Читать книгу Anywhere or Not At All - Peter Osborne - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIn US art writing of the mid-1960s – at the moment of the emergence of what would become ‘contemporary art’ from the standpoint of its immanently artistic periodization – it mattered very much who was speaking. Whether it was the formalist critic (Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried) or the self-proclaimed conceptual artist (Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth), the authority of the discourse rested heavily on the construction of the author-function. The struggle over art’s relationship to aesthetic was a struggle over the institutional authorization of ‘the beholder’, conducted by a new generation of artist-critics, constructing a new kind of author-function, who refused to offer up objects deemed appropriate to the beholder’s gaze.1 This campaign against a certain ‘aesthetic’ institution of spectatorship was at once anti-institutional and the bearer of an alternative institutionalization, following the temporal logic of artistic avant-gardes established at least a century before.2 It so fundamentally transformed the field of practices institutionally recognized as ‘art’, it will be argued here, as to constitute a change in art’s ‘ontology’ or very mode of being. The new, postconceptual artistic ontology that was established – ‘beyond aesthetic’ – came to define the field to which the phrase ‘contemporary art’ most appropriately refers, in its deepest critical sense. The historical ontology of contemporary art, it is argued here, is thus most directly grasped in the proposition: ‘Contemporary art is postconceptual art’.3
Before I expound this proposition, though, we need to consider the modern concept of art more generally, in its difference from Kant’s concept of ‘aesthetic art’, with which it is still frequently conflated, since this conflation (grounded in a confusion about autonomy) continues to generate confusion about the ontological status of aesthetic aspects of contemporary art. To do this, we need to return to the relationship between Kant’s thought and that of Jena Romanticism, to clarify the difference established there between ‘aesthetic’ and ‘metaphysical’ conceptions of art. This is the topic of the first section. Next, these terms are returned to the present, in the presentation of early Romantic philosophy of art as the conceptual ground for contemporary art criticism, by virtue of contemporary art’s primary historical and metaphysical determination as postconceptual art. The proposition ‘contemporary art is postconceptual art’, through which this situation is grasped, it is argued, has a philosophical status similar to what Hegel called a ‘speculative proposition’ – or at least, a speculative proposition reinterpreted romantically. Finally, the early Romantic interpretation of art’s conceptuality is emblematically condensed into a reading of Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art through Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum Fragments – a reading that is methodologically grounded in Walter Benjamin’s account of the historical meaning of dialectical images. The image in question here is the image of LeWitt’s Sentences as at once an image of Romanticism and an image of conceptual art.
Art Versus Aesthetic (Jena Romanticism contra Kant)
What is wrong with thinking about art, philosophically, as ‘aesthetic’? What is wrong with identifying ‘aesthetics’ with the philosophy of art? The problem appears in an exemplary formulation in the fortieth of Friedrich Schlegel’s Critical Fragments (1798):
In the sense in which it has been defined and used in Germany, aesthetic is a word which notoriously reveals an equally perfect ignorance of the thing and of the language. Why is it still used?4
What is this ‘equally perfect ignorance’ [ gleich vollendete Unkenntnis]of both the language and the thing? Nothing less, it would seem, than what Kant himself derided in his much-quoted footnote to the Transcendental Aesthetic of his Critique of Pure Reason (1781): namely, its use by ‘the Germans … to designate that which others call the critique of taste’. Schlegel’s fragment is an ironic citation or rewriting of this passage. Its reference to ‘ignorance of the language’ cannot but evoke Kant’s advice to ‘desist’ from the use of the word ‘aesthetic’ to designate the critique of taste, in order ‘to save it for that doctrine which is true science (whereby one would come closer to the language and the sense of the ancients, among whom the division of cognition into aisthéta and noéta [things of sensibility and things of the mind] was very well known).’5 The doctrine to which Kant is referring is his own Transcendental Aesthetic, the first part of the Transcendental Doctrine of Elements [of knowledge] in the Critique of Pure Reason, within which the passage in question is located. It is dedicated not to taste, but to the exposition of space and time as pure forms of intuition, conditioning the possibility of objects of knowledge in general.
Schlegel’s rewriting is ironic, in part because Kant himself equally famously appeared to go against his own advice when, nine years later, in 1790, the first part of his Critique of Judgement-Power, ‘Critique of Aesthetic Judgement-Power’, contained an extensive analysis of aesthetic judgements understood as, precisely, judgements of taste. The idea that ‘aesthetics’ is a philosophical discourse about art is in large part the fatal legacy of the reception of this text, with its apparent confirmation of the legitimacy of drawing together the three (originally independent) discourses of beauty, sensibility and art into an integral philosophical whole.6 Schlegel may be read as referring his readers back to Kant’s earlier text in the context of Kant’s own apparent subsequent concession to Alexander Baumgarten’s ‘German’ usage. He is being sarcastic about the first Critique, and hence about Kant’s self-understanding; at the very least, he is drawing attention to Kant’s apparent inconsistency or change of mind.7 Schlegel is crowing over the triumph of the ‘German’ use of ‘aesthetic’ – a terminological triumph which, in the Romantic philosophy of art, was in the process of being transformed into a philosophical victory of a higher order: a triumph of art over ‘philosophy’ within metaphysics itself.
However, discursively, the famous Romantic triumph of art within metaphysics (against which Schaeffer rages)8 is a triumph of philosophical art criticism over systematic philosophy; it is not a triumph of aesthetic, as Kant understood it in Critique of Judgement-Power. In the transition within critical metaphysics from systematic philosophy to Romantic art criticism, Kant’s transcendental account of aesthetic judgement is a vanishing mediator. In order to understand the disjunction between aesthetics and art criticism that is produced here (prefiguring the development of aesthetics as a discipline, in the course of the nineteenth century), it is necessary to examine the apparent inconsistency between Kant’s two meanings of ‘aesthetic’ in more detail.
The inconsistency in question is that between an insistence upon restricting the term ‘aesthetic’ to its ‘original’ meaning, denoting the sensible element in knowledge, and its extended use to refer to judgements of taste. The error of the extension, from the standpoint of Kant’s first Critique, derives from what Kant describes there as the ‘failed hope’ of ‘bringing the critical estimation of the beautiful under principles of reason, and elevating its rules to a science’; that is, from the aspiration to a rational doctrine of the beautiful, an ‘aesthetics’, in a scientific disciplinary sense. It was this aspiration that led Baumgarten to subsume the philosophical treatment of beauty under the sign of a doctrine of sensible knowledge. And it is the ‘futility’ of this aspiration that led Kant to judge the usage inappropriate, since, he claimed, ‘the putative rules or criteria are merely empirical as far as their sources are concerned’. It is not – note – the connection between beauty and sensibility to which Kant objects in the Critique of Pure Reason, but the idea that the field of their connection (judgements of taste) might be governed by ‘a priori rules’.9 For Kant, then, the term ‘aesthetic’ was from the outset a term of philosophical art, part of the doctrine (Lehre) of knowledge. And it is for this reason that it should not have been used to refer to taste: not because beauty is not ‘sensible’, but precisely because of the fact that it is, and hence, its judgements are merely empirical. So what led Kant to change his mind?
The fact is that he did not; at least, not on this particular point. For there is a rarely acknowledged underlying consistency to Kant’s position, despite the change in usage. When he subsequently himself adopted the supposedly inappropriate, extended usage, Kant never went back upon his initial reason for rejecting Baumgarten’s extended use of ‘aesthetic’. In Critique of Judgement-Power, Kant maintains – in fact he emphasizes – this point: ‘There is neither a science [Wissenschaft] of the beautiful, only a critique, nor beautiful science’. In fact, he writes it twice: first in section 44, ‘On Fine Art’, and then again in section 60, the appendix, ‘On Methodology Concerning Taste’, where it becomes more emphatically, ‘there cannot be any science of the beautiful’.10 That is, there neither is, nor can be, a philosophical aesthetics. Rather, the change in Kant’s position concerns a clarification of the methodological status of ‘critique’. Critique appears here no longer in association with doctrine (Lehre), but as a conceptually self-sufficient term, distinct from both ‘science’ (qua doctrine) and ‘the empirical’. ‘Criticism of taste’ is no longer conceived in terms of the application of a priori rules to particular cases, or the judgement of such rules by particular cases (Kant’s earlier focus), but in terms of the immanent notion of transcendental critique that governed the project of the Critique of Pure Reason from the outset. It is a part of ‘critique of reason by reason alone’: in this instance, critique of aesthetic judgement-power (Urteilskraft) by transcendental reflection, critique of a particular power of the faculty of judgement, not criticism of particular judgements. Philosophically, where judgements of the beautiful are concerned, there is only critique, transcendental critique, of the structure (but not the content) of what are always singular (that is, radically empirical) judgements.
This distinctively Kantian idea of philosophy as a critical standpoint beyond positive ‘criteria’, or positive knowledge, that is nonetheless no longer metaphysically self-sufficient as rational doctrine, but purely reflective, was crucially formative for Romanticism. It is the other side of the more familiar Kantian idea of the ‘limits’ to reason, which Karl Ameriks has emphasized as the basis for the construction of a common ‘Kantian-Romantic position’.11 Famously, the method of immanently transcendental critique allowed Kant to stray beyond the cognitive limits of reason, legitimately, as a ‘standpoint’ but never as a doctrine. The critique of aesthetic judgement-power concretizes this standpoint, subjectively, as the feeling of pleasure accompanying reflective awareness of the unity of subjectivity, as the ‘harmony’ of the faculties. It was precisely this ‘straying beyond’ that the Romantics seized upon and elaborated further, in a new post-critical metaphysics of art. However, this formal consistency in Kant’s position does not appear sufficient to meet his own earlier objection to that use of ‘aesthetic’ which strays too far from ‘the language and sense of the ancients’. For the standpoint of a transcendental critique of the structure of judgement abstracts from all concretely sensuous particularity (that is, it conceptualizes sensuous particularity in terms of its logical singularity). It is thus not actually ‘aesthetic’, in Kant’s original sense of ‘things of sensibility’. (The pure forms of intuition, on the other hand – space and time – being also ‘pure intuitions’, are themselves aesthetic.) Transcendental critique of taste – as the critique of a specific type of judgement-power, rather than the critical estimation of sensuous representations – is not ‘aesthetic’ in the sense in which the ‘things of sensibility’ may be distinguished from the ‘things of the mind’. Rather, it is decisively ‘of the mind’, or, better, it is ‘of the mind’ and ‘of sensibility’ at the same time: in pure aesthetic judgements of taste, the ontological distinction between aisthéta and noéta collapses. The mind feels itself.
This is precisely the point of Kant’s transcendental analysis of judgements of taste in terms of the reflective relations between cognitive faculties – linguistic niceties apart, which at this point begin to appear pedantic and (as Hegel later treated them) ‘a mere name’.12 Kant’s Third Critique transformed the meaning of ‘aesthetic’ by extending it beyond the sensible (spatial and temporal) apprehension of the objects of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ intuition to include reference to the feelings accompanying the relations of reflection constitutive of the internal cognitive structure of subjectivity itself. What is this but what Novalis would have called a ‘romanticization’ of aesthetic; its presentation as a self-reflection of the absolute, once, following Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the subject has been absolutized qua self-positing and self-reflective process?13 The ancient distinction between aisthéta and noéta, to which Kant initially appealed, is here no more than the linguistic register of a dualistic rationalism that Kant has, finally, managed to move beyond. Human sensibility is irreducibly judgemental and furthermore (contra Aristotle – who thought each sense judged discretely) internally relationally so. This is a new philosophical account of the ontological specificity of human subjectivity – the main philosophical source of the early Heidegger’s existentialism, in fact. Kant’s linguistic innovation – to extend the range of ‘aesthetic’ to embrace the paradoxical pure ‘self-affection’ of the self-relation of human subjectivity14 – registers this conceptual novelty. Philologically speaking, this is hardly ‘ignorance’.
But what of ‘the thing’, critique of taste, as Kant called it, or more simply ‘criticism’ as it was known in England at the time, to which the new philosophically extended usage of ‘aesthetic’ must also refer, since aesthetic subjectivity can only feel itself, for Kant, via judgements of taste occasioned by objects that ‘quicken’ it?15 This is the point at which the satirical charge of ‘ignorance’ begins to acquire a more literal bite. For, in Kant’s later, dialectically ambiguous sense of aesthetic, it is not the extension of sensibility to include the subject’s relation to itself – auto-affection – that is the problem, so much as its consequent principled indifference to the character of the objects that occasion judgement; in particular, its principled indifference to the cognitive, relational, historical and world-disclosing dimensions of works of art, which were such a central part of ‘that which others call the critique of taste’.
Famously, art judgements (such as ‘this is a beautiful painting’) – are explicitly excluded by Kant from ‘pure’ aesthetic judgements of taste. That is, Kant excludes from aesthetics precisely those judgements that constitute the main part of the critique of taste, historically, as a critical discourse, as an effect of the transcendentalism of his method. These are grasped only by Kant’s much neglected and under-elaborated concept of ‘logically conditioned’ aesthetic judgements – judgements which, operating under the conditions of a determinate concept, such as ‘art’ or ‘painting’, are not aesthetically ‘pure’. For Kant, artistic beauty can never be what he calls a ‘free’ or ‘purely aesthetic’ beauty (at least, not qua artistic beauty), but only an ‘accessory’ or adherent beauty.16 This is the conceptual residue of his earlier objection to Baumgarten’s use of the term ‘aesthetic’. There is thus a conceptual gap between art and aesthetic that cannot be adequately bridged within the terms of Kant’s thought. In so far as ‘aesthetics’ is taken as the name for the philosophical treatment of art, we are confronted with a new and equally ironic ‘ignorance of the thing and of the language’: aesthetic’s principled ignorance of art qua art.17 For Kant readily acknowledges that ‘aesthetic’ itself cannot distinguish art from nature: art becomes aesthetically pure only when it appears ‘as if it were a mere product of nature’.18 Moreover, Kantian aesthetic judgement does not reflect on the conditions of this appearing ‘as if’ – that is, upon its ontological and epistemological qualities as illusion; it merely takes it as its condition. Kant’s restriction of the concept of beautiful or ‘fine’ art to a type of ‘aesthetic art’ (his own term) thus excludes most of what has always been and continues to be of most significance about art: the difference from nature marked by its metaphysical, cognitive, and politico-ideological functions, qua art.
In identifying the ‘aesthetic’ significance of objects with their affect upon the subject in its purely reflective judgement, Kant simultaneously expanded ‘aesthetic’, giving it a central role in the metaphysics of the subject, and cut it off from any possible metaphysics of the artwork as a self-sufficient or ‘autonomous’ entity. ‘Aesthetic art’ is the contradictory result of the negotiation of the impasse.
The nineteenth and twentieth century tradition of ‘art as aesthetic’ – artistic aestheticism – covertly perpetuated by the very term ‘aesthetics’, when used to refer to philosophy of art, rests upon a self-contradictory absolutization of Kant’s conception of ‘aesthetic art’. Contrary to Hegel’s acceptance of it as a mere ‘name’, the term ‘aesthetics’ functions as much more than a name here: it seals and legitimates the exclusion of art’s other aspects from the philosophical concept of art, reducing it to a single plane of significance – namely, its capacity to appear as ‘a product of mere nature’ and hence as the object of pure judgements of taste. Even Kant’s account of genius (otherwise so productive for a post-Kantian, Romantic aesthetic) is subjected to the constraints of this problematic. This ignorance of language – the idea that ‘aesthetics’ is an appropriate term to designate the philosophical treatment of art – sums up the ignorance of the thing: ‘art’. This ignorance persists today in the widespread belief that it is the logical autonomy of pure aesthetic judgements of taste from other types of judgement (as theorized by Kant) that is the philosophical basis of the autonomy of art. Even writers as sophisticated in their reading of German idealism as Andrew Bowie and Jay Bernstein, for example, have contributed to the perpetuation of this myth to the level of a philosophical commonplace through their use of the phrase ‘aesthetic autonomy’ to refer to the autonomy of art.19 Yet Kant’s work cannot, in principle, provide the conceptual ground for an account of the autonomy of the artwork, since it has no account of (nor interest in) the ontological distinctiveness of the work of art. That was the contribution of Jena Romanticism.
Locating the origin of the autonomy claim for art after Kant, in Schiller’s reinterpretation of aesthetic appearance in terms of self-determination, in his Kallias Letters (1793) – ‘a reformulation of Kant’s aesthetic theory that reaches its apotheosis in On the Aesthetic Education of Man’ (1795), the crucial transitional text between Kant and early Romanticism – is more convincing.20 However, this is so only if one follows through its ontological consequences for the artwork to their Romantic conclusion. Schiller himself remained largely at the epistemological level of aesthetic appearance, that is, illusion – the illusion of self-determination of the object of aesthetic judgement; at his best, at the level of an aesthetically modified practical reason (thereby founding the notorious problematic of ‘aesthetic and politics’ to which our intellectual culture compulsively returns).21 However, there are metaphysical as well as practical implications of the artwork’s production of the illusion of its self-determination. The illusion of self-determination appears metaphysically as a distinctive type of productivity. Kant provided the model for this special kind of productivity – call it creativity (as long as you remember it is the creation of an illusion) – in his concept of genius. But he failed to connect genius to self-determination, or to the illusion of self-determination (at least explicitly), let alone to theorize the production of the illusion of self-determination as the self-reflexive structure of the artwork (since he had no ontological concept of the artwork). That was left to Novalis’s transposition of the structure of Fichte’s absolutization of the subject onto the work of art. Only at this point does art become a distinctive form of presentation of truth: a ‘presentation of the unpresentable’ (Darstellung des Undarstellbaren), as Novalis put it, or ‘the infinite finitely displayed’, anticipating Jean-François Lyotard’s supposedly postmodern sublime by some two hundred years.22 This is the philosophical ground of the ‘autonomy of art’ claim – autonomy not of a type of judgement (Kant), nor merely at the level of appearance, the illusion of self-determination (Schiller), but of a certain kind of production of meaning in the object, an autopoiesis, distinct from both techné and mimesis (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel). This is not an ‘aesthetic regime of art’ but a supra-aesthetic artistic regime of truth.
Furthermore, such a regime can only be realized under particular historical and institutional conditions, the social relations of which must thus be considered constitutive of a paradoxically ontologically ‘autonomous’ art. This Hegelian addendum to early Romanticism (art as form of objective spirit), or what Adorno called the ‘dual character of art as autonomy and social fact’ (and which we might be sharpen into ‘the dialectical unity of art as autonomy and social fact’ – the social fact of autonomy), is crucial if philosophical discourse on art is be critically mediated with art-historical, cultural-historical and social discourses, and thereby to become capable of engagement with contemporary art in its full social specificity.23
This is not the place for an account of the emergence of the Romantic conception of the autonomous artwork out of a displacement of the aporia of Fichte’s attempt at a foundational philosophy of the subject into the realm of poetic meaning. Benjamin reconstructed this passage via the concept of reflection in his 1923 dissertation, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, and others have recently returned to the topic.24 However, with respect to Kant, three things about the Romantic theory of art, in particular, should be borne in mind: first, its rejection (or what August Schlegel called its ‘denunciation’) of the distinction between free and accessory beauty, ‘as invalid and as springing from too narrow and too low an assessment of the beautiful’;25 second, its abolition of the categorial separation of the beautiful and the sublime (prefigured in Kant’s own notion of aesthetic ideas); third, its elaboration of a metaphysically invested conception of art – as, in Schelling’s words, the ‘organon of philosophy’26 – at a concrete-historical level, not as a medium-based system of the arts, but as a philosophically constructed (negative) theory of genres, in an ongoing mediation of the categories of the philosophy of art with the history of art. This third feature is the mediating core of the Romantic philosophy of art, through which it acquires its distinctive philosophical shape of being at once transcendental, metaphysical and (unlike its later, Heideggerian version) concretely historical: an historical-ontological theory of art. This was Friedrich Schlegel’s distinctive contribution. In this respect, the early Schelling does not belong to Romanticism proper, but recasts its insights within the tradition of philosophical idealism. In fact, in so far as it retains a concretely historical sense of the present, Hegel’s philosophy of art is closer to Schlegel’s philosophical Romanticism than is Schelling’s early philosophy of art. The difference lies in Hegel’s absolutely idealist, subject-dissolving presupposition of the possibility of the purely conceptual self-reflection of the absolute. With respect to the application of the art-historical problematic of early Romanticism to contemporary art, Schlegel’s Romantic categories of poetry and the novel, as absolute genres ‘forever becoming’, have a similar philosophical status to what Thierry de Duve calls ‘generic’ art and what I am here calling ‘postconceptual’ art.27
As the product of the displacement of the structure of a seemingly irresolvable metaphysical problem (the infinite reflexivity of a self-positing subject frustrates the project of self-grounding) into a special kind of object (art), the autonomous work of art is as irreducibly conceptual – and metaphysical – in its philosophical structure as it is historical and ‘aesthetic’ (felt by the mind) in its mode of appearance. It is thus a mistake to suppose that because it is conceptual, there is no role for ‘aesthetic’ within it. Far from it. As the registration of the feeling associated with presentations to the intellect, aesthetic is an ineliminable aspect of the early Romantics’ ontological conception of art. It is, however, ontologically both partial and relational. More generally, the artistic significance of aesthetic must be judged in the context of the historically shifting relations between aesthetic and other – cognitive, semantic, social, political and ideological – aspects of artworks. And the balance and meaning will be different in different kinds of art. Furthermore, these relations between the aesthetic and other aspects of artworks derive their critical meaning from their relations to the equally historically variable aesthetic dimension of other (non-art) cultural forms – today, predominantly but by no means exclusively: commodity design and display, advertising, mass media and communications technologies – the whole non-art aspects of the apparatus of visual culture. One problem with the philosophical discourse of ‘art as aesthetic’ is that it militates against recognition of these relations as being internal to the critical structure of the artwork, and hence against the understanding of contemporary art in certain of its most significant, historical and anti-aesthetic aspects.
Periodization and Historical Ontology: Postconceptual Art
In the light of this brief reconstruction of the philosophical pre-history of the polemical opposition of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘conceptual’ art played out in the 1960 and ’70s, as a difference between Kant and Jena Romanticism, we can discern two parallel and competing, though to some extent also overlapping traditions in the criticism of art since the end of the eighteenth century, corresponding to the two philosophical discourses of ‘art as aesthetic’ and ‘art as (historical) ontology’. The first runs from Kant through nineteenth-century aestheticism (Baudelaire, Pater, Wilde), via Roger Fry and Clive Bell, to Greenberg’s later writings, which mark the aestheticist collapse of his earlier historical self-understanding. It rests upon an aesthetic theory of the arts, with its distant origins in Renaissance naturalism and the new science of optics28 and its mainstream in an empirical reduction of Kant’s transcendentalism to a psychology – at best, a phenomenology – of perception, of which Richard Wollheim was the recent master.29 The second tradition runs from philosophical Romanticism through Hegel, Duchamp, surrealism and the revolutionary Romanticism of Constructivism, to conceptual art and its consequences in what has been called the ‘post-medium condition’, but which I prefer to think of as the transmedia condition of postconceptual art.30
The first (aesthetic) tradition finds its concrete critical terms in an aesthetic theory of medium that dates back to Gotthold Lessing. It is currently being revived in both a Friedian variant (by Jeff Wall, amongst others) and a more explicitly Kantian, transcendental variant by Jay Bernstein, as the philosophical basis for a theory of modernism as the cultural representation of nature’s resistance to history – a reading which combines Greenberg with Adorno, via an immanent critique of T.J. Clarke’s interpretation of Jackson Pollock.31 The second (historical-ontological) tradition finds its critical terms in a philosophically negative theory of the ‘truth of art’ which manifests this negativity historically in the concept of ‘the new’ – a sometimes proto-, sometimes post-avant-gardist constitutive negation that, today, determines artistic meaning as a determination of contemporaneity itself. It derives its content empirically within a historically open, but nonetheless speculatively totalizing, generic conception of art, within which the historical present is necessarily privileged as the standpoint of an implicit but unactualizable (and therefore negative) totalization. And it comes in a spectrum of relations to the future, from the insistent but increasingly abstract future-orientation of modernism, as the cultural affirmation of the temporality of the new, to the flat presentism of the immediately contemporary. The qualitative historical temporality of art-critical judgement appears here as a consequence of the philosophical dynamics of historical totalization. This second proto-Romantic or generic artistic tradition has developed in active relation to both historical transformations in the institutional conditions of artistic autonomy (which establish the social conditions of possibility of the illusion of autonomous meaning production) and socially progressive political cultures, which have criticised the prevailing social forms of autonomy, and in particular, their misrecognition as ‘aesthetic’. Its current representative is the anti-aestheticism of postconceptual art.
But what exactly is postconceptual art? In what sense does it determine the contemporaneity of ‘contemporary art’? And what does this equivalence between ‘postconceptual’ art and ‘contemporary’ art tell us about ‘the art history that art criticism is’, or should be? – to return to the terms of Harold Rosenberg’s declaration from which we set out in the Introduction.
In the course of the 1980s, it became conventional to periodize the Western art of the previous forty years in terms of a transition from ‘modernism’ to ‘postmodernism’ – however vaguely or varyingly the second of these two terms was understood in this context. Greenberg’s critical hegemony had tended to fix the art-historical meaning of the first term, in a conceptually and chronologically restrictive manner. It thereby opened up the artistic field of the ‘postmodern’ as the space of its abstract negation. The problem with this periodization, however, is that it fails to endow the complexly interacting set of what were initially conceived as ‘post-formalist’, anti-Greenbergian artistic strategies of the 1960s with either sufficient conceptual determinacy and distinctness or adequate historical effectivity. In particular, it fails to register both the critical priority of conceptual art within this field and the historical and critical significance of its postconceptual legacy. It thus fails to provide a theoretical basis on which we might specify the ontological distinctiveness of contemporary art. I therefore propose an alternative periodization of ‘art after Greenbergian modernism’ that privileges the sequence: formalist modernism, conceptual art, postconceptual art – over the modernist–postmodernist couplet, and treats the conceptual–postconceptual trajectory as the standpoint from which to totalize the wide array of other anti-formalist movements. (A broader, philosophically adequate conception of modernism as a temporal logic of cultural forms would embrace the whole sequence; ‘postmodernism’ being the misrecognition of a particular stage in the dialectic of modernisms.)32
By ‘postconceptual’ art, then, I understand an art premised on the complex historical experience and critical legacy of conceptual art, broadly construed, which registers its fundamental mutation of the ontology of the artwork. Postconceptual art is a critical category that is constituted at the level of the historical ontology of the artwork; it is not a traditional art-historical or art-critical concept at the level of medium, form or style. Rather, as the critical register of the historical destruction of the ontological significance of such categories, it provides new interpretative conditions for analyses of individual works. The critical legacy of conceptual art consists in the combination of six main insights, which collectively make up the condition of possibility of a postconceptual art. These are:
1. Art’s necessary conceptuality. (Art is constituted by concepts, their relations and their instantiation in practices of discrimination: art/non-art.)
2. Art’s ineliminable – but radically insufficient – aesthetic dimension. (All art requires some form of materialization; that is to say, aesthetic – felt, spatio-temporal – presentation.)
3. The critical necessity of an anti-aestheticist use of aesthetic materials. (This is a critical consequence of art’s necessary conceptuality.)
4. An expansion to infinity of the possible material forms of art.
5. A radically distributive – that is, irreducibly relational – unity of the individual artwork across the totality of its multiple material instantiations, at any particular time.
6. A historical malleability of the borders of this unity.
The conjunction of the first two features leads to the third; together they imply the fourth; while the fifth and sixth are expressions of the logical and temporal consequences of the fourth, respectively.
The principle of the ineliminability of the aesthetic dimension of the artwork is the product of the so-called ‘failure’ of Conceptual Art in its strong, ‘pure’ or analytical programme; that is, the idea of a ‘purely’ conceptual art associated for a brief period (1968–72) with Joseph Kosuth in the US and the Art & Language in Britain – although there are important differences between the critical positions of these artists. (The case of Sol LeWitt, the founding father of Conceptual art as a movement, is more complicated, because of his essentially psychological conception of ‘ideas’.)33 What ‘failure’ means here is the practical demonstration of the incoherence of a particular self-understanding of ‘conceptual art’. This was not an artistic failure. Indeed, it was a perverse artistic success. It was the ironic historical achievement of the strong programme of ‘analytical’ or ‘pure’ conceptual art to have demonstrated the ineliminability of the aesthetic as a necessary, though radically insufficient, component of the artwork through the failure of its attempt at its elimination: the failure of an absolute anti-aesthetic. In this sense, it staged a certain repetition of the reception of Duchamp: a repetition of the necessary erosion of ‘aesthetic indifference’. This experimental programme thereby fulfilled the classically Hegelian function of exceeding a limit in its established form (the aesthetic) in such a way as to render it visible and thereby reinstitute it on new grounds.34 In this respect, the meaning of ‘conceptual art’ must be retrospectively critically refigured to incorporate this insight.35 In its strongest sense, of a ‘purely’ conceptual or analytical art, conceptual art was an idea that marked the experimental investigation of a particular anti-aesthetic desire.
At the same time, however, in demonstrating the radical insufficiency, or minimal conditionality, of the aesthetic dimension of the artwork to its status as art, conceptual art was able to bring once again to light, in a more decisive way, the necessary conceptuality of the work which had been buried by the aesthetic ideology of formalist modernism – a conceptuality which was always historically central to the allegorical function of art. Conceptual art demonstrated in a whole variety of novel ways, with respect to a whole series of different forms of materiality, the sense in which ‘aesthetic’ in both its ancient and later Kantian senses (as sensibility and as pure reflective judgement) is a part of yet utterly fails to account for the ontological specificity of ‘art’. The aesthetic concept of art mistakes one of art’s many conditions for the whole. It mistakes art’s necessary aesthetic appearance for the ground of its apparently autonomous, and hence infinite, production of meaning, which is in fact historically relational, rather than ‘positive’ in an aesthetic sense. Conceptual art demonstrated the radical emptiness or blankness of the aesthetic in itself, as an ontological support, that derives its meaning, in each instance, relationally or contextually, whatever its precise form of materiality – and this includes those instances when it functions as a negation, as well as a carrier, of meaning.
Having exposed the aesthetic misrecognition of the artwork as an ideological fraud, conceptual art thereby established the need for art actively to counter aesthetic misrecognition within the work, through the constructive or strategic aesthetic use of aesthetic materials. The victory of the ‘aesthetic remainder’ over strong conceptualism (that is, conceptual art’s own inevitable pictorialism) was thus ultimately a Pyrrhic one. This Pyrrhic victory – and the transition to a postconceptual art that it represents – accounts for the privileged status of photographic practice within contemporary art, with its strategic or selective pictorialism (see Chapter 5, below). It was reflected upon by Art & Language themselves in their paintings and installations of the 1980s and 1990s, which were increasingly reduced to a historical reflection on their own earlier practice.36
The principle of the expansion to infinity of the possible material means of art-making follows from conceptual reflection on the de facto expansion of means that destroyed the ontological significance for art of the norms governing the ‘mediums’ previously constituting art as a system of arts. This is the liberation of the so-called ‘post-medium’, transmedia condition. It requires a new conception of the unity of the individual work. No longer identifiable with either a physically unique instantiation or a simple set of reproducible tokens (readymades), the unity of the work becomes both distributive and malleable. In its informality, its proliferation of artistic materials and its inclusion of both preparatory and subsequent, documentary materials within its conception of the work, conceptual art demonstrated the radically distributive character of the unity of the work. That is to say, each work is distributed across a potentially unlimited, but nonetheless conceptually defined and in practice (at any one time) finite, totality of spatio-temporal sites of instantiation.37 Furthermore, the material borders of this totality are historically malleable, with regard to the new relations into which the work enters in the course of its ‘afterlife’. The role of the afterlife of a work in constituting ‘what it is’ gives the artwork a retroactive ontology.38
Methodologically, one might say that the reason for the critical priority of conceptual art, within the field of anti-formalist practices of the 1960s, is that it was the art that raised the retrospective search for the universal determinations of ‘art’ to the highest theoretical power by its negative totalization of the previous set of practices, to produce a new (negative) artistic absolute, which functions as the enabling condition of a new set of practices: postconceptual art. As Adorno recognized, it is only retrospectively that the concept of art acquires any kind of unity, and this unity is therefore ‘not abstract’, but ‘presupposes concrete analyses, [n]ot as proofs and examples but as its own condition.’ The idea of art is given through each work, but no individual work is adequate to this idea. Furthermore, this ongoing retrospective and reflective totalization is necessarily open, fractured, incomplete and therefore inherently speculative:
The definition of art is at every point indicated by what art once was, but it is legitimated only by what art became with regard to what it wants to be, and perhaps can, become … Because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain … Art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not … Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of; its law of movement is its law of form.39
It is the historical movement of conceptual art from the idea of an absolute anti-aesthetic to the recognition of its own inevitable pictorial dimension that makes it a privileged mediating form – that makes it, in fact, the art in relation to which contestation over the meanings and possibilities of contemporary art is to be fought out. Indeed, if the claim for the critical-historical priority of conceptual art can be sustained, it is only in relation to the category of conceptual art, in its inherent problematicity, that a critical historical experience of contemporary art is possible. In this respect, ‘postconceptual art’ is not the name for a particular type of art so much as the historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in general – art, that is, that can sustain the signifers ‘art’ and ‘contemporary’ in their deepest theoretical senses.
In its most condensed form, then, we may propose: ‘Contemporary art is postconceptual art’. However, in its theoretical meaning, this sentence should not be understood as a grammatically ‘standard’ proposition in which ‘postconceptual’ is a simple predicate of ‘contemporary art’, among others. Rather, it is a specifically philosophical proposition. Indeed, I shall propose, one of a very distinctive kind: namely, a ‘speculative proposition’ in the technical sense in which that phrase is used in Hegel’s philosophy (in particular, in paragraphs 60–66 of the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit). It is the distinctive feature of such a proposition, on Hegel’s understanding, that the movement of thinking that establishes the identity of its component parts is understood to ‘destroy’ the ‘general nature of judgement’ based on the distinction between subject and predicate, which defines the standard propositional form. As a result of the speculative depth of the identity proposed, the subject is understood to ‘disappear’ into its predicate, robbing thinking of ‘the firm objective basis it had in the subject’. In the process, the predicate (here, ‘postconceptual art’) thereby itself becomes the subject, inverting the proposition (‘Postconceptual art is contemporary art’) such that it too consequently, as such, will disappear into its predicate in turn. On Hegel’s account, this generates an infinite movement of thinking between the two terms, such that the proposition (that is to say, predication) becomes ‘immediately a merely empty form’.40 However, this infinite movement is not experienced as unlimited temporal extension (the endlessness of the ‘bad’ infinite), but rather as the subjective register of a movement internal to an ultimately atemporal conceptual unity.
For Hegel, a speculative proposition is a specifically philosophical type of proposition because it is its ‘philosophical content’ (the conceptually fundamental character of its components as mutually determining aspects of the absolute) that destroys the standard propositional form, in such a way that the conceptual difference between the components survives the destruction. This difference is now conceived as that of the internal movement of a certain ‘unity’ or ‘harmony’ that emerges out of the infinite process of the adoption and discarding of the grammatical roles of subject and predicate. Briefly put, this is a way of registering linguistically a kind of identity that exceeds the expressive possibilities of predication, but which may nonetheless be experienced through it, in and as its auto-destructive speculative construal. For Hegel, ‘speculative experience’ – the highest form of philosophical experience, higher than dialectical experience – was the experience of a speculative proposition.41 Speculative experience refigures dialectical experience from the standpoint of the ultimate oneness of its determinations. This is the moment at which, in a proto-early Romantic, non-propositional mode – infinite self-reflection of the absolute – Hegelian philosophy most closely approaches a certain experience of art. It does so, however, only at the end of a very long theoretical process through which the meaning of the elements at issue – in our case here, ‘contemporary art’ and ‘postconceptual art’ – have been developed, dialectically. In Hegel’s terms, a speculative proposition states, in its immediacy, a ‘result’ that derives its meaning from its condensation of the totality of the process of which it is the self-reflective result: the philosophical history out of which its elements emerge as higher-level concepts, or in our case, the philosophical history of art that provides the initial determinations of these concepts, which finally come together, speculatively, in the guise – and it is a conceptual disguise – of the fundamental mutual determinations of the restless movement of the process.
Just as for Hegel, the speculative proposition had a certain constitutive unintelligibility (Unverstandlichkeit) – since it is a compromise formation between the propositional structure of language and a philosophical content that exceeds the representational possibilities of language – ‘substance is subject’, for example, or ‘the actual is the rational’ – so also for us, the speculative proposition ‘contemporary art is postconceptual art’ retains a certain productive opaqueness. It derives its meaning from the role it plays in the interpretation of the individual works that constitute its referent: contemporary/postconceptual art.
The reason that the idea of postconceptual art may be said to determine the contemporaneity of ‘contemporary art’ is that it condenses and reflects the critical historical experience of conceptual art in relation to the totality of current art practices. As such, it requires a reflective totality of lower-level critical categories for its more concrete comprehension. The construction of such a reflective totality of categories is the task of criticism. The meaning of these categories, however, ultimately derives from their contribution to the (future-oriented) retrospective totalization of which they are a part. This contribution defines the form of that ‘art history that art criticism (ideally) is’ as an art history of the qualitative historical temporality of the new. From this point of view, ‘the art history that art criticism (ideally) is’ is thus still, fundamentally, a modernist art history of the qualitative historical novelty of the present, from the multiple standpoints of which the past is to be reconstructed and made legible. Methodologically, however, given the openness of the present onto an indeterminate future – which Hegel’s philosophy foreclosed – this cannot involve totalization as a continuous or developmental process of systematic presentation, imagined as approaching a point of completeness, but rather, more Romantically, the placing of emblematic fragments into systematic perspective. In constellating conceptual art with the heritage of philosophical romanticism, in a post-Hegelian historical situation, two sets of Ur-fragments stand out: Friedrich Schlegel’s ‘Athenaeum’ Fragments and Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art. Together, they form an image of Romanticism, a dialectical image of the historico-philosophical meaning of ‘art’.
An Image of Romanticism (Benjamin, Schlegel, LeWitt)
What have become known as Schlegel’s ‘Athenaeum’ Fragments are the bulk of the fragments published anonymously, simply as ‘Fragments’, in the second issue (Volume 1, Number 2) of the journal The Athenaeum, in Jena, Prussia in 1798.42 LeWitt’s Sentences were written 170 years later, towards the end of 1968, and published in the fifth issue of Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer’s journal, 0–9, in New York in January 1969. They were then reprinted in the first issue of Art–Language, the journal of the British conceptual art group Art & Language, in May of the same year.43 The three contexts of publication are similar in various ways. The Athenaeum was the short-lived experimental journal (just six issues, 1798–1800) of a handful of poet-critic-philosophers: in particular, the Schlegel brothers (August and Friedrich), Friedrich Schleiermacher and Novalis – and especially with regard to the concept of art, Friedrich Schlegel. In it, what would become known in the European tradition simply as ‘literature’ (later, ‘writing’) achieved its first forms of theoretical and practical self-consciousness. 0–9 and Art–Language were, similarly, ‘small magazines’ – self-published in the manner of the 1960s, printing or mimeographing just 200 or 300 copies of each issue, a print run not so different from those of the 1790s. In these issues, what would soon become known as ‘conceptual art’ achieved some of its first forms of theoretical and practical self-consciousness.
0–9 was essentially a journal of avant-garde poetry, influenced by John Ashbery. (It is important to remember that in the mid-1960s, figures like Carl Andre and Dan Graham still saw them themselves, in large part, as poets.) Language works in journals like this (such as Aspen, which published Graham’s important work Scheme in 1965) explored the boundaries between concrete poetry, notation, instructions for performances, and criticism, in a fluid experimental manner that helped create the conditions for what would shortly become identified as conceptual art.44 By 1969, however, the energy of this kind of work, which had its roots in the late 1950s, was becoming dissipated, in part precisely because of the rise of ‘conceptual art’ as a distinct artistic genre. Number 5 was the penultimate issue of 0–9; the final issue appeared in July 1969. LeWitt had already published his influential ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ in the mainstream Artforum in summer 1967, eighteen months previously. It was thus not surprising to see his Sentences reproduced, alongside Graham’s 1966 Poem-Schema and Laurence Weiner’s 1968 Statements, in the first issue of Art–Language, the self-declared ‘Journal of Conceptual Art’, as a sample of the latest US conceptual art for British readers.
Art–Language was the journal of an intellectual avant-garde too. However, it was moving reflectively from ‘art’ towards ‘philosophy’, rather than from ‘poetry’ to ‘art’ – each, here, a distinct aspect of what in The Athenaeum was a single movement. Furthermore, the philosophy that so fascinated Art & Language was of an analytical, logico-linguistic variety. In the context of Art–Language, the poetic dimension of LeWitt’s Sentences was thus downplayed, to the point of its erasure, in favour of its ‘purely’ or ideally conceptual content. Placing LeWitt’s Sentences in the context of Athenaeum Fragments allows us to revive something of their formal dimension in a philosophical manner unrelated to the kind of philosophical work that so fascinated Art & Language, but which nonetheless occupies some of the same conceptual space.
Still, this might seem an idiosyncratic and arbitrary conjunction, dreamt up across a gap of 170 years, between two continents, in the spirit of a surrealistic montage. And there is indeed something of surrealist montage about this. However, there is a method in this madness (as there was in surrealism). It is not an arbitrary connection – the method of what Walter Benjamin called the construction of ‘an image at the now of recognizability’, or what we might call the experimental method of montage as the means of production of historical intelligibility. This is the basic method of a post-Hegelian philosophy of history. As Benjamin wrote in one of the notes for his Arcades Project:
It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been come together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical … The image that is read … [is] the image in the now of its recognizability [das Bild im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit] …45
There is a ‘particular recognizability’ to the ‘now’ of LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art today (1969 in 2011), through which it ‘enters into legibility’ with the ‘then’ of the Athenaeum Fragments (1798 in 2011): the recognizability of philosophical romanticism in conceptual art, and thereby, conversely, the retrospective anticipation of conceptual art in philosophical romanticism itself. Or to put it another way, at the level of their critical historical intelligibility, there is a mutual constitution of philosophical romanticism and conceptual art, through which they acquire a conjoint contemporaneity. The dialectical image constructed by the relation between the then of the Athenaeum Fragments and the now of Sentences on Conceptual Art produces an image of romanticism as a conceptual art, and an image of conceptualism as a romantic art.46
I shall proceed by concentrating on two concepts at the heart of philosophical romanticism and contemporary art alike – fragment and project – as lenses through which to focus a reading of LeWitt’s Sentences, which will, I hope, help to give new meaning to these terms in turn. The point is not to assimilate LeWitt to philosophical romanticism, or vice versa, but rather to constellate their terms, transforming the historical meaning of each. On the Benjaminian model of historical intelligibility that I am using here: ‘Historical “understanding” (Verstehen) is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife (Nachleben) of that which is understood.’47 In this sense, LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art is part of the afterlife of philosophical romanticism; just as this analysis is part of the afterlife of Sentences itself.
By philosophical romanticism, I mean something quite precise: namely, that body of thought produced in Jena in the second half of the 1790s, whose main representatives were the authors of The Athenaeum along with (among others), most importantly, Friedrich Hölderlin. It is also known as ‘early German Romanticism’. This was a moment defined, for Friedrich Schlegel, by the conjunction of a political event, a philosophical event and a literary event: ‘the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s [Wilhelm] Meister’, which he described as the three ‘greatest tendencies of the age’ [AF 216]. Many of the ideas central to the understanding of modern and contemporary art – indeed, the philosophical concepts of art and criticism themselves – derive from the writings of this small group in this brief period: fragment and project, but also the ideas of the new, of collective (anonymous or pseudonymous) production (see Chapter 1, above), of the dissolution of genres into an artistic process of infinite becoming (see Chapters 3 and 4, below) and, finally, the incomprehensible (the topic of the final essay/fragment in the last issue of the Athenaeum). ‘Fragments’ is a text that distils much of the art-critical significance of this philosophical romanticism.
But what is it about Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art that suggests it be constellated with this romanticism? After all, as far as I am aware, there is no philological connection, no ‘influence’ in an empirical art-historical sense, no ‘appearance of continuity’ – as Benjamin defined tradition. LeWitt is more commonly associated with the North American reception of Eastern philosophy, than with Romanticism. In fact, the significance of philosophical romanticism for the understanding of the plastic arts was increasingly obscured from the late nineteenth century onwards, by its literary origins, once the generic term ‘art’ [Kunst], whose meaning it articulated, migrated from the field of literature to the plastic arts. In its place came the preoccupation with notions of ‘medium’ and ‘aesthetic’, with an emphasis on the specific visuality or opticality of works, which further separated three-dimensional work from the heritage of the early romanticism. It is interesting just how unproblematic the distinction between ‘art’ and ‘literature’ remains in LeWitt’s Sentences, despite its explicit opposition to the limitations imposed by conventional concepts of medium:
8. When words such as painting and sculpture are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond the limitations.
Yet, it is claimed:
16. If words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature …
Sentence 16 depends upon a conventional but nonetheless historically quite odd opposition. When conceptual art broke with these conventions in the 1960s – recovering and extending the alternative modernism of a generic concept of art, and laying the ground for the radical openness of contemporary art – its philosophical self-understanding was largely restricted to the Anglo-American analytical philosophy of its day, unrelated to the philosophical heritage that it was unknowingly recovering.48 LeWitt was something of an exception in this regard, not because he had other philosophical sources, but because his critical writings offer more direct conceptual reflections on the structure of his practice. This is their strength. Nonetheless, whether they knew it or not, the more or less loosely affiliated groups of artist-critics of the 1960s and 1970s (Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Sol LeWitt, Adrian Piper, Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, and more formally, Ian Burn, Roger Cutforth and Mel Ramsden in the Society for Theoretical Art and Analyses, in the US; Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin in Art & Language, in the UK; and N.E. Thing Co., in Canada) were following in the footsteps of what Schlegel called the ‘poetizing-philosophers, philosophizing poets’ of the 1790s [AF 249], both in combining the roles of artist and critic and in the collective aspects of their practices.
In the case of LeWitt’s Sentences, there are more particular connections: both formal and semantic resemblances, which point to deeper affinities – affinities that operate below the level of consciousness and intentionality and hence against any psychological understanding of historical meaning, and which depend upon, precisely, what we might call literary aspects of the work, suppressed by the purely analytical context of reception of Art–Language, and the usual comparisons with Kosuth (whose own two-part essay, ‘Art and Philosophy’, appeared later in autumn 1969, in Studio International).49 The formal resemblance is that between the fragment and the sentence, and hence between fragments and sentences, as groups. The similarities of meaning primarily concern process and ideality. The more fundamental affinities that underlie and give a deeper meaning to these resemblances concern ideas and projects, and connectedly the artistic role and art-status of a certain kind of criticism. For the ultimate question raised by the constellation of LeWitt’s Sentences with Schlegel’s Fragments is that of the art-status of Sentences itself, and hence the plausibility of its final sentence:
35. These sentences comment on art, but are not art.
‘These sentences comment on art, but are not art’, even though, (Sentence 16) ‘[i]f words are used, and they proceed from ideas about art, then they are art and not literature …’ The contradiction is apparent. If we take it literally, Sentence 35 opposes Sentences to the self-understanding of both the Society for Theoretical Art and Analyses – alongside whom LeWitt published in Art Press, in July 196950 – and Art & Language themselves, who were exploring the idea that such sentences could be, precisely, art, as a theoretical intervention; hence their publication of Sentences. This opposition perhaps explains Sentence 35. But should we take it literally? Or is it rather an invitation to refutation, or at least a way of rendering indeterminate, and thereby, ironically, artistic the art-status of the Sentences?
The fragment is the central philosophical concept of early German Romanticism. It appears at first sight to be a narrowly literary or artistic concept, a genre concept (which it is also), but it is crucial to comprehend it in its philosophical meaning. For early Romanticism is characterized, first and foremost, by its crossing and mutual transformation of literary and philosophical discourses, through which a new kind of discourse about art comes into being. In this central case, the concept of the fragment is constituted by the reception into the context of post-Kantian German philosophy of a French and English (and before that, Roman) tradition of brief and occasional moral writings. This context unified what is otherwise a diverse multiplicity of forms – the essay, the pensée, the maxim, the aphorism, the opinion, the remark, the anecdote (in Montaigne, Pascal, Shaftsbury, La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort, respectively) – through their mutual ‘fragmentariness’ or relative incompletion, in order to posit the new form constituted by this unity – that is, the fragment – as an artistic solution to a philosophical problem. The problem was the equal necessity and impossibility of a philosophical system, through which the world might be known as a whole – that is, in its truth.
It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two. [AF 53]
The mode of combination devised by Schlegel was to adopt a systematic orientation towards the (potentially infinite) disjunctive ensemble of parts or ‘fragments’ of knowledge, and thereby to posit what Adorno would later call, in his Negative Dialectics, an ‘anti-system’.51 The fragment is the basic unit of intelligibility of the romantic anti-system; the also always-incomplete collection of fragments is its higher form. It is important to this philosophical conception of the fragment that, despite their individual independence (and purely negative relation to an absent whole), the genre is plural: fragments.
The occasion for this critically transformative unification of genres into the meta-genre of the fragment was the posthumous publication of Chamfort’s Pensées, Maxims and Anecdotes in 1795, which was received by Schlegel into the critical debates immediately following the 1794 publication of Fichte’s Theory of Science [Wissenschaftslehre]. Chamfort ‘sparked’ the fragment, as it were. This is not the occasion to elaborate upon those intense and intricate, often hermetic, philosophical debates. (In 1794 Fichte had taken up the chair in philosophy in Jena, where Schlegel himself arrived, belatedly relative to the ‘Jena constellation’, in August 1796, attending Fichte’s lectures, along with others in the group.) However, a brief summary of Schlegel’s argument is necessary. The issue at stake was the possibility of a self-grounding first principle from which a system of philosophy could be deduced. Knowledge of the absolute, in the form of the system (philosophical idealism), appeared dependent upon such a principle. However, the very notion of a first principle from which a system of the absolute could be deduced appeared contradictory, since in order to ground such a system, the principle itself would have to be absolute, thereby dispensing with the need for a system through which to know the absolute. But such immediate, intuitive knowledge of the absolute would have no determinate or systematic content, and so would itself lack ‘absoluteness’. A philosophical system thus appeared – at this stage in the argument at least – to be both necessary but impossible to ground.
The fragment acquired its philosophical meaning by being posited as the medium of reflection of this apparent contradiction between the finite and infinite aspects of an absolute knowledge. On the one hand, it epitomizes self-consciousness of the finitude or partiality of knowledge: it is not only self-enclosed but self-enclosing – a self-limiting form, conscious of its incompleteness, yet nonetheless also relatively self-sufficient. On the other hand, constructed from the systematic standpoint of its negative relation to the idea of a system (totality or lack of limitation), it carries the idea of totality within itself, both negatively, conceptually, and – this is the important bit – positively, in its figural or formal self-sufficiency, its independence from other fragments.
A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog. [AF 206]
The hedgehog here is crucial to romantic epistemology: it provides the imagistic ‘flash’ of understanding associated with insight and wit (Witz), without which philosophical knowledge is not possible. The independence of each individual fragment from others figures the idea of totality, from which the ensemble or collection of fragments derives both its necessity – as an externally imposed or constructed unity of a multiplicity, the unity of a montage – and its own sense of incompletion. The collection cannot make up for the partiality of the parts; it can only constitute a new partiality at a higher level. There is thus a dialectics of completion–incompletion at work within the philosophy of the fragment at three levels: (i) internal to each fragment, (ii) at the level of each collection of fragments, and finally (iii) at the speculative level of the totality of all possible fragments. In the process of this philosophizing (Novalis would say ‘romanticizing’) of the fragment, it becomes the basic unit of philosophical intelligibility. Something – anything – becomes a possible object of philosophical interpretation – that is, a possible object of experience of truth, in so far as it is grasped as a fragment: namely, a finite form that carries a reference to the infinite, negatively, through the combination of the partiality of its content and the completeness or self-sufficiency of its form. From this point of view, the work of art carries a metaphysical meaning in so far as it is a fragment. In short, philosophically, the fragment is the work of art. This is the origin of the modern conception of the non-organic work, and the sense in which modern art, contra classicism, is romantic – unless it is reactively neo-classical, that is, but that is another story. In fact, one might say that the developmental structures of both modern art and philosophy after Hegel take the form of dialectics of romanticizations and reactive neo-classicisms (returns to order).52
That this notion of the fragment is indeed a philosophical concept rather than a merely literary one is attested by Schlegel’s reference to its ideality.
… as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual [this is what separates it off from other fragments – PO], and completely objective and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences. [AF 77]
The fragment is an ideal form.
What does this have to do with LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art? LeWitt certainly did not write ‘fragments’ in any self-conscious literary or philosophical sense; or conceive his three-dimensional works and projects in such terms. In terms of his literary production, he wrote, first, ‘paragraphs’ and then, a year or so later, ‘sentences’: paragraphs and sentences ‘on’ conceptual art. In doing so, he was probably more influenced formally by some of Ad Reinhardt’s writings from the late 1950s than by anything else; such as the 1957 ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ or the 1958 ‘25 Lines of Words on Art’.53 Nonetheless, these literal grammatical designations – paragraphs, sentences – clearly involve a certain literary formalism, quite distinct from the logical and performative uses of grammatical forms by artists like Weiner, Kosuth, early John Baldessari or Mel Ramsden.
Weiner’s 1968 ‘Statements’ (reprinted in the same first issue of Art–Language as LeWitt’s Sentences) have an awkward declarative, aphoristic independence and sculptural intent that allowed them to be displayed independently, in a variety of graphical forms, transposed onto walls in a range of public sites, allying them, belatedly, with the Pop-typographic aspect of the early Kosuth, and making them, retrospectively (after Jenny Holzer) into obscure truisms. Early works by Baldessari and Ramsden depend upon context and materials – painting – for the jokey critical effects of their linguistic propositions. While Kosuth’s analogical conception of the propositional status of art – ‘art as idea as idea’ – had a more ambiguous relation to linguistic expression. In Kosuth, language offers a logical model – the analytical proposition; the art need not be actually ‘made’ of language as such.
Indeed, for all the numerical formalism of his works, and the subtle literary formalism of his main critical statements – and I am suggesting a parallel here between those two formalisms – LeWitt was famously polemically against ‘the logical’ and the ‘rational’ forms (words he tended to use as synonyms) seemingly embraced by other practicioners of a conceptual art. LeWitt identified the conceptual with the ‘mental’, rather than the logical: ‘Conceptual, not logical – the mind is used to infer’, we read in the ‘Notes’.54 And, of course, he famously wrote in Sentences:
1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Artists are very fond of this sentence. This ‘mystical’ aspect is one clue to the depth at which one can make a claim for the status of Sentences as fragments; to its being, one might say, ‘fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, and completely objective’. But it is philosophically a rather more complicated ‘mysticism’ than some may care to know (as was that of the early Romantics). The way Sentences acquires this fragmentary status is by participating, equally, in the potentially infinite openness but actually finite closure of an exhibited part of a series. The way it does this is by reducing each sentence, formally, to a unit of ‘information’.
The historical meaning of the concept of information appears most clearly in Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’, which recounts the epochal historical transition from an oral narrative tradition, directed towards transmitting the ‘epic side of truth’ – namely, wisdom’ – via the rise of the book form of the novel, to the ‘new form of communication’ of information. Information, associated with the newspaper, is understood to bring about ‘a crisis in the novel’. Information has two main features: prompt verifiability and ‘understandability in itself’, or semantic self-sufficiency. As Benjamin puts it: ‘The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time.’ This need to ‘sound plausible’ is understood to be incompatible with the ‘spirit’ of storytelling. Hence information marks the decline of narrative. However, this is not itself (as it is often taken to be) a narrative of decline:
… nothing would be more fatuous than to see in it merely a ‘“symptom of decay”, let alone a “modern” symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from living speech …55
This historical sequence, epic–novel–information (which then gets taken up into montage, in both literary and film forms), was replayed in condensed form at high speed in the curatorial history of conceptual art between spring 1969 and autumn 1970: in the series of exhibitions running from When Attitudes Become Form (Bern, spring 1969), subtitled ‘Works–Concepts–Processes–Situation–Information’ (information is fifth in an informational series), via the seminal show Information (Museum of Modern Art, New York, July 1970) – in which information becomes synonymous with the work of art – to Software: Information Technology – Its New Meaning as Art, (Jewish Museum, New York, autumn 1970), in which information is itself reduced to its latest technological medium. What is interesting about Sol LeWitt’s serialism is that it uses the semantic self-sufficiency of the unit of information – here, the sentence – as its material, but gives it new meaning by reconfiguring the relations between such units, in order to display the pure form of information itself, independently of any particular content, thereby giving the ‘major’ form a new ‘minor’ artistic use.56 As LeWitt himself put it, in his description of his ‘Serial Project No. 1’, in Aspen 5–6 (1967):
