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.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, it becomes the basic unit of philosophical intelligibility.Something – anything – becomes a possible object of philosophical interpretation – that is, a possible object of experience of truth, in so far as it is grasped as a fragment: namely, a finite form that carries a reference to the infinite, negatively, through the combination of the partiality of its content and the completeness or self-sufficiency of its form.From this point of view, the work of art carries a metaphysical meaning in so far as it is a fragment.In short, philosophically, the fragment is the work of art.This is the origin of the modern conception of the non-organic work, and the sense in which modern art, contra classicism, is romantic – unless it is reactively neo-classical, that is, but that is another story.In fact, one might say that the developmental structures of both modern art and philosophy after Hegel take the form of dialectics of romanticizations and reactive neo-classicisms (returns to order).52That this notion of the fragment is indeed a philosophical concept rather than a merely literary one is attested by Schlegel’s reference to its ideality.… as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual [this is what separates it off from other fragments – PO], and completely objective and like a necessary part in a system of all the sciences.[AF 77]The fragment is an ideal form.What does this have to do with LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art? LeWitt certainly did not write ‘fragments’ in any self-conscious literary or philosophical sense; or conceive his three-dimensional works and projects in such terms.In terms of his literary production, he wrote, first, ‘paragraphs’ and then, a year or so later, ‘sentences’: paragraphs and sentences ‘on’ conceptual art.In doing so, he was probably more influenced formally by some of Ad Reinhardt’s writings from the late 1950s than by anything else; such as the 1957 ‘Twelve Rules for a New Academy’ or the 1958 ‘25 Lines of Words on Art’.53 Nonetheless, these literal grammatical designations – paragraphs, sentences – clearly involve a certain literary formalism, quite distinct from the logical and performative uses of grammatical forms by artists like Weiner, Kosuth, early John Baldessari or Mel Ramsden.Weiner’s 1968 ‘Statements’ (reprinted in the same first issue of Art–Language as LeWitt’s Sentences) have an awkward declarative, aphoristic independence and sculptural intent that allowed them to be displayed independently, in a variety of graphical forms, transposed onto walls in a range of public sites, allying them, belatedly, with the Pop-typographic aspect of the early Kosuth, and making them, retrospectively (after Jenny Holzer) into obscure truisms.Early works by Baldessari and Ramsden depend upon context and materials – painting – for the jokey critical effects of their linguistic propositions.While Kosuth’s analogical conception of the propositional status of art – ‘art as idea as idea’ – had a more ambiguous relation to linguistic expression.In Kosuth, language offers a logical model – the analytical proposition; the art need not be actually ‘made’ of language as such.Indeed, for all the numerical formalism of his works, and the subtle literary formalism of his main critical statements – and I am suggesting a parallel here between those two formalisms – LeWitt was famously polemically against ‘the logical’ and the ‘rational’ forms (words he tended to use as synonyms) seemingly embraced by other practicioners of a conceptual art.LeWitt identified the conceptual with the ‘mental’, rather than the logical: ‘Conceptual, not logical – the mind is used to infer’, we read in the ‘Notes’.54 And, of course, he famously wrote in Sentences:1.Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.Artists are very fond of this sentence.This ‘mystical’ aspect is one clue to the depth at which one can make a claim for the status of Sentences as fragments; to its being, one might say, ‘fragmentary both in form and content, simultaneously completely subjective and individual, and completely objective’.But it is philosophically a rather more complicated ‘mysticism’ than some may care to know (as was that of the early Romantics).The way Sentences acquires this fragmentary status is by participating, equally, in the potentially infinite openness but actually finite closure of an exhibited part of a series.The way it does this is by reducing each sentence, formally, to a unit of ‘information’.Information and SeriesThe historical meaning of the concept of information appears most clearly in Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’, which recounts the epochal historical transition from an oral narrative tradition, directed towards transmitting the ‘epic side of truth’ – namely, wisdom’ – via the rise of the book form of the novel, to the ‘new form of communication’ of information.Information, associated with the newspaper, is understood to bring about ‘a crisis in the novel’ [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]