A Redescription of "Romantic Art"

i?

Niklas Luhmann

I

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

 (Fruhroniantik)

, to modern society and its self-description as "modern";

1

 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 Romandc 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 re-main intelligible—regardless of whether one continues the discursive tradition or suggests particular changes. And, as is well-known, it is dif-

1

 See Karl Heinz Bohrer,

 Die Kritik derRomantik,

 Frankfurt 1989.

MLN,

 111 (1996): 506-522© 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

 

MLN 507 ficult (if not impossible, at least dependent on coincidences hard to foresee) to intervene in disciplines from the outside in the name of in-terdisciplinarity.

2

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.

3

There 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 func-tional differentiation.

4

 If Romanticism was modern and still is, then not because it preferred the "hovering" (

das Schwebendt )

 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 can-not 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 formu-lated, 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 orienta-tion. Today entirely different theoretical instruments are available for a discussion of these foundational issues.

2

 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.

3

 The concept of "redescription" is here employed in the sense of Mary Hesse,

 Mod-els and Analogies in

 Science,

 Notre Dame 1966, p. 157ff. One should, however, speak of "metaphorical redescription

w

 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.

4

 See, for example, Siegfried J. Schmidt,

 Die Selbstorganisation

 des Sozialsystems

 Literatur im 18. Jahrhundert\

 Frankfurt 1989; Niels Werber,

 Literatur als System: Zur Ausdifferen-zierung

 literariscker

 Kommunikation,

 Opladen 1992. Cf. also Gerhard Plumpe,

 Asthetische Kommunikation der

 Moderne,

 Vol. I:

 Von

 Kant bis

 Hegel,

 Opladen 1993.

 

508 NIKLAS LUHMANN Important changes in the conceptual repertoire of systems theory re-sult when one substitutes "essential definitions"

 

Wesensdefmitionen)

,

 but also so-called analytic system concepts, with the theoretical notion of the

 operative

 closure

 of systems. Essential definitions rested on a hetero-referential

 (fremdreferentiell

) orientation, analytic definitions on a self-referential orientation of the observer. The nouon of operative closure and, related to it, die 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 appro-priate if it takes the self-reference of the system and, in the case of sys-tems operating with meaning

 (sinnhafl operierend),

 (he self-observation of the system into account. The "paradigm shift" that is thereby ac-complished displaces systems

 theory

 from the level of first-order obser-vation (systems as objects) to the level of second-order observation (sys-tems as subobjectsor 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

 dis-tinction 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 illusion.''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 sec today more clearly why and how something like "imagination" is required and in what sense construction/deconstruction/ reconstruction as an on-going process, an ongoing displacement of distinctions (Derrida's

 dif-ferance),

 is necessary in order to dissolve paradoxes in and as lime.'

5

 See

 Clavis h'ichteana seu

 Leibgeberiana,

 in Jean Paul,

 Werke,

 vol. 3, Munich 1961. pp. 1011-56, or

 Ftegetjahre,

 arte

 Biographie,

 in

 Werke,

 vol. 2, Munich 1959, pp. 567-1065, esp. 641.

6

 This 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 rea-son we can leave it out of consideration in what follows.

7

 The parallels between deconstruction and second-order cybernetics are treated more thoroughly in: Niklas I.uhmann, "Deconstruction as Second Order Observing,"

New

 Literary History

 24 (1993). pp. 763-82.