant search for the one true judgment, but rather the perpetual improvement of the artwork itself.
When, in the wake of the French Revolution, one contemplated alter-
In the face of such deliberate
284 Self-Description
natives, one ran up against the problem of communication. The romantic
critique of Idealism focused on the unresolved problem of communica-
164
tion. One preferred "hovering" in a state of undecidability,
because
communication no longer found stability in the old categories of an on-
tological metaphysics and because even successful communication could
not compensate for this lack. Hovering between the universal and the in-
dividual was now considered "interesting," a notion that adequately char-
acterized and at the same time devalued communication. One cultivated
humor and irony as forms of communication, as the presentation [Dar-
stellung] of a "hovering" self-relation. Since information (hetero-reference)
lacked certainty, one relied all the more on utterance [Mitteilung] (self-
165
reference).
It is possible to understand the romantics' longing for unity
and wholeness as a cipher for a problem of communication, and their ex-
perimentation with myth and poetry as an attempt to reach out to the
people across social boundaries. Within their own circle, the romantics in-
tensely engaged in dialogue and correspondence, only to run up against
the limits of agreement. Worst of all, claiming a separate world of beauty,
aesthetics, symbolism, and poetry bifurcated the realm of social commu-
nication. The reflection of autonomy faced an excess of internal commu-
nicative possibilities that resulted from the loss of external reference points
and their indifference. The romantics experienced this problem in the self-
relation of the subject. But freedom and reason could no longer be iden-
tified as the same. This was evident in the realization that oral communi-
cation was bound to fail (the couple in Jean Paul's Siebenkds is acutely
aware of this failure--as are the twins in his Flegeljahre, or the lover in
Constant's Adolphe, who is no longer in love--and this awareness mani-
fests itself in attempts to live out the liberties of a romantically inspired
166
communication).
Friedrich Schlegel puts it poignandy in Lucinde: "What separates the be-
167
ings is not hatred . . . but love. "
communication provoked the endless self-reflection of the subject. The in- dividual became the subject of his own being.
Written communication provides a way out of this dilemma. Texts can- not deny their communicative intent, even when they present themselves as fragments or unfinished utterances that might or might not elicit a response, or when they react to an excess of communicative possibilities
168
devoid of credibility.
standing practice in the visual arts by including the unfinished, the sketch,
Communication replicated misunderstanding. As
Lack of positive affirmation through
Text-art caught up with what had been a long-
Self-Description 285
and the fragment; and it was no accident that the visual medium of per- ception was indispensable for the stability of such forms. The fragment al- lowed for the articulation of self-referentiality; it made room for freedom to decide whether completion was necessary or whether it might be pref-
169
erable to play with the magic of the fragment;
burden the work with an excess of information. Communicating auton- omy in this manner avoided the impression that the artist did not know how to go on and therefore left his work unfinished. In order to exclude this possibility, the "fragment" was marked as form and cultivated and re- flected upon as such--and it, too, presupposed writing.
In romanticism, art was perhaps for the first time fully acknowledged as
170
writing,
and poetry was the name that announced a programmatic
form for this kind of writing. What was at stake in poetry was neither
rhetoric nor enlightenment, but the attempt to capture the unattainable.
This notion yielded the inevitable conclusion (which encountered much
171
resistance ) that the theory of literature was actually literature, and that
literature inevitably partook of literary theory. It became possible to en- tertain the notion that the reflection on art should express itself not only in learned treatises but also and above all in works of art. The prototype is Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde.
This shift affected the poetry of nature as well. Nature no longer de-
rived its significance from its own resources or from die fact that humans
are natural beings. Rather, it mirrored die infinitely displaced search of the
self for itself; a search that appeared interminable, because it no longer en-
countered a limit in society. "The relationship with nature has been su-
perseded by an intersubjective, interpersonal relationship, that in the last
analysis [but only for romanticism, N. L. ] is a relationship of the subject
172 toward itself. "
The problem became how to deal further with the excess of commu- nicative possibilities and with the interminability (or connective uncer- tainty) of communication, if thisproblem could not be resolved by the in- dividual subject. Romanticism solved it by introducing the notion of art criticism. The notion that criticism is an essential component in the per- fection of art acknowledged for the first time the status of theory as a self-
173
description of the system within the system.
Classical examples of romantic criticism are Friedrich Schlegel's essays
on Georg Forster, on Lessing, and on Goethe's Meister, all of which relate
174
works to their authors and present both as a unity.
When dealing with
completion would only
286 Self-Description
romantic criticism, we must disregard any potential analogies to science,
in particular the notion that the convergence of critical opinions indicates
175
their truth. This notion must be sacrificed. In romanticism, individual
differences between aesthetic judgments were considered normal and le-
176
gitimate.
diminish the value of critical judgment.
themselves, if they mediate communication in the form of artworks, served as an equivalent for the kind of security that was accomplished ver- bally only via consensus or dissent--an equivalent that secured the con- tinuation of autopoietic communication. Criticism was already a pro- gram for an observation of the second order--for an ability to distinguish that, for its part, could be distinguished and did not need to strive toward convergence. But if this was so, communication had to allow itself to be supported by perceptible objects in order to compensate for its boundless insecurity.
Accordingly, reflection turned into a medium for shaping critical judg-
178
ment.
tem, for the underlying idea of art. But this idea could not be realized in the form of a perceptible work. It remained unattainable. Any attempt to approach the idea exposed itself to criticism and observation. Every form infinitely displaced what made it observable, lagging behind its ambition at the level of realization. Transcending the boundaries of the imagination was as necessary as it was impossible.
This is why criticism could achieve only a broken--"reflective," "sober"
(attentive to artistic means), "ironic"--relationship to its object. Criticism
did not expect the object to meet its standards of judgment, nor did it
strive, as criticism, for beauty, let alone to surpass itself as a critically con-
ceived work of art. Its goal was neither rejection nor the mere classifica-
tion of art in terms of whether it succeeds or fails. Rather, the task of crit-
icism was to distinguish the visible from what is rendered invisible by the
visible. As if from the corner of its eye, criticism attempted to catch a
glimpse of the excluded within the included. This is why Jean Paul, unlike
Goethe and Schiller, located the sublime in the finite rather than in the
179
infinite.
cluded its own motive: the reflection of unity in the paradox of distin- guishing, which constituted the "unmarked space" and the unobservabil-
ity of observation. Resolute awareness of the chasm between art and the
180
There was nothing offensive about disagreement, nor did it
177
This suggested that the objects
The medium itself continued to stand for the unity of the sys-
For the first time, the self-description of the art system in-
"real world" was called irony;
irony was dead serious, so to speak, about
Self-Description 287
the fact that it did not take die world seriously; it was a consistently main- tained self-assertion.
Criticism renounced the ambition of being measured against artistic standards, and the critic compensated for this renunciation by presenting himself as a member of an elite of reflection--being neither of noble birth
181
nor rich, but competent and full of high self-expectations.
As for the
negative side--neither noble nor rich--the critic could identify with artists
and poets, while distinguishing himself by his role as critic. The sheer
amount of emerging talent allowed for a differentiation of functions, if not
of persons. To many, among them Goethe and Hegel, the excessive pro-
liferation of differences appeared to be an untenable subjectivism. The re-
fusal to determine identity objectively was certainly one of the features of
romanticism. It dispensed with the Idea as the point of convergence be-
tween subject and object (even though this Idea was retained in multiple
182
Who is to say that the subject/object distinction matters to the
forms).
self-description of a functional system?
Another possibility for exploiting the freedom of autonomy while es- caping the dead end of transcendental reflection was the dissolution of
183
identity for the purpose of communication.
nated with Doppelgdnger, mirror-images, and twins, as well as with narra- tives from which the informed reader could infer that the author had split
184
himself into two different personae that communicate with one another. As Schlegel puts it, "Nobody can know himself, unless he is both himself
185
and an other. "
hetero-reference; instead they organized self-reference. Under such condi- tions, one could exploit the dissolution of identity in order to represent both the difficulties and the failure of the ego's self-reflection as a problem of communication. One did not yet speak of "genius," but there was a general awareness of the fact that the inclusion of artists into the system was the system's own affair and not determined by nature or by birth. One retained the original/copy distinction while knowing--as expressed in the figure of the Doppelgdnger--that this distinction was not derived from re- ality, but produced by art in order to commit the art system to the pro- duction of "original" works.
These epochal historical changes affected the romantic conception of historical time as well. The erosion of proven methods of inferring the future from the past at first increased freedom in relation to both past and future by allowing for a transfiguration of the past (not just of an-
Identities no longer functioned as a means to secure
Romanticism was fasci-
288 Self-Description
tiquity but also of the Middle Ages) that left the future indeterminate and turned it into a summons. What became politically an open ques- tion after the French Revolution corresponded artistically to the problem of self-confirming form. As Novalis puts it, "We have outgrown the age
186
of generally valid forms. "
To the extent that the factual limitations of what is artistically permitted
fall away, relevant art forms are defined in terms of a temporal relationship to previous forms. The avant-garde claimed to be ahead of its time. But since, like everyone else, it could not act in the future, this claim boils down in practice to a distanced, critical, and polemical attitude within a shared present. Even the self-descriptions of postmodernism suggest his- torical periodization. But claiming a historical position requires unam- biguous structural decisions of the sort postmodernism refuses to provide. Only postmodern architecture lives up to this claim in some sense, since it succeeds in distinguishing itself clearly from the reductionist style that pre- cedes it (keyword Bauhaus). Everywhere else, attempts to define postmod- ern art lead to a temporal melange of modern, late modern, and postmod- ern trends. All of these trends converge in the effort to eliminate an excess of communicative possibilities by means of the form of the utterance [Mit- teilung] rather than via the kind of information it entails. In other words, one tends to privilege self-reference over hetero-reference. This preference appears to be the decisive factor in the further development of art, espe- cially in the twentieth century. It is astonishing that such a privileging of self-reference should be possible at all, and that convincing forms could be found to articulate it--given that self-reference can be observed only by distinguishing it from hetero-reference. Hetero-reference is reduced more and more to the "unmarked space. " Entering that space yields nothing, since the boundary must be crossed again if something is to be accom- plished there. However, characterizing modern art in this way highlights the historical contingency of its bias toward self-reference, which raises the question of whether representing autonomy in terms of self-reference is a permanent solution.
Despite all agonizing over the bifurcation of the bourgeois world, and despite the diagnosis of this world as divided by oppositions, the distance that comes with differentiated reflection appears as a structure one must subsequently accept. One might dress up this structure with expectations of a "new mythology" (in the manner of the Alteste Systemprogramm of Friedrich Schlegel, Holderlin, and Schelling), only to provoke self-doubts
Self-Description 2 8 9
and disbelief. A "new mythology" requires decisions in place of the mod- els that used to be provided by tradition and by the contractually fixed or-
187
ders of patrons.
unity of sociability (= society), only to find oneself out on the limb of a
188
bourgeois interiority.
One might indulge in "sublime" experiences and
Or one can share Schiller's hopes for a moral-aesthetic
miracles, in magic, ghosts, and dreadful surprises--only to admit that for
every one of these phenomena, the modern world offers a trivial explana-
189
tion.
ble only in reflection (with emphasis on "henceforth only"). The observer has entered die scene and subjects himself to observation. Henceforth, one can no longer escape the question of what kinds of distinctions one employs in observation and why just these and not others. With the ad- vent of the observer, philosophical attempts to put down art as a com- petitor come to an end. Minerva allows more than one owl to fly, and every observer can be observed as someone who constructs a world that appears to him as if it really were the way it appears.
V
There is nothing particularly new in the romantic trend to think of art in terms of a self-generated mystery, of a limit of what can be conceptu- ally grasped. The romantic description of art is work-oriented, even where a description of artistic means would be more appropriate. It does not penetrate to the level of the elemental operations that produce and repro- duce the work. This situation changed, at the latest with the advent of im- pressionism. In the nineteenth century, even more so today, descriptions of art must keep up with the increasing awareness of the operations in- volved in art, which means that the beautiful can no longer be the goal of such descriptions.
Hegel puts an end, if not to art, at least to a philosophy of art that claims to situate it within the systematic structure of philosophical theory and to determine the range of artistic possibilities from within that struc- ture. There will always be philosophers who deal with art; but the object of interpretation is determined by the rapid development of the art sys- tem, which escapes questions concerning its why and whence. When painters, beginning with Manet, began to rediscover the canvas and ac- centuate its visual space in paintings that are still to be perceived in spatial terms, their rediscovery did not depend on a prior study of philosophy,
Or one might follow Hegel's belief that unity is henceforth possi-
2 9 0 Self-Description
nor was it motivated by irritations that came from philosophical theories. Rather, it emerged from the artists' reflection upon their own activity, from their reaction to a prior "realism," accompanied perhaps by a sense of the paradox that one at once sees the space of the image, sees it disap- pear [and become only canvas], then sees it again. No philosophy could evaluate, from the perspective of its own system, what is happening here and why. A description that wants to resonate with the art system must be able to connect to discoveries within the system.
The artistic trends that established themselves as "modern" during the second half of the nineteenth century suggested a renunciation not only of imitation but of fictionality as such. Fictional representations were not supposed to be confused with reality. The reader was meant to react with disbelief, then suspend his disbelief and consider the artwork to be a real- ity in its own right. The suspension of disbelief--this double negation of the relevance of the real--now became superfluous. Fictionality still pre- supposes the possibility for discovering what the world is really like, so that fiction can offer a fitting description. To do so, the work of art must supply both contextual similarity and redundancies. Modern art goes be- yond these conditions of fictionality. The modern artwork does not imi- tate (or does so only ironically), nor does it seek to anchor its own reality in the fictional realm. It relies exclusively on its own means to convince its audience, and it assumes that its attempt to surpass previous models is persuasive. This farewell to fictionality might be the ultimate consequence of a differentiated art system, which had to sacrifice the recognizable as- pects and redundancies implied in the notion of a fictional reality as dis- tinct from a reality "out there" in order to realize redundancies exclusively as internal suggestions within the work or, in contemporary terminology, as "intertextuality" within the system.
Some observers of the eventful (and nonetheless rich) history of twenti-
190
eth-century art have returned once again to "dialectical" presuppositions. Dialectics suggests that a process driven by negation must eventually cul- minate in affirmation. Proving this point, however, turned out to be diffi- cult. We think of Adorno's efforts to find affirmation in Schonberg (but not in Stravinsky). One stereotypically invokes "capitalism" and "bourgeois society. " But such cross-references no longer succeed in analytical terms, and there is no concept of society that could explain why art runs into
problems with its own autonomy (even though everyone seems to concur
191
that it does). But if dialectics--after the "dialectic of Enlightenment"
--
Self-Description 2 9 1
no longer offers any prospects for the future, are we supposed to infer that this holds for art and society as well? Or, given the improbability of this proposition, wouldn't it make more sense to sacrifice dialectics? For this reason (and without referring to other findings) we break with this loosely Marxist mode of argumentation and regard the social modernity of art, like that of other functional systems, to be a matter of system autonomy, which then becomes the theme of self-descriptions.
Self-descriptions of the system within the system, however, do not re- produce the system's operations, only the ideas that guide these opera- tions. This process preserves the differentiation of specific activities of re- flection. The theory of art is increasingly applied within works themselves, until the avant-garde eventually seizes the political idea of experimenting with the entire range of the concept of art, if not with the universality of the realm of artistic competence as such. What used to be ideal'in the idea of art is replaced by a notion of universality that is independent of objects and determined internally.
The possibilities for escaping into the exotic or the trivial that used to
be available no longer suffice; one now transgresses their boundaries.
Everything mysterious is expelled from art--unless it elicits a shock ef-
192
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
193
or the silence that makes
Signs once again turn into symbols
2 9 2 Self-Description
does it mean for the art system to contain its own descriptions, and how can this fact be rendered observable in a work of art?
However, a self-description of the system can also contain a self-negation of the system--for example, as a negation of every boundary and every in- ternal determination, as a negation of the obligation to follow traditional
195
models, or as a negation of the system's future.
negation is a positive operation (here, of communication), which depends on a meaning recursively secured within an actually existing autopoietic system. Self-negation is therefore possible only when the system that exe- cutes the negation operates autopoietically, when it disposes over a mem- ory and projects a future--if only in the empty formula of "I have no idea how to go on. "
Romantic "criticism" wanted to exhaust the most perfect possibilities and complete the artwork in its unattainable perfection. Now, the chal- lenge was to locate the negation of the system within the system, to per- fect the system's autonomy, because autonomy, in its most radical sense, can be thought only in terms of the inclusion of self-negation into the sys- tem (or, phrased differently, in terms of the exclusion of hetero-negation). As a result of this development--one already "historical" from today's standpoint--one can see that art can deal with limitations in two ways: it can reject limitations as repression and try to overcome them, or it can ac- cept limitations as necessary working conditions and subsequently treat such conditions as substitutable.
Based on a fundamental notion of negativity, Adorno's aesthetics offers
196
two alternative versions of negativity:
jecting any external influence, and a sociocritical version that reflects on the contradiction that art realizes itself positively in society while assum- ing a negative (critical) position vis-a-vis society. It is difficult to see which common notion of negativity could reconcile these two versions and bring about their dialectical synthesis. Earlier we raised the question of
197
whether one can assume negation at the operative level,
there must be a prelogical notion of distinction, which requires the oper- ation of negation only at the level of self-description, that is, the level where self-reference and hetero-reference are distinguished.