Jean-François Lyotard’s supposedly postmodern sublime by some two hundred years.22 This is the philosophical ground of the ‘autonomy of art’ claim – autonomy not of a type of judgement (Kant), nor merely at the level of appearance, the illusion of self-determination (Schiller), but of a certain kind of production of meaning in the object, an autopoiesis, distinct from both techné and mimesis (Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel). This is not an ‘aesthetic regime of art’ but a supra-aesthetic artistic regime of truth.
Furthermore, such a regime can only be realized under particular historical and institutional conditions, the social relations of which must thus be considered constitutive of a paradoxically ontologically ‘autonomous’ art. This Hegelian addendum to early Romanticism (art as form of objective spirit), or what Adorno called the ‘dual character of art as autonomy and social fact’ (and which we might be sharpen into ‘the dialectical unity of art as autonomy and social fact’ – the social fact of autonomy), is crucial if philosophical discourse on art is be critically mediated with art-historical, cultural-historical and social discourses, and thereby to become capable of engagement with contemporary art in its full social specificity.23
This is not the place for an account of the emergence of the Romantic conception of the autonomous artwork out of a displacement of the aporia of Fichte’s attempt at a foundational philosophy of the subject into the realm of poetic meaning. Benjamin reconstructed this passage via the concept of reflection in his 1923 dissertation, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, and others have recently returned to the topic.24 However, with respect to Kant, three things about the Romantic theory of art, in particular, should be borne in mind: first, its rejection (or what August Schlegel called its ‘denunciation’) of the distinction between free and accessory beauty, ‘as invalid and as springing from too narrow and too low an assessment of the beautiful’;25 second, its abolition of the categorial separation of the beautiful and the sublime (prefigured in Kant’s own notion of aesthetic ideas); third, its elaboration of a metaphysically invested conception of art – as, in Schelling’s words, the ‘organon of philosophy’26 – at a concrete-historical level, not as a medium-based system of the arts, but as a philosophically constructed (negative) theory of genres, in an ongoing mediation of the categories of the philosophy of art with the history of art. This third feature is the mediating core of the Romantic philosophy of art, through which it acquires its distinctive philosophical shape of being at once transcendental, metaphysical and (unlike its later, Heideggerian version) concretely historical: an historical-ontological theory of art. This was Friedrich Schlegel’s distinctive contribution. In this respect, the early Schelling does not belong to Romanticism proper, but recasts its insights within the tradition of philosophical idealism. In fact, in so far as it retains a concretely historical sense of the present, Hegel’s philosophy of art is closer to Schlegel’s philosophical Romanticism than is Schelling’s early philosophy of art. The difference lies in Hegel’s absolutely idealist, subject-dissolving presupposition of the possibility of the purely conceptual self-reflection of the absolute. With respect to the application of the art-historical problematic of early Romanticism to contemporary art, Schlegel’s Romantic categories of poetry and the novel, as absolute genres ‘forever becoming’, have a similar philosophical status to what Thierry de Duve calls ‘generic’ art and what I am here calling ‘postconceptual’ art.27
As the product of the displacement of the structure of a seemingly irresolvable metaphysical problem (the infinite reflexivity of a self-positing subject frustrates the project of self-grounding) into a special kind of object (art), the autonomous work of art is as irreducibly conceptual – and metaphysical – in its philosophical structure as it is historical and ‘aesthetic’ (felt by the mind) in its mode of appearance. It is thus a mistake to suppose that because it is conceptual, there is no role for ‘aesthetic’ within it. Far from it. As the registration of the feeling associated with presentations to the intellect, aesthetic is an ineliminable aspect of the early Romantics’ ontological conception of art. It is, however, ontologically both partial and relational. More generally, the artistic significance of aesthetic must be judged in the context of the historically shifting relations between aesthetic and other – cognitive, semantic, social, political and ideological – aspects of artworks. And the balance and meaning will be different in different kinds of art. Furthermore, these relations between the aesthetic and other aspects of artworks derive their critical meaning from their relations to the equally historically variable aesthetic dimension of other (non-art) cultural forms – today, predominantly but by no means exclusively: commodity design and display, advertising, mass media and communications technologies – the whole non-art aspects of the apparatus of visual culture. One problem with the philosophical discourse of ‘art as aesthetic’ is that it militates against recognition of these relations as being internal to the critical structure of the artwork, and hence against the understanding of contemporary art in certain of its most significant, historical and anti-aesthetic aspects.
Periodization and Historical Ontology: Postconceptual Art
In the light of this brief reconstruction of the philosophical pre-history of the polemical opposition of ‘aesthetic’ and ‘conceptual’ art played out in the 1960 and ’70s, as a difference between Kant and Jena Romanticism, we can discern two parallel and competing, though to some extent also overlapping traditions in the criticism of art since the end of the eighteenth century, corresponding to the two philosophical discourses of ‘art as aesthetic’ and ‘art as (historical) ontology’. The first runs from Kant through nineteenth-century aestheticism (Baudelaire, Pater, Wilde), via Roger Fry and Clive Bell, to Greenberg’s later writings, which mark the aestheticist collapse of his earlier historical self-understanding. It rests upon an aesthetic theory of the arts, with its distant origins in Renaissance naturalism and the new science of optics28 and its mainstream in an empirical reduction of Kant’s transcendentalism to a psychology – at best, a phenomenology – of perception, of which Richard Wollheim was the recent master.29 The second tradition runs from philosophical Romanticism through Hegel, Duchamp, surrealism and the revolutionary Romanticism of Constructivism, to conceptual art and its consequences in what has been called the ‘post-medium condition’, but which I prefer to think of as the transmedia condition of postconceptual art.30
The first (aesthetic) tradition finds its concrete critical terms in an aesthetic theory of medium that dates back to Gotthold Lessing. It is currently being revived in both a Friedian variant (by Jeff Wall, amongst others) and a more explicitly Kantian, transcendental variant by Jay Bernstein, as the philosophical basis for a theory of modernism as the cultural representation of nature’s resistance to history – a reading which combines Greenberg with Adorno, via an immanent critique of T.J. Clarke’s interpretation of Jackson Pollock.31 The second (historical-ontological) tradition finds its critical terms in a philosophically negative theory of the ‘truth of art’ which manifests this negativity historically in the concept of ‘the new’ – a sometimes proto-, sometimes post-avant-gardist constitutive negation that, today, determines artistic meaning as a determination of contemporaneity itself. It derives its content empirically within a historically open, but nonetheless speculatively totalizing, generic conception of art, within which the historical present is necessarily privileged as the standpoint of an implicit but unactualizable (and therefore negative) totalization. And it comes in a spectrum of relations to the future, from the insistent but increasingly abstract future-orientation of modernism, as the cultural affirmation of the temporality of the new, to the flat presentism of the immediately contemporary. The qualitative historical temporality of art-critical judgement appears here as a consequence of the philosophical dynamics of historical totalization. This second proto-Romantic or generic artistic tradition has developed in active relation to both historical transformations in the institutional conditions of artistic autonomy (which establish the social conditions of possibility of the illusion of autonomous meaning production) and socially progressive political cultures, which have criticised the prevailing social forms of autonomy, and in particular, their misrecognition as ‘aesthetic’. Its current representative is the anti-aestheticism of postconceptual art.
But what exactly is postconceptual art? In what sense