Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
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