luhmann - romantic art

A Redescription of "Romantic Art"

Niklas Luhmann

MLN, Vol. 111, No. 3, German Issue. (Apr., 1996), pp. 506-522.

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A Redescription of "Romantic Art" w

Niklas Luhmann

A sociologist taking up a theme like "romantic art" should endeavor to add nothing new to the subject matter itself. Faithfulness to the ob- ject is called for-even if only in the ordinary sense of "empirical." In what follows it is therefore not a matter of competing with literary or aesthetic inquiry or of offering new interpretations of Romantic texts or other contemporary works of art. Nor shall I intervene in the broad discussion bearing on the relationship of Romanticism, and above all early German Romanticism (Friihromantik), to modern society and its self-description as "modern";' this discussion is too dependent on crude evaluations (for example, "irrationalism") and will necessarily remain controversial as long as the concept of modernity itself remains controversial. It is, then, not a question of hermeneutics, not a matter of 'knowing better' in the domain of the critical analysis of art; in fact it is not even, at least not directly, a question here of a more adequate understanding of key Romantic concepts such as poetry (Poesie) ,irony, arabesque, fragment, criticism. Such may emerge as a byproduct of our investigation. But disciplinary discourses operate in their own spe- cific recursive networks, with their own intertextualities, their own self- fabricated pasts, which, for instance, determine what one has to do in order to assume the standpoint of second-order observation and to remain intelligible-regardless of whether one continues the discursive tradition or suggests particular changes. And, as is well-known, it is dif-

See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik, Frankfurt 1989

MLN, 11 1 (1996): 506522 O 1996by The Johns Hopkins University Press

ficult (if not impossible, at least dependent on coincidences hard to foresee) to intervene in disciplines from the outside in the name of in- terdisciplinarity2

This should be emphasized in advance when, as here, it is a matter of redescribing with systems-theoretical instruments what happened when Romanticism discovered its own autonomy and realized and worked through what had already taken place historically, namely the social differentiation of a functional system specifically related to art."here is a considerable literature bearing on this development, a literature that takes as its point of departure the notion that the spe- cific character of Romanticism as well as subsequent reflections of art is conditioned by the reorganization of society along the lines of functional differentiati~n.~ If Romanticism was modern and still is, then not because it preferred the "hovering" (das "Schwebende") or the "ir- rational" or the "fantastic," but because it attempts to endure system autonomy. Up till now, however, there have not been any investigations that seek to make clear, at the level of abstraction of general systems theory, what is to be expected when functional systems are differenti- ated as self-referential, operationally closed systems. This process cannot be grasped according to the schema-still predominant at the time of Romanticism--of part and whole. The same goes for general concepts of the advantageous division of labor or, negatively formulated, of the eternal conflict of apriori binding values; phrased in terms of proper names: the point holds for Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. For neither can one assume that an "organic" solidarity corre- sponding to the division of labor emerges on its own, nor is it justified to conceive of values as fixed points on the horizon of action orientation. Today entirely different theoretical instruments are available for a discussion of these foundational issues.

On these difficulties, but also on possible parallelisms among developments in the natural sciences, cybernetics, and literary studies, see the book by the English scholar trained in chemistry: N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, Ithaca 1990, esp. p. 37.

The concept of "redescription" is here employed in the sense of Mary Hesse, Mod-els and Analogzes i n Science, Notre Dame 1966, p. 157ff. One should, however, speak of "metaphorical redescription" only if one accepts that no theory can do without metaphors and furthermore that the concept of metaphor is itself a metaphor that uses "metapherein" in a figural, extended, or translated sense.

See, for example, Siegfried J.Schmidt, Die Selbstorganisation des Sozialsystems Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt 1989; Niels Werber, Literatur als System: Zur Ausdifferen- zierung literarischer Kommunikation, Opladen 1992. Cf. also Gerhard Plumpe, Asthetische Kommunikation der Moderne, Vol. I : Von Kant bis Hegel, Opladen 1993.

NIKLAS LUHMANN

Important changes in the conceptual repertoire of systems theory result when one substitutes "essential definitions" ( WesensdeJinitionen),but also so-called analytic system concepts, with the theoretical notion of the operative closure of systems. Essential definitions rested on a hetero- referential (jirerndrefkrentiell) orientation, analytic definitions on a self- referential orientation of the observer. The notion of operative closure and, related to it, the theory of autopoietic systems presuppose that self- referential systems must be observed. They are just that which they make out of themselves. An observation is therefore only then appropriate if it takes the self-reference of the system and, in the case of systems operating with meaning (sinnhaft operimend), the self-observation of the system into account. The "paradigm shift" that is thereby accomplished displaces systems theory from the level of first-order observation (systems as objects) to the level of second-order observation (sys tems as subobjects or obsubjects, to employ formulations ofJean Paul) .5

With this turn, the distinction between self-reference and hetero- reference is relocated within the observed observing system. Not only the scientific observer must be able to distinguish between him/herself and others (that is, between concepts and objects); this verba/res distinction is valid for all observing systems, even when they are occupied with sense perceptions and have to rely on the external world without being able to distinguish between reality and i l l ~ s i o n . ~ The generaliza- tion of the concept and the structural problems of observing systems has far-reaching consequences, which only became apparent through mathematical analyses. This detour via mathematics frees us at the same time from the mystifications previously attached to concepts such as "meaning" (Sinn) or "mind" (Geist). They enable us to see today more clearly why and how something like "imagination" is required and in what sense construction/deconstruction/ reconstruction as an ongoing process, an ongoing displacement of distinctions (Derrida's dzf- fhance), is necessary in order to dissolve paradoxes in and as time.'

See Clauis Fzchteana seu Labgeberiana, in Jean Paul, Werke, vol. 3, Munich 1961, pp. 101 1-56, or Flegeeljahre, eine Biographie, in Werke,vol. 2, Munich 1959, pp. 567-1065, esp. 641.

"his special condition of an unavoidable trust in the world that can only be dis- rupted through critical reflection holds, however, only for psychic systems. For this reason we can leave it out of consideration in what follows.

The parallels between deconstruction and second-order cybernetics are treated more thoroughly in: Niklas Luhmann, "Deconstruction as Second Order Observing," Nrw Literary History 24 (1993), pp. 76382.

In what follows we rely on the calculus of form developed by George Spencer B r o ~ n . ~ Similar considerations are to be found in the second- order cybernetics which Heinz von Foerster has elaborated."Here the consideration as to what happens when the output of a system is im- mediately reintroduced into the system (that is, when the system forms reflective loops within itself) leads to the concept of the non-trivial, and therefore unpredictable, machine. And here too the problem consists in the fact that the space of possibilities of the system is so greatly expanded through self-reference that neither internal nor external observations can predict the operations of the system. A further inference that can be drawn from these mathematical analyses: the system requires meaning in order to deal successfully (zurechtzukommen) with both itself and its world.1°

With reference to this problematic locus Spencer Brown employs the concept of the "re-entry" of a distinction into itself.llHere too it is a question of deploying possibilities of ordering that cannot be achieved through the normal operations of the arithmetic and alge- bra and can only be demonstrated as paradoxes. Spencer Brown's mode of presentation has the advantage of being directly applicable to a very formal concept of observation. Observation is, in this con- text, nothing other than the use of a distinction for the indication of one and not the other side of the distinction, however the system that performs this might be constituted. For this reason the analysis con- cludes by referring back to its beginning in the equation of observing and drawing a distinction: "We see now that the first distinction, the mark, and the observer are not only interchangeable, but, in the form, identical."12

For the analysis of the Romantic world, the consequences of such a re-entry are of central importance. If it can be accomplished (whether it is accomplished is then an empirical question), the system reaches a state of "unresolvable indeterrninacy."l"he decisive aspect of this

See George Spencer Brown, Laws ofFurm, New York 1979. Cf. also Dirk Baecker, ed., Kalkul derForm, Frankfurt 1993.

Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems, Seaside, Cal. 1981. See also the German edi- tion expanded with several additional contributions: Heinz von Foerster, Wzssen und Gmissen. Versuch einer Briicke, Frankfurt 1993.

lo This presupposes, of course, a de-subjectification of the concept of meaning. For a thorough elaboration of this point see Niklas Luhmann, SoziaZe Systeme: CrundnjU einer allgemeinen Themie, Frankfurt 1984, p. 92ff.

l1 On this point and on what follows, see Spencer Brown, Laws oJFwm, 54ff., 69ff. " Ibid., p. 76. l 3 Ibid., p. 57.

510 NIKLAS LUHMANN

concept is that the indeterminacy is not explained with reference to dependence on an overpowering, itself indeterminable environment, but rather is caused by the re-entry within the system itself: It is thus a matter of seIf-generated uncertainty with which the system in one way or another, but in any case selectively, must deal.

In order to do this the system requires:

1.a memory function. Memory must be understood here as the presentation of the present as the result of the past; or alternatively as the result of an ongoing discrimination between forgetting and remembering.14 The memory function is thus a necessary accompaniment to all operations of observing systems. It is by no means a matter of the occasional calling up of memories on the time-scale of the past (after the pattern: where did I put my glasses?).

2. an oscillator function. This can be interpreted-going beyond Spencer Brown- as the correlate of the use of distinctions. With every deploy- ment of distinctions in observation the system will also observe (mit-beobachten) the possibility of crossing the border of the distinction with a further operation and thus moving from one side to the other-for ex-ample: from the positive to the negative, from the good to the bad, from the allowed to the prohibited, from the useful to the non-useful, from the profane to the sacred, etc., from the realistic to the fantastic and back again.

With the memory function the system binds itself to its own, now un- alterable past. In this way it produces a present with a past horizon and motivates itself to proceed from the present state of the world rather than presupposing everything as new and unknown at every moment and thus always starting from the beginning.15 For this reason there is no "originary" present, no present that would be its own origin. With the oscillator function the system holds its future open-and not merely as the freedom of performing this or that action, but with regard to the fact that everything can arrive different; and this not arbi- trarily, but depending on the distinction being used, which, because it

l4 Hence of the freeing-up and the reimpregnation of the observational capacities of the system. This according to Heinz FBrster, Das Gedachtnis. Eine quantenmechanische Un- tersuchung, Vienna 1948. This formulation, by the way, shows how identities emerge, namely through confirmation (Bmahrung) in reimpregnation or, in the terms of Spencer Brown (Laws ofForm, p. l o ) , through condensation and confirmation; in any case, however, through the ongoing equation (Abgleichung) with new irritations but not with fixed contents of the environment.

l 5 In doctrines of wisdom the opposite requirement is occasionally stated: "The wise perceive every thing as new, in attentive observation if not at first glance." Baltasar Gracian, Criticon oder Ueber die allgemeinen Laster des Menschen, Hamburg 1957, p. 15.

includes what it excludes, indicates what in any given case can be otherwise. This too does not require, but rather makes possible a chrono- metric ordering of future temporal positions.

The difference between the simultaneously required memory and oscillator functions makes the construction of time necessary, the distinction of past and future and the insertion of a present between them in which alone the system can operate. Via temporal difference modal- theoretical paradoxes can be dissolved, for example the supramodal necessity of contingency that was once so important to theology. The necessary can now be seen as a consequence of its being past, the con- tingent as a feature of the future. With the distinction of past and future the system can, additionally, deal with the requirement that it simultaneously (!) generate and hold in store both redundancy and variety; the requisite redundancy will then be attributed to the past, the requisite variety to the future. And that still leaves the question open whether one conceives of the present as constant, as enduring, and time as flowing through it, or construes the present of the system as process, as a movement out of the past in the direction of the future. The system can think of itself as static and as the correlate to the eter- nity of God, for example as a soul which must endure its temporal ex- istence; or as dynamic and with the necessity/impossibility of using the present in order to shape the future. This distinction can then be used to adapt the temporal structures to socio-cultural configurations. In any case, however, the constructivist analysis compels one to conclude that every present is furnished with past and future horizons and for that reason that the future can never become present.16 The temporal horizons only shift with, indeed by virtue of, the operations of the system so that from moment to moment new pasts and futures are being selected.

Reformulated in terms of the theory of games, what follows from this analysis is that the game can only be played within the game and only with distinctions that identify the individual operations a n d simultaneously the play itseV1' That's why Adam (in Paradise Lost) had to have the world explained to him by the archangel Raphael; and that's why Henry Adams can only describe his education as the play of an indeterminate I against an indeterminate world.18

'"n this point see Niklas Luhmann, "The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Struc- tures in Modern Society," Social Research 43 (1976), pp. 130-52.

l7 For several mathematical variants of this theme, cf. Louis H. Kauffman, "Ways of the Game-Play and Position Play," Cybmnetics and Human Knowing2/3 (1994), pp. 17-34.

la Henry Adams, The Education ofHenry Adams, New York 1918.

NIKLAS LUHMANN

In certain respects, mathematical theories have today overtaken what in the so-called human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), but in sociology as well, had always been intuited and expressed through a rather am- biguous use of language. This is true above all for chaos theory.lg It is also true of the catastrophe theory of Reni. Thom and of the post- Godelian calculus of forms of Spencer Brown discussed above. Of course, it is not to be expected that Romanticism anticipated and more or less intuitively took such a development of formal theory programs into consideration. However, a close examination of the texts of Romanticism can disclose so many correspondences that it becomes unavoidable to ask how they can be explained.

An overhasty conclusion would be to say that Romanticism is nothing other than the poetic paraphrase of a mathematical problem, a poetic version of mathematics. We shall leave that view aside and instead make our way via a sociological theory that can sustain empirical verification. This intention was already alluded to above. Its point of departure is the notion that the functional differentiation of modern society can be conceived in terms of autonomous, operatively closed, autopoietic functional systems. That leads to the hypothesis that all functional systems draw limits or borders and therefore must reproduce the difference between inside and outside internally as the difference self-reference,' hetero-reference. The transition from hierarchically fixed positional orders describable as nature to the primacy of the distinction between self- and hetero-reference is considered a characteristic, if not the decisive feature of Romantic literature20 (and, one can add, Romantic art in general). That encourages us to be on the lookout for the above described consequences of re-entry. For in the final analysis the distinction between self- and hetero-reference is nothing other than the re-entry of the distinction system/environment into the system itself.

With the differentiation of the art system and its disconnection from external compulsions, an excess of communicative possibilities

'"On this point see Hayles, Chaos Bound (note2 ) . On the discussions set into motion by the theory o f thermodynamics, see Kenneth D. Bailey, Socioloa and the New Systems Themy, New York 1994.

' O See esp. Earl R. Wasserman,The Subtler Language: Cntzcal Readings ofVeoclassica1 and Romantic Poems, Baltimore 1959.

emerges internally and must be internally controlled and brought into form.21 The relationship of redundancy and variety, which for a long time had accompanied the description of art,22 shifts in the direction of a flood of variational possibilities that can hardly any longer be mas- tered.23 The "marvelous" is not an invention of Romanticism, but of the cinque cent^;^^ but when its differentiation is fully accomplished, art can more forcefully distance itself from a pre-given reality.25 More and more, art must generate the requisite redundancies itself, and this through the restriction of variety. Today one would speak of "self- organization." For this reason, Romanticism discovers itself as if new born in an empty space and called on to give itself its own meaning. How that's supposed to happen becomes a question in terms of which one can gather together diverse themes of Romantic literature.

For example, the call for a new mythology.26 With a formulation coined to describe postmodern architecture but entirely applicable to Romanticism, one could say: "Whereas mythology was given to the artist by tradition and by patron, in the postmodern world it is chosen and in~ented."~' That can happen in an entirely "sentimentalist" fash- ion by drawing on antiquity and Christianity, through borrowings that reflect on the fact that they form their observations from a different

" On this see Peter Fuchs, Moderne Kommunikation: Zur The& des aperativen Displace- ments, Frankfurt 1993, p. 79ff.

' ~

For example, for the Renaissance in the twin concepts unita/moltitudine or, distinguished from these, va'simile/meraviglioso. For a representative example, see Torquato Tasso, Discorsi dell'artepoetica e in partzculare sopra ilpoema eroica (1587), in: Prose, Milano 1969, where (p. 366) it is stated that the poet should rely more on the one than the other ("0 piu del verisimile o piu del mirabile") in order to produce "magior diletto." The sphere of the "marvelous," however, is limited by the fact that means have to be found "per accoppiare il meraviglioso co'l verisimile." (p. 367) Beyond this example, one could of course recall such ancient cosmological distinctions as ordo/varietas or unitas/diversi-tas.

'3 At the same time, biology reorients its inquiries from pre-given essential charac- teristics to "irritability" as that characteristic which enables the evolution of living be- ings. See Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Philosophie zoologzque, Paris 1809, reprint Weinheim 1960, esp. vol. I, p. 82ff.

'4 Cf. Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplares: Renaissance Literary Criticism, New York 1968. "Of course, that doesn't mean that art can indicate the one-way traffic on Fifth

Avenue incorrectly or claim that Carthage defeated Rome. In this, Tasso is still right (Discorsi,p. 367), but today that's no longer the problem.

P6 For example, in the sense of the "5lteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealis- mus," here cited from G. W. F. Hegel, Werke,vol. I, Frankfurt 1971, pp. 23436, or in the sense of Friedrich Schlegel.

P7 Charles Jencks, "Postmodern vs. Late-Modern," in Ingeborg Hoesterey, ed., Zeitgeist in Babel: T hPostmodernist Controversy, Bloomington 1991, pp. 9-21; here, p. 9.

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temporal position. In contradistinction to the Renaissance, the great discovery of which was that there had once been perfection in this world, the directive difference no longer lies in the distinction between secular and theological descriptions, but in the temporal difference between present and past.

Or-second example-the accentuation of writing as a form in which absences (author or content) can appear as present.28 "Die Schrift hat fiir mich," Friedrich Schlegel confesses, "ich weiR nicht welchen geheimen Zauber, vielleicht durch die Dammerung von Ewigkeit, welche sie ~mschwebt."~" In Ludwig Tieck's William Lovell, the characters reveal themselves and their opinions only through writing. What's Romantic in this is not the presentational form of the epis- tolary novel, but rather the fact that an image of "voriiberfliegenden Gefiihlen, die mit unserer Vernunft (nicht) in eins zu schmelzen (sind),"" is fixed in writing. And when that which has been suppos- edly written down is published, the reader can dissolve the narrative and accept as his/her own one of the possible points of view. Writing evidently compensates for the displacement of an enduring present with process, since it can be reused in the present, but also read differently. It fixes itself, as it were, but not the reader.

And above all-third example-criticism (Kritik), conceived as the ongoing labor in reflection on the never-complete artwork. Romanti- cism, then, seeks forms with which it can respond to the necessity/ impossibility of transcending the limits of the imagination. The ex- pressive devices on the literary plane that correspond to this are irony and the fragment, in music the preference for the piano with its con- text- and continuation-dependent tonal qualities. The unambiguous distinctions are no longer sufficient, every frame of observation refers to a further frame of observation, which it confirms by realizing itself in it.31

Systemic autonomy, to which Romanticism in this way endeavors to respond, isjust what happened to the art system as a result of the functional differentiation of society. One can no longer expect instruction

''Here too the parallel to postmodernism, in this case to Derrida, is astonishing. " "Uber Philosophie," in Friedrich Schlegel, Werke, Berlin 1980, vol. 11, pp. 101-29;

here, p. 104. 30 Ludwig Tieck, Friihe Erzahlungen und Romane, Munich 1963, p. 378. 31 In this regard also the correspondences to postmodernism are not accidental. See

David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory aafer Adorno, I,incoln, Neb. 1991; "Die Paradoxie der Form in der Literatur," in Dirk Baecker, ed., Problemr &Form, Frank-furt 1993, pp. 22-44.

from the religious system, the political or economic systems, nor from the households of the most important families as to how artworks are to be made. For this reason one could almost say: autonomy becomes the destiny which is interpreted as a defence against external inter- vention; or the invisible cage in which the artist is forced to select, to be original and free. Romanticism thus views and deals with the problem of autonomy on the level of the artwork and the creative freedom of the artist derived from it, but not on the social level of the functional system of art; for only in this way can Romanticism define its position. The social system of art lets itself be represented through the idea of art.

All that reads like a commentary on the self-generated "unresolvable indeterminacy" that is unavoidable as soon as one reintroduces the difference between system and environment within the system itself. And just as in mathematics imaginary numbers or imaginary spaces are required in order to absorb paradoxes,32 Romanticism con- denses the imaginary to the fantastic, and thereby to forms that precisely do not mean what they show, but are nothing other than mate- rialized irony.33 But that by no means implies that all forms dissolve, that no distinction any longer holds, that everything becomes arbi- trary. On the other hand, it does not suffice to postulate with Kant that freedom is given for its rational use or that the genius must make a dis- ciplined and cautious use of his geniality.34 Rather, the artwork re- ceives the task of demonstrating its own contingency and being its own program; and that makes very severe demands on both productive and receptive observation, which therefore cannot happen "just any way." Self-generated indeterminacy does not by any means imply that no meaningful operations, no determinations are possible; merely that determinations must be recognizable as self-determinations and as such observable. In other words, communication must be transferred to the level of second-order observation.

Against this background the reason that the Romantics begin to play

surface on which the system performs its acceptable calculations. Cf. Dirk Baecker, "Im Tunnel," in Dirk Baecker, ed., Probleme drrForm, pp. 1437.

33 On the further development of this tendenc-th ever new outraged oppo- nents-up to surrealism, see Bohrer, Die Kritik dm Romantik, p. 39ff.

34This is, by the way, a longstanding, pre-romantic idea. One encounters it in the distinction libertas/licentia of natural law theory or in the disegno doctrine of the n'nquecento with its distinction between creative imagination and the skilled and practiced execu- tion of a drawing.

p. 58ff, where a tunnel is introduced beneath the ofFwm,LawsSee Spencer Brown, 3'

516 NIKLAS LUHMANN

with "reality," doubling identities in the form of Doppelganger, twins, ex- changed names, and mirror images, becomes intelligible: in order to show that the same can also be otherwise and must be set into relation with itself. Instead of the ontological guiding difference (Leitunter-scheidung) between being and non-being-which on the side of being congeals to substance so that in the reapplication of the distinction to itself the side of being is confirmed-other guiding distinctions appear, for example, the distinction finite/infinite (determinate/ indeterminate) or, alternatively, inside and outside.35 Ontological metaphysics, which took only one possible primary distinction as its point of departure, now had to be outtrumped by a meta-metaphysics, which could take shape with the typically Kantian question regarding conditions of possibility. The localization of reality with respect to the distinction inside/outside was then as now a hardly solvable p r ~ b l e m : ~ " "1st das Reale auBer uns: so sind wir ewig geschieden davon; ist es in uns: so sind wirs ~elber ."~ ' However, because no adequate, sufficiently rich, many-valued logic is available, the problem is displaced onto aes- thetics. Translated into constructivist terminology, that means that the decision as to what can be treated as reality and what not is made internal to the system. The reality test of "resistance" doesn't have to be given up as a result, but it is no longer a matter of a resistance of the environment to the system, rather of system operations to system operations within the same system-above all the resistance of the self- produced memory against new impulses or occurent ideas, or the resistance of the already begun artwork or narrative against something which can no longer be added to it. Viewed in this way, reality is nothing more than the correlate of consistency tests within the system, and this can occur in such a way that magic, ghosts, the supernatural, etc. are introduced into a tale so as to acquire narrative plausibility, which can then be revoked within the tale itself when, at the end, a perfectly natural explanation for all the strangeness is provided.38 The figure of the Doppelganger thus means nothing more than that in reality there is

35 On the plurality of such "primary distinctions," see Philip G. Herbst, Alternatives to Hierarchies, Leiden 1976, p. 88. Herbst's work is, by the way, quite probably the earliest sociological response to Spencer Brown.

36 On the contemporary version of the problem, see N. Katherine Hayles, "Con- strained Constructivism: 1,ocating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation," in George Levine, ed., Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem ofRealism in Rela- tion to Science, Literature, and Culture, Madison, Wisc. 1993, pp. 27-43.

37 Jean Paul, Vorschule derAsthetik, in Werke,vol. 5, Munich 1963, p. 7-514 (445). 38 This is a well-known narrative technique of Ludwig Tieck's, from William Louell to

Llas ZauberschloJ.

no assymmetry of original and copy; rather, that this is a distinction art alone requires for itself, an entry on the cost side in the balance of its autonomy.

All this can be handled with the de-reification (Entding-lichung) of the concept of world introduced already by Kant. World is no longer a totality of things, an agpgatio corpororum, a uniuersitas re- rum, but rather the final, and therewith unobservable, condition of possibility of observations, that is of every sort of use of distinctions. To formulate this another way, the world must be invisiblized so that observations become possible. For every observation requires a "blind spot,"gg or more precisely: it can only indicate one side of the distinction being used, employing it as a starting point for subsequent observations, but not the distinction itself as a unity and above all not the "unmarked space," precisely the world from which every distinction, as soon as it is marked as a distinction, must be delimited.

This invisibilization of the nevertheless doubtlessly given and presupposed world had dramatic consequences for Kant, Fichte, and above all for the Romantics. It leads to an overburdening of the individual with expectations regarding the production of meaning and therewith to the collapse of the communication weighed down with such expectations. The individual endowed with reflection now re- ceives the title of "subject." But the higher and more complex the expectations that subjects direct toward themselves and their others, the greater is the probablity of a failure of their communications. Texts ex- emplary of this are Jean Paul's Siebenkas (the marriage scenes) and his Flegeljahre.40 The forcing of subjectivity as the single answer to the problem of world makes intersubjectivity difficult, indeed, if one is conceptually rigorous, actually impossible. Today this necessarily leads to the question whether the "human being," the "subject," or similar collective singulars are a possible starting point for social theory at all. The Romantics used them and couldn't give the matter a second thought, for they had in any case no chance to develop an adequate theory of society. For them this position was occupied by the concept of "spirit" (Gezst) and by the French Revolution.

"On this point, see Heinz von Foerster, "Das Gleichnis vom blinden Fleck," in Ger- hard Johann Lischka, ed., Dm entfrsselte Blick: Symposium, Workshops, Ausstellung, Bern 1992, pp. 15-47.

40 See also Ludwig Tieck, William Lowell, p. 603: "Es ist ein Fluch, der auf der Sprache des Menschen liegt, daB keiner den anderen verstehen kann." Cf. also p. 383 (Balder's letter to William 1,ovell).

NIKLAS LUHMANN

Nearly contemporaneous with Romanticism a new sort of concept of "culture" (Kultur) arises, offering itself as a serviceable "memory function" for modern society. One can see this with respect to the Roman- tics, but also other "humanistic" (geisteswissenschaftlich)endeavors, including religion (Schleiermacher) and philosophy (the late work of Husserl). From the middle of the eighteenth century, the term "culture" is employed as an independent expression, that is: it is no longer related to the care of something else as in "agriculture" or "cultura animi" (Cicero). Formally, culture is distinguished from nature, but that is merely an external delimitation and says nothing about the contents that are seen as cultural and, as such, approved or disapproved.

Here too one must distinguish between themes and functions: the themes of culture and its function with regard to the autopoiesis of a highly complex societal system. The themes of culture are formulated with reference to possible comparisons, in particular regional (at first national) and historical comparisons. Historically, such comparisons can in principle reach back indefinitely, as far as the "sources" that are always being discovered allow. With respect to content, cultures are related to ideas (Zdeen) or values, for which an "apriori" validity, or at least a fixed orientation, is presupposed well into the twentieth century. Fol- lowing the schema laid down in the Kantian critiques or by some other method, a plurality of validity types can then be posited, the unity of which either remains unreflected or is described as a tragic conflict (Weber) or as endless discourse ( H a b e r m a ~ ) . ~ ~

Ideas, values, validity claims of all sorts emerge as correlates or, as it were, as secretions of the comparative construction of culture. In this way one endeavors to retransform contingency into necessity, with the result, however, that contingency reappears in daily practice-be it as the merely approximate realization of ideas, be it as the ever renewed necessity of deciding in cases of value conflict. This problematic oc- cupies the thematic horizon of modern society, but still doesn't show wherein the persuasive force of the comparative method consists. It seems to be rooted in the fact that extremely diverse states of affairs can neuertheless be compared, in the conspicuousness value of the equality of the diverse, which is to say: in the successful solution of a paradox. What is similar fascinates and, so to speak, proves itself by

41 One can speculate that Kant's Kntik der Urteilskraftaimed at such an integration, but failed to provide it.

virtue of the fact that it is found unexpectedly. This is called "wit" (Witz) and is found "intere~ting."~' One can show that the same is different and that diverse things allow identities to be known so long as one di- rects the comparison in terms of this cognitive interest. But why should one do that? For the reason that it is a cognitive strategy that makes it possible to deal with extraordinarily complex, in the final analysis world- societal states of affairs. The semantics of the society is keyed to its structural complexity and one component of this is that talk of ideas and values provides a surface description that prevents inquiry from reaching the paradox of the equivalence of the different and thus from developing modes of description sufficiently complex to grasp the complexity of the society.

One could speak in this connection of a cultural ~ ~ r n ~ t o m o l o g y . ~ " The themes of culture have a symptomatic function. They do not merely mean themselves, but also something else; and that becomes especially noticeable when they are formulated as unconditional, tran- scendental, or absolute, and are introduced into the communicative process with precisely this import. Thus there arises in the course of the nineteenth century a second culture, a culture of suspicion that raises the question of what is being disguised by the themes of culture. I am referring, of course, to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the sociology of knowledge that follows in their path.

Poking around in allegedly latent structures is a way of searching out hidden interests. The appropriate response to such searching is a tu quoqueargument, namely the question as to the interest behind this interest in latency. The suspicion of veiled motives becomes universal and therefore trivial; it is then a matter of nothing other than a dou- ble description of reality with first- and second-order observation.

The considerations set forth in the previous sections allow for a re- formulation of the question as to the function of cultural themes. So-ciety requires a memory function that allows it to accept the present as the result of the past and as the starting point for subsequent operations. A memory, however, does not merely hold past events in re- serve; it accomplishes above all a continuous discrimination of forgetting and remembering. Most everything sinks away and very little is so condensed and reconfirmed that it can be reused. This sortal

4P For the subsequent development of this configuration, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, Pldtzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des asthetzschen Scheins, Frankfurt 1981.

43 This is the formulation of Matei Calinescu, "From the One to the Many: Pluralism in Today's Thought," in Hoesterey, ed., Postmodmist Controversy, pp. 15674;here, 157.

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function serves the ongoing adaptation of the system to that which it can construct as repetition. However, as a sortal function it must remain latent because otherwise it would also remember what is forgotten. The memory must, to put the matter differently, accomplish a re- entry of the difference between forgetting and remembering within forgetting, and the form in which this occurs seems to be the construction of themes-of identities and generalizations that can be fixed in communicatively available d e ~ i g n a t i o n s . ~ ~ Themes, in other words, make possible a forgetting of forgetting, and at the same time the way in which themes are constructed serves the ongoing adaptation of the system to itself, the continuing inscription of a consistent "reality."

To return to Romanticism after this long digression: one can assume that this systems-theoretical concept will contribute to a socio-historical understanding of Romanticism. With a peculiar preference for transitional tones, for paradoxes, for the narratively produced believ- ability of the unbelievable, for the cognition of what cannot be com- municated, the Romantics cultivate a symptomology that avoids con- gealing to theses, which could then be accepted or rejected. The previously binding, early European tradition has to be forgotten in order to free up new capacities, and then restaged in a timely form (zeitgemaJ) with a nostalgia that reflects on itself. In Romantic poetry and criticism ideas are evoked and simultaneously marked as un- reachable.

The temporal conceptions of the Romantics also fit with this analysis. Time is still presupposed as a movement in the old sense and therewith related implicitly to the cognitive possibilities of conscious per- ception. But the present is experienced as precarious, as a caesura, as the "Differential der Funktion der Zukunft und Verga~~genhei t . "~~ The ambivalence in the evaluation of the French Revolution provides

44 "Themesn-the reference, of course, is to communicating and therefore social systems. For perceptual (psychic) systems one would have to speak of "objects."

45 Novalis, Werke,ed. Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg 1957, vol. I, p. 129 (fragment 417). Cf. fragment 2225 (vol. 11, p. 125): "Ale Erinnerung ist Gegenwart. Im reinen Element wird alle Erinnerung uns wie notwendige Verdichtung erscheinen." Or Bliilhenslaub109: "Die gewohnliche Gegenwart verknupft Vergangenheit und Zukunft durch Beschrankung. Es entsteht Kontiguitit, durch Erstarrung, Krystallisation. Es gibt aber eine geistige Gegenwart, die beyde durch Auflosung identifiziert." Werke, Tagehiicherund BriejFriedrich uon Hardenbergs, ed. Hans Joachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, Darmstadt 1978, vol. 2, p. 283. Cf. also Jean Paul, fitan, in Werke,ed. Norbert Miller, Munich 1969, vol. 11, p. 478: "Nein, wir haben keine Gegenwart, die Vergangenheit mu13 ohne sie die Zukunft gebiren."

a political illustration of the same tendency. And that seems to suffice as a symptom of the insecurity of the Zeitgeist. One does not find the way to an adequate theory of time although the idea of a three-phase passage from the past through the present to the future has already been refuted by the experience of the precarious character of the present, by its d e - o n t o l o g i ~ a t i o n . ~ ~ h e present is valued precisely because of its undecidablity (but wouldn't one then have to say: because of the necessity of deciding?) and is projected onto the historical moment of European society. The past loses itself in history. One can forget or remember it4'; one has to prophesize it, as Friedrich Schlegel c l a i m ~ . ~ ~ And the future becomes the best guarantee for the fact that the world is indescribable, and will remain so.

Despite this historicization and, if one can put it this way, rendering precarious of temporal conceptuality, however, the Romantics do not entirely succeed in detaching the concept of time from the premises of ontological metaphysics. Their concept of the world is too strongly oriented in terms of the human being for that. In contradistinction to many animals,49 for humans a thing remains identical to itself when it shifts from rest to movement. And that suggests an ontologically nested concept of time, oriented in terms of the phenomenon of movement, a concept that presupposes identities that bridge the distinction movement/non-movement and can sustain not merely movement but also the change from non-movement to movement and vice versa, that is, the "crossing" of this distinguishing limit. Even Heideg- ger will still have difficulty with this. From the perspective of a radical constructivist theory of observation, however, identity is not a time- independent given, but merely an instrument for binding time when it is a question of mediating past and future in the present.

Science, including systems theory, cannot afford such cultivated un- decidabilities in the temporal, material, and social dimensions. It must aim for refutable theses. That does not, however, exclude attempts to

46 On this point, see Ingrid Oesterle, "Der 'Fithrungswechsel der Zeithorizonte' in der deutschen Literatur," in Dirk Grathoff, ed., Studien zurAsthetik und Literaturgeschichte der Kunstperiodz Frankfurt 1985, pp. 11-75.

47 A concept of memory based in quantum physics that fits this state of affairs can be found in Heinz von Foerster, "Was ist Gedachtnis, daR es Ritckschau und Vorschau er- moglicht?" in Wissen und Gewissen, pp. 299-336. See also by the same author, Das Gedacht- nis (note 14).

4X Werke (n. 29), vol. I, p. 199. 4Y For example, frogs. See J. Y. Letbin, H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H.

Pitts, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," Proceedings ofthe Institute of Radio En- gineers 47 (1959), pp. 1940-59.

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do justice to Romanticism in a theoretical redescription. The systems- theoretical instruments of description break with the semantic repertoire in terms of which Romanticism sought to understand itself. For the actual aim of this redescription is a theory of modern society for which Romanticism can only have-but this in a most revealing way- symptomatic value.

University ofBielefild

luhmann - romantic art

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