Anywhere or Not At All. Peter Osborne
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,