Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 2 Number 3, December 2001

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Luhmann, Niklas, Art as a Social System, Stanford California, Stanford University Press, 2000, 422 pages, ISBN 0-8047-3907-2. Pbk., £24.95

 

Reviewed by

 

John Danvers

 

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, or for anyone with no understanding of the technical vocabulary of social theory. The writing (in translation) has the density of an ancient bramble hedge and is, at times, as difficult to enter. I found my reading faltering here and there – partly due to the weight of technical terms and also due to the repetitious and circular quality of the writing. I assume accessibility to a lay reader is not high on the author’s list of priorities. However despite the ponderous prose, the possible weaknesses in translation and the extensive use of jargon, there are many interesting ideas and arguments to be gleaned from the heavily textured text.

 

It is impossible to reduce a book of this kind to a concise overview – there are almost 90 pages of endnotes! Luhmann negotiates so many ideas that one can only deal with a few in a review of this kind. Scanning through the first chapter we find the following under discussion: the distinction between perception and communication; perception framing all communication; art rendering visible what is invisible without it (echoes of Klee and Kandinsky); and the way in which “art escapes the strict application of the yes/no code”.

 

Though Luhmann states early on that he aims to put forward a theoretical analysis that moves beyond “a tradition that arranged psychological faculties hierarchically, relegating ‘sensuousness’ – that is, perception – to a lower position in comparison to higher, reflective functions of reason and understanding”, one can’t help thinking that he often perpetuates the very tradition he seeks to transcend.

 

Luhmann argues that art considered as a social system is self-programming and he examines in considerable detail the “self-describing” operations of this system. His constructivist analysis, set against essentialist explications of art, leads to a questioning of culture as a “given” and proposes that culture is itself a self-describing system with an internal identity maintained and developed by its participants. Luhmann’s analysis of the “distinctions for describing art” – the binary vocabulary of the system – demonstrates how the self-describing process erects boundaries within boundaries, setting up a “dynamic from within”.

 

Luhmann also has some interesting and perceptive ideas about the development of “taste”, the binary distinctions of good/bad taste, and the whole question as to how the capacity for qualitative judgements arises out of “first-order” observations. He argues that the “naked eye does not recognise artistic quality”. This suggests a rather outmoded and simplistic view of perception and cognition as relatively discrete processes. Gibson and others have shown how the perceptual and cognitive processes are intertwined and interdependent - echoing Merleau-Ponty’s view that perceiving and interpreting (making meaning) are indivisibly linked.

 

Statements like, “staring at the work of art for a prolonged period of time is of no help” in acquiring taste, have an immediate appeal but only confirm the suspicion that Luhmann has an over-simplified view of the act of seeing. Indeed he appears to denigrate perceptual processes – note the rather derogatory tone creeping into the use of the term “staring”. There is a constant reiteration of the mind/body, conceptual/perceptual divide – expressed in terms of these binary opposites, and always favouring the conceptual/linguistic axis.

 

Luhmann surveys the shifting power relations involved in the development of ideas of taste, professional art criticism and the reaction against connoisseurship, providing a useful introduction to an examination of other issues including perspective, beauty and criteria of judgement. A more detailed account of the nature and implications of second-order observations affirms the sophistication of a second-order observer, who “harbours suspicion about [the] ‘philosophical’ project of a first-order observer [who] could still cherish the hope of penetrating beneath the surface and grasping a Being beyond appearance”. Indeed the second-order observer “is not particularly fond of wisdom and know-how, nor does he love knowledge. Rather he wants to understand how knowledge is produced and by whom, and how long the illusion might last… To him, Being is an observational schema that produces ‘ontology’, and nature is nothing more than a concept that promises a comfortable end and blocks further questioning”.

 

This apparent privileging of second-order over first-order observations is no surprise given the social-constructivist discourse Luhmann employs and enacts. In a brief reference to the deconstruction theories of Derrida and de Man he acknowledges what is true of his own position and selected “distinctions” – that any distinction “presupposes itself as its own blind spot”. Deconstruction also provides a “crucial insight” in its critique of the assumed distinction between “a material object and its description” and a questioning of the “materiality of objects” – a “something” beyond the description. This phenomenalism is now a standard characteristic of the constructivist approach. The disbelief in “materiality” and the corresponding belief in the enhanced substantiality of the linguistic/conceptual domain, suggests Luhmann would like to transcend, or at least ignore, the biological, corporeal, mass and mess of life - which no longer has status or even actuality.

 

Luhmann makes no bones about the fact that he has no intention of “offering a helpful theory of art” but rather a “theoretical endeavour… to clarify the context and contingency of art from a sociotheoretical perspective”. And one does get the feeling that the cluttered object-strewn territory of art is something to be flown over rather to be negotiated at ground level.

 

Luhmann’s analysis sheds a perceptive, yet curiously remote, light upon the discourses framing art, but has little to say about the corpus of objects, events and behaviours self-described as art. This is like someone entering a dark attic with a flickering candle who keeps stumbling over “something”, only to look closer at the candle flame - analysing the shifting vocabulary of photo-retinal experience - yet never bending down to touch or pick up the objects that impede his free passage through the space. By concentrating on the discourse, the linguistic frame, enveloping the artefact, Luhmann is in danger of not noticing the objects that inhabit the space and over which competing discourses stumble.

 

In a curious way Luhmann seems to perpetuate the longstanding western/christian tendency to privilege rationality over sensuality, mind over matter, soul over body. The corporeal lumpiness of actual existence is marginalised and devalued. The linguistic, conceptualising domain is prioritised over all else. This is a kind of idealism – a rather conservative, dualistic mode of thinking that belies its own contemporaneity and apparent radicalism.

 

Overall this is a fascinating, stimulating and thought-provoking book – not always in ways that may have been intended by the author. Time and again Luhmann returns to the theme of control, categorisation and “what counts as art”, as if he regrets the disappearance of the clear distinctions between art and non-art that may once have existed, and hankers after more certainty in distinguishing between “success and failure” in art. Implicit in these concerns is a lingering belief that a unified “grand narrative“ of art would be preferable to the multi-perspectival, pluralist and relativist situation in which we currently find ourselves.

 

Luhmann’s final paragraph includes the sentence: “If anything is possible, [in art] then the criteria for selecting what is admissible must be tightened”. Deciding whether you agree with him, or whether you prefer the more inclusive and fluid indeterminacy of contemporary cultures, may be indicative of how you will respond to Luhmann’s analysis of art as a social system and his interrogation of the discourse(s) that frame and validate the bewildering diversity of art practices, products and audiences.

 

John Danvers. Exeter School of Arts & Design, University of Plymouth, UK.