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1 See Karl Heinz Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik, Frankfurt 1989.
MLN, 111 (1996): 506-522 ? 1996 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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MLN
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not because it preferred the "hovering" (das "Schwebende') or the "irrational" 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 differentiated as self-referential, operationally closed systems. This process cannot be grasped according to the schema-still predominant at the
time of Romanticism-of part and whole. The same goes for general
concepts of the advantageous division of labor or, negatively formulated, of the eternal conflict of apriori binding values; phrased in
terms of proper names: the point holds for Emile Durkheim and Max
Weber. For neither can one assume that an "organic" solidarity corresponding to the division of labor emerges on its own, nor is itjustified
to conceive of values as fixed points on the horizon of action orientation. Today entirely different theoretical instruments are available for
a discussion of these foundational issues.
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NIKLAS ITIIHMANN
II
Important changes in the conceptual repertoire of systems theory result when one substitutes "essential definitions" ( Wesensdefinitionen), but
also so-called analytic system concepts, with the theoretical notion of
the operative closure of systems. Essential definitions rested on a heteroreferential (fremdreferentiell) orientation, analytic definitions on a selfreferential orientation of the observer. The notion of operative closure
and, related to it, the theory of autopoietic systems presuppose that selfreferential systems must be observed. They are just that which they
make out of themselves. An observation is therefore only then appropriate if it takes the self-reference of the system and, in the case of systems operating with meaning (sinnhaft operierend), the self-observation
of the system into account. The "paradigm shift" that is thereby accomplished displaces systems theory from the level of first-order observation (systems as objects) to the level of second-order observation (systems as subobjects or obsubjects, to employ formulations of Jean Paul) .5
With this turn, the distinction between self-reference and hetero-
being able to distinguish between reality and illusion.6 The generalization of the concept and the structural problems of observing systems
has far-reaching consequences, which only became apparent through
mathematical analyses. This detour via mathematics frees us at the
same time from the mystifications previously attached to concepts such
as "meaning" (Sinn) or "mind" (Geist). They enable us to see today
more clearly why and how something like "imagination" is required and
in what sense construction/deconstruction/ reconstruction as an on-
going process, an ongoing displacement of distinctions (Derrida's differance), is necessary in order to dissolve paradoxes in and as time.7
5 See Clavis Fichteana seu Leibgeberiana, in Jean Paul, Werke, vol. 3, Munich 1961,
pp. 1011-56, or Flegeljahre, eine 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 reason we can leave it out of consideration in what follows.
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Spencer Brown.8 Similar considerations are to be found in the secondorder cybernetics which Heinz von Foerster has elaborated.9 Here the
consideration as to what happens when the output of a system is immediately reintroduced into the system (that is, when the system forms
performs this might be constituted. For this reason the analysis concludes by referring back to its beginning in the equation of observing
and drawing a distinction: "We see now that the first distinction, the
mark, and the observer are not only interchangeable, but, in the form,
identical. 12
9 Heinz von Foerster, Observing Systems, Seaside, Cal. 1981. See also the German edition expanded with several additional contributions: Heinz von Foerster, Wissen und
Gewissen. Versuch einer Briicke, Frankfurt 1993.
11 On this point and on what follows, see Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, 54ff., 69ff.
12 Ibid., p. 76.
13 Ibid., p. 57.
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With the memory function the system binds itself to its own, now unalterable past. In this way it produces a present with a past horizon and
motivates itself to proceed from the present state of the world rather
than presupposing everything as new and unknown at every moment
and thus always starting from the beginning.15 For this reason there is
no "originary" present, no present that would be its own origin. With
the oscillator function the system holds its future open-and not
merely as the freedom of performing this or that action, but with regard to the fact that everything can arrive different; and this not arbitrarily, but depending on the distinction being used, which, because it
14 Hence of the freeing-up and the reimpregnation of the observational capacities of
the system. This according to Heinz F6rster, Das Geddchtnis. Eine quantenmechanische Untersuchung, Vienna 1948. This formulation, by the way, shows how identities emerge,
namely through confirmation (Bewdhrung) in reimpregnation or, in the terms of
Spencer Brown (Laws of Form, p. 10), through condensation and confirmation; in any
case, however, through the ongoing equation (Abgleichung) with new irritations but not
with fixed contents of the environment.
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includes what it excludes, indicates what in any given case can be otherwise. This too does not require, but rather makes possible a chronometric ordering of future temporal positions.
The difference between the simultaneously required memory and oscillator functions makes the construction of time necessary, the distinction of past and future and the insertion of a present between them in
which alone the system can operate. Via temporal difference modaltheoretical paradoxes can be dissolved, for example the supramodal
necessity of contingency that was once so important to theology. The
necessary can now be seen as a consequence of its being past, the contingent as a feature of the future. With the distinction of past and future the system can, additionally, deal with the requirement that it simultaneously (!) generate and hold in store both redundancy and
variety; the requisite redundancy will then be attributed to the past, the
requisite variety to the future. And that still leaves the question open
whether one conceives of the present as constant, as enduring, and
time as flowing through it, or construes the present of the system as
process, as a movement out of the past in the direction of the future.
The system can think of itself as static and as the correlate to the eternity of God, for example as a soul which must endure its temporal existence; or as dynamic and with the necessity/impossibility of using the
present in order to shape the future. This distinction can then be used
to adapt the temporal structures to socio-cultural configurations. In any
case, however, the constructivist analysis compels one to conclude that
every present is furnished with past and future horizons and for that
reason that the future can never become present.16 The temporal horizons only shift with, indeed by virtue of, the operations of the system so
that from moment to moment new pasts and futures are being selected.
Reformulated in terms of the theory of games, what follows from
this analysis is that the game can only be played within the game and
only with distinctions that identify the individual operations and simultaneously the play itself.17 That's why Adam (in Paradise Lost) had to
have the world explained to him by the archangel Raphael; and that's
why Henry Adams can only describe his education as the play of an in-
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512
NIKLAS LUHMANN
III
also true of the catastrophe theory of Ren6 Thom and of the postGodelian calculus of forms of Spencer Brown discussed above. Of
course, it is not to be expected that Romanticism anticipated and more
or less intuitively took such a development of formal theory programs
into consideration. However, a close examination of the texts of
our way via a sociological theory that can sustain empirical verification.
This intention was already alluded to above. Its point of departure is the
notion that the functional differentiation of modern society can be con-
ceived in terms of autonomous, operatively closed, autopoietic functional systems. That leads to the hypothesis that all functional systems
IV
With the differentiation of the art system and its disconnection from
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21 On this see Peter Fuchs, Moderne Kommunikation: Zur Theorie des operativen Displacements, Frankfurt 1993, p. 79ff.
22 For example, for the Renaissance in the twin concepts unita/moltitudine or, distinguished from these, verisimile/meraviglioso. For a representative example, see Torquato
Tasso, Discorsi dell'arte poetica e in particulare sopra il poema eroica (1587), in: Prose, Milano
1969, where (p. 366) it is stated that the poet should rely more on the one than the other
("o piu del verisimile o piu del mirabile") in order to produce "magior diletto." The
sphere of the "marvelous," however, is limited by the fact that means have to be found
"per accoppiare il meraviglioso co'l verisimile." (p. 367) Beyond this example, one could
of course recall such ancient cosmological distinctions as ordo/varietas or unitas/diversitas.
23 At the same time, biology reorients its inquiries from pre-given essential characteristics to "irritability" as that characteristic which enables the evolution of living beings. SeeJean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, Paris
1809, reprint Weinheim 1960, esp. vol. I, p. 82ff.
24 Cf. Baxter Hathaway, Marvels and Commonplaces: Renaissance Literary Criticism, New
York 1968.
25 Of course, that doesn't mean that art can indicate the one-way traffic on Fifth
Avenue incorrectly or claim that Carthage defeated Rome. In this, Tasso is still right
(Discorsi, p. 367), but today that's no longer the problem.
26 For example, in the sense of the "alteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus," here cited from G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. I, Frankfurt 1971, pp. 234-36, or in the
sense of Friedrich Schlegel.
27 CharlesJencks, "Postmodern vs. Late-Modern," in Ingeborg Hoesterey, ed., Zeitgeist
in Babel: The Postmodernist Controversy, Bloomington 1991, pp. 9-21; here, p. 9.
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(sind),"30 is fixed in writing. And when that which has been supposedly written down is published, the reader can dissolve the narrative
and accept as his/her own one of the possible points of view. Writing
evidently compensates for the displacement of an enduring present
with process, since it can be reused in the present, but also read differently. It fixes itself, as it were, but not the reader.
And above all-third example-criticism (Kritik), conceived as the
ongoing labor in reflection on the never-complete artwork. Romanticism, then, seeks forms with which it can respond to the necessity/
impossibility of transcending the limits of the imagination. The expressive devices on the literary plane that correspond to this are irony
and the fragment, in music the preference for the piano with its con-
31 In this regard also the correspondences to postmodernism are not accidental. See
David Roberts, Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno, Lincoln, Neb. 1991;
"Die Paradoxie der Form in der Literatur," in Dirk Baecker, ed., Probleme derForm, Frankfurt 1993, pp. 22-44.
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from the religious system, the political or economic systems, nor from
the households of the most important families as to how artworks are
to be made. For this reason one could almost say: autonomy becomes
the destiny which is interpreted as a defence against external intervention; or the invisible cage in which the artist is forced to select,
to be original and free. Romanticism thus views and deals with the
problem of autonomy on the level of the artwork and the creative freedom of the artist derived from it, but not on the social level of the func-
tional system of art; for only in this way can Romanticism define its position. The social system of art lets itself be represented through the
idea of art.
All that reads like a commentary on the self-generated "unresolvable indeterminacy" that is unavoidable as soon as one reintroduces
the difference between system and environment within the system itself. And just as in mathematics imaginary numbers or imaginary
spaces are required in order to absorb paradoxes,32 Romanticism condenses the imaginary to the fantastic, and thereby to forms that precisely do not mean what they show, but are nothing other than materialized irony.33 But that by no means implies that all forms dissolve,
that no distinction any longer holds, that everything becomes arbitrary. On the other hand, it does not suffice to postulate with Kant that
freedom is given for its rational use or that the genius must make a dis-
ciplined and cautious use of his geniality.34 Rather, the artwork receives the task of demonstrating its own contingency and being its own
program; and that makes very severe demands on both productive and
Against this background the reason that the Romantics begin to play
32 See Spencer Brown, Laws ofForm, p. 58ff, where a tunnel is introduced beneath the
surface on which the system performs its acceptable calculations. Cf. Dirk Baecker, "Im
Tunnel," in Dirk Baecker, ed., Probleme derForm, pp. 14-37.
33 On the further development of this tendency-with ever new outraged opponents-up to surrealism, see Bohrer, Die Kritik der Romantik, p. 39ff.
34 This is, by the way, a longstanding, pre-romantic idea. One encounters it in the distinction libertas/licentia of natural law theory or in the disegno doctrine of the cinquecento
with its distinction between creative imagination and the skilled and practiced execution of a drawing.
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with "reality," doubling identities in the form of Doppelgdnger, twins, exchanged names, and mirror images, becomes intelligible: in order to
show that the same can also be otherwise and must be set into relation
rich, many-valued logic is available, the problem is displaced onto aesthetics. Translated into constructivist terminology, that means that the
decision as to what can be treated as reality and what not is made internal to the system. The reality test of "resistance" doesn't have to be
given up as a result, but it is no longer a matter of a resistance of the
environment to the system, rather of system operations to system operations within the same system-above all the resistance of the selfproduced memory against new impulses or occurent ideas, or the resistance of the already begun artwork or narrative against something
which can no longer be added to it. Viewed in this way, reality is nothing more than the correlate of consistency tests within the system, and
this can occur in such a way that magic, ghosts, the supernatural, etc.
are introduced into a tale so as to acquire narrative plausibility, which
can then be revoked within the tale itself when, at the end, a perfectly
natural explanation for all the strangeness is provided.38 The figure of
the Doppelgdnger thus means nothing more than that in reality there is
35 On the plurality of such "primary distinctions," see Philip G. Herbst, Alternatives to
Hierarchies, Leiden 1976, p. 88. Herbst's work is, by the way, quite probably the earliest
sociological response to Spencer Brown.
36 On the contemporary version of the problem, see N. Katherine Hayles, "Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation,"
in George Levine, ed., Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, Madison, Wisc. 1993, pp. 27-43.
37Jean Paul, Vorschule derAsthetik, in Werke, vol. 5, Munich 1963, p. 7-514 (445).
38 This is a well-known narrative technique of Ludwig Tieck's, from William Lovell to
Das Zauberschlo/3.
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All this can be handled with the de-reification (Entdinglichung) of the concept of world introduced already by Kant. World is
no longer a totality of things, an aggregatio corpororum, a universitas rerum, but rather the final, and therewith unobservable, condition of
This invisibilization of the nevertheless doubtlessly given and presupposed world had dramatic consequences for Kant, Fichte, and
above all for the Romantics. It leads to an overburdening of the individual with expectations regarding the production of meaning and
therewith to the collapse of the communication weighed down with
such expectations. The individual endowed with reflection now receives the title of "subject." But the higher and more complex the expectations that subjects direct toward themselves and their others, the
greater is the probablity of a failure of their communications. Texts exemplary of this are Jean Paul's Siebenkds (the marriage scenes) and his
39 On this point, see Heinz von Foerster, "Das Gleichnis vom blinden Fleck," in Gerhard Johann Lischka, ed., Der entfesselte Blick: Symposium, Workshops, Ausstellung, Bern
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NIKLAS LUHMANN
41 One can speculate that Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft aimed at such an integration,
but failed to provide it.
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519
virtue of the fact that it is found unexpectedly. This is called "wit" (Witz)
and is found "interesting."42 One can show that the same is different
and that diverse things allow identities to be known so long as one directs the comparison in terms of this cognitive interest. But why should one
do that? For the reason that it is a cognitive strategy that makes it possible to deal with extraordinarily complex, in the final analysis worldsocietal states of affairs. The semantics of the society is keyed to its
structural complexity and one component of this is that talk of ideas
and values provides a surface description that prevents inquiry from
reaching the paradox of the equivalence of the different and thus
from developing modes of description sufficiently complex to grasp
the complexity of the society.
process with precisely this import. Thus there arises in the course of
the nineteenth century a second culture, a culture of suspicion that
raises the question of what is being disguised by the themes of culture.
I am referring, of course, to Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and the sociology
of knowledge that follows in their path.
Poking around in allegedly latent structures is a way of searching out
hidden interests. The appropriate response to such searching is a tu
quoque argument, namely the question as to the interest behind this interest in latency. The suspicion of veiled motives becomes universal
and therefore trivial; it is then a matter of nothing other than a double description of reality with first- and second-order observation.
The considerations set forth in the previous sections allow for a reformulation of the question as to the function of cultural themes. Society requires a memory function that allows it to accept the present
as the result of the past and as the starting point for subsequent operations. A memory, however, does not merely hold past events in reserve; it accomplishes above all a continuous discrimination of forgetting and remembering. Most everything sinks away and very little
is so condensed and reconfirmed that it can be reused. This sortal
42 For the subsequent development of this configuration, see Karl Heinz Bohrer,
Plotzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des dsthetischen Scheins, Frankfurt 1981.
43 This is the formulation of Matei Calinescu, "From the One to the Many: Pluralism
in Today's Thought," in Hoesterey, ed., Postmodernist Controversy, pp. 156-74; here, 157.
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The temporal conceptions of the Romantics also fit with this analysis. Time is still presupposed as a movement in the old sense and therewith related implicitly to the cognitive possibilities of conscious perception. But the present is experienced as precarious, as a caesura, as
44 "Themes"-the reference, of course, is to communicating and therefore social systems. For perceptual (psychic) systems one would have to speak of "objects."
45 Novalis, Werke, ed. Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg 1957, vol. I, p. 129 (fragment 417).
Cf. fragment 2225 (vol. II, p. 125): "Alle Erinnerung ist Gegenwart. Im reinen Element
wird alle Erinnerung uns wie notwendige Verdichtung erscheinen." Or Bliithenstaub 109:
"Die gewohnliche Gegenwart verknupft Vergangenheit und Zukunft durch
Beschrankung. Es entsteht Kontiguitat, durch Erstarrung, Krystallisation. Es gibt aber
eine geistige Gegenwart, die beyde durch Aufl6sung identifiziert." Werke, Tagebiicher und
Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. HansJoachim Mahl and Richard Samuel, Darmstadt
1978, vol. 2, p. 283. Cf. also Jean Paul, Titan, in Werke, ed. Norbert Miller, Munich 1969,
vol. II, p. 478: "Nein, wir haben keine Gegenwart, die Vergangenheit muB ohne sie die
Zukunft gebaren."
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MLN
521
Despite this historicization and, if one can put it this way, rendering
precarious of temporal conceptuality, however, the Romantics do not
entirely succeed in detaching the concept of time from the premises
of ontological metaphysics. Their concept of the world is too strongly
oriented in terms of the human being for that. In contradistinction to
many animals,49 for humans a thing remains identical to itself when it
shifts from rest to movement. And that suggests an ontologically
nested concept of time, oriented in terms of the phenomenon of
movement, a concept that presupposes identities that bridge the distinction movement/non-movement and can sustain not merely movement but also the change from non-movement to movement and vice
versa, that is, the "crossing" of this distinguishing limit. Even Heidegger will still have difficulty with this. From the perspective of a radical
constructivist theory of observation, however, identity is not a timeindependent given, but merely an instrument for binding time when
it is a question of mediating past and future in the present.
Science, including systems theory, cannot afford such cultivated undecidabilities in the temporal, material, and social dimensions. It must
aim for refutable theses. That does not, however, exclude attempts to
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do justice to Romanticism in a theoretical redescription. The systemstheoretical instruments of description break with the semantic repertoire in terms of which Romanticism sought to understand itself. For
the actual aim of this redescription is a theory of modern society for
which Romanticism can only have-but this in a most revealing waysymptomatic value.
University of Bielefeld
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