… One begins, places a difference, draws a distinction, and then abandons oneself to what can no longer be altered, only destroyed.
… art tests arrangements that are at once fictional and real in order to show society, from a position within society, that things could be done differently …
… (one must keep in mind, of course, that there are structural couplings between communication and the perceptions of individuals and that individuals tend to intervene in communication when claims are made that contradict their perceptions).
Concluding post from Art as a Social System by Niklas Luhmann (2000):
… 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 concept of “culture” — one of the most detrimental concepts ever to be invented. 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 — presupposed this kind of relativization, which served as a basis for generating historical or national comparisons between cultures — an event staged by “educated Europe,” as it was called in those days. Despite its comparative relativization, culture remained an object of essential propositions that could be either true or false. What we mean by “self-description,” by contrast, refers to the mode of operations by which systems generate their internal 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.)
[ ... ]
… The hypothesis that every fully autonomous system requires an external reference might provide a starting point. Gödel as witness. Selecting the dimension of time for the purpose of externalization provides the greatest possible freedom for a specifically social, communicative self-determination of the system. As a concrete reality that cannot, indeed must not be treated as binding any longer, the past fulfills its function as a guarantor of autonomy. The past is thus neither insignificant nor dispensable. But it can henceforth fulfill its function only paradoxically: as the presence of an absence, as the inclusion of an exclusion, as the trace that, according to Derrida, is left by the effacement of the trace — in short, as a parasite that thrives on the paradox that the unity of the distinction (old/new), which is used by an observer, cannot be indicated in the observation itself.
Even if one follows Nelson Goodman and places on art the burden of contributing to the creation of the world, a world can be created operatively only within the world and, in observation, only from another world. In this way, the world accompanies all operations as a continually reproduced “unmarked space.” At the observational level, however, it is possible — in science as well as in art — to make transparent the premises behind previous ways of world making. Doing so inevitably marks the previously valid world and thereby cancels it as a world. Subsequently, earlier theories, styles, works, and so forth can no longer function as world (no matter how such concepts as reality, objectivity, Being, and so on are treated at the level of philosophical terminology). In this way, the degradation of the world through signification perpetually regenerates new unobservabilities. This is why the generation of the new is ultimately inexplicable.
… The art of the past cannot be treated as something external simply because it is past and operatively unattainable. Presumably one learns that only the system can guarantee the reality of its own world. Therefore reference to reality resides exclusively in the resistance of the system’s operations to themselves — some form combinations simply won’t work! — and in the fact that the world, whether one likes it or not, remains unobservable.
… The goal is not to affirm the present, the moment, the decision as the sole guarantee of reality; quite the opposite: one perpetually rebels against the present to the extent that it still contains traces of the past. The present revolts against itself, and what is at stake in this revolt is the inclusion of the system’s negation into the system. The present is reduced to a mere caesura, a temporal “nothing,” where art cannot reflect but only operate. The future represents the self-reference of art, and the past, because it cannot be altered, represents its hetero-reference. The parasites generated by this distinction force their way unnoticed into the system and take over its invisible government [see Serres]. The invisible hand (the metaphor indicates the paradox) remains invisible, because it knows only a timeless present. Whatever happens, happens. One begins, places a difference, draws a distinction, and then abandons oneself to what can no longer be altered, only destroyed.
… But the historical reconstruction of the self-description of art raises the question of whether there might have been submerged, other history, a history concerned not with unity but with difference. Pursuing this question suggests that the theme of reflection does not define the meaning of the autonomy of art, but the meaning of the doubling of reality in which this autonomy established itself.
… One must therefore ask oneself how and to what purpose one distinguishes between reality and fiction, and what reality must be in itself that it can tolerate this distinction. … Employing the distinction between reality and fiction begs the question of what reality itself must be like in order to assume both a real and a fictional form, while leaving open the possibility for crossing the internal boundary of this distinction. We have based our investigation on a theoretical concept capable of answering this question; we presupposed an operative system that draws this distinction and, in so doing, renders the world invisible. When communication (rather than perception, for example) is at stake, society is the system that makes it possible — for itself and for art — to distinguish between reality and fiction. One could then pursue the suggestion that art tests arrangements that are at once fictional and real in order to show society, from a position within society, that things could be done differently, which does not mean that anything goes.
Along these lines, reality might still be defined in terms of a resistance, which is no longer the resistance of the external world to attempts to grasp it by knowing and acting, but a resistance, within one and the same system, of internal operations to the operations of the system. In the system of society, one might think of the resistance of communication to itself, a resistance that ends up constructing a genuine reality (one must keep in mind, of course, that there are structural couplings between communication and the perceptions of individuals and that individuals tend to intervene in communication when claims are made that contradict their perceptions). In the art system, this resistance has to do, as we suggested earlier, with incongruities in the formal arrangements of artworks or with disturbances in communication through art and about art that can be traced to the lack of fit between the components of an artwork. If a work manages to pass this test, then it creates what we have called a fictional reality.
… our description remains external and has no control over whether, and in what ways, the art system, together with its works and self-descriptions, will venture into [the] future. To do so, the art system will have to proceed in a manner specific to form, that is, by using distinctions. One will have to avoid the trap of identity.
My most recent previous post from Luhmann’s book is here.
-Julie
