The Romantic Circumstance: Novalis between Kittler and Luhmann

• Published in: SubStance 2014-01, Vol.43 (3), p.46-66
• Main Author: Weatherby, Leif
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Apperception; Audiences; Bands; Bildungsroman; Cognition; English for special purposes; German literature; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832); Hardenberg, Georg Philipp Friedrich von (Novalis) (1772-1801); Intervention; Judgment; Luhmann, Niklas (1927-1998); Mediation; Metaphysics; Mimesis; Modernity; Morality; Negotiation; Origin of language; Philosophy; Realism; Redescriptions; Romantic art; Romantic poetry; Self concept; Semiotics; Sensory perception; Social systems; System theory
• ISSN: 0049-2426; 1527-2095; 1527-2095
• DOI: 10.1353/sub.2014.0039

With the idealized origin of language (the Mother), and the shift to a focus on meaning (or the signified) as the object of reading-instruction, Goethe, Novalis, and Hegel dealt fundamentally with a language-practice hovering between its self-conception (transparent and translatable world of signs) and its social and technological origins. First: social systems exist, and in fact, modern society is constituted as a negotiation of such systems. Elements of systems are defined and in fact given functional (and no other) existence on the basis of self-drawn boundaries between system and environment (“The difference between system and environment becomes relevant in the constitution of each element of sense [Sinnelement]” [Soziale Systeme 269]). Because systems define their own limits and constituents (partially) in this way—and this is the second point—they consist in what Luhmann calls “second-order observation,” or the mediated observation of the system/environment distinction itself from within the system. “Organ” is defined as passive, but in this very gesture, also as receptive of activity. [...]its stasis—the duration of its modification by an affecting object—is its essence, but its ability to be moved is just as essential (Hemsterhuis, Lettre 9ff., esp. 10).