No More Learning

What had thus evolved within a few centuries was a diversity of forms which in retrospect could no longer be under- stood as nature or perfection and which today cannot even be considered progress. This development began in early modernity; that much we know, because at that time stylistic orientation was already coupled to the production of art. Variation was motivated not only by the production of works but also by work-transcending structures, which could be experi- enced as contingent--as a maniera one could choose--and which could be hypercorrected (thus appearing to the observer of styles as a kind of mannerism or a symptom of stylistic decay). Style legitimized both con- forming behavior and deviation--precisely because it was a structural condensation of what was going on in art at any given time. Some theo- ries (for example, of landscape painting) preceded the production of cor- responding works, and one demanded of the work, among other things,
91 that it acknowledge the maniera it followed.
Art has been condemned to autonomy, and the problems of self- description that arise from this situation are translated into works of art in ways that (still) elude an intelligible theoretical explication. This is evi- dent, for example, in the poetry of paradox and later in romanticism, and it manifests itself forcefully in the avant-garde of the nineteenth and twen- tieth centuries. We shall return to this point. What interests us here is that this situation does not lead to the collapse of the mechanisms of variation, selection, and restabilization, but rather to a circular network that com- prises these different levels of evolution. Evolution is accelerated as a re-
This meant that society was no longer repre-
2 4 2 Evolution
suit, and the reservoir of forms expands to the point where the only pur- pose of constraints is to be challenged.
The nexus between diversification and acceleration corresponds to pre- cisely the kind of hypothesis an evolutionary theory would propose. So far as we can tell, we currently have no other explanation.
VI
An autonomous art system has emerged as the result of an internal evo- lution within art. The same holds for other functional systems. They all realize operative closure and self-organization, and, in so doing, they in- crease causal dependencies and independence in selective forms that are typical of modern society. Art, however, bears a special trait which it shares only with religion: participation is optional. Inclusion, whether ac- tive or passive, is a matter of individual choice. The low rate of participa- tion in art is astonishing. Only a fraction of the population participates in art, and the idiosyncrasies of modern art often serve as an excuse for stay- ing away from it. Difficulties of observation and understanding abound. On the active side, it becomes increasingly cumbersome for artists to find a niche, a style, a manner of presentation for which they can claim origi- nality. These difficulties seem extravagant and forced, which in turn af- fects people's readiness to participate passively in art.
There has been much lament over this development. But there is an- other side to it, an important advantage. Because the art system looks upon participation/nonparticipation as a matter of individual choice, both options are socially possible. No one is forced--as they were in William James's times--to feign a musical self in order to visit the opera in Boston. One abandons conventions of this sort, which were always class specific. The art system thereby gains the advantage of making its mechanism of inclusion/exclusion largely independent of the inclusions and exclusions of other functional systems. Empirical research has no difficulty noticing that the number of people who go to concerts and visit museums and art exhi- bitions is not a representative selection of the population at large. But this bias cannot be comprehended as a result of a social regulation. Rather, it is a correlate of the evolutionary improbability of equal distribution, which manifests itself differently in mega-events, such as rock concerts, and in classical theater.
In another terminology, one might say: there are only a few, rather
Evolution
243
loose structural couplings between the art system and other systems. As before, a specialized art market couples the art system and the economic system. But in this market, artworks are traded as capital investments or as extremely expensive individual goods. On the production side, access to this market depends on an established reputation, and the market takes an active role in developing such reputations. However, one should not overestimate the irritating effects of the market on the production of art. Precisely the demand for artistic originality prevents the artist from work- ing with an eye to the market.
Compared to other intersystemic relationships--between law and pol- itics, for example, between the health care system and the economy as an employment system, or between the economy and science--the art sys- tem is surprisingly isolated. This might explain why modern art is capable of developing a symbolization of fundamental social problems of modern society that relies neither on an imitation of society's "nature" nor on a cri- tique of its effects.
Art is a "playful" doubling of reality; this is both the result and the con- dition of its evolution. But what is this enigmatic double? How can it be observed? As a unity? As a boundary one can cross without being able to occupy it? As nothing, and thus once again as something that can serve as an indication of the unobservability of the world?
This situation, which has evolved (unplanned), can be described in sev- eral ways, from which society can choose the one it likes best, the one that it finds convincing and that works for communication--whether as a sign for its essence or as a critique, depending on whether society searches for a positive or negative relationship to itself. But if there is a plurality of possible self-descriptions, why not several at once? Perhaps it is the prob- lem of a "postmodern" poly-contexturality of self-descriptions, which so- ciety at first explores in the realm of art.
? 7 Self-Description
I
One of the incalculable effects of Wittgenstein's philosophy was to raise the question of whether a concept of art can be defined. If the notion of play defies definition, then art should remain undefined as well. This view
1
was widely held in the 1960s. It denies only die possibility for a definition
that corresponds to the "essence" of art and holds unequivocally for all ob- servers, however, thus leaving a loophole for the recent theory of operative constructivism, which no longer raises issues of essence or of the consen- sus of all observers but instead leaves the decision of what counts as art to
2
the art system itself. In relation to this system, all other observers assume
the position of second-order observers. Such observers must restrict them- selves to reporting what the art system designates as art. They must leave it to the system to determine its own boundaries. This move burdens the theory of self-describing systems with a momentous inheritance. It must salvage a highly encumbered "firm" that has been dealing in "essences" and "referring signs," for which tliere is no market left.
Moreover, this means that the notion of self-description is not a consti- tutive operation--in the sense that the system needs to know what art is before it can begin to produce art. Self-description--here and in other con- texts as well--is a retrospective operation that requires die prior existence of something it can resort to. This might still leave open the possibility of characterizing self-description as a cognitive apprehension of the "essence" of art, so long as such a terminology is still acceptable. Modern art in par- ticular initially thought of itself as representing a kind of clean, purified
244
Self-Description
245
essence or quest for truth. But from the viewpoint of self-description, the appeal to "essence" or "truth" is only one possibility among others, which disintegrates under the gaze of the second-order observer. All products of self-description must be treated as contingent, even if they resist contin- gency at the semantic level. Most importantly, they must be treated as se- lective choices, incapable of retaining and representing in the system's memory the sum total of what is happening in the system.
This "modalization" of all self-descriptive propositions implies nothing yet about the limits of plausibility to which self-descriptions must adhere. Making concessions to contingency, belatedness, selectivity, or a plurality of self-descriptions does not answer the question of what is accomplished by such self-descriptions. It merely addresses this question to another au- thority--an authority that is presumably motivated by its own interests to keep arbitrariness under control and is in a better position to do so. Whether it does so remains to be seen. At any rate, works of art must be distinguishable as such. Otherwise they are perceived as objects of utility or, more recently, as trash--or they are mistaken for sacred objects, in- structional texts, and so on. As we have shown in detail, society, in order to recognize art, requires a recursive network of observations that makes use of identifiable structures to generate nonidentical reproductions. The artist must anticipate what an observer might observe as a work of art and what kind of additional information one might be able to expect (in terms of theater buildings, art exhibitions, museums, the length of lines in po- etry, and so forth). Even the individual operations one performs when ob- serving a work of art must, via other operations, refer back to themselves. They acquire their distinguishable identity only by a detour through other objects--even when, and precisely when, they are unique. Observations of art occur only in the autopoietic network of the art system. In this sense, one can speak of a basal self-reference at the level of operations that
3
cannot be decomposed further. Without this self-reference, there would
be no art. Art, in other words, is not a "composition" made up of preex- isting "autochtonous" parts that only need to be put together.
Moreover, the institutionalization of art and the establishment of sup- porting information (exhibitions and so on) require that works of art "converse" with one another, that art cite, copy, reject, renew, ironize art --that art is reproduced, no matter how, within a referential nexus that transcends the work. Today this is called "intertextuality," which is an-
4
other way of saying that the art system must have a memory. Memory is
246 Self-Description
presupposed especially when the evolution of artistic communication leads to a situation in which the artwork makes its own laws. We have called this phenomenon the self-programming ofart. Self-programming re- quires the specification of such referential networks to ensure that art is still recognized as art, despite the growing tolerance for idiosyncratic art- works. One can now identify the types of form (stylistic levels, sympho- nies, sonnets) that underlie certain formal constraints. One can identify the styles or "signatures" of a certain artist, or isolate periods in his work in which he draws on his work in a recognizable manner. If one takes this into account, then one can distinguish several levels at which observations of art are self-referentially determined ("level" here does not indicate pri- ority, in the sense that the general would be more important than the par- ticular or vice versa). Under the strenuous conditions of a complexity that increases in the course of evolution, all of these circumstances contribute to the autopoietic self-reproduction of art.
If we speak in the following of the self-description of the art system, then we presuppose these developments. The concept of self-description points in another direction, however. We must presuppose all the operations that produce a difference between art and nonart within the recursive network of these operations. We further assume the basal self-referentiality of ob- servation to be an operation. Without it, there would be nothing to be de- scribed as art. But the type of reflection that goes under the name "self- description" uses a different distinction. It refers to an other different from the system's basal self-reference, namely, to the environment and specifi- cally to the inner-social environment of the autopoietic system of art. The
theory of self-description always already assumes the existence of self- descriptions. Theoretical analysis only reiterates the system's own self-
5
descriptions.
In society, all the interpretations generated by communication come to-
gether. When art becomes visible as a distinct phenomenon, it stimulates descriptions. One wants to determine what art is all about. Since antiq- uity, there has been a literature on art. Recognizing works of art as works of art was understood to be a kind of astonishment that provokes curios- ity, or a surprise that imprints itself in memory. Such notions lack speci- ficity. One might be surprised on other occasions as well; the narratives of the religious system abound with such reports. Moreover, descriptions of this sort are not localized within the art system. They do not engage in the internal affairs of art, not in the manner in which romantic art criticism
Self-Description
247
engaged itself. They are basically philosophical texts, concerned with one
aspect of world descriptions that desire and search for truth. Accordingly,
neither in antiquity nor in the Middle Ages was there any concept for
what we today call the (fine) arts. What catches one's eye at first are par-
ticular differences between media of perception, and also between the vi-
sual arts and texts (poetry). August Wilhelm Schlegel still published his
lectures of 1801--which were conceived as a comprehensive presentation
and certainly belong to the epoch of reflection--in two volumes, under
6 the title Lectures on the Fine Arts and Literature.
It was difficult to separate out what, according to our modern under- standing, does not belong to art. When representational issues moved into the foreground, as they did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one felt compelled to include in the realm of art the beautiful appearance of good manners and benevolence (bienseance)--everything that was called morality at the time and treated in a science de mceurs. Under such condi- tions, aesthetics and morality became inseparable. The debate about the "beautiful"--whether understood as exemplary perfection, balanced pro- portion, or a refined sharpening of the intellect (acutezza, Witz)--was car- ried on for several centuries. In these terms, however, it was impossible to separate artistic beauty from natural beauty, the good looks of people, the elegance of their behavior, the eloquence of their speeches, or the dissim- ulation of their imperfections.
In retrospect one might ask: What was missing? And what would be the theoretical criterion for a self-description of the art system? Approaching the wealth of materials contained in the pertinent literature in the manner of the "intellectual historian" is not enough. We first need to clarify what we mean by self-description.
An understanding of this phenomenon has been obscured by the con- cept of "culture"--one of the most detrimental concepts ever to be in- vented. While the concept allowed one to distinguish between objective and subjective culture, both referred to an (artificial) state of affairs that was relativized by attributing it to individuals or groups. The invention of culture toward the end of the eighteenth century--of a form of reflection that subsumed under culture everything that was not nature--presup- posed this kind of relativization, which served as a basis for generating his- torical or national comparisons between cultures--an event staged by "ed- ucated Europe," as it was called in those days. Despite its comparative relativization, culture remained an object of essential propositions that
2 4 8 Self-Description
could be either true or false. What we mean by "self-description," by con- trast, refers to the mode of operation by which systems generate their in- ternal identity, whatever the observers of this process might think of it. One can certainly imagine a plurality of simultaneously generated self- descriptions; but the notion of relativity is completely inappropriate in this case. (Similarly, no relativism whatsoever is involved in making the point that some animals have tails and some don't. ) What creates prob- lems is classical bivalent logic, since the description of a self-description projects realities that differ from the ones it describes.
A definition of the concept of self-description can be quickly intro- duced. As the word indicates, we are dealing with a description of the sys- tem by the system. During the years between Baumgarten and Hegel, the theory of art temporarily maintained close ties to philosophy, yielding to
7 theoretical constraints that did not originate in the art system; this is still
8
true for Adorno, at least for his "dialectic. " Ever since then, one speaks of
"aesthetics. " The term alludes to theoretical tools that have nothing to do with art, to imported plausibilities, to an orientation toward what is also otherwise (for example, geschichtsphilosophisch) acceptable. By contrast, we consider aesthetics a self-description of the art system to the extent that it reacts to internal problems of meaning and is not just concerned with il- lustrating general philosophical theories. If aesthetics were indeed a phi- losophy that covers the entire realm of knowledge about art, it is not clear
9
what kind of independence would be left for art.
In self-description, the system becomes its own theme; it claims an
identity of its own. The concepts of self-thematization (if communication is at stake) and self-reflection mean the same thing. And yet, this equation glosses over considerable difficulties. Describing is a kind of observation. Observation is a distinguishing indication. Distinguishing and indicating always go along with a twofold exclusion. What is excluded is the un- marked space on the other side of the distinction, that which is not indi- cated. The unity of the operation that employs a distinction in order to indicate one of its sides but not the other is also excluded. Being an ob- servation, the description renders the world and the operating observation invisible. To be sure, the text indicates that there is more than just a text-- an author, for example. The internal side of the description suggests an ex- ternal, unmarked side. If one wants to cross this boundary, one must be able to distinguish and indicate something on the other side, and the ini- tial problem poses itself again in a different constellation. This might be
Self-Description
249
why the classical theory of the self-reflection of consciousness, or later,
of Spirit, preferred to articulate itself within the schema determined/
undetermined, without, however, being able to justify its choice of this
10
schema.
The boundary between marked and unmarked, the form of this mark,
supplies the starting point for our hypotheses. It raises the question: What is rendered invisible by which distinctions? Or, more precisely: What kinds of distinctions does art employ in order to distinguish (observe, de- scribe) itself? The selection of distinctions for describing art is certainly not accidental (nor are they determined by the "essence of art"). A back- ground process might enforce certain boundaries and block further ques- tioning by way of final concepts. This background process might bring about a reorganization of the domain of social communication or, more accurately, a transition of the social system to a primarily functional dif- ferentiation--an order in which art must eventually claim a place of its own that cannot be determined by outside forces.
In all subdomains of society, self-descriptions typically grapple with an excess of possibilities that results from the differentiation of a system within the social system. The emergence of an aristocratic upper class, for example, thanks to a concentration of resources, creates possibilities of co- operation and conflict and allows for dominating a lower class. Such pos- sibilities would not exist without such a differentiation. Therefore it be- comes necessary to restrict what is admissible--for example, in the form of a special ethos of the aristocratic way of life. One can observe the same tendency in conjunction with the emergence of functional systems and, hence, also in a differentiated art system. Self-description does not shield the system from constant irritation by excluded excess possibilities. In Au- gust 1994, the German press reported that the Federal Association of Ger- man Galleries had rejected a proposal to admit artworks (but are these re- ally "artworks"? ) by Australian Aborigines to the Cologne art fair, "Art Cologne," on the grounds that these works are merely folk art. One can see here--last but not least because of a long tradition in modern art of attempting to subvert the distinction axtlkitsch or of presenting forms that are directly and generally intelligible--how strongly the possible rebels against the limits of the admissible, and tends to succeed. Self-description erects a boundary from within a boundary, a "frame" within the "frame" of the system; but precisely because of this difference, self-descriptions re- main subject to irritation and become dynamic from within.
2 5 0 Self-Description
II
Already in antiquity, the interpretive description of art had become problematic. One observed that art extends reality in ways that cannot be justified by its utility, by religion, or by a mythical familiarity with origins. There is (alphabetic) writing, a production of texts in which the redou- bling of reality surfaces as a problem, simply because one is dealing with writing. The meaning of poetry becomes problematic. The solutions pro- posed, however, made no claims for an autonomy of art, nor did they maintain that art has a value of its own. They assumed instead that the real world, as nature, does not always appear in its most perfect form. One needed to remember (Platonically) the original Ideas that define the es- sence of things, or (following Aristode) to observe nature empirically in its perfect forms rather than in its corrupted forms. Despite differences be- tween these philosophical concepts, the meaning of art resided in a cor-
rective imitation that directs the awareness of the observer toward the es- sential and purges it of imperfections and defects. One could almost speak of an ornamented support and foregrounding of the essence of things, of nature, of the world. Be this as it may, art did not find its meaning in it- selfas a realization of its own value.
This situation did not change significantly during the Middle Ages, even though entirely different conditions prevailed. Dionysius (Pseudo- Dionysius Areopagites), who strongly influenced the medieval conception of art, continued to propagate the ideas of late antiquity. A passive notion of cognition prevailed, despite frequent interruptions of this tradition. The world was considered to be a beautifully ordered cosmos, in which the most diverse things distinguished themselves and were fused, despite their diversity, into a harmony that shone even through ugliness, failure, and incompletion. Knowledge did not construct distinctions; it received distinctions. Against this background, the distinctions that determined
11
the conception of art were quite different from the ones we use today. They were determined above all by the guiding distinction between the visible and the invisible and by efforts, inspired by this distinction, to me- diate symbolically between the two. Since beauty was considered a prop- erty of being or even of matter, all symbolic mediations partook of being; they were made of the same stuff as the Creation ratlier than signifying something radically other.
This is why a concept such as imitation (which played no central role at
Self-Description 2 5 1
all) could move about through creation naively and without bias. This sit-
uation did not change until the beginning of early modernity, although a
notion of imitation persisted for quite some time. An independent motive
for this change might have been the discovery of antique models, by
means of which art began to refer to itself. Without referring to the living
present and to the infinite distance of God--that is, without religious
symbolization--one could now presume thatperfection had earlier existed
in this world. This notion offered the prospect of recapturing perfection
solely through artistic means. There was no need to criticize religion; it
sufficed to improve one's own work. The contrast antiquilmoderni served
this distinction} This transition shifted the focus onto the individual'that brought it about, while stimulating a criticaldiscussion that evaluated this transition, initially on the basis of Aristotle's PoeticsP In retrospect, we can appreciate these trends as first attempts toward a self-description of the art system.
The discussion proceeded initially from premises inherited from antiq- uity, such as the notion mimesislimitatio. One naively assumed that the ob- ject of imitation was already an image that could be perceived. At the same time, this concept signaled a distance from the artistic accomplishments of the original images. Gradually, however, and for different reasons, the no- tion of constant essential forms became problematic to the extent that the social authority responsible for their interpretation began to crumble. New forms of differentiation undermined former reference points--especially
14
as the guiding distinction in this regard, and emphasis could vary within 2
stratification, but also the differentiation between city and country.
sure, these forms of life continued to persist, and small portions of the pop- ulation were marked as aristocratic or as living in cities. But for the evolu- tion of the social system, new system formations became more vital: the le- gal system, the territorial state, the monetary economy, a religion that retreated to orthodoxy, and, last but not least, a science oriented toward provocative experiments and an artificial mathematics. The incipient func- tional differentiation of the social system created, as if from the outside, a new situation to which the self-description of the art system must respond from a position of autonomy.
Correlation between the functional differentiation of the social system, the operative closure and autopoietic autonomy of functional systems that follow from it, and the resulting need for reflection can be traced and con- cretized at various levels. A strong argument for such a correlation can be
To be
2 5 2 Self-Description
made by showing that similar internal reflection theories developed not
only in the art system but in other functional systems as well, beginning in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and culminating in the eighteenth
century. Whereas differentiation has always existed at the level of types of
interaction or roles, only the differentiation of functional systems enforced
the renunciation of an externally determined identity--of a cosmological-
religious nature, for example. It thus created a vacuum that could be filled
only by self-descriptions of the respective systems.
This qualified self-
description as a phenomenon bound to a particular form of social differ-
15
entiation,
themselves. Yet we are not dealing simply with an arbitrary sequence of "discourses. " We refrain at this point from returning to these general
16
social-theoretical arguments.
By 1600 at the latest, one can state explicitly that a special kind of
knowledge was required in the realms of painting, sculpture, and architec-
ture--a knowledge that philosophers and theologians were unable to sup-
17
ply. The learned scholastic terminology now seemed useless and gratu-
18
itous. The arslscientiadebate,
Ages, subsided; the reflection of artistic activity now supplied enough ma- terial of its own. One resorted to treatises that contained working instruc- tions for artists. For this type of knowledge one still claimed truth. Delight in formulas, especially deliberately obscure ones, did not develop until the seventeenth century. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the litera- ture about art was not concerned with an overarching system of art, but fo- cused instead on painting and poetry. Apart from technical instructions, it was concerned with evaluating stylistic decisions (for example, by taking a position for or against clearly isolated figures in the critical discussion of mannerism). In this form, the literature on art influenced artistic produc- tion in ways that were difficult to evaluate without reference to the system of patronage supplied by the church and the courts; in other words, the in-
19 fluence of the literature on art manifested itself only in its indirect effects.
Another consideration is the question of which other specialized func- tional systems gain significance for the differentiation and self-description of a particular functional system--whether a system relies on the possibil- ity for external support or requires distinction and separation. Rudolf Stichweh has investigated in great historical detail how the university sys- tem (the ultimate level of the educational system) gained independence by giving up its reliance on religion and orienting itself toward the early
rather than a matter of perfecting one's knowledge of things
which had preoccupied the late Middle
Self-Description
^53
modern territorial state.
ering the next impetus toward independence, which became possible in the nineteenth century when the educational system focused its primary
21
20
This analysis is easily supplemented by consid-
orientation on science (on the "unity of research and teaching"). sumably, art gained a similar degree of freedom when it gave up religious
22
and eventually on the emerg- Several systems then profited from the same operations and their results, but each system interpreted these operations differently and in the context of different recursive networks, that is, without ad-
24 versely affecting the operative closure of other participating systems. The
effects of symbiotic relationships of this sort on the self-descriptions of systems were mostly negative and restrictive, however. One doesn't bite the hand of one's host, at least not during dinner. This is why the distance that art eventually established from its sponsors did not manifest itself in an offensive way; instead, art emphasized its own accomplishments and its independence with regard to the invention of forms while respecting the sponsor's thematic interests. This situation did not necessarily give rise to a new theory of art or to a self-description of the art system that would be directed explicitly against the environment.
We therefore suspect that a different kind of system-to-system relation- ship affected the self-description of art much more strongly--indeed, in- augurated this description in the true sense of the word--at a time when the incompatibility of functional systems became apparent. In the early fif- teenth century, a new humanistic and scientific understanding of art (based on geometry, perspective, anatomy) freed itself from church supervision. Artists began to rely on their own reason and on their personal access to the
25
world. They claimed a social status that superseded mere craftsmanship. This process of separation initially required that art and the knowledge of nature and human affairs in the widest sense form a unity. In the sixteenth century, knowledge was still as interested in technology and in the expla- nation of ordinary experience as it was in phenomena that were strange, miraculous, unusual, or astonishing. The former were useful for life, the latter satisfied curiosity and the need for entertainment. Both came to- gether in the double sense of Latin recreatio. As late as the sixteenth cen- tury, one can still insist that an order striving toward unity was to be val-
26
ued positively and mere multitudo negatively. In the tendency toward
unity, everything ultimately leads to God. The representations of art, too, partook of this cosmological evaluation, for which one furnished examples
patronage and began to rely on the courts
ing art market.
23
Pre-
Self-Description
*54
from the world of objects, from the animal kingdom, and from the realm
of human life. Beauty was a kind of reflex of an order that strove toward
27
unity, it expressed a preference for unity by order itself. By no means was
beauty a criterion that helped differentiate a distinct world of art. But pre- cisely this cultural climate, this insistence on unity, indicated a divergence of heterogeneous tendencies and interests. This was due primarily to dra- matic changes and to a wealth of innovations in areas one would classify today as the beginnings of modern science. Cosmology altered its notion of the unity of the world, especially in Italy, abandoning the assumption of an effective unifying principle (read off the paradigm of the soul) and adopting the notion of a dynamic processing of differences for which laws (possibly mathematical ones) must be discovered--all of which boiled
28 down to an empirically and mathematically oriented type of research.
As early as the sixteenth century, the interpretation of art ran into diffi- culties because it could not keep up with trends that would, in the seven- teenth century, aim to consolidate an empirico-rational, experimentally and
29
mathematically oriented system of science. At that time, the need to dis-
tance oneself from a truth-oriented science constituted the front on which the early modern understanding of art--primarily of poetry--crystallized. Contemporaries must have been impressed by this move, since previous centuries--the epoch of Alberti, Diirer, Leonardo da Vinci, Palladio, and Cardano--had emphasized the unity of scientific knowledge and an art
30
that strove for beauty. Among the factors that inspired this emphasis was
the idea of an ars magna et ultima, which could be traced to Ramon Lull and prevailed until the late sixteenth century. Around the mid-sixteenth century, art, including painting, sculpture, and architecture, was still a topic
31
in scientific treatises by famous scholars;
stricted to factual knowledge did not take hold until the seventeenth cen- tury. Truth was still bound by expectations of a proper interpretation of the world, which included not only explanations of fact but also fictive repre- sentations and, of course, normative validity claims. Only against this com- mon background does the dispute about the truth claims of poetry become intelligible. This dispute staked out the boundaries that would eventually separate demonstrable knowledge from beautiful appearance.
For a long time, poetry continued to exploit a numeric mysticism that
32
suggested harmony.
size numerical relationships through meter and direct naming. Around the mid-sixteenth century, painting began to resist the scientism of the
a rigorous notion of truth re-
It could do so without effort, since it could empha-
Self-Description
*55
33
Florentine doctrine of proportion,
nature. Along with the emphasis on proportion, this doctrine declared re- dundancy to be the essence of things and reduced variety to an accidental property. One could almost speak of a protest by painters against an atti- tude that did not differentiate between painting and architecture. Their concerns focused on a more appropriate access to the unique possibilities of painting. Painting was more than mere imitation. "La Pittura e propria
34
poesia, cioe invenzione, la qual fa apparere quello que non e. " Eventu-
ally, architectural doctrine, too, turned away from the notion of mystical-
mathematical harmony and toward more practical purposes. In the wake
of Alberti, the doctrine of mathematical proportion--which imitated the
hidden harmony of the universe in the form of numerical relationships--
3i culminated in Luca Pacioli's treatise De divina proportione (1577). But
Pacioli's treatise offers almost no practical directives for applying this doc- trine in the construction of buildings. Carlo Borromeo's treatise on the construction of cathedrals (1577) rejects the Platonic, geometrical archi- tecture of centralized construction in favor of a cross construction, which is better suited for liturgical purposes anyway. In addition, one empha- sized practical interests. In writing about cloisters, for example, Borromeo elaborates on portions of buildings that existed merely for utility: the
36
lodgings of servants, lavatories, latrines, and prisons.
Counter Reformation, religion retreated into itself. Another point of de- parture for the separation of art was the debate, inherited from antiquity, about the meaning of poetry, which was provoked by the dissociation of
37
poetry from religio-cultic and gende contexts.
provided a motive for observing the activity of poets and singers "philo- sophically," that is, in view of their truth content. The effect was twofold: on the one hand, poets complained about being treated poorly by society and bemoaned the lack of recognition of their merits (reading made them
38
aware of tlieir situation).
ciety as useless, if not harmful, in view of the assumption that it was now possible to publish and read up on the truth. The controversies about the proper form of (noble) education raised the issue of whether fictions or
39
which treated art solely as a mirror of
On the other hand, they were criticized by so-
stories, even if they were true, could contribute to education.
simism of Christianity and the rediscovery of classical skepticism provided the sixteenth century with a new basis for such doubts. Especially in Eng- land, one began to emphasize practical utility, and the polemic against po- etry and the theater could appeal in an ambiguous way either to the sal-
In the wake of the
The possibility of writing
The pes-
2 j 6 Self-Description
vation of the soul or to a secular prosperity; in both cases, poetry and per- formance could be judged to be only a distraction from what really mat-
40
tered.
also in circles that oriented themselves economically toward the market, there was no place for a function of fictionality.
Moreover, the need to distinguish science from art became more urgent to the extent that art, or the artes in general, became incapable of think- ing of themselves in terms of a reworking or a recapitulation of classical artistic skill. The unique accomplishments of painting and sculpture--the kind considered modern at the time--began to stand out in comparison with an antiquity that had become increasingly familiar and saturated with interpretation. Mannerism turned deviation into a program. One used one's knowledge of perspective for the deformation of forms. This knowledge, as die saying goes, was applied in paradoxical ways, raising the issue of criteria. As usual, however, the issue of criteria remained sec- ondary in relation to the question of what could function as a binary code whose values could be assigned according to those criteria. At first, tradi- tional models continued to determine the discussion and forced the artis- tic striving for independence into an unfavorable position. Knowledge re- mained focused on truth versus untruth, and for ontology or, later, the purposes of actions, the issue was being versus appearance. As long as this was so, art was forced to position itself on the side of untruth and appear- ance and to affirm this position, if it was to distinguish itself from a knowledge that conformed to reality. Art had to assert itself against the complex alliance of religion, knowledge, and utility.
Thanks to a number of chance events that affected the tradition, this
turned out to be easier than it seemed at first. In the discussion about the
relationship between (and the pedagogical value of) historical knowledge
(historia) and poetry (poesia), history was at a disadvantage because it was
41
considered to be a collection of real but accidental events.
the events might have happened exactly as they were told, this process was
42
obscured by a reality that remained erratic.
could represent ideal forms--forms that did not exist in the ordinary sense, but defined the goal toward which being strives nonetheless. His- tory only narrated facts that depended on chance, whereas poetry "reduces
43
the thing to the species and to universal nature. "
torical details but also fictional supplements were considered accidental; only the latter, however, were needed to represent the essential. The doc-
In the worldview of the Puritans and other religious groups, but
Poetry, on the other hand,
Even though
In poetry, not only his-
Self-Description
257
trine of vanitas mundi could serve as a means of religious justification, which allowed art to distance itself from worldly excess and from preten- tious truth claims, even in situations in which art accentuated its own skill (as, for example, in Holbein). Such an attitude could also be symbolized in the form of paradox (for example, by the presence of a skull).
By contrast, religion, which claimed to represent the real world, blamed poetry for taking things too lightly. Moreover, the ancient doctrine still held that only a fraction of knowledge was given in the form of absolutely certain truths (episteme), whereas in many other respects, one had to be content with doctrinal tradition {doxa) or with efforts to represent the probable or a "semblance of truth" (verisimilitudo), which might also be represented in art, especially in art. The ambivalence of "verisimilitude" glossed over the fact that the distinction between truth and falsity did not matter the least in art, nor was there a need to admit that this was so. Within a clerical context, probabilistic thinking provided an indispensable assistance to knowledge. (Of course, a mathematically founded theory of
probability was not yet available; besides, art had no reason to adopt such a theory. ) Poetry began to search for its own synthesis of truth and falsity by distancing itself from the specific truth code of science. "The fable . . . is not only false but false and true together; false as to history, true as to its
44
semblance to the truth. "
pretation of Aristotle's text, which left the relationship between truth and astonishment in suspense.
*Tn the context of searching for a code and for artistic criteria, one can easily maintain that art establishes a kingdom of its own in the realm of an artificial-artistic semblance, which seeks to compete neither with the abstractions of mathematics nor with the pedantry of factual knowledge, but rather develops internal criteria of success for its own representations and ought to be allowed to search for ways of affecting its audience. Art, in particular poetry, conceals political allusions behind the notion that art
45
is an activity of poiesis which "makes" its own works.
appeal to its own, in the meantime well-established reputation and point to works that are generally considered significant.
When insisting on the rights of beautiful appearance, one means more
46
than just deception.
apart a simple, bivalent ontology and to reinvent the place of mankind within the cosmos. This requires more complex distinctions, that is, dis- tinctions of distinctions. In the theater, this double framing is fairly
Theory could present this notion as an inter-
The point is not simply to deceive, but to break
In so doing, art can
z58 Self-Description
straightforward: the spectator is supposed to know that what he perceives on stage is "only" a play, and that within this play, deception--of the self and others--simulates worlds within a simulated world. In narratives, this difference is less evident. Narratives might be presented as Active from the start and subsequently repeat the fiction within the fiction, as in Don Quixote. Or the author might attempt to cancel the distinction between fact and fiction, for example, by feigning (or not feigning? ) the presenta-
47
tion of "discovered letters. "
An awareness of frames, as well as a sense for their confusion, spread in
a variety of ways. This situation enforced the tendency to think of truth
and beauty as opposites against a background of social conduct (social sit-
uation). Truth concerned being in itself; beauty concerned being for oth-
ers. To be sure, poetry needed to be defended to the extent that it forsook
truth and focused on beautiful appearance. Poetry no longer presented a
deficient mirror of reality, nor was it concerned with improving that mir-
ror; on the contrary, what mattered was an appearance that was inten-
tional. When science--in the wake of Copernicus and Galileo, assisted by
the telescope and mathematics--set out to explore realities that seemed at
first implausible, rhetoric, in alliance with poetry, conceived its task to be
finding lasting forms for astonishment and wit. Starting witJh Vasari, one
48
spoke of arti del disegno. In so doing, one elevated oneself beyond mere
craftsmanship while being aware of one's historically secure ground. Bal- tasar Gracian succeeded in formulating this notion as a principle and com-
49
bining it with wisdom and politics.
accomplished little unless it was concealed.
were self-confidence, the ability to assert himself, and social success. Every- thing occurred in a sphere of self-produced appearance, anyhow. The question of what the world was really like remained unanswered. This was why language, in order to be adequate, had to be obscure, ambiguous, playful, paradoxical, and, in this sense, witty. The genuine achievement of
51
such a language was "to speak where one is not. "
notion of Being as being for others (as opposed to Being in and for itself), one immediately recognizes that die enforcement of beautiful appearance hangs together with a subjective individualism that emerges at the same time and provides an opportunity to undermine all previously accepted distinctions. Instead of relying on such distinctions, one now had to con- struct and defend positions.
Art had greater obligations to social life, and it was much closer to life
In a world without certainties, truth
50
The main issues for Gracian
If one adopts Hegel's
Self-Description 259
in an effective, technical sense than a plain and unadorned knowledge. Art alone was formulated in a manner adequate to the world's social intri- cacies. It did not function as a sign for something other, but instead im- pressed itself upon its audience. The technological potential of science had not yet come into view; it remained outside the social interests of the (Je- suit) order or die Spanish political system. Yet subjectivity developed early in Spain, where it confronted an almost cosmological alliance between
52
politics and religion.
have been plausible as a formula for compromise. To it, Gracian adds a shift in emphasis from truth to effect and thus from being to time.
Filling out the negative side of the truth code--untruth and appear-
ance--highlighted both the skills and the difficulties involved in a task
that is not exactly favored by Being. Unlike in the Middle Ages, one now
demanded that the conception of the artwork be the artist's own. For-
merly, works of art were considered works of a client who made use of
skilled labor to carry out his plans. Now the artist was considered the au-
thor of the work--at first perhaps only for masterworks, but eventually for
any work that claimed to be art, whereas clients and observers were ex-
pected to contribute only expertise and critical judgment. Such demands
were expressed in the notion of concetto. In addition, intense efforts and
as a quality of superb artists.
54
The thoroughgoing duality of description
In such circumstances, beautiful appearance might
wit (Witz) were necessary to produce art. In the Italian literature dominant 53
at the time, one spoke of acutezza. The British were praising "cunning"
{acutezzalconcetto, agudezalconcepto, cunninglconceit) was striking. It im-
plied that life and erudition must coincide. A skill of this sort rendered it-
self--that is, the illusion--transparent as a deliberately created surprise.
The concetto underlying the illusion was displayed along with it; indeed,
the concetto was what ultimately mattered. This was how John Donne
55
dragged paradox out into the open--a paradox hidden
behind abstract
concepts of species and genre in the controversy between realists and nom-
inalists, in Ramism, and in a Platonism that was once again perceived as
modern. But Donne did not expect anyone to believe in such decep-
56
tions.
gumentative mode of theologians and philosophers. Unlike in traditional rhetoric, to which early modern art owed its awareness of tricks, the recip- ient of the message was not supposed to be deluded or remain in the dark. Rather, he was exposed to a shock, which rendered the deception trans- parent and elicited admiration (admiratio). The meaning of admiratio
The point was to reveal the deception, which now included the ar-
2 6 0 Self-Description
shifted toward irritation. In order to accomplish this goal, art had to know its audience, which soon gave rise to a discussion about whether art was
57
meant for the common people or for connoisseurs.
Did the concetto draw its force of conviction from erudition? The hu-
manism of the Renaissance tempts us to believe all too quickly that this was so. Several authors expressed themselves in ways that support this claim--and they seemed to be aware that expertise and a knowledge of lit-
58
erature did not depend on social origin.
"learned plagiary" (with reference to Ben Jonson).
the idiosyncrasies of "witty" allusions did not justify sacrificing redundan- cies embedded in the foundations of knowledge shared by all of Europe. Moreover, we must keep in mind that art depended on patronage and, hence, on contracts. Thematic models were frequently tied to specific ex- pectations, especially in the iconography of the visual arts. If the artist pos- sessed the necessary education (which became possible only in the wake of print), he could balance thematic faithfulness and artistic freedom in ways
60
that avoided potential conflicts with the client.
sixteenth century, these ties began to crumble, a trend that seemed to be supported by the fact that the artist took responsibility for his own con- cetto, turning it into a flash of wit. Against every stylistic rule of traditional rhetoric, one "conceived" the improbability of forms, the lack of resem- blance, exaggeration, artificiality, skill, and the confusion of signs. More- over, the notion ofconcetto implied that the flash of wit had no effect of its own accord. "Ogni concetto," writes Pellegrini, "e sempre necessariamente
61
sommistrato dall occorso di qualqu'altro concetto. "
supported and encouraged one another. They pointed to one another within a recursive network of implicit and explicit references, which served as a precondition for the observation of astonishing and striking appear- ances. And where an early humanistic erudition still claimed truth to be the entire realm of its awareness, one looked for another kind of fascina- tion within the mutually supporting network of concetti, namely, for an in- tellectual force that convinced by deviating from the familiar.
The notion of concettismo renders imitation {mimesis) problematic, with- out overcoming it right away. A contemporary text, written entirely in the
1
spirit of concettismo? states that art supplements nature with a second be-
ing, elevating it to a state of supremely beautiful perfection. But how could one know such perfection if not through nature? Consequently, the con- cept of nature dissolved into a multiplicity of meanings--depending on
Dryden still spoke positively of
59
However, tolerating
In the second half of the
Concetti mutually
Self-Description 261
63
what one wanted to get out of it.
tory, which must be taken into account if one wants to understand why imitation prevailed for so long. The beginnings of the concept in Plato suggest an act of liberation--a liberation from the idea that the invisible re- sides within the (cult) image. The notion of "residing in," which always carries religious connotations, was replaced by a notion of relation, which was subsequently burdened with the entire legacy of religion, and which
64
remained in need of interpretation.
the "simulacra" of the old world, and this is what earned the support of a theologically inspired religion--until it was taken entirely for granted and there was no further need to insist on it.
This tradition still assumed that things themselves preserved a memory of their origin and communicated this meaning to those who perceived them. But this notion conflicted with another assumption running paral- lel to the former, namely, that the artist himself was the origin of the art- work and that works of art preserved the memory of the artist. In Plato, this contradiction results in a devaluation of art. With the revalorization of art in early modernity, this solution became unacceptable. The demand that artworks had to be original shifted the emphasis entirely onto the (in- explicable) genius of the artist. A process of erosion began to affect all for- mer ties and eventually called into question the notion of imitation itself.
If we base this conceptual history on an analytical scheme that tran- scends it, then we realize that the concept of imitatio combines two com- ponents: one of resemblance (to what? ), and one of repeatability (redun- dancy). In one way or another, a sufficient degree of recognizability must be secured; the concept of imitatio accomplishes this by referring to an al- ready existing knowledge of the world. The assumption is that redun- dancy can be guaranteed by resemblance. After all, it is possible that, within this combination, the accent shifts away from resemblance and to- ward redundancy, especially when the reference of the demand for resem- blance becomes increasingly unclear--resemblance can refer to clerical tradition, to reality or to the ideas behind reality, to Being or to appear- ance, to what exists or to what does not exist but could exist or ought to exist. So long as repeatability is guaranteed, one can grant more room to nonresemblance. What matters, eventually, is nothing more than the re- peatability of observation, and this is guaranteed only by the manner in which the artwork is executed.
Long before the final break with imitation, one began to focus on artis-
The notion of imitatio has a long his-
Imitatio amounts to a liberation from
z6z Self-Description
tic skill. To the extent one becomes concerned with know-how (in the widest technical sense), the notion of art as imitatio loses its power to con- vince. With music, one was forced to relinquish the idea of cosmic imita- tion for the simple reason that the idea of the cosmos as a harmony of pro-
65
portions and numerical relationships began to wane.
for example, imitation in poetry could still mean imitation of the divine in-
66
spiration of what could or ought to be.
ations from the familiar became possible; they were sought out, legiti- mized, and made conspicuous. According to Aristotle, poetry must also
67
Poetry compares itself to painting and vice versa. The treatises on imitation typically contain contradictory state-
69
ments.
only a more demanding kind of imitation that strives to create an illusion
stimulate astonishment.
68
Imitation is too easy and therefore no longer deserves admiration;
can assert itself as art.
70 71 Instead of imitatio one emphasized inventio,
which no longer meant discovery but invention. By imitation, art elicits as-
tonishment and calls attention to itself. (Familiar and recognizable objects
appear in an unfamiliar context. ) Once art is fully differentiated, getting at-
tention becomes its own affair.