… Atmosphere is always what the individual objects that occupy places are not, the other side of their form, what perishes along with them. … It comes into being each time an object occupies a place and creates an ambiance that is neither identical to the object nor able to exist without it.
Continuing through Art as a Social System by Niklas Luhmann (2000):
… Forms are always stronger and more assertive than the medium. The medium offers no resistance — words cannot struggle against the formation of phrases any more than money can refuse be paid at specific prices.
… forms, rather than exhausting the medium, regenerate its possibilities. This is remarkable and can be easily demonstrated with reference to the role of words in the formation of utterances. Forms fulfill this regenerating function, because their duration is typically shorter than the duration of the medium. Forms, one might say, couple and decouple the medium.
… No matter how short-lived or lasting they turn out to be, forms can be created without exhausting the medium or causing it to disappear along with the form. As we noted earlier, the medium receives without resistance the forms that are possible within it, but the form’s resilience is paid for with instability. Even this account is far too simple. It disregards the fact that the medium can be observed only via forms, never as such. The medium manifests itself only in the relationship between constancy and variety that obtains in individual forms. A form, in other words, can be observed through the schema of constant/variable, because it is always a form-in-a-medium.
… The most general medium that makes both psychic and social systems possible and is essential to their functioning can be called “meaning” [Sinn]. Meaning is compatible with the temporalized manner in which psychic and social systems operate. It is compatible, in other words, with the way these systems constitute their elements exclusively in the form of events that are bound to a certain point in time … . Meaning assures that the world remains accessible to the events that constitute the system — in the form of actualized contents of consciousness or communications — although they vanish as soon as they emerge, each appearing for the first and for the last time. The world itself is never accessible as a unity — as a whole, or totality, a mystical “all at once” — but is available only as a condition and domain for the temporal processing of meaning. Each meaning-event can lead to another. The question is: How?
Initially, the problem presents itself as follows: no matter how distinct, how obtrusive and indubitable any momentary actualization may be, meaning can represent the world accessible from a given position only in the form of a referential surplus, that is, as an excess of connective possibilities that cannot be actualized all at once. Instead of presenting a world, the medium of meaning refers to a selective processing. This is true even when concepts, descriptions, or semantics referring to the world are generated within the world. Actualized meaning always comes about selectively and refers to further selections. It is therefore fair to say that meaning is constituted by the distinction between actuality and potentiality (or between the real as momentary given and as possibility). This implies and confirms that the medium of meaning is itself a form constituted by a specific distinction. But this raises the further question of how to comprehend the selective processing of meaning and in what ways it is accomplished.
… we understand space and time to be media of the measurement and calculation of objects (hence not forms of intuition!). By measurement and calculation we do not have in mind culturally introduced criteria; rather, we are thinking of the neurophysiological operation of the brain.
… From the internal viewpoint of conscious operations or communication, the world is always already temporally and spatially disclosed. They have no power to control, let alone prevent, the operations that bring about this disclosure; only in positioning objects within these media do they have a certain freedom. This accounts for a certain uniformity of the space and time that is presupposed in any meaningful constitution of objects and that can be used as a medium. This uniformity is needed to apprehend discontinuities, caesurae, and boundaries, as well as to estimate distances in both space and time.
The ability to identify places independently of the objects that occupy these places generates space and time.
… One cannot do without the other, and this is why variety remains bound to redundancy. In time, the same formal accomplishment is tied to the identity of objects that can be recognized and confirmed in new situations, even though the temporal conditions may have changed. Space makes it possible for objects to leave their places. Time makes it necessary for places to leave their objects. In this way, contingency is furnished with necessity and necessity with contingency. The separation of the two media thus permits the unfolding, in the world, of the modal-theoretical paradox that the necessary is contingent and contingency necessary — this is already accomplished by perception, independently of any modal-logical solution to the problem.
An occupied space creates an atmosphere. Atmosphere is always what the individual objects that occupy places are not, the other side of their form, what perishes along with them. This explains the “invulnerability” of atmosphere, along with its dependency on a given occupied space. Atmosphere is a kind of excess effect caused by the difference between places. It cannot be analyzed by describing places, nor is it reducible to places. It comes into being each time an object occupies a place and creates an ambiance that is neither identical to the object nor able to exist without it. Atmosphere makes visible both the unity of the difference that constitutes space and the invisibility of space as a medium for the creation of forms. But it is not the same as space, which, as a medium, can never become visible.
… the wealth of artistic possibilities rests on an imitation of the differential structure of space and time — not, as common belief has it, on an imitation of objects in the world of real space/time. Even “abstract” art creates and places objects. Otherwise it could accomplish nothing. But abstract art takes the liberty of unfolding these objects according to the logic of space and time and leaves it to the individual artwork to create a convincing arrangement.
My most recent previous post from Luhmann’s book is here.
-Julie
